<p>
</p>
<p>I imagine those NASCAR guys get some money from auto makers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s better for Harvard’s brand/endowment in the long run to be seen as a charitable institution that is generous with it’s money, and that winds up garnering significantly larger donations to the school than they feel they would get by a straight-up auction of its classes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, how so? When did I ever compare universities to business? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I believe I did, and explicitly so. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And when have I ever done that? If anything, I have made a judgment based on *social<a href=“and%20perhaps%20political”>/i</a> theory. Not once have I invoked economics to bolster my position. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And implicit in your tiresome argument is the assumption that universities haven’t been accumulating a treasure trove of information about the performance of past students over many decades, when we all know that they have. That information could be used in the exact same manner that insurance companies use actuarial information to decide whether to offer insurance to somebody or not, and at what price. </p>
<p>For example, if prior information strongly indicates that people who drive red sportscars tend to have more car accidents, then the answer is to simply not offer car insurance to such people in the future, or charge higher premiums if you do. Similarly, one could determine that if certain high schools are notorious for producing numerous past lazy admittees to your college, then one answer could be to admit fewer students from that high school in the future. Or if it is found that - to conjure an example - students who played high school football turn out to be lazier college students than students who play high schooled soccer, then the answer is to admit more students who played soccer and fewer who played football. </p>
<p>You continue to make the tiresome argument that such a thing would be impossible, conveniently ignoring the fact that this is what insurance companies do every day, and have done for centuries. Colleges could surely do the same. I’m amazed that you continue to ignore this fact. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, once again, colleges (and college students) do not live in the ‘free’ society that you seem to romanticize, for one simple reason: people can’t simply “decide” to attend whatever college that they want. Rather, they have to be admitted. Hence, colleges are inherently in the active business of curtailing the free choice of students. </p>
<p>And we as society have actively participated in determining when it is appropriate for universities to admit whoever they want. See the discussion below. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And now we’re getting to the brass tacks of the true philosophical question at hand, striking at the very heart of what it means to be a truly free society, and the appropriateness of the strictures society places upon the organizations within our midst. </p>
<p>To wit, let me offer you some historical counterexamples to the notion that universities have the free choice to admit whoever they wish for whatever ‘goofy’ reason they want, and that is is truly none of our business. Clearly the most famous example in recent history is the desegregation effort as part and parcel of the Civil Rights act to open universities in the South that had for decades been closed to blacks. The University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama were famously forced only under the pain of court order to admit black students and even so such admission was only secured through the active intervention of Federal Marshals, with the desegregation of Ole Miss sparking a race riot on campus. Similarly, women were allowed admission into VMI and the Citadel only through court order sparked by lawsuits instigated by the Clinton Administration via the Department of Justice. Proposition 209 , Proposal 2, Initiative 200, and Initiative 424 specifically barred public universities in California, Michigan, Washington state, and Nebraska respectively from using race/sex/ethnicity in determining admissions decisions. A movement currently exists to force private universities to stop legacy admissions on pain of withdrawal of taxpayer research grant funding, and potentially even their tax exempt status. {They as private universities may be free to run legacy admissions, but we as taxpayers are then free not to provide public subsidies for them.} </p>
<p>If you truly believe that it is absolutely “none of our business” who universities choose to admit because they should be allowed the freedom to admit whoever they wish for whatever ‘goofy’ reason they want, then to be logically consistent, I don’t see how you escape the position that Ole Miss, Alabama and every other school in the old Confederacy should then be perfectly free to continue to ban black students to this very day if they so wish. After all, like you said, they’re free to admit students based on whatever ‘goofy’ reason they want, right? {And in this case, their ‘goofy’ reason was the enforcement of white supremacy and that blacks were inherently inferior.} Like you said, we as society have no right to interfere, right? So when JFK intervened with Federal troops to secure the admission of black students in Southern universities, that must have been clearly wrong. Heck, if the Ivy League wanted to revive its turn-of-the-century Jewish quotas, they should be perfectly free to do that also, right? Similarly, we as society have no right to force VMI and Citadel to admit women, and the voters in their respective states had no right to pass Prop 209, Proposal 2, Initiative 200, or Initiative 424, because they abrogated the freedom of public universities in those states to implement whatever admissions policies they wish, right? </p>
<p>Whatever the merits of those arguments, the fact remains that we as society can and have historically repeatedly intervened in university admissions policies and will surely continue to do so. Coureur, you are free to take the position that society had no right to racially desegregate Southern universities, but that would seem to be a position far from the mainstream. </p>
<p>Otherwise, you’re left with the logical quandary to explain why society was allowed to intervene in university admissions policies in those instances, but never in any others.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, I don’t think they do - drivers are paid by the racing teams.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Really?</p>
<p>First off if we’re paying taxes to help pay for their education. Second it’s a societal problem when people are unable to be productive. That makes everyone poorer, not just the person involved. Interest on education loans is subsidized by the government. All these are either “paid” by printing more money, thus decreasing the value of the money you hold or is paid through taxes. If it doesn’t lead to more productive citizens, it was a waste.</p>
<p>Ninety percent of all adult Americans are gainfully employed. Ninety-five per cent would be working if they could find a job. Who are all of these “unproductive” and lazy people everyone is talking about?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Exactly. I would further add that almost every university (except for the ‘for-profit’ colleges that Hanna referred to) are nonprofit organizations. They therefore are exempt from taxation, and that exemption is granted by society. Even if you truly believe that universities are perfectly free to do whatever they wish, that doesn’t mean that we as society are obligated to provide them with a tax exemption for doing so. Nonprofit organizations are exempted from taxes because they ostensibly provide some service to society in exchange. {Otherwise, why isn’t every business exempt from taxation? Heck, why do I have to pay taxes?}</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You just mentioned something like 20 million people. In addition to that everyone who has a college degree but isn’t working in a job which benefits from their college education. In addition to that every college graduate who is currently an inmate.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think Bernie Madoff was a finance major.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Absolutely wrong. What you meant to say is that 90% of adult Americans in the workforce are gainfully employed. The definition of being in the workforce means to either hold or be actively seeking work, which is true of only a tiny fraction of college students. {I agree that those rare college students who are also working or seeking work are indeed highly productive individuals.} </p>
<p>What you’re actually talking about is the labor participation rate which comprises the percentage of workers compared to all eligible adults. According to the BLS, the labor participation rate is only 64.2%. Many of that missing 35.8% consists of college students. </p>
<p>[Employment</a> Situation Summary](<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm]Employment”>http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm)</p>
<p>Frankly, all one really has to do is talk to any given sample of current college students at any regular school (that is to say, a non-specialized school such as a military academy or a tech institute), and they will surely tell you about plenty of their colleagues that they know who, frankly, aren’t really doing anything.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>You appear to be implying that the sole purpose of education for an individual is job training and the sole value of of college education for society is increased economic productivity. Wrong on both counts. There are many things of value that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>No quandary whatsoever. As the courts have ruled, society has a compelling interest in ensuring no unjust treatment based on racial discrimination occur in public colleges. No court has ruled nor does society have a compelling interest in imposing on universities a system of unjust treatment consisting of forcing them to deny education to individuals based on the suspicion that they might have the wrong attitude about education.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>The big difference is that insurance companies are predicting what a POPULATION, on average, will do. What is impossible for universities (and insurance companies for that matter) to do is predict is what any given INDIVIDUAL will do. </p>
<p>Sorry, but I’m not going to tell some kid that he can’t go to college, that he is not one of the chosen ones, simply because he graduated from a high school that, according to the colleges’ “treasure trove” of data, has a reputation for putting out kids with bad attitudes.</p>
<p>The best part of this whole discussion is the fact that colleges will never go for this unfair and unworkable system that you propose. Nor will Congress or the courts will ever impose it. Happily, it just ain’t going to happen.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, I don’t. I am providing evidence as to why educating people is a societal cost and why we should care if people go to college and don’t learn anything. </p>
<p>However you are somewhat right. I do believe subsidizing education which will never lead to a boost to productivity to be an issue worth considering.</p>
<p>If people are worried about the worth if their degree just do this, go to a better college. Everyone may have a degree but nit everyone has one from a top school.</p>
<p>Also, one of my main college goals is to get a job and make money. Anyone e that thinks otherwise has their head in the clouds or is in the very liberal liberal arts</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not yet. But in the future, who knows? For example, the courts (or future legislation) may well find in the near future that there is a compelling interest not to send tax dollars or even to revoke the tax exemption of universities who persist in running legacy admissions preferences. No guarantees of course, but who’s to say what will happen in the future? </p>
<p>Things change over time. A century ago, during the so-called ‘nadir’ of US race relations, few people would have seriously predicted that the courts would eventually ban racial segregation even amongst such private organizations such as hotels and restaurants (as stipulated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Heck, two centuries ago, it was entirely permissible for much of the United States to treat human beings as chattel. </p>
<p>If nobody ever agitated against the status quo, then social change would never happen. For example, if Shannon Faulkner had decided that it was indeed ‘her business’ to challenge the Citadel’s current admissions policies, then Citadel would probably be a male-only school to this very day. {While Faulkner didn’t graduate, she at least paved the way for hundreds of other women to eventually graduate from the Citadel.} </p>
<p>The upshot is - who’s to say that schools’ admissions policies are never the business of us in society? You say that a compelling interest by society has to exist in order for a social movement to exist, yet that compelling interest is entirely endogenous to the social movement itself. Before the Civil Rights Movement, no courts had ever decided that a compelling interest existed to ensure that no unjust treatment based on racial discrimination occurred in public colleges. It was precisely the Civil Rights Movement that generated that compelling interest in the first place. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And what is a population, if not an aggregation of individuals? </p>
<p>And besides, it isn’t the goal of a university to perfectly predict any individual’s outcomes, just as it isn’t the goal of any insurance company to predict any individual outcome. You may well be the rare person who can chain-smoke 3 packs a day and nevertheless live to be over 90. But life insurance companies are still going to charge you a higher premium, or not even offer you insurance at all. All that the insurance company knows is that most heavy smokers will die young, and so if you are a heavy smoker also, then you too are probably going to die young and insurance prices should therefore be calculated accordingly. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why not? We basically tell plenty of applicants that, sorry, they aren’t one of the ‘chosen ones’ and reject them now, for example, simply because they earned low grades and test scores that are correlated, however weakly, with college success. Right now, we reject applicants who didn’t participate in ‘enough’ extracurricular activities, or if they did, that they didn’t participate in the ‘right’ ones, or that their participation was not ‘impressive’ enough. More controversially, most top schools reject applicants - or at least hold them to a higher bar - simply because they happen to be Asian or Jewish, because they don’t provide sufficient ‘diversity’ to the student body. It’s not his fault if somebody is born Asian or Jewish, nor can he ever change that fact. But college adcoms don’t care about that. And most controversially of all, most top colleges implement legacy admissions. If you’re not one of the ‘chosen ones’ who just happens to have a parent who graduated from that college, you have to surmount a higher admissions hurdle. </p>
<p>More to the point, I suspect that some colleges already do incorporate the quality of the school into their admissions. For example, many Ivies continue to have long-standing connections to elite Eastern schools - Philips Exeter and Boston Latin are still seen widely seen as gateway prep schools to Harvard. But if certain high schools are gateways to certain colleges, then that must mean that other high schools are 'anti-'gateways to those same colleges. </p>
<p>So what exactly is the difference between a college rejecting an applicant because went to a high school with a poor reputation, and the college rejecting that applicant just because he didn’t go to Philips Exeter? (That is, if he had earned the same exact academic record but at Exeter, he would have been admitted?) That’s basically the same thing.. Yet colleges do that right now. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Right, because the current system, infused with legacy admissions preferences and undeniable discrimination against Asian and Jewish applicants is perfectly fair and not at all controversial in the least, right? Well, I will say is that in the near future, we may finally see the edifice of legacy admissions demolished either by court order or by legislation (probably by withholding all taxpayer research funds from schools who refuse to change). </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m quite certain there was a time when plenty of people thought that neither Congress nor the courts would ever force Southern public universities to desegregate, and when ‘separate but equal’ was the law of the land.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The grave irony that you don’t see - I suspect because you refuse to see it - is that right now, plenty of people are not getting into the college of their choice, or in some cases, not into any college at all. And those rejections are often times made on the basis of criteria that are highly controversial and arbitrary, such as one applicant being admitted over another applicant just because the former applicant luckily happened to fulfill the school’s desperate need for a new tailback for the football team whereas the latter was unluckily rejected because the school already had a sufficient number of point guards on the basketball team. </p>
<p>Hence, I am not advocating that we reduce the number of overall admissions slots. Schools will be rejecting plenty of students either way. What I advocate is that schools reject students based on predictions of future academic dedication. Those students who are predicted to not really be interested in academics but are more interested in a multi-year vacation should probably be rejected in favor of students who actually want to study and learn. </p>
<p>Why is that so controversial? You say that you don’t want to have to tell an applicant “Sorry”, he isn’t one of the chosen ones, because a predictive statistical model of academic dedication indicates that he is unlikely to care about academics. Yet right now we are telling plenty of other applicants ‘Sorry’, and rejecting them based on far more controversial criteria (for example: “We would have admitted you if one of your parents was an alum, but since they’re not, sorry.”) I would actually argue that it is the least controversial choice to base admissions decisions on predictive academic dedication, rather than the current criteria which often times has nothing to do with academics whatsoever.</p>
<p>Sakky wrote:
</p>
<p>Actually, many of those in the missing 35.8% are retired people. Are they lazy and unproductive, too?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You are missing what is controversial with what is not. What really is controversial is whether a university, particularly in the middle or lower range of selectivity, can make highly accurate individual predictions of applicants’ future academic dedication. You appear to think that it is possible for a university to find a highly accurate formula for making such predictions that is much more accurate than what they currently use now. Yes, there is more leeway for private universities to do so behind the opacity of holistic admissions, compared to public universities that have greater political constraints and a need to show more transparency in how they do things. But the private universities have not found a way to admit students who will graduate at a 100% rate.</p>
<p>It appears that Mr. Thiel is one of those “rich lazy types” who cruised through an elite school, at little or no cost to himself, without giving much effort to his ACADEMIC education. His position ignores so many basic issues that it would take a whole book to document them … a book he doubtless would not read, because he’s like, you know, brilliant.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So if I form a corporation and the university paid that instead of me (and then my corporation paid me), would that be seen as better business for Harvard? I don’t imagine Chevy would be as willing to give Team Lowe’s money if I was driving it instead of Jimmie Johnson.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Obviously if they had worked hard enough to make enough money to retire, then they are not lazy and unproductive. But surely you can agree that most college students have done no such thing. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Nobody is arguing that graduation rates would ever equal 100%. No statistical model is ever perfect, just as obviously no insurance actuarial model is ever perfect. </p>
<p>On the other hand, you could surely become far more accurate than you are now. Like I said, only around 60% of incoming college students ever graduate. That seems to leave substantial room for improvement. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Your analogy is faulty: racing teams aren’t ‘paid’ by Chevy (at least, not until the team becomes highly successful, by which time the team is rich anyway). Racing teams are paid by advertising sponsors, and also by prize money. Racing teams, when they start out, generally have to pay millions of dollars to buy and modify cars - they certainly don’t get paid by the manufacturer. </p>
<p>Granted, I agree that if you become as well established as Jimmie Johnson, then the manufacturer might well begin to pay you to drive their car. But getting to that point surely involved buying numerous cars during the interim.</p>