dagblog - Comments for "The Three Myths of Reverse Racism in College Admissions"

the point really struck me

artappraiser — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 21:22:54 +0000

the point really struck me already a couple years back when a so-called "fancy" (by colleagues) midtown lawyer, a 60-something, who is also known as a quite a leader in the Manhattan Jewish community, told me: "nobody is impressed by an Ivy League education anymore". The climbing, it's changed already.

Like dead carcasses on

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 17:18:07 +0000

In reply to Well, I think there's two

Like dead carcasses on tenterhooks?

I'm from NZ, which is one of

Harry East — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 14:20:08 +0000

In reply to Very interesting piece Doc.

I'm from NZ, which is one of those places where university admissions are almost entirely based on academic achievement. The only exceptions I know about relate to things like architecture or art which have portfolios, and urban planning which I have heard has an essay. There is, in fact, a nationally set minimum level you have to meet (UE) but generally you need to do better than that. The largest university, for example, has a thing called a rank score... and if you beat the rank score, you're in. It doesn't matter how many other students do so: it's guaranteed entry. (Actually, if you ask me, getting into university isn't a challenge at all, assuming you're not worried about failing at school.)

But the thing to note is that NZ also operates a national exam competition known as Scholarship. There are several issues with how this works, but the basic idea is you pay a fee to enter and if you pass, you get some money. If you pass a lot or particularly well, you get more money. And if you do really well across sufficiently many Schol papers, then you get fabulously rewarded. These are not particularly easy exams. For example, I tried three (at the time you could try three for free) and wasn't confident of passing any, despite thinking very carefully about which three. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that I just passed one and just failed another.

The thing with Scholarship is that it works from the same curriculum that is assessed by a thing called NCEA (it is a bit complex to explain), although it is open to people who do CIE or IB too. Hence, you would expect the female advantage noted in NCEA would be repeated in Scholarship, right? With NCEA of girls who could get UE, 68.7% do whereas the comparable figure for boys is 57% (pg. 20) and 17.4% of girls versus 11.2% of boys getting NCEA Level 3 with Excellence (i.e. doing very well), all for final year pupils. However, with Scholarship 23.4% of female candidates pass versus 25.1% of male candidates. Similarly, on top of those percentages, for the outstanding passes the figures of 2.1% and 3.6% respectively (not all Schol candidates will be final year, but most will be). What's going on?

To be honest, I don't know why the reversal happens. It could be like the Simpson's Paradox UC Berkeley thing and female candidates disproportionately go for more competitive Schol subjects (which, I feel, is consistent with there being more female candidates) or that relatively more boys are like me and only pick fights we think we might win rather than being more daring. It could be that the distribution of female candidates has a smaller range, i.e. there are fewer candidates out in the "successful" tail relative to boys. My gut feeling/extremely guessing interpretation of the table on pg.74 suggests that if you can do well at English, maths (calculus and/or statistics), biology, chemistry and physics you're a typical very top candidate. We might wonder if some of these subjects have a male bias (if more boys take these and they synergise well then we'd expect more boys). But to reiterate I don't know and while NZQA might provide data to help look at these questions, it's not in the pdf (they're very transparent so if you care enough to ask they might hook you up).

(Another possible explanation is that there are some truly enormous all boys schools in NZ which cater to a socio-economically advantaged subsection of society, and that I do hear about structured programmes intended to generate scholarship passes. These, for example, did not exist at my school, and I doubt existed at the local private school either... as far as I know, only that school's dux attempted Schol in our year, probably because they're a CIE school.)

The point I am making, though, is that looking at a selection of universities and expecting the general pattern to be true is flawed. Princeton might have a mere 48% simply because they can only admit applicants they receive, and of those applicants there are disproportionately many "academically able" boys. I think I do presuppose either a bunch of dumb males or greater variability in male academic achievement, but the idea is that if you're sufficiently exclusive you might end up with the same number of males and females who meet your minimum standards.

Anyway, I'm not sure how relevant this has been to your post but I've already written it so... I guess I will leave with my thoughts on the difficulty of determining to what demographics the admissions of a university should converge.

Thanks.

Flavius — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 21:02:14 +0000

In reply to Hutchin, Adler, Barr, and

Thanks.

Rather than merely throwing bread on the water I checked out the St. Johns' web site and they are still doing business at the same old stand(s) in Annapolis and Santa Fe.

'My personal contact with that approach was limited to one Political Science class. The professor had graduated from Hutchins' Chicago. Been initially a conscientious objector in WWll , ultimately rethinking his position and serving. . I think in the coast guard, I think on Nantucket. So inevitably I associate him with Lowell's "Quaker Graveyard on Nantucket."

I visited him once, half way up a mountain. They grew much of their food, made their own butter-which had a liturgical symbol on it. The whole family played recorders by themselves and also with some compatible types down the other side of the mountain (they walked) Had no radio or phonographs because of some objection to "artificial" music.

Not as unworldly as that suggests . He went into politics and became the minority leader in the State House.

Then a college president

Well, I think there's two

artappraiser — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 17:30:42 +0000

In reply to And what other clubs costing

Well, I think there's two people who don't find those kind of prices worth it: Flavius and I. Beyond that I can't say.

And FWIW, if I was going to agitate about making some of these clubs different, both private and public, I'd be on the whole sports thing, in trying to make it less valuable in the offerings of higher education, sell that somewhere else.

But I'm too old to get all het up about the bread and circuses thing.

Edit to add: Furthermore, I suspect the whole Ivy League thing will be worth much less in a very short amount of time. They might even be begging for students in a couple decades. We have massive culture change hanging in the air.

And what other clubs costing

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 17:08:11 +0000

In reply to It just struck me keeping up

And what other clubs costing $100-250k would be worth that time and expense? The military *pays* people to enjoy their community. How many years as an artist is that kind of money, considering rent, food, materials?

It just struck me keeping up

artappraiser — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 16:22:19 +0000

In reply to Remember the " Great Books" ?

It just struck me keeping up with the discussions on this thread that elite schools are about creating a community and then selling it to others who would like to be in it.

I never had any choice of college (I was too young, the eldest so the first, had to do it on my own, my parents had zero money and too many kids, there was no use in even trying for anything else, couldn't find any scholarships that applied to me, the state college was excellent (UW) and not super expensive back then, I didn't qualify for any aid but there were loans.)

But it hits me now I've seen boomer friends going through looking at colleges with their kids and they go visit the campuses and would check out not just the education on offer but the student body, the environment and the housing and the amenities and sports and activities and rules, they are just really shopping for a community. That private schools are about selling a community of students and teachers to the appllcants.

And yes, it is just like Goldman Sachs life like you mention. The kid sees that and he wants to be in it, that's the life he wants. Well, it's a club and maybe they think you are a good fit as a member and maybe they don't.

In the end, the elite colleges, they are not any different in trying to create a certain type of community than other intellectual clubs/communes like the Bloomsbury Group or an artist's colony like Byrdcliffe As well as clubs that a lot of us have a bad attitude about now, like fancy country clubs, or the local Italian social club. What Yale or Harvard or some Christian School accepts as its student body at some point in time is just marketing. If they are very desirable and have a lot of applicants, that means they have done a good job of selling the idea of that community to the public. Strikes me as an important way that culture gets made. So yes, we want to argue and pressure the most popular ones to change this way or that, and that's fine to put that pressure on them, it's part of the process. But at the same time, it just shouldn't be heavily regulated by law, that would ruin the whole process of how culture gets created. Except for blatant stupid things like exclusion for race or gender. (And even that is problematic, i.e., do we really want to regulate that all private schools be mixed gender?)

Groucho's joke still applies for me, very much so. It's got to be a desirable community for anyone to even be interested in arguing about it.

Hutchin, Adler, Barr, and

moat — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 16:11:34 +0000

In reply to Remember the " Great Books" ?

Hutchin, Adler, Barr, and others, promoted their program not only to influence the minds of elites but to change the nature of universal education. The emphasis in education on making students competent at particular occupations can only be counter balanced by the growth of an intellectual Commons:

Yet the substitution of machines for slaves gives us an opportunity to build a civilization as glorious as that of the Greeks, and far more lasting because far more just. I do not concede that torpor of mind is the natural and normal condition of the mass of mankind, or that these people are necessarily incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, or of conceiving generous, noble, and tender sentiments, or of forming just judgments concerning the affairs of private and public life. If they are so, and if they are so as a result of the division of labor, then industrialization and democracy are fundamentally opposed; for people in this condition are not qualified to govern themselves. I do not believe that industrialization and democracy are inherently opposed. But they are in actual practice opposed unless the gap between them is bridged by liberal education for all. That mechanization which tends to reduce a man to a robot also supplies the economic base and the leisure that will enable him to get a liberal education and to become truly a man.

Remember the " Great Books" ?

Flavius — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 04:47:02 +0000

In reply to P.S. Flavius' wise comments

Remember the " Great Books" ? At Robert Hutchin's Chicago and several other mid- century campuses instead of keeping your "eyes on the prize" of that fast track through Goldman, Sachs you were exposed to the concerns and the conclusions of the smartest people who ever left behind a record of how they had tried to make sense of the world.

How did that work out?

I knew a couple of them. And I wish they were here to talk about it Or more precisely I wish they were here to talk about anything because they were interesting and just good folks.

.Maybe they sadly discovered there's no market for philosophers. Or maybe they were in such demand that they never had time to be philosophical.

Or maybe they found there's no demand for philosophers . And were philosophical about that..

P.S. Flavius' wise comments

artappraiser — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 18:54:18 +0000

In reply to absolutely, but the problem

P.S. Flavius' wise comments upthread and his recent blog are an important perspective on all this; people invest too much promise and belief into that whole elite college or club thing, when life is really more of crap shoot. You can get an elite education outside an elite college if you really want it. And it is a guarantee of nothing as well.