I know the person's intentions are good in putting forth such an idea, but the problem with intentions is that they're always good. But they often ignore the bad side effects of the idea when it comes to putting it into practice.
First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified tier of applicants has a better shot at getting in. These lower tier students get a better chance in a lottery, at the expense of people who through better work/aptitude/achievement/(and no small amount of luck, finance, or legacy also) would otherwise usually get in with high likelihood. (Note, those last exceptional categories are a small portion -- something like 10%.)
So what's one of the side effects here? Or let's call it incentives produced by such a system?
Well, perhaps it's that students, who throughout school are taught to study hard, do well, apply themselves, at the end face a selection that tosses that out the window and says, well, everyone is equally good and we're going to do a lottery. We're lowering the bar so that everyone who got above a B average has an equal chance of getting into Harvard.
Is that teaching them the right lesson? Is that incentivizing people to excel and be really good at something? How would you respond at work if at the end of the year, everyone doing a minimum amount of work were given the same salary?
I don't think you'd actually like that (most people reading these forums, at least). Now, I don't dispute that there's a lot of unnecessary pressure on students today. And part of it is a bigger problem that the population has grown while top spots have stayed relatively constant. So people are trying to fix this.
But I disagree with attempts to create artificial equality at the last step. We wouldn't accept this for anything else that matters -- you wouldn't prefer to be treated by a doctor who was just "good enough", or be flown by a pilot who barely passed the flight exam. In the name of lowering their level of stress, or making the doctor / pilot population look a certain way. And by the way, to make a difference in college admissions (according to the function I can imagine the author desires), you really have to lower the bar a lot.
I don't want these kinds of distortions for a system that my kids will be subject to. That's not the lesson I want them to learn. Students in other countries have a far harder and more competitive time than ours. I don't want them to wake up to that reality only when it comes time to apply for their first job and find themselves falling flat.
The problem is that those factors confound measurement so much that we don't actually know if the highest-scoring students are really the best. Lowering the bar in the face of absolute certainty and precision might be bad (that itself is a debatable point) but that's not what the authors are proposing.
people say that Ivy's get such a large number of applicants and accept such a small percentage that they could take their applicant pool, accept one cohort, put it aside, accept another cohort and the 2nd cohort would be just as successful as the first cohort.
If that is true, its not about lowering the bar, as both cohort pass the same bar, its just about increasing fairness.
if its not true, then yes, you are correct, it lowers the bar.
If you take the bottom 1/3 of any ivy class and replace it with the next folks in line, then I would probably agree in a hand-wavy kind of way.
Some points:
1. The folks who barely missed getting into (somewhat randomly) Columbia will most likely get into a place like Cornell. Is there really a loss there?
2. The folks who barely miss getting into Cornell will most likely get into a place like NYU. For most of these folks, is there really a loss there? My guess is that, at most, they lose some cocktail party swagger.
3. The top (15-30%?)of the classes at the Ivies really makes those schools academically. That said, there are a lot of other folks at the school that have significant social and intellectual capital to the schools. Athletes are one group, folks who demonstrably know how to get stuff done on a regional/national/international level are another group. Using these criteria to assess merit will produce a class not dissimilar to what we see now.
I think the issue is that I want a doctor who is competent, not just one who can get the best score on exams. More to the point, I want good effective fairly priced healthcare, not necessarily a doctor at all.
The current system is meritocracy with regards to a set of metrics very loosely associated with merit. It's insanity how much we read into meaningless differences in indicators of merit. We take an indicator that is very very loosely correlated with ability over the entire distribution, for typical applications, and assume that small differences at one end always matter. It's like reading tea leaves with regards to actual outcomes.
The problem with current inequity in society is that it's disproportionate and arbitrary. We frame these discussions as if it's meritocratic capitalism vs blind communism or something when what we have isn't actually meritocratic at all. If it were, we'd see much more diversity in society than we do, and many more options as consumers.
I'm not sure I agree with the proposal but at least it's honest. I'd rather have my child dealing with that than the current lie society tells itself. Then she wouldn't fall into a cycle of despair over a cruel fairy tale, and everyone would have a more accurate appraisal of what different outcomes mean.
First, let's not mince words here -- this suggested policy is about lowering the bar for admission to top universities so that some previously unqualified tier of applicants has a better shot at getting in. These lower tier students get a better chance in a lottery, at the expense of people who through better work/aptitude/achievement/(and no small amount of luck, finance, or legacy also) would otherwise usually get in with high likelihood. (Note, those last exceptional categories are a small portion -- something like 10%.)
So what's one of the side effects here? Or let's call it incentives produced by such a system?
Well, perhaps it's that students, who throughout school are taught to study hard, do well, apply themselves, at the end face a selection that tosses that out the window and says, well, everyone is equally good and we're going to do a lottery. We're lowering the bar so that everyone who got above a B average has an equal chance of getting into Harvard.
Is that teaching them the right lesson? Is that incentivizing people to excel and be really good at something? How would you respond at work if at the end of the year, everyone doing a minimum amount of work were given the same salary?
I don't think you'd actually like that (most people reading these forums, at least). Now, I don't dispute that there's a lot of unnecessary pressure on students today. And part of it is a bigger problem that the population has grown while top spots have stayed relatively constant. So people are trying to fix this.
But I disagree with attempts to create artificial equality at the last step. We wouldn't accept this for anything else that matters -- you wouldn't prefer to be treated by a doctor who was just "good enough", or be flown by a pilot who barely passed the flight exam. In the name of lowering their level of stress, or making the doctor / pilot population look a certain way. And by the way, to make a difference in college admissions (according to the function I can imagine the author desires), you really have to lower the bar a lot.
I don't want these kinds of distortions for a system that my kids will be subject to. That's not the lesson I want them to learn. Students in other countries have a far harder and more competitive time than ours. I don't want them to wake up to that reality only when it comes time to apply for their first job and find themselves falling flat.