If you structured society such that only the top 0.5% of households by income could send their kids to college, you'd find that a lot of your successful entrepreneurs, judges, scientists, etc. went to college and had a high income growing up.
But I don't know that proposing something else, like standardized testing, as an alternative to this would be quite a remarkable claim. You're just saying that the scoring function produces a lot of false negatives.
In your hypothetical, institutions would quickly realize that a bunch of non-college graduates were just as smart as college graduates. Which is actually the public perception in places where jobs are filled based on social status and connections rather than objective metrics.
What I’m saying that the current scoring function appears to match up pretty well with our intuition about who is smart enough to work on Wall Street or at Facebook. At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.
> In your hypothetical, institutions would quickly realize that a bunch of non-college graduates were just as smart as college graduates.
Which would cause those institutions to move away from income as a means of deciding who gets in; much like in institutions now are moving away from standardized testing as a means of deciding who gets in.
> At least, these profit-seeking institutions don’t seem to think it would be better for them to shift their hiring from Stanford to kids with 4.1s and lower SATs who went to UCSB instead.
There's two assumptions here that you may want to reexamine:
1. Profit selling institutions are purely rational at hiring, and only hire based on merit. As in, if you're hired to work at a Wall Street firm, it's not because you went to Harvard; it's because you're smart. Which is very optimistic, to say the least.
2. That people are intrinsically smart or not, and the institution you go to doesn't change that. If test scores didn't correlate at all with merit, you'd still want to hire from Stanford over UCSB; not because the SAT scores are higher at Stanford but because Stanford is a better institution for educating people. So even if the people who go in are the same caliber, the people who come out are different.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing that test scores can measure aptitude. I'm disagreeing with the line of reasoning where we have the following premises:
1. We live in a society where resources are allocated by performance in standardized testing.
2. Having more resources increases the likelihood you're successful.
3. People who are successful have high standardized test scores.
And conclude that standardized test scores are an accurate predictor of future success.
If you structured society such that only the top 0.5% of households by income could send their kids to college, you'd find that a lot of your successful entrepreneurs, judges, scientists, etc. went to college and had a high income growing up.
But I don't know that proposing something else, like standardized testing, as an alternative to this would be quite a remarkable claim. You're just saying that the scoring function produces a lot of false negatives.