This sort of discrimination is run of the mill
Putnam? inb4 ke$ha
The money needs to come from somewhere I guess
I think one thing we can do to set aside the silliness is to make the best public school we can and then make copies of it all throughout the country. The best universities in Canada are public and I don’t see why we can’t do the same in the US.
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Dude, the Putnam conversation was ages ago. You are slower than Mark Cavendish going up a mountain.
[quote="now_samantha, post:187, topic:8076”]
slower than Mark Cavendish going up a mountain.
[/quote]
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The best Canadian universities are certainly the public ones but I don’t see how the US could get to that situation? The Canadian public universities have uniform high standards so a student in an undergraduate program doesn’t need to worry much about which one he/she gets into. Graduate programs vary more.
The few private universities that exist in Canada are non-factors. Some are “subsidiaries” of secondary private US universities. I don’t think any of the highly rated private US universities have satellite campuses here.
Now that the Right has won this particular battle, they’re expanding their efforts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/diversity-equity-dei-companies-blum-2040b173?st=3x2qcli4jmtmaai&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
(supposedly free link)
In general, I disagree with corporate diversity efforts as widely defined by racial/gender composition. However, any such opposition from Republicans is mostly rooted in bad faith. I would prefer it come from logical discussion. Occasionally, Republicans “get it right” but for the wrong reasons.
But I am in favor of “discrimination” in favor of “the poor” (intentionally vaguely defined), which would be more direct and would still achieve others’ goal of helping minorities at a disproportionate level.
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I used to think this way, but have shifted my thinking somewhat. When an entire cultural group has been historically disadvantaged, they end up with a lack of role models to provide them with “people like them” that they can aspire to be like.
Focusing on the “poor” seems to be a good idea at first glance, since they are the ones most in need and the criteria captures a wider cross-section of people. But it does nothing to push groups through glass ceilings and make those coming behind believe they can achieve things. Focusing on the poor floats the lowest boats higher, but keeps the larger groups that need help floating lower than they should as a whole.
Maybe a middle-class black man doesn’t need help to get by, but the others who aren’t as lucky need him to thrive, so he can stand up for others getting a fair shot.
Corporations attempt to hire a diverse workforce not because they are trying to help the poor, but because it’s good for a corporation to have a diverse workforce. If you want to sell insurance to Black and Hispanic customers, it helps to have some Black and Hispanic employees.
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A cynic would also point out that if corporations don’t hire a diverse workforce, they risk accusations of discrimination from watchdogs and regulators and the associated reputational risk that comes from such accusations.
I’ve worked at a couple of corporations that seemed to have that mentality, although one of them, a major P&C carrier in the US, seems to have evolved since my days there.
Most corporations do not attempt to hire a diverse workforce. Corporations attempt to have employee quotas only by race and gender so they can check the boxes. Most corporations do not seek true diversity, but rather a visual diversity from outside pressures. It also does not help that the media uses the very same limited definition of “diversity”.
If you want to sell insurance to black and Hispanic customers, then hire black and Hispanic agents (not necessarily corporate employees).
Separately, I am in favor of discrimination in educational programs that are for the poor; however, this does not mean throwing even more money at schools. Attitudes of perpetual victimization and beliefs that money will solve everything are the keys to what holds people back. More money only continues the reliance on it, and does not create shifts in motivation. It is not the poor who need to adopt these attitudes, but rather society at-large to sell it in the way of mentorship and more self reliance. The more you tell someone they aren’t in charge of themselves, the more they believe it.
You cannot save everybody. There will continue to be poor people. This will only help some unknown % of the poor.
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Speaking of why schools want to admit “diversity”…
(Lightly edited from a post i read elsewhere by a person more insightful than i am)
There’s a real sense in which the full pay kids at any university are the customer. The full aid kids are there because they help provide the sort of experiences the full-pay families want. They want their kids to go to school and study with a heavily curated diverse population, because that’s more fun than homogenity and because it helps broaden their minds.
Are suburban white kids seemed squeezed out by the system? They absolutely are. A kid who went to a fancy feeder school and grew up in a household with an annual income of over 400k doesn’t want to room with a kid from Topeka whose dad is a CPA. He either wants to room with someone like him, or someone “exotic”.
So the kids who need full or near full aid really should be seen as something the university provides its actual customers. And its not a bad trade. You serve as a rich kid’s cultural experience but you get a fantastic education and get launched straight into affluence yourself.
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Another cynical fact-- the Ivys want to educate America’s leaders.
And, no matter what, Americans will never elect Asians into every seat of power.
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NYT’s “The Morning” ran an article today about Dartmouth and SAT scores and their impact on admissions. They made SAT scores optional during Covid and after-the-fact discovered that doing so actually hurt socially disadvantaged applicants. So they are now back to requiring them.
Full article below.
Dartmouth College announced this morning that it would again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, starting next year. It’s a significant development because other selective colleges are now deciding whether to do so. In today’s newsletter, I’ll tell you the story behind Dartmouth’s decision.
Training future leaders
Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.
“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.
Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.
A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.
The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.
Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.
As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.
That finding, as much as any other, led to Dartmouth’s announcement this morning. “Our goal at Dartmouth is academic excellence in the service of training the broadest swath of future leaders,” Beilock told me. “I’m convinced by the data that this will help us do that.”
It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students. The college doesn’t apologize for that. Students from poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools have effectively been running with wind in their face. They are not competing fairly with affluent teenagers.
Source: Cascio, Sacerdote, Staiger, Tine (Dartmouth) Disadvantaged students are low-income, first-generation college or enrolled at a challenged high school. By The New York Times
“We’re looking for the kids who are excelling in their environment. We know society is unequal,” Beilock said. “Kids that are excelling in their environment, we think, are a good bet to excel at Dartmouth and out in the world.” The admissions office will judge an applicant’s environment partly by comparing his or her test score with the score distribution at the applicant’s high schools, Coffin said. In some cases, even an SAT score well below 1,400 can help an application.
Questions and answers
In our conversations, I asked Beilock and her colleagues about several common criticisms of standardized tests, and they said that they did not find the criticisms persuasive.
For instance, many critics on the political left argue the tests are racially or economically biased, but Beilock said the evidence didn’t support those claims. “The research suggests this tool is helpful in finding students we might otherwise miss,” she said.
I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said. I’ve heard similar sentiments from leaders at other colleges that have reinstated the test requirement, including Georgetown and M.I.T.
And I asked Beilock and her colleagues whether fewer students might now apply to Dartmouth. Coffin, the admissions dean, replied that such an outcome might be OK. He noted that the test-optional policy since 2020 had not led to a more diverse pool of applicants and that Dartmouth already received more than enough applications — 31,000 this year, for 1,200 first-year slots. “I don’t think volume is the holy grail,” he said.
Finally, I asked Beilock whether she was satisfied with Dartmouth’s level of economic diversity, which is slightly below that of most similarly elite colleges. She said no. “We have aspirations to bring it up,” she said. Reinstating the test requirement, she believes, can help Dartmouth do so.
Oh. The description was confusing. Dartmouth has a policy that effectively boosts the SAT scores of socially disadvantaged applicants, so when there’s no SAT score to boost, it can hurt them? When described that way, it belongs in the obvious results thread.
Yeah, without the scores, applicant is “average student overcoming hardships.”
With the test scores, the applicant is “way-above-average student overcoming hardships.”
And, applicants were concerned that their way-above-average scores were not high enough, so they declined to provide them. And then they got declined by Dartmouth instead of accepted.
I’d like to see it by socioeconomic background