I certainly did not want to find a way to get $100 to take an actuarial exam in college. Or $100 for anything. I didn’t start exams until after college. But when there is a will, there is a way, and motivated people do what they need to. I did agree to a one-time free exam.
I appreciate your participation in that scholarship program.
Eh, probably 80% of the applicants to Harvard are smart enough to succeed there and they accept 4% of applicants (last time I checked which was a while ago). That means that 76% of the applicants are smart enough to cut it but still don’t get in. One presumes they use Affirmative Action to get to a different cut of the 4/76 breakdown, and still none of the 20% who aren’t smart enough get in.
Now that’s Harvard.
A lot of colleges are probably accepting somewhere north of 90% of the applicants who are smart enough to succeed there and not getting the cut quite right and accepting some who are either not smart enough or not driven enough to succeed as well.
And then a number of colleges are in between those extremes.
Yeah, I didn’t pass my first exam until the very end of my senior year, but it’s a different world out there now. I can’t recall the last time we interviewed someone for full time entry level job without an exam. It’s rare we interview someone with just one. And so many candidates (before IFM was eliminated) had three.
Career changers obviously are in a bit of a different boat, but they’d need at least a handful of exams passed too for us to consider them.
My sense is that Canada is even crazier than the US with the Universities of Waterloo and Laval churning out actuarial student graduates half way to Fellowship.
Don’t know your age but I also didn’t write my first actuarial exam until late in my university years. I did pure math and had the luxury of not opting for actuarial over graduate school or teaching until late in the game. That seems tougher to do now.
Isn’t Harvard like a tiny, tiny fraction of the college population? How does affirmative action impact the system as a whole? I mean after you get past the top 50 unis or so things aren’t really selective at all, so does it even matter?
Eh, certain programs can be selective even at schools that aren’t particularly selective.
Especially at the graduate level. Especially veterinary / medical / law schools.
But various undergraduate programs can also be selective even if the Uni they’re attached to is not.
The NYT happened to have an article with some data.
Looking at white kids who were admitted to colleges in 2021, 60% went to colleges that accept 75% or more of applicants. Another 27% went to colleges that accept 50-75%.
The corresponding numbers for black students were 58% and 29%.
Fundamentally racism is an economic issue hence the burnings in the early 1920s.
One of the reasons Justice Clarence is said to be against AA is because he got AA in to Yale and then struggled because of the stigma against AA but yet he felt he could have gotten in without it.
The sad thing about this is AA probably needed refinement rather than being thrown out. Just to give an example in 2020 there were more white women than people of colour who are actuaries.
Actuaries | Data USA)%20and%20Black%20(3.53%25).
I will also add that the constitution is not colourblind. By design, the voting right were for white men hence the need for amendment 15 and 19. The constitution is flawed. I have stronger views but it is what it is.
I want to reinforce this point. When I was at HU those who came to HU with AP classes jumped the some first-year classes. If you then got 2 shots at doing Math 55 or CS 50 with the better score being taken you are in a wonderful position.
The article is behind a paywall so I can’t see the numbers against the percentages. Percentages are misleading because they don’t help us compare numbers that are by far different in degrees of magnitude. For example if the total smaller number is 10% of the larger number what exactly do these numbers mean eg is comparing 5.8m of 10m the same as 116m of 200m? Is the point here they are the same in percentage terms or they are way way different in terms of magnitude?
The point is much simpler than you are imagining.
colonelsmoothie pointed out that we always hear about AA in reference to these extremely selective schools. But, it seems that most people go to much less selective schools, so does AA in admissions really matter much if most people are getting in anyway?
I recalled that I had seen some statistics recently. Among people who go to college, most white kids and most black kids go to fairly non-selective schools.
Yes, there are fewer black kids and even fewer black college students. That doesn’t change the fact that most kids of both colors go to less selective schools. And, there is no strong discrepancy between the 50+ admission schools and the 75+ admissions schools.
Fair point
It does at the elite schools, or hard-to-get-into programs at non-elite schools.
If you want to be a history major at podunk U… not so much. But an average school with a great music or engineering program? Or medical & law schools pretty much across the board? Yeah, it matters a lot.
And the point of the article is that elite schools get a lot of attention, but the great majority of students go to schools that are much less selective.
I only have have first person knowledge wrt Stanford University. A really top tier, elite university.
An article in the alum magazine about four years ago popped out at me. The number of applicants with 4.0 GPA and perfect SAT results was four times the number of positions available.
That means some really great students were not getting in. And having a student body of nothing but perfect students does not strike me as healthy for the university. What a dreary place.
Approximately 0.07% of students (7 in 10,000) who take the SAT achieve a perfect score. Since roughly 1.7 million people take the test each year, that comes out to around 1,000 people who score a perfect 1600.
Stanford has over 2000 admits each year so something doesn’t seem right. Maybe after legacy admissions and athletes there are only a couple of hundred positions available,
That’s just simple math.
Your point has zero dimension, which is also simple math.