as favoring reducing the role of family wealth in college admission decisions. History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly--for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children's qualities.
What specific changes would help college admission practices improve in this regard?
I've though before that a data driven approach would be an interesting attack on this problem. Take the applications, then 4 years later (or 10 or 20) compare it to the students' records and see what factors correlated best with success. There really is a treasure trove of data here that is just going to waste.
That's an interesting suggestion. I think some college admission offices do that. I've heard MIT describe one admission factor it looks for: students challenging themselves with HARD classes in high school, which correlates better with success in upper division courses in MIT than does having a perfect high school grade point average.
I think public schools are obligated to publish some of this data by law, but we really should get some from private schools too. Should it become a widely available data set, you'd see a few wikis/apps/startups/etc overnight.
Incredulous as it sounds, if there's really a flood of qualified (as deemed by college admissions people who aren't just making excuses) students for top schools, then simple supply and demand states that there's a market opportunity for 'top schools'. How to form a top school quickly is an issue, I'll admit - but there are scenarios that instantly attract smart and talented people.
For instance, consider a new private college/academy that had close ties with TED - they recruited a lot of the TED speakers to be professors or advisors and students would have the opportunity to work with these people. That would definitely attract talent quickly.
It takes an enormous amount of money to do it. Also accreditation is a big issue -- you can't get accredited until a class graduates. Olin got accredited immediately after their first class graduated.
I'm curious about what HN readers would suggest for a better approach to college admission.
Maybe I'm biased because I code systems for Japanese universities for a living, but I've always really liked examinations.
We have a system we sell as consultingware to many Japanese colleges, installing the base of what is considered acceptable here, with customizations per request. By default, it provides:
1) No way to even tell if a student is legacy, plays soccer, etc
2) Strict auditing of everything. First text in the design document, in 48 point font: OUR OVERIDING PRIORITY IS TO NOT COMPROMISE THE PUBLIC'S TRUST IN THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE EXAMINATION.
3) Affirmative action? Not supported or encouraged (I won't say impossible, but its pretty close -- you'd have to use manual overrides of examination results after turning off the failsafes preventing you from doing so accidentally, which causes BIG RED ANNOUNCEMENTS to appear to the other people responsible for the system).
4) Some schools have particular needs for X number of Y students. (For example, a school with a historical association with a particular church/temple might need X priests per year). They can accomplish it in one very transparent way: say "We are looking for X priests. Please apply to the I Want To Be A Priest exam if you're interested", and then the top X wants-to-be-priest candidates are accepted. Note that, importantly, this has absolutely no effect on the general applicant pool, and is not an effective way to get out of the general admissions standards (since if you elect that sort of treatment, you WILL be tracked straight into the Becomes A Priest major and you will not really be allowed to change).
5) Transparency for everything. The school starts the year by saying "English Department seeking 12 students. History Department seeking 16...." Then, after the exam is over, all scores are published (anonymized) with aggregate statistics: the English Department filled 12 spots out of 127 applicants having an average score of 187 points. The minimum passing score was 214, and students scoring above 212 were added to the wait list, from which 2 were offered admission.
The stats are also broken down by test load: say you're told to take two subjects out of three, your pick. The University will publish the distributions of scores for every possible combination (3 in this trivial case), letting you know if any combination was harder or easier than others (which they do A LOT of work to avoid, incidentally).
And the icing on the cake of full transparency: the university maintains five to ten years of these stats and prints it right in the bloody admission handbook itself. Because that's how confident we are that the process is not corrupt.
I want American universities to be like that. Heck, fine by me if they want to put a thumb on the admissions scales. Just publish how big the thumb was:
"15 black students admitted with average SATs of..."
Incidentally, in the category of "I'm not exaggerating, really", here's one of hunreds of pages provided by Tokyo University, who I am using as an example because they're indisputably the #1 university in the country and not because they're a client of ours (which they may or may not be).
Last year, for these majors, we had X applicants, Y students pass the exam, and Z students accept the offer of admission to the University. A special examination was offered to graduates of foreign high schools. The number of students taking the special examination is reported in two groups: Japanese/permanent residents of Japan and everybody else. (The numbers are less than one percent of admitted students.) We additionally allowed Q students into this major as a result of the government-sponsored Japan/Korea Engineering Student Exchange (and two other exceptions).
And on the subject of ballsy transparency: "Here's how many students got jobs, how many went into further schooling, and how many have neither jobs nor education prospects as of graduation, broken down by major and industry employed in."
In one case this was done as a result of a lawsuit (U-Mich). Translating the "thumb" into GPA, we get:
+1.0 on GPA if black, +0.2 if legacy, +0.5 if from michigan. (I.e., a non-legacy with a 3.8 GPA is treated the same as a legacy with a 3.6 GPA, all else held equal).
For comparison, "national" levels of personal achievement get you +0.25 on GPA.
Is it a good idea to improve in this regard? While the credential pie may be unevenly distributed, it seems that by improving things you may just shrink the pie.
Ending legacies may reduce alumni contributions, thereby "forcing" (1) colleges to reduce financial aid and raise tuition.
(1) I use the term "forcing" loosely. Of course colleges could reduce waste (like the football team) and increase class sizes. Realistically that won't happen.
Some make money, but most don't. Duke should keep their team, I imagine it makes money. Rutgers shouldn't.
However, I probably should have given an example besides the football team. There is plenty of unglamorous waste to cut at any college. For instance, no college should have 3+ affirmative action offices (no desire to debate on 0 vs 1). As another example, I know of a college with a 7 person math dept and a 3 person statistics dept (each with a dept chair and underworked secretary). If they were combined, you could cut a chair and a secretary.
That's an interesting suggestion on why to leave well enough alone. I wonder how one would check the economic effect on colleges of changing current admission policies. Daniel Golden's book _The Price of Admission_
claims that colleges could be much more meritocratic in admission than they now are, but his good examples (Caltech among research universities, and Berea among small liberal arts colleges) perhaps undermine his argument.
For every single not-as-qualified VIP or preferential student they admit, at a highly competitive school like Harvard that means they have to reject nine qualified non-VIP candidates.
Read that in an article, don't have the link handy.
http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html
as favoring reducing the role of family wealth in college admission decisions. History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly--for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children's qualities.
What specific changes would help college admission practices improve in this regard?