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For decades, struggling community colleges have done the hard work of remediation for students coming out of high schools ill equipped to give them the skills they need to thrive after graduation. What if that work, all too often stymied by a punishing lack of resources, shifted instead to schools with multibillion-dollar taxpayer-subsidized endowments?
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Originally Posted by RamenAddict
The content of the article was slightly different than the title. I don’t necessarily see a problem with schools establishing a base criteria for community college students to apply and then picking randomly from there. I know a lot of people who started in community college and were ultimately successful in going to undergrad and getting graduate degrees. Presumably at the point where they are about to finish the two-year degree, anyone unqualified would have been weeded out.
I don’t agree that there should be a free-for-all random admission though.
The problem is, if you read the quote above from the article, they aren't talking about picking from among those who meet the higher standards. Rather they are talking about specifically the students who need "remediation" going to the Ivy League schools instead of those who exceed the standards. Those students "who need remediation" are the ones who could barely pass high school classes.
The article isn't about selecting who of the 10,000 highly qualified get one of the 1000 slots, but who of the million unqualified gets those slots. They're not talking equality or equity, but a complete reversal of any form of merit where the unqualified get rewarded for their lack of ability.
College admissions, especially at the elite level, is already basically a random process, so officially making it a random lottery won't really change anything.
My high school had several teachers who taught AP Bio. The teacher that I had made it almost impossible to get an A, and he outright refused to give B+ or C+ regardless of your grades. Another AP Bio teacher gave an A to basically any student. Many of the students who had the easy teacher had GPA's above 4.0 and got into Ivy League schools. The students with the hard teacher mostly did not get into Ivy League schools, and that one grade was just about the only thing separating us. Basically a random lottery that I lost on my first day of 10th grade.
On the other hand, there was a really nice girl who had a 4.0 but did not get into Ivy League schools, even though there was seemingly nothing separating her from the people who did get into Ivy League schools. Again, random lottery.
There was also a white male student who was 1/16 Hispanic, who got into Ivy League schools by checking the Hispanic box on the applications. His appearance and his name were very obviously non-Hispanic, and was in a mostly white high school. Again, random lottery.
Those are more like random within tight samples not legitimately random.
The problem is, if you read the quote above from the article, they aren't talking about picking from among those who meet the higher standards. Rather they are talking about specifically the students who need "remediation" going to the Ivy League schools instead of those who exceed the standards. Those students "who need remediation" are the ones who could barely pass high school classes.
The article isn't about selecting who of the 10,000 highly qualified get one of the 1000 slots, but who of the million unqualified gets those slots. They're not talking equality or equity, but a complete reversal of any form of merit where the unqualified get rewarded for their lack of ability.
But what if — even as a temporary measure to try and rectify some of the injustices of a pandemic that has left so many with so much less — these schools deployed their enormous resources to randomly select students from a vast pool that included more than merely the exceptionally credentialed?
...Is very different from this.
Quote:
What if elite colleges chose students whose resilience had so far eluded them? Whose schoolwork went off the rails during an epic crisis in which they were forced to work because parents lost their jobs? A revolution in the name of fairness would seem to require, at the minimum, the abandonment of perfection as a baseline, an understanding that failure is not the assassin of potential.
Notwithstanding the misleading, clickbait-y headline, I think there's something to be said for "abandon[ing] perfection as a baseline[.]" When I was applying to law school (not so terribly long ago), Berkeley was known as a "black box" because unlike other top law schools not named "Yale," their admissions process was very holistic and placed a lot less weight on LSAT score and undergraduate GPA. Of course, Berkeley by no means abandoned those factors and would still appear highly selective if you only examined their admitted students' LSAT score and GPA statistics in a vacuum. There can be a happy medium between hyper-focusing on students with straight A's, perfect SAT scores, and extracurricular lists as thick as phonebooks to the exclusion of all others and picking your incoming class by throwing darts at the wall.
Those are more like random within tight samples not legitimately random.
I clarified in a later post that it's a random lottery between those who are qualified. Those who are not qualified are never entered into the lottery.
I clarified in a later post that it's a random lottery between those who are qualified. Those who are not qualified are never entered into the lottery.
GIven admissions are test optional this year, admissions are going to end up being a little bit more random anyway.
Just the opposite is true. Because tests are optional, admissions will be less random. They will be based on the social engineering objectives of the admissions committee.
I have a friend who teaches community college, and he says you would not believe how inadequate and uninterested the students are.
And since when is it a top colleges mission to have a better relationship with the rest of the country?
Should Ivy League Schools Randomly Select Students (At Least For A Little While)?
By Ginia Bellafante
When she assumed the office of the presidency at Brown University in 2001, Ruth Simmons said in an inauguration speech that it was an important goal of hers to bring more community college students to the university. Throughout her 11-year tenure, Dr. Simmons, now the president of Prairie View A&M in Texas (a historically Black college to which MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, pledged a $50 million gift this week) tried to push her colleagues in the Ivy League to open themselves to these nontraditional students.
“I would say, ‘If we were to collectively agree to make space for community college students, think of how much better our relationship to the rest of the country would be,’” she told me. But it proved to be a difficult road. “The noise from people who feel entitled to Harvard or Brown is tremendous.”
I should mention that my post above was based on the assumption that only students who are "qualified" for the college would be entered into the lottery.
Regarding the bold above, "qualified" means one point above "unqualified." It is a very low bar.
Far better to have a strict meritocracy. Rather than lottery, students should be stack-ranked from best to worst, and only take the cream of the cream of the cream.
In reality, only a very, very tiny fraction of students will go on to achieve greatness. In the history of Mankind, there are only a handful of people who have made earth-changing advances in the various disciplines (physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, politics, literature, etc).
There are only a handful of Isaac Newtons, Leonardo Da Vincis, Bertrand Russells, Marie Curies, James Watsons & Francis Cricks, Milton Friedmans and the like.
The objective is to maximize the likelihood that those towering minds are nurtured.
Last edited by RationalExpectations; 02-06-2021 at 09:01 PM..
Regarding the bold above, "qualified" means one point above "unqualified." It is a very low bar.
Far better to have a strict meritocracy. Rather than lottery, students should be stack-ranked from best to worst, and only take the cream of the cream of the cream.
In reality, only a very, very tiny fraction of students will go on to achieve greatness. In the history of Mankind, there are only a handful of people who have made earth-changing advances in the various disciplines (physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, politics, literature, etc).
There are only a handful of Isaac Newtons, Leonardo Da Vincis, Bertrand Russells, Marie Curies, James Watsons & Francis Cricks, Milton Friedmans and the like.
The objective is to maximize the likelihood that those towering minds are nurtured.
I wonder though how many of those towering minds would be selected under today's school systems? Would their minds have been given a chance the today's 11th grade or would they be labeled trouble makers because they don't fit within the school's expectations?
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