It doesn’t have to make sense if your chief objective is virtue signaling.
And it’s even worse than all of this. Many public schools have eliminated advanced courses -- having deemed them “racist” -- that offered students in underperforming schools an opportunity to distinguish themselves in their college applications.
As seems typical, policy changes purportedly enacted to help a certain population do more to hurt them than anything else. Not to mention the backlash they create.
But no way to differentiate beyond that. Students in high performing schools have varying levels of courses (regular, honors, AP) along which they can differentiate. At many public high schools now, As are handed out like candy, with no way to tell what that A really means.
That will never happen, the whole point of admissions (hell you could argue as I believe Freddie has that the whole point of college) is to ensure only “the right people” get in.
Oh I agree. I'm just separating out what hypothetically the universities themselves will want/say, vs. what theoretically activists would want/say. The universities will want to maintain some level of pretense I imagine.
There's another comment elaborating on the kind of mix the elite universities want/need to maintain for their luxury product (with all the tension between somehow simultaneously catering to elites, the talented/upwardly mobile, and the disadvantaged).
A lottery would be fair but only if you started with a particular metric. As in, anyone with a SAT score over x could put in for the Harvard lottery. It would be an interesting experiment.
Great stuff. I do think you also made a glance at another issue, too many humanities people in journalism who’s eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking numbers.
Oh absolutely, and plenty of people who are good at math are terrible at expressing things in writing, but if journalists want to do something about their rock bottom trust rating in the US not being so actively hostile to numbers would be a good place to start.
It's pretty straightforward. If you're an elite, Ivy institution whose brand is all about mingling with "future leaders" and the ruling class of tomorrow, the rise of poor and working-class Asian children of immigrants who've been absolutely crushing the SATs presents a big problem. If something like half of an incoming class is composed of these students, it makes it difficult for admissions offices to include enough children of the current (largely white) elite, who will go on to be in influential positions in politics, media, finance, etc. in the next generation (and will be donors, influential alumni, etc.). This is not only *not* about admitting more poor black and brown kids, it's about keeping the "merely" bright kids of laundromat and bodega owners from diluting the social capital of the Ivy league "experience." It is deeply classist on an axis that is also, alas, racist. It is also about keeping elite college presidents from having to testify in front of the Supreme Court (reputation management -- like stock price -- being the obsessive goal of any executive board or body).
Racist? Really? It seems to me the elite schools are eschewing standardized testing so they can maintain the current affirmative action regime in advance of what is sure to be an adverse (for their current regime) Supreme Court opinion in the Harvard/UNC cases this June.
It is definitively and unquestionably true. In the mailers Harvard sends to high school students in (I think?) Iowa, they very deliberately set a higher PSAT cutoff for Asian students to get pamphlets than white ones.
I think that's at most a secondary concern for these institutions. The outcome of this case could have a slight downward pressure on admission of Black and Hispanic students (though places like Harvard have other ways to fiddle with that knob, like "Dean's Interest" lists and the like). It seems like the sharp rise in Asian students from non-elite backgrounds is the factor they are actually trying to control for (as evidenced, in fact, by the admissions office documents relating to "personality scores" in the Supreme Court case).
This is a very important point that is often overlooked. The affirmative action case threatens their ability to depress Asian enrollment more than it threatens them having a respectable number of Black and Hispanic students.
There are lots of “class-based” initiatives you can use to boost Black and Latino enrollment. But it’s a lot harder to design policies that favor whites over (more qualified, less wealthy) Asian students, without making it obvious that this is your goal.
These elite universities aren’t scrambling to figure out how to enroll Black students after the court rules, like people imagine. They know how to do that. The problem is getting the demographics they want when Asians score higher than whites.
I think you have this exactly backwards. Moving to class/poverty based admittance would result in Asian admittees entirely replacing black admits. Admitting more upper middle class and rich white students is comparatively easy (and profitable!) - ditching needs-blind admissions and favoring full-fare applicants the way they do with foreign and transfer students. There is no legal jeopardy to this move.
Maybe I’m underestimating the potential legal consequences, but I assumed they would design their “class” initiatives in a way that does not help Asian students, such as zip codes. In California, Black and Latino enrollment plummeted when affirmative action was banned, but they figured out various strategies over the years. They won’t just do “you get extra points if you’re poor.”
I agree wrt reputation management around the possible SCOTUS decision. But I think you underestimate the desire of the administrators and now-more-powerful DEI bureaucracies at these institutions to virtue signal around their minority data AND “first generation college” admit rates. I’ve been going through the process with my kids over the last couple of years, and many of these people are “true believers” around woke ideas.
Note this part of Freddie's post: "Contrast that quantitative transparency with the fact that almost all competitive colleges have proprietary formulas which they use to adjust GPAs before consideration for admission. These adjustments are hugely important for admissions decisions, and yet they represent a black box, as schools usually keep their particular adjustment systems secret."
The real point behind ditching the SAT/ACT is that those scores are published. It's a restraint on the school admitting who they want to admit. Which is not just AA students, but also athletes, children of celebrities/pols, children of staff and friends of the admin and donor class kids. Now, they can just not include their score and thus there's no "cost" in prestige in admitting them. Harvard and Yale really don't want to publish scores showing places like Rice, Wash U and U Chicago are admitting students with higher average scores. Because long term, it will change perceptions of the brand.
There’s also the other point that high school GPAs get very “blunt” in the upper range (I think more than eight or ten students at my good-but-not-great suburban high school had 4.0s or above). The SATs don’t have that extreme top-out bluntness distortion. Short answer: if just going by GPAs, you can admit tons more white kids from Northeast and West Coast private schools who will turn around and be donors or visiting lecturers to dandle current Harvard students on their knees and tell them about life among the elite.
"the rise of poor and working-class Asian children of immigrants who've been absolutely crushing the SATs presents a big problem"
I'm going to need a cite for that, with household income figures- because my impression is that many in the high-achieving "Asian" (that absurd "ethnic" category, drawn from a territorial arc ranging from Afghanistan to Japan) "children of immigrant" student population in the US come from families that are neither poor or working class. Some of the recent immigrants are in fact very, very wealthy.
If you have reference links to studies that include household income in the variables, by all means post them.
Then there's the matter of social capital; it isn't unusual for educated immigrants to take much lower status jobs in their new country. A confounding factor that I haven't found referenced in quick and dirty metrical "studies". (Ethnographic accounts often go quite a bit deeper, but they lack the shorthand convenience of simple numerical and percentage measures.) One of the problems in sociological studies is that few of them provide any information on questions like how many books in the home, or similar measures indicating that the family is taking an active role in ensuring educational achievement of their children. Instead, we get Role Model and Model Minority anecdotes, in journalistic accounts; I'm not disbelieving the stories, but they are not data sets.
I wonder if it is in part due to the general (current) proclivity for whining among Gen Z….boo hoo I don’t want so much of my future to rest on one test….I might be having a bad day or suffering from emotional trauma bwaaaahhhh….or the test itself might traumatize me. Gasp!
I overhear these special pleading narratives from every generation though; some people seem to really need to believe that they'd have had a top score too, if only they hadn't had a cold that week.
I think this is a legitimate concern with high-stakes one-shot events, but also pretty well addressed by the fact that you can take these tests multiple times and submit your best score. Many schools even take a “superscore” which is a composite of your best score for each section across different sittings.
It seems that on every metric of education one can measure oneself on, Asians keep coming out on top. Many of these Asians are from poor immigrant families that view higher education as a path to upward mobility. These elite institutions right now are trying to get rid of any quantifiable metric of educational achievement so that when the Supreme Court ends affirmative action next year, these institutions can still try and keep Asians fixed to a quota.
It wouldn''t be a problem if Asians on every available input metric were also extraordinarily better on output, but they aren't.
The average SAT scores to get into various institutions has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, but there's no evidence that we're getting smarter college grads, and lots of evidence they are actually less impressive (speaking overall, not just of Asians).
(I never know if people prefer commenting on their own blog or on the one they linked from)
That was a good post, and something I've been wondering about for awhile...I work right next to a large commuter university, so a huge proportion of our customers and employees are Asian, students, and Asian students. Getting to work with someone in a real down-to-tack-brass way, outside the comfortable structure of formal academics, is a great opportunity to assess if their book smarts translate into practical smarts - and so often, they kinda don't?
These aren't all kids majoring in Sociology or whatever either: plenty of engineers, biologists, programmers, and whatnot. They've got good GPAs, good SATs, good [metrics]...but as you write, they're false positives. Bright enough, yet not __bright__. Struggle with spreadsheets, terrible vocabulary, reading, and writing (there's no SpellCheck irl, I guess). Doesn't help them with the paperwork aspects of retail, like keeping inventory. No one can make change, although that's probably generational. The distinct lack of curiosity is what throws me the most, though; I'm more likely to have a stimulating intellectual conversation with the grizzled college-dropout retail veterans than the undergrads. Life experience, ah, finds a way to substitute for academic credentials.
Couldn't say whether there's as much a racial skew here as you've observed - the demographic baselines are different, we have weirdly low proportions of black/Latin - but it really does make me wonder about the modern incarnation of "school" and what it's all for. I think if there's some sort of general intelligence "g", school and tests probably measure it to some extent, even in the current form. But if this "g" mostly seems to be good at efficiently filling out Scantrons(tm), and the professional equivalent of that after college, then...I don't know. It's a depressing thought.
I should reiterate for those who didn't read my article that I work with a TON of really creative, innovative Asian students. But when I find someone who doesn't live up to the credentials and scores, that person is very likely Asian and here recently.
Put another way: If I meet a black, Hispanic, or white kid with an SAT over 1400, that kid is pretty exceptional. If I meet an Asian kid with that number, that kid might be exceptional...or might not.
School has definitely turned into a matter of acceleration and instant regurgitation mattering more than depth and permanent understanding, which is not a good thing.
Interesting blog! I grew up in Fairfax VA and there was a definite pattern that non-Asian kids with top scores pretty much all seemed really bright where more like 1/2 of top scoring Asian kids did. The other half were really hardworking and needed tons of test prep to get those high scores.
Anecdote, but I have a couple coworkers (I work as a programmer at a fortune 500) who test prepped their way to elite schools but the raw aptitude wasn't there to end up in high end jobs/grad school and they all seem to be going through mid 20s crises about not meeting their childhood expectations. The brilliant coworker who went to the local commuter school for financial reasons seems much more well adjusted than the ivy grads.
I wonder if this is promoted because of underlying fears that they are going to get rid of affirmative action. I think it’s too bad it, because if anything else, they should expand affirmative action to include kids who are white but low income, along with everyone who is covered right now.
I think the trouble is that affluent liberal white people want a system, where they can feel good about things being equal,without them having to give up anything.
Long after I’m dead inequality will not be any better because we as a society are ignoring the elephant in the room which is the breakdown of American Black families. This is not racism as immigrant African families are doing well.
Why is any hierarchy racist by definition? I reject Kendi’s assumption a priori. Also why do Black kids from African families (immigrants) do well on GPA and testing? The answer has nothing to do with race.
Thanks.....wasn't sure if you meant Kendi or the article itself.
I don't think Kendi has given specific examples, of for isnstance, what he means by different types of literacy, etc. He seems to me a type of Trofim Lysenko.
I ctrl-f'ed in the essay and couldn't find any mention of "hierarchy" that wasn't immediately preceded by "racial". So it seems like the scope of the discussion is racial hierarchies.
This isn't my issue and I don't know a lot, but it seems clear Asian and East Asian immigrant kids have been getting royally screwed. There were a ton at my high school. They had SAT prep, but not because they were rich, but because their parents and communities banded together to form a cottage industry of affordable tutoring.
I remember my best friend, first-generation Chinese-American, crying when she was rejected from Columbia: she was brilliant and so talented and not at all the cliche of robotic overachiever. I assumed she was rejected because NO ONE ever gets into Columbia, but as an adult, I've met complete idiots who're like, "I went to Columbia!" We had only one girl from the school get into Harvard in like 8 years. I do think affirmative action has a role to play. But doing it at the expense of immigrants is awful.
Sorry, location-specific! Just the kids that didn't have many intellectual interests but were obsessed with getting perfect grades because of their semi-abusive parents!
It’s the Asian stereotype that elite college administrators use to downgrade Asians whose objective qualifications should make them highly likely to be admitted, by marking them down on “personality factors”.
Why do we as a culture put our selves and our children into the hands of ‘elite college administrators’ or even ANY college admins? they’re all ‘elite’. Further to my comment above, re my kid, prior to college, he swam though a few high schools, he’s a good reader and writer, but unchallenged; so we thought, well lets try private schools then. Interviewed at Andover Exeter NMH Putney Choate Hotchkiss; got into most of them; but i’d be damned if i were to put him into the hands of those institutions whose craven-ness was so clear (and had an interesting unintentional eavesdrop in the admissions office when they thought i was a janitor, so were talking freely in front of the peon). Colleges are no different; they are using kids for other reasons than educating them. It’s akin to the hamburger source scene in ‘Cloud Atlas’, a less than stellar film. But when you look around for the meat and you dont see none…well then, you’re the meat.
An enormous disconnect re education and Ivy Leagues etc; the ‘education’ across all sectors - private, Ivies, state Universities etc - is so captured by ideology….kids coming out of any of these places will have been mostly taught by young [rightfully angry] adjuncts, steeped in the last 10 years of ideological bullsh*tery. I have a child at UMass; was in HS at Bard and also public HS in Cambridge Mass; he recoils from the identity basis in all classes, from the ideology which reminds me of Trotsky/Lenin // Red guard re-education & etc. He’s not sure how to find uninfected teachers.
"because their parents and communities banded together to form a cottage industry of affordable tutoring."
No. Because a lot of them aren't actually poor, or have a lot of money coming from back home. Also the cottage industry has a lot of cheating in it--and not only for test prep, but also for schools. (Many of them keep all the math tests of local high schools, for example.)
That's ... not the direction in which money flows with immigration. Yes a lot of them had the cultural capital of educated parents, which is priceless, but most of them were pretty much middle class.
So the Supreme Court just heard arguments in a pair of cases that question the constitutionality of affirmative action for college admissions in America. The expectation is that they’re going to shoot it down.
If I was an elite-school admissions officer and I wanted to pursue a plausibly deniable strategy of minimal compliance with the court’s new agenda, I would definitely prefer to be dealing with GPAs than SATs.
If you want a problem to go away, then one of the ways you can do it is to stop measuring for it.
In manufacturing, if you are having poor yields because your parts are failing a test, you can do a few things:
1. Fix the process, so that the parts stop failing the test
2. Ignore the results, and use the parts anyway. Your production numbers improve, but it looks bad when someone looks back and wonders why the end product continues to have issues.
3. Stop running that test. When the end product fails, refuse to let anyone do a root cause analysis that shows why it failed. Now everyone who built the product looks good, because all the tests passed during the process. When the end product keeps failing, it can be blamed on user error.
I think we have been choosing option 2 for a long time, but now we are slowly moving towards option 3.
Freddie pointing out that he and the mainstream media class are not BFFs is a pretty consistent staple of this newsletter.
Well done. These ‘liberal’ writers whom the author refers to wouldn’t understand a correlation coefficient if it knocked them down on the street.
It doesn’t have to make sense if your chief objective is virtue signaling.
And it’s even worse than all of this. Many public schools have eliminated advanced courses -- having deemed them “racist” -- that offered students in underperforming schools an opportunity to distinguish themselves in their college applications.
As seems typical, policy changes purportedly enacted to help a certain population do more to hurt them than anything else. Not to mention the backlash they create.
Nonsense. Students in underperforming schools are far more likely to get As for work that is substandard.
But no way to differentiate beyond that. Students in high performing schools have varying levels of courses (regular, honors, AP) along which they can differentiate. At many public high schools now, As are handed out like candy, with no way to tell what that A really means.
My question is how long after removing the SAT will it take for the powers that be to recognize this and to then get rid of GPA too.
Letters of recommendation and essays only maybe.
To make the admissions system as unbiased as possible we must go back to the way we did it when we were an Old Boys Club!
Eventually we will get a lottery system. Then people can get mad about fluctuations in random variation.
That will never happen, the whole point of admissions (hell you could argue as I believe Freddie has that the whole point of college) is to ensure only “the right people” get in.
Oh I agree. I'm just separating out what hypothetically the universities themselves will want/say, vs. what theoretically activists would want/say. The universities will want to maintain some level of pretense I imagine.
There's another comment elaborating on the kind of mix the elite universities want/need to maintain for their luxury product (with all the tension between somehow simultaneously catering to elites, the talented/upwardly mobile, and the disadvantaged).
Only at the elite level.
A lottery would be fair but only if you started with a particular metric. As in, anyone with a SAT score over x could put in for the Harvard lottery. It would be an interesting experiment.
Right. Why not get rid of school altogether? Isn’t education itself racist? (You see where this leads to...)
Great stuff. I do think you also made a glance at another issue, too many humanities people in journalism who’s eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking numbers.
If you’re at all good at math you have no economic motivation to become a journalist.
Oh absolutely, and plenty of people who are good at math are terrible at expressing things in writing, but if journalists want to do something about their rock bottom trust rating in the US not being so actively hostile to numbers would be a good place to start.
True
It's pretty straightforward. If you're an elite, Ivy institution whose brand is all about mingling with "future leaders" and the ruling class of tomorrow, the rise of poor and working-class Asian children of immigrants who've been absolutely crushing the SATs presents a big problem. If something like half of an incoming class is composed of these students, it makes it difficult for admissions offices to include enough children of the current (largely white) elite, who will go on to be in influential positions in politics, media, finance, etc. in the next generation (and will be donors, influential alumni, etc.). This is not only *not* about admitting more poor black and brown kids, it's about keeping the "merely" bright kids of laundromat and bodega owners from diluting the social capital of the Ivy league "experience." It is deeply classist on an axis that is also, alas, racist. It is also about keeping elite college presidents from having to testify in front of the Supreme Court (reputation management -- like stock price -- being the obsessive goal of any executive board or body).
Racist? Really? It seems to me the elite schools are eschewing standardized testing so they can maintain the current affirmative action regime in advance of what is sure to be an adverse (for their current regime) Supreme Court opinion in the Harvard/UNC cases this June.
It is definitively and unquestionably true. In the mailers Harvard sends to high school students in (I think?) Iowa, they very deliberately set a higher PSAT cutoff for Asian students to get pamphlets than white ones.
I think that's at most a secondary concern for these institutions. The outcome of this case could have a slight downward pressure on admission of Black and Hispanic students (though places like Harvard have other ways to fiddle with that knob, like "Dean's Interest" lists and the like). It seems like the sharp rise in Asian students from non-elite backgrounds is the factor they are actually trying to control for (as evidenced, in fact, by the admissions office documents relating to "personality scores" in the Supreme Court case).
This is a very important point that is often overlooked. The affirmative action case threatens their ability to depress Asian enrollment more than it threatens them having a respectable number of Black and Hispanic students.
There are lots of “class-based” initiatives you can use to boost Black and Latino enrollment. But it’s a lot harder to design policies that favor whites over (more qualified, less wealthy) Asian students, without making it obvious that this is your goal.
These elite universities aren’t scrambling to figure out how to enroll Black students after the court rules, like people imagine. They know how to do that. The problem is getting the demographics they want when Asians score higher than whites.
I think you have this exactly backwards. Moving to class/poverty based admittance would result in Asian admittees entirely replacing black admits. Admitting more upper middle class and rich white students is comparatively easy (and profitable!) - ditching needs-blind admissions and favoring full-fare applicants the way they do with foreign and transfer students. There is no legal jeopardy to this move.
Maybe I’m underestimating the potential legal consequences, but I assumed they would design their “class” initiatives in a way that does not help Asian students, such as zip codes. In California, Black and Latino enrollment plummeted when affirmative action was banned, but they figured out various strategies over the years. They won’t just do “you get extra points if you’re poor.”
They can try, but it probably won't work. A lot of Asian and Hispanic immigrants live in majority black neighborhoods.
I agree wrt reputation management around the possible SCOTUS decision. But I think you underestimate the desire of the administrators and now-more-powerful DEI bureaucracies at these institutions to virtue signal around their minority data AND “first generation college” admit rates. I’ve been going through the process with my kids over the last couple of years, and many of these people are “true believers” around woke ideas.
How is this not the exact same nonsensical argument reversed? Clever Asian-American working class children…also get great GPAs!
Note this part of Freddie's post: "Contrast that quantitative transparency with the fact that almost all competitive colleges have proprietary formulas which they use to adjust GPAs before consideration for admission. These adjustments are hugely important for admissions decisions, and yet they represent a black box, as schools usually keep their particular adjustment systems secret."
The real point behind ditching the SAT/ACT is that those scores are published. It's a restraint on the school admitting who they want to admit. Which is not just AA students, but also athletes, children of celebrities/pols, children of staff and friends of the admin and donor class kids. Now, they can just not include their score and thus there's no "cost" in prestige in admitting them. Harvard and Yale really don't want to publish scores showing places like Rice, Wash U and U Chicago are admitting students with higher average scores. Because long term, it will change perceptions of the brand.
There’s also the other point that high school GPAs get very “blunt” in the upper range (I think more than eight or ten students at my good-but-not-great suburban high school had 4.0s or above). The SATs don’t have that extreme top-out bluntness distortion. Short answer: if just going by GPAs, you can admit tons more white kids from Northeast and West Coast private schools who will turn around and be donors or visiting lecturers to dandle current Harvard students on their knees and tell them about life among the elite.
Actually, the new SAT is getting towards that top-out bluntness. But on the other hand, 20-30 kids are getting 4.0 or higher in many high schools.
Hoiwever, you're wrong about gpa being about whites.
Perfect classist argument. These people are doing this on purpose to keep the lower class lower!
"the rise of poor and working-class Asian children of immigrants who've been absolutely crushing the SATs presents a big problem"
I'm going to need a cite for that, with household income figures- because my impression is that many in the high-achieving "Asian" (that absurd "ethnic" category, drawn from a territorial arc ranging from Afghanistan to Japan) "children of immigrant" student population in the US come from families that are neither poor or working class. Some of the recent immigrants are in fact very, very wealthy.
If you have reference links to studies that include household income in the variables, by all means post them.
Then there's the matter of social capital; it isn't unusual for educated immigrants to take much lower status jobs in their new country. A confounding factor that I haven't found referenced in quick and dirty metrical "studies". (Ethnographic accounts often go quite a bit deeper, but they lack the shorthand convenience of simple numerical and percentage measures.) One of the problems in sociological studies is that few of them provide any information on questions like how many books in the home, or similar measures indicating that the family is taking an active role in ensuring educational achievement of their children. Instead, we get Role Model and Model Minority anecdotes, in journalistic accounts; I'm not disbelieving the stories, but they are not data sets.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/05/16/on-concentrated-poverty-and-its-effects-on-academic-outcomes/
I wonder if it is in part due to the general (current) proclivity for whining among Gen Z….boo hoo I don’t want so much of my future to rest on one test….I might be having a bad day or suffering from emotional trauma bwaaaahhhh….or the test itself might traumatize me. Gasp!
I overhear these special pleading narratives from every generation though; some people seem to really need to believe that they'd have had a top score too, if only they hadn't had a cold that week.
I think this is a legitimate concern with high-stakes one-shot events, but also pretty well addressed by the fact that you can take these tests multiple times and submit your best score. Many schools even take a “superscore” which is a composite of your best score for each section across different sittings.
This is controversial?!?
Humans spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to convince themselves that blindly obvious truths aren't blindingly obvious.
Humans have regressed since the days when they worshipped cats.
Yes. Especially in current times. Welcome to Wokeism.
It seems that on every metric of education one can measure oneself on, Asians keep coming out on top. Many of these Asians are from poor immigrant families that view higher education as a path to upward mobility. These elite institutions right now are trying to get rid of any quantifiable metric of educational achievement so that when the Supreme Court ends affirmative action next year, these institutions can still try and keep Asians fixed to a quota.
It wouldn''t be a problem if Asians on every available input metric were also extraordinarily better on output, but they aren't.
The average SAT scores to get into various institutions has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, but there's no evidence that we're getting smarter college grads, and lots of evidence they are actually less impressive (speaking overall, not just of Asians).
The problem is that a high SAT score and grades means something very different among whites, blacks, and Hispanics than it does among Asians. Lots of false positives. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/
"Strong work ethic" != "learn to master the test and forget".
And I'd really rather smart than hardworking, although both is nice.
(I never know if people prefer commenting on their own blog or on the one they linked from)
That was a good post, and something I've been wondering about for awhile...I work right next to a large commuter university, so a huge proportion of our customers and employees are Asian, students, and Asian students. Getting to work with someone in a real down-to-tack-brass way, outside the comfortable structure of formal academics, is a great opportunity to assess if their book smarts translate into practical smarts - and so often, they kinda don't?
These aren't all kids majoring in Sociology or whatever either: plenty of engineers, biologists, programmers, and whatnot. They've got good GPAs, good SATs, good [metrics]...but as you write, they're false positives. Bright enough, yet not __bright__. Struggle with spreadsheets, terrible vocabulary, reading, and writing (there's no SpellCheck irl, I guess). Doesn't help them with the paperwork aspects of retail, like keeping inventory. No one can make change, although that's probably generational. The distinct lack of curiosity is what throws me the most, though; I'm more likely to have a stimulating intellectual conversation with the grizzled college-dropout retail veterans than the undergrads. Life experience, ah, finds a way to substitute for academic credentials.
Couldn't say whether there's as much a racial skew here as you've observed - the demographic baselines are different, we have weirdly low proportions of black/Latin - but it really does make me wonder about the modern incarnation of "school" and what it's all for. I think if there's some sort of general intelligence "g", school and tests probably measure it to some extent, even in the current form. But if this "g" mostly seems to be good at efficiently filling out Scantrons(tm), and the professional equivalent of that after college, then...I don't know. It's a depressing thought.
I should reiterate for those who didn't read my article that I work with a TON of really creative, innovative Asian students. But when I find someone who doesn't live up to the credentials and scores, that person is very likely Asian and here recently.
Put another way: If I meet a black, Hispanic, or white kid with an SAT over 1400, that kid is pretty exceptional. If I meet an Asian kid with that number, that kid might be exceptional...or might not.
School has definitely turned into a matter of acceleration and instant regurgitation mattering more than depth and permanent understanding, which is not a good thing.
Interesting blog! I grew up in Fairfax VA and there was a definite pattern that non-Asian kids with top scores pretty much all seemed really bright where more like 1/2 of top scoring Asian kids did. The other half were really hardworking and needed tons of test prep to get those high scores.
Anecdote, but I have a couple coworkers (I work as a programmer at a fortune 500) who test prepped their way to elite schools but the raw aptitude wasn't there to end up in high end jobs/grad school and they all seem to be going through mid 20s crises about not meeting their childhood expectations. The brilliant coworker who went to the local commuter school for financial reasons seems much more well adjusted than the ivy grads.
Good points.
I wonder if this is promoted because of underlying fears that they are going to get rid of affirmative action. I think it’s too bad it, because if anything else, they should expand affirmative action to include kids who are white but low income, along with everyone who is covered right now.
I think the trouble is that affluent liberal white people want a system, where they can feel good about things being equal,without them having to give up anything.
Yes exactly!!!! I think a lot of poor whites--never mentioned in these debates
Long after I’m dead inequality will not be any better because we as a society are ignoring the elephant in the room which is the breakdown of American Black families. This is not racism as immigrant African families are doing well.
Yes!!!! Aka *culture*
Wanted to get readers' thoughts on this article.......It's a new substack to me, wirtten by Matthew Green. Not that long.....
Would really appreciate comments from others. Thank you.
https://matthewgreen.substack.com/p/ibram-x-kendi-on-the-racial-educational
Total garbage.
Why? one specific example....
Why is any hierarchy racist by definition? I reject Kendi’s assumption a priori. Also why do Black kids from African families (immigrants) do well on GPA and testing? The answer has nothing to do with race.
Thanks.....wasn't sure if you meant Kendi or the article itself.
I don't think Kendi has given specific examples, of for isnstance, what he means by different types of literacy, etc. He seems to me a type of Trofim Lysenko.
I just think he’s a scam artist with one dumb idea but it’s like the Emperors New Clothes. People are terrified to say this is one dumb idea.
I ctrl-f'ed in the essay and couldn't find any mention of "hierarchy" that wasn't immediately preceded by "racial". So it seems like the scope of the discussion is racial hierarchies.
https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-be-an-antiracist
Thank you.....I had read that article back then and forgotten about it. I will re-read.
As I commented below, Kendi seems to me a kind of Trofim Lysenko.
Is his great talent for knowing how to assuage what is known as "white guilt"?
This isn't my issue and I don't know a lot, but it seems clear Asian and East Asian immigrant kids have been getting royally screwed. There were a ton at my high school. They had SAT prep, but not because they were rich, but because their parents and communities banded together to form a cottage industry of affordable tutoring.
I remember my best friend, first-generation Chinese-American, crying when she was rejected from Columbia: she was brilliant and so talented and not at all the cliche of robotic overachiever. I assumed she was rejected because NO ONE ever gets into Columbia, but as an adult, I've met complete idiots who're like, "I went to Columbia!" We had only one girl from the school get into Harvard in like 8 years. I do think affirmative action has a role to play. But doing it at the expense of immigrants is awful.
What is a ‘robotic overachiever’?
Sorry, location-specific! Just the kids that didn't have many intellectual interests but were obsessed with getting perfect grades because of their semi-abusive parents!
It’s the Asian stereotype that elite college administrators use to downgrade Asians whose objective qualifications should make them highly likely to be admitted, by marking them down on “personality factors”.
Why do we as a culture put our selves and our children into the hands of ‘elite college administrators’ or even ANY college admins? they’re all ‘elite’. Further to my comment above, re my kid, prior to college, he swam though a few high schools, he’s a good reader and writer, but unchallenged; so we thought, well lets try private schools then. Interviewed at Andover Exeter NMH Putney Choate Hotchkiss; got into most of them; but i’d be damned if i were to put him into the hands of those institutions whose craven-ness was so clear (and had an interesting unintentional eavesdrop in the admissions office when they thought i was a janitor, so were talking freely in front of the peon). Colleges are no different; they are using kids for other reasons than educating them. It’s akin to the hamburger source scene in ‘Cloud Atlas’, a less than stellar film. But when you look around for the meat and you dont see none…well then, you’re the meat.
An enormous disconnect re education and Ivy Leagues etc; the ‘education’ across all sectors - private, Ivies, state Universities etc - is so captured by ideology….kids coming out of any of these places will have been mostly taught by young [rightfully angry] adjuncts, steeped in the last 10 years of ideological bullsh*tery. I have a child at UMass; was in HS at Bard and also public HS in Cambridge Mass; he recoils from the identity basis in all classes, from the ideology which reminds me of Trotsky/Lenin // Red guard re-education & etc. He’s not sure how to find uninfected teachers.
Sounds about right.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/george-orwells-politics-and-the-english
Yes. Culture.
"because their parents and communities banded together to form a cottage industry of affordable tutoring."
No. Because a lot of them aren't actually poor, or have a lot of money coming from back home. Also the cottage industry has a lot of cheating in it--and not only for test prep, but also for schools. (Many of them keep all the math tests of local high schools, for example.)
That's ... not the direction in which money flows with immigration. Yes a lot of them had the cultural capital of educated parents, which is priceless, but most of them were pretty much middle class.
Lots of money coming from back home.
The ethnic breakdown of selective immigration and those coming from more money back home is not what you would want to believe.
So the Supreme Court just heard arguments in a pair of cases that question the constitutionality of affirmative action for college admissions in America. The expectation is that they’re going to shoot it down.
If I was an elite-school admissions officer and I wanted to pursue a plausibly deniable strategy of minimal compliance with the court’s new agenda, I would definitely prefer to be dealing with GPAs than SATs.
If you want a problem to go away, then one of the ways you can do it is to stop measuring for it.
In manufacturing, if you are having poor yields because your parts are failing a test, you can do a few things:
1. Fix the process, so that the parts stop failing the test
2. Ignore the results, and use the parts anyway. Your production numbers improve, but it looks bad when someone looks back and wonders why the end product continues to have issues.
3. Stop running that test. When the end product fails, refuse to let anyone do a root cause analysis that shows why it failed. Now everyone who built the product looks good, because all the tests passed during the process. When the end product keeps failing, it can be blamed on user error.
I think we have been choosing option 2 for a long time, but now we are slowly moving towards option 3.
Let’s be sure to add a metric for leadership or personality or something nebulous to downgrade those Asian applicants.