Why Are We Pouring Money Into a Black Box? Why Are We Subjecting Our Young People to a Process with Such Little Transparency? Why Are We Risking Our Economy On It All?
Why Are We Pouring Money Into a Black Box? Why Are We Subjecting Our Young People to a Process with Such Little Transparency? Why Are We Risking Our Economy On It All?
Forgive me for making the same basic point I made in somewhat more profane terms recently, but via a reader I learn that Princeton intends to make its application process even more opaque - and, of course, in the name of fairness and diversity, and certainly not for their own cynical self-interest:
Since I actually personally know some of the people who make these sorts of decisions (and at Princeton specifically, I know people who know those decision makers), part of your cynicism is misplaced. The impetus REALLY IS greater RACIAL diversity. They didn't need to dump the SAT to game legacy admits, athlete admits (which drive sports success which drives future donations: as UC President Clark Kerr once famously put it, "the job of a university president is to provide sex for the students, football for the alumni, and parking for the faculty"), etc. Dropping the SAT is ENTIRELY a respone to SJW pressure. They are horrified as being thought "racist", and worry that the SAT really might be racist (because most of them don't understand statistics, and the ones who do turn a blind eye).
Of course the policies they are adopting actually are racist by the dictionary definition of the word, but not by the modern wokist paradigm.
To reflect on the earlier post on student loan debt forgiveness:. I would more willingly support it if the Ivies and their ilk had to kick in 80% of their endowment.
I have nothing to say about Ivy League admissions but the Timothee Chalamet bit is so funny and true. It reminds me of an article I read on James Franco a few years back. The awed tone it used to describe how Franco *somehow* (against all odds) managed to pursue two degrees at two different schools while never taking a break from shooting movies. The subtext was like, “What dark arts of the left-hand path does this smoke show have at his disposal? How does he do it?” Meanwhile I’m screaming at my laptop screen like a sandwich-boarded street maniac, “HE’S RICH AND FAMOUS! YOU ABSOLUTE MORON! YOU BIRDBRAIN!” Maybe he’s also brilliant, but after reading a little bit of his fiction…I’m not getting that vibe.
This is such a classically absurd response to a problem.
The problem: We are afraid our high GPA average and high SAT average will discourage students with lower GPA scores and SATs from applying.
The solution: stop showing that our averages are so high.
The rational response: if we really do admit people with many different scores, but the average ends up being high, we could either 1) admit more people with lower scores so that the average actually reflects the kinds of students we want, or 2) release *more* data that shows the "spread" of our admittance is quite high; even if the average is, say, 1350, the distribution includes a lot of 1000s and a lot 1600s.
Edit: Forgot to include: this says to me that either Princeton is not being entirely honest about the reasons it's not releasing these numbers, or that its admissions folks are not very creative or forthright in how they solve problems. Or both.
Trying to fix these places is like greasing a guillotine or putting padding on an electric chair. So what's the solution to the problem? It's right there but it's the one thing no one want to hear - get off the fucking treadmill! Get off! Go to the woods, literally or metaphorically, but go, for the same reason Thoreau went:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to reach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear."
What these places want you to live is not life. There's no "fix" for that.
I’d definitely feel worse about this if I felt like the Ivies were a great _educational_ opportunity for those who were currently shut out. Right now they’re just indoctrination factories for the super-striving and super-compliant.
As it is, I’m disgusted by their behavior but also feel kinda like “rich people gonna rich.” They have their institutions and their clubs and they keep tight control over who’s in and who’s out. It’s always been the case.
There was a period of time in the late 20th century when “poor but ‘deserving’ ” (high test score) kids got into these schools. Now the demographic variables of interest have shifted to “racially diverse.”
Whichever method they use to let the outsiders in, they let a few kids into their clubs and then try to brainwash them into being “one of us”—effectively neutralizing them.
When I was the “scholarship kid” at a very prestigious boarding school, we were told constantly how special and deserving we were, how we were proof the system worked, how we would be running the world someday. Coming from a very different view of the world and how it worked, I experienced this as if it were attempted brainwashing.
Letting a few “poor but ‘deserving’ “ or “racially diverse” kids into your school is proof our system works in the same way a winning Lotto ticket is a viable retirement plan. Except you’re also told you really, really deserved and earned that ticket, and all the schlubs back in the old neighborhood are a bunch of losers.
Jordan Peterson helps. He makes a very compelling case that the primary human pursuit is status in the dominance hierarchy. I would add that this is really a primary component of the top self-actualization needs pursuit that follows things like making sure you can eat, are safe and are loved. This need also explains tribalism. We become tribal only if we see our association with the tribe as helping to fulfill our needs.
This is where American society has gone off the rails.
Before the late 70s and 80s there were two primary macro-paths to dominance hierarchy ascendancy. One was the academic path and the other was the path of the successful private sector producer. However, with some exception, the academic path generally did not pay commensurate with the effort to achieve the academic credentials. Highly educated people tended to work in the public sector... where they would seethe with resentment that the B-average team football captain worked his way up in sales and then opened a chain of restaurants and is an influential man of society.
Then the math-brained quants started heading to investment banking. And the big academic brains in education, politics and government started to recognize that their inability to gain higher social status was related to the competition for status from the successful producers in the private economy.
So they went to work, some with knowing malice... but most just led by their baked in insecurities and resentments (see Liz Warren against Elon Musk)... to dismantle our productive economy and turn it into an information economy where the highly-educated would have the upper hand in social dominance.
It isn't that those with the greater academic achievements are more capable to do great things for humanity... generally quite the opposite... it is that they have effectively destroyed their competition. A competition that Donald J. Trump wanted to resurrect.
And they saw the risk in DJT succeeding, and so they got together with their globalist ilk to go for it... the Great Reset project that would lock in the world into the totalitarian power of the elite academic set.
The opaque admissions rule changes are simply their way of keeping out the knowing, and educating more sheep clones of their project to once and for all, destroy the free and open economy where Elon Musks can grow to dominance over them. Note that Elon only has a bachelors degree.
We are in the middle of WWW-III and we are only debating around the edges because we are stupid enough to adopt the new absurdity of the enemy as something worthy of debate.
Puts me in mind of the old joke, How do you know when (person X) is lying? Easy, his lips are moving.
This needs to be updated to: How do you know when (person or institution X) is lying? Easy, they claim to be doing X ......in the name of fairness and diversity....
Once I understood how easily the left fell for things like "banning dihydrous monoxide" (water by another name) because it was in our water supplies and killed thousands of people every year I began to look far more closely at "rescuer" activity among them for that same lack of critical thinking (or any kind of useful knowledge base about the real world). I remember the first time I was totally rocked out of my comfortable left nurturing blankets. I was reading a Harper's magazine and they had a short snippet from a book entitled "A woman whose calling is men." It is a book a former sex worker wrote, the snippet contradicted everything I had read in the media and had been told and was widely believed by the majority of the left.
So, I began to read in earnest the works of former or current sex workers as well as numerous texts by female anthropologists who had studied prostitution in all its various forms for decades in numerous countries around the globe. The picture that emerged had (and has) nothing to do with the common picture that is regularly presented in the media or in conversations. Few are drug addicts, many have advanced degrees, nearly all view it as just a job (they don't seem to have the ick factor that protestants normally do), some even, as that Harper's writer did, actually enjoy the work. All of them make far more money than otherwise, the vast majority of them are in charge of their work, not all that many work with pimps.
In fact, in my correspondence with them and with a number of the anthropologists, what I found was a highly articulate group of women (I was focusing on women sex workers at that point) who found it highly offensive to be told they were suffering from false consciousness, that they had been so infected by the patriarchy that they could no longer reason. They seemed pretty sure that that attitude was itself patriarchal. This same dynamic is continuing in an odd fashion when it comes to "people who menstruate" instead of women who menstruate. A number of women have made the point that the whole thing is misogynistic and the easiest way to see it is that no one is routinely saying "people who produce semen" or "People who have erections."
This kind of thing is rampant now, the University processes Freddie talks about here are only one example. The problem is the lack of intellectual rigor among those who insist that they are educated and that the flyover states are filled with the ignorant. Thus complex, nuanced discussions cannot take place. The end result is, as Hannah Arendt put it, the truly guilty go unrecognized and those who really are responsible will never be held accountable.
It has been difficult for a great many true leftists, social democrats (as I am myself), progressives, and Enlightenment liberals to stomach, it grows more difficult every day. But truly, the left as it is now constructed is merely our version of Qanon. Many of them might have received a college degree, even advanced degrees, but they surely are not educated, only schooled.
Personally, letting a bunch of anonymous people judge me "holistically" sounds a lot more stressful than a test I can practice and study for.
Since I actually personally know some of the people who make these sorts of decisions (and at Princeton specifically, I know people who know those decision makers), part of your cynicism is misplaced. The impetus REALLY IS greater RACIAL diversity. They didn't need to dump the SAT to game legacy admits, athlete admits (which drive sports success which drives future donations: as UC President Clark Kerr once famously put it, "the job of a university president is to provide sex for the students, football for the alumni, and parking for the faculty"), etc. Dropping the SAT is ENTIRELY a respone to SJW pressure. They are horrified as being thought "racist", and worry that the SAT really might be racist (because most of them don't understand statistics, and the ones who do turn a blind eye).
Of course the policies they are adopting actually are racist by the dictionary definition of the word, but not by the modern wokist paradigm.
They may want star power to attract paying customers. They certainly flaunt their alumni.
Maybe connected kids, regardless of academic achievement.
Jeff Bezos, JFK, Sonia Sotomayor, Mrs. Obama--https://edurank.org/uni/princeton-university/alumni/
Could they be trying any harder to make the right-wing view of higher education a reality?
I guess we're back to claiming we're all native American. 😂
it's hard out there for a nonperformative leftist...
To reflect on the earlier post on student loan debt forgiveness:. I would more willingly support it if the Ivies and their ilk had to kick in 80% of their endowment.
"(I assure you, if Timothee Chalamet had a 1.8 GPA and an arrest record as long as your arm, Harvard would find a pretext to let him in. I promise.)"
Yes but this article wasn't about Haaahvaaahd it was about Princeton. Or are they essentially the same elite networking opportunity as the other?
I have nothing to say about Ivy League admissions but the Timothee Chalamet bit is so funny and true. It reminds me of an article I read on James Franco a few years back. The awed tone it used to describe how Franco *somehow* (against all odds) managed to pursue two degrees at two different schools while never taking a break from shooting movies. The subtext was like, “What dark arts of the left-hand path does this smoke show have at his disposal? How does he do it?” Meanwhile I’m screaming at my laptop screen like a sandwich-boarded street maniac, “HE’S RICH AND FAMOUS! YOU ABSOLUTE MORON! YOU BIRDBRAIN!” Maybe he’s also brilliant, but after reading a little bit of his fiction…I’m not getting that vibe.
This is such a classically absurd response to a problem.
The problem: We are afraid our high GPA average and high SAT average will discourage students with lower GPA scores and SATs from applying.
The solution: stop showing that our averages are so high.
The rational response: if we really do admit people with many different scores, but the average ends up being high, we could either 1) admit more people with lower scores so that the average actually reflects the kinds of students we want, or 2) release *more* data that shows the "spread" of our admittance is quite high; even if the average is, say, 1350, the distribution includes a lot of 1000s and a lot 1600s.
Edit: Forgot to include: this says to me that either Princeton is not being entirely honest about the reasons it's not releasing these numbers, or that its admissions folks are not very creative or forthright in how they solve problems. Or both.
Trying to fix these places is like greasing a guillotine or putting padding on an electric chair. So what's the solution to the problem? It's right there but it's the one thing no one want to hear - get off the fucking treadmill! Get off! Go to the woods, literally or metaphorically, but go, for the same reason Thoreau went:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to reach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear."
What these places want you to live is not life. There's no "fix" for that.
I’d definitely feel worse about this if I felt like the Ivies were a great _educational_ opportunity for those who were currently shut out. Right now they’re just indoctrination factories for the super-striving and super-compliant.
As it is, I’m disgusted by their behavior but also feel kinda like “rich people gonna rich.” They have their institutions and their clubs and they keep tight control over who’s in and who’s out. It’s always been the case.
There was a period of time in the late 20th century when “poor but ‘deserving’ ” (high test score) kids got into these schools. Now the demographic variables of interest have shifted to “racially diverse.”
Whichever method they use to let the outsiders in, they let a few kids into their clubs and then try to brainwash them into being “one of us”—effectively neutralizing them.
When I was the “scholarship kid” at a very prestigious boarding school, we were told constantly how special and deserving we were, how we were proof the system worked, how we would be running the world someday. Coming from a very different view of the world and how it worked, I experienced this as if it were attempted brainwashing.
Letting a few “poor but ‘deserving’ “ or “racially diverse” kids into your school is proof our system works in the same way a winning Lotto ticket is a viable retirement plan. Except you’re also told you really, really deserved and earned that ticket, and all the schlubs back in the old neighborhood are a bunch of losers.
O/T: https://nypost.com/2021/12/25/harvard-and-others-nixing-standardized-tests-reinforce-privilege-and-harm-minorities/
Disclaimer: NY Post is a rightwing tabloid level rag.
I can explain.
Jordan Peterson helps. He makes a very compelling case that the primary human pursuit is status in the dominance hierarchy. I would add that this is really a primary component of the top self-actualization needs pursuit that follows things like making sure you can eat, are safe and are loved. This need also explains tribalism. We become tribal only if we see our association with the tribe as helping to fulfill our needs.
This is where American society has gone off the rails.
Before the late 70s and 80s there were two primary macro-paths to dominance hierarchy ascendancy. One was the academic path and the other was the path of the successful private sector producer. However, with some exception, the academic path generally did not pay commensurate with the effort to achieve the academic credentials. Highly educated people tended to work in the public sector... where they would seethe with resentment that the B-average team football captain worked his way up in sales and then opened a chain of restaurants and is an influential man of society.
Then the math-brained quants started heading to investment banking. And the big academic brains in education, politics and government started to recognize that their inability to gain higher social status was related to the competition for status from the successful producers in the private economy.
So they went to work, some with knowing malice... but most just led by their baked in insecurities and resentments (see Liz Warren against Elon Musk)... to dismantle our productive economy and turn it into an information economy where the highly-educated would have the upper hand in social dominance.
It isn't that those with the greater academic achievements are more capable to do great things for humanity... generally quite the opposite... it is that they have effectively destroyed their competition. A competition that Donald J. Trump wanted to resurrect.
And they saw the risk in DJT succeeding, and so they got together with their globalist ilk to go for it... the Great Reset project that would lock in the world into the totalitarian power of the elite academic set.
The opaque admissions rule changes are simply their way of keeping out the knowing, and educating more sheep clones of their project to once and for all, destroy the free and open economy where Elon Musks can grow to dominance over them. Note that Elon only has a bachelors degree.
We are in the middle of WWW-III and we are only debating around the edges because we are stupid enough to adopt the new absurdity of the enemy as something worthy of debate.
Puts me in mind of the old joke, How do you know when (person X) is lying? Easy, his lips are moving.
This needs to be updated to: How do you know when (person or institution X) is lying? Easy, they claim to be doing X ......in the name of fairness and diversity....
Once I understood how easily the left fell for things like "banning dihydrous monoxide" (water by another name) because it was in our water supplies and killed thousands of people every year I began to look far more closely at "rescuer" activity among them for that same lack of critical thinking (or any kind of useful knowledge base about the real world). I remember the first time I was totally rocked out of my comfortable left nurturing blankets. I was reading a Harper's magazine and they had a short snippet from a book entitled "A woman whose calling is men." It is a book a former sex worker wrote, the snippet contradicted everything I had read in the media and had been told and was widely believed by the majority of the left.
So, I began to read in earnest the works of former or current sex workers as well as numerous texts by female anthropologists who had studied prostitution in all its various forms for decades in numerous countries around the globe. The picture that emerged had (and has) nothing to do with the common picture that is regularly presented in the media or in conversations. Few are drug addicts, many have advanced degrees, nearly all view it as just a job (they don't seem to have the ick factor that protestants normally do), some even, as that Harper's writer did, actually enjoy the work. All of them make far more money than otherwise, the vast majority of them are in charge of their work, not all that many work with pimps.
In fact, in my correspondence with them and with a number of the anthropologists, what I found was a highly articulate group of women (I was focusing on women sex workers at that point) who found it highly offensive to be told they were suffering from false consciousness, that they had been so infected by the patriarchy that they could no longer reason. They seemed pretty sure that that attitude was itself patriarchal. This same dynamic is continuing in an odd fashion when it comes to "people who menstruate" instead of women who menstruate. A number of women have made the point that the whole thing is misogynistic and the easiest way to see it is that no one is routinely saying "people who produce semen" or "People who have erections."
This kind of thing is rampant now, the University processes Freddie talks about here are only one example. The problem is the lack of intellectual rigor among those who insist that they are educated and that the flyover states are filled with the ignorant. Thus complex, nuanced discussions cannot take place. The end result is, as Hannah Arendt put it, the truly guilty go unrecognized and those who really are responsible will never be held accountable.
It has been difficult for a great many true leftists, social democrats (as I am myself), progressives, and Enlightenment liberals to stomach, it grows more difficult every day. But truly, the left as it is now constructed is merely our version of Qanon. Many of them might have received a college degree, even advanced degrees, but they surely are not educated, only schooled.