Very interesting. I don't know much about educational theory, but it would be pretty amazing to think that relatively "simple" changes like that could have such a gigantic impact. Can there really be "100 dollar bills" lying on the ground everywhere?
There are hundreds dollar bills lying everywhere. Here's a video where Neal Spackman talks about investors not getting aboard permaculture because the time needed to exit is "too long.": https://youtu.be/451TJvQYWn8
There's also a sequel to it called Common Ground that is about to be released.
Now, if you're curious as to *why* there are these particular $100 bills lying around, I think it comes down to lack of knowledge and first principles thinking, informational bubbles, short-term incentives, and institutional capture. All of these factors make the inferential gap hard to overcome.
Yes! I didn't address that because it's a much harder question (and only worth asking if you buy the first argument).
Anyway, I don't pretend to know the answer! But one idea I quite like would be partly randomized admissions. Basically, Ivy+ colleges could set some kind of absolute threshold for "qualified to succeed here". Among all the people that clear that threshold, the admitted people are chosen at random. Everyone else gets a nice official "you were accepted to Fancy Ivy+ school but lost the lottery" certificate.
It's open exactly how high that threshold should be but given that almost 100% of admitted people graduate from Harvard now, I'm sure they could raise their acceptance rate quite a lot and still have a very well-qualified cohort.
Anyway, there might be huge downsides to something like this. But I think that if an Ivy+ school explicitly *wanted* to reduce the degree to which they pick winners, I think they could probably do that without greatly harming their educational mission.
I was ready to scoff and say that you weren't providing any solutions - but I'd love you to think through and write a bit more about the randomisation idea more - would be really interesting thing to think through the pros and cons.
The solution isn't at Harvard or any Ivy+, it's in our expectations as society.
As far as I know, in every society ever, the best predictor of political power is being from a family already in political power, or being close to people in power.
> When you argue about how it does admissions, you’re accepting the premise that it should exist at all. It only seems reasonable because we’ve been indoctrinated since birth with the idea that “Ivy League = prestige”, and humans are programmed to think prestigious things are good.
I think a lot of people are arguing about the wrong parts of this post.
Re: "It has a huge impact: At SIU Edwardsville, 54% of students graduate within 6 years. At Harvard, it’s 98%. Harvard does not do selective admissions so that it can push the most talented people to their limit. The hardest part is getting in. Do you think every legacy admit student athlete is a genius?" An anecdote:
So I went to undergrad in rural Quebec and many of my friends were therefore from Quebec and attended CGEP (think of it as somewhere between high school and university). One time this friend of theirs who got into Boston College comes to visit. (A five hour drive or so.) My friends tell me he did not take CGEP seriously, he always slacked off. But his parents own a motel chain and have money. (I do not know if either went to Boston College.) We start talking about school. He goes on and on about how Boston College is easier than CGEP. None of my friends at my university (that few Americans have ever heard of) think it is easier than CGEP. As far as I can tell, there's nothing particularly special about this guy academically, he's just another guy. But he swears he has it easier now. He thinks they want him and everyone else to graduate. Every time I hear about the high marks and high graduation rates of the Ivies and other "elite" schools, I think about this conversation.
I don't really have a strong opinion on overall "easiness"—I was just trying to say that it isn't a primary goal of Harvard to push their students to the limit. Once you're in, they want you to finish.
I do think there's a difference in general between state colleges and private ones in that private colleges have a much stronger desire that their students graduate. (If you think about incentives, then in some sense the "customers" of a private college are the students while the "customers" of a state college are the state taxpayers.) This isn't just about "easiness" though—on average, I suspect private colleges tend to do a better job of "catching" students who are struggling, making it easier to change majors, etc. Also important to remember that the vast majority of private colleges are much easier to get into than highly selective state schools like Michigan, Berkeley, et al.
I think the reason Harvard exists is not to reward the smartest people, but to identify, collect, and connect the people who will have the most success in political arenas. Legacy admissions make perfect sense to that end because being from a powerful and connected family dramatically increases your ability to be an effective political actor.
There is a merit bar for being an effective political actor, but it’s not the absolute top of SAT scores.
The real world rewards high intelligence students pretty well. I would be hesitant and confused to receive a CV from a Harvard grad for software engineering (why go to an Ivy?!) but would not hesitate to take a well performing candidate from any accredited state school.
In any political domain, the elites will be dominated by network effects. Trying to change that is trying to change humans.
Isn't it true that some supergeniuses do more good for the world than hordes of ordinary geniuses working together? Like, if we want relativity, we're better off making sure Einstein gets the best education possible than we are making sure that a bunch of randos like me get a decent education. The more complex problems are regarding *which* areas require small numbers of supergeniuses versus large numbers of ordinarily smart people (and, of course, whether we should prioritise those areas). (There's an issue regarding the degree to which supergeniuses *need* formal education; James Joyce's output is worth more than the output of a dozen pretty-solid MFA students, but he didn't need an MFA at all.)
That's certainly an argument worth taking seriously. But even if we presuppose that the goal is just to give Einstein the best possible education, what's the best way to do that? Elitism is good for Einstein if he is selected to be elite, but bad for him if he doesn't. So my concern about gating functions is that they might make it harder for many "potential Einsteins" to rise out of the pool of people who don't get through the gate.
This is a solved problem, the solution is called markets. Education is a private good, resources are scarce, markets will take it from there.
We pretend otherwise, try to solve an economic calculation problem, and fail in predictable ways.
It's not surprising that with one possible exception (journalism) the top of the overrepresented list is all government related: senators, presidents, judges, while the income effect is NOT casual.
My main disagreement lies in the fact that supervisor ratings and job screening correlates weakly with job performance (r = .4-.6), so test scores and ivy graduation would serve as incremental predictors of performance independent of these assessments.
Seeing the words "Czech-language math class" caught me off-guard. Greetings from the Czech Republic :) A couple of facts and thoughts from this small country:
All state-run education is free here, with some limits on how long you can study in uni for free. At the primary and secondary school level, private schools are often able to provide better services, but they are expensive. We also have schools for gifted kids, so-called Gymnasiums (starting from 11 or 15 years of age), which are quite hard to get into, with acceptance rates usually ranging from 20-40%.
As for gating mechanisms, here it mostly depends on the major you choose, not the university. Some majors, such as most of STEM, are rather trivial to get into (around 50% get in), even for our top-ranked university. But that results in a low completion rate (eg. 40% for a bachelor's in comp sci). Then there is medicine (20% acceptance) and law (30%) which is difficult to get into but results in a higher completion rate (75% & 60%). Others, like some specific humanities majors, offer only low tens of spots a year and the admissions can be very competitive. We do have private universities, which, as far as you have money for tuition, are both easy to get into and easy to complete. Because of that, they are viewed as degree farms.
Nothing here is close to Harvard's levels of acceptance and completion. I think it's a pity they don't push their students harder, but there is definitely an incentive (image, money) not to do that.
It's possible our "market" is just not big enough to support something like Harvard, especially when they would have to compete for students with elite universities abroad. Or it's partly due to the way universities are financed here - through the state, mainly based on the number of current students and the costliness of courses (e.g. medicine has higher associated costs with classes than maths).
Perhaps it is due to our past, which resulted in high equality, close to no old money, and a very small upper class, which usually sends their kids abroad. While still valuable, contacts hold less value, and universities are more about education. Perhaps 30 years of capitalism (with left-wing economic policies by US standards) isn't enough for these issues to start showing.
It's also worth pointing out the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) limitation of the Chetty study. The causal estimates apply just to those on the waitlist and would not necessarily be representative of those outside that boundary. Those at the boundary could be significantly different than those below and those above that waitlist band of applicants.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. I don't have much intuition for if it would be higher or lower, though. I think you can kind of make arguments either way?
Yup, either way - you can imagine folks double downing on their Ivy+ identity by just getting in, and there are those whose identity feels diminished by being on the "low end" of the distribution of Ivy+ admits. Here's a paper /w a similar RDD design in Mexico noting that these kids who are admitted on the margin perform worse due a combination of imposter syndrome, confidence, and academic difficulty.
It's the challenge faced by many of these quasi-experimental designs and it's hard to make sweeping claims. Yet, we can make practical ones "at the boundary" with these sort of built-in randomization schemes.
I live in New Zealand, where there isn't any significant tier system to universities (apart from the distinction between full 'universities' and Polytechnics, which I believe are roughly equivelent to your community colleges). If anything, universities here act as a bottleneck/equaliser where possibly people on an elite pipeline have to mix with and compete with everybody else (compared with children, where elite private schools exist, and afterwards in the job market/business world where connections and money obviously help.)
I think one benefit (beyond meritocracy itself) is an increased cohesion between elites and the rest of the population. Lots of 'regular' people know or knew political leaders or business leaders etc at university and got a feeling of whether they were actually competent or exceptional. This limits the perception of a 'gold elite' cabal who look after their own (and might plausibly be committing terrible sins or coverups). Not sure if you can blame ALL that on Harvard, but I don't think it helps.
I think the "best while still plausible" solution is going to be increased class sizes.
The main reason people feel like Harvard, etc. are worthy of scorn, is because of all the people *not admitted.* Getting into a top state school (Michigan and Ohio State) are not exactly walks in the park, Michigan sits at a (wanted to say "respectable", lmao) 20% admit rate and Ohio State is a 57%. The difference is that Michigan and Ohio State, including their branch campuses, etc. etc., accept a ton of people. Harvard accepts less than 2000. Ohio State is deliberately trying to lower their class size (https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/ohio-state-university/ohio-state-university-enrollment-reaches-number-not-seen-in-years/) but Ohio State has a $7.4b endowment and about 60k students. Harvard has quite a bit more at $53b. If you get rejected from Ohio State, Ohio State can say "Look, we have branch campuses for you and also we are running an entire city's worth of people." Harvard says "We have ensured that this class is ethnically diverse" and then swan-dives into a pile of gold.
You could say, "But Harvey, given that the benefit of Harvard is *actually* elite certification, and a chance at the VERY top, wouldn't this not change the desired outcome of more competent people in office, who are deprived of that opportunity in exchange of elites?"
To which I'd say maybe, but then I don't care all that much! Right now Harvard is an elite minter that is also {amount x) in the business of education. What if it was an elite minter, and also 10x in the business of education? Surely they have the resources for it - think of all the tuition they'd make! I suspect that the elites will still be elite, that the movers and shakers of various academic departments would still be movers and shakers, that the additional people would still get some of those prestige perks. This is utility maximizing!
The current admissions + affirmative action discussions are essentially "Who is morally justified in winning a knife fight." The real answer is, if you quadruple enrollment and ease off the knife fight, nobody would care about a 1-2% change between admitted student races. Harvard might not care about a 10-50% increase in Asian American students, as racist as they seem to be in the court findings. Harvard could continue to print money. Tuition could continue to climb, and the colleges could still price fix while the government mandates that you share your familial net worth before entering into the transaction. But at least (against your applicant competitors) things would be just a little bit more *fair*.
Thanks for the comment! Can you expand on the point that the government mandates that you share your familial net worth? I'm not sure how that works—I would have thought that it was the colleges demanding that, but I don't know much about this point!
Typically, American students must fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). You're correct that the colleges are asking for this, but there are a ton of government incentives to make sure people get this completed. A growing number of states simply make it a mandatory requirement of high school graduation (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2019-08-14/is-the-fafsa-required)
Included in the FAFSA is two years of IRS tax information. If you are filing as a dependent, aka your parents are helping with your education, they input their information instead. Recently, the FAFSA added a new tool that pulls your information directly from the IRS, into your FAFSA application.
The end result of all this is that the government is sending you repeated reminders to complete your FAFSA, so that they can meet a program requirement or collect a grant, etc. This information is then given to the colleges you apply to, where they are able to determine:
Sticker price - "Financial Need" = The max price you and your family are willing to pay
Increased class sizes might harm the "intangibles" of status, but the tuition hikes, the 501c3 status, the endowments, and the government keeping itself busy mandating FAFSA completion can sail smoothly into a world where each school accepts more applicants.
One minor comment: the calculus test comparison is meaningless. First-semester calculus at Harvard serves the very weakest students mathematically, who have to take it as part of their general education requirements. Its existence is barely relevant to the STEM majors. Almost every hard sciences major starts in freshman year at several levels ahead of the course you linked to. Many of the math majors learned the material in that course early in high school--if not earlier. I don't know what the situation at SIU Edwardsville is but you'd have to check that it is comparable before making the comparison. And I'm fairly confident the proportion of students who mastered calculus in high school in the general college population does not match the proportion at Harvard.
I am pretty sure if you looked at the numbers you would see a significant quantitative difference, especially since we're not just talking about "in high school" but *when*. Most people I hung out with at college (not Harvard, but similar) took calculus in 10th grade or earlier. Most of them weren't even math majors. Do you really think I could have found a comparable peer group just anywhere? I find that unbelievable. I've also spoken to a lot of math professors who have spent time at a variety of schools of different ranks throughout their career and they can certainly tell the difference. There exist advanced students everywhere, but the ratios aren't the same.
Can you clarify what the disagreement is? I agree that the incoming class at Harvard is stronger and you don't seem to be disputing that Harvard's calc 101 seems similar to SIU's. It's possible (plausible) that the average Harvard student starts at a higher level class. But if that same student were to go to SIU, they would start at a higher level there, too. My (twin's?) claim was just that equivalent courses at different universities mostly cover the same stuff, i.e. that there's no pattern that more selective universities make the "same" courses much harder.
(I think the strongest argument against this claim would be that Harvard offers Math 55, something where nothing analogous exists at all at most universities.)
Right, sorry, I guess my point is that at whatever level the advanced SIU student ran out of enough peers to support the existence of the kinds of classes they wanted to take, the same student at Harvard would still have a bunch of those peers. The advanced SIU student could maybe work around this by replacing all those classes with independent/professor-guided reading, but it would be a very different and in my opinion much worse experience. Like, it might also be true that the calculus class at my high school wasn't much easier than the calculus class at Harvard (although I think in fact it was at least somewhat easier), but nevertheless I think it was very important for me to go to college instead of spending four more years in high school trying to do math on my own (even if I'd been able to find suitable mentors)!
Definitely interesting and food for thought. Thank you.
For a glimpse of the (math-specific) "magical dreamworld" you mentioned, read this:
https://www.factfreaks.com/blog/now-everyone-can-be-a-math-person-thanks-to-covid
Very interesting. I don't know much about educational theory, but it would be pretty amazing to think that relatively "simple" changes like that could have such a gigantic impact. Can there really be "100 dollar bills" lying on the ground everywhere?
There are hundreds dollar bills lying everywhere. Here's a video where Neal Spackman talks about investors not getting aboard permaculture because the time needed to exit is "too long.": https://youtu.be/451TJvQYWn8
If the video is too long, browsing https://regenerativeresources.co/ will suffice for an overview of his approach.
For a primer on regen ag, which lets farmers make money without relying on ag subsidies, here's a trailer for Kiss the Ground:
https://youtu.be/K3-V1j-zMZw
There's also a sequel to it called Common Ground that is about to be released.
Now, if you're curious as to *why* there are these particular $100 bills lying around, I think it comes down to lack of knowledge and first principles thinking, informational bubbles, short-term incentives, and institutional capture. All of these factors make the inferential gap hard to overcome.
To end on a positive note, here's how certain parts of India used permaculture to solve their "drought --> urban migration" problem: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNdMkGYdEqODK1mtweVoVZaPgtdzseGdr
What are the policy suggestions or action items here then? Banning Ivy+ colleges from accepting undergrads, for example, is a non-starter.
Yes! I didn't address that because it's a much harder question (and only worth asking if you buy the first argument).
Anyway, I don't pretend to know the answer! But one idea I quite like would be partly randomized admissions. Basically, Ivy+ colleges could set some kind of absolute threshold for "qualified to succeed here". Among all the people that clear that threshold, the admitted people are chosen at random. Everyone else gets a nice official "you were accepted to Fancy Ivy+ school but lost the lottery" certificate.
It's open exactly how high that threshold should be but given that almost 100% of admitted people graduate from Harvard now, I'm sure they could raise their acceptance rate quite a lot and still have a very well-qualified cohort.
Anyway, there might be huge downsides to something like this. But I think that if an Ivy+ school explicitly *wanted* to reduce the degree to which they pick winners, I think they could probably do that without greatly harming their educational mission.
I was ready to scoff and say that you weren't providing any solutions - but I'd love you to think through and write a bit more about the randomisation idea more - would be really interesting thing to think through the pros and cons.
The solution isn't at Harvard or any Ivy+, it's in our expectations as society.
As far as I know, in every society ever, the best predictor of political power is being from a family already in political power, or being close to people in power.
As a current Harvard PhD student I agree. Seen from the inside, Harvard isn't about "veritas", it's about power.
> When you argue about how it does admissions, you’re accepting the premise that it should exist at all. It only seems reasonable because we’ve been indoctrinated since birth with the idea that “Ivy League = prestige”, and humans are programmed to think prestigious things are good.
I think a lot of people are arguing about the wrong parts of this post.
Re: "It has a huge impact: At SIU Edwardsville, 54% of students graduate within 6 years. At Harvard, it’s 98%. Harvard does not do selective admissions so that it can push the most talented people to their limit. The hardest part is getting in. Do you think every legacy admit student athlete is a genius?" An anecdote:
So I went to undergrad in rural Quebec and many of my friends were therefore from Quebec and attended CGEP (think of it as somewhere between high school and university). One time this friend of theirs who got into Boston College comes to visit. (A five hour drive or so.) My friends tell me he did not take CGEP seriously, he always slacked off. But his parents own a motel chain and have money. (I do not know if either went to Boston College.) We start talking about school. He goes on and on about how Boston College is easier than CGEP. None of my friends at my university (that few Americans have ever heard of) think it is easier than CGEP. As far as I can tell, there's nothing particularly special about this guy academically, he's just another guy. But he swears he has it easier now. He thinks they want him and everyone else to graduate. Every time I hear about the high marks and high graduation rates of the Ivies and other "elite" schools, I think about this conversation.
I don't really have a strong opinion on overall "easiness"—I was just trying to say that it isn't a primary goal of Harvard to push their students to the limit. Once you're in, they want you to finish.
I do think there's a difference in general between state colleges and private ones in that private colleges have a much stronger desire that their students graduate. (If you think about incentives, then in some sense the "customers" of a private college are the students while the "customers" of a state college are the state taxpayers.) This isn't just about "easiness" though—on average, I suspect private colleges tend to do a better job of "catching" students who are struggling, making it easier to change majors, etc. Also important to remember that the vast majority of private colleges are much easier to get into than highly selective state schools like Michigan, Berkeley, et al.
I completely agree with the idea that once you're in, they want you to finish. That was my experience in grad school.
I think the reason Harvard exists is not to reward the smartest people, but to identify, collect, and connect the people who will have the most success in political arenas. Legacy admissions make perfect sense to that end because being from a powerful and connected family dramatically increases your ability to be an effective political actor.
There is a merit bar for being an effective political actor, but it’s not the absolute top of SAT scores.
The real world rewards high intelligence students pretty well. I would be hesitant and confused to receive a CV from a Harvard grad for software engineering (why go to an Ivy?!) but would not hesitate to take a well performing candidate from any accredited state school.
In any political domain, the elites will be dominated by network effects. Trying to change that is trying to change humans.
Isn't it true that some supergeniuses do more good for the world than hordes of ordinary geniuses working together? Like, if we want relativity, we're better off making sure Einstein gets the best education possible than we are making sure that a bunch of randos like me get a decent education. The more complex problems are regarding *which* areas require small numbers of supergeniuses versus large numbers of ordinarily smart people (and, of course, whether we should prioritise those areas). (There's an issue regarding the degree to which supergeniuses *need* formal education; James Joyce's output is worth more than the output of a dozen pretty-solid MFA students, but he didn't need an MFA at all.)
That's certainly an argument worth taking seriously. But even if we presuppose that the goal is just to give Einstein the best possible education, what's the best way to do that? Elitism is good for Einstein if he is selected to be elite, but bad for him if he doesn't. So my concern about gating functions is that they might make it harder for many "potential Einsteins" to rise out of the pool of people who don't get through the gate.
Sure.
This is a solved problem, the solution is called markets. Education is a private good, resources are scarce, markets will take it from there.
We pretend otherwise, try to solve an economic calculation problem, and fail in predictable ways.
It's not surprising that with one possible exception (journalism) the top of the overrepresented list is all government related: senators, presidents, judges, while the income effect is NOT casual.
I've published a reply to your post:
https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/why-ivies-should-exist
My main disagreement lies in the fact that supervisor ratings and job screening correlates weakly with job performance (r = .4-.6), so test scores and ivy graduation would serve as incremental predictors of performance independent of these assessments.
Seeing the words "Czech-language math class" caught me off-guard. Greetings from the Czech Republic :) A couple of facts and thoughts from this small country:
All state-run education is free here, with some limits on how long you can study in uni for free. At the primary and secondary school level, private schools are often able to provide better services, but they are expensive. We also have schools for gifted kids, so-called Gymnasiums (starting from 11 or 15 years of age), which are quite hard to get into, with acceptance rates usually ranging from 20-40%.
As for gating mechanisms, here it mostly depends on the major you choose, not the university. Some majors, such as most of STEM, are rather trivial to get into (around 50% get in), even for our top-ranked university. But that results in a low completion rate (eg. 40% for a bachelor's in comp sci). Then there is medicine (20% acceptance) and law (30%) which is difficult to get into but results in a higher completion rate (75% & 60%). Others, like some specific humanities majors, offer only low tens of spots a year and the admissions can be very competitive. We do have private universities, which, as far as you have money for tuition, are both easy to get into and easy to complete. Because of that, they are viewed as degree farms.
Nothing here is close to Harvard's levels of acceptance and completion. I think it's a pity they don't push their students harder, but there is definitely an incentive (image, money) not to do that.
It's possible our "market" is just not big enough to support something like Harvard, especially when they would have to compete for students with elite universities abroad. Or it's partly due to the way universities are financed here - through the state, mainly based on the number of current students and the costliness of courses (e.g. medicine has higher associated costs with classes than maths).
Perhaps it is due to our past, which resulted in high equality, close to no old money, and a very small upper class, which usually sends their kids abroad. While still valuable, contacts hold less value, and universities are more about education. Perhaps 30 years of capitalism (with left-wing economic policies by US standards) isn't enough for these issues to start showing.
It's also worth pointing out the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) limitation of the Chetty study. The causal estimates apply just to those on the waitlist and would not necessarily be representative of those outside that boundary. Those at the boundary could be significantly different than those below and those above that waitlist band of applicants.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. I don't have much intuition for if it would be higher or lower, though. I think you can kind of make arguments either way?
Yup, either way - you can imagine folks double downing on their Ivy+ identity by just getting in, and there are those whose identity feels diminished by being on the "low end" of the distribution of Ivy+ admits. Here's a paper /w a similar RDD design in Mexico noting that these kids who are admitted on the margin perform worse due a combination of imposter syndrome, confidence, and academic difficulty.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ej/uead042/7197427?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
It's the challenge faced by many of these quasi-experimental designs and it's hard to make sweeping claims. Yet, we can make practical ones "at the boundary" with these sort of built-in randomization schemes.
I live in New Zealand, where there isn't any significant tier system to universities (apart from the distinction between full 'universities' and Polytechnics, which I believe are roughly equivelent to your community colleges). If anything, universities here act as a bottleneck/equaliser where possibly people on an elite pipeline have to mix with and compete with everybody else (compared with children, where elite private schools exist, and afterwards in the job market/business world where connections and money obviously help.)
I think one benefit (beyond meritocracy itself) is an increased cohesion between elites and the rest of the population. Lots of 'regular' people know or knew political leaders or business leaders etc at university and got a feeling of whether they were actually competent or exceptional. This limits the perception of a 'gold elite' cabal who look after their own (and might plausibly be committing terrible sins or coverups). Not sure if you can blame ALL that on Harvard, but I don't think it helps.
I think the "best while still plausible" solution is going to be increased class sizes.
The main reason people feel like Harvard, etc. are worthy of scorn, is because of all the people *not admitted.* Getting into a top state school (Michigan and Ohio State) are not exactly walks in the park, Michigan sits at a (wanted to say "respectable", lmao) 20% admit rate and Ohio State is a 57%. The difference is that Michigan and Ohio State, including their branch campuses, etc. etc., accept a ton of people. Harvard accepts less than 2000. Ohio State is deliberately trying to lower their class size (https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/ohio-state-university/ohio-state-university-enrollment-reaches-number-not-seen-in-years/) but Ohio State has a $7.4b endowment and about 60k students. Harvard has quite a bit more at $53b. If you get rejected from Ohio State, Ohio State can say "Look, we have branch campuses for you and also we are running an entire city's worth of people." Harvard says "We have ensured that this class is ethnically diverse" and then swan-dives into a pile of gold.
You could say, "But Harvey, given that the benefit of Harvard is *actually* elite certification, and a chance at the VERY top, wouldn't this not change the desired outcome of more competent people in office, who are deprived of that opportunity in exchange of elites?"
To which I'd say maybe, but then I don't care all that much! Right now Harvard is an elite minter that is also {amount x) in the business of education. What if it was an elite minter, and also 10x in the business of education? Surely they have the resources for it - think of all the tuition they'd make! I suspect that the elites will still be elite, that the movers and shakers of various academic departments would still be movers and shakers, that the additional people would still get some of those prestige perks. This is utility maximizing!
The current admissions + affirmative action discussions are essentially "Who is morally justified in winning a knife fight." The real answer is, if you quadruple enrollment and ease off the knife fight, nobody would care about a 1-2% change between admitted student races. Harvard might not care about a 10-50% increase in Asian American students, as racist as they seem to be in the court findings. Harvard could continue to print money. Tuition could continue to climb, and the colleges could still price fix while the government mandates that you share your familial net worth before entering into the transaction. But at least (against your applicant competitors) things would be just a little bit more *fair*.
Thanks for the comment! Can you expand on the point that the government mandates that you share your familial net worth? I'm not sure how that works—I would have thought that it was the colleges demanding that, but I don't know much about this point!
Typically, American students must fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). You're correct that the colleges are asking for this, but there are a ton of government incentives to make sure people get this completed. A growing number of states simply make it a mandatory requirement of high school graduation (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2019-08-14/is-the-fafsa-required)
Included in the FAFSA is two years of IRS tax information. If you are filing as a dependent, aka your parents are helping with your education, they input their information instead. Recently, the FAFSA added a new tool that pulls your information directly from the IRS, into your FAFSA application.
The end result of all this is that the government is sending you repeated reminders to complete your FAFSA, so that they can meet a program requirement or collect a grant, etc. This information is then given to the colleges you apply to, where they are able to determine:
Sticker price - "Financial Need" = The max price you and your family are willing to pay
Conrad Bastable's Uncharity of College (https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands) explains the secret sauce of this whole scheme, which is using the "financial need" to legally justify the 501c3 status - tuition is going up to keep the "financial need" up, to keep endowments tax free! If you haven't read it, it's a crucial text of the genre.
Increased class sizes might harm the "intangibles" of status, but the tuition hikes, the 501c3 status, the endowments, and the government keeping itself busy mandating FAFSA completion can sail smoothly into a world where each school accepts more applicants.
Exactly.
As Everlast said, “You know how it ends/It usually depends on where you start.”
One minor comment: the calculus test comparison is meaningless. First-semester calculus at Harvard serves the very weakest students mathematically, who have to take it as part of their general education requirements. Its existence is barely relevant to the STEM majors. Almost every hard sciences major starts in freshman year at several levels ahead of the course you linked to. Many of the math majors learned the material in that course early in high school--if not earlier. I don't know what the situation at SIU Edwardsville is but you'd have to check that it is comparable before making the comparison. And I'm fairly confident the proportion of students who mastered calculus in high school in the general college population does not match the proportion at Harvard.
Most STEM majors at any major college took calculus in high school.
I am pretty sure if you looked at the numbers you would see a significant quantitative difference, especially since we're not just talking about "in high school" but *when*. Most people I hung out with at college (not Harvard, but similar) took calculus in 10th grade or earlier. Most of them weren't even math majors. Do you really think I could have found a comparable peer group just anywhere? I find that unbelievable. I've also spoken to a lot of math professors who have spent time at a variety of schools of different ranks throughout their career and they can certainly tell the difference. There exist advanced students everywhere, but the ratios aren't the same.
Can you clarify what the disagreement is? I agree that the incoming class at Harvard is stronger and you don't seem to be disputing that Harvard's calc 101 seems similar to SIU's. It's possible (plausible) that the average Harvard student starts at a higher level class. But if that same student were to go to SIU, they would start at a higher level there, too. My (twin's?) claim was just that equivalent courses at different universities mostly cover the same stuff, i.e. that there's no pattern that more selective universities make the "same" courses much harder.
(I think the strongest argument against this claim would be that Harvard offers Math 55, something where nothing analogous exists at all at most universities.)
Right, sorry, I guess my point is that at whatever level the advanced SIU student ran out of enough peers to support the existence of the kinds of classes they wanted to take, the same student at Harvard would still have a bunch of those peers. The advanced SIU student could maybe work around this by replacing all those classes with independent/professor-guided reading, but it would be a very different and in my opinion much worse experience. Like, it might also be true that the calculus class at my high school wasn't much easier than the calculus class at Harvard (although I think in fact it was at least somewhat easier), but nevertheless I think it was very important for me to go to college instead of spending four more years in high school trying to do math on my own (even if I'd been able to find suitable mentors)!