Posted on 09/24/2007 9:09:10 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...Just how skewed the system is toward the already advantaged is illustrated by the findings of a recent study of 146 selective colleges and universities, which concluded that students from the top quartile of the socioeconomic hierarchy (based on parental income, education and occupation) are 25 times more likely to attend a “top tier” college than students from the bottom quartile.
Yet at least since the 1970s, selective colleges have repeatedly claimed — most recently in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in the landmark affirmative case concerning the University of Michigan — to give an edge in admissions to disadvantaged students, regardless of race. So it came as a rude shock a few years ago when William Bowen...discovered selective colleges, that applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds essentially no break get no break...
The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process (though affirmative action for the privileged persists in preferences for the children of alumni and big donors) as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges. For by the conventional definition, which relies heavily on scores on the SAT, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.
Only a vigorous policy of class-based affirmative action that accounts for the huge class differences in educational opportunity has a chance of altering this pattern. This change should be accompanied by a fundamental re-examination of the very meaning of “merit.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The author also forgets the basic knowledge about intelligence--which by the way was developed and measures potential academic achievment--documents that income is highly correlated with intelligence regardless of the college's reputation.
For example, Charles Murray examined the studies correlating income and IQ within the same families. These studies found the correlations were clear and unequivocal. Since all members of the same faimily came from the same socio-economic group and familial background, one could not posit these as reasons for the differences. The URL for this review is found: HERE.
A quote from Murray's article is as follows:
The inequalities among siblings that I have described are from 1993 and are going to become much wider in the years ahead. The income trajectory for low-skill occupations usually peaks in a worker's twenties or thirties. The income trajectory for managers and professionals usually peaks in their fifties. The snapshot I have given you was taken for an age group of 28-36 when many of the brights are still near the bottom of a steep rise into wealth and almost all the dulls' incomes are stagnant or even falling. . . .
The inequalities I have presented are the kind you are used to seeing in articles that compare inner-city children with suburban ones, black with white, children of single parents with those from intact families. Yet they refer to the children of a population more advantaged in jobs, income and marital stability than even the most starry-eyed social reformer can hope to achieve.
A Google Search on this subject should be a requirment before one writes articles demanding vast increases in governmental power to achieve some sort of egalitarian idea which is neither necessary or possible.
I wonder if the NY Slimes has ever considered the remote possibility that Ivy League tuitions play a role in this process.
A better solution might be to tax the overly generous endowment at Harvard and other such places and distribute it to less well-endowed institutions like Tuskegee. < / sarcasm >
hmmm... academic achievers get into better colleges. who’d a thunk?
And smart people tend to achieve more and prosper. gee!
Scandal?
How?
Why?
Yeah, it will take a bunch of poorer kids with good SAT scores who could have graduated from a decent state university and move them to places like MIT and Harvard where they can fail.
Please see Dr. Sowell's research on the effect that this type of affirmative action has on mismatching students and the college they should go to.
The study is BS. They obviously did not study the self-employed and small businesses. Many of them were started and led by high school graduates and are very successful to the tune of some millions a year.
Ask any general contractor, owner of a plumbing or electrical business, owners of cleaning services, etc etc. Go read the book “The Millionaire Next Door”. There are more millionaires among the self-employed than there are among white collar workers. And, when managers in their 50s are being laid off, self-employed people are not so affected.
hmmm... academic achievers get into better colleges. who’d a thunk?The original author had a point. For middle class kids, like me it wasn't that hard to go to a good school because we could just take the SAT/prep classes until we got a good score. At my school we were taking SAT prep from freshman year onward. In the end we could do it with our eyes closed.
Define “smart”. Academic achiever doesn’t necessarily mean smart.
There are a lot of “smart” people who are absolute “idiots” in other respects - think Bill Clinton, Noam Chomsky, Katie Couric, etc. Or think “idiot savant”.
There are a lot of other “smart” people, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Einstein, etc, who did not do that well academically but are superachievers in life in spite of their academic record.
Sorry, I have to niggle a little bit.
Einstein did quite well in school. The bad grades are an urban myth. Einstein(and Feynman for that matter, I don’t know what gets into physicists) ended up with more woman than slick willie, although I’m pretty sure they were thin and attractive(or maybe that was what you were referring to? ;)
The Noamer redefined linguistics and computer science and is the world’s most cited living intellectual. Not exactly an idiot savant, even if you think his politics are nutty. You wouldn’t be typing on free republic if it weren’t for Noam(google Chomsky Normal Form and Context Free Grammar).
Dumb-sh!t parents have dumb-sh!t kids; where’s the scandal?
The scandal, instead, is that Harvard fails to educate.
If it were my brain I want the best man or woman and do not give a damn what color, sex, religion, or sexual orientation they have. I want the best one cutting.
The most intelligent parents are those who will not pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college education that produces a graduate with unmarketable skills. It would be far wiser to take the money and help their son or daughter launch a business. Gates became the nation’s richest man by dropping out of college after one year. He was too intelligent to waste his time there and managed to learn to be PC on his own.
My guess is there is an extremely high correlation of college students coming from families that value education. If one or more of our diverse society does not value education, are you really surprised when they don’t show up in college surveys? Why is it assumed that everyone should go to college? You could make a much better argument that everyone should serve in the Military before they could attend college.
My guess is there is an extremely high correlation of college students coming from families that value education. If one or more of our diverse society does not value education, are you really surprised when they don’t show up in college surveys? Why is it assumed that everyone should go to college? You could make a much better argument that everyone should serve in the Military before they could attend college.I wasn't clear. What I'm saying is that the ivies make it impossible for an otherwise talented poor student to get in because they require excessively high standardized test scores(which are easily circumvented by expensive test prep) and extra-curriculars which no poor family can afford.
The study is BS. They obviously did not study the self-employed and small businesses. Many of them were started and led by high school graduates and are very successful to the tune of some millions a year.
The study is not BS. Many intellegent people go into the trades and do very well. The study addressed it. hTe ccritera was the amount of monies made not the type of education. Although the studies noted that 52% of the brights received college degrees it also acknowledged that the brights who were not degreed were very succesful in their craft or trade.
When my daughters took SAT and ACT tests (in the late 90s and early 00s), although they were allowed to take them as many times as they wanted, ALL their scores were reported to the schools.
When my daughters took SAT and ACT tests (in the late 90s and early 00s), although they were allowed to take them as many times as they wanted, ALL their scores were reported to the schools.
they’d all be little Chinas.
You say that like it would be a bad thing.
You need to read a bit more closely.
http://www.einstein-website.de/z_kids/print/p_certificatekids.html
The bad grades in some areas, and the fact that he left school without a degree, are not an urban myth. Like Bill Gates, Einstein did not deal well with typical school structure.
I wasn’t saying that Chomsky is not an intellectual - I am calling him an educated moron. To the best of my knowledge (and it’s a bit out of date but accurate I think) Berners-Lee didn’t create html based on Chomsky’s work. Chomsky, IMO, only has a reputation based on the sheer volume of his books - and most of them are highly political.
This quote was the target of my comments. The implicit assumption is that managers and professionals are "more skilled" than "low-skill" occupations - those low-skill occupations have usually been interpreted to include the mechanical trades.
Those people are laughing all the way to the bank.
That statement, indeed, is the core of this discussion, and it is totally missed by the NYT. Bright kids do well in college, in spite of the quality their education, and not so bright students do poorly in college, regardless of the quality of their education. The dirty little secret here is that most successful colleges are successful because of their admission criteria, not because of the quality of their professors.
When my daughters took SAT and ACT tests (in the late 90s and early 00s), although they were allowed to take them as many times as they wanted, ALL their scores were reported to the schools.IIRC schools still only count the highest combination of scores.
It seems to me that the author sees a correllation between wealth and achievement in children ... but not the other way around, a correllation between parental achievement and wealth.
Intelligence is, at least partially, genetic. Intelligent people are far more likely to be wealthy. Intelligent people are also far more likely to have intelligent children. Thus, the wealth of the parents can be connected to the intelligence of the children without the children necessarily deriving any social or intellectual benefit from the fact that they grew up wealthy.
The wealth of the parents, and the intelligence of their children, are both possible byproducts of the intelligence of the parents.
It seems to me the controlling factor may be parental IQ rather than wealth.
H
You need to read a bit more closely.Nope, I've heard this one a million times. Einstein graduated from school, he just did it by taking his A levels instead of graduating normally.
I wasn’t saying that Chomsky is not an intellectual - I am calling him an educated moron. To the best of my knowledge (and it’s a bit out of date but accurate I think) Berners-Lee didn’t create html based on Chomsky’s work. Chomsky, IMO, only has a reputation based on the sheer volume of his books - and most of them are highly political.Chomsky is responsible for laying the groundwork for *compiler theory*(Hopcroft and Ullman used a lot of Chomsky's work) and thereby much of the theoretical basis for modern higher level languages and compilers. Which is just a tad more important than html(or sgml for that matter).
You say that like it would be a bad thing.Nope. Just reality. The ivies have always skewed their admissions towards the rich and powerful. The intelligent are secondary, back in the day they had quotas on Jewish people, now Asians are the quota du jour.
>> The social darwinism, while cute, isn’t on topic.
It is certainly on topic ... but I wrote it because it struck me as inescapably cute.
>> The ivies don’t select on intelligence. All of their applicants already have 4.0s. They select on extra-curriculars, essay, interview and standardized test scores all of which by their very nature keep the proles out.
Standardized test scores are a measure of both knowledge and intelligence. Writing ability (via the essay) is a measure of intelligence. Interviews and extra-curriculars are not necessarily a measure of intelligence ... but are certainly reasonable criteria when all other things are equal.
There must be standards for selection into top-tier schools ... and when “all applicants already have a 4.0”, there must be standards outside of high school grades alone. Extra-curricular activities, standardized tests, writing samples, and interviews sound like reasonable selection criteria to me (and it certainly prepares applicants for the process of getting a job ... where interivews, writing samples, and test scores can be quite important).
H
Nope, buddy, we are NOT going to give Egalitarianism a try. You can see how it worked in Communist countries. The US is not actually based on egalitarianism, but rather on equal OPPORTUNITY. And then, you take advantage of the opportunities given to you and work your butt off.
It is quite different.
Go blather your liberal guilt somewhere else.
Re Einstein - did you even read the link, or do you just ignore what does not fit your theory ?
Re Chomsky and the compiler - only a part of any compiler is based on Chomsky’s work, the rest is a lot more pragmatic ... optimizing for efficiency, code output, etc. You can argue all you want about which is more important - compilers or interpreters - I’ll argue they each have their part to play.
Think the author would go for an "affirmative action" Heart Surgeon? Or maybe ride an elevator designed by an AA engineer?
- those low-skill occupations have usually been interpreted to include the mechanical trades
Boy I sure dont see that there. The mechanical trades often are high earners. But the real money in the trades is to manage a fleet of trucks in plumbing or electiricty. Not hour work for pay but using other’s hours to pay you.
Managers do not necessarily come in coats and ties...or with B school-degrees. I know intellegent lawn men and carpenters who now MANAGE multimillion dollar businesses.
Re Einstein - did you even read the link, or do you just ignore what does not fit your theory ?Yes I read your link. Google is your friend.
Re Chomsky and the compiler - only a part of any compiler is based on Chomsky’s work, the rest is a lot more pragmatic ... optimizing for efficiency, code output, etc. You can argue all you want about which is more important - compilers or interpreters - I’ll argue they each have their part to play.
Far better than this article, Ross Douthat’s _Privilege_ is an excellent examination of Harvard and what happens to its scholarship admissions. They have a very hard time competing with the lifestyle of the scions of wealth.
The REALLY dirty little secret is that our societal overlords know that a Harvard education isn’t worth the toilet paper it’s written on (as came out during the 2000 Presidential election, when for partisan reasons, they revealed that President Bush didn’t need to be smart or well-educated to have graduated Harvard Business School), when it comes to education, but it provides the ticket to join an exclusive elite which essentially runs the country. A 2.1 GPA at Harvard or one of the other “in-society” schools (including other Ivy League schools, Stanford, and in some cases UCB or Chicago) trumps a 4.0 from a non-elitist school, even if the non-elitist school has a tougher curriculum. Therefore, the admissions department at such schools determine who is fit to rule America.
I totally disagree with the first part. One does not have to be well educated to graduate from Harvard Business School, but one certainly has to be smart. My point was, and is, that it is the admission standards that determines the capability of the university, not the professors. Don't fall for the media hype that President Bush is not smart.
The others should work harder to get up to speed.
Military experience, a degree in hard science ,or business seem to be a reliable route to wealth.
The trades are also an overlooked route to building wealth.
Yes, and I do not mean to say that class motility in America is dead. Far from it! But money is not the same as influence, either, and the radical leftists in control of traditional American universities have done much to establish an “unintelligentsia,” an elite of the supposedly best educated, who never learned the basics of our society.
Saul of Tarsus is perhaps the most influential person in Western culture, after Jesus Christ. And what portion of Ivy-league graduates could even identify who he is.
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