It's frustrating that we encourage fraudulent behavior for the college application process. I blame the judges, and college admissions departments.
It orients the entire USA public education system around training sociopathic behavior into teenagers.
We tell young people the best way to get ahead in life is through exaggerating. Then we train them to do it in their college essays and extracurriculars.
We need lottery based admissions. Let schools set a minimum test score, and anyone over that goes into lottery for admissions. Kill off essays, extra curriculars, club sports, summer programs, AP tests, Legacy admits, early applications, and let kids have some life again.
This feels fair. I would personally be totally in favor of nationalizing college admissions along such lines. Every school is given a fixed number of admits/waitlists and these are then allocated by lottery based upon such rudimentary qualifications. The federal government could easily force the issue by tying federal funds to a unified national admission scheme (They did this back in the 60's to eliminate men's colleges).
And the cool second order effect of this, is that all the energy currently invested in this zero sum competition will be redirected into a plan B for kids that don't make the cut.
Which prompts all sorts of interesting ideas like, why don't we have more prestigious universities? Did we decide that there was only so much science that needed done? Or were we trying to put a protective moat round the children of the elites so they didn't need to compete? And then put all our energies into ensuring our kid scraped into the bottom rung of that protected elite and didn't end up on the scrap heap?
Depends what you mean by "prestigious universities". If you mean "one of the N best schools in the country" then per definition you cannot create more prestigious universities. If you mean universities capable of offering really high quality education to undergrads, then there are already very many 'unprestigious' universities that are every bit as good as the prestigious ones and in many cases probably a lot better.
I guess what is needed is some sort signal that, while this university doesn't have as many Nobel laureates as Stanford, it is every bit as good at teaching undergraduate physics. I wish there was a university ranking that only focused on the quality of the undergraduate teaching and education, but I have no idea how that would be done.
Legacy families need prestigious universities to be rare and exclusive so that them having gone there increases in value. They already know that their kids will get in so making top universities more exclusive only has benefits for them.
Love where your head is at, but assuming we're talking about the united states, we literally just have enough money and resources to subsidize every kid who wants to attend college if we really wanted to.
There are so many measurable long-term benefits to higher education both for the individual as well as the state that it's truly insane (to me any at least) with how unaccessible we've let it become.
We do have many good schools but unlike most places we also have extremely great schools. So while it's pretty easy to fund a good education for everyone, there's always going to be competition for the best.
From what I've read, the alternative they've come up with is favoring certain ethnic backgrounds over others. But the courts are currently not favoring that approach. So they may have to go back to looking at grades and test scores.
I recommend some type of testing. Even subject specific.
And for most desirable institutions just outright auction for certain amount of spots. Let the rich bid for spot and the money spend to subsidise others.
At some point a test stops becoming a general aptitude test and starts becoming a "how good are you at taking this test" situation. You get specific prep courses designed just around that one specific test and strategies optimized for that specific test. You start selecting for "elite" rather than "smart."
A merit lottery also keeps everybody from having to waste shitloads of time studying for this one test.
Any test checks how good are you at taking this test. I've not seen evidence that at some complexity level it stops correlating with success in university, have you?
The lottery sortition above the minimum standard (which can still be set quite high) is the solution to preventing a competitive monoculture that a strict "top N scores admitted" policy would make.
any tests will always be gamed by those with the resources to game them. either ethically (through special tutors and private programs) or unethically (cheating).
Any system can and will be cheated, that wasn't the point of neither OP's or mine proposals.
Standardized testing is a good predictor. In my country people are admitted based on standardized testing only (country wide subject exams and sat-like test) or results of university-adjacent "preparation courses" and it works fairly well.
The affirmative action is realized directly as a bonus points to your scores based on the background, which reduces the effect of ethical gaming.
Paying tutors is not gaming the system. It is trying to learn effectively. I get that one wants to avoid creating a system where students are forced to spend too much time to learn purely for competition sake with no real practical need, but still.
The core issue is the pyramid shaped system where not being at one of these super places means that you are out of the competition for best work in general.
If you are genuinely smart you will do well enough on qualify for top schools just by studying at school and on your own and relying on your own ability. And even the best and most expensive tutors cannot do that much to improve your scores if you just don't have the aptitude and discipline.
The system now is far more geared towards sending only rich kids to college than any national testing and admissions system would be.
How do kids end up "genuinely smart" or "have discipline"?
If your parents are rich and have are around and can provide excellent schools, nutrition, love and care, pay for extra-curricular activities etc, you are far more likely to end up being "smart" and "have discipline" than someone who grows up in a family where parents are absent, they have to go to an inner city school, they can't afford school trips, instruments, extra-curricular activities, since they have to have a part time job themselves to make ends meet.
My point is, that SO many of the qualities we think that somehow kids got "innately" are actually purely products of luck and circumstance. The ability to "work hard" isn't a gift some are born with and some are born without, it's learned and modeled from our lives, parents, teachers, experiences etc.
If you never have parents that buy you books and encourage you to read, it's doubtful you will end up being "smart"
Plenty of poor kids are genuinely smart and have discipline too.
My point was, people love to imagine world where smart and discipline is mutually exclusive with "parents paying tutor" or other rich person perk. ImAnd if parents pay those, kid must be lazy or stupid.
It is not so. Even super entitled kid can be smart and work hard. If rich entitlement is just another advantage and so is tutor. Poor kids can be as smart as hardworking too, just without additional advantages.
Plsu, some people are not smart or hard working due to genetics. And damm they can be rich too.
You should read "The Tyranny of Merit" by Michael Sandel (Harvard Professor), this problem is well studied at this point. The books point is that America has the idea that it's a meritocracy and the kids that end up succeeding got their out of merit and their inherent talents, but in fact it's actually a delusion, America doesn't have a meritocracy at all, and in fact success is mostly to do with money and influence based on your family background. And this is all based on actual data presented in the book.
Sure, there are poor kids from bad backgrounds who, against all odds, end up doing well. But these are outliers. In general, coming from rich families who throw money into your education, tutors, therapy, extra-curricular activities etc, is a MASSIVE advantage, and as such, one of the highest predictors of ending up at a prestigious college and high paying job is how wealthy your parents are...
I've witnessed this first hand via a friend of the family. Their kid didn't have the grades or entrance exam test scores to study what they wanted at university. So the kid got to take a year off after high school and focus entirely on studying for the entrance exams with regular tutoring from various private tutors. And while their test scores absolutely did improve quite a bit by doing this, they didn't improve enough, and they still ended up having to study at a secondary choice anyway.
That argument has nothing to do with whether it is gaming the system. Just like intentionally buying a house on a good school district is not gaming the system.
It orients the entire USA public education system around training sociopathic behavior into teenagers.
We tell young people the best way to get ahead in life is through exaggerating. Then we train them to do it in their college essays and extracurriculars.
Gross.