Making College Admissions more Meritocratic

[BasketCase]

So if a kid busts his ass to learn and do well, but has no good foundation, gets an average of 600 per test on the SAT coming from a background in which he didn't even know what the SAT was until some teacher in his high school talked him into taking it months earlier, that kid may have vastly more academic merit than the kid with 700s and AP courses etc.

Key word underlined.

How do you know for sure? Measuring a student's academic merit is the entire point of the SAT to begin with. If the poor kid has greater aptitude, why doesn't it show on the test? If you can't measure it with some kind of verifiable test, how do you even know it exists?

Getting students into higher education is not the problem here, people. You've got the wrong end there. What we want to be doing is getting them out. Out the graduating end. With those silly caps on their heads. Putting a kid into college when he has no chance of graduating is a waste of resources that the American education system is already short of. So it all comes down to: how do you find out which kids have a good chance of making it through? That's the whole point behind grade school.

 

[Zelig]

That's the whole point behind grade school.

Well, other than education, obviously.

 

[Lay_Lay]

When you have two kids, where neither are ready to study most serious academic subjects at a university, the rich kid can afford to pay full tuition for their degree, even if they goof off for more than four years, in mass communication/sociology or whatever liberal arts. It doesn't really help to give large scholarships to poor kids do to the same even if they have equal high school credentials but not enough to make it in a real major, that's not helping meritocracy and can't be afforded by colleges anyway.

This. No way in hell I want to be paying for some kid to go be Van Wilder and get a 4 year Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration in 5 years.

 

[Kozmos]

Make higher education free for the students who fulfill their duties regularly. For what they fail they pay. Easy peasy.

 

[Archbob]

And whose is going to pay for that? You?

 

[aelf]

Why, you, FAL. I heard you have money.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

And whose is going to pay for that? You?

The citizens of the United States I would assume.

 

[Elrohir]

Of course they do. The school system fits very well within the capitalist system. I just don't want people pretending that more intellectually motivated kids or more independent learners are going to see more success because of their merit. That's just not our education system works.

As to opposed to socialism, which just loves people who can't follow orders, and consistently establishes educational systems where no one takes orders, right?

Oh wait -- any successful society, capitalist or not, needs people who are able to follow reasonable orders both at work and in society at large!

Our educational system is definitely geared towards educating people to live within our current (capitalist) system, but taking the position that good grades = following orders = capitalism! is silly talk.

 

[Archbob]

I do, but seriously, they can take loans to go to a state school. I also did work online to pay for room and board. I could have gone to any state school for free on grades and test scores but I went out of state because U of I had a great engineering school at the time I applied. My parents did foot the tuition mostly and I paid for room and board while borrowing $6k-$7k to pay for tuition along the way. If my family's income was just a little lower I could have borrow much more interest free money.

I do donate to causes pretty often but I'm not going to give $40,000 to some kid randomly.

 

[BasketCase]

Well, other than education, obviously.

Not really. You don't need the school system to learn stuff; why, just today I finally learned how to get Minecraft to work in Windows 7 with more than a gigabyte of memory allocated to it (i.e. something actually useful).

First and foremost, the point behind any given grade level is to see if you've got what it takes to make it to the next grade level. And also to see if you've got the stamina to sit in a chair for hours on end and listen to a boring jerk give a boring lecture. Because if you can't handle that, you can't handle modern-day staff meetings.

 

[Earthling]

Thats just what the article is saying actually.

You shouldn't directly quote other CFC posters and claim they are making a point that you are actually addressing from the article then.

If this discussion is going to segue to talking about budgets and similar stuff, people, especially non-USians, should realize schools are in a crunch for money and will be in the forseeable future. Politically funding is more likely to be cut than anything else, so proposing massive expansions of scholarships and aid at the university level is pie-in-the-sky but not just an easy practical answer.

 

[mangxema]

@Kennigit: Personally without HOPE, I'd have been screwed. I had some other decent scholarships, but that was huge for me.

 

[Archbob]

You shouldn't directly quote other CFC posters and claim they are making a point that you are actually addressing from the article then.

You better look at the quotes I quoted carefully again. mrt144 is implying in his quote that since the resources kids are different, then their scores/merit should be viewed differently.

 

[mrt144]

The citizens of the United States I would assume.

Imagine that...tax payers, paying taxes to benefit more people in society which has the reciprocal benefit of creating well educated and functional adults.

 

[BuckeyeJim]

Imagine that...tax payers, paying taxes to benefit more people in society which has the reciprocal benefit of creating well educated and functional adults.

What's the problem with individual loans? This seems to be a better route to creating a reciprocal benefit of creating well educated and functional adults than taxes do.

 

[Hitti-Litti]

The citizens of the United States I would assume.

I hope not, because that means taxes, and taxes are socialism, and socialism is bad because of the USSR.

Seriously speaking, USA should be a land of equal opportunities, where everyone can achieve the cherished American dream. Having to pay so much for your education is anything but giving people equal opportunities.

 

[azzaman333]

DT, you might find it interesting to look at how Australia handles this stuff. (obligatory wiki link)

 

[BuckeyeJim]

I hope not, because that means taxes, and taxes are socialism, and socialism is bad because of the USSR.

Seriously speaking, USA should be a land of equal opportunities, where everyone can achieve the cherished American dream. Having to pay so much for your education is anything but giving people equal opportunities.

Why is that? And how is taxing one group in favor of another a measure of equality? Not every college in America is Harvard. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reputable state colleges in America that are more than affordable to anybody. Especially if you view college as a future investment. There is FASFA, Perkins Loans, government grants, scholarships, work study programs, you can get this thing called a part time job. You can space out your college career by a few extra years to earn a manageable amount of income to limit your debt. You can join the reserves, or even ROTC and go for free. Everyone has equal opportunity to loans. And if you make a judicious decision about which career path you take, you will have a job when you graduate, and you will have no problem paying back whatever loans you may have.

Everyone has equal opportunity to park their butts in a seat and pay attention in school. Everyone has an equal opportunity to do all their homework and get A's in high school. Everyone has equal opportunity to earn scholarships. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get a loan. I don't really see why taxing Peter so that Paul can go to college to play Van Wilder is necessary or equal.

 

[Patroklos]

I'd say it's vital. A straight-A teenager from a rich family with a private tutor hasn't achieved very much at all compared to a straight-A teenager from a poor family with no parental support.

According to your social engineering wants.

Merit is based on demonsrtated results, two people with the same test scores are demonstrating the same results. If you set benchmark to be X, then benchmark is X.

If you want to use income as a metric for merit, then you might as well not use test scores at all, because in your scenario you are not measuring from test scores anyway.

 

[Arwon]

Judging everyone by a single contextless number isn't meritocratic unless the system and society is very egalitarian. Merit can and should mean judging achievements relative to the circumstances they're coming from. A decent score from a poor kid from a rural comprehensive public high school is more of an achievement than the same score achieved by an affluent city kid who went to an elite school.

Honestly though, in the United States, a far bigger issue for inequalities in tertiary education entrance is the dismally uneven quality of primary and secondary schools across states, counties and school districts. You're never going to get perfect equality of results and tertiary education rates across income brackets and demographics, but there's point at which the system is so brokenly uneven you can no longer even claim there's equality of opportunity in education.