Comment by os2warpman
5 days ago
Merit is not easily definable.
Standardized tests are bullshit, IQ tests are phrenology, class rankings are not comparable across school districts. Someone who was president of every club at school may be less able than a kid who had to flip burgers in the evenings to help make rent.
Merit to a university may mean "someone whose charisma and social connections will bring great repute to the institution" more than "a child prodigy who will burn out at 27 and end up fixing typewriters in his parent's garage because they actually had an undiagnosed mental illness growing up".
Merit may mean "a middling student smart enough to pass who will stick around working as a post-doc temporarily forever because they have no ambition beyond performing slave wage labor in exchange for the cold comfort of the known and familiar".
Any definition of merit is going to be irredeemably faulty. Like recruiting sporting talent based solely on stats without considering if the talent is an asshole who will destroy the atmosphere in the clubhouse and immediately get arrested for DUI after being signed.
I thought we wanted to let the market decide?
The government funding aspect is irrelevant. Nearly every business in the country receives some form of government funding either direct or indirect and they hire based on a wide variety of criteria. I was once hired to a position I would need time to be a productive in because I am a ham radio guy and my boss wanted someone to talk radios with.
Standardized test reliably predict academic success. IQ tests similarly.
Here in Sweden, if you do well enough on the entrance exam, we simply let you in, even to the best universities. This means that people other than hoop-jumpers have a chance.
Academic success isn’t what Harvard cares about. They want leaders, not kids who are great at “school”.
Put it this way they’d much rather have Roberts or Obama as alumni than your typical 1600 SAT quant.
Whats the best metric to find the people they are looking to educate?
If that is their goal, should they even be classified as a university? Formal education that the government regulate has different goals from non-formal and informal education. If the goal is to be a primer for leaders, then they can be that without mixing it with formal education.
If we want the selection process of future leaders to be government regulated under formal education, then we should have a discussion on how such system should look like. The current system is a bit like the old fraternal groups, with the admission system being relocated to the university admission board. There should be better way to select future leaders.
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In reality though, Harvard actually educates perfectly ordinary physicians, engineers, etc., and I assume that the vast majority of their output consists of relatively ordinary people.
What people need isn't leaders, but the capacity for decentralised self-organisation.
Their decision to make education into finding or creating leaders is, I think, a terrible mistake and socially dangerous, and in a way exclusionary. If they are truly successful and are able to notice natural leaders and bring them into their institutions that might well channel the capacity of ordinary people away from decentralised self-organisation and into a pure elite society.
You can try, but I think it'll be hellish.
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Do you think there's a specific (whether public or hidden) criterion being used to deny Asian students based on "leadership abilities"? Or do you think they're simply being held to higher standards or subject to an informal quota?
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> Standardized test reliably predict academic success. IQ tests similarly.
So do home addresses. And skin colour. And parent's money. There are issues with all of those for different reasons. People saying IQ is problematic don't mean there's no correlation at all. Just that they can be culture / approach / etc. specific and we shouldn't treat them as an objective measure.
Are you saying these aren’t objective measures or that they’re “problematic”? The distinction is important.
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If you think that Ivy League cares about academic success, you're out of touch of how US universities work.
Y'all have a lot of inner city neighborhoods that have been systematically destroyed over decades due to redlining, Jim Crow laws, lynching their inhabitants or just outright burning them to the ground, or is “but we do it in Europe” maybe frequently as stupid a comment as “but we do it in America” and is best kept to one’s self, if one doesn’t actually understand how it might be applicable?
Also, bullshit on IQ tests. They do reliably predict a number of socioeconomic factors, so I suppose they’re a great way to keep the poors out. How very “enlightened” of you.
If someone has a low IQ and can’t do well on a standardized test, how in the world will they succeed at Harvard?
Even if you believe that such tests simply reflect privilege and reveal absolutely nothing regarding innate talent, what difference does it make? It can be a point-of-time snapshot but it still doesn’t mean letting in low-IQ poorly-equipped students to Harvard will help them or anyone else.
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I fail to see how the lack of a perfect quantifiable metric of merit logically flows down to "stop admitting Asians because we have too many"? Whatever the university's method of determining merit is, it should be applied to everyone equally, and racially discriminating because one group historically performs well is indefensible imo
It’s also not what they’re doing. Seems like you’re arguing against a strawman.
Both standardized tests and IQ highly correlate with success in higher education and career over a lifetime. Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies, and the market is indeed responding, slowly but surely. You are making things up and conjuring nonsensical hypotheticals to deny the evidence that's right in front of our eyes.
> Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies
Do you have data to back this up?
Admissions data does not back it up. And based on my college recruiting data, recruiting doesn’t back it up either.
> Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies
[Citation needed]
Yeah, it's like how when they wanted to put in a Jewish quota at the university it was struck down and then they found that the same percentage of Jewish applicants were well-rounded coincidentally so they just stuck to determining if they were well-rounded. Today's folk may call it anti-semitism but really it was just that Jews Were Square.
Sounds fine, test for those things and admit the best. Or do a random lottery.
Just dont pick and choose students to disqualify based on race.
> I thought we wanted to let the market decide?
That sounds like an excellent reason to remove government funds.
"Standardized tests are bullshit, IQ tests are phrenology"
Asians don't believe this because our society is much more homogeneous than western societies. Correlation is often causation.
“Merit definitions can be faulty, so completely abandon any attempt to measure merit and admit people based on vibes.”
This is why Harvard students now need remedial algebra classes.