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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31876 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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There are about 3.5 million high school graduates each year. The literal 1% is 35000 students. Without international students, Harvard admits about 1750 Americans each year, or 5% of the 1%. All these numbers are inexact, but the scale is obvious: Harvard's admission process isn't really about identifying the 1% among its huge pile of applicants, which is not actually that huge, only about 60000, and most of the 35000 are in it. If Harvard wanted to, it could simply pick the applicants at random, admit 3500 Americans instead of 1750, fail half of them after the first semester and achieve basically the same result: only the one-percenters would remain.

The dirty secret is that practically none of these 3500 students would fail their exams. The top 1% of high school alumni is Harvard-grade. But so is the next 1%, and the one after it and so on, I'd say the top 5% of high school graduates countrywide, or 175000 people could easily graduate from Harvard. What Harvard does instead is define what the actual elite should look like, and matches its applicants against this profile: sufficiently similar to the previous generations to not threaten the existing order of things, fashionably diverse but not exceedingly so, likely to support Harvard monetarily and to preserve its privileged position later. It doesn't admit many Asians because it doesn't like them. The number of generous, gregarious and charismatic individuals with a strong internal drive can truly be lower among non-legacy Asian applicants than among other races, but that doesn't make the selection criteria less racist.

The top 1% of high school graduates nationally, sure, are basically all smart enough for Harvard.

But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions. Lots of individual high schools have valedictorians who are not college material.

But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions.

This statement sounds weird to me? "There is no way to identify them, unless you use the extremely obvious and easy method to identify them."

The USA culturally puts more emphasis on grades as opposed to strictly standardized test scores(yes, these are different things in the US). Changing that would require getting rid of everyone overseeing college admissions and then putting new people in.

If you meet these kids, it is immediately obvious, in the first minute or so, whether the child has it or not. The difference between the top kids (say, the top 20% of the class at a top university) and the rest is palpable. The top 5% are different yet again, and the smartest ten kids in the grade are obvious to all the faculty who mee them, as well as all their peers.

The SAT does not work, especially know that all the heavily g loaded parts have been removed.

Perhaps not Harvard material, but are you really feeling that there are 'lots' ( 5? 50? a double-digit percentage?) of highschools where the year's most academically successful graduate is not among the approximately 50% of Americans able to eventually navigate some form of post-secondary education? I know some districts are pretty rough but 'their top 1% is worse than our median' is a heck of a claim.

I’m quite confident that the typical public high school in Baltimore Maryland, Jackson Mississippi, Washington DC, and certain parts of Central Valley fits the bill. I would be shocked if chicago and LA and New York didn’t have at least a few apiece.

I in general expect low performing high schools to be much, much worse than it says on the tin because of fraud on the part of teachers and administrators.

There are 60 schools in Chicago where no student is proficient in math or reading.

These are not underfunded schools. The Douglass Academy High School gets $56k a student and has none that are proficient in reading.

And to note- the usual response to a high failure rate in schools is to lower standards, and admins and teachers are strongly incentivized to make rounding errors in a students favor. These are not unrealistically high standards; these are extremely doable standards even for a student body with an average IQ in the 80’s.

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