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College admissions should depend on academics alone (city-journal.org)
7 points by Bostonian on June 3, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments


Not a good article at all. It's very brief, and the content doesn't appear to match the "academics alone" blurb.

The article is mainly about elite colleges reinstating or not reinstating requiring an SAT score for admissions. I'll admit to taking both the ACT and the SAT in 1978 or 1979 and getting rejected by MIT. But I doubt there's a connection between a single, 4-hour test and "academics".


The SAT has been shown, in conjunction with high school grades, to predict college grades, as the article mentions. That's the connection with academics.


With how far away from academics most college admissions have strayed, I wonder whether we will see a new round of institutions founded to actually do academics.


> With how far away from academics most college admissions have strayed

How far is that?


Quite far, as the folks who replied below have demonstrated. College admissions today have almost nothing to do with academics, and once enrolled, the programs themselves are as much about grievance and political nonsense as they are about learning.

We started with this idea that everyone should go to college to learn useful knowledge and skills, but ended up with just a huge population going to these expensive institutions just to party and protest.

Now that college doesn't teach things of any value, we are in need of new institutions that do what college was meant to do.


> Quite far, as the folks who replied below have demonstrated.

With a single infographic about Harvard? No.

Nothing in your comment rises above the level of a hyperbolic rant about - given your lack of citations and mind-bogglingly loose definition of "demonstrate" - something you don't seem to actually believe.


Here's another chart which I think is evidence in the direction of other major universities [1] engaging in a similar extent of affirmative action: https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imageca...

The comparison with Caltech (besides the population of college-aged Asisan-Amercians) is because in California, due to Proposition 209 [2], public universities are legally prohibited from using direct racial criteria in admissions.

[1]: Brown, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...



Looking at the heading of the graphic, it's just Harvard. I want to know "how far away from academics most college admissions have strayed".

What even is that chart supposed to demonstrate?


The data is due to a lawsuit against Harvard, and I'm not aware of comparable data for other universities.

But do you think Harvard is unique in that regard? Probably not.

> What even is that chart supposed to demonstrate?

The extent of affirmative action?


> it's just Harvard

Since other colleges mouth the same platitudes about the benefits of diversity and the systemic racism they must atone for, Occam's razor demands we assume their admissions are similar unless proven otherwise.


That's not how evidence works.


You'd like your assertion to be assumed true, and mine to be assumed false until proven beyond reasonable doubt?


That's not how fruitful discussions work.


If we disagree on what fundamental concepts such as "evidence" and "assertion" mean, and disagree on how burden of proof works, then we wouldn't be having a discussion so much as writing words at each other.

Have a good day / night.




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