This reminds me of an article about tuition cost going up by just the right amount to make sure 55% of people qualify for financial aid. I don't remember where I read this but I remember the argument making sense. What numbers do we get when we look at what percentage of people qualify for financial aid at Harvard and how has this number changed? I wonder if they keep track of and make this data available?
Some? I think the assumption implicit in this thread of the conversation is that scoring well on the SATs is a way for brilliant poor kids to compete with rich well-connected kids.
When I attended Caltech, I didn't notice any bias towards rich kids. The ones whose families I knew were all economically ordinary. None of the kids had a Porsche or Ferrari or BMW or anything expensive. Hal Finney had an ancient VW bug, and I had my 67 Mustang. Another friend bought a Chevette upon graduation with his own money.
Yes. I understand this is the assumption but why is this the assumption? I can imagine poor kids doing just as well if not better without artificial barriers to entry like the SAT and GRE. For some reason everyone is assuming these tests are "good" and "meritocratic" but I don't see it. Everyone seems to assume there need to be tests and no one is wondering what happens when there are no tests.
I suspect no one is wondering because without tests people have to face some harsh truths about economic and social class structures that most people in the US like to pretend do not exist. If these tests were about meritocracy then they would be enforced without exceptions and rich kids wouldn't be able to buy their way into their favorite schools like they do now after their parents make a generous donation. The existence of the test does not matter if you're rich enough so the argument about meritocracy rings hollow.
Poor kids aren't going to have the resources to compete as equitably on extracurriculars. A kid in a wealthy school might be able to host a fundraiser for charity and raise thousands of dollars easily, while a kid at a poor school would be able to raise only a fraction of that. That poor student is also going to have more trouble showing excellence in art/sports/intellectual hobbies if their parents aren't able to pay or take time off to send them off to competitions. The schools might be adjusting for the difficulty, but they'll be doing it in a very non-transparent way.
> Poor kids aren't going to have the resources to compete as equitably on extracurriculars.
Yes, that's my point. Given fewer learning opportunities poor kids end up at a disadvantage even though the next Einstein is more than likely somewhere in a poor neighborhood. The SAT might be a good way to find this person but it would be better if we required a standardized minimum from everyone and helped them as much as possible to achieve those minimum standards. That way the next Einstein wouldn't be like finding a needle in haystack with very poor objective measures of learning potential (Einstein himself being famously unfit for his own educational system based on standard measures of the time).
