Of course. There are great universities outside the U.S. But the U.S. is still, overall, the most desirable academic destination in the world.
If our namby-pamby touchy-feely admissions process was counterproductive to excellence, as is being posited here, you would think there would be some evidence of that.
The crazy racial people bore me, but I would like to provide some actual information about university admissions process.
Terr, if Harvard’s approach to picking students is so god-awful, why do you think Harvard has such a high reputation?
Seems to me if it’s been going about things the wrong way for so long, it’s record would be dismal and no one would care about being rejected from its lofty halls.
If Cambridge’s approach is superior, then it won’t take long for all the smart students to ditch Harvard and flock there.
I won’t be holding my breath.
I agree with you, but just a small correction: to the best of my knowledge, everyone who is accepted at Cambridge must have a personal interview, along the same lines as Harvard. They also might be required to submit one or more essays, depending on the college.
The “stupid crap” here is the extraordinarily narrow view of education in general and science in particular that considers science to operate in a vacuum independent of society and the humanity it serves.
Not quite as ridiculous as the rest of your rant.
So a school that has so many applicants in the highest tiers of education that it can pick and choose who it will admit is giving up candidates who will be world class engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists etc. by seeking to get a better cross-section of society by using criteria in addition to test scores and grades. Your complaint pretends that they are letting in C- students while looking at additional criteria. In reality, all the students who get accepted are already at the top of their classes, but there are so many that Harvard is able to set some additional selection criteria.
(And, of course, that is without even getting into the whole examination of just how many 4.0 students actually turn out to be exceptional engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists etc. I presume that they will be qualified. However, I have known rather few 4.0 students who went on to be truly exceptional in their fields. Certainly, some are, but a rather large number of those 4.0 students get passed by in real life in terms of quality of output from “lesser” students.)
Your complaint is bad joke.
Let me turn the question around. Harvard’s approach is racial discrimination (among other methods). When that is brought up, the response is (as it has been in this thread) that we have to discriminate, because it’s the “holistic” approach that creates “diversity”, without which academic excellence is impossible.
Well then, how come Cambridge that doesn’t do “holistic approach” and actually judges applicants on academic credentials somehow manages to be one of the top universities in the world?
Britain does not have the same history as the U.S., nor the same populations. (It may be working toward it, but it is not there, yet.)
That has nothing to do with the question. That is - if in the US the application process was done using academic criteria only, would that damage the academic institution’s excellence? Cambridge’s example says no. And it would get rid of the evil of racial discrimination. Win-win.
I don’t know. My guess is that the British aren’t as likely to believe their society is a meritocracy, so they are a lot more tolerant of systems that cater to notions of aristocracy and nobility. Americans, on the other hand, like to imagine there’s a Horatio Alger, Abraham Lincoln, or Oprah Winfrey around every corner. The only way to find them is to make people talk about their lives.
An interesting story gives someone a chance to broadcast how much of a rugged individualist he or she is. Americans love them some rugged individualism. If a fat Mexican can get into Harvard by making people laugh, then so can anyone. The sky’s the limit for everyone in America.
But I’m not a sociologist, so I could be completely off-base.
That doesn’t answer what I asked. See #207.
Because the reputation comes from something that has nothing to do with undergraduates, that being faculty research:
http://hms.harvard.edu/news/harvard-medicine/timeline-discovery-harvard-medical-school
Look at the list of achievements in my last link. And then consider than about half those advances occurred when not only was there a lot of discrimination against Jews (and, I think, blacks) in admissions, but there was even greater discrimination when it came to medical school faculty appointments (not sure about liberal arts).* Of course, I think this discrimination was terrible. Without it, science, and medical care, would be more advanced than it is today. However, there are a lot of factors in what makes for a great university. They can very bad in some ways and outstanding in others.
Nah. It would just shift the racial discrimination to a state more acceptable to old white guys.
(And, of course, we have only your claim that Cambridge relies exclusively on academic criteria, a point that has already been successfully challenged. The non-academic criteria are simply different in Britain, so you can pretend they do not exist.)
The actual admissions process for any competitive institution of secondary education is pretty straightforward:
Get the best academic applicants you can, using standardized scores as the primary criterion; grades (against rigor of topics and institution in which those grades were gained) as a secondary criterion.
Winnow the pool using secondary criteria such as breadth of life experience; recommendations; well-roundedness; demonstration of leadership or community involvement…all the soft items which try to evaluate areas not purely academic.
Balance for race-based diversity using self-identified (or obvious) race and ethnicity assignments.
Hmm. I don’t think the student who applies to Harvard does so ONLY because of faculty research. They apply because they want to surround themselves with incredibly smart, talented people…the kind of students who can take advantage of top-notch faculty research.
If Harvard’s approach failed at crafting smart, talented classes, then it wouldn’t take very long for in-coming students to notice it and react accordingly. It also wouldn’t take long for professors to realize their classes contain too many students who are riding on the fat Mexican overcoming stories and not on innate talent.
Yet I haven’t heard complaints from either side about Harvard’s inferiority. By all accounts, Harvard is still held in very high regard.
So I’m wondering what’s the rational basis for besmirching their admissions approach. You may not like such touchy-feely stuff, but that doesn’t mean it does not work.
That’s what their web site says - that I linked to.
Because it is racial discrimination. That’s not rational enough for you?
In case anyone is unfamiliar with this argument, it’s no more than a hypothesis as a possible explanation for a few paltry decades of disparate test scores (and feeble efforts at correcting these disparities), with no evidence about the actual genes for these “skillsets” or how they may differ between various populations. And the stuff about “average gene pools” being separated by tens of thousands of years (when most African Americans have significant amounts of European/white ancestry and many European/white Americans have some African ancestry) is completely bunk.
‘Black people are inherently inferior in intellectual ability, on average, due to inferior genes for intelligence’ is kind of Chief Pedant’s big thing… and for some unfathomable reason, he believes that if only this 19th century view on the abilities of black people were accepted (again!) by most of America, things would be better for black people (because, after all, things were so great the last time most of America believe black people were intellectually inferior!).
Hopefully we can avert any hijack, and I recommend any further discussion on Chief Pedant’s assertions about the inherent average genetic inferiority of black people’s intelligence be in a new thread.
Since a holistic approach doesn’t not equate to racial discrimination, then no, that’s not a rational argument against using it.
This is a hilarious line of argument that I’d love to see applied to every other organization. Presumably the women advocating for sufferage had no rational basis to besmirch the unequal political process which held that their opinions were not equal to those of a man’s, because of how successful early-1900s America was relative to the rest of the world.
Being racist does not mean that you necessarily have a bad lineup of candidates. It means that you’re excluding good candidates for stupid reasons, to the detriment of both you and them.
The literacy tests for voting didn’t equal racial discrimination, either; they were just the mechanism by which said discrimination was carried out. You could tell this by looking at the degree to which various cohorts passed them (or were never given them in the first place).
So, we’re cool with things that have blatantly and obviously disproportionate racial impact as long as they don’t actually say they’re screening for race? Is this the standard you’re comfortable applying to, oh, the criminal justice system?
Affirmative Action (and similar policies) act on the assumption that, without it, various biases and forces inherent in society make it harder for various minorities to achieve – that our society really isn’t yet fully equal. I understand many people think that this isn’t the case, and that minorities and women who work hard are just as likely to succeed as white men. But for those of us who believe this is still true – that, in America, there still exist various obstacles that make it harder for hard-working minorities and women (and other groups) to succeed – the situation without Affirmative Action and similar policies results in “excluding good candidates for stupid reasons, to the detriment of both you and them”.