You know, I got my back up immediately on reading this, but a moment’s reflection says you probably are correct. I don’t know that a ‘true’ meritocracy would actually be possible in a human society, to be honest, because it would require complete dispassion and a crackdown on any form of corruption.
Not happening if humans are involved!
And when were you admitted to the bar?
I’m guessing having family and community role models, expectations, and glorification of intellectual pursuits goes a long way. I mean, I always grew up with the vast majority of role models in my life being people who either worked in intellectual fields or who worked in intellectual fields, and in my parents’ generation, they were all college educated.
So I think that signaling IS there, at least in some communities.
I do think that the promotion of that sort of thinking should be done, with the caveat that it’s not a get-rich quick scheme, but rather a “graduate college and make a maximum of 100k in your highest paid year” type of scheme, and one that allows for a non-poverty lifestyle that’s secure and that’ll propagate itself in future generations ensuring their success.
I think the signaling is mostly within families. Now, my high school was very big, and we were tracked, so almost all my classes were with peers who expected to go to good colleges and who cared about academics. We probably got more support from the teachers and the admin than the basketball players. We didn’t even have a football team. I liked my high school experience.
I did get a shout out by having my picture in the local daily for having the second highest Regents scholarship score in Queens. And a mention in a list in the Times. And there were academic awards at graduation. Just not much during the course of our studies.
I agree about not making it about money.
Both my daughters pushed their boyfriends academically. Not every man is so lucky.
Without having read the entire thread, one of the lines in Michelle Obama’s book resonated a lot with me \
i.e - (paraphrasing)
We should be measuring people by how far they have come not by how high they have reached
While working in Singapore I was teaching “enrichment lessons” on a pay of $100 per hour to high-schoolers which was essentially the “purchasing” of grades. I was an outside consultant brought in after school hours to teach how to answer literature questions.
When you see the “wealthy” doing things like this, “meritocracy” takes on a pall of disillusionment.
In my mind, there is no such thing as meritocracy without true equality of opportunity.
And equality of opportunity is like unicorn blood.
I compare the “opportunity” my children have now to the opportunity I had and I shudder.
My highschooler (turning 16 this year) had a choice of about 25 electives for next year, she could choose between three different “themes” or levels of english and I compare it to my equivalent year where I had exactly 1 elective to choose - and that was only because I was willing to do it via correspondence. If the two of us were to have identical levels of innate intelligence and work ethic - I simply wouldn’t be able to compete in any meritocratic race.
And that is before we even start down the road of extra curricular activities I support, fund and encourage that I simply would have had no access to (living in a small rural community) even if my parents had the same attitude and willingness to support as I now have.
Here is a table based on your source:
2019 Admissions |
||||||||
Native American |
Asian |
Black |
Latino |
White |
Multi-racial |
Unknown |
Total |
|
TESTER SUMMARY |
||||||||
Total Testers |
269 | 8,471 | 5,488 | 6,622 | 5,008 | 362 | 1,321 | 27,521 |
Distribution of Testers, by Ethnicity |
1.0% | 30.7% | 19.9% | 24.1% | 18.2% | 1.3% | 4.8% | 100% |
OFFER SUMMARY |
||||||||
Stuyvesant High School |
9 | 587 | 7 | 33 | 194 | 20 | 45 | 895 |
Distribution of Offers, by Ethnicity |
1.0% | 65.6% | 0.7% | 3.7% | 21.7% | 2.2% | 5.0% | 100% |
Percent of Testers who Received an Offer, by Ethnicity |
3.3% | 6.9% | 0.1% | 0.5% | 3.9% | 5.5% | 3.4% | 3.3% |
For a little more insight as to what this means, we'll look at the admissions process for Stuyvesant. According to the 2020 student handbook, after the SHSAT (Stuyvesant High School Admissions Test) has been scored:
To determine offers to a Specialized High School:
- All students take the SHSAT and list their school choices on the SHSAT answer sheet in their true preference order. Students only list the eight Specialized High Schools where admissions is based on the SHSAT. [...]
- All scores of the students who took the test are ordered from highest score to lowest score.
- The student with the highest composite score is placed in their first choice (highest listed school).
- Starting from the highest score on down, each student, in turn, is placed in that student’s highest listed school in which seats are still available. Therefore, if all the seats in a student’s first-choice school have been offered to students who scored higher, the student is placed in their second-choice school if seats are available. If all the seats in the student’s second-choice school have been offered to students who scored higher, the student is offered a seat in their third-choice school if there are still seats available, and so on. This process continues until there are no seats available in any of these eight Specialized High Schools.
The process is surprisingly straightforward, since the student's test performance and school preference are the only criteria. I'm assuming that if there are two or more students with the same scores and with Stuyvesant as the top preference, they are either all offered admission or none of them are offered admission, depending on whether there are enough seats left.
Perhaps the only relevant thing to take away is that we see an actual disparity the percent of testers within the same race who receive offers. The disparity is most noticable between Asians and Blacks. 6.9% of Asian applicants were offered admission, while only 0.1% of Black applicants were offered admission.
Now let's look at what I wrote, and what you wrote.
I claimed:
"If the applicants accurately reflected the community demographics, then a somewhat random hiring process (after culling all the subpar candidates) would somewhat reflect community demographics."
You responded:
"You sure about that? [...] The population of NYC is about 9% asian, 43% white and 44% black/hispanic. [...]"
So far as I can tell, nothing pertaining to Stuyvesant High School has contradicted my claim.
The racial breakdown of Stuyvesant High School applicants does not accurately reflect the racial demographics of New York City, according to your own numbers. Compare the above quoted demographics of New York City with the Distribution of Testers, by Ethnicity from the table. 44% of applicants are Black/Hispanic, which matches the 44% of the city population belonging to those groups if your numbers are to be trusted. Apparently 43% of New York City is White, yet only 18.2% of applicants were White. I suspect some - but not all - of that disparity might be due to Hispanic Whites counting towards your 43% statistic. Most glaringly, only 9% of the city is Asian, yet 30.7% of applicants are Asian.
The racial breakdown of the top-tier of Stuyvesant High School applicants does not accurately reflect the racial demographics of New York City. I am going to assume that all of the applicants picked Stuyvesant as their preferred school. That way, as I see it, the 895 students who were actually offered admission constitute the top-tier of applicants. Now we can compare your statistics for the racial demographics of New York City with the Distribution of Offers, by Ethnicity from the table. I don't need to go over everything, you can see for yourself that 65.6% of offers were extended to Asians. 65.6% does not match the 9% of the city population which identify as Asian.
Now, my argument rests on the premise that the top-tier applicants for a position accurately reflect community demographics. These previous two paragraphs have proven, to my satisfaction at least, that the top-tier of applicants to Stuyvesant High School do not accurately reflect the racial demographics of New York City. Therefore, I see nothing about Stuyvesant or its admissions process that can possibly counter my argument.
For the sake of completion, let's put that to the side. The second half of my argument concerns a somewhat random hiring process. I had been talking about blind auditions for orchestra seats, and assuming that when all applicants are equally skilled, the blind audition can no longer tell you who is better. So I had in mind a secondary process, after the blind auditions, which randomly chooses which applicant gets the job offer. In practice I don't think it would actually be random, but for the thought experiment I thought random makes a good approximation.
The Stuyvesant High School admissions process is not random in any way, shape, or form. Each applicant comes with a numeric score, and I have no reason to believe most of the 895 students were equally scored. The Stuyvesant admissions process is a lot like the blind audition, very focused on "merit". This just goes to show that Stuyvesant is completely unrelated to the argument I made.
I can't read your mind, so I don't know what point you are trying to make or why you might think I am mistaken. As I said before, the argument you seem to take issue with is based on deduction. I believe it follows from basic principles of probability theory, at least when there are large numbers of applications and hires.
~Max
That’s the way I meant it.
(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 876000 hours unless flagged)
And when you have an entire community that shares these values based on a common millenia long history of these values, some people would call that culture.
I know plenty of asian families where there is not a history of college education but there is still this reverence for education that drives the parents to make sacrifices and push their kids. This is IMHO a significant effect because in many other communities uneducated parents frequently may not realize the full value of education but if those uneducated parents come from a culture that reveres education, then it is probably more likely that uneducated parents will make sacrifices for their children’s education when the opportunity presents itself.
I think the trick is to figure out how to put that signalling in place for all communities.
It’s definitely generational work. You live for your children in ways that will improve the lives of your grandchildren. Not everyone in these communities live up to these notions but it’s not a foreign concept to them.
That’s the way I meant it. On rereading it, I can see why you would see it as confrontational. That was not the intent.
In the 1990s.
Mostly? Maybe. But there is also a cultural context for this signalling. If your family is the only one doing this, it is harder to pull off. If your entire neighborhood is doing this, it’s different.
The students that will be pushed out by mayor deblasio’s policies above are poorer than the average students at their school. Asians in nyc have the highest poverty rate in nyc.
And yet poor asian students consistently beat out wealthier white students for these spots. In fact the top school has gone from 75% white and 5% asian to 75% asian and 20% white. Most of the spots taken by asians have been at the expense of wealthier white kids. That is why we call this meritocracy even though we might think “true meritocracy” is impossible to achieve.
I’m not sure I understand your point here.
The ultimate pool of successful candidates does not reflect the demographics at large or the demographics of self selected test takers. But you think if EVERYONE took the test, the pool of successful candidates would reflect the demographics at large? Really?
ETA:
I think I misread your initial post. I did not realize you were actually arguing for getting rid of meritocracy in favor of proportional representation. It sounds like you think we should just take the pool of applicants to medical school and just randomly assign who gets in? Same with lawyers, bankers, teachers, etc? That seems like a really bad idea. Or am I missing something about your proposal?
Wow, were you ever right. I don’t know @thickpancreas but I want to be his friend. His views and my own align on almost every point. All the arguments there were the same arguments tossed at me, all with the same ‘know it all’ derision that all too often rears it’s head here. I won’t call it a liberal thing but some posters here sure find it easy to do in this liberal leaning board.
People would much rather vilify the opposing view instead of understand it. They sometimes have their minds made up what the thought process is and fight against that cartoon version of reality.
Yeah, I thought he added an important voice and insightful perspective.
I don’t know how many times I have responded to you with those same thoughts. The black communities DO have a few glaring things that are internal that they and only they can fix. I have stated many times that with the help of everyone that the differences could get addressed. I have argued with iiandyiii and you specifically about this but all the feedback I’ve gotten are excuses for the differences and cries of racism.
Racism has dissipated to the point that opportunities abound for all minorities, it is now up to them to grab onto them and pull. They are not alone but no one can make them grab that rope.
Exactly. I think there’s too much emphasis on being “rich”, and not enough on being middle class/upper middle class across American society.
I mean, the latter is generally something that usually takes a large dose of luck, whether that’s in the form of audacious business moves that pay off, lucky personal networking, etc… But the latter (middle-class/upper middle class) is something that can be ground out through hard work and education. While there’s luck involved, it’s much more in the form of getting a 75k job or a 55k job, and not as akin to a lottery win like being “rich” requires.
I guess what I’m saying is that I know some “rich” people, and while they’re definitely extremely hard workers who put in a lot of personal sacrifice and long hours, there’s definitely a huge component of luck there- they got the right contracts to build certain buildings, or they were born into a wealthy family and inherited the family business.
Meanwhile, I know a LOT of middle class/upper middle class people who came from backgrounds that were either working class or lower middle class. Their parents were willing to put their kids’ education ahead of other priorities and those kids took advantage and became architects, teachers, IT people, etc… Now none of them are exactly driving Bentleys, but they’re not food insecure, they’re able to take occasional vacations, they’re homeowners for the most part, and they’ve got enough scratch to weather the majority of the inevitable calamities that strike families.
That’s a lot better than being poor, but it’s not spectacular, and it’s not something you can really show off in your community; it feels too much like a judgment on their lifestyles, I suspect. (echoes of what this thickpancreas person said) So I’d be willing to bet it’s a hard sell- “do this educational stuff that’s going to cost you 4-5 years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you’ll make 75k 10 years after the end of it.” , unless that’s what’s already expected of you in your own community. But it’s absolutely the way out of poverty.
I think you misread my post, and continue to misunderstand me.
I think meritocracy is useless when there is both a merit ceiling (skill ceiling in the context of an orchestra seat) and more top-tier applicants than positions to fill. This is perhaps the part of my position most relevant to the thread overall. Meritocracy will help you pick out the top-tier applicants from the rest of the pool, but it cannot help you choose which of those to hire if they all have equla merit. I defy you to make a counterargument. This is not my original argument, it’s Anthony Tommasini’s argument (of the New York Times) which I happen to find convincing. I take the limits of meritocracy as a premise and built arguments on top of it.
I envisioned how an orchestra might hire their musicians. First you have the blind audition, which is a merit-based process. But apparently that doesn’t eliminate enough candidates because there are more perfectly skilled musicians than chairs in the orchestra. So there has to be some way of whittling down the pool of perfect candidates. Maybe they look at references? Maybe they just give out offers to whoever is older, or younger, or whoever submitted the application first, or whoever’s last names come first on an alphabetically sorted spreadsheet? I think it’s most likely that they just keep doing blind auditions and the jury - unable to distinguish who is better - just picks at random in the final rounds. So we have a two-step hiring process: first the merit-based elimination rounds, then effectively random elimination until the pool is small enough to hire everyone.
Now I can make my main argument. I think, with orchestra seats, temporary and careful racial or gender quotas can be justified in place of this random elimination round (or between the merit-based eliminations and the random eliminations). In my opinion, the social good of having an orchestra reflect its community demographics (the good consequences of racial/gender quotas) outweighs the top-tier applicant’s individual right to a fair but random chance (the bad consequences of racial/gender quotas). When the good consequences of a proposal outweigh the bad consequences, in the absence of a better solution, that proposal is justified.
“Temporary and careful racial or gender quotas” is not a blank check. It’s a temporary measure because the social good of quotas is having an orchestra reflect the racial and gender makeup of its community; this is only a social good because it encourages more diverse enrollment in music education and so fights existing institutional racism. All other things equal, once the music students and graduates are proportional to the community demographics, the social good of quotas in the orchestra evaporates. Because at that point, a random elimination round at the end of the hiring process will produce an accurate sample of the community (this is what you appeared to object to).
But quotas have to be careful, too. In real life, all other things are not equal. We have to be constantly vigilant of outright racism in the music education pipeline, otherwise using quotas to inspire diversity is useless. We have to factor into the quotas cultural differences among groups, because if a particular culture discourages classical music education or careers in the orchestra, despite the inspiration of having proportional representation in that orchestra, then proportional representation in the orchestra cannot inspire proportional representation among violinist applicants, for example. That partially undermines the social good of having quotas to begin with, and it contradicts the requirement that quotas be temporary in nature.
~Max
I think I’m still confused.
Right now stuyvesant high school accepts the 800 best test scores on the SHSAT every year (for various reasons, some students with great test scores choose to go to a different school but this is a good generalization).
~27,500 students take the test and ~4800 get into one of the 8 specialized high schools in nyc. The entire pool of students accepted to any of the specialized high schools does not come close to tracking either the pool of test takers or the general population.
How far down do you think the “top tier” is? Sure you might be able to dig down far enough to fill stuyvesant with a proportional quota of black/hispanic kids but then you have almost noone left for the other specialized high schools.
So can you give me concrete examples using the numbers available from that chart and the general population numbers of nyc? how do you fill those 8 specialized high schools according to your criteria? I mean to we even have enough black/hispanic concert violinists to create a representative orchestra?
My argument was made regarding orchestras, not schools. Schools can and do claim that diversity provides a benefit to education itself. Orchestras, to my knowledge, do not claim that diversity provides a benefit to the performance of orchestral music, at least not when we rule out improvisation. In the field of education, the “job” so to speak is to learn. So if student diversity is beneficial to the learning process, that significantly alters the calculus used to justify quotas or Affirmative Action.
But putting that aside, Stuyvesant assigns merit as the numeric score of their test results, so unless more than 895 students are tied for the top score, it’s not comparable.
ETA: See this quote from my first post in this topic:
~Max
Of course there is. But in the context of the discussion, it is important to cover the people who don’t get cultural signals. Peer group signals are very important also, as are signals from the schools.
I doubt many parents or cultures actively discourage academic achievement, they just don’t encourage it. Thus encouragement from schools can be very important.
Oh. OK.
BTW, one of the specialized high schools in nyc that is not on the list is laguardia school for music and art. Their graduates include folks like jennifer aniston, nikki minaj, akwafina. This school still has about twice as many white kids as black and hispanic kids in a school system where there are about 4 times as many black/hispanic kids as white kids. But noone is seems to be getting bent out of shape about it.
Yes, I agree that schools can be an equalizing force but there is only so much they can do to equalize the effects of living in different communities and households. I don’t know how you equalize for community and household short of raising kids in a creche