Well, that only shows that you completely forgot what leftists like me (and most dopers BTW) think about the immature Maduro. We had a conversation about Maduro and Venezuela before, so what you typed here is not a good way to inspire confidence on anyone that you are capable of learning.
You have nailed it.
Why is this so hard? No matter how much I try to explain to you, you never seem to understand what I’m saying. It’s a very frustrating experience for me, and I assume for you too.
I thought it was plain that if I say “you really believe pigs might fly?” That means I believe they never will. Apparently not.
This should not be so fucking complicated. In the holistic review, either they never use the information on family income to favour students with rich parents, or they always do, or they sometimes do. Those are the only possibilities.
I think they never use it to favour students with rich parents, because I believe it would be wrong to do so, and contrary to their expressed principles. I think they sometimes use that information to favour students with poor parents.
My questions to you:
Do you think they always, sometimes, or never use the information on family income to favour students with rich parents? (Saying you don’t know is also an acceptable answer.)
Do you agree with me that it would be wrong to favour students for having a high family income, in the admissions process?
If you still can’t give me a straight answer, I will give up, because I cannot imagine how I could make it any plainer.
I’m considering giving up debating with you altogether, because while I’m sure I bear at least some of the responsibility for our difficulty communicating, you are not only blaming it all on me, but falsely accusing me of changing what I’m arguing. And I haven’t even got anything useful out of it! I wanted to know if there was a flaw in my reasoning, and you have spent the whole time
ambiguously disagreeing with one of my premises. Even if we did get to the actual point, how could I possibly trust that you weren’t answering some totally different question?
I want to test out ideas to see if there might be flaws in them that I haven’t thought of, but increasingly it seems impossible. It’s a real shame.
Oh fuck off, you miserable hanger-on. At least @Kimstu debates and makes useful posts on other topics. All you do is say ‘me too’.
But I really can’t argue with you about what you “think” admissions departments do based just on your ideas of their duties and their principles. I’ve told you in my most recent post what I specifically know about the selection process, which is very little. (There is a more detailed UC website on application review, but it doesn’t explain the process in detail, just lists “some factors” that they “may consider”, which apparently doesn’t include standardized test scores.) I don’t see the point of arguing unsupported hypotheticals about a process that neither of us fully understands.
Maybe that would be best, as I get the strong impression that what you call “giving you a straight answer” basically amounts to “undertaking to set up strawmen for you to knock down”.
Just as you like, of course. I try not to force my responses on anyone who really doesn’t want to talk to me.
In general, I don’t think ideas test very well in an informational vaccuum. If a knowledgeable college admissions officer wants to come by and explain the specific workings of the application review process they use, I’ll gladly take the opportunity to learn about it. At present, though, most of my understanding of the process consists of impressions more or less divorced from evidence and context, and my opining that I thought it would be “right” or “wrong” to do this or that thing would be essentially making up imaginary situations.
This might bother me more if there weren’t so infinitely many other subjects to potentially have better information, ideas and opinions about.
Oh, God you are such a tiresome dumbass.
Yeah, I doubt a college admissions officer would say ……”Little Suzie’s daddy is a millionaire, let’s accept her because we need more snotty fucks in our student body”……although they might be thinking about how a couple mil added to their endowment courtesy of Suzie’s grateful daddy would help students less fortunate than Suzie, or help build a new polo stadium.
So, it’s going to be more like “Lookee here, little Suzie has been playing polo since her daddy bought her a pony at age 4 - wouldn’t one of the youngest world class polo players be a wonderful addition to our diverse student body?”
They aren’t straight up admitting her because of her family’s high income, but because of the second order effects of that income. There was an entire huge scandal about such things not too long ago.
Colleges and universities need money, and rich students whose parents will fund endowments in exchange admitting their marginally qualified students are a big source of cash.
Oh, the world’s more complicated than that.
If the school’s getting lots and lots of qualified applicants; and if applicants who’ve managed to pull off being qualified from a poor start are given extra credit for that, as they should be; but if one’s family having money is always considered either negative or neutral – then that school’s never going to accept any rich kids, ever.
Which for one thing would be genuinely unfair to the rich kids, who would then not only have to win over other kids running in their own lane, but would have no chance at all.
What the schools would presumably be doing by acknowledging that income and family position play a role (and I agree with @Kimstu that we, me included, have insufficient information about what they’re actually doing) is recognizing that those running in a different lane, which has multiple barriers built into it at the start, have no chance if the only thing noted is the time taken to run the race and no account is made of the time needed to jump or climb the barriers.
In other words, since they’re in a position to take only from the far end of the bell curve, if they prioritize the students who do best at the tests and desired extracurrula while ignoring family income, they’re going to take few if any poor kids. But if they prioritize the students who’ve done best at overcoming adversity, they’re going to take few if any rich kids.
So what they might – note that “might”! – be doing is taking the front runners in each of a batch of different lanes; partly in the interest of fairness because that way each student at least has a chance in their lane instead of their lane’s being cut out at the start, partly in the IMO legitimate interest of finding it useful to their students’ education, and to the country as a whole, to teach their students to work and live with others from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Which is nowhere near as simple as their either choosing to favor the poor kids, or choosing to favor the rich kids, or attempting to ignore the whole issue altogether.
There are 6,000 colleges in the US, of which almost 4,000 offer degree programs.
I would think it is safe to say that some of the 6k do take into account ‘potential revenue from the parents’ as a criterion for enrollment. Snagging Bill Gates’ kid would probably be a windfall for a school, to be honest.
Some colleges and universities look at the prospective student’s financial situation when evaluating an application, and others don’t.
It’s a thing. There are words for it. College that don’t consider the financial situation of the student are called “need-blind”. Colleges that do are called “need-aware”.
Please note that the prospective students almost always submit their family’s financial information to the university, but in “need-blind” schools the admissions department doesn’t see it. After admission decisions are made, the information is used to determine what level of financial aid the student requires.
Large prestigious universities with large endowments are usually need- blind, and will offer all qualifying low income students a full free ride. Other need-blind schools offer less generous aid packages that may include loans and work-study employment.
Need-aware schools consider the student’s ability to pay when making admissions decisions. This is frequently because the school has limited financial aid resources and a needs a certain number of full-price students.
No matter how much a school wants a diverse student body, no matter how many low income students they accept, the low income students aren’t attending the college unless they can pay for it - and giving a bright but disadvantaged student the opportunity to attend your school if he can come up with a quarter million dollars over the next four years isn’t much of a gift.
I know there this right wing idea that “woke” need-aware schools are favoring disadvantaged minorities to the detriment of qualified white kids - but if that is happening it’s very expensive for the school. I suspect the situation where a school has to reject some qualified low-income students because of financial aid limitations while accepting all qualified high income students is more common.
I don’t see how that is true at all. It entirely depends on how much preference is given to underrepresented groups, and there is no reason to give such a large preference that no kids from better off families are accepted. Their actual goal seems to be to match the demographics of young people in the state as a whole, which would entail discriminating against students with richer and better educated parents, but certainly not excluding them altogether.
We do have some idea about their admissions process; they say in the report:
In admissions selection, test scores are used to rank applicants throughout the entire pool…
and
UC also gives admissions preferences for low-income and first-generation college students, other qualifications being equal.
This is what I was referring to when I said they ‘favour’ one student or another. Not that they might only admit rich students, or only poor students, or something equally extreme.
There’s also this section where they explain the principles they follow in evaluating student qualifications:
Holistic Review and Proposition 209
In 1998, the Educational Testing Service proposed a new test-score measure, known as the “Strivers” proposal (Carnevale & Haghighat, 1998). ETS researchers compared student’s actual SAT scores with their predicted scores based on socioeconomic and other factors, including race. Students whose actual score significantly exceeded their predicted score were deemed “strivers.” As an ETS official explained, “A combined score of 1000 on the SATs is not always a 1000. When you look at a Striver who gets a 1000, you’re looking at someone who really performs at a 1200. This is a way of measuring not just where students are, but how far they’ve come” (Marcus, 1999). The proposal was later withdrawn after it sparked controversy and was rejected by the College Board.
Yet the underlying idea of the Strivers proposal remains very much alive at selective universities, like UC, that practice holistic admissions. “Holistic” or comprehensive review considers the totality of information in applicants’ files. Admissions staff who read files are “normed” and trained to evaluate indicators of academic achievement, such as test scores, in light of applicants’ educational and socioeconomic circumstances. Though far less algorithmic than the Strivers proposal, holistic admissions shares the same impulse to assess “achievement in context,” as emphasized in UC admissions policy:
Standardized tests and academic indices as part of the review process must be considered in the context of other factors that impact performance, including personal and academic circumstances (e.g. low-income status, access to honors courses, and college-going culture of the school).
UC’s holistic review process differs, however, from that at most other selective universities in one key respect: UC admissions readers cannot consider race as a contextual factor when evaluating applicants’ SAT or ACT scores. Proposition 209 amended the California state constitution “… to prohibit public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity.” While it made no mention of affirmative action, Proposition 209 was widely viewed as a referendum on that policy. Until then, UC had considered underrepresented minority status a “plus factor” in selection decisions. Supporters of the ballot measure saw it as a vehicle to end “race preferences” and “reverse discrimination” in university admissions.
Race was removed from applicant files after Proposition 209 took effect in 1998. UC continues to collect data on applicants’ race and ethnicity, but that information is not given to admissions readers. Proposition 209 has thus had the effect of eliminating any attention to race, whether as a “plus factor” or a socioeconomic disadvantage, in UC’s admissions process. In barring consideration of race as an admissions criterion, it has also effectively barred consideration of how other admissions criteria—like SAT and ACT scores—are themselves conditioned by race.
This is what I was basing my assumptions about their admissions selection on. They are not following an algorithm like the ‘strivers’ idea would have done, but they say they are following the same principles of ‘uprating’ a student if they have disadvantageous demographic characteristics.
They don’t mention anything like your ‘lanes’ idea. That sounds like a quota system to me, which I think is illegal for race, but maybe not for social class?
This is really a separate issue, but in several ways I think this goal is antithetical to the purpose of universities, especially highly selective ones. One of their purposes is to educate people who are good at a particular skill (academic work), which necessarily creates a certain amount of homogeneity, and another is to produce a future elite, so learning to fit in with elite culture is one of the benefits of attending. No matter what background the students came from, they have similar goals and are likely to end up in similar positions in life.
My university was diverse in some ways: for example there were lots of foreign students from many different countries, and not in others: all the foreign students had wealthy families, all of the students generally were smart and ambitious people very unlikely to end up working a minimum wage job.
There certainly are benefits to going to university (or at least there used to be) in terms of opening one’s mind and widening one’s horizons, but that’s mostly due to contact with very smart people, not due to contact with people from different backgrounds.
If you really want people to learn to work and live with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, then you should reintroduce national service. Not the military sort, but some kind of program(s) to benefit the country that doesn’t require any special skills or abilities, just a willingness to work. Take young people out of the inner city and culturally isolated rural towns and leafy suburbs and have them work together. IMO that would be far more valuable than 100 diversity seminars.
You accused me of doing it. And your “commentary” is a gross misrepresentation of the event of last summer.
But we understand - as the right devolves into more and more extreme violence, insurrection and outright insanity, you need to keep moving your Preferred Narrative about the left ever further away from reality so that you can tell yourself that no matter how bad the right is, the left is “even worse”. Because to face reality would mean you’d have to admit you’ve been supporting violent traitors bent on destroying America.
I look forward to your next desperate lie.
Venezuela - that’s the place where a narcissistic and incompetent demagogue destroyed the economy by funnelling public funds to his corrupt cronies, sent military troops to suppress protests, did everything in his power to hinder free and fair journalism, subverted the judiciary, materially undermined the democratic process, and encouraged his violent supporters to attack anyone who opposed him.
Why would we go to Venezuela? We’ve just spent four years in a country like that.
Because if the people who disagree with them leave, it saves them from having to defend indefensible positions.
Not you. @asahi. He said ‘we’ - meaning the left - should install a dictator to stop the right doing the same. But in general dictators are bad not because they are right or left-wing, but because they are dictators.
In Latin America it’s usually the educated elite who are on the right, supporting neo-liberal policies that benefit them (and benefit their ally the USA), but leave the masses in poverty. Thus left-wing populists are very common. In the USA the educated and cosmopolitan class who benefit from neo-liberalism are mostly Democrats, so it’s not so surprising the populist would be a Republican.
Nah. If the people who disagree with them leave, they will be able to do things the way they want.
But I don’t think that is why right-wingers say such things. With every election we see Americans on one side or the other say that they will leave if the other side wins. So there is probably an element of bluff calling. And maybe for the right there is also the fact left-wingers tend to be very critical of America, in a way that can seem hypocritical when they are enjoying all the benefits of living there, and most other countries are much worse off. The rejoinder ‘if you hate the place so much, why don’t you leave’ is kind of inevitable.
And as nonsensical as responding to someone pointing out that the roof of the house they both own and both live in is leaking, not by helping to get the roof fixed; not by investigating and deciding the problem’s not the roof but the plumbing and then proceeding to fix that (and then also fixing the roof if the plumbing fix didn’t end the problem and/or shingles keep appearing on the lawn); and not even by putting a pot under the leak: but by telling the person who’s pointing it out to abandon the place and go live somewhere where the roof may be in even worse shape.
They absolutely would, at least in the US. You probably don’t get it, because you are from a more socialistic country instead of one where the biggest challenge to getting into college is paying for college.
People write articles and books about it, and the overwhelming general consensus of those articles and books is that underprivileged students have a better chance of being admitted to a school that DOESN’T take the financial status of the students and their families into consideration - and there are school that deliberately withhold that information from the admissions department as a matter of policy.
In the US, the biggest barrier to college admissions is the inability to pay for college. I know you’re entrenched in your stupid right wing fantasy of college admission boards sneering and throwing away all the applications from rich kids and admitting only poor and underprivileged kids, but the reality is that it’s largely about money, and kids whose parents have it almost always come out ahead in the admissions process.
Oh, and I’m glad you consider your university education to be diverse because you went to school with lots of smart people. How did it feel to be a token?
ETA: This board is dedicated to fighting ignorance and I will never understand why some of you want to level the playing field.
One additional factor is also that parents with money are more likely to believe that college is the path to having money and will push their kid along the college path. Certainly paying for college is easier if parents have lots of money, but their children have likely grown up with the expectation that they will go to college after HS. I imagine poorer kids are more likely to have parents who didn’t go to college and wouldn’t necessarily see college as a worthwhile pursuit. Paying for college is a challenge for poorer students, but just having college as a goal in the first place is probably less common in poorer kids because their parents have not modeled that as being a goal. A poor kid who does well in school will likely have many avenues for financial aid that can bring the cost down to a manageable level. But they have to know that’s available and have that as a goal in order to pursue it.
Yeah, DemonTree has had that pointed out to them:
Oooh, where’s the aloe vera gel?
True, but I am trying to make the more narrow point that it is an actual factual fact that the offering of a financial aid package for underprivileged students is a standard part of the admissions procedure at competitive colleges and universities.
It is such an integral part of the procedure that if a school admits a student without offering sufficient financial aid package, it’s seen as a back-door denial. There’s a term for it, it’s called admit-deny.
I fostered an underprivileged teen for a few years and I researched this subject extensively at the time.
It seems like many of the people posting here aren’t aware of how the admissions procedure for competitive institutions works in the US, they seem to think that once a student gets accepted, it’s on them to figure out how to pay. If they are rich or middle class, yes but if they are poor it’s not true at all.
OK, it may be true for lower cost schools, community colleges and second and third tier state schools, which may be affordable with Pell grants and small federally backed loans - but those schools tend not to be competitive with regards to admissions.
The bottom line is that there is a very real financial cost to the school when they admit an underprivileged student, and sometimes the school doesn’t want (or can’t afford to) assume that cost, so they favor rich kids. Those financial factors also make it highly unlikely that the schools are looking at less tangible factors in order to level the playing field in favor of poor students.
I didn’t say I agreed. But do bear in mind that they built that house together, and the person being sensitive to criticism is very proud of it.
Dude, Suez Canal… hello!