Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Elite Colleges Admissions Merit Based?

Its pretty clear they are not at all merit based with the exception of Caltech.

In fact, just the opposite at the Ivies. Its very clear that admissions are extremely biased against Asians and non-Jewish whites.

This is a loong article but its worth it. Read it ALL the way.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

The author is very fair and all the cites check out.

Very interesting. Will comment after I've read it all.

Of course they're not "merit-based".

They are not trying to be "merit-based".

This isn't news.

Agree with JonLaw. Top colleges do not claim to be strictly merit based in their admissions. There are many other factors that come into play. Just some of them -- ability to pay, gender balance, desire for a "balanced" class with diverse accomplishments and interests, ethnic diversity, economic class diversity, geographic diversity, need to fill certain types of skills for the school (eg, athletic).

"Nations which put their future national leadership in the hands of such individuals are likely to encounter enormous economic and social problems"

Exactly what has America (and most of the rest of the world) done for the past hundreds of years by shutting women out of top education and job opportunities? If colleges went by strictly "merit based" admissions today, boys would lose out to girls by a large margin in terms of the 'merit' measurements of GPA and test scores. It is significantly easier for boys to be admitted to top schools with lower statistics because women are doing so much better in the classroom and in testing now that they have been given the opportunity. I am pretty sure that is not what most readers of the American Conservative (source of this article) would like to see.

Yes. And there is a huge difference betweeen this process and admitting "unqualified" applicants, as the article asserts.

The article is an overt attempt to provoke.

DeeDee

That's very interesting point about boys vs. girls. It's a long piece, but was it addressed anywhere? The author had some sort of randomized admission proposal (from a pool of qualified applicants).

And what exactly would be the conservative proposal for dealing with the situation, were it a problem? I thought conservatives were all for staying out of the affairs of private institutions.

DeeDee

Well...maybe, but provoking isn't always a bad thing.

I regret to say that I've seen the admission of unqualified applicants. Never mind the details, but I saw this happen. Two wealthy parents I know had a child who was, shall we say, something of an underachiever. But Mom and Dad went to fancy schools, and Child had to. So they called up College A, which was somewhere around the low end of the Tier 1 schools, negotiated a donation in exchange for admission, and presto! He got in. And no, the kid did not suddenly shine in college.

There is some truth to this:


This is backwards, and misinformed:

Not in all cases. Caltech and MIT are held up in this article as islands of merit-based admissions, and I have certainly never heard of them being female-dominated. In fact, Caltech definitely aims for a better gender balance in admissions to the extent they can do so without dooming underqualified freshmen women to failure.