| There is so much classism, elitism, and unsupported effect therefor cause reasoning in this comment I don't even know where to start with it. Which is ironic, because I am also generally against the idea of colleges basing their admissions solely on standardized tests. Those tests have their roots in the eugenics movement, have been shown to be deeply problematic and biased, and have completely failed to predict future success when you remove confounding factors. > I would challenge that these schools are looking for people who think better than most people. Yes they need to be smart when it comes to doing school work, but they need to be more than that to attend an elite university. I would argue that far more people who "think better than most" people come out of public schools than the "elite" schools. What the elite schools do very well is laundering the mediocrity of the upper class. (See "legacy admissions") > The people that go to these schools go on to be the upper-crust of society. They can think outside of the box and push the envelope of human knowledge. ... https://hbr.org/2020/09/graduates-of-elite-universities-get-... > Our results offer some solace to the traditional recruiters. After controlling for age, gender, and the year of study, we found that graduates from higher-ranked universities performed better, but only nominally and only on some dimensions of performance. Specifically, the overall performance improved by only 1.9% for every 1,000 positions in the Webometrics global university rankings. When comparing the performance of candidates whose universities rank further apart — a graduate from a top university versus a “global average” university — the performance differential jumps to 19%. > The 19% difference in performance between the top and the average seems significant, but keep in mind that this is for graduates from universities that are 10,000 university ranking positions apart. At a given organization, candidates are likely to be selected from within a much narrower pool, perhaps from universities whose rankings differ by a couple of hundred positions. In this more realistic case, the predicted difference in performance would be closer to 1%. Keep in mind, this[1] is the ranking they are using. The top 10 includes public universities and omits several Ivy league "elite" universities. [1] https://www.webometrics.info/en/world |
It seems to me that measuring/estimating the scholastic ability/preparedness of a prospective student has value independent of whether that preparedness is correlated with some other variables (wealth, neighborhood, childhood nutrition, other socioeconomic markers).
“Are they prepared/do they have the aptitude to succeed here?” matters much more than the underlying reasons why they might or might not be prepared.