[renewiltord]

I read the book SAT Wars and came away with a horrifying takeaway: admissions programs in US universities are creative enterprises for the person involved. One of them talks about “crafting a class”.

Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into your admissions officer’s biases. Knowing that they’re mostly liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be childless it’s presumably important to match that person’s energy.

Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted student that went “Black Lives Matter” x100

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187

[flufluflufluffy]

It’s always been this way; previously we just had to play to the old white men’s biases.

[umanwizard]

Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. Lots of places just sort by grades or test scores. Part of the reason for the weird US system is the low ceiling: school is relatively easy compared to developed countries, so there are way too many people with identical scores at the top.

[cyberax]

Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.

[anon291]

I mean contrary to the comment above this is how American universities used to be. They had standing exams... Show up on admission day, take a test, highest scores get admission. Easy

[smelendez]

That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.

[Ekaros]

Blind review to same rubric works reasonably well. Same test with same expected learning goals should remove nearly all issues.

[cyberax]

Come on. For math/physics/chemistry/CS the exams are easy. Just written questions and answers. Grading is also simple, just check if the answer is correct. For high-school-level questions, all the answers can be trivially checked. We're not talking about PhD-level problems.

It's a bit more complicated for humanities, grading essays is more subjective. But we also have solutions for that: have 2-3 people independently grade each essay, and have a special group review all the cases where the graders disagree.

[smelendez]

Yeah, there’s really no way around it when you have more qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery.

But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras.

And you also don’t want a class that’s all computer science majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal, but I’m guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some outspoken conservatives.

[Ekaros]

You could have quotas for each program. And then just set exams differently for each. Removes the "general education" as major, but most other countries find that one insane thing in first place. University is already for specialisation. High school is place were general education should happen.

[umanwizard]

No they don’t “have” to do any of this as evidenced by the fact that the US is the only country where it happens. In most countries it would (rightly) be considered strange to care how good someone is at sports or marching band when evaluating their ability to study academic subjects (the actual purpose of a university).

[its_ethan]

That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose of a university is.

Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice".

The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping others", etc. etc. etc.

Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building a community at the university that can successfully achieve those mission statements.

[umanwizard]

> Look at the charter of any university

Any university in the world? Or any university in the very idiosyncratic US system?

Again, nobody else does stuff like this, and their universities seem to be working fine.

[its_ethan]

Yea I'd say any university. Here's the results of maybe 3 minutes of quick googling for universities around the world:

University of Mumbai: "The Fruit of Learning is Character and Righteous Conduct" - highlights character and behavior as key to learning

University of Tokyo: "The University of Tokyo aims to be a world-class platform for research and education [and] ... nurture global leaders with a strong sense of public responsibility and a pioneering spirit [and] ... to expand the boundaries of human knowledge in partnership with society." - yes it's academically focussed, but again highlights strong civic duty and partnerships

University of Sydney: "We make lives better by producing leaders of society and equipping our people with leadership qualities so they can serve our communities at every level." - pretty focussed on creating leaders who serve communitities

Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia has a listed value: "AAU pursues innovation, research, and development through team spirit and partnership within the institution, with the communities it serves and with its global partners."

So.. yea most universities? Are there exceptions that are just ultra focussed on being exclusively robot-generating education factories? Sure. I'm not sure where you live that they are so common, but a quick survey of Africa, Asia, and Australia I was able to find universities that check the box for what I claimed.

But again, sorry for being so US-centric on the US website focussed on discussion (mostly) US news (and in this case discussing literally only US universities????), and the goings on of US tech start ups where most everyone speaks English and is active during the US timezones peak hours.

[cyberax]

> An obvious example is athletic recruiting

Itself a very US-specific thing. So much so that trans athletes in college sports were a focal point of a propaganda campaign that resulted in Trump winning.

I don't think any large European country even has athletic admissions, outside of maybe Olympic-level athletes.

[derfy]

More accurately, the issue is male athletes in women's sports. For whatever reason, the political left seem determined to die on this hill, despite the obvious disadvantage to female athletes.

[renewiltord]

I can’t say I’m the kind of guy who faces bootlicking with a gastronomic interest. The taste of the boot doesn’t change what’s being done.

[RobRivera]

From School Ties' Brendan Frasiers character "Youre going to use me for football, Im going to use you to get into Harvard"

Competitive admission hasn't really changed by nature