> well-off kids often get the helicopter-parent-study-to-the-test short-term-maximization childhood; less well-off ones do not.
This criticism of standardized tests is ubiquitous, but what never, ever seems to be discussed is whether holistic review of many facets actually improves this problem or simply entrenches the well-off further.
Say you're a poor, smart kid who works to support a dysfunctional family. You want to go to a life-changing school. Would you rather prove your potential by simply taking a test, perhaps along with a brief note about your disadvantaged background, or would you rather have to submit materials reflecting ten different dimensions of yourself, all of which the wealthy have hired armies of consultants to optimize for them, and networks of insiders to feed them knowledge of what the schools want to see?
We don't have to answer that because the schools have never asked. It was never their goal to get poor students in the first place, and income statistics of admits at Ivies show this clearly.
In practice the wealthy and connected are likely to be somewhat advantaged either way. Whatever system you set up is going to get gamed, whether that means having someone ghostwrite/coach their admissions essays, exaggerate their recommendation letters, prep them (or even help them cheat) on admissions tests, train them in exclusive sports, help them obtain experiences inaccessible to other students such as working in a research laboratory or visiting exotic places, or just directly bribe the school with cash. But IMO you still have to try to push back against those games.
The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. South Korea or some Chinese social classes. It’s nonstop test prep from morning to night starting from age 3 or 4 through the end of high school. Sure some of the kids who succeed in that system are “working hard for it”, but at what cost?
And while one particular extraordinary disadvantaged kid might succeed in that system, it’s not any kind of general recipe for social mobility or fixing large-scale social justice problems.
Best thing is probably something straightforward that can't be gamed like a difficult to game SAT. Instead we have a complicated set of criteria that can basically only be gamed by rich people. Worst case scenario if you are are poor and want to get into one of these colleges.
While I agree in principle, I don’t think this would easily work at super prestigious schools like Harvard, since there would be far too many applicants.
Harvard has about 1700 undergraduates per class (total undergraduate population ~7000), with an acceptance rate of 4%. That means they get around 40,000 applicants for each freshman class. Harvard’s matriculation rate is around 80%, so we can conservatively assume that somewhat less of those 40,000 applicants would enroll in your proposed trial period, say 50%.
Even if the weed-out period was just the first semester of freshman year, how would it handle an influx of 20,000 additional undergrads for that single semester? For reference, Harvard’s entire student body (including all graduate/professional degree students) is around 30,000.
> The purely test-based system is absolutely ruinous for some kinds of ambitious parents’ children. Look at the childhoods of kids growing up in e.g. South Korea or some Chinese social classes.
It's not the test doing that, it's the parents. If it weren't a test they'd target whatever else is being used as the evaluation metric.
This criticism of standardized tests is ubiquitous, but what never, ever seems to be discussed is whether holistic review of many facets actually improves this problem or simply entrenches the well-off further.
Say you're a poor, smart kid who works to support a dysfunctional family. You want to go to a life-changing school. Would you rather prove your potential by simply taking a test, perhaps along with a brief note about your disadvantaged background, or would you rather have to submit materials reflecting ten different dimensions of yourself, all of which the wealthy have hired armies of consultants to optimize for them, and networks of insiders to feed them knowledge of what the schools want to see?
We don't have to answer that because the schools have never asked. It was never their goal to get poor students in the first place, and income statistics of admits at Ivies show this clearly.