Who needs peer review? Plan offers easier grants to schools that agree to limits.
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Trump offers universities a choice: Comply for preferential funding
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The attitude of not fabricating a persecution story? Demonizing furriners and "woke universities," with a story pulled from my asshole? I checked out the last few year's rosters for Colorado, Colorado-Mesa and Colorado State women's swims. Mostly US/Anglo sounding names. Aussies are a presence in top tier NCAA swim - not Colorado. But, "The Aussies are eating the pet cats and dogs."
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Abbott and his fellow Nazis have put so many "freedom is only for the RIGHT" laws in place, and installed so many of their henchmen in positions of power in Texas that UT's president bolted for SMU where he wouldn't have to deal with all that shit earlier this year. That's right, he left the school with the biggest public college endowment in the country - and second only to Harvard overall - for something with a fraction of UT's resources and breadth.
And he got his undergrad from a small liberal arts school in San Antonio so despite having a Ph.D. from UT was probably "suspect" in their eyes, anyway.
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So, I've done admissions at a relatively exclusive public university. It was also in California where affirmative action was illegal since the start of my career in the 90s. I've also done a careers worth of data science on student achievement, completion, etc.
SATs are mostly useless. The one place they work is as a threshold, not continuous function. That is, somewhere around a 500-550 you do get an achievement inflection point where students below that number do struggle relative to students above that number, but there's no benefit to being much above that number. That is, there's no correlation between success for 800s over 550s - they do the same. 500-550 is about where the College Board jumps off of the straightforward high school fundamentals and goes onto seeing how clever you are. The fundamentals matter, the rest doesn't.
GPAs are helpful, but more the unweighted over the weighted. Your honors and AP course grades after weighting undermine the model. The unweighted GPAs help it. That helps underrepresented students who attend poorly funded schools that can't afford to offer AP and honors courses. A push to a model like this will be received by a movement toward unweighted GPA which will undercut the entitlements of the upper middle class, mostly white communities. Unweighted GPA better reflects discipline, commitment, etc. You just have to work harder to get straight As than a mix of As and Bs that get weighted up.
AP scores can be helpful particularly in disciplines where they can get ahead of the curriculum, buying some breathing room which helps success, but who knows if they're allowed to be used here.
But the single most important metric in admissions for selective universites is none of this stuff. The most important metric is how predictably you will accept the admissions offer. Exclusive universes have a numbers problem. We had 130,000 applications for 5,000 seats. If you expect ⅓ of your offers to be taken, you have to make 15,000 offers. If you're wrong on that ⅓, and half take them, you're fucked - you have 2,500 students with no dorm rooms, not enough classrooms, instructors, not enough services, and so on. At a public university they also won't get their subsidy, so you're taking a ~$10,000 loss on each student. You've probably also wrecked your financial aid pool. If you go under that's less devastating, but still pretty bad because you have a lot of fixed costs that you need that tuition + subsidy at a public to cover. You can backfill from waitlist to some degree, but only so much. Universities care more about how reliably they can predict your likelihood to take the offer than they do about boosting the average GPA or whatever. When you're admitting 12% of the pool, there's really no difference between the top 1% and the top 5%, and the top 1% are the hardest to predict so you don't admit them. Yes, you turn down the highest achieving students because they're the hardest to get and you can't risk modeling them wrong.
Another byproduct of this kind of policy is male attendance is going to get hammered even harder. Why? Because male students (and this is true everywhere) for some reason overestimate their chances of getting in. If you look at the GPA/SAT distribution by gender, they're wildly different. Your distribution of women will look a lot more like your distribution of admits - with median GPAs and SATs a lot closer to where you will be making your selection. Your distribution of men will be miles from that mark. The bottom third of your pool is almost all guys that have no chance of getting in. What got these lower achieving men into the school in the past were athletics, legacy, etc. This removes one of your tools to try and balance the gender pool. Note, I'm not saying that men underachieve women, I'm saying that men overestimate where they are competitive. They tend to think they're competitive at a their of school that they really aren't, and they might even pick safety schools that they are a coin flip to get into. Women are better at estimated their competitiveness and tend to slightly underestimate where they are competitive. Our application gender mix was 50/50 but our mix when we offered admission was 70/30 in favor of women, and we were a state where considering race and gender was illegal. You can get around the race thing a big by substituting a geographic servicing mandate, which we had - we were a public, saying we would try and admit equally from across all taxpaying regions was valid so we did evaluation in the local context - you weren't competing against all other applicants in the state, only other applicants from your school or your district - and because communities segregate by race to some degree that kind of policy ensures that you are getting some degree of equal representation by race. But we don't segregate by gender. There aren't proxies to use apart from activity participation to do that. But a decent number of well achieving male students wind up at community college because they thought they were Berkeley material when they had no hope of getting in and got shut out of 20 schools they applied to. We soaked up as many of them through transfer admissions as we could, but many would just give up before we could get to them. I don't recall a single female student that wound up at a community college because they got shut out, they were all guys and there were a lot of them.
And we never figured out how to get students to better recognize where they were competitive. There are tools in the high schools that we provided data to that are personalized, and the boys would just straight up ignore them. I did studies showing that. Counselors were ineffective to correct that - students simply didn't believe them. The only thing that seemed to work was a one on one come to Jesus talk by admissions officers after reviewing their record, and we can't do that with 65,000 applicants. It's a serious problem and we need some cultural mechanisms to solve it, and we're doing the exact opposite. One thing that might work is what the California State Universities is trying now - they're sending admissions offers to students that never even applied. They get a students basic admissions record with grades and make an offer. That might get more discouraged male students to attend. We'll see. It's new, and it's a pilot, and I'm retired so I can't help my colleagues with that.
Anyway, this will be disastrous if it's implemented because like everything else it fails to understand why the system is in the state that it's in, it fails to understand the complexity of the problem, and it fails to anticipate unintended consequences. It's based like so much on some kind of utopian wishcasting, as if those of us in California haven't been working on this problem for the last 30 years out of 40 different universities and recognizing really clearly where the countervailing forces are regarding culture, rankings, economics, and so on. Privates are in a little better position to manage it because they lack the hard economic forcing function of how state subsidies are handled, but unless they have graduate programs actually carrying their institution (which the elites do) they're going to get hammered. And we have a private university closing in this country about once a month as it is. They are failing pretty steadily right now.
SATs are mostly useless. The one place they work is as a threshold, not continuous function. That is, somewhere around a 500-550 you do get an achievement inflection point where students below that number do struggle relative to students above that number, but there's no benefit to being much above that number. That is, there's no correlation between success for 800s over 550s - they do the same. 500-550 is about where the College Board jumps off of the straightforward high school fundamentals and goes onto seeing how clever you are. The fundamentals matter, the rest doesn't.
GPAs are helpful, but more the unweighted over the weighted. Your honors and AP course grades after weighting undermine the model. The unweighted GPAs help it. That helps underrepresented students who attend poorly funded schools that can't afford to offer AP and honors courses. A push to a model like this will be received by a movement toward unweighted GPA which will undercut the entitlements of the upper middle class, mostly white communities. Unweighted GPA better reflects discipline, commitment, etc. You just have to work harder to get straight As than a mix of As and Bs that get weighted up.
AP scores can be helpful particularly in disciplines where they can get ahead of the curriculum, buying some breathing room which helps success, but who knows if they're allowed to be used here.
But the single most important metric in admissions for selective universites is none of this stuff. The most important metric is how predictably you will accept the admissions offer. Exclusive universes have a numbers problem. We had 130,000 applications for 5,000 seats. If you expect ⅓ of your offers to be taken, you have to make 15,000 offers. If you're wrong on that ⅓, and half take them, you're fucked - you have 2,500 students with no dorm rooms, not enough classrooms, instructors, not enough services, and so on. At a public university they also won't get their subsidy, so you're taking a ~$10,000 loss on each student. You've probably also wrecked your financial aid pool. If you go under that's less devastating, but still pretty bad because you have a lot of fixed costs that you need that tuition + subsidy at a public to cover. You can backfill from waitlist to some degree, but only so much. Universities care more about how reliably they can predict your likelihood to take the offer than they do about boosting the average GPA or whatever. When you're admitting 12% of the pool, there's really no difference between the top 1% and the top 5%, and the top 1% are the hardest to predict so you don't admit them. Yes, you turn down the highest achieving students because they're the hardest to get and you can't risk modeling them wrong.
Another byproduct of this kind of policy is male attendance is going to get hammered even harder. Why? Because male students (and this is true everywhere) for some reason overestimate their chances of getting in. If you look at the GPA/SAT distribution by gender, they're wildly different. Your distribution of women will look a lot more like your distribution of admits - with median GPAs and SATs a lot closer to where you will be making your selection. Your distribution of men will be miles from that mark. The bottom third of your pool is almost all guys that have no chance of getting in. What got these lower achieving men into the school in the past were athletics, legacy, etc. This removes one of your tools to try and balance the gender pool. Note, I'm not saying that men underachieve women, I'm saying that men overestimate where they are competitive. They tend to think they're competitive at a their of school that they really aren't, and they might even pick safety schools that they are a coin flip to get into. Women are better at estimated their competitiveness and tend to slightly underestimate where they are competitive. Our application gender mix was 50/50 but our mix when we offered admission was 70/30 in favor of women, and we were a state where considering race and gender was illegal. You can get around the race thing a big by substituting a geographic servicing mandate, which we had - we were a public, saying we would try and admit equally from across all taxpaying regions was valid so we did evaluation in the local context - you weren't competing against all other applicants in the state, only other applicants from your school or your district - and because communities segregate by race to some degree that kind of policy ensures that you are getting some degree of equal representation by race. But we don't segregate by gender. There aren't proxies to use apart from activity participation to do that. But a decent number of well achieving male students wind up at community college because they thought they were Berkeley material when they had no hope of getting in and got shut out of 20 schools they applied to. We soaked up as many of them through transfer admissions as we could, but many would just give up before we could get to them. I don't recall a single female student that wound up at a community college because they got shut out, they were all guys and there were a lot of them.
And we never figured out how to get students to better recognize where they were competitive. There are tools in the high schools that we provided data to that are personalized, and the boys would just straight up ignore them. I did studies showing that. Counselors were ineffective to correct that - students simply didn't believe them. The only thing that seemed to work was a one on one come to Jesus talk by admissions officers after reviewing their record, and we can't do that with 65,000 applicants. It's a serious problem and we need some cultural mechanisms to solve it, and we're doing the exact opposite. One thing that might work is what the California State Universities is trying now - they're sending admissions offers to students that never even applied. They get a students basic admissions record with grades and make an offer. That might get more discouraged male students to attend. We'll see. It's new, and it's a pilot, and I'm retired so I can't help my colleagues with that.
Anyway, this will be disastrous if it's implemented because like everything else it fails to understand why the system is in the state that it's in, it fails to understand the complexity of the problem, and it fails to anticipate unintended consequences. It's based like so much on some kind of utopian wishcasting, as if those of us in California haven't been working on this problem for the last 30 years out of 40 different universities and recognizing really clearly where the countervailing forces are regarding culture, rankings, economics, and so on. Privates are in a little better position to manage it because they lack the hard economic forcing function of how state subsidies are handled, but unless they have graduate programs actually carrying their institution (which the elites do) they're going to get hammered. And we have a private university closing in this country about once a month as it is. They are failing pretty steadily right now.
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How does one teach history, political science, sociology, or economics at all under this stricture?
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They are (probably correctly) relying on the left never even considering the kind of authoritarian tactics that would be necessary for anything that looked like payback. I've been an advocate for some time for putting more matching responsibility on states for federal funds. Make them put more skin in the game. If they can't sort out their local politics, then cut their funding. A big underlying problem is that the states that invest more in their economies (almost all blue states) are subsidizing the ones that don't and the red states know this. The moral hurtle to overcome is that you already have markedly lower life expectancy in those states (and that gap is expanding), and my proposal would make that much worse.
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Just like literally now means figuratively, objective now means subjective.
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Presumably one does not, and the resources potentially wasted on teaching those "useless humanities" can be put towards more STEM education! /s
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Well...don't worry too much, it is always darkest before the (simultaneous) giant meteor, GRB, and unexpected nova of Sol...
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And honestly, Canada, England and Ireland tuition are expensive now by EU standards.
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Your whole comment is fantastic, and I stickied it to the story, but I just want to point out how evergreen this part is for every story about this administration we write.
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I'm embarrassed just having to have Columbia on my resume under the education section and I went there 15 years ago.
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Question :
Would some common university application system, implementing stable mariage, help ?
(Either automatically with student pre-ranking, or manually, with student having say a week to decide between two offers, and then the freed up slot going to the next person in line).
In such a way, you could rank say twice the number of slot, but guarantee not to overflow.
(Are there situation under which students can accept an offer and then cancel (last minute) ?)
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I went to a CSU a little over 10 years ago and had this issue, didn't realize I was applying to UCs out of my league and thankfully ended up getting accepted to the closest CSU to me anyway (LB). How much of that is just ignorance vs overconfidence? A lot of the kids in my school would have been first generation university, and maybe it's just my own ignorance but I didn't even know about tactics of applications like safety schools. Our counselors back then were basically telling us to shoot for the stars, especially since we had the 3 waived application-fees.
That Pilot program is interesting though, and could probably spread the load between some super high impacted schools and lessen the number of people commuting 50 miles each way because that's the only place they got in.
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You have to remember that these people think that they are naturally superior and so it is a foregone conclusion that the “objective criteria” and “meritocracy” they’re always talking about will naturally put them in charge and any existing systems that don’t produce those results can only be the result of everyone else cheating and persecuting them for being so righteous
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What GPA and standardized testing tends to show is what zip code the student lived in, not how good of a student they are. For some strange reason, the kids from wealthier zip codes do better on those tests...
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Exactly. The requirements will constantly change and be used to find areas of non-compliance. It is exactly like the mob. If you give in then you are owned by them. If you resist they will keep coming back until you give in. The fact that non-compliance is a DOJ referral is insane.
As said on here many times before. If/when a Democrat gets into the Oval Office, they need to round up all the conspirators. Don’t go after Trump. Go after the Vought, Millers, etc. The base doesn’t care about them. However, they are the truly dangerous ones.
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"there's no reason to expect that every class will produce a neat bell curve of grades"
Best class I ever took: busted my ass producing multiple page proofs every week.
End of the semester, Prof (who was the Math dean) said it was the most fun he'd ever had teaching a class, and gave us all As.
I knew most everyone else in the class and they were all busting ass too. No way a bell curve would have fit that class, regardless of the Prof's decision.
Best class I ever took: busted my ass producing multiple page proofs every week.
End of the semester, Prof (who was the Math dean) said it was the most fun he'd ever had teaching a class, and gave us all As.
I knew most everyone else in the class and they were all busting ass too. No way a bell curve would have fit that class, regardless of the Prof's decision.
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The silver lining is that after Trump the current GOP leadership is full people who, to be charitable, are not charismatic. They can't hypnotize a crowd like Trump. Most of them come across as completely out of touch and downright weird. Unlike Trump, none of them has that same power to not give a shit and just keep talking when they get called out.
Vance and Johnson will be utterly tainted by being Trump's toady through all this, DeSantis already tried to run in 2024 and failed miserably because he has all the charisma of a moldy gym sock, Ramaswamy plays the tech angle but says obviously and incredibly stupid things like "we could halve the size of the Federal government with no impact just firing people based on the last digit of their SSN", the list goes on. From what I remember from their 2024 primary, Nikki Haley was basically the only one who didn't exude Hitler particles or come off as an utter idiot. Which tbh probably makes her unelectable to the MAGA base* (aside from being female), so instead Republicans will keep getting increasingly weird candidates.
EDIT: Spelling
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I will say one thing somewhat in support of this proposal. I despise the gun-to-the-head aspect of this, especially as I know there is a secondary effort underway to reshape many of these schools into right-wing indoctrination academies as happened with New School in Florida. That's not particularly public right now, but I an assure you it's now a national effort apart from this one.
But my support is that college admissions really does need to be a lot simpler for students and parents to understand. That's partially a supply/demand problem in some parts of the country (mostly blue states again where demand for college keeps going up, and where red states are often struggling to fill seats because demand has fallen off - this is a cultural/economic phenomenon) and partially education being corrupted by rankings. Rankings are completely useless, but they have huge impact in terms of decision making inside of institutions. Consider my previous comment where prediction of a student taking the offer is the most important thing. In rankings selectivity is the driver, not GPA or SAT. Ideally, if you have 5,000 open seats you will only admit 5,000 students and 100% of them will take the offer. You can engineer that to some degree with early access, early selection, legacy/donor admissions, and so on (we never did any of them, but we did study their effects so we knew how to factor them into our prediction models) but if you have 130,000 applicants and want to maximize your yield (the % of students admitted who choose to attend) and minimize your selectivity (the thing that matters in rankings) then you chop off the top 10% or 20% of your applicant pool and reject them, because they'll have the lowest yield because they'll have the most choices, and you draw from the top end of your first standard deviation above the median. That's your sweet spot - they're good, but you aren't a safety school, and you'll get them in pretty high numbers. They're the ones that you'll yield ⅓ and only need to admit 3x as many, it's the top group you'll yield 5% of and need to admit 20 to enroll 1. They destroy your selectivity.
So how do you navigate an admission space where the harder you work, the LESS likely you are to get admitted? How do you navigate an admission space where there's so much competition and focus on lowering selectivity that the GPA band from the bottom to top of your admit pool is effectively a few tenths of a point - go over and you're rejected, go under and you're rejected. This is why all the activities and other things get factored into selection - because the top end of our selection pool and the bottom end of our rarselection pool looked almost identical, but we still had 100 different targets to hit - because you can't admit 5,000 students into your drama program. You have to distribute those students across your programs in numbers that the programs have the resources to absorb. We had 400 variables our selection model. We're rerun our admit model usually a couple time a day, trying get a distribution that matched those internal targets. In doing so, we'd throw out a thousand or more students and add in an equal number, students that were distinguished by trivial matters. Keep in mind, our critieria for qualification was MILES from the bottom of our pool. If we admitted all qualified students, we'd have admitted 80,000+ students. We're essentially doing Monte Carlo simulations until we get the profile we need, but it's needs to be deterministic so we are shoving these trivial variables, not because they matter to success, but because we are trying to not break the economy of the institution. It's not like if we get it wrong and admit 1,000 more engineers than we have space for that government is going to drop the $100M in immediate funding we would need to construct buildings, labs, hire faculty and so on. No, we need to solve that problem not with more funding, but less. Those problems get solved in brutal ways (I was part of those decisions) and they are best avoided, so we did.
If you reduced competition between institutions and went with more of a lottery/fall through system where any qualified student could win that lottery, you'd eliminate about 95% of the pressure and stress students face to overachieve. But we need to compete in all the things, even when that becomes destructive.
But my support is that college admissions really does need to be a lot simpler for students and parents to understand. That's partially a supply/demand problem in some parts of the country (mostly blue states again where demand for college keeps going up, and where red states are often struggling to fill seats because demand has fallen off - this is a cultural/economic phenomenon) and partially education being corrupted by rankings. Rankings are completely useless, but they have huge impact in terms of decision making inside of institutions. Consider my previous comment where prediction of a student taking the offer is the most important thing. In rankings selectivity is the driver, not GPA or SAT. Ideally, if you have 5,000 open seats you will only admit 5,000 students and 100% of them will take the offer. You can engineer that to some degree with early access, early selection, legacy/donor admissions, and so on (we never did any of them, but we did study their effects so we knew how to factor them into our prediction models) but if you have 130,000 applicants and want to maximize your yield (the % of students admitted who choose to attend) and minimize your selectivity (the thing that matters in rankings) then you chop off the top 10% or 20% of your applicant pool and reject them, because they'll have the lowest yield because they'll have the most choices, and you draw from the top end of your first standard deviation above the median. That's your sweet spot - they're good, but you aren't a safety school, and you'll get them in pretty high numbers. They're the ones that you'll yield ⅓ and only need to admit 3x as many, it's the top group you'll yield 5% of and need to admit 20 to enroll 1. They destroy your selectivity.
So how do you navigate an admission space where the harder you work, the LESS likely you are to get admitted? How do you navigate an admission space where there's so much competition and focus on lowering selectivity that the GPA band from the bottom to top of your admit pool is effectively a few tenths of a point - go over and you're rejected, go under and you're rejected. This is why all the activities and other things get factored into selection - because the top end of our selection pool and the bottom end of our rarselection pool looked almost identical, but we still had 100 different targets to hit - because you can't admit 5,000 students into your drama program. You have to distribute those students across your programs in numbers that the programs have the resources to absorb. We had 400 variables our selection model. We're rerun our admit model usually a couple time a day, trying get a distribution that matched those internal targets. In doing so, we'd throw out a thousand or more students and add in an equal number, students that were distinguished by trivial matters. Keep in mind, our critieria for qualification was MILES from the bottom of our pool. If we admitted all qualified students, we'd have admitted 80,000+ students. We're essentially doing Monte Carlo simulations until we get the profile we need, but it's needs to be deterministic so we are shoving these trivial variables, not because they matter to success, but because we are trying to not break the economy of the institution. It's not like if we get it wrong and admit 1,000 more engineers than we have space for that government is going to drop the $100M in immediate funding we would need to construct buildings, labs, hire faculty and so on. No, we need to solve that problem not with more funding, but less. Those problems get solved in brutal ways (I was part of those decisions) and they are best avoided, so we did.
If you reduced competition between institutions and went with more of a lottery/fall through system where any qualified student could win that lottery, you'd eliminate about 95% of the pressure and stress students face to overachieve. But we need to compete in all the things, even when that becomes destructive.
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This is less Trump's doing, than the doing of the Heritage Institute and other participants in drafting Project 2025.
Trump is just a useful figurehead -- something of a loose cannon, but one that that the coalition of religious zealots, ideological zealots, racists and billionaires currently running the administrative machinery, are still finding more useful than not.
Otherwise, Trump would be long gone already.
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Also, is that process different at school at the very top of the ranking ? (e.g Ivy Leagues, Carnegie Mellon, etc)
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No, rich people who think that they are smart and successful tend to live near each other.
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McGill is a very good school, but keep in mind that at the undergraduate level, you're not necessarily getting a better education at Harvard than you would at your local community college. For one, nobody actually does assessment of college outcomes. Like, at all. None of the rankings have any consideration for whether you learned anything - go look at the methodology (I did rankings for my institution).
And one of my most controversial studies on achievement was one that demonstrated that students that came out of the community college system were better prepared for upper-level study in STEM than students from our own top-10 public university. And like, it wasn't even close. These students has vastly worse metrics at high school graduation than our students did, and yet they were much better prepared in math, physics, chem, etc. than our students. That was almost entirely a product of class size and focus. In descending priority we cared about PhD instruction over MS, over upper-division BS, over lower-division BS. The community college only do lower division BS, so they're actually very good at it and we treated it as the place to find cost efficiency.
We never saw any meaningful evidence that students applying for PhD programs that came out of Berkeley were better than those that came out of Cal State Fullerton. Like, they could often hit the program running a bit better, but in terms of completion or work product, they were indistinguishable. Regardless, there is a lot of reputational bias in grad admissions which should be excised.
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They absolutely would. Institutions and companies are not allowed to set hard quotas for hiring specific minorities. The (former) idea that schools were allowed to consider race as part of achieving affirmative action goals only allowed for race to be considered as one component in a totality of circumstances.
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Tell me what evidence will convince you and I'll present it.
The fact that standardized tests are rigged in favor of the upper class is not exactly news. Even Binet said that what his test measured was how well people did on his test, not what IQ really was.
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Americans made their bed. The thought of moving anywhere near left of center was too much. So instead, fascism wins. US citizens deserves everything happening I mean they literally voted for it. lol
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No, SAT scores are most strongly correlated to household income. That's not a genetic thing, that's a result of high income households can have their kids spend their free time doing SAT prep rather than working. That's really well documented. Anyone can add 200+ points to their SATs with sufficient prep. Not everyone can afford that prep.
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It's great that you had that experience, but it's by no means a universal experience.
A family member of mine went to a community college. Some aspects of it, like small class size, were comparable to my own experience at a small liberal arts school -- but many were not. When the school ran into professor shortages, they assigned instructors who had no experience in the relevant field. My family member's chemistry class was taught by a biology professor with no knowledge of chemistry. Her chemistry classes never covered topics like stoichiometry. I learned about stoichiometry in first-year high school chemistry. That wasn't the only shortfall, just the one I remember specifically. She got to a four-year institution and only then discovered that she had missed huge swathes of teaching she absolutely should have gotten.
The end result was that she struggled a great deal when transferring from a two-year to a four-year institution. Her community college classes did not prepare her appropriately.
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Don't you think Trump is just a pawn? I don't think this won't end with Trump. Do you?
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