A long article. I had to push it to Kindle and read it slowly. Here are some key points for you to decide whether to read through this long article. (1) The author examines admission to undergraduate program in many Ivy League Colleges in the US (I went to one of them) and compares them to admission in a few purely merit institutions. (2) He finds that Ivy league institutions, by using a opaque admission policy discriminate against Asians and to a certain extent whites, but benefits Jews disproportionately. (The author himself is a Jew.) (3) Jews until a certain point in time found it very difficult to get into Ivy League schools, but then some policies were changed and since then Jews are present there disproportionately larger to their population and ability. By comparing Ivy League admissions to Caltech and U-Cals which follows a strict merit based admissions, the author shows that Asians almost occupy 35%+ of the spots in these institutions but are kept artificially low in the Ivy League colleges. (4) The author brings up diversity vs meritocracy argument. Conservatives generally feel that meritocracy is the right approach and diversity argument helps less able blacks and hispanics to get in ahead of more accomplished white and asians. Liberals believe that admission policy should largely reflect the national population and merit is irrelevant as long as the admitted students learn enough to do some useful work. (5) The author shows that in the name of diversity what has actually happened is corruption and favouritism, and that the admissions neither reflect the general population, nor bring in the most abled. (6) The author continues with specific argument on Asians forcing their children to aggressively work on competitive exams in order to get into the best schools and the impact this may have on the coming generations if this spreads to the entire population. He proposes an alternate selection mechanism which is meritocracy combined with a socio-economic status. There is more, but I will leave it here. There are many things we can learn from this article applied to the situation in Tamil Nadu (and India) and try to at least debate them in a civil manner.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:18:19 +0000
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