I went to Stanford with full financial aid (apparently says something about my financials). I didn’t have to work to support the family, but I didn’t have private tutoring either, and my parents didn’t help me with my homework. I didn’t feel punished at all compared to kids who have everything in the world at their disposal; in fact, knowledge in my brain is about the last thing in the world that’s affected by my family’s socioeconomic status, and standardized testing, with all its problems, is about the fairest thing in this unfair society. Now tell me why you want to ruin the fairest thing by giving kids who have equal access to resources as I did an edge just because their parents earn a few grands less. Oh, while we’re at it, apparently I have above-average intelligence, which largely came from my parents’ DNA; should I be punished for that too?

There are so many online resources and free tutors out their nowadays for high school students, and it is only getting better.

We can't control your upbringing or the opportunities your parents give you completely though. People think the material opportunities given by parents is not fair, but think that the emotional or social opportunities of parents is. If my parents were emotionally abusive, but I grew up rich, should they rig the SAT to show that? How would they even measure that?

In a perfect world outcomes would only be determined by genetics, and the environmental factors would not play into life at all. We don't live in that world, and it would be impossible to replicate it. There are too many variables to be able to measure who deserves what beyond a merit based system.

Look at it another way, would it be fair for a high school/ college sport to artificially raise and lower rankings based on upbringing or environment? Should players with significant coaching be lowered in the rankings, and poor players be raised? I don't think so.

> Why does my parents’ achievement have a fundamental impact on my opportunities?

Because they are your parents and they will have an impact on your life whether you like it or not, right down from the genes you inherit to the kind of people you hang out with. So yes there achievement will have an impact on your opportunities.

What you want can only happen when parents are no longer associated with their children in any way and all children are raised by the State so that everyone can be provided "equal opportunities" and even then the type of genes you inherit will impact your opportunities because although social inequality has been removed, biological inequalities can never be removed.

So no your children or not equal to anybody else's children and yes what you do in life will have an impact on your children's life that's how life works.

We decide how life works, between us. You want the kids of rich people to win the next generation unquestioned? I think we can do better.

> You want the kids of rich people to win the next generation unquestioned?

I am not the person you were replying to, but no. However, the person who wins should be the more qualified person based on merit not based on some standard of suffering. Just because you had a harder environment does not mean you are more qualified than someone with an easier environment.

I agree completely. But there should be some heterogeneity available in the routes to success. Not all bright kids are ready and trained for the SATs. I was not and luckily I found another route in 1990s England. I’m trying to keep some alternate routes open.

What do you mean by merit? Ability? Capacity? Effort? Worthiness? Ability at what? Are the SATs a good measure of that?

Probably the best/ most ubiquitous method we have right now.

It would be trivial to improve our tests of merit compared to the almost impossible task of testing how well a student would do free from environmental factors.

This concept equal opportunities by separating children from their parents is something that Plato explored quite a lot with the concept of the guardians, with some rather absurd suggestions which was likely given as both a commentary on the problem and criticism of the aristocratic society. If I remember right this is a central theme in Utopia.

Philip K dick also had a short story called Progeny with a similar theme, but here exploring it from the perspective of psychology.

> Is it fair that a child from a better-off family is more likely to enter better academic institutions regardless of their merit?

At the point of admission, the merits of our two imaginary college kids are not same, even if they started out "the same". The current system, that only looks at objective test scores, is actually blind to anything but merit. You seem to be making the same strawman mistake you described: No one claims that rich kids can buy their way into elite schools, but rather that they can buy better education along the way.

By the time you hit the SAT it's too late. If you aren't qualified enough to do well on the SAT then, you are going to struggle and hold classmates back more-so than the peer you displaced would have.

Offer free additional after-school programs, etc in high school to solve the problem. You don't make a slow runner faster by moving the finish line closer for him/her.

> By the time you hit the SAT it's too late.

We should maintain some real alternate paths for kids for whom this timing is bad.

I grew up on on welfare and left school at 15. Was smart but troubled. Worked dumb jobs for a while. Benefitted from enlightened admissions policy and eventually graduated from $VERYGOODSCHOOL. I worked hard and did just fine. My kids are privileged and my late career is fun and rewarding. I want to do all I can to pass on these opportunities to the next generation of kids like me.

I disagree on this as a goal. Some things take generations: my great-grandparents had a good standing back in pre-war Europe. Then the war came and my grandparents escaped to South America - not great. My parents got up to high school level education. I got a B.Sc. Maybe my kid will go farther.

Play with the cards you were dealt.

In your stance, let’s hope you don’t have some bad luck with your circumstances or health, and your kids drop back a couple generations.

In my stance, your kids can get ahead on their own merit.

I don’t know how to achieve this perfectly, but it’s an aspiration.

The underlying problem is that we're trying to ration something that shouldn't be this scarce.

If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school and accept more students?

Because the same brand of metrics trolls who are screwing this up have also screwed up in the school rankings by making schools rank better if they reject more applicants, so now the schools optimize for that.

> If everybody wants to go to Harvard then why can't they expand the school

Well, you can only physically expand a single school so far, but I get what you mean. I think the bigger problem is this concept of “elite universities” and this sort of credential signaling that seems to matter so much. Honestly, I can’t tell how much it really does matter. I went to Valdosta State University (never heard of it? Nope, neither has anybody else), but have worked with Harvard and MIT grads who respected my opinion and treated me as an equal. My 15 year old son, who I’ve never really pushed too hard to worry about getting into a “good” college worries about it anyway, because everybody he knows is worrying about it. He says things like, “If I don’t do well on this test, I’m going to end up going to Texas Tech” and I think, “Hell, Texas Tech is better than where I went to college, and I’m doing fine… should I tell him not to worry so much or encourage him to shoot for the top-ranked colleges?”

This is a good point. I think the their intent here is fine, but it seems like the wrong way to go about opening up more opportunities to people who start with somewhat of a disadvantage.

In any case, I don't think you should have to graduate from a prestigious college to find work that helps you live a good life. Maybe this involves making a place like Harvard accept more students, or maybe it involves improving the quality and our perceptions of middle and lower-tier universities. I don't know.

Keep in mind that given 1000 admission slots and 1000 very smart poor/disadvantaged kids and 1000 average rich kids most institutions will never admit all the 1000 poor/disadvantaged kids (though the absolute smartest and absolute richest will probably have a leg up).

Colleges are gatekeeper institutions that want to identify the worst off person that's still likely to have high success so that they can talk about how great their programs and commitment to diversity are while still mostly admitting wealthy folks and raking in money for their foundations and endowments. And so that they can point to those successes as proof that they're serving a social interest by anecdote, regardless of what the actual numbers on social mobility say.

It's really at level very removed from what you bring up. It's not that you're being punished because your parents are not part of the oligarch class. Rather, the oligarch class wants higher education to be a system that primarily benefits themselves while making it palatable by marketing the whole thing as a societal benefit.

Some colleges have become attuned to the fact that people caught on to this, which is why some elite institutions advertise that they're "need blind," a phrase which is more marketing than reality. They know that they can admit many middle class people and have them turn down "affordable" packages that are actually very draining for financially responsible families. And they know that they can calibrate their admissions to get exactly the amount and quality of disadvantaged students they want to mix with their legacy and elite admits, which will leave the majority of admits upper class and elite ("need blind" might as well be a synonym for "oligarchs are meritorious").

This is the game because elites have succeeded in twisting the system to benefit them. And the game now is to convince the public at large is that they should keep a system created for the oligarchy in place while putting lipstick on it.

If you want to shatter this state of affairs, the #1 thing you can do is start treating elite institutions and their graduates with the social stigma they deserve.

It's also worth keeping in mind that a significant reason this happens is because of admissions decisions revolving around institutional interests rather than societal interests, which means putting admit decisions in the hands of a body that does not represent the institution(s) in question could also be another route towards addressing what you bring up.

Life is not fair, by the time you are six the number of distinct words you have heard varies drastically depending on your parents socio-economic status and education. The answer should be to extend the SAT with an IQ test, those are robust to environmental factors as twin studies have shown. Maybe you can couple that with a subject specific aptitude test. But also there is largely no equality of opportunity, because you never had a chance to change your genetics in the first place.

> But also there is largely no equality of opportunity, because you never had a chance to change your genetics in the first place.

We are probably hundreds of years away from solving all other factors besides genetics, which have an influence on SAT (or whatever equivalent other countries have), so this doesn't seem like a huge problem right now.

We can talk about genetics again when we've fixed everything else.

Truth is, college admissions from Saratoga is a blood bath with so many over qualified, over worked, over stressed kids. If you are the oddball kid in a worse school and worse neighborhood and you're motivated enough to watch Khan Academy you are going stand out and do great, whether you end up at SJSU or Stanford.