To MAX

Vakavaka Pakapaka says because of the caste quota, the standards of elite schools in India have gone down. They are no more competitive.

You seem to be for affirmative action in admission to top schools in India but not when it comes to the selective schools in America.

Why?

What is wrong with the Hispanic lady who cleans the toilet in my workplace aspiring for her children to go to an Ivy league school?

Suppose her son gets 1950 on SAT. Given the lady's circumstance and social capital, is it not an achievement?

i never said i'm for the kind of affirmative action that prevails in india. limited economics based affirmative action is something that i could get behind. what riles me up in the US is legacy admissions. that gets my BP up.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:i never said i'm for the kind of affirmative action that prevails in india. limited economics based affirmative action is something that i could get behind. what riles me up in the US is legacy admissions. that gets my BP up.

That one is what the schools use to maintain influence, ensure they will continue to get big time donations, enabling them to encash their name to enjoy financial strength to maintain their name.

If you have connections to industrial houses, politicians (of any country), and average credentials you are in. Essay (20%) and legacy (another 20%) gives them enough weapons to give admission to anyone under the sun.

The endowments of some of these schools are as big as budgets of some small countries.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:i never said i'm for the kind of affirmative action that prevails in india. limited economics based affirmative action is something that i could get behind. what riles me up in the US is legacy admissions. that gets my BP up.

by and large, in private universities, especially those in the ivy league, the relatively small number of legacy admissions prompt wealthy people to contribute large amounts of money and other assets to the universities; it is these contributions that make up the bulk of the universities' endowments, which are then used to give scholarships to the relatively large number of bright students whose families can't afford the superior education that these universities provide. harvard's endowment is about $35 billion, and yale's, about $22 billion.

these are universities that were founded and fostered by people with lofty objectives, not using tax money. i don't believe that my children have a right to admission to or an education in them according to our criteria.

Rishi wrote:You seem to be for affirmative action in admission to top schools in India but not when it comes to the selective schools in America.

you may be confusing max with charvak who is strongly in favour of india's affirmative action which is largely caste-based. it's not surprising that you confuse one for the other these days.

Seriously speaking, GOI should open more IIT , IIMs and AIIMS which cater exclusively to dalits, p;ace the best teachers and pump in a lot of money setting up labs etc. They could bring in teachers from good schools from abroad.

I think this experiment will succeed in making those schools pretty good.

Rishi wrote:Seriously speaking, GOI should open more IIT , IIMs and AIIMS which cater exclusively to dalits, p;ace the best teachers and pump in a lot of money setting up labs etc. They could bring in teachers from good schools from abroad.

I think this experiment will succeed in making those schools pretty good.

not a good idea for more than one reason.

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

Rishi wrote:Seriously speaking, GOI should open more IIT , IIMs and AIIMS which cater exclusively to dalits, p;ace the best teachers and pump in a lot of money setting up labs etc. They could bring in teachers from good schools from abroad.

I think this experiment will succeed in making those schools pretty good.

not a good idea for more than one reason.

I think when Dalit kids are placed among other castes, they will be distracted by the caste issues whether real or perceived. It will hobble them in their efforts to reach their full potential. They will get depressed and angry and will not be able to focus on their studies.

Suppose GOI spends a billion dollar in setting up an IIT exclusively for dalit which has no Indian faculty. Everyone teacher is a non-Indian from places like Harvard, Stanford etc who demand the best from their students. Then there is no problem of caste discrimination issues about the teachers or the fellow students because the environment is set up that way.

Btw what are your reasons against it?

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:i never said i'm for the kind of affirmative action that prevails in india. limited economics based affirmative action is something that i could get behind. what riles me up in the US is legacy admissions. that gets my BP up.

by and large, in private universities, especially those in the ivy league, the relatively small number of legacy admissions prompt wealthy people to contribute large amounts of money and other assets to the universities; it is these contributions that make up the bulk of the universities' endowments, which are then used to give scholarships to the relatively large number of bright students whose families can't afford the superior education that these universities provide. harvard's endowment is about $35 billion, and yale's, about $22 billion.

these are universities that were founded and fostered by people with lofty objectives, not using tax money. i don't believe that my children have a right to admission to or an education in them according to our criteria.

i understand the reasons why legacy admissions exist, but there is something broken with the system when the george bushes of the world end up at yale.

legacy admissions are not always small in number. i don't know how things are at other ivies, but i remember reading about this one.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:i never said i'm for the kind of affirmative action that prevails in india. limited economics based affirmative action is something that i could get behind. what riles me up in the US is legacy admissions. that gets my BP up.

by and large, in private universities, especially those in the ivy league, the relatively small number of legacy admissions prompt wealthy people to contribute large amounts of money and other assets to the universities; it is these contributions that make up the bulk of the universities' endowments, which are then used to give scholarships to the relatively large number of bright students whose families can't afford the superior education that these universities provide. harvard's endowment is about $35 billion, and yale's, about $22 billion.

these are universities that were founded and fostered by people with lofty objectives, not using tax money. i don't believe that my children have a right to admission to or an education in them according to our criteria.

i understand the reasons why legacy admissions exist, but there is something broken with the system when the george bushes of the world end up at yale.

How else Harvard and Yale Lawyers and Business grads can occupy the most position in any administrations?

In my view....all these great schools - IVY Leagues, IITs and IIMs - are just as good as any of the most other good schools for most students. The great, brilliant profs help those few students who go after knowledge. For everything else, these schools are just student-recruitment centers that recruit great students to be outsourced to corporations, Government, etc...It is the environment of bringing all these students together that these schools offer. if one were to transplant a cohort of students and put them in Chimmichanga State in the same city, they will be just as good.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:i never said i'm for the kind of affirmative action that prevails in india. limited economics based affirmative action is something that i could get behind. what riles me up in the US is legacy admissions. that gets my BP up.

by and large, in private universities, especially those in the ivy league, the relatively small number of legacy admissions prompt wealthy people to contribute large amounts of money and other assets to the universities; it is these contributions that make up the bulk of the universities' endowments, which are then used to give scholarships to the relatively large number of bright students whose families can't afford the superior education that these universities provide. harvard's endowment is about $35 billion, and yale's, about $22 billion.

these are universities that were founded and fostered by people with lofty objectives, not using tax money. i don't believe that my children have a right to admission to or an education in them according to our criteria.

i understand the reasons why legacy admissions exist, but there is something broken with the system when the george bushes of the world end up at yale.

may i remind you that they were both presidents of the united states. they were not elected by yale alumni.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:legacy admissions are not always small in number. i don't know how things are at other ivies, but i remember reading about this one.

Most schools have spun off the endowment segment as separate corporations - for legal and business reasons. These "sub-corporations" have ENORMOUS clout over admissions. Very rarely admissions have the guts to say NO to a request/pressure from endowment.

IITs and the ivy leagues are not in the same league. not by any stretch of the imagination. get real. the average quality of faculty at the ivies is far superior to that of the IITs. the IITs have much more variability in faculty quality. i've had great teachers who were also great researchers, but also a fair number of horrible ones. for instance i completely taught myself the second math course - - the vector calculus stuff, divergence, curl, green's theorem etc. the lecturer sucked. i attended exactly one lecture that semester. i ended up with an A- while the kids who attended lectures regularly, ended up with far worse grades.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:IITs and the ivy leagues are not in the same league. not by any stretch of the imagination. get real. the average quality of faculty at the ivies is far superior to that of the IITs. the IITs have much more variability in faculty quality. i've had great teachers who were also great researchers, but also a fair number of horrible ones. for instance i completely taught myself the second math course - - the vector calculus stuff, divergence, curl, green's theorem etc. the lecturer sucked. i attended exactly one lecture that semester. i ended up with an A- while the kids who attended lectures regularly, ended up with far worse grades.

Okiee...let us get real now.

How many of THESE great faculties at IVY leagues are likely to teach your kids when they go to undergraduate class?

it will be a good idea to just walk across the river and check it out.

BTW, did u know that Subra Suresh will become the president of CMU ?

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:

BTW, did u know that Subra Suresh will become the president of CMU ?

very old news. knew it well before it was announced. and it's not just the faculty that make the experience great at the ivies. the IITs and much as i still have great affection for my alma mater, fall far far short of their potential.

Rishi wrote:Seriously speaking, GOI should open more IIT , IIMs and AIIMS which cater exclusively to dalits, p;ace the best teachers and pump in a lot of money setting up labs etc. They could bring in teachers from good schools from abroad.

I think this experiment will succeed in making those schools pretty good.

There is no reason for good teachers from anywhere to waste their time and effort in schools and colleges where most of the students have caste and religion based privileges, including in getting the admissions and stipends.

A person with 1950 SAT score who went to a mediocre high school in a ghetto and did not have the money to attend the Princeton review SAT training can catch up with his peers at Yale if he worked hard,

Rishi wrote:A person with 1950 SAT score who went to a mediocre high school in a ghetto and did not have the money to attend the Princeton review SAT training can catch up with his peers at Yale if he worked hard,

I agree 102%. Any system that helps unearth brilliance in neglected segments and encourage and promote them will be fantastic - irrespective of caste or religion.

In short, the needy should be helped in every way. I will include the poor muslim children to poor Brahmins and everyone in between who needs help in the form of environment, financial or academic help. While the well-to-do send their kids to the better schools and then arrange for help after schools, the poor send their children to any available school with whatever food is available and no after school help (homework, special coaching, motivation, etc...). These are the kids that deserve reservation.

Rishi wrote:
What is wrong with the Hispanic lady who cleans the toilet in my workplace aspiring for her children to go to an Ivy league school?

Suppose her son gets 1950 on SAT. Given the lady's circumstance and social capital, is it not an achievement?

I happened to sit next to exactly such a Hispanic lady on a train recently and we were exchanging notes - she is from DR of low means/wealth and has children of the same age as my own. She has had a hard life ever since she moved to this country, right around when I did, and while her daughter is a "straight A" student, I was wondering about what it would take for that girl to make the cut-

1. She was telling me about how the local Univ has reached out to her, offering SAT and general College prep classes during summer. In this country there are a lot of opportunities for those in the lower socio economic strata. There is a realization that there is not enough representation of these kids in colleges and concerted efforts are being made.
2. She lives in a neighborhood where it would have to be an effort on the family's part to rise above the narrow confines of day-to-day issues and become part of larger national conversations. They do not subscribe to Times or for that matter the Journal, listen to NPR or for that matter Fox News, and certainly the only avenues for broader intellectual enlightenment comes right from her school. Her parents, immigrants, are what I would classify as working poor - managing with discount club groceries and insanely hard work hours.

Unfortunately, she sits right on top of the left-side of normal curve of applicant pool and the only way for her to distinguish herself is to show awareness of her circumstances and be able to place it in the larger context of modern life. If she is able to take life lessons from the stories that she is exposed to, at school, and if she had a 'passionate' teacher who gave a damn, and this mythical Mister Hendrix tracked her progress through all four years of her life, visited her parents at home suggesting extracurriculars and mentored her, she may have a chance at peering outside her window and seeing ivy.

Muezzin-Bar'chu wrote:

Rishi wrote:
What is wrong with the Hispanic lady who cleans the toilet in my workplace aspiring for her children to go to an Ivy league school?

Suppose her son gets 1950 on SAT. Given the lady's circumstance and social capital, is it not an achievement?

2. She lives in a neighborhood where it would have to be an effort on the family's part to rise above the narrow confines of day-to-day issues and become part of larger national conversations. They do not subscribe to Times or for that matter the Journal, listen to NPR or for that matter Fox News, and certainly the only avenues for broader intellectual enlightenment comes right from her school. Her parents, immigrants, are what I would classify as working poor - managing with discount club groceries and insanely hard work hours.

Exactly....these kids have a hard time dealing after school hours - no place to stay, no help with school work to push them up, and not even a good decent dinner. Any day, a B-student from this segment is better than an A student from a privileged family.

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:

Muezzin-Bar'chu wrote:

Rishi wrote:
What is wrong with the Hispanic lady who cleans the toilet in my workplace aspiring for her children to go to an Ivy league school?

Suppose her son gets 1950 on SAT. Given the lady's circumstance and social capital, is it not an achievement?

2. She lives in a neighborhood where it would have to be an effort on the family's part to rise above the narrow confines of day-to-day issues and become part of larger national conversations. They do not subscribe to Times or for that matter the Journal, listen to NPR or for that matter Fox News, and certainly the only avenues for broader intellectual enlightenment comes right from her school. Her parents, immigrants, are what I would classify as working poor - managing with discount club groceries and insanely hard work hours.

Exactly....these kids have a hard time dealing after school hours - no place to stay, no help with school work to push them up, and not even a good decent dinner. Any day, a B-student from this segment is better than an A student from a privileged family.

Just curious about one thing.

Quite a few desi doctors have their kids going to schools like Columbia, UPenn etc. Some of these kids especially females are quite arrogant. How did they get in to those schools? Is it simply money?

I support reservations in India and affirmative action in the US. I know a lot more about reservations in India than I do about affirmative action in the US. My only exposure to affirmative action in the US was at my grad school, where I noticed the ridiculously severe under-representation of some American minority groups in my class. The reason: my public university was barred by a ballot initiative from using race as a financial aid criterion, while its private competitors attracted the high-profile minority candidates with lucrative scholarships.

The basic question here is: do you support preferential treatment of economically disadvantaged students as a means to level the playing field and correct for the advantage that their richer peers enjoyed? If you do, as most people say they do, then it is hard to argue against reservations or affirmative action.

Any researcher who uses statistical methods has to account for the likelihood and the impact of both false positives and false negatives in her research. These factors are also important in public policy. Any public policy intervention that seeks to level the playing field for poor kids needs minimize the sum of: (a) the total social damage from "rich kids taking advantage of the intervention," which I refer to as false positives and (b) the total social damage from "poor kids being denied the benefits of the intervention," which I refer to as false negatives.

The total social damage done, from false positives or false negatives, is a product of two factors: likelihood of occurrence and damage per individual occurrence. Now, let us apply this framework to reservations in India.

Less than 2% of Indian households file income tax returns. The overwhelming majority of those households are middle-class families whose income comes from salaries taxed at source by the employer; many of them file IT returns because they expect a refund on the high deductions on their Form 16 (analogous to W-2 in the US). Now, let us say by way of public policy principle that any reservations that target poor kids should only be available to the bottom half of the income distribution. We have about 48% of India's households that should not be eligible for those reservations but have no formal record of income. This means that almost half of Indian families can claim that their children qualify for reservations based on a falsified income certificate, which is easy to get in India. The other half is actually eligible, but has fewer resources to claim what is their due. That makes for an awful lot of false positives for a reservation system based on income. So this would render the intervention useless -- if 98% of the people are eligible in practice, that is not much of a quota. The likelihood of false negatives is not very high for a reservation system based on income.

Now consider the system based on caste with an exemption for the creamy layer -- the law in India today. There is a strong correlation between caste and income/wealth in India. The likelihood of false positives in this system is a lot lower. The majority of India's people live in the villages, and in the villages, everybody knows everybody's caste. It is practically difficult, and socially undesirable, for people from the "upper" castes to claim to be from a "lower" caste. Even in urban areas, there is a social stigma for the "upper" castes to style themselves "lower" caste. As long as caste remains the dominant social construct it is in Indian society, this social stigma to "lowering oneself" in the hierarchy will apply, and it will keep low the likelihood of false positives. As for the "lower" caste people who benefited from reservations in previous generations and are now upper-middle class, they are caught in the creamy layer exemption. A tiny fraction of wealthy "lower" caste business families do squeak through as false positives, but that is nowhere close to the 48% number mentioned above.

Under the caste-based system, there certainly are some false negatives: poor kids from "upper" castes who are denied the benefits of reservations. But the "upper" castes account for a minority of India's population, and those castes are typically wealthier than their "lower" caste peers. The percentage of really poor people among those "upper" castes is lower than the 48% number from the above discussion. So all said, a small fraction of India's population is likely to be in the bucket of false negatives with the caste-based system.

Now let us tackle damage-per-occurrence. In my personal opinion, it is more damaging to society if a rich "upper" caste kid takes advantage of income-based reservations meant for the poor, than if a poor "lower" caste kid is denied reservations meant for the poor because they are administered based on caste. The abuse of an income-based system by the "upper" castes would completely undermine it, as 98% of people would be eligible in practice. With the caste-based system, the poor "upper" caste kid, by virtue of his caste affiliation, has access to other social support structures beyond the government-sponsored education and employment, that his poor peers from "lower" castes do not. This, admittedly, is my own value judgment and I am open to considering other views on this.

So let us sum up the alternatives available to India.

System	Likelihood of false positives	Likelihood of false negatives	Damage to society per incident
Caste-based with creamy layer exemption	Small because of social stigma, and creamy-layer exemption	Small, because less than 10% of India's population is likely to be able to produce these false negatives	Moderate, as false positives have access to other societal advantages that their peers from "lower" castes do not
Income-based	Large, as ~48% of India's population is able to produce these false positives	Small because nobody will claim to earn more than they	High, as it perpetuates historical discrimination

Based on this, it ought to be clear that the caste-based system is superior -- for now -- to a hypothetical income-based system. What would change this? If tracking of income in India improves to the point where a lot lower than 48% of Indian families could pull off a false positive with an income-based system, that would make it less worrisome to me. At the same time, if the correlation between income and caste weakens to the point where the likelihood of false negatives in a caste-based system shoots up, I would advocate its termination. It may well be that both those things will come to pass in a few decades. But until that time comes, the current system is one that works reasonably well at addressing an incredibly difficult and complex public policy challenge.

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:Okiee...let us get real now.

How many of THESE great faculties at IVY leagues are likely to teach your kids when they go to undergraduate class?

it will be a good idea to just walk across the river and check it out.

at yale, all faculty members, including the seniormost professors are required to teach undergrads. that may be the case at princeton also, but most likely not at harvard. i know a yale alumna who majored in physics who took at least one undergrad course taught by the chairman of the physics department.

Jeremiah Mburuburu wrote:

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:Okiee...let us get real now.

How many of THESE great faculties at IVY leagues are likely to teach your kids when they go to undergraduate class?

it will be a good idea to just walk across the river and check it out.

at yale, all faculty members, including the seniormost professors are required to teach undergrads. that may be the case at princeton also, but most likely not at harvard. i know a yale alumna who majored in physics who took at least one undergrad course taught by the chairman of the physics department.

I dont know how and from where you deduced your facts (probably from your D).

I had a close friend at Yale - he fell out with the Dean (former Head of FDA - forgot the name) in the sciences. He taught ONE graduate course every FOURTH semester. Even that he would send his Post-doc to his class most of the time. To this day, I dont think he has ever stepped foot in an undergraduate class.

I stand by my statement - most profs dont teach the UG classes - except Senior courses in their specialty. At U Chicago, many profs do teach but some of them are better off not teaching to the the new minds. Then there are a few other difficulties in those "crown schools" that call for special approaches and advise to kids.