Sure. The adversity score looks at things like the crime rate of the neighborhood you grew up in. That neighborhood is (primarily) a function of two things: Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued. Some parents work really hard and pinch every penny to devote resources to their kid's education. Scoring kids based on adversity partially mitigates those efforts for the purpose of getting into college.
> Your parents income level, and their ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood. The second thing is what's being de-valued.
So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right? How well you are able to compete for a slot in college should depend on who your parents are?
> So, you're saying that people who have the misfortune to have parents who can't do those things for them should suffer a handicap, right?
Yes, for the reasons that I outlined. If you don't reward kids for their parents investment, their parents won't invest, and that will be worse for everyone.
If you spending 1 hour or 10 hours teaching your kids at night makes no difference to their life outcomes, which will you choose?
This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.
There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
> This line of argumentation falls flat to me because the kids that are better educated by their parents will undoubtedly have better lifelong outcomes, regardless of what college it enables them to get into.
Sure that may be true in relative terms. But at the margin, decreased reward -> decreased investment.
> There's a lot more to success in life than what college you go to. Going to Harvard is pretty worthless if you haven't even been set up with the skills to be able to graduate, for instance -- which the kid with highly invested parents is more likely to have.
That sounds like something that could be true, it just isn't. A Harvard degree is mostly about signaling. Once you are accepted to Harvard, you're nearly guaranteed to graduate (the graduation rate is 97.5%). Once you've gotten in, you're set. A huge number of jobs care more about marketing their ivy league staff than the actual skill output of that staff. You can do extremely well with zero talent and a Harvard degree. Obviously having both is better, but the Harvard degree itself confers tremendous value on anyone who has it, even if that person has no real skills or intelligence.
Now suddenly having dedicated parents and high-quality education is not a reward in itself. Why be king of a minor gold hill, if it cannot entitle you to rule a mountain, am I right?
The kid who gets a better education is still better off. High school isn't just a means to an end of going to college; you're learning lots of valuable things while you go there, that will help you for the rest of your life. And you're also being set up for better success in college because of that foundation.
To be clear then, you're not actually talking about quality of education (tutoring, robotics teams, mock trial, great teachers, enrichment activities, science museum trips, history competitions). As you say, it's "ability to prioritize what income they do have to make sure you're in a good neighborhood". Your primary problem with this, then,is that it devalues the ability to move into rich neighborhoods.
How does the ability to move into a rich neighborhood correlate with college success? I teach math, so that would be a great place to give an example.
My point is this: parents have limited resources. They can devote those resources to things like: nice cars, fancy meals, vacations...or, they can devote them to educating their kids. Asian families notoriously prize devoting every last resource they can to educating their kids. That is a really great thing for society.
However, the adversity score policy being proposed here would blunt the impact of that resource allocation. When you blunt the return to an investment, you get less of that investment. If those same Asian families cannot improve their kids chances by making those sacrifices, then they have no reason to make those sacrifices.
