Thursday, April 12, 2007

Genius

Aw man. Every now and then you find something so totally academically brilliant you want to share it with everybody. Er, well, I do, at least. I just finished Joseph Soares' The Power of Privilege, and there is this table on page 184 that is pure genius. I wanted to share it with you, but the data appendix here does not present it so easily (and not even comprehensibly for those not well-versed in regression analyses). You'll just have to take my word for it. A totally nontechnical summary would go something like this: The public middle-class belief about what it takes to succeed in the most elite institutions, which are assumed to be desirable, do not coincide with the actual characteristics required to be admitted. And we can prove it with statistics.

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