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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]On the other hand, there might be lots of less advantaged kids who are more likely to find solutions to future problems because they are better at original thinking because they haven’t had everything handed to them by parents who are financially well off and/or focused on education.

I was the kid who was a NMF from a less advantaged family, so I know that kids like that need more support from the schools than kids who get plenty of support at home. As a society, it would be too bad to lose out on all that those kids can do in the future. 
[/quote]

I don't doubt that less advantaged kids can achieve a lot.
I was not wealthy growing up, if you want to argue about who grew up poorer, we can have that debate but I think I met the threshold for growing up poor.  
My family was on government assistance from time to time.
I know what government cheese, government peanut butter and government canned meat taste like.
I can tell you the denomination of a food stamp by its color.
But I also think that poor kids can meet objective measures of academic merit as well as anyone else.

There are three selective high schools in NYC whose alumni have won a ton of math and science prizes including 15 nobel prizes, a handful of wolf, field, abel, prizes in math, and a bunch of others.  
These schools range from 40% to 60% free/reduced lunch.  
Admissions to these schools is based on a single test.  
The SHSAT is more or less the same test that TJHSST used until recently.  
In this day and age of test prep, the population at these schools are significantly poorer than TJ and even more asian.

We know how to give preferences for poverty while preserving merit but we didn't do that at TJ because that was not the purpose of the change.  
The purpose of the change was to reduce the asian population and increase the population of kids of other skin colors.
If we tried to preserve preferences for poverty while preserving merit, we would have seen an even larger concentration of asians as poor asians take a disproportionate number of spots meant for poor kids.[/quote]

Are you sure about that? I thought the change was to address the rampant test buying and allow those who can't afford that a level playing field.[/quote]

That makes more sense. [b]The largest beneficiaries of the change in admissions were low-income Asian families.[/b][/quote]

People with means had gamed the system, so they had to make a change, but I was happy to hear that some who might otherwise not have this opportunity now do.[/quote]

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