The who is more privileged game is not a fun one to play.
Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors.
There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a male always more privileged than a non male? How do you weight one point of privilege vs another? It all started to feel very subjective. I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.
Even if it did happen, it would immediately become useless. What's the old adage? Once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.
Such a matrix would only become a goal for those wanting to get their kids into schools. I have no doubt at all, you'd get a cottage industry of counselors that would plan out how to best maximize your kids' privileged scores to get in.
Sell your house to a relative at X months before admissions, find an ancestor of Y race on our special website at Z months before submission, claim a disability of ABC and take a SAT/ACT/FGH test under that disability, etc. You'll have a score of III with Stanford, a score of JJJ with Harvard, and a score of LLL with your safety school. Yadda yadda yadda, and here's the percent chances for each school.
Hell, with AI and all this jazz, this won't even cost all that much and be the purview of the upper-middle class. You could likely just buy that service for under $100 by 2040.
For me, the goal wouldn't be to rank the oppressed against each other, but to provide resources for all those who need it.
I think of it less like a tournament and more like food stamps: below a certain income, food becomes difficult to afford, and aid is helpful (I was on food stamps for a short bit and really appreciated it). It doesn't really matter WHY their income is low, just that society can help them with food.
College aid is similar, except that admission seats aren't as easily fungible as tuition dollars. Same for job spots, I suppose.
Let's say you have 100 openings of something. A candidate would be scored across the board, mixing demographics with performance. 10 points for an essay. -3 for bad GPA. +5 for a bad zip code. +3 for being a woman. -6 for wealthy parents. Whatever. In that way all those factors could be considered.
But yes, the exact numbers would be difficult to arrive at. Maybe we could try to statistically model those based on their impact to lifetime earnings, updated every census or whatever. It wouldn't be easy. At all.
Is it legal? I don't know. But the law can change. More to your point, I'm not even sure if this is a GOOD or ethical idea. Just a thought for discussion.
> I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.
Probably not, but I heard from an acquaintance college admissions official that systems like this exist, and they are highly secretive. This is just one anecdote, so make of that what you will.
Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors.
There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a male always more privileged than a non male? How do you weight one point of privilege vs another? It all started to feel very subjective. I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.