There are claims that the Catalan numbers were actually first discovered in the 1730′s by a mongolain mathematician named Minggatu. For example, see
http://i-wasan.jp/seki/abstract/Luo_abstract.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minggatu

“Western Europe, of course, has inexpensive education, but is misleading as an example, since most universities are public and tend to be equal in funding and opportunities (within each country). Also, things are slowly changing. But in Eastern Europe, the universities are often very different in quality and offered majors, while still inexpensive enough to allow students to ignore parents’ advice and enjoy several years of travel and self-discovery. Occasionally, a foreign born celebrity laments on the lack of that in America, but is never taken seriously. Too bad.”

It is then a curious fact that in Eastern Europe (my experience comes from Poland, but I’d guess it’s similar elsewhere) this sort of pre-university self-discovery is typically *not* the case. Very few people consider alternatives to going to university straight from high school (although probably freshman students are more mature than their counterparts in the US). Of course, after a couple of years some of them drop out, some discover that university is not really their thing etc., but generally going to university and then wondering what to do with one’s life is more or less a default choice. This is may be considered somewhat puzzling, since nowadays getting higher education does not guarantee decent employment, as it used to do a couple of decades ago.

Thanks for an insightful post. I especially like the final recommendation to use less overt regulation of the admission process and at the same time make it completely transparent.

Note, however, that this makes sense not only when it comes to discrimination, affirmative action etc., but also e.g. in the case of grad school admission, where presumably this sort of prejudice is less of an issue. One thing that was annoying to me (and not only to me) when applying to grad school is how little actual information one has, regarding what is valued in the applicants by the admissions committee, what sort of people can expect to get where (e.g. “I have 2 publications in journal X, GPA Y, participated in Z and W, recommendations for profs Alpha and Beta – would university Q be likely to accept me or not?”) and so on. Lack of reliable information about one’s chances to get admitted turns the admission process to some extent into a broken lottery, where you can apply to however many places you want, but you don’t have any estimate of your winning chances.

Making this process transparent (i.e. publishing CVs and research statements of admitted candidates, of course probably edited if someone doesn’t want to make their data public) would be a welcome remedy for this problem, although probably unlikely to actually get implemented.

Consider an alternative position – GRE is a basically a money-making scheme and should be ditched altogether. How would life look like after the revolution?

My impression is that the marginal value of GRE results is negligible (I have no experience with handling graduate admissions, though, so I might be simply wrong). If someone does well on GRE, it adds nothing to their application as it gives no competitive advantage over other applicants with similar scores. On the other hand, if someone fails GRE badly, they probably wouldn’t be admitted anyway. If they don’t have basic mathematical competence as tested by GRE, they most likely won’t be able to obtain recommendation letters (and other “application paraphernalia”) required to get into a prestigious program. Is there any conceivable case where GRE makes a vital difference, e.g. being admitted versus not admitted?

One could argue that GRE results make it easier to assess international applicants, quality of whose undergraduate programs might not always be clear to the admission committee. But again, if someone’s undergraduate program is so weak that they couldn’t get a good GRE score, would they stand a chance of getting admitted anyway? Also, notice that there are reasonably prestigious universities in North America that don’t require GRE (e.g. Toronto or Waterloo, math departments at least). If their graduate students are weaker than, say, grad students at Berkeley or MIT, I’m pretty sure it’s not because of lack of GRE, but simply because exceptional students go to more prestigious places. Not to mention that GRE doesn’t exist in Europe and grad programs there seem to be having problem with that.

I don’t claim that GRE adds zero value to the admission process. However, its value seems, at least to me, not worth the price. Graduate applications can already be a drain on one’s pocket (esp. if one applies to a dozen of schools and/or is an international applicant), why make it even more expensive with a test that provides relatively little information?

Marcin Kotowski