It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself.
Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.
Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.
> beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
> Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.
At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.
It makes sense to group people for education based on ability. If a low performer is in a class of high performers, one of two things will likely happen:
* the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities
* the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential
That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.
I remain stunned by the level of incompetence in university administration. The covid epidemic really shined some light on it for me. I have one child still in university, and the school still has no plan for what to do about the foreign study and foreign internship requirements for his degree program. Everyone is just on-hold and unable to graduate. We also continue to run into silly requirements to appear in-person, which requires flying him out and back. Basic stuff that seems obvious to me seems unsolvable to them. And they won't even admit it. The answer for everything is just that they "understand" and "are working on it".
I went to a middle tier undergrad and a top tier grad school. The difference was night and day in terms of rigor and general academic interest. I don't know that the profs were particularly better or worse at one school, but the student body was very, very different in terms of interest and ability, and that has a huge impact on the way you learn. I took a single writing class in undergrad. Most students were not capable of writing an argument and supporting it with evidence. No hyperbole, the basic reasoning and writing ability of the average student is appalling. I would strongly favor environments that cluster only demonstrated high ability students.
This is the single most important issue imo in modern higher education. It is fundamental to the success of our society that we can provide high quality education to all who want it.
If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students.
So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1]
It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space.
Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory.
[1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.
At my selective university, the vast majority of the value came from the students paying to attend rather than college itself. Some professors were brilliant, but others were completely useless and you basically had to learn by yourself or from your peers. Meanwhile, a large chunk of tuition dollars was going towards the construction of new buildings that end up being very underutilized.
Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities.
The way to get there, IMO, is a lot more freedom to experiment. Not just charters, but something closer to a startup culture.
A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own
B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids
C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate
D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.
E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.
This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.
So, you think that top schools having top faculty and educators has zero effect on educational outcomes? And somehow they only produce good outcomes because they select good students and that "most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have".
It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.
What selection criteria would you recommend for early indicator of ability than high school?
I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics).
I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random
This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).
Pros and cons like anything but one big pro of corralling all the most productive and intelligent people together is the network effect that can have. Big things can happen when you get a bunch of really smart people together that wouldn’t have happened if they were all dispersed.
What selection mechanism would you recommend for early indicator of ability than high school? I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent)
That's assuming random people are driven to excel in highly competitive environments and that going to university is a mostly academic and self-improvement pursuit and not just a diploma.
In the US, you can condition employment on the quality of the school someone went to, but it is much more difficult to condition it based on IQ or a standardized test of some kind.
We do not need to find this randomized-admission institution for your analysis. Just take an Ivy and several state universities of different rankings, and pick students with similar high-school backgrounds (top grades, similar family net worth, etc.). Such students of similar capability must exist, unless we think top universities admit all the top students and there is no one left for lower-rank schools.
Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.
We have too many smart people for capitalism in its current form to support. If you look for them, you will see artificial barriers erected throughout society to stymie real meritocracy.
Context: It's because the students admitted last year requested to defer starting until this year due to COVID, limiting the available space for new applicants.
Edit: Also exacerbated by more applicants this year, I suppose due to reduced entry requirements, again due to COVID.
Looking at the graph that they provided, it seems that admittance rate has been slowly dropping for a few years now. I'd expect it to bounce up above 4% next year due to the lack of deferring students, but I wonder if their admittance percentage will hit 3.98% or less through natural growth in the upcoming years.
Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel.
First of all, a major issue here is that we don't have enough good universities to accept all the talented kids applying. That holds true for high schools, etc. wherever there is contentious debate over "equity" or merit-based admissions. Just increase the number of good schools (which has not been done in proportion to population growth) and many things are solved.
Just like how you never hear people in countries with great broadband access complain about usage caps. That's a purely US (or other country) phenomenon when you have shitty supply of broadband. Increase the supply, competition, and problem solved.
Secondly, a question for those who feel that colleges have a duty to "shape our future generation leaders who should look like the people they represent". Tell me, for all the mental contortions, evaluations, interviews, processes to make flawed judgement calls on whether people "contribute by their diversity" to the student body, how different an outcome does that achieve over just using an objective test, and then admitting everyone above a certain bar?
These colleges receive enough applicants to admit 3-4 classes worth of valedictorians. Yet they seem to think their admissions scrutiny and processes make their classes a much better place than if they had a simpler process. Is that true? Judge people on skill and talent, for every type of academic program a university offers. Simple rules and processes allow people do creative things. Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged and worthy therefore of admissions.
I don't think they've tried serious alternatives, yet they believe these complicated admissions systems to be correct. And you look to other countries that have purely exam-based admissions, yet they are not producing classes full of socially inept, non-contributing, non-leaders.
Maybe it's worth a rethink. Or some new kinds of institutions.
> First of all, a major issue here is that we don't have enough good universities to accept all the talented kids applying.
Yes, we do. We really do.
There are a surprisingly high number of marginal admits at elite schools who slow down the education of the really smart students (at times).
Some of these marginal admits are there for what is deemed a good reason (e.g., recruited athlete), but others are just filling in the class. These folks are what I call “look alikes”, because they all look alike academically/intellectually — they study hard, jump through hoops skillfully, but are largely incapable of individual initiative or independent thought. A very small number of these folks transition into interesting thinkers while at school, but most don’t.
The really smart kids often go into the smart majors that have early hard courses that weed out the weaker students, and these weaker students find themselves in majors that cater to students who are not at the top of the intellectual ladder at their given school.
As a simple example, how many math departments at elite schools are complaining that they have too many really good students such that they can’t handle the load in upper division classes. The answer rounds to zero.
> Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged
If you think this is how the vast majority of elite school admits get in, then you are woefully mistaken.
Indeed, I don't think there's a social or economic reason why higher education should be a scarce good. Likewise health care.
There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities.
The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty.
I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.
You are lying. You know most students at top schools aren't capable of doing serious scholarly work or engineering. There are more than enough spots for every good student. State schools like UT Austin have 20,000 students who can barely handle freshman level science and math.
If you judge people only on skills and talent, you will surely further stratify society.
Who has the most advantages to succeed in that kind of environment? The rich. Because they have the most resources and likely the most well raised and educated kids.
It blows my mind that a record-low acceptance rate is held up as an achievement, and not a structural failure. Why is the metric not "we are able to educate X% of students who meet this well-defined bar"? There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible. And they do that with substantially fewer resources than many of these Ivies. Why, as a society, do we tolerate universities selling "exclusivity" instead of education?
A low acceptance rate just means either there were more applications than usual or fewer places than usual.
A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications.
> There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible
I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.
Parsing through 37,601 (and accepting only 1500) applications without standardized testing sounds incredibly difficult.
If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
> If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof.
If I knew a teenager in this situation, I'd emphasize that there is a large "quasi-random" component to admission to these types of school.
What I mean is that the number of incredibly talented applicants _rejected_ by Princeton and Harvard is probably as large as the number of admissions.
I know someone who is _tenured_ in the physics department @ a HYPS school. He was an undergrad (and grad student) @ Harvard. He once told me that if he applied as an undergraduate today, he'd probably have a 50/50 shot at getting in.
I can't imagine standardized testing being anything but a low pass filter for these schools. Roughly 2 million students take the SAT every year, which means 100,000 scores in the top 5%; 20,000 in the top 1%. Whittling down 20,000 high scores to 1500 isn't any easier.
> Parsing through 37,601 (and accepting only 1500) applications without standardized testing sounds incredibly difficult.
While the task is daunting, it’s not quite as bad as you think when well over half of the applications are almost instant rejections.
> If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
It’s quality not quantity. So many people miss this point.
When looking at acceptance rates of Ivies, it's good to remember that the concept of a "reach school" that counselors push on students means that almost every kid is applying to some school they are not really qualified to get into. These disproportionately end up being top schools like Princeton and Harvard. If you're going to reach, why not really reach? Is the chance of getting into Princeton 4%? No, if you're well qualified to get in, the chance is much higher. If you're not qualified to get in, the chance is 0%. Average it out and you get the 4%-8%.
School counselors (at least those that are good, and care) are in kind of a tough spot. If they are realistic with kids about what they are qualified to do after high school, they catch shit from parents about "crushing dreams" and if they are not they create false hope by encouraging average students to do things like apply to Harvard or Princeton with some kind of message like "you can't get in if you don't apply."
More broadly most applicants apply to several schools. If there are as many spots as applicants and each applicants apply to k schools, you could go as low as 1/k average admittance percentage (rates will be higher when colleges accept applicants that do not come: you could have 100% rate after all). With k = 12, you're at about a 8% lower bound for the average college.
For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low.
If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.
There seems to be a trend toward students submitting ever more college applications. It's not uncommon for seniors to apply to a dozen schools or more, of which perhaps 1/3 are unlikely to accept.
So my question is, what is the larger context of applicants this year? Has a year of COVID sequestration altered the numbers? Are elite schools admitting fewer students? Has the total number of applications gone up? Is each student sending out more applications? Are kids applying to more elite schools than in years past?
One bare statistic really doesn't tell a useful story.
I've always thought that the French model for top-tier engineering schools was cruel but it might have some merits.
You essentially study for two years post high-school to take a competitive exam, your ranking in this exam determines where you can go (first place chooses, then the second place gets to pick etc.) You suffer for two years but at the end it's based mostly on merit.
Obviously it's not entirely based on merit as privileged kids have a huge head start but you at least get a chance to catch up during those two years.
I went through program like this (french-speaking country). My concern after doing those two years are:
1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US.
2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program.
3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life!
4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!!
5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).
Last year I made an app for a professor that tells you your chances of getting into Harvard based on your high school circumstances. The results are pretty crazy: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/
Wow, if you have a perfect SAT, perfect grades, and are of a race which is more likely to get in, you still only have a ~50% chance. It really seems like a lot of these admissions are purely random, unless you're a legacy kid or football player.
I'm not American (Canada), and I beat myself up over not applying in the US, because of intangibles like "networking" and "small class sizes". Now I'm glad I didn't, this seems fucked up.
As a long-ago grad of one of these fancy-schmancy schools with vast endowments and big revenue streams from application fees, I have this question, and complaint:
Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections.
They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population.
So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity.
In this particular year, the low number is due to the deferrals from last year and (most likely) reduced requirements in the admissions process.
That said, over the long term, the number of Hail Mary applications is most likely the bulk of the gradual increase in applications. There are a very large number of applications to elite schools that effectively zero chance of being accepted,
and that number seems to be increasing over time.
To be fair, I do think that the overall quality of admitted student is increasing as well, but the improvements are largely seen in the marginal admits rather than the core admits.
Admission rates may or may not be a long term indicator of anything, but it doesn't take an indicator to know that elite-exclusive college has been getting more exclusive. That aside, a lot is covid related.
On-campus education is a good that has been underproduced... this is excess demand. Maybe we'll be graduating fewer doctors, nurses, and such than expected over the coming decade
> but it doesn't take an indicator to know that elite-exclusive college has been getting more exclusive.
Or maybe there are just a lot more “reach school” applications.
I agree that the overall applicant pool is improving, but it is not improving nearly as much as the admissions numbers alone suggest. The number of applications from applicants who are very unlikely to be admitted are increasing substantially.
Scott Galloway once proposed taxing the endowments of universities that don’t expand their accepted admissions pool in accordance with population growth at a higher rate.
The logic being that these universities are essentially providers of a “Veblen Good” (elite, exclusive status in society) and should be taxed as such.
I wonder how this impacts lower-tier schools. My n=1 data point: my child just received a rejection notice from a middle-tier out-of-state university. Top test scores, top of her class, International Baccalaureate (IB). Obviously not a lot of activities.
I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.
I'd be curious to know more, since 'top' means different things to different folks. Is 'top' 1480 SAT or 1580? If your child is at the top of an IB high school, that is certainly impressive in its own right.
One thing I would note is that some schools 'manage' their acceptances in order to keep their yield numbers looking good. That is, they may have determined that your child was overqualified for their school and very unlikely to come. They'd rather reject/wait-list applicants like this because then their yield numbers (percent of accepted students who matriculate) look better.
As a prof, I'm terrified of the exploding enrollment in CS. My 2021 enrollment for a juniors/seniors course is up 70% from recent years and still growing.
Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.
I’m not sure what the leadership of your department and university want your enrollment to be, but a very tough (reasonable, but tough) required weeder class early in the CS sequence will clean out the people who like the idea of being a CS major/grad more than the actual reality of being a CS major.
This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level of engagement with students (versus classroom management and handling weak students).
College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions.
Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.
Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.
Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).
Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.
The problem with objectivity is that "good high schools" tend to be cram schools for admission to prestige colleges. Not to mention the admissions consultants who will tell a student what to do to maximize their chances for a target school.
THE FOLLOWING IS MADE UP AND IS NOT ADMISSIONS ADVICE: The consultant says "Harvard, help rebuild a clinic in El Salvador, but Yale, tutor poor kids in Oakland instead, be sure it's Oakland, the admissions committee has never heard of Richmond."
Also geography. I'm sure that Princeton could fill their entire incoming class with students from one or two zip codes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for example. They don't want to do that, so they must specifically spread out admissions.
Considering the school: Suppose a kid from let's say Gunn High School in Palo Alto, whose parents are a surgeon and a Stanford professor, takes only two AP classes. Hmm, maybe just a doofus who will bust out of Princeton within the first year.
Am I the only one who hates it when headlines use the phrase "X admits Y"? It always frames the story in a certain way regardless of the actually context.
So when we remove the legacies and school fund donators (roughly half) - about 40 to 50 percent of the class, athletes (affirmative action for rich whites with relatively lower credentials and scores) - about 10-20 percent of the class, and regular affirmative action ( about 15 percent of the class and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos). The remainder is the group based on traditional credentials.
The academic reputation of these schools is disproportionately from that remainder group.
The rest of the world just has an exam system. Interesting way of comparing the systems.
Legacy certainly gives you an advantage, but I think people also discount the fact that if you are the child of an Ivy grad, you are perhaps more likely to go to a top-tier school of your own merits as well.
I say that as an obviously biased Harvard legacy, who also got into other Ivies without legacy, had a 1600 SAT, etc. We never donated anything and I never intend to, we were on financial aid, but my dad did happen to go, and I'm sure it did give me an advantage. I am less sure that there is no chance I would have gotten in without it.
It is really uncomfortable to see how much in life depends on the choice of university and how much they have a say in arbitrarily selecting their students.
It would really be much better if lots of activities could be decoupled from universities instead of making them mini-nations where people live, find friends, do extracurriculares and everything else.
>> and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos
Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
endisneigh|4 years ago
Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.
Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.
beforeolives|4 years ago
How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
slibhb|4 years ago
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.
At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.
dolni|4 years ago
* the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities
* the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential
That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.
tyingq|4 years ago
klmadfejno|4 years ago
nvarsj|4 years ago
If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students.
So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1]
It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space.
Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory.
[1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.
Aunche|4 years ago
Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities.
(742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University
brightball|4 years ago
A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own
B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids
C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate
D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.
E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.
This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.
titzer|4 years ago
It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.
mgh2|4 years ago
I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics).
I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)
silicon2401|4 years ago
This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).
zkid18|4 years ago
outlace|4 years ago
offtop5|4 years ago
If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.
mgh2|4 years ago
Bancakes|4 years ago
1980phipsi|4 years ago
warkdarrior|4 years ago
Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
insert_coin|4 years ago
Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.
option|4 years ago
debacle|4 years ago
happytoexplain|4 years ago
Edit: Also exacerbated by more applicants this year, I suppose due to reduced entry requirements, again due to COVID.
jdhn|4 years ago
hkmurakami|4 years ago
Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel.
Disclaimer: Princeton alumnus.
nunez|4 years ago
supernova87a|4 years ago
Just like how you never hear people in countries with great broadband access complain about usage caps. That's a purely US (or other country) phenomenon when you have shitty supply of broadband. Increase the supply, competition, and problem solved.
Secondly, a question for those who feel that colleges have a duty to "shape our future generation leaders who should look like the people they represent". Tell me, for all the mental contortions, evaluations, interviews, processes to make flawed judgement calls on whether people "contribute by their diversity" to the student body, how different an outcome does that achieve over just using an objective test, and then admitting everyone above a certain bar?
These colleges receive enough applicants to admit 3-4 classes worth of valedictorians. Yet they seem to think their admissions scrutiny and processes make their classes a much better place than if they had a simpler process. Is that true? Judge people on skill and talent, for every type of academic program a university offers. Simple rules and processes allow people do creative things. Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged and worthy therefore of admissions.
I don't think they've tried serious alternatives, yet they believe these complicated admissions systems to be correct. And you look to other countries that have purely exam-based admissions, yet they are not producing classes full of socially inept, non-contributing, non-leaders.
Maybe it's worth a rethink. Or some new kinds of institutions.
csa|4 years ago
Yes, we do. We really do.
There are a surprisingly high number of marginal admits at elite schools who slow down the education of the really smart students (at times).
Some of these marginal admits are there for what is deemed a good reason (e.g., recruited athlete), but others are just filling in the class. These folks are what I call “look alikes”, because they all look alike academically/intellectually — they study hard, jump through hoops skillfully, but are largely incapable of individual initiative or independent thought. A very small number of these folks transition into interesting thinkers while at school, but most don’t.
The really smart kids often go into the smart majors that have early hard courses that weed out the weaker students, and these weaker students find themselves in majors that cater to students who are not at the top of the intellectual ladder at their given school.
As a simple example, how many math departments at elite schools are complaining that they have too many really good students such that they can’t handle the load in upper division classes. The answer rounds to zero.
> Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged
If you think this is how the vast majority of elite school admits get in, then you are woefully mistaken.
analog31|4 years ago
There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities.
The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty.
I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.
ryan93|4 years ago
kiba|4 years ago
Who has the most advantages to succeed in that kind of environment? The rich. Because they have the most resources and likely the most well raised and educated kids.
finexplained|4 years ago
beojan|4 years ago
A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications.
> There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible
I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.
purple_ferret|4 years ago
If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
busyant|4 years ago
If I knew a teenager in this situation, I'd emphasize that there is a large "quasi-random" component to admission to these types of school.
What I mean is that the number of incredibly talented applicants _rejected_ by Princeton and Harvard is probably as large as the number of admissions.
I know someone who is _tenured_ in the physics department @ a HYPS school. He was an undergrad (and grad student) @ Harvard. He once told me that if he applied as an undergraduate today, he'd probably have a 50/50 shot at getting in.
nemothekid|4 years ago
csa|4 years ago
While the task is daunting, it’s not quite as bad as you think when well over half of the applications are almost instant rejections.
> If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
It’s quality not quantity. So many people miss this point.
abledon|4 years ago
jplr8922|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
basically, people educate themselves because it looks good, not because you learn usefull stuff. Thoughts?
ModernMech|4 years ago
I think PG said something similar with respect to the chance of getting accepted to YC. Or maybe it wasn't PG and I'm thinking of this: https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y...
throwawayboise|4 years ago
jean_tta|4 years ago
For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low.
If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.
randcraw|4 years ago
So my question is, what is the larger context of applicants this year? Has a year of COVID sequestration altered the numbers? Are elite schools admitting fewer students? Has the total number of applications gone up? Is each student sending out more applications? Are kids applying to more elite schools than in years past?
One bare statistic really doesn't tell a useful story.
jean-malo|4 years ago
You essentially study for two years post high-school to take a competitive exam, your ranking in this exam determines where you can go (first place chooses, then the second place gets to pick etc.) You suffer for two years but at the end it's based mostly on merit.
Obviously it's not entirely based on merit as privileged kids have a huge head start but you at least get a chance to catch up during those two years.
chakerb|4 years ago
1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US.
2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program.
3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life!
4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!!
5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).
granshaw|4 years ago
908B64B197|4 years ago
Personal interests? Projects? Nope. It's all a waste of time compared to min-maxing points for the admission test.
wkoury|4 years ago
HDMI_Cable|4 years ago
I'm not American (Canada), and I beat myself up over not applying in the US, because of intangibles like "networking" and "small class sizes". Now I'm glad I didn't, this seems fucked up.
jnwatson|4 years ago
OliverJones|4 years ago
Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections.
They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population.
So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity.
</rant>
CheezeIt|4 years ago
csa|4 years ago
That said, over the long term, the number of Hail Mary applications is most likely the bulk of the gradual increase in applications. There are a very large number of applications to elite schools that effectively zero chance of being accepted, and that number seems to be increasing over time.
To be fair, I do think that the overall quality of admitted student is increasing as well, but the improvements are largely seen in the marginal admits rather than the core admits.
dalbasal|4 years ago
On-campus education is a good that has been underproduced... this is excess demand. Maybe we'll be graduating fewer doctors, nurses, and such than expected over the coming decade
csa|4 years ago
Or maybe there are just a lot more “reach school” applications.
I agree that the overall applicant pool is improving, but it is not improving nearly as much as the admissions numbers alone suggest. The number of applications from applicants who are very unlikely to be admitted are increasing substantially.
pratik661|4 years ago
The logic being that these universities are essentially providers of a “Veblen Good” (elite, exclusive status in society) and should be taxed as such.
jnwatson|4 years ago
I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.
gnicholas|4 years ago
One thing I would note is that some schools 'manage' their acceptances in order to keep their yield numbers looking good. That is, they may have determined that your child was overqualified for their school and very unlikely to come. They'd rather reject/wait-list applicants like this because then their yield numbers (percent of accepted students who matriculate) look better.
el_benhameen|4 years ago
I’m sorry about your kid’s rejection letter. Larger societal trends aside, that’s not a fun experience.
jean_tta|4 years ago
Two more interesting metrics would be:
* how many applicants admitted actually enroll (and not go to some other college)
* related, bu what is the "rank" of the last admitted applicant: how far do they need to reach to fill their spots?
azhenley|4 years ago
Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.
csa|4 years ago
This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level of engagement with students (versus classroom management and handling weak students).
unknown|4 years ago
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unknown|4 years ago
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flowerlad|4 years ago
Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.
Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.
Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).
Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
Excerpts:
UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.
So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.
JJMcJ|4 years ago
THE FOLLOWING IS MADE UP AND IS NOT ADMISSIONS ADVICE: The consultant says "Harvard, help rebuild a clinic in El Salvador, but Yale, tutor poor kids in Oakland instead, be sure it's Oakland, the admissions committee has never heard of Richmond."
Also geography. I'm sure that Princeton could fill their entire incoming class with students from one or two zip codes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for example. They don't want to do that, so they must specifically spread out admissions.
Considering the school: Suppose a kid from let's say Gunn High School in Palo Alto, whose parents are a surgeon and a Stanford professor, takes only two AP classes. Hmm, maybe just a doofus who will bust out of Princeton within the first year.
wnevets|4 years ago
mewse-hn|4 years ago
1cvmask|4 years ago
The academic reputation of these schools is disproportionately from that remainder group.
The rest of the world just has an exam system. Interesting way of comparing the systems.
whimsicalism|4 years ago
Legacy certainly gives you an advantage, but I think people also discount the fact that if you are the child of an Ivy grad, you are perhaps more likely to go to a top-tier school of your own merits as well.
I say that as an obviously biased Harvard legacy, who also got into other Ivies without legacy, had a 1600 SAT, etc. We never donated anything and I never intend to, we were on financial aid, but my dad did happen to go, and I'm sure it did give me an advantage. I am less sure that there is no chance I would have gotten in without it.
LudwigNagasena|4 years ago
It would really be much better if lots of activities could be decoupled from universities instead of making them mini-nations where people live, find friends, do extracurriculares and everything else.
huitzitziltzin|4 years ago
Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
908B64B197|4 years ago
I guess the hours of training don't count.
> mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos
I'd be curious to see stats on the number of kids of Brazilian/Mexican and Nigerian millionaires (in US dollars).
blue5|4 years ago
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blue6|4 years ago
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