
Gladwell: Getting In, The social logic of Ivy League admissions - frisco
http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html
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brandnewlow
I was an admissions officer at Princeton 4 years ago when this came out. It
caused a bit of a stir in the office.

Here's the best bit, in my opinion:

"But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not
sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an
exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and
they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that
experience."

~~~
ajju
Do you know if this is this also true for gradschool admissions? (even
business schools?)

~~~
brandnewlow
I have no direct experience there.

But think about a few things. There's a general sense of what an undergraduate
education looks like, 4 years, prerequisites followed by picking a major, etc.

"Grad school," on the other hand, is kind of meaningless. Is it a master's
program? PhD? Is it in a hard science? English? It it in a trade a la
journalism?

So my assumption is that every program is different and every school does it
differently for grad programs. They're small and weird enough that they have
to.

I do think there's a lot more faculty involvement in grad school admissions. I
also think that master's programs are much, much easier to get into than
people suspect. I went to the one of the top journalism schools in the
country, and as far as I could tell, it had about a 50% admission rate.
50%!!!!!

~~~
scott_s
There's a perverse relationship between Master's and PhD programs in the same
department.

A PhD student is an investment: they will crank out papers with the school's
name on it, they will carry around the school's name for the rest of their
academic career, and their projects are more likely to bring in grant money.

Master's students are shorter term, don't go into as much depth, so there's
less opportunity for papers and grants. They're less likely to be in academic
circles after graduation, so the school's name doesn't get promoted.

Funding for Master's and PhD students comes from the same pool, so in many
cases, getting into a PhD program can be easier than a Master's program in the
same department.

~~~
blasdel
Masters programs are often used to print money for the department, especially
for industries that have adopted the degree as an auto-salary-boosting
credential. You end up with a lot of vocational students that are treating it
as an investment, which is entirely counter to the aims of an academic
graduate program.

The absolute worst are Masters in Education, followed by MBAs, with evening CS
Masters programs trailing far behind.

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tokenadult
What do all of you hear about QuestBridge

<http://www.questbridge.org/index.html>

in this regard? It appears that there is an effort now by colleges to look
more proactively for another kind of prospective student.

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karl11
One of my professors, at an ivy league school no less, mentioned how he thinks
admissions would get the same quality student body if they admitted every
fifth candidate, as long as they didn't tell anyone they were doing things
that way. I'm inclined to agree.

~~~
unalone
I'm certain that at the very least that would make a lot of applicants feel
better about themselves.

Our valedictorian spent 12 years of her life doing everything she could to be
a "Yale candidate." She took classes she didn't like, extracurriculars she
didn't like, just to fit to this billing. When she got rejected it was a
pretty tragic week for her.

~~~
yters
Yeah, life must suck for all the many, many kids whose childhoods are
completely erradicated for a remote shot at something that people only
consider valuable because people have to dedicate their lives for even a
remote shot at it. The icing on the cake is that those who don't dedicate
their lives to getting in probably have a better chance of getting in.

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wallflower
"As the number of applicants has soared in recent years, premier schools admit
as few as 1 in 10 students, a far more selective rate compared with a
generation ago. To make room for an academically borderline development case,
a top college typically rejects _nine_ _other_ applicants, many of whom might
have greater intellectual potential."

[http://www.projo.com/education/content/projo_20060917_brown9...](http://www.projo.com/education/content/projo_20060917_brown917.327aa8d.html)

~~~
brandnewlow
That's not how it works, though. The development case is getting in so the
school can pay the piper. If you don't admit those kids, then you don't have a
kickass school that everyone wants to go to. Think of it as a reality tax.

------
Raplh
Caltech and Swarthmore (conflict of interest notice: I have degrees from both)
are luxury brands with good success (as brands measured by endowment). They
are quite different from the ivies as described by Gladwell.

I was always surprised that Caltech had the highest SATs of entering students:
surely Harvard, Princeton, etc. had the ability to outdraw Caltech. Now I
understand it: highest SATs is part of Caltech's luxury brand but not that of
the ivies, just as high (er) performance is BMW but not Mercedes, or
Lamborghini but not Rolls Royce.

Another feature of Admissions that Gladwell doesn't mention in this article is
one I discovered when reviewing 400 applicants a year for perhaps 15 spots in
the Electrical Engineering PhD program at University of Rochester. Your job is
to create a great department, NOT to find the 15 most deserving of the 400. My
own evolution on the graduate admissions committee was from poring over the
details of hundreds of applications, to using numerical screens to bring
myself down to perhaps 60 that I would look at in some details. One of the
great things about having so many applicants is I could afford to be wrong
about some of my filter metrics. Perhaps limiting myself to 4 or 5
universities in China (for Chinese applicants) was not necessary, but having
done so I still had 10X as many good applicants as we could admit.

Is interpreting the admissions job as creating a great university rather than
"fairly" picking the top applicants a feature or a bug? On reflection, I think
it is clearly a feature. If you were hiring for a startup you would instantly
recognize this approach to your selection process as the only one that vaguely
made sense. Why would it be different when trying to create quality at older
bigger places? But the kicker that makes it a sure thing as the right policy
is this: it is IMPOSSIBLE to identify the best few % of a large pool of
excellent applicants. When of two policy choices, one is impossible, it is
likely it is not the optimum.

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screwperman
I'm aware that there was a discussion about the other extreme on HN a month
ago -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257> \-- but I need to vent off
a little. Forgive me if I go off on a tangent.

I've recently graduated from a high school in India and I haven't spent a day
thinking about how idiotic the education system is here. I wish I could have
been a part of a culture that encouraged well-roundedness and recognized
passionate kids, rather than one that exclusively rewarded academic
performance. Having spent some time at an elementary school both in the US and
in India, I can assure you that there is a great disparity in pedagogy even at
that level.

My school wouldn't give a rat's ass about those who didn't get awesome grades.
And doing so required one to allocate a disproportionate amount of time to
rote learning. I would always rather spend time hacking (and perhaps
slacking), like I have being doing ever since I was 8.

It's hilarious to see what gets passed for extracurricular activities here.
All "club presidents" are just required to set up a 15 minute inter-house quiz
containing 10 or so questions.

For four straight years, I was never picked by my teachers to be
president/secretary of the computer club, even though I was known by my peers
as "the comp guy", and had won competitions, etc., etc.. Some four random
sycophants who got better grades than we were chosen instead. The shit really
hit the fan last year, and my parents decided to talk to the principal about
this. The principal was overly defensive, and said the faculty was looking for
"leadership qualities" (for conducting a stupid quiz, yeah right). Of course,
they never did anything in the first place to create these "leadership
qualities". A month later, during a parent-teacher meeting, my parents and I
were taken to the principal, who blamed my parents for making me a complete
introvert. She couldn't see that possibly the school's fault, considering that
I had been there for 11 years. And whenever I've won some sort of a
competition, teachers would tell me "you're wasting my time, and shouldn't
have any hobbies at this young an age". I've qualified for my country's
training camp for the IOI this year, and I'm fairly confident I will get a
medal. Will any Indian college notice this? Nope. Hell, even my school won't
notice that.

Thankfully, I have parents who can afford to send me to a college in the US.
I've been accepted by some decent but not-so-selective public universities,
but I don't think the really good schools will admit me, because I have
mediocre grades and no "leadership qualities", and I respect their decision:
in this discussion, brandnewlow has reassured that the admissions process,
despite a few idiosyncrasies, is pretty good. Plus, there isn't really much of
a cut-throat competition for getting admission. Hell, I learned a lot just by
applying. For instance, writing a few essays, showing them to others for
advice on how to improve them, and repeatedly editing and proofreading them
were things I had never done before.

Sorry for this terribly incoherent rant.

~~~
brandnewlow
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's pretty good across the board. I was proud
of the work I did at my employer, but who knows, maybe they pick names out of
a hat at Yale! Evidence suggests as much :) Die Yalies.

I read a good number of Indian applicants during my short stint in admissions.
They were, for the most part, completely indistinguishable from one another.
Perfect scores. Perfect grades. They all faxed in 20 pages of certificates,
honors and awards. They all had the same list of leadership positions in
school clubs.

We had a few folks on the team who had traveled over there and were able to
parse through these applicants to find the really good ones, but it was crazy
how similar all the applicants from India were.

I figured the schools had imperfect data about what we were looking for, so
they had all constructed some sort of a rubric and were sending kids of type X
to Princeton, Y to Harvard, Z to Williams, etc.

If I were to meet a 16-year-old promising student in India, my advice to him
would be the same advice I'd give to the asian students in the U.S. Go to
clown school. Join a circus. Build a rocket. Do SOMETHING that could not have
come from your parents or teachers.

~~~
screwperman
Wow, Princeton's admissions process seems to be more thorough than I could
have imagined. However, you seem to be referring to those expensive
international schools where most Indian applicants come from. Typical Indian
schools like the one I used to attend are quite different: only 5 (out of 120)
of us from this year's graduating class have applied to American universities
(though I know that at least 2 students in the past 4 years were accepted by
Princeton).

Nevertheless, it's quite insightful.

------
villageidiot
I'll wait for Cliff Notes version. Gladwell is so goddamned longwinded.

~~~
physcab
The Cliff Notes version is as such:

\- College admissions is a horrible, flawed process.

\- Standardized testing is a horrible, flawed process.

\- Education is being treated like a commodity.

\- It's not the school you go to; its what you do with the time that you are
there.

~~~
time_management
I've often thought that America's goofy and somewhat unfair admissions system
is actually a blessing in disguise.

Most countries have only a handful of excellent colleges, and the vast
majority of the bright people end up at a small number of them. This means
that it matters a great deal, in these countries, where you went to school.

In the US, partly as a consequence of the silly admissions system, the
talent's much more widely spread around. So there are more colleges worth
teaching at, and consequently we have 50-100 excellent schools. It also
doesn't matter, because of this, nearly as much where one goes to school; it's
almost irrelevant after the first job.

~~~
yters
It seems, in general, that one of America's greatest assets is incompetence.

