
Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Low - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html?hp
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guyzero
Per the article, this is really an increase in number of applications per
student rather than any other change. There hasn't been a net reduction in the
number of students accepted _somewhere_.

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michaelochurch
Sure, but the effect of that is to make everything more random and a lot less
meritocratic.

Pedigree travels everywhere and is legible. Merit is impossible to
demonstrate. Merit plus a noise term is easy to demonstrate. The noisier the
process, the more of an advantage pedigree has over merit.

For example, a blue-blooded asshat like Evan Spiegel will be able to get into
every college no matter what happens, even though he's (by Ivy/Stanford
standards) a joke. On the other hand, I've heard of IMO medalists getting
turned away in this (after 2006 or so) brave new world. Any system that has
Evan Spiegels outranking IMO medalists is completely broken.

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ForHackernews
Top schools are always looking for "leaders" (by which they mostly mean people
who go on to be prominently successful in business and/or politics). Speigel
certainly fits this mold, far more than a math prodigy who'd be more likely to
wind up an anonymous quant in some financial firm.

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michaelochurch
_Top schools are always looking for "leaders" (by which they mostly mean
people who go on to be prominently successful in business and/or politics)._

Corrected: kids whose parents know how to play the game and have the resources
to make sure their kids win it.

For all the complaints people make about the SAT, that's actually the most
meritocratic component of the admissions process by far. The "leadership"
stuff might give middle-class clueless a warm/fuzzy feeling, but it's designed
specifically to keep them out.

 _Speigel certainly fits this mold_

He's a product, not a leader. Someone saw him and said, "he seems like a
douchebag". Right now, douchebags are in style in the VC-funded/spider-pooping
circuit. If you're looking to produce someone and sell him to your VC friends
in order to sway the herd, douchebags are the least risky choice right now.

 _far more than a math prodigy who 'd be more likely to wind up an anonymous
quant in some financial firm._

IMO medalists have the talent to do much more. The Spiegels, on the other
hand, are useless unless lifted/"produced". They create nothing, but what they
are told to make. Of course, some very smart people get lazy and complacent
later in life-- it happens to all sorts of people for all kinds of reasons--
but there's no way to forecast that for teenagers.

~~~
jessriedel
With respect, you sound like you're under the very common misconception that
top universities are interested in educating the most academically impressive
undergrads, and that it's a fight between parents to see who can trick the
school into thinking their child is among the best students. In fact,
universities are driven primarily to increase their influence on the world at
large.

When hiring professors, this can indeed mean academic acumen is valued, since
impressive scholarship shapes the world and brings the university prestige. At
the same time, grant-getting abilities are very important, since you can use
money to buy influence in lots of ways.

When selecting undergrads, academic ability has some instrumental value but
very little intrinsic value to the university. This is because academic-
superstar undergrads will leave the university before they exert influence
with their scholarship. The universities _does_ wants to mold the minds of
future powerful people, and that usually means looking for students who are
fairly (though not necessarily outrageously) smart.

But to first order, you can think of the undergraduate program at top
universities as a pure money-making venture. The first strategy used is near-
perfect price discrimination to maximize immediate returns, i.e. "send us your
parent's W2s and we'll tell you how much you'll pay". (Tuition is extremely
high but most students get substantial financial aid.) The second strategy is
to groom an ideal donor pool for long term revenue, and this is primarily
composed of a few business superstars with a long tail of doctors, lawyers,
and financial folks.

These blog posts touch on some of these ideas...

Sean Carroll: "The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People"
[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-
purp...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-purpose-of-
harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/)

Steve Hsu: "Defining Merit" [http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-
merit.html](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html)

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michaelochurch
To be most cynical, I think they want to admit just enough middle-class smart
kids to create the appearance of academic excellence, while letting rich
mediocrities benefit from the aura effect of being in a place where it's
genuinely difficult to get in if you're not rich.

The soft ("leadership") component of college admissions and venture capital
fill a similar role in the US, which is to launder the connections and
parental wealth of the rich and make their advantages appear earned.

~~~
jessriedel
Well, I think you'll find that the people in positions of power at top
universities have rather leftist values. They don't make all that much money
in terms of salary, so their satisfaction generally comes from pursuing those
values in their own eyes. That doesn't mean they're idealistic; they often
make deals with the devil to increase influence, and they are happy to sell
their prestige to the highest bidder. But the hypothesis that they are helping
rich people as an intrinsic goal doesn't make sense, and it isn't needed to
explain their behavior.

Also, my impression based on things like twin studies is that rich parents's
ability give their kids unfair advantages is much weaker than you think. But
that's a whole other discussion.

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FD3SA
> Also, my impression based on things like twin studies is that rich parents's
> ability give their kids unfair advantages is much weaker than you think. But
> that's a whole other discussion.

We're not saying kids like Spiegel are wholly untalented. They come from
excellent genetic stock. But as discussed above, they are nowhere near the
true outliers in terms of merit. Think Putnam Fellows, Math Olympiad Champs,
etc.

Yet the Spiegelites' success is so far above that of these far more talented
folk in the startup scene, that one cannot help but suspect that merit appears
to be worth far less than class as a determinant of success.

~~~
jessriedel
You're conflating intelligence with money-making ability. Solid intelligence
helps for sure, and it's probably even true that, all things being equal,
intelligence is monotonically related to money-making ability. But all other
things are not equal, and there are other things necessary for money-making.
In particular, colleges will look for kids with unusually high ambition,
people skills, conscientiousness, leadership, etc. It can make sense to
sacrifice the very far tail of the IQ bell curve in order to fish out still-
very-smart people who are strong in those other necessary ways.

Again, I suggest you look into twin studies if you want to see the evidence
that class per se is not particularly important. But I'm not going to discuss
that here.

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not_paul_graham
It is likely to keep hitting new lows unless these colleges drastically
increase the number of seats that they have on offer (which is unlikely if
they want to maintain the aurora of attracting and educating the best and
brightest).

More students want to attend college than ever. The ease of the common app
takes the pain out of requesting "paper applications" from colleges
individually and college ranking lists are available for all to see. Most
students have colleges segregated into:

1.) top choices; 2.) middle of the pile; 3.) safety schools

and it is mostly always the case that a lot of students are qualified enough
to be at these institutions, so it is likely that this group will apply to the
top 5 or 10 colleges because he fits the profile of the student most likely to
attend these institutions. Almost 30% of applicants are applying to 7 or more
colleges and these low acceptance rates will only perpetuate the increase in
this ~30% figure because students are afraid that they won't get into the top
two college categories.

From the article:

> _Students applying to seven or more colleges made up just 9 percent of the
> applicant pool in 1990, but accounted for 29 percent in 2011._

> _..students send more applications than they once did, abetted by the
> electronic forms that have become nearly universal, and uniform applications
> that can make adding one more college to the list just a matter of a mouse
> click._

On another note I was recently talking with a CS professor and he mentioned
that rankings are highly correlated with the years that an institution has
been in existence which is worth thinking about.

~~~
markdown
> which is unlikely if they want to maintain the aurora of attracting and
> educating the best and brightest

aura

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noobermin
One of the relevant issues here is that the top colleges have are essentially
a better bet wrt prestige vs. other colleges. The fact that the college
educated adult in the US is not as capable as the average college educated
adult in a developed country world-wide (in OECD countries, see[1]) to me
tells me how there is some truth to this perception. There is no denying that
a physicist from Harvard is far above the average in the world, the problem is
that if you're not from Harvard, statistics like these seem to imply that you
aren't even prepared to be average. The problem here is that the Ivys suck up
all the intelligent people and professors and the rest of us are left with
less bright people (bright no doubt, but not "Ivy" material). Unless you can
make it into the club, you won't be as prepared as your smarter and/or luckier
peers.

The problem is that we in the US are doing fantastic in raising up the best of
us (those who get into Harvard) but the average has obviously fucking
languished. Personally, one way I think we can help at least somewhat is for
government not to exclusively fund only these Ivys, but to cut off some for
the rest of us (you know, judge research by its merit). Other than that, I'm
at a loss for ideas

It wouldn't be too bad to not go to Harvard if the local state uni wasn't that
much worse.

[1] [http://www.oecd.org/statistics/datalab/skills-
outlook.htm](http://www.oecd.org/statistics/datalab/skills-outlook.htm)

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noobermin
Not sure why I was downrated. A rebuttal would be nice.

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scarmig
Colleges have low admission rates. Students send out more applications.
Colleges lower admission rates. Etc.

What's the stable equilibrium here? It's a complicated matching problem that's
driving up costs, stress, and randomness for everyone. Maybe something like
how medical residencies are doled out?

The question is how to keep costs under control...

~~~
guyzero
Given that a 4-year degree costs from $40K to $100K with all the costs, it's
pretty trivial to spend $1K on applications.

And application fees are probably self-funding. I doubt there's any incentive
for schools to try to limit the number of applicants.

~~~
harvestmoon
Don't you mean from 0-$200,000? (It's even possible to make money from going
to college, oddly enough. A college acquaintance of mine posted how she got
more scholarships than school cost.)

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dpeck
There has been a seemingly endless number of articles the last few years about
how "affordable" top tier schools can be for kids coming from lower/middle
income families.

This is the natural progression from that.

~~~
duaneb
It's also actively driven downward by the colleges themselves—no value in
accepting more people!

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egillie
Crazy -- it's already halved from 2006, when it was 10.8%

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gradstudent
> Stanford received 42,167 applications for the class of 2018 and sent 2,138
> acceptance notices, for a first-year class that, ultimately, will number
> about 1,700.

2018? What?

~~~
DanAndersen
If the students are expected to start in 2014 and do 4 years of university,
then they would be the class of 2018.

