
What College Admissions Want - bryanrasmussen
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-admissions-paul-tough.html
======
_hardwaregeek
Man, higher education just doesn't make sense. Colleges charge insane amounts
in tuition and are still losing money. While the richer schools prostrate
themselves to donors and beg for more cash.

Admissions is becoming a game of who can work themselves weary in high school
between grades and extracurriculars and test scores and essays. Colleges
perpetuate the myth that their admission is "holistic" with some magic all
seeing formula, when in reality Harvard probably can't read 40k applications
in 5 months without some mass culling, probably via metrics (5 months is
approx 150 days, divided by 40,000/150 is 267 applications a day, assuming no
weekends or vacations). Unless you have connections or the right scores,
you're not even going to be considered. Maybe, just maybe you'll get really
lucky like Angel and have someone chance upon your app. But applications have
increased in the last 10-20 years so probably not.

Either schools are being horribly mismanaged or higher education just isn't a
profitable business. Probably both.

~~~
akhilcacharya
To be clear, schools like Trinity are a few tiers below schools like Harvard.
Harvard almost definitely does have mass culling (ex: remove everyone with <
1550/1600 unless X, Y, Z) and then do holistic review for the remainder.

Its difficult to even put Trinity in the same bucket as places like the Ivies,
MIT, Caltech, Duke, and Stanford.

Here's the question - who cares? As someone that never got into any, I was
told elite schools don't matter! Unless everyone is lying to me for the sake
of political correctness of course...

I think it's great that institutions can select their student body however
they want. They have that right as private organizations, and it's why I
oppose the Asian affirmative action lawsuits. But lets not pretend this social
engineering is _good for America_ or laudable. Giving a lottery ticket to 500
more people or 500 different people does nothing to benefit society.

~~~
nradov
Actually they can't select their student body however they want. When private
institutions accept _public_ funding then they are legally required to play by
certain rules. That's why Asian applicants who feel they were unfairly
discriminated against have grounds to sue.

Some colleges — particularly religious schools — forego all government funding
as a matter of principle. This gives them almost complete freedom of action in
setting their admission policies.

------
leftyted
I'd guess around 90% of people (including me) who attended a 4 year degree
program did so because "that's what you do after high school if you're a
member of the broad middle class".

College should be for academically interested adults. It shouldn't be a rubber
stamp that's required to hold a white-collar job. I think the culprits here
are the colleges themselves. They're selling a bad product to people who don't
need it at a very high price.

Colleges should be much smaller, shouldn't have sports, legacy admissions
should be removed, diversity initiatives should be removed, and industry
should open up to people without degrees.

~~~
ip26
Athletics matter, IMO. I care nothing for college football, but I wish I would
have taken more athletics credits in school.

~~~
flyingfences
Depends how you define and implement "athletics" IMO. Club sports, informal
martial arts, swimming lessons, that sort of thing are great. I was required
to take four semesters of "physical education" credits of these sorts in order
to graduate with my CS BS. These big _sports_ sports that some colleges have
going on, though... If a student wants to do that on their own time and dime
then I of course have no objection, but the amount that even the not-really-
good-at-sports schools are shelling out for facilities and equipment and
coaches for the few students who participate is simply not justifiable in 99%
of cases.

------
ilamont
I read this article with great interest. I have two children, one of them a
high school senior, and we have been doing a lot of travel to various parts of
the U.S. and Canada to visit campuses and better understand our options.

One factor that the article did not mention in the admissions circus: The high
sticker prices for many private colleges are resulting in some students &
families _not even considering them as an option_. Trinity and many other 1st
and 2nd-tier private schools in New England (where we live) are $70k+ all in.
This includes my undergraduate alma mater, Boston University, which I don't
even discuss with my children as an option.

The other trend taking place: Some state colleges have become extremely
competitive in part because they are affordable. Not only are they cheap for
in-state residents (UMass Amherst all-in is about $30k for Mass. residents)
but they are _relatively_ inexpensive for out of state residents (UVM ~$53k
all-in for out of state students) compared to private colleges.

We are middle class but really tight on finances, driving used vehicles and
putting almost every extra dollar we can afford into 529 and retirement plans.
Because our AGI is well above the median we won't be eligible for Pell grants,
and my assumption is other grants will very rightly be designated for students
and families who have far greater economic needs than us. I don't put any hope
that our children's grades will make much of a difference. "Financial aid" in
the form of loans is just putting off the pain, with interest.

And even if we get $5k or $10k lopped off per year? Congratulations, you will
now be paying a quarter of a million dollars over the next four years, instead
of $300,000. It's still not worth it, so the BUs, Trinitys, and Brandeises are
not part of our college tours.

~~~
refurb
I think one of the problems in the US is the worshiping of school rankings.

When I grew up in Canada there was very little of that. You typically went to
a local university, maybe in the next province over, but often in your home
town. I knew very few people who said "It's McGill or nothing".

Yes, there are really highly ranked universities in Canada, but there wasn't
the mad scramble of "if I don't get into a top school my life is over"
attitude. Most of the universities were middle-of-the-road and you know what?
That was ok and people turned out just fine.

There is a pervasive attitude in the US that unless you're going to a top
school, you are severely handicapping your future.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>There is a pervasive attitude in the US that unless you're going to a top
school, you are severely handicapping your future.

This is mostly only among the upper middle class who worry about how non-upper
class they are.

------
neilv
This seems like a great article (assuming it's accurate). It's also pretty
discouraging. One bit that's encouraging:

> _Soon after the U.S. News ranking came out, 17 members of Trinity’s English
> department sent a letter to the college’s board of trustees acknowledging
> that Trinity’s slide in the rankings might “spark some misgivings among
> Trustees about admissions policies enacted by Angel Pérez.” The professors
> urged the trustees to ignore the rankings and continue the new direction in
> admissions. The students that Pérez was admitting, they explained, were
> qualitatively different than those in earlier classes. They were more
> rewarding to teach. They were just plain better students._

> _“We perceive in many of these students a refreshing array of qualities that
> were all too rare in prior years: intellectual curiosity, openness of mind
> and spirit and genuine will to engage with their peers,” the professors
> wrote. If Pérez’s admissions policies were “having inadvertent, temporary
> effects on U.S.N.W.R.’s dubious ‘selectivity’ measure,” they added, “we
> think this is a small price to pay for one of the most exciting
> transformations Trinity has witnessed in many years.”_

It gets discouraging again, after that.

------
JamesBarney
This article seems myopically focused on the status games of colleges.

It doesn't seem like a revelation that private colleges that spend tons of
money per student require tons of revenue per student.

I'm sure every private school admission officer wants to admit a class that's
great to teach and diverse without ever having to worry about money.

But these private institutions seem to exist for wealthy parents to transform
cash into a slightly better stamp on their children's diploma. We already have
a better solution to the problem mentioned in this article, which is the
public college system which is both affordable and just as good of an
education.

------
doctorpangloss
To keep this on topic with HN, how could engineering / math / software could
inform the admissions process? In my opinion, ranked lists in general are
misinterpreted by nearly everyone.

Here's an example. Suppose I create an admissions exam and admit the first N
top-scoring students. Great, that might explain a great deal of admissions
criteria among many schools, seems reasonable.

Now, administer the exam by putting the hardest questions first (i.e. lowest
correct answer rate in some representative sample). Enforce questions must be
answered in order, and immediately terminate the exam after a student has
gotten some number K of answers wrong. Admit the students who answered the
most right questions.

What would the admit list look like? It would turn out to look basically the
same as the conventional way the test was administered, except with some noise
near the cut-off number of questions--in other words, K and N are the same
parameter in disguise.

What would be different? For something like the Specialized High School
Admissions Test or how the SAT is used for highly competitive schools, the
vast majority of students would get every one of the first K questions wrong
and be immediately eliminated. You can't _possibly_ claim that their knowledge
or competency was tested, because so few questions can't _possibly_ be
representative of comprehensive knowledge or competency. And yet, the admit
list would be nearly the same!

I can say, with high confidence, that the purpose of at least test-based
admissions is _not_ to validate knowledge or competency. That in fact, making
students endure taking the whole test is a waste of their time. And now it
should be obvious why such an admissions structure, despite being what some
people and some schools _want_ , feels so immensely _unfair_.

And the only way I came to this conclusion is by just looking at the math.

~~~
mountainofdeath
I had an idea similar to this. You look at where the statistical performance
cliff is. Are the 90-th percentile students that much worse than 99-th
percentile? After a certain level, it's a lottery.

It's already the case where the vast majority of students applying to these
schools have near perfect scores, so a lottery makes it fair.

------
no_flags
I didn't understand this comment:

"The pool of affluent 18-year-old Americans was shrinking, especially in the
Northeast, and the ones who remained had come to understand that they had
significant bargaining power when it came to negotiating tuition discounts
with the colleges that wanted to admit them."

Are negotiated tuition discounts a thing? I've never heard of that.

~~~
throwawayjava
Yes. It's called a discount rate. The national average for private
institutions is around 45%. Maybe higher by now. See link below for stats.

At most private Universitues, only suckers pay full sticker price.

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/nacubo-
report...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/04/30/nacubo-report-finds-
tuition-discounting-again)

------
Aunche
> Enrollment managers know there is no shortage of deserving low-income
> students applying to good colleges.

This may be true for Trinity College, but I don't think this is true overall.
Lower-income students are already less likely to graduate from college than
others:

> An even larger gap between graduates of low- and high-poverty high schools
> was documented as well. After six years, only 18 percent of high-poverty
> high school graduates achieved a four-year degree compared to 52 percent
> from schools with low poverty rates.

[https://collegeforamerica.org/college-completion-low-
income-...](https://collegeforamerica.org/college-completion-low-income-
students/)

There is an interesting and somewhat depressing this American Life episode
related to this, [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/550/three-
miles](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/550/three-miles).

------
parsimo2010
There has been some discussion in the comments about how some colleges may be
admitting "diversity" students at the detriment of otherwise qualified white
and/or male students. Here's my personal experience from six semesters of
teaching introductory calculus and statistics before returning to full-time
student status to finish my PhD. I taught at a relatively selective (<10%
admissions rate) school that ranks in the top 100 nationwide and is highly
ranked for most of our technical majors (we offer humanities majors as well
but they are not highly ranked). I had over 400 students during this time.

Nearly all incoming college students are poorly prepared for college level
math (and probably other subjects, but this is where I have experience).
Gender doesn't matter. Race doesn't matter. The only consistent signal that
I've found is that students that took AP calculus were even less prepared for
college level math than those who had not- this was noticed by nearly all our
faculty and led to our decision to not accept AP test scores for credit.
Obviously there were good students who had AP classes, but the majority
thought that they knew a subject because they had memorized a few
differentiation and integration shortcuts. They messed up on the fundamental
arithmetic so much that they often couldn't apply the shortcuts correctly. The
AP student's belief that they were "better" than the other students seemingly
led to a worse work/study ethic. Their idea that they could memorize a few
common question types and be ready for a test really hurt them when we asked
questions that even remotely tested their understanding- we often worked out
how to optimize a fence enclosure where one side was a pre-built wall, but the
final exam included a problem where two sides were pre-built, and most AP
students failed this easier version of the question.

I guess what I'm saying is that most of the existing tests aren't useful when
it comes to predicting college performance- there's a significant correlation,
but the variance is so high that we might as well not even use the
information. To add on to that, most of the "advanced" courses don't do a
better job at preparing students, and neither do "college prep" courses. All
they do is train students how to answer standardized tests. So people
complaining that white kids with high test scores are being left out of
college in favor of black kids with lower test scores are making a faulty
argument. Those test scores don't indicate that those white kids would be any
better students, and the hovering parents that insisted that their kids take
all the advanced classes are probably doing their kid a disservice.

So what do colleges actually want? They want students that will graduate and
increase the prestige of the college, which leads to a cycle of better
admissions and even further prestige. Graduates can do this either by donating
money (which is why we let in rich kids as legacy admissions), or by doing
something noteworthy (such as being the first black-Jewish-woman astronaut). A
middle class white kid just doesn't appeal to a college in any special way,
because they probably won't become insanely rich, and their accomplishments
won't be that great. As a final secret for anyone still reading, female Native
American applicants get the most "bonus points" for diversity. While gender
gets some basic scrutiny, ethnic heritage is very rarely verified so now you
have an unethical way to help your white kid get into school.

~~~
username90
You get the students other universities didn't pick. That means that you often
get strange correlations at mid level schools, such as the dumbest students
took AP while the smartest students didn't since AP classes helps with school
admission.

That is similar to the brilliant jerk effect, if a person is smart enough to
get a job at a top company but didn't they are very likely going to be a jerk.
So brilliant jerks are not a thing at top companies, but at mediocre companies
which picks what the top didn't they have to choose between brilliant jerks
and dim friendly people making it seem like brilliant people are often jerks.

------
safeandsound
reminds me of health care industry

------
shiki48
Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity. But
their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.

~~~
krastanov
This is objectively wrong. The top-of-the-charts schools almost universally
offer need-blind admission and great financial aid. A number of my
acquaintances (middle and lower-middle class economically) graduated from
Harvard, Princeton, or Yale without any loans and without paying more than
$5000.

On the other hand, being rich means you can provide better K12 education to
your children, which makes it easier for them to get accepted in elite
universities.

------
simplecomplex
College is a scam. Just take the money and buy real estate, and learn a trade
online for free.

~~~
SeyelentEco
Who is lending you $100k-$200k to buy real estate as an 18 year old? Nobody
unless you're rich already.

~~~
simplecomplex
Many middle-class parents spend $100k putting their child through college
(tuition + rent).

Instead, they could use that money for a down payment on a rental. Their kid
then learns to code (or whatever) for free while having a place to live and
cash flow from an asset.

------
tastygreenapple
Of course colleges want students from wealthy families. There's a reason Marx
noticed class warfare, class is the primordial hierarchy.

However, among the fraction of the class that's accepted for reasons other
than wealth, it seems like colleges play ethnic and gender favorites:
[https://twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1140063678345011200](https://twitter.com/DavidRozado/status/1140063678345011200)

~~~
mfoy_
I think this is the point:

>There is a popular and persistent image of college admissions in which
diversity-obsessed universities are using affirmative action to deny spaces to
academically talented affluent students while admitting low-income students
with lower ability in their place. Boeckenstedt says the opposite is closer to
the truth.

~~~
romaaeterna
I'm sure that Boeckenstedt is a good blogger and everything, but you can
actually calculate how many SAT points race is worth (black positive, Asian
negative) compared to wealth. And poor, non-Jewish white and East Asian males,
are huge losers in the current admissions system.

One problem is that "diversity" means a lot of things to different people, and
unfortunately to some, it means "freedom to exercise my hatred of <insert non-
diverse boogeyman group>."

~~~
Simon_says
There’s no such thing as black race being worth positive SAT points and Asian
negative. It’s only relative. Your race can only be an absolute positive or
negative factor if there’s a no-race or neutral race to compare against ... oh
you mean compared to white.

~~~
romaaeterna
Not true even a little. You can compare to the average or median applicant.

~~~
Simon_says
Yea, I guess that's a good point.

------
linuxftw
Public institutions should be based on an entrance exam and that's it. It
shouldn't be competitive, it should be first-come, first-served based on a
pass/fail score.

What about the poor and minorities? College should not be the only route to a
middle class life. There should be opportunities for those that are not
academically gifted. Additionally, if public schools failed to prepare lower
income students to be prepared, that's the problem that needs to be addressed.

We should also outlaw all GPAs across secondary and post-secondary schools. It
should be pass/fail only.

~~~
ip26
Congratulations, you've just created eighteen years of nothing but studying to
the test in cram school, with family wealth being the strongest single
predictor of admission.

~~~
linuxftw
Pass/Fail. I think you're overestimating how difficult the test should be. I
think it should be easy enough for almost anyone with a high school diploma to
pass it.

~~~
leetcrew
that sounds great, now how do you decide which of the 35,000 qualified
applicants get to join the harvard class of 2024?

~~~
linuxftw
Is harvard public or private? If it's public, you just take the first X
applicants. If you don't have room for all of them, either make more room or
setup a wait list.

Are we saying there's not enough room in public universities to accommodate
everyone? There seems to be enough room in secondary schools, and those should
have a much high operating cost per student (buses, lunches, etc).

