
Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know - ve55
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competitive-college-admissions-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
======
kestreloats
Somehow the idea that this is all caused by people applying to more places
doesn't cut it to me. It might account for some of it, but not all of it. A
lot of this is probably fairly chaotic and complex. For example, the GI bill
probably contributed directly somewhat also, but also probably led to cultural
shifts because of the veteran population, which then in turn changed career
and educational expectations, but the GI bill itself reflects WWII, which also
reflects cataclysmic societal changes (that is, WWII caused many significant
things, but was also caused by many significant things).

Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing,
and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and
research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases
in bullshit.

The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor.
It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not
_useless_ , but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a
certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're
selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit.

Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about
replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in
general
([https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/the-
mueller-report-theranos-billions-american-scams/586297/)). Something is
broken. Probably many things.

~~~
CompelTechnic
The SAT reliably correlates with IQ, and of any psychometric variable we are
able to measure, IQ has the strongest correlation with long-term socioeconomic
success. Insofar as it is useful to funnel smart people into college, using
the SAT is a good way to filter them.

~~~
mj_olnir
Do you have a source on the first claim?

I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1]
exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a
weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read
showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now)
collegiate performance [2].

[1] [https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/)
[2] [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-
research-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-
suggests-sat-under-or-overpredicts-first-year-grades-hundreds-thousands)

~~~
jasode
_> Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and
first year [...] collegiate performance [2]._

That's not what your cite says. The InsideHigherEd article actually shows a
_strong correlation_ between SAT and grades but Aquinas identified a _minority
%_ of schools where it didn't. Please carefully read the 3 bullet points again
and notice the minority percentages.

Your qualifier of _" Generally"_ in your comment is misrepresenting Aguinis'
findings.

------
cafard
Back in the neolithic (1972), when I applied to college, most kids seemed to
apply to two or three colleges at most. I'm not sure I even completed two
applications. In the fall of 2006, my son was threatened with Saturday
detention if he didn't have three safety school applications completed by the
date the counselor preferred. He ended up applying to eight that I recall. A
kid a year or so ahead of him at the same school applied to fourteen or
eighteen. So if kids are encouraged to step up their applications to about 4x
that of the boomers, will that not drive acceptance rates now?

[Edit--added dates.]

~~~
kd5bjo
Presumably, except at the boundary conditions, an increase in the number of
applications per student comes with a corresponding decrease in the percentage
of accepted applications that result in a student actually showing up to the
university— in the end every student still picks only one to actually attend.
These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate
(offers extended per application received) about the same.

~~~
busyant
>These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate
(offers extended per application received) about the same.

I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have
changed w/ college applications.

The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal
vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd
and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to
foreign undergrads. I don't _know_ the reason for this, but my suspicion is
that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera
and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them.
I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my
thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good
conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your
lecturers?"

e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an
influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the
foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was
obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is
understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat
on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it
out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did
not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to
complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by
admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to
legitimately succeed in.

Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US,
the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not
the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue.

[1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.

~~~
kaitai
It's not Coursera and EdX. It's that foreign students pay full price. As
administrative costs increase and infrastructure costs increase and state
contributions decrease if there ever were any, the money needs to come from
somewhere.

~~~
fhbdukfrh
Specific programs also tend to set their own prices. Even in Canada with all
public schools tuition for business, medical, veterinary, etc. Are all higher

------
yumraj
IMHO the biggest problem with US college admissions is that it is very
subjective and dependent on hidden variables.

I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write
essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in
life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of
people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales.

All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress.

Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports,
affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.

~~~
tacomonstrous
There is a simple explanation: Academics is not the primary focus at most top
schools outside of perhaps MIT, Caltech and Chicago. When it comes down to it,
their goal is to develop the next generation of 'elites', and the basic MO is
to get a bunch of current gen elites and surround them with a cross-section of
the society, so that their education is 'well-rounded'.

Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools,
should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based
on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and
resources are so unevenly distributed.

~~~
loblollyboy
If I were a school I would just recruit people based on their instagram,
selecting for physical attractiveness, psychopathic tendencies, creativity,
narcissism and/or special skills/talents.

~~~
4ntonius8lock
They already do. It's just more subtle and complex... but they do review
social media. And narcissism and psychopathy is going to bring you big points.
Those things let you get the things they want to see (school president, etc)

------
paulpauper
[http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-
evil/](http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/) In spite of
increased debt and tuition, no matter how you crunch the numbers, college
grads--especially 'high-ROI' subjects such as computer sci, econ, math etc.--
do better than non-grads. And the gap in wages and employment between grads
and non-grads, especially since 2009, is the widest it has ever been and shows
no signs of narrowing. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, college is
more expensive but also more necessary, partially due to the continued decline
of manufacturing jobs, but the failure of middle-class, medium-skill jobs such
as construction and auto to recover to their pre-crisis peaks .

This guy ran the numbers and found even the worse-ranked college still
provided a positive ROI [https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-
triangle-o...](https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-of-
wealth)

 _And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated
return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale,
click “See Full List”, and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that
doesn’t have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major._

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I wonder what happens if you include all the people who do a few years, drop
out, and never get a degree. Graduating from college still makes sense if you
can do it, but lots more people start college than graduate, especially as you
start getting to less selective schools.

~~~
alexhutcheson
Bryan Caplan's book[1] has a chapter where he specifically aims to control for
this, and to separately calculate the ROI of different levels of education for
"Excellent", "Good", "Fair", and "Poor" students. The main result was that
college is a good deal for Excellent/Good students, a terrible choice for Poor
students, and only makes sense for Fair students in special cases (e.g. they
got a scholarship, or plan to study engineering).

The bad ROI for Fair and Poor students is mostly driven by their lower
probability of actually graduating and getting the degree.

I highly recommend the book if you're interested.

[1]
[https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html)

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Thanks! I'm a fan of him based on blog posts of his I've read, but I haven't
read the book yet.

------
pitt1980
"3.4: Could the issue be that students are just trying harder?"

\-----

without making a value judgment about it,

I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that
we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can
leverage.

Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there
isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them.

\--------

I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have
accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so
ago.

~~~
paulpauper
The media and pundits often push a narrative that society is 'dumbing-down,'
regressing, or that standards are being lowered, and maybe to some degree they
are depending on where one looks, but we also see evidence of increased
competitiveness and higher standards. Cramming for AP courses and SATs have
become the norm for an increasingly large number of high schoolers. High-
stakes testing is also common for New York's elite public and private primary
and secondary schools. A high school grad who gets high AP and SAT scores and
a 4.0 GPA is demonstrably smarter and more competent than someone than from
generations ago without such scores and credentials.

~~~
pitt1980
To riff off Charles Murray's thesis a little, it could be 'Coming Apart' too

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_\(book\))

\-------

I think youtube and twitter are sort of interesting tools in this regard.

I see a lot of commentary about how they're tools of distraction, but I'm not
sure that's quite right.

I think the better way to think about it is they're going to send you down
rabbit holes that will magnify whatever habits you already have.

If you're into cat videos, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,

If you're into physics lectures, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit
hole,

youtube is magnifying the differences between what the people who are into cat
videos and what the people who are into physics lectures know

twitter works like this too

------
davemp
A solution to an increased number of applications per candidate is to use a
modified version of the stable marriage problem. [1] This is how medical
rotations and a few other positions are filled.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem)

------
bigred100
Perhaps my opinion is a bit stupid, but I frankly don’t view attending a top
college as such an important thing. The point of a career is to eat and live
with some dignity. I don’t think you need a top school for this. If you’re
much more ambitious, maybe you want to contribute in a higher way to society
with your career. If you’re on a path where it’s obvious to others you’re
doing this and likely to be successful, you’ll probably end up at the top
school naturally. If not, you’ll probably end up somewhere better fit for your
level. I frankly consider the state school honors kids to be the intellectual
elites of their communities and the top school kids to be some weird
combination of academic parents, childhood interventions (extra math tutoring
etc.), extreme striving, VERY abnormal talent in a specific academic area, or,
as recent events have shown, nepotism

------
commandlinefan
When I was young and considering college in the 80's, I knew that they
considered grades as well as extracurriculars - sports, clubs, activities,
volunteerism, etc. Where I lived, there were few opportunities for that sort
of thing and I couldn't afford the ones that there were, so I hoped my grades
would be enough. I did OK, I suppose, but now that I'm a parent and coaching
my own teenagers through college prep, I can't help but notice how expensive,
time-consuming and out-of-reach all of these college-admissions-approved
extracurricular activities are for all but the upper-middle class. My kids
have done sports, band, dance, church and camps their whole lives, and all of
those have been time consuming, expensive or both.

------
manishsharan
How about we drop all criteria for admitting students into colleges ? Instead
we increase the coursework load and passing requirements ? They can all get in
but they can't get out unless they are exceptional students ?

~~~
shereadsthenews
Why would Yale exist under your proposal?

~~~
akhilcacharya
It wouldn't, and perhaps we should discuss if that's really a bad thing.

------
smrk007
How much of dropping acceptance rates is simply due to students applying to
more colleges? I know when I applied a few years ago, I was able to apply to
over a dozen colleges simply because they all used a very similar electronic
application form. [1] Were these sorts of services available, or as widely
used in 2006?

[1]: [https://www.commonapp.org/](https://www.commonapp.org/)

~~~
chrisseaton
> I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges

How did you find time to visit over a dozen colleges?

~~~
akhilcacharya
Not OP but I know lots of people that applied to colleges they never visited.

With that said, I also know lots of people that visited lots of colleges,
doing a road trip or something spring break during high school. I didn’t and
honestly don’t know why someone would.

~~~
chrisseaton
I can't understand why you'd uproot your entire life and move to somewhere for
at least four years and set the tone of your social and professional life,
based on somewhere you couldn't even be bothered to visit.

~~~
bluGill
Getting away from your comfortable home is a good thing. Once you have agreed
to leave everything you know and move it doesn't matter where you go.

Visiting local schools is important because you need to ensure that the
details work. Can you get from your parents home to class during rush hour?
Can you get from class to your weekend job?

If you are going far away from home though, who cares. What you can do in
Fargo North Dakota are very different what you can do in Maui Hawaii, but
either way you there are plenty of things to do. You will find out when you
get there. If forced to either you will find something you like that you
didn't know before. You will meet new friends.

~~~
chrisseaton
You can have very different lifestyle in different communities. Moving blind
to somewhere you have no understanding of is a recipe for unhappiness when you
find it doesn’t suit you due to climate, politics, economics, etc.

For example moving to a college and realising you can’t get anywhere in the
area without driving and you’re a walking person.

~~~
bluGill
Only if you are so closed minded that you cannot learn to enjoy something
different. I know many such people, they wouldn't go to any college not close
to home. I also know many people who have moved to different countries blindly
and had the best time of their lives because they can enjoy something new.

Either way visiting campus isn't really required, either you are cut out for
anything or you already are not cut out because it isn't close to home.

~~~
chrisseaton
I think you think I’m arguing to go to college at home - nobody here said that
you’ve imagined it.

You’re arguing you’ll probably be fine wherever so don’t bother yourself to
learn anything about the community you’ll be joining before you go. I’m saying
do research into where you want to be. How can you argue against informing
yourself?

~~~
bluGill
I'm not arguing against all research (though this is obviously not clear). I'm
arguing visiting campus and the town are not useful research in general. You
should research your proposed school to make sure that you can get the type of
education you want: that is why you go to a school, to get an education. If
you can get the education you want, that is important.

Note, if you are disabled in some way you might need to research campus and
town are accessible to your needs. Most people don't have this consideration.

------
gumby
I intuitively believed the strongest explanation in this excellent essay (the
common application) but it is likely easy to test for.

Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those
only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their
own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is
merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative.
In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly
high).

As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general
deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had _not_
been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to
blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing
else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was
unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.

------
stemc43
When I went to college - there were 30 people per 1 college placement for
comp-sci. In order to even be considered u had to have top scores from high
school (gold metal is better). And that was in regional college - I can only
imagine what was happening in the capital. TIL - getting in harvard is easier.
Americans have it easy.

~~~
bilbo0s
I've always wondered why we're so over the top about college admissions? It's
weird. It's already really easy to get into our schools compared with other
nations. And the data in this article really does agitate on the side of an
uncompetitive application as the reason for any failure to gain admission.

This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international
students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you
didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really
are not _that_ many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks
or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at
Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd
care to take a truly objective comparative measure.

Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into
college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to
beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and
whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the
same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people
try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our
schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into
some school.

~~~
commandlinefan
> The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you

My kids can claim hispanic status through their (very very Mexican mother) and
conventional wisdom is that they can both breeze into any college they care to
by checking the right box on the application. Whether that's true or not, I've
always warned them not to rely on it - if they coast in and find themselves
surrounded by people who know the material backward and forward while they're
still struggling with the basics, they're going to end up coasting right back
out.

~~~
bilbo0s
They won't even get in if they "coast".

The blacks and hispanics at MIT or wherever, they are definitely _not_
"coasters". That's an urban myth that will be roundly dispelled about 15
minutes into a working relationship with one of them.

------
graeme
You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian
academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more
students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt:

\-------------

" But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale –
it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million
people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has
67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means
there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one
spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more
competitive.

Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a
list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the
number of students (undergraduate, I believe):

Princeton: 5,336

Harvard: 6,658

Yale: 5,405

Columbia: 6,068

Stanford: 7,063

Chicago: 5,590

Duke: 6,655

MIT: 4,503

Upenn: 9,682

CIT: 997

Dartmouth: 4,193

That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over
315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only
62,150 students.

By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3
Canadian universities:

McGill: 30,000

UBC: 47,500

UofT: 67,000

So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of
144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In
fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top
10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the
population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher
education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3
million students."

Full article here: [http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-
education...](http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education/)

\----------

I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and
the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that
students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the
US top ten.

I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them
broke ranks would make untold amount of money.

I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so
money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector.
Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes
the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.

~~~
rellui
Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If
everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the
prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know
what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're
taking.

~~~
graeme
The thing is, those top three are quite prestigious in Canada. Maybe not _as_
prestigious, but being a smaller country we have less room for minor shifts in
ranking value.

MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified
students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don’t really care about money.
The prestige has more of a perceived value.

Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you’d be astounded to see what they
could collect if they were truly profit motivated.

~~~
chillacy
If US schools are Veblen goods then we can look to luxury goods as a
comparison.

Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from
exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under
new management and tightly control the supply.

------
basetop
What a great article. Loved the mix of historical references mixed with
statistical data. Easily better than any news article I've read on college
admissions issue. It's so rare that an article exceeds my expectations.

~~~
commandlinefan
Everything he writes is amazing - you should go back through his archives,
you'll be shocked at how much you can learn from this guy.

------
alpineidyll3
The author is too humble. Should be titled: what everyone must know.

~~~
skybrian
I disagree. It's great that Scott Alexander gathers all this information, and
in the end admits he still doesn't know what the cause is. It leaves it open
to further discussion.

~~~
alpineidyll3
Human behavior isn't always explicable. This is one of those deleterious
behaviors which boils down to a bunch of smart people exploiting the
cognitive, emotional biases of parents and students.

------
spenrose
He titles it "college" and mostly uses Harvard as the example. About 0.1% of
students attend Harvard, and their admissions experience is atypical.

------
shereadsthenews
The author sort of casually dismisses foreign enrollment but then also focuses
on UC which seems like cherry-picking. There are 6500 foreign nationals
enrolled at UCB alone in 2018. That is up by 600% in the last 15 years alone.
The entire UC system has 45k foreign nationals enrolled, up from only 8k in
1999.

------
aiddun
I’m a high school senior who just went through the process. Feel free to ask
me any questions if you have any.

~~~
arrayThrowaway
Ok, where are you planning to go, and why? What will be your major?

------
alexhutcheson
Re-posting my SSC comment here:

I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains
the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor
that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately
forecast what a given school will cost anymore.

At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools
started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from
middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton
followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar
things, albeit with more constrained resources.

Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or
above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost:
they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures.
After this change, they would have no idea until _after_ they were admitted.
They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to
the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except
loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not
well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.

In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They
were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents
were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them,
and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out
of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have
been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools,
from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full
ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need-
based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was
exclusively from merit scholarships.

In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in,
there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's
difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get
in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost
of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying
to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that
are known to provide generous financial packages.

[1] [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-
annou...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-announces-
sweeping-middle-income-initiative/)

------
lexpar
We are thankful for SSC.

