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.
That is not the only scenario. More people want to apply to the best colleges than ever. Also given that these schools are targeting students/schools in road shows nationally & internationally it is likely that the increase in number of applicants is also due to the a larger percentage of the sample population's interest in attending these institutions.
As an anecdote, I recently took the GMAT and had MIT as one of the schools that my score was sent to. I scored well above the 95% which is a decent score. Since then I've been getting extremely targeted emails from MIT almost weekly either about an online chat / forum, some resources, etc.
FYI, schools deliberately try to drum up interest from students they would never dream of admitting. The way US News & World Reports ranks schools, they look better if their admit percentage is lower, so the more chumps (no offense) they can talk into paying the application fee and then reject, the higher their score.
When I was in high school, I got all sorts of recruitment mailers from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. and there's no way those schools seriously considered me a viable prospect.
Right, is it really any "harder"? If we assume rational and consistent grading of applicants (I know, I know, but we have to make some assumptions) then if you're in, say, the top 3%, is it actually any hard to get in? Are the new applicants for any given school actually good or are they simply optimistic students who didn't apply before?
I mean, how many people who Harvard (say) would accept don't already apply? Probably a pretty small number. The issue with getting into Harvard remains a number of factors, but other applicants in't really one of them. That is, the quality of the applicant pool of people accepted hasn't changed much.
Not sure if you were agreeing or disagreeing, but yes that's my point.
The only way for it become twice as hard to get in is, if there were another set of equally brilliant 18,000 applicants who would've never considered applying, apply.
At least based on my experience, when I applied almost 20 years ago, anyone who had shot at being accepted applied, including all the geniuses.
Colleges actually accept larger numbers than they can have in a class (i.e 1,800 for a 1,000 person class). Students will get in off the waitlist, but I don't think that affects the overall admission percentages
My undergrad ( Texas State University ) had the problem recently where they accepted the higher number, expecting the smaller number, and then most of the higher number actually attended :P It was the largest freshmen class in the school's history and let to a more... relaxed policy for sophomores living off campus.
That increase in applications per student is totally rational, since students have learned just how random the process is. Admissions officer ate some bad sushi last night and feels ill while he reads your application? Rejected. Admissions officer just got back from a long lunch outside in sunny weather? Accepted. It's not that simple of course, but there is a large random component.
I considered applying to a lot of colleges a "hack" when I did it in high school since most people didn't accept that the process was highly random. But students have caught on since then.
This is exactly what I did for grad school. I applied to an even distribution of schools across rankings, except at the top, where I applied to as many as I could. If you know anyone who got into a "top" school, you will also know they were rejected from many schools ranked much lower. It's just a guessing game at the top.
Given this, it might be nice if applications could be split into pieces, anonymized, and then each piece reviewed and accepted/rejected separately over different days by different people. (This would also mean that a re-application would look no different than an initial application.)
Many universities do this, but usually only after the first pass of applications is removed. Also, even though 5% of the applicants are admitted, a much larger fraction of the applicants are completely qualified (i.e., if you selected a group of applications 3x the size you can admit, and then randomly selected 1 in 3 of those, you'd hardly be able to tell). So at that stage, multiple reviewers would help but not fix the randomness problem.
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.
"It's not about working harder; it's about working the system." - Evan Spiegel
Yes indeed, and when it comes to working the system, wealthy elite families have achieved quite a formidable monopoly.
This is an incredibly good article to act as a counterweight to all of pg's essays on merit based success. It's easy to forget that Zuck, PG, and many other successful people are part of an extremely selective elite (e.g. Ivy League attendants), and that this may have a significant impact on their success.
Of course, members of this group will tell us that their Ivy League networks are totally independent of their multi-million dollar exits, but an impartial eye would scrutinize this relationship more closely.
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.
Oh please. I go to one of these schools and it's the same attitude that every "joke" major has that somehow by partying their way through college they will emerge more creative than the "nerds" who are trying hard. Yeah, you're a "leader", huh? Gonna be really successful with your app-idea once you outsource it to an Indian firm for $20k of your parents money? Oh and it's a blatant Facebook rip-off that you have to have your parents pay someone to manually remake for every college because you don't know what scalability is? Sounds great, if you don't make billions here's my number so I can add you to my team as an "idea leader".
There are other billionaires, and he's an embarrassment to Stanford (although not as much of one as Lucas Duplan for Clinkle). They could've done better with that slot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When I was at Dartmouth I overheard some sheik (guessing by the clothes he was wearing and complexion, could have been a really tan Norwegian who liked wearing a Keffiyeh) talking on his phone outside his car.
His side of the conversation went something like:
"I want to talk to the dean!"
pause....
"No, it must have been a mistake. My son went to Eton!"
pause...
"Well that's the last time I give this school 10 million dollars!"
I don't think your correction modifies anything about my original statement. HYP & Friends are interested in admitting "leaders", who are quite often children of wealthy and connected parents.
The colleges don't care if an alum becomes wealthy and successful through their own gumption, or through parental connections. Either way, they reflect glory on the institution. Playing the odds, it makes more sense to bet on the scions of the powerful than the unknown genius.
He's a product, not a leader.
How are those two things exclusive? The next generation of leaders are products of a system that grooms them for power. Elite colleges are a winnowing system and a stamp of legitimacy for America's ruling caste.
IMO medalists have the talent to do much more.
Yes, but only if they choose, and the current incentive structure is all wrong. Unless they have a particular personality type[0] that favors the academic monastery over worldly riches, a rational math genius would go get rich at Goldman Sachs.
No. They obviously were not more than a few decades ago (race and gender equality were issues that were not even paid lip service to until the 20th century, in many cases the late 20th century.) Even today, now that we pay lip service to these issues, they are not completely ironed out.
The other issues that remain today are nothing new, and cover the rest of the 20th century.
For whatever it is worth, top tier universities (particularly Ivy League schools) are very good with need-based scholarships. If Harvard accepts you, Harvard will see to it that you can afford to attend.
