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I once heard the dean of admissions at Columbia claim that they could get rid of the entire incoming class and replace them from kids in the applicant pool with
by chadash 7y ago
I once heard the dean of admissions at Columbia claim that they could get rid of the entire incoming class and replace them from kids in the applicant pool without suffering a decline in quality. I'm guessing this is mostly true, save for a few truly impressive students at the tippy top. Given the low number of spots compared to applicants, it's likely that you can fill an entire class with children of alumni without much of a dip in quality. But it sure is unfair to people who don't have parents who went to elite schools.
- leetcrew 7y agoI think it's fair to assume that the "quality" of an applicant is some combination of innate ability (normally distributed) and the amount of resources that have already been invested in that student (exponentially distributed). this implies that the differences between students increase at the very high percentiles. if the dean's claim is true, they are basically admitting that their admissions criteria sucks.
- chadash 7y agoI think the dean would freely admit this. If elite colleges had a perfect admissions process, they would never fail to admit people who go on to accomplish great things. But they do. All the time. The issue is that they have a limited set of things to go on. And high school performance, test scores and extracurriculars just aren't a great predictor of success, but they certainly better than just picking students randomly.