4 ms·
Malcolm Gladwell has a great series of podcasts in Revisionist History on elite colleges and admissions that made a lot of this stuff click. Elite colleges want
by dayvid 5y ago
Malcolm Gladwell has a great series of podcasts in Revisionist History on elite colleges and admissions that made a lot of this stuff click. Elite colleges want to be a desired place for the high class to attend.
As a result of this, they have to keep a consistent ratio of high class students (with some baseline/distribution of ability) to talented students to miscellaneous students. Too many high class students, and they lose their academic prestige only to be an expensive private school. Too many talented students, then very few high class students can attend and the higher class will focus on other schools. If it's mainly other students, then it won't be a notable school.
Viewing elite college admissions from this level makes a lot of their actions more sensible. People are now able to game their old system so they have to adjust things to keep the ratio intact. I imagine at the graduate level, things are lot more performance/talent based and less political (excluding maybe MBAs or Law School).
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CM4Q8lOoGrEOSnXmqp1D1?si=697c7b0330a24a26 https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CM4Q8lOoGrEOSnXmqp1D1?si=6...
- Erik816 5y agoI'm getting old, but at least 15 years ago, law school admission was almost purely LSAT score + College GPA (weighted by perceived difficulty/prestige of College).
- divbzero 5y agoThat was my impression too from 15 years ago, curious if this has changed at all.
- xapata 5y agoAnecdotally, I've found that more prestigious professional schools -- law, medicine -- weight standardized testing higher. The less prestigious, more regionally focused ones, care more about GPA. This is different from undergraduate schools. I've met several people who applied to a large number of professional schools and were only admitted to the top tier. It could be due to the randomness of admissions, but the sample is large enough to convince me.
- reducesuffering 5y agoExactly. Elite colleges are an intelligence laundering operation. Start with average students from wealthy families. Add in just enough talented students. And out of it they both come out with a status indicator indicating they're "very intelligent", much more intelligent than the legacy students, but less so than if all the talented students defected into their own school.