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I don't know - I have two kids, one 17 and one 19. The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scor

I don't know - I have two kids, one 17 and one 19. The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT... and was still rejected by the "top" colleges he applied to (Stanford, MIT). The 17-year-old got a B this year, and she's devastated - if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.

ke88y 3y ago
> The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT > Stanford, MIT I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best. MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun. Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots. Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots. The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.) So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions. But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc. And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them. And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international). > It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's. Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition. > if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > I know they can get a great education Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.
  - ke88y 3y ago
    The unemployement rate is around 3%-4%, and at least 99% of people don't have degrees from elite universities.
  - currymj 3y ago
    fyi at least in STEM type fields, the top students at one of the good state schools have pretty similar opportunities to Stanford MIT etc. you can go work for big tech, top HFT and finance firms, go to top grad schools, or whatever. unlike at Stanford/MIT/Ivy, it's not the default path, so it takes a little bit more scheming while you're there to make sure you stand out, but it's still quite common every year.
  - DrThunder 3y ago
    Huh? You believe people that don't go to Ive League schools are just living in squalor? I don't know of any jobs that require a degree from those schools. MIT is even more silly because most tech sector jobs don't care where your degree is from. I'm sure there's some weird pompous elitist corporation out there that only pulls from those schools but no one NEEDS to work at those places. If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area.
    - ke88y 3y ago
      > If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area. Either that or a middle income/upper middle income immigrant community. Often the intersection of the two. But, yeah. Having worked at several and in the orbit of basically of them: I'm an extreme skeptic of undergraduate prestige factories. Go to a school with decent resources. That's a MUCH better way to think about it than "decent school", which could mean anything. Want does that mean? Depends on your major. Once there, be curious. Be voracious. Advocate for yourself. Major it whatever you want. But also make sure at least one of your majors has a lower-risk career track to fall back on. Never, ever accept "prestige" in lieu of either opportunities to grow or earn cold hard $$$. Always remember you live in a capital-ist society. People and institutions say they value a lot of things -- knowledge, God, country. But in a Capital-ism, power and comfort flow from people who have access to capital to whomever those people please.
DrThunder 3y ago
What do you mean, what hope does she have? You do not need to go to Stanford or MIT to be successful. In fact I think the average person would be better off not going to an expensive school like that. If you're goal is to be in the top echelons of elitist society I guess that's where you've got to be. If your aim is be gainfully employed and make a good living then those schools aren't necessary for anything.

ke88y 3y ago

> The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT > Stanford, MIT I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best. MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun. Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots. Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots. The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.) So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions. But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc. And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them. And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international). > It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's. Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition. > if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have? I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.

commandlinefan 3y ago
> I know they can get a great education Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.
- ke88y 3y ago
  The unemployement rate is around 3%-4%, and at least 99% of people don't have degrees from elite universities.
- currymj 3y ago
  fyi at least in STEM type fields, the top students at one of the good state schools have pretty similar opportunities to Stanford MIT etc. you can go work for big tech, top HFT and finance firms, go to top grad schools, or whatever. unlike at Stanford/MIT/Ivy, it's not the default path, so it takes a little bit more scheming while you're there to make sure you stand out, but it's still quite common every year.
- DrThunder 3y ago
  Huh? You believe people that don't go to Ive League schools are just living in squalor? I don't know of any jobs that require a degree from those schools. MIT is even more silly because most tech sector jobs don't care where your degree is from. I'm sure there's some weird pompous elitist corporation out there that only pulls from those schools but no one NEEDS to work at those places. If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area.
  - ke88y 3y ago
    > If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area. Either that or a middle income/upper middle income immigrant community. Often the intersection of the two. But, yeah. Having worked at several and in the orbit of basically of them: I'm an extreme skeptic of undergraduate prestige factories. Go to a school with decent resources. That's a MUCH better way to think about it than "decent school", which could mean anything. Want does that mean? Depends on your major. Once there, be curious. Be voracious. Advocate for yourself. Major it whatever you want. But also make sure at least one of your majors has a lower-risk career track to fall back on. Never, ever accept "prestige" in lieu of either opportunities to grow or earn cold hard $$$. Always remember you live in a capital-ist society. People and institutions say they value a lot of things -- knowledge, God, country. But in a Capital-ism, power and comfort flow from people who have access to capital to whomever those people please.

DrThunder 3y ago

What do you mean, what hope does she have? You do not need to go to Stanford or MIT to be successful. In fact I think the average person would be better off not going to an expensive school like that. If you're goal is to be in the top echelons of elitist society I guess that's where you've got to be. If your aim is be gainfully employed and make a good living then those schools aren't necessary for anything.