5 ms·

Determinants and causal effects of admission to selective private colleges [pdf] (2023)

33 points by EvgeniyZh 1y ago

mrangle 1y ago
The problem is that private elite colleges never used just SAT scores for admissions criteria, and no amount of assertion that they did or should will change that fact. Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic. While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools. Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  > never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools This really strains credulity. Decision criteria may not be purely based on academic merit (e.g., SAT), or even significantly based on it. It may also be true that they seek candidates likely to succeed b/c why not? Successful alumni are a self-perpetuating advertisement for your school. But to say they have never refused admission to a candidate that will "truly" go on to succeed is trivially falsified, if only by having limited admissions slots. It's an imperfect game, and I think you're giving them too much benefit of doubt, and playing a "no true scottsman" game here.
- lolwow1234 1y ago
  This is naive. The job of admissions is to make money for the institution. Academics, being "well rounded", being a "leader" is all kayfabe.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    If things were really so machiavellian they wouldn’t take broke students at all.
  - aabhay 1y ago
    Colleges are a “marketplace” as much as any other marketplace. Just how Stanford disrupted the traditional Ivy League monopoly, other schools can disrupt the status quo by consistent churning out leaders, great thinkers, entrepreneurs, and the like. What sells the colleges the most is the sense that successful people tend to be there. So while admissions profit can be a very short term goal, any admit counselor knows that the long term goal is to create admirable leaders and change makers. This is not impossible for publicly funded schools. Berkeley has put out consistently top AI researchers and engineers, more so than Stanford in my opinion.
    - mistrial9 1y ago
      Stanford builds companies; Berkeley builds entire industries
      - SilverElfin 1y ago
        Interesting take. But Wikipedia has lists of scientific achievements and also companies associated with both. Is it really the case that each university has such a strong “personality” or is it just their reputation.
        mistrial9 1y ago
        years ago I had no interest in this old football rivalry stuff.. very, very smart people work&play hard individually at both places. However once things get more organized, the differences are indeed profound for example, the rise and concentration of capital on the one hand, and the Nobel prizes and social contracts on the other. Agree that both places are large enough, active enough, stable enough such that simple comparisons are certainly refutable. However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two. The inward and enduring commitment to certain (polarized) politics, in both cases, is evident to me. Both institutions can claim societal-level accomplishments in the pure sciences..
- darth_avocado 1y ago
  How are you judging “students who excel in leadership positions” at 18 year old while dismissing SAT scores as an admission criteria? Most of the “captains” in my high school have grown up to have mediocre careers (including me) and at some point were in leadership positions mostly because they “looked cute”.
  - aabhay 1y ago
    SAT scores are taken into account by many schools for that very reason that it can change how you read the application of a candidate. SAT is almost always read in terms of the deviation from the school or community average. So its not the case that having a decent score from a shit school is worse than a slight-better-than-decent score from an elite school
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  > While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports. By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination.
  - mrangle 1y ago
    What you're missing is that elite prep school admissions to Ivies (for example) virtually all smoke the SAT and are well rounded. The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment. And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores. Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in. When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion. Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college. > The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it. Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  I agree with a lot of this comment. For example, focusing on SAT scores is definitely not the way to go. > But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools. The only way you could make this assertion would be if you knew "high level candidates" who were being refused admission "to elite colleges". And do you mean one? Or talking collectively? So a counterexample would be an high-level candidate who was admitted to NO elite colleges. I do know examples. It happens all of the time. It doesn't even bother me. Colleges only have so many space. Unqualified rich kids getting in: undesirable and irritating. Qualified kids not getting in: a necessary consequence of the math. The easiest way to find examples is to look in poor communities, where kids don't even know that Harvard would be free for them instead of $87k/year. Can't find any exceptional candidates there? Look harder. The idea that there is some fictional "high-level" to begin with is crazy. Reducing all of a young person's humanity to a single metric ("level")?
- cool_dude85 1y ago
  >While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. The paper says that the three main causes for Ivy-plus admission rates among the 1% are: "The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families" But are these oh-so-important factors what make for successful students? Let's ask the authors. "Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success." Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse.
  - doctorpangloss 1y ago
    It’s even simpler than how you’re putting it. Gini coefficient has risen since 1980 and freshman class quality by objective measures like incoming grades and test scores is declining since 1993. It is really improbable that being rich helps you in college - in fact you don’t need to have a study at all to know that the opposite is very probably true. But people like the guy you’re replying to are so hung up on first principles thinking like “increasing selectivity means greater quality.” He thinks that’s axiomatic, when you need to conduct a pretty serious study to measure quality. This study was good because it shows how being rich improves your admissions chances. Probably, increasing numbers of richer students have been causing class quality to DECLINE, not improve, and if it weren’t for donations funding research, the universities are actually WORSE off with the children of the merely richest Americans. This aligns with my experience at such universities, over many years, both as a student and an educator.
    - mrangle 1y ago
LeftHandPath 1y ago
This is a flawed idea. It presumes, in the abstract and conclusion, that changing admissions preferences to artificially increase diversity would result in a more diverse group of leaders in the country, because elite colleges tend to produce leaders and high-income earners. Fundamentally altering the admissions process will also fundamentally alter the institution and what graduates of it look like. If we alter selection for Navy SEALs -- because SEAL school graduates are known to be athletic, motivated, and team-oriented, and we want more people like that -- I have a feeling that we'd simply destroy the image of the SEALs rather than increasing the number of people with those personality traits. Back to my point: It always starts with the notion of focusing on merit, but devolves into checkboxes and quotas and arbitrary preferences, because those are easier to measure than actual merit. The end result is an institution that still fails to reward merit, and no longer creates the generous benefits it did at the start of the exercise. It also creates a group of bitter, resentful people who feel wronged by the changes that will significantly reduce any prior public goodwill towards the institution. To be even more explicit, a lot of the reason that these colleges are so strongly correlated with high incomes and high achievement is that they allow attendees to network with people whose parents and family members have already reached the upper echelon. Refactoring admissions to replace that will shred that benefit altogether. Colleges are not a totally isolated system; the value of a degree does not derive solely from the lectures the individual receives there, nor perhaps from the name-prestige of the university, but largely from the networking people are able to do there and the companies that visit and recruit from the school because of that network.
- SilverElfin 1y ago
  I see the value of companies visiting and recruiting from certain schools. But is the other networking you’re talking about valuable or even real? I feel like most students aren’t networking. Making friends, yes. But I haven’t seen a focus on networking in that professional sense. Is it prevalent in Ivy League schools or something?
  - LeftHandPath 1y ago
    "Networking" makes it sound more active than it really is. It's just who they are meeting over those four years. The friends they make, the professors they meet and perhaps work with, the guest lecturers they're able to talk to, the parents of friends that they meet on the holidays who make calls to help land internships. The companies that show up to the career fair. Over four years, there's a big difference in your future prospects if you were meeting people with ties to Google, Berkshire, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Meta, et al., vs meeting people from Garmin (<$100k/year for fresh CS grads, when I graduated) and small local midwestern companies. Even if you don't get direct referrals to those big-name places, you're talking to people who know what a resume that can get in there looks like, rather than having to blindly follow whatever advice you can find online. Harvard has a page about it: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2025/04/04/how-to-network-in-college-and-why-it-matters/ https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2025/04/04/how-t...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
godelski 1y ago
I think we also forget that high schoolers are dumb and young. The difference between top high schoolers is not that different from the average. But as the years go by that gap widens. The gaps may seem big at the time but that's viewing it locally. I did a lot of teaching in grad school and while there were a handful of kids (<1%) who were just exceptional this was almost never clear on paper. For the most part the main difference was effort. Some of my favorite students started off terribly! Well below average. But I've seen that turn around in a single class and I've seen freshman who are at risk of flunking out get straight A's in their junior and senior years. (I've also seen the complete opposite!) Because of this, I always wonder about how many more "geniuses" were missing out on because of this. I'm pretty confident that in an elite university if you threw out the bottom 50% (or fewer!) of candidates and then just randomly selected you'd end up with a pretty similar if not identical outcome. The gap is small and shaped by environments. At college admission time the gap is just so small compared when looking from a PhD level. I think the admissions systems are fucked up. It's become an arms race over things that don't matter. The root of the problem is just that we're trying to measure systems with lots of noise in them. At some point you're fitting noise, not meaningful data. It'll look successful but it's not successful do to your metrics, it's successful because an arbitrary metric would have sufficed. That doesn't mean don't use metrics, but rather to use cautiously. Data and measures are meaningless without context. In this context we're talking about kids. What, they can't ever fuck up? If they don't fuck up in high school they're more likely to in college. Ultimately we're dealing with humans, who adapt, change, and where it's hard to predict their futures. Personally I'd rather those kids to figure out how to be human easier. I don't know about causation, but there definitely is a strong correlation between their ability to cross these gaps when they've already learned those soft skills (those kids come to college and don't need to learn skills like taking care of yourself, cooking, or other forms of independence. They often are more clear about their desires and not just going through the motions). Unfortunately these are often inversely correlated to grades (like B's, not F's). We can't have meritocracy if you believe merits can be measured without noise. The irony is that often the pursuit of meritocracy hinders its progress. The unfortunate reality is that there are things you just cannot measure. We should always try and seek to improve but that can't happen without deep understanding of limitations. I'm also reminded of a scene from Silicon Valley. Richard gets into an argument about the marketing team and Jack Barker says because they're the best you gave to give them easier things to sell. There's a lot of ways to interpret that in this context so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.
Animats 1y ago
Caltech does not have legacy admissions. So what happens? Here's the list of famous Caltech people, from Wikipedia [1] Very impressive people, but unless you're in their field, you probably haven't heard of them. Some CEOs - Hughes Aircraft, Berkshire Hathaway (Munger, not Buffett), Intel, Quora, TRW, Union Carbide, Evans and Sutherland. Mostly high-tech companies of their time. Don't see any elected officials. Caltech builds tomorrow's nerds, not tomorrow's leaders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_Institute_of_Technology_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_Institute_o...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- msgodel 1y ago
  Should that be surprising? Bourgeoisie != elite. Elite is a club, Bourgeoisie (at least in the US) is an attitude.
graycat 1y ago
Easier: At the best, cheap in-state college, major in math, science, or tech. Do well, and then for an Ivy, etc. college, go there as a grad student which can be even better for meeting people than being a ugrad student at an Ivy. Going as a grad student might be for free. Maybe teach some ugrad courses -- a way to meet people, especially girls 1-3 years younger. Generally do a lot of the obvious things to meet people -- much of the reason for an Ivy is to meet people. If you want an academic career, then a top research university can be a HUGE help, i.e., may have several world class research professors any one of whom could get you a good start on an excellent research direction. As a ugrad, to help getting into the college you want as a grad student, be sure to work hard and do well. E.g., any free time you might have, get and study the books of courses you plan to take. Then in such courses you will have a head start that can make you look MUCH smarter. For some of the profs that taught courses you did well in, get them to help you with suggestions of courses, texts, papers. You will want one or more such profs to recommend you for the grad program you want. To do well, maybe write an honors paper.
elizabetht2 1y ago
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elizabetht2 1y ago
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33 points by EvgeniyZh 1y ago

The problem is that private elite colleges never used just SAT scores for admissions criteria, and no amount of assertion that they did or should will change that fact. Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic. While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools. Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness.

jvanderbot 1y ago
> never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools This really strains credulity. Decision criteria may not be purely based on academic merit (e.g., SAT), or even significantly based on it. It may also be true that they seek candidates likely to succeed b/c why not? Successful alumni are a self-perpetuating advertisement for your school. But to say they have never refused admission to a candidate that will "truly" go on to succeed is trivially falsified, if only by having limited admissions slots. It's an imperfect game, and I think you're giving them too much benefit of doubt, and playing a "no true scottsman" game here.
lolwow1234 1y ago
This is naive. The job of admissions is to make money for the institution. Academics, being "well rounded", being a "leader" is all kayfabe.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  If things were really so machiavellian they wouldn’t take broke students at all.
- aabhay 1y ago
  Colleges are a “marketplace” as much as any other marketplace. Just how Stanford disrupted the traditional Ivy League monopoly, other schools can disrupt the status quo by consistent churning out leaders, great thinkers, entrepreneurs, and the like. What sells the colleges the most is the sense that successful people tend to be there. So while admissions profit can be a very short term goal, any admit counselor knows that the long term goal is to create admirable leaders and change makers. This is not impossible for publicly funded schools. Berkeley has put out consistently top AI researchers and engineers, more so than Stanford in my opinion.
  - mistrial9 1y ago
    Stanford builds companies; Berkeley builds entire industries
    - SilverElfin 1y ago
      Interesting take. But Wikipedia has lists of scientific achievements and also companies associated with both. Is it really the case that each university has such a strong “personality” or is it just their reputation.
      - mistrial9 1y ago
        years ago I had no interest in this old football rivalry stuff.. very, very smart people work&play hard individually at both places. However once things get more organized, the differences are indeed profound for example, the rise and concentration of capital on the one hand, and the Nobel prizes and social contracts on the other. Agree that both places are large enough, active enough, stable enough such that simple comparisons are certainly refutable. However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two. The inward and enduring commitment to certain (polarized) politics, in both cases, is evident to me. Both institutions can claim societal-level accomplishments in the pure sciences..
darth_avocado 1y ago
How are you judging “students who excel in leadership positions” at 18 year old while dismissing SAT scores as an admission criteria? Most of the “captains” in my high school have grown up to have mediocre careers (including me) and at some point were in leadership positions mostly because they “looked cute”.
- aabhay 1y ago
  SAT scores are taken into account by many schools for that very reason that it can change how you read the application of a candidate. SAT is almost always read in terms of the deviation from the school or community average. So its not the case that having a decent score from a shit school is worse than a slight-better-than-decent score from an elite school
SilverElfin 1y ago
> While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports. By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination.
- mrangle 1y ago
  What you're missing is that elite prep school admissions to Ivies (for example) virtually all smoke the SAT and are well rounded. The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment. And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores. Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in. When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion. Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college. > The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it. Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement.
fn-mote 1y ago
I agree with a lot of this comment. For example, focusing on SAT scores is definitely not the way to go. > But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools. The only way you could make this assertion would be if you knew "high level candidates" who were being refused admission "to elite colleges". And do you mean one? Or talking collectively? So a counterexample would be an high-level candidate who was admitted to NO elite colleges. I do know examples. It happens all of the time. It doesn't even bother me. Colleges only have so many space. Unqualified rich kids getting in: undesirable and irritating. Qualified kids not getting in: a necessary consequence of the math. The easiest way to find examples is to look in poor communities, where kids don't even know that Harvard would be free for them instead of $87k/year. Can't find any exceptional candidates there? Look harder. The idea that there is some fictional "high-level" to begin with is crazy. Reducing all of a young person's humanity to a single metric ("level")?
cool_dude85 1y ago
>While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. The paper says that the three main causes for Ivy-plus admission rates among the 1% are: "The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families" But are these oh-so-important factors what make for successful students? Let's ask the authors. "Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success." Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  It’s even simpler than how you’re putting it. Gini coefficient has risen since 1980 and freshman class quality by objective measures like incoming grades and test scores is declining since 1993. It is really improbable that being rich helps you in college - in fact you don’t need to have a study at all to know that the opposite is very probably true. But people like the guy you’re replying to are so hung up on first principles thinking like “increasing selectivity means greater quality.” He thinks that’s axiomatic, when you need to conduct a pretty serious study to measure quality. This study was good because it shows how being rich improves your admissions chances. Probably, increasing numbers of richer students have been causing class quality to DECLINE, not improve, and if it weren’t for donations funding research, the universities are actually WORSE off with the children of the merely richest Americans. This aligns with my experience at such universities, over many years, both as a student and an educator.
  - mrangle 1y ago

LeftHandPath 1y ago

This is a flawed idea. It presumes, in the abstract and conclusion, that changing admissions preferences to artificially increase diversity would result in a more diverse group of leaders in the country, because elite colleges tend to produce leaders and high-income earners. Fundamentally altering the admissions process will also fundamentally alter the institution and what graduates of it look like. If we alter selection for Navy SEALs -- because SEAL school graduates are known to be athletic, motivated, and team-oriented, and we want more people like that -- I have a feeling that we'd simply destroy the image of the SEALs rather than increasing the number of people with those personality traits. Back to my point: It always starts with the notion of focusing on merit, but devolves into checkboxes and quotas and arbitrary preferences, because those are easier to measure than actual merit. The end result is an institution that still fails to reward merit, and no longer creates the generous benefits it did at the start of the exercise. It also creates a group of bitter, resentful people who feel wronged by the changes that will significantly reduce any prior public goodwill towards the institution. To be even more explicit, a lot of the reason that these colleges are so strongly correlated with high incomes and high achievement is that they allow attendees to network with people whose parents and family members have already reached the upper echelon. Refactoring admissions to replace that will shred that benefit altogether. Colleges are not a totally isolated system; the value of a degree does not derive solely from the lectures the individual receives there, nor perhaps from the name-prestige of the university, but largely from the networking people are able to do there and the companies that visit and recruit from the school because of that network.

SilverElfin 1y ago
I see the value of companies visiting and recruiting from certain schools. But is the other networking you’re talking about valuable or even real? I feel like most students aren’t networking. Making friends, yes. But I haven’t seen a focus on networking in that professional sense. Is it prevalent in Ivy League schools or something?
- LeftHandPath 1y ago
  "Networking" makes it sound more active than it really is. It's just who they are meeting over those four years. The friends they make, the professors they meet and perhaps work with, the guest lecturers they're able to talk to, the parents of friends that they meet on the holidays who make calls to help land internships. The companies that show up to the career fair. Over four years, there's a big difference in your future prospects if you were meeting people with ties to Google, Berkshire, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Meta, et al., vs meeting people from Garmin (<$100k/year for fresh CS grads, when I graduated) and small local midwestern companies. Even if you don't get direct referrals to those big-name places, you're talking to people who know what a resume that can get in there looks like, rather than having to blindly follow whatever advice you can find online. Harvard has a page about it: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2025/04/04/how-to-network-in-college-and-why-it-matters/ https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2025/04/04/how-t...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

godelski 1y ago

I think we also forget that high schoolers are dumb and young. The difference between top high schoolers is not that different from the average. But as the years go by that gap widens. The gaps may seem big at the time but that's viewing it locally. I did a lot of teaching in grad school and while there were a handful of kids (<1%) who were just exceptional this was almost never clear on paper. For the most part the main difference was effort. Some of my favorite students started off terribly! Well below average. But I've seen that turn around in a single class and I've seen freshman who are at risk of flunking out get straight A's in their junior and senior years. (I've also seen the complete opposite!) Because of this, I always wonder about how many more "geniuses" were missing out on because of this. I'm pretty confident that in an elite university if you threw out the bottom 50% (or fewer!) of candidates and then just randomly selected you'd end up with a pretty similar if not identical outcome. The gap is small and shaped by environments. At college admission time the gap is just so small compared when looking from a PhD level. I think the admissions systems are fucked up. It's become an arms race over things that don't matter. The root of the problem is just that we're trying to measure systems with lots of noise in them. At some point you're fitting noise, not meaningful data. It'll look successful but it's not successful do to your metrics, it's successful because an arbitrary metric would have sufficed. That doesn't mean don't use metrics, but rather to use cautiously. Data and measures are meaningless without context. In this context we're talking about kids. What, they can't ever fuck up? If they don't fuck up in high school they're more likely to in college. Ultimately we're dealing with humans, who adapt, change, and where it's hard to predict their futures. Personally I'd rather those kids to figure out how to be human easier. I don't know about causation, but there definitely is a strong correlation between their ability to cross these gaps when they've already learned those soft skills (those kids come to college and don't need to learn skills like taking care of yourself, cooking, or other forms of independence. They often are more clear about their desires and not just going through the motions). Unfortunately these are often inversely correlated to grades (like B's, not F's). We can't have meritocracy if you believe merits can be measured without noise. The irony is that often the pursuit of meritocracy hinders its progress. The unfortunate reality is that there are things you just cannot measure. We should always try and seek to improve but that can't happen without deep understanding of limitations. I'm also reminded of a scene from Silicon Valley. Richard gets into an argument about the marketing team and Jack Barker says because they're the best you gave to give them easier things to sell. There's a lot of ways to interpret that in this context so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.

Animats 1y ago

Caltech does not have legacy admissions. So what happens? Here's the list of famous Caltech people, from Wikipedia [1] Very impressive people, but unless you're in their field, you probably haven't heard of them. Some CEOs - Hughes Aircraft, Berkshire Hathaway (Munger, not Buffett), Intel, Quora, TRW, Union Carbide, Evans and Sutherland. Mostly high-tech companies of their time. Don't see any elected officials. Caltech builds tomorrow's nerds, not tomorrow's leaders. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_Institute_of_Technology_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_Institute_o...

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msgodel 1y ago
Should that be surprising? Bourgeoisie != elite. Elite is a club, Bourgeoisie (at least in the US) is an attitude.

graycat 1y ago

Easier: At the best, cheap in-state college, major in math, science, or tech. Do well, and then for an Ivy, etc. college, go there as a grad student which can be even better for meeting people than being a ugrad student at an Ivy. Going as a grad student might be for free. Maybe teach some ugrad courses -- a way to meet people, especially girls 1-3 years younger. Generally do a lot of the obvious things to meet people -- much of the reason for an Ivy is to meet people. If you want an academic career, then a top research university can be a HUGE help, i.e., may have several world class research professors any one of whom could get you a good start on an excellent research direction. As a ugrad, to help getting into the college you want as a grad student, be sure to work hard and do well. E.g., any free time you might have, get and study the books of courses you plan to take. Then in such courses you will have a head start that can make you look MUCH smarter. For some of the profs that taught courses you did well in, get them to help you with suggestions of courses, texts, papers. You will want one or more such profs to recommend you for the grad program you want. To do well, maybe write an honors paper.

elizabetht2 1y ago

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elizabetht2 1y ago

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