5 ms·

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

by guyzero 12y ago

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.

michaelochurch 12y ago
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.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  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.
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    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.
    - jessriedel 12y ago
      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. These blog posts touch on some of these ideas... Sean Carroll: "The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People" http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-purp... Steve Hsu: "Defining Merit" http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html
      - michaelochurch 12y ago
        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.
  - mjfl 12y ago
    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".
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - michaelochurch 12y ago
        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.
- scarmig 12y ago
  Why is Evan Spiegel someone we should hate? Genuine question, had to look him up. Snapchat seems no worse than half a dozen other startups...
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    He really is a genuine wanker: http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel/?showFullText=true http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-spiege...
    - FD3SA 12y ago
      "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.
- mbesto 12y ago
  Serious question - has university ever been meritocratic?
  - Crito 12y ago
    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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
not_paul_graham 12y ago
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.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  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.
  - aet 12y ago
    Donate a million (or ten) and apply again.. :)
  - guyzero 12y ago
    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.
jeffdavis 12y ago
And doesn't this mean also that many students are getting many acceptances and turning most of them down? That, of course, should lead to higher acceptance rates again so that colleges don't end up with an empty incoming class.
- klinskyc 12y ago
  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
  - rkuykendall-com 12y ago
    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.
pcurve 12y ago
Yes very true. Number of undergrad applied for Fall 1998: 18,888 Number of undergrad applied for Fall 2012: 37,000 Did it become harder to get into Stanford in 14 years? Yes it's probably harder than before. But not twice as hard as the numbers would suggest. (Edit: why the down votes? I'm confused. I didn't say anything that is factually incorrect. If you disagree, speak up)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - pcurve 12y ago
    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.
- jamesaguilar 12y ago
  I think people must be misreading you, as I did, thinking that you said, "Did it become harder ... sure, twice as hard, as the numbers suggest."
  - pcurve 12y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I rephrased.
    - jamesaguilar 12y ago
      I think the fault is mostly mine for not reading closely enough, but that is helpful of you to rephrase anyway.
qq66 12y ago
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.
- derefr 12y ago
  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.)
  - qq66 12y ago
    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.
- rkuykendall-com 12y ago
  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.
  - bduerst 12y ago
    This is pretty hard to do when your mentors have to answer letters of recommendation for each school :( Many of them are questionnaires now, not just copy+paste.

by guyzero 12y ago

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.

michaelochurch 12y ago

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.

ForHackernews 12y ago
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.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  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.
  - jessriedel 12y ago
    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. These blog posts touch on some of these ideas... Sean Carroll: "The Purpose of Harvard is Not to Educate People" http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-purpose-of-harvard-is-not-to-educate-people/ http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2008/05/29/the-purp... Steve Hsu: "Defining Merit" http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html
    - michaelochurch 12y ago
      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.
- mjfl 12y ago
  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".
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - michaelochurch 12y ago
      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.
scarmig 12y ago
Why is Evan Spiegel someone we should hate? Genuine question, had to look him up. Snapchat seems no worse than half a dozen other startups...
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  He really is a genuine wanker: http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-spiegel/?showFullText=true http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan-spiege...
  - FD3SA 12y ago
    "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.
mbesto 12y ago
Serious question - has university ever been meritocratic?
- Crito 12y ago
  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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

not_paul_graham 12y ago

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.

ForHackernews 12y ago
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.
- aet 12y ago
  Donate a million (or ten) and apply again.. :)
- guyzero 12y ago
  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.

jeffdavis 12y ago

And doesn't this mean also that many students are getting many acceptances and turning most of them down? That, of course, should lead to higher acceptance rates again so that colleges don't end up with an empty incoming class.

klinskyc 12y ago
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
- rkuykendall-com 12y ago
  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.

pcurve 12y ago

Yes very true. Number of undergrad applied for Fall 1998: 18,888 Number of undergrad applied for Fall 2012: 37,000 Did it become harder to get into Stanford in 14 years? Yes it's probably harder than before. But not twice as hard as the numbers would suggest. (Edit: why the down votes? I'm confused. I didn't say anything that is factually incorrect. If you disagree, speak up)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- pcurve 12y ago
  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.
jamesaguilar 12y ago
I think people must be misreading you, as I did, thinking that you said, "Did it become harder ... sure, twice as hard, as the numbers suggest."
- pcurve 12y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. I rephrased.
  - jamesaguilar 12y ago
    I think the fault is mostly mine for not reading closely enough, but that is helpful of you to rephrase anyway.

qq66 12y ago

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.

derefr 12y ago
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.)
- qq66 12y ago
  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.
rkuykendall-com 12y ago
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.
- bduerst 12y ago
  This is pretty hard to do when your mentors have to answer letters of recommendation for each school :( Many of them are questionnaires now, not just copy+paste.