Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing, and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases in bullshit.
The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not useless, but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit.
Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in general (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...). Something is broken. Probably many things.
I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1] exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now) collegiate performance [2].
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/ [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-...
That's not what your cite says. The InsideHigherEd article actually shows a strong correlation between SAT and grades but Aquinas identified a minority % of schools where it didn't. Please carefully read the 3 bullet points again and notice the minority percentages.
Your qualifier of "Generally" in your comment is misrepresenting Aguinis' findings.
Correlation was .82 between the SAT and the armed forces vocational aptitude battery, which is designed as an IQ test.
https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/12/14/how-well-does-the-sat-c...
Correlation was 0.48 between SAT and Raven Progressive Matrices.
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
I hate that piece because most of what he's referring to has been dealt with for decades. It's like "narcissist who knows nothing about a field doesn't bother to learn anything about it and as a result takes down a strawman to make himself look good."
Broadly speaking, IQ tests tend to include a lot of cultural assumptions and therefore members of the in-group will test higher than members of out-groups of the same aptitude. IQ tests are therefore treated as discriminatory (disproportionate impact) "by default." The administration of a particular test for a specific purpose can usually be OK'd by either showing that particular test is not discriminatory, or by showing that particular test has a measurable correlation to the specific purpose for which it's used. My understanding is that "specific purpose" in the employment context means the individual job description, not just hiring in general.
I wonder if there's an "IQ test" that unfairly disadvantages non-minority candidates. It would be interesting to see the results if the same pool of people (minority and non-minority) take both tests.
IQ isn't the only correlate of success. I think if you look at it all, there's a large dose of conscientiousness (which standardized testing companies are now going after), and attractiveness/charisma...
... but that's on the individual side of things. There's also a whole host of societal and random stuff that is outside the control of the individual, or maybe is significant to a person, but that studies tend to treat as irrelevant.
Also, saying that the SAT is useful as a selection device doesn't mean it's the only useful selection device, or that as a selection device it's very good. Offhand I don't remember the numbers, but standardized test score probably correlates .45 or so with first-year college grades? Think about that for a second. First, that's a ton of noise. That's not very predictive at all. Second, that's first-year college grades. Change the criterion but it's still the same: your best tool really is a pretty fuzzy predictor.
So now take this very fuzzy predictor, add some other fuzzy predictors that at best get things up to like maybe .6 correlation? Still fuzzy. Now you're going to be really selective on these things? What you're going to end up with is a lot of people who would have done as well but for whom the stars didn't align right at a particular period in their life. But now we as a society have this crazy income inequality, rent-seeking monopolies of all forms, and a general winner-takes all climate, so these small meaningless differences get amplified tenfold.
The conversations about this too have this kind of all-or-nothing quality, like you're forced to choose between "standardized tests are meaningless" or "standardized tests are valid predictors for a large portion of people so we need to treat them as infallible predictors for everyone." The truth is really much greyer than these positions: yes they predict, but they predict pretty weakly, all things considered, and generally for people who fit into a certain box. This all might be fine, except now we've structured our society in part around these oversimplified assumptions, pretending it works when it doesn't really. It might be ok when there's lots of second chances, lots of opportunities for people to get back on their feet from the vagaries of life, and good opportunities in general for everyone, but when resources gets hoarded by fewer and fewer, there's more noise, that's compounded by people gaming the system, etc. etc. etc.
Just as a thought exercise: what do most human traits look like in terms of distribution? They're pretty normal, pretty Gaussian. What does income look like? Not that, not at all. The discrepancy between them should be shocking to everyone.
No is saying it is, clearly there other factors that may be much more important but IQ is clearly a factor.
The SAT when combined with the high school GPA (HSGPA) has an adjusted correlation correlation coefficient of 0.56 with first-year GPA, meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time. [1]
That's actually pretty good, what other proposed metrics can say their signals match outcomes with 56% validity? How much you liked their essay?
Lower SAT scores have about 63% retention rate for first-year students whereas high SAT scores have about a 95% retention rate [2]. That is, high schoolers with poor SATs drop out of college about 40% of the time in their first year.
Standardized tests have many problems -- obviously -- but no one has developed a less unfair system.
When colleges abandon standardized tests what else are they relying on? Random signals made up by admissions officers? That's worse than job interviewing.
I have no problem criticizing standardized testing, but I feel everyone who does should be obligated to propose a better alternative method with a higher validity rate than 56%.
Thaaat's not what "correlation" means.
https://blog.udemy.com/correlation-coefficient-interpretatio...
If you have a better description, it's more helpful to chime in with that instead of "You're wrong!"
If you took a random sample of cases, half of them wouldn’t exhibit a direct relationship b/w SAT and first year GPA and half nothing (unless the data is _super_ weird). Instead, SAT would be instructive-ish in predicting first year GPA for all those cases.
The point was to draw a connection for the general audience, not present the most scientifically accurate description of a relationship between two variables -- that's what the links to the research are for.
> meaning the combined measurement accurately predicts how a potential college applicant will perform in their first year of college 56% of the time.
"accurately predicts...56% of the time" implies that half of predictions are 'accurate', which most readers would interpret as 'correct' i.e. knowing SAT + HSGPA allows you to state FYGPA _exactly_ for about half of cases. That's not what the research you cited says. Rather, the square of the multiple correlation R (which is exactly R^2, the coefficient of determination) indicates how much of the variance in the output variable is explained by the input variables. That quantity _must_ be communicated in terms of the strength of the relationship, not accuracy for a given or share of cases as it doesn't tell us anything about a given case. One could say it tells us about 30% (0.56^2, correction from my statement above) of the information we'd need to know to perfectly predict the outcome, or that the relationship is better than random, but doesn't predict perfectly, or ...
Additionally, table 5 of the link you cited indicates the adjust correlation coefficient b/w FYGPA and the combination of HSGPA and SAT is 0.62. None of the numbers in that table are 0.56, so I'm not sure where you pulled that exact number from. I've used 0.56/56% above to be clear which quantity I'm referring to.
Again, if you can simplify this in a way more accurate than I have, great, be my guest-- I look forward to reading it.
R^2, coefficient of determination, output variable variance, etc etc -- most readers aren't going to go that deep in the math. For those who do, like you, the links to the actual research is provided.
But so far all I see are data scientists complaining about how my description is not 100% statistically accurate without providing any alternative explanation that doesn't devolve into variance of output variables.
Again, be my guest to show me I'm wrong, but what you wrote above is not something that would be easy to understand for the general audience, IMHO.
> "accurately predicts...56% of the time" implies that half of predictions are 'accurate', which most readers would interpret as 'correct' i.e. knowing SAT + HSGPA allows you to state FYGPA _exactly_ for about half of cases.
This interpretation is easy to arrive at, and clearly does not correspond to a reasonable understanding of the source, even for a general audience.
I provide two suggestions above:
> One could say it tells us about 30% of the information we'd need to know to perfectly predict the outcome, or that the relationship is better than random, but doesn't predict perfectly
I appreciate your commitment to academic rigor but sometimes oversimplifying things, even at the cost of mathematical accuracy, is enough for a general audience who aren't going to compute variance of output variables.
You're right that a general audience isn't going to look at the source, nor think about variance of output variables. Therefore, it's the responsibility of us as communicators of statistics to relate the conclusions that can be drawn from the data in a way that first and foremost is not wrong or misleading, and secondly captures the concept as accurately as possible for the audience.
The first principle is the overriding obligation. Your simplification can capture as little of the information and conclusions supported by the data as you want, but it cannot imply or state conclusions that are not supported.
You're getting this response to your statement, from me and others, because your interpretation of the source can easily be read as drastically overstating the character (and strength) of the relationship supported by the data - even if that's not what you intended.
I'm getting this response to my statement, from you and many other data scientists, who can't accept oversimplifying math, but all of whom have failed to produce a general description in plain English.
In some ways it's like the test-- everyone hates it but no one has a better alternative. You've complained maybe 7 or 8 times in this thread about how scientifically inaccurate my general summary is but have not produced a description that a regular person could understand in 5 words or less, with no technical jargon.
somewhat associated with
partially explained by the combination of
... HSGPA And SAT’
‘
"Something is partially explained by a combination of numbers"?
That says nothing semantic of value. Better to exaggerate the causal relationship and give a sense of meaning than offer meaningless generics like that, because at least the general reader intuits a sense of the universe of the relationship. The above implies nothing.
1) Your description is 0% correct; and 2) It's not a complaint. Maybe you don't know what a correlation coefficient is. That's okay -- I don't know what polyfinite rings are.
"Correlation is a number in [-1,1] where -1 means predictably inversely related and 1 means predictably directly related". What is correlation 0.5? There isn't even an unique definition of "correlation", man.
The best thing you could do is to produce a table of correlation coefficients for comparison. That would communicate some qualitative nuance as to what a 0.5 correlation really means.
You can also try to do something like a bootstrap or kernel density or use a prior distribution to claim that the probability that increment dx leads to an increment of dy or more is... That's more technically involved, but satisfies your desire of saying something specific that correlation coefficients do not allow you to say.
You and a couple of others have provided plenty of context for the serious data scientist who wants to understand the exact nature of the relationship between these two variables, but 99% of readers do not understand much less want to read about "kernel density".
Again, my challenge remains open: instead of complaining about inaccuracy, try to render the relationship in plain English.
"It's the strength of the relationship"
I happen to like:
"It's how perfectly you can fit a straight line to them."
You can be mathematically accurate without being mathematically precise. Better imprecise but correct than incorrect but precise.
If you're trying to give a quantitative lay picture of what exactly 0.56 linear correlation means, you need to still be quantitatively right, while the above are quantitative. Pictures and examples can help. "For perspective, 0.56 is about the correlation between <example> and <example>"
Saying there is a quantitative strength to a relationship is, to a regular person, meaningless. Am I .56 in love with my wife?
Can I fit in a straight line to her?
These are not good descriptions. Of course HN is full of data scientists who wildly object to oversimplifying statistical relationships -- luckily you are here to give the detailed mathematical context. But these are not simplified descriptions for a general audience.
That the average person would not understand a particular accurate description of a subject does not, in and of itself, make a completely inaccurate alternative description less wrong or even a good simplification.
[1] http://www.bwgriffin.com/gsu/courses/edur7130/images/twelve_...
This is a totally incorrect interpretation of what correlation is.
Trustable assessments would go a long way to accurately rewarding merit.
But teachers still prefer teachers over standard tests, and they shun conversation with their researching peers. The classroom is their kingdom and that’s how people prefer it.
The objective should be the creation of a system that allows teachers to retain the flexibility to modify curriculum in a manner appropriate to their specific student population while also maintaining the trust and reliability benefits found in standardized tests.
These expectations are the root of the current outrage culture. It's as if now that we have these wonderful technological advances we assume every problem should have been solved by now, and get outraged when we realize we don't live in a utopia.
[Edit--added dates.]
I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have changed w/ college applications.
The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to foreign undergrads. I don't know the reason for this, but my suspicion is that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them. I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your lecturers?"
e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to legitimately succeed in.
Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US, the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue.
[1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.
Some of the ways colleges can combat this on their own is by trying to jump the rest of the system through early admission (that creeps earlier and earlier over time), or by giving out exploding offers (I don't think this is nearly as common).
The solution is to go to a deferred-acceptance algorithm such as Gale-Shapley. It's a relatively minor change, adding a third party that matches students to colleges algorithmically. The students send in a rank-ordering of the colleges they wish to attend, and colleges send in a rank-ordering of which students they'd prefer to admit (along with quantity). The students get their most-preferred college that likes them enough to admit them over others, and the colleges run zero risk of sending out too many offers.
School in the US is weird.
I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales.
All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress.
Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.
But how about this: an objective test that anyone can take however many times they want, as long as they have a high school diploma.
That’s essentially the Brazilian system. There are arguments to be made about well off kids still getting an advantage because their parents can afford prep schools, but the government counters (at least partially) that by introducing quotas for certain disadvantaged groups.
I have many misgivings about many things in Brazil, but I do think the university admissions process down there is the fairest I’ve seen in my life.
scholastic aptitude is a very important part of admissions criteria, but it's not the only thing colleges care about. for example, they also care about things like extracurriculars because these indicate that a student is more likely to participate in campus organizations.
you personally might not care about orgs and sports teams (I certainly didn't) but some of the students they want to attract do. there needs to be a critical mass of sports and orgs people to make these things viable.
For one thing, it simply isn't possible to have truly "objective" criteria for admissions.
If it were only based on standardized test scores, the bulk of the students that got in to the most elite schools would be ones who went to elite private high schools and perhaps had extra highly-paid tutoring or those who enjoyed the obsessive life-long dedication of a tiger-mom. That would skew the population to students from a narrow demographic along with a very small number of unicorns. Forget about late-bloomers, promising students that went to crappy high-schools, forget about making up for decades of exclusionary practices. And after all that, guess what, the children of the uber-rich would STILL get in because a pile of money big enough to pay for a building will ALWAYS bend reality.
The most elite schools will always have their admissions under a magnifying glass, but there's a lot of excellent universities out there which offer a superb education and don't have outrageous admissions requirements. A student who got top-scores and excellent grades can still go to their pick of a large number of these other fine schools if they get rejected from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/MIT/Caltech because of losing out to some intangible criteria.
This is both correct and why the Asian students' Harvard suits offend me. If we're holding the bar at Harvard or zilch, what the hell did I spend 4 years of my time on?
That's me! I was rejected from one of those schools and ended up at a "tier 2" school, and have been very successful. IOW, getting rejected from a "tier 1" school isn't a big deal, and a student may be better off at a "lesser" school.
Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools, should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and resources are so unevenly distributed.
A poor person can study for the SATs just like the rich kids (expensive tutors don't actually raise the score very much), but there is no way they will have the same opportunities (money, time, connections) for the sort of fancy extracurriculars that rich kids do to impress admission committees.
The actual solution is not messing around with admission criteria, but rather tackling the unequal distribution of opportunity at the primary and secondary school level.
When I compare the American system to my home country’s system, which based on thorough, objective testing, people tell me the US system is better in terms of determining if someone is “college material.”
IMO the extremely subjective nature of it only enables discrimination.
Because of what corporate HR calls "cultural fit". Harvard is not looking necessarily for top students or even students with the most potential. It's looking for "Harvard men". While there is some well-grounded suspicion that corporate HR cultural fit is a mask for discrimination, we know this was the case with university admissions. MIT is an academic powerhouse because it was willing to take the influx of smart Jewish kids that applied to Harvard after WWII and didn't get in because they were Jewish.
This is the ideal person for an ivy league: - Parents moved to an expensive zip code so kid gets into good schools - Parents and kids deal with lots of bureaucracies. Clubs, pastimes and volunteering... which are all specifically designed to get you into college. These places don't motivate critical thinking. They REQUIRE constant observance of rules and compliance to the rule makers. - Massive student loans for the majority
The whole idea is that if someone graduates as a reporter, that person might voluntarily choose to not talk about things like, how we started a war of aggression to further our economic interest.
This goes also for the engineer working on the latest westernization of some random object/system.
Colleges don't want the best and the brightest. They want the best and the brightest... who are compliant and who have lots invested in the 'system'... commitment leads to leverage. They want 'team players'.
They also want to give as much advantage as they can to the existing elites. So... they require things that require money. That way they can say, 'we aren't turning away the best and brightest'... we are just turning away people who are smarter in favor of 'team players' who went to school practice, and ballet, and the model UN, and etc... which are of course out of reach for the average US family.
In the US, a solid majority of colleges -- including the Ivies -- were established first as religious institutions. Harvard and Yale were established to educate clergy (first) and also civil servants maybe. All these colleges in the Midwest that collectively provide a substantial portion of college education: established by religious groups, often along ethnic lines. Bible colleges were the first colleges in America.
At their founding, these colleges were not interested in just educating the 'smartest'. They were founded to pass on values within certain communities. Protestant colleges and Catholic colleges were not interchangeable. Lutheran colleges and Presbyterian colleges were not interchangeable. Swedish Lutheran and Norwegian Lutheran colleges are not quite interchangeable! While many of these colleges have left religion in their pasts, others have not. I taught for two years at a Lutheran college and interviewed at a Catholic college for a tenure-track position, and have spent time at two R1 land-grant institutions. All these institutions have explicitly different goals. Using the SAT/ACT and GPA to admit students to a Lutheran institution that still has a service every day and starts events with prayer just doesn't work for anyone, while the land-grant institution has a particular focus on economic and academic development for the geographic region.
This guy ran the numbers and found even the worse-ranked college still provided a positive ROI https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-o...
And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale, click “See Full List”, and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that doesn’t have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major.
The bad ROI for Fair and Poor students is mostly driven by their lower probability of actually graduating and getting the degree.
I highly recommend the book if you're interested.
I'm pretty sure the market clearing quantity of college-educated labor increases with supply just like most goods and services, so, yes, the marginal college graduation should increase the number of white-collar jobs (and reduces rather than exacerbates the positional advantage, because in addition to increasing market clearit quantity, increased supply reduces market clearing price.)
I'm arguing that this degree-required job isn't created ex-nihilo, but rather at the expense of the "best" job that used to not have a degree requirement. In other words, the average price of hiring a college graduate goes down because we're now hiring them as daycare workers and firefighters, and the positional advantage of a college degree now includes eligibility for these jobs.
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without making a value judgment about it,
I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can leverage.
Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them.
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I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so ago.
I think the greater “problem” is that merit is impossible to define. The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else.
I definitely agree with the "The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else. "
but I don't think that's the would we live in
Schools like Harvard have become more and more adept at correlating themselves with success
At the same time they cause it less and less
Harvard is really a place for people who don't actually need Harvard to succeed
You don't need Harvard either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)
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I think youtube and twitter are sort of interesting tools in this regard.
I see a lot of commentary about how they're tools of distraction, but I'm not sure that's quite right.
I think the better way to think about it is they're going to send you down rabbit holes that will magnify whatever habits you already have.
If you're into cat videos, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,
If you're into physics lectures, youtube is going to send you down that rabbit hole,
youtube is magnifying the differences between what the people who are into cat videos and what the people who are into physics lectures know
twitter works like this too
Ironically, the people perhaps pushing the narrative are often themselves HYPSM grads and beneficiaries of elite status. Same with the folks who claim "the college you go to doesn't matter".
How did you find time to visit over a dozen colleges?
If everyone did that it'd turn the system around and have the colleges bidding for and trying to attract you.
In the UK they only let you apply to some small number of colleges (universities), and only let you apply to one elite college.
With that said, I also know lots of people that visited lots of colleges, doing a road trip or something spring break during high school. I didn’t and honestly don’t know why someone would.
Apply to many universities that interest you, and then go visit the ones that give admits.
Visiting local schools is important because you need to ensure that the details work. Can you get from your parents home to class during rush hour? Can you get from class to your weekend job?
If you are going far away from home though, who cares. What you can do in Fargo North Dakota are very different what you can do in Maui Hawaii, but either way you there are plenty of things to do. You will find out when you get there. If forced to either you will find something you like that you didn't know before. You will meet new friends.
For example moving to a college and realising you can’t get anywhere in the area without driving and you’re a walking person.
Either way visiting campus isn't really required, either you are cut out for anything or you already are not cut out because it isn't close to home.
You’re arguing you’ll probably be fine wherever so don’t bother yourself to learn anything about the community you’ll be joining before you go. I’m saying do research into where you want to be. How can you argue against informing yourself?
Note, if you are disabled in some way you might need to research campus and town are accessible to your needs. Most people don't have this consideration.
3.3: Could the issue be increasing number of applications per student?
Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high).
As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had not been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_A... [2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7841444d78457a6333566d54/...
This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really are not that many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd care to take a truly objective comparative measure.
Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into some school.
My kids can claim hispanic status through their (very very Mexican mother) and conventional wisdom is that they can both breeze into any college they care to by checking the right box on the application. Whether that's true or not, I've always warned them not to rely on it - if they coast in and find themselves surrounded by people who know the material backward and forward while they're still struggling with the basics, they're going to end up coasting right back out.
The blacks and hispanics at MIT or wherever, they are definitely not "coasters". That's an urban myth that will be roundly dispelled about 15 minutes into a working relationship with one of them.
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" But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive.
Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe):
Princeton: 5,336
Harvard: 6,658
Yale: 5,405
Columbia: 6,068
Stanford: 7,063
Chicago: 5,590
Duke: 6,655
MIT: 4,503
Upenn: 9,682
CIT: 997
Dartmouth: 4,193
That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students.
By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities:
McGill: 30,000
UBC: 47,500
UofT: 67,000
So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students."
Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...
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I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten.
I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money.
I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.
MIT could make 5x the money while still taking in extremely qualified students. But, they're a non-profit, so they don’t really care about money. The prestige has more of a perceived value.
Us top 10 schools have a lot of money. But you’d be astounded to see what they could collect if they were truly profit motivated.
Consider Ray Ban/Burberry who at points in the past crossed the line from exclusivity into mass market and suffered a reputation hit, only to go under new management and tightly control the supply.
https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers
Interestingly, the elite research universities on your list above do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students to Berkeley (or Michigan, UCLA). The big difference is in the undergraduate enrollment. Also interesting is the way the list shuffles up when you consider top PhD programs or top science and engineering programs. Many of the schools in the top 10 on the US News List are replaced by top-50 schools with a much larger representation of public universities.
Berkeley, for instance, by many measurements, has more top-5 PhD programs (a good representation of department strength in research) than any other university, including Harvard and Stanford. Michigan isn't far behind (and keep in mind, Berkeley's med school is split off into UCSF).
Even US News's engineering school rankings, which I do think overwhelmingly favor very small private universities with large endowments, show this trend.
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...
There are privates on there (Stanford, MIT, Columbia), but now you have Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, University of Illinois, and UC San Diego and Texas at Austin at the 11th spot.
One thing the US News report rankings don't do is reward scale, but scale does matter. UCLA, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. Until recently, this was true of Berkeley as well, and numbers are still much much higher there - not just as a percentage, but in absolute numbers.
Private universities receive a lot of subsidies and favorable tax treatment on the grounds that they provide a public good - personally, I'm not enthusiastic about providing this subsidy to universities with massive endowments that enroll a tiny number of students.
I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore.
At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar things, albeit with more constrained resources.
Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.
In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need-based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships.
In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-annou...