Hacker News Reader

Comment by glaukopis | Hacker News Reader

A nitpick orthogonal to your main point, but I would argue anecdotally that there's no way elite schools have an average undergraduate IQ "multiple standard deviations" above the mean - unless by multiple, you mean "two". Any integer over that, and at 4,000,000 students graduating high school a year, and 3sigma working out to ~1/1000, there literally wouldn't be enough smart kids to go around, especially considering a majority of those students probably don't go to T10 schools anyways due to the fact that college isn't an idealized market.

Having gone to an elite school for undergrad, I'd argue most students were around 2sigma or slightly below, but almost universally also had 2sigma levels of work ethic, self-discipline, and goal-seeking.

View on HN

I did not go to an elite university though I have family members who did. The eye general attitude seems to be that “the smart kids at your high school were probably just as smart as the kids at [Harvard], but at [Harvard] all the kids are that smart”.

Only if Harvard's admissions don't work very well—for example, because intelligence isn't scalar or is hard to measure, or because they use the wrong measurements, or because they get turned down by a lot of kids they admit, or because a lot of kids they would admit aren't applying. My high school had 2000 students, which I think is typical to large in the US. If we're talking about multiple smart kids at an "average" 1000-person high school, then those are the top 1/500 or top 1/250 of the population. Harvard admits about 2000 students per year and enrolls about 1700 of them, about ⅞ from the US. That's about 1/2000 of the 4-million-or-so US graduates per year.

https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

So the average US high school has about 0.5 kids who get admitted to Harvard, about one every 8 years. So if Harvard is admitting exactly the smartest US kids (plus a smaller number of even smarter international students), all of them are probably smarter than any of the smart kids at your high school.

But they probably aren't. I didn't apply to Harvard, myself. If I had, I probably wouldn't have gotten in.

What I meant is that elite universities like Harvard and Stanford are capturing something like 90% of those 3 sigma high school graduates, not that all Harvard and Stanford students are 3 sigma. That was not the case 100 years ago, and in the 1970s it was a rapidly increasing trend. Thank you for calling out this ambiguity.

It seems pretty hard to believe for that Harvard and Stanford, or even just the more "elite" universities capture 90% of circa 3 sigma high school students. My experience is that desiring to go to Harvard, Stanford, or other "prestigious" schools is way more correlated to the socialization of valuing prestige than anything, and that many of the very smart folks I've met value particular interests or other concerns much more than status signaling. I'm also not sure the most common admissions tools have great usefulness or accuracy into measurement above 2 sigma. (Though I'm sure people are pretty smart at these schools.)

Foreign students?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com