Why Selective Colleges - and Outstanding Students - Should Become Less Selective | Hacker News Reader

Why Selective Colleges - and Outstanding Students - Should Become Less Selective

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12 pointstokenadult18 comments

Why couldn't we follow a different path to reform from that proposed by the Swarthmore psychology professor and have all applicants to some "top" group of colleges submit a rank-ordered list of their preferred colleges to a central matching organization, to which colleges would also submit a rank-ordered list of applicants? That is already done for medical residency programs in the United States after graduation from medical school,

http://www.nrmp.org/

and it is provable mathematically that the match algorithm offers the optimal trade-off among the different preferences of applicants and programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~evs/intro/stable/

I think bright high school students on their way to top colleges could figure out their preferences well enough to deal with such a system, and the colleges ought to be able to deal with it too.

It's an interesting idea, but you have to be careful about these mathematical proofs of optimality.

First of all, it is very hard to rank the schools before seeing the offers, visiting the campuses, doing more thorough research (which you may not have as much time to do while preparing your applications). Second of all, there are other factors involved. Where did your friends and boyfriend/girlfriend get in to? This is one big problem of the medical placement system, especially for those who are married by then.

Where did your friends and boyfriend/girlfriend get in to?

Yes, the mathematical proof of optimality only applies to one snapshot of time. Having exactly one choice of college after a date certain is a feature of any admission system, but there is considerable argument for that date certain being as late as possible.

Social welfare mechanisms like this are optimal in the utilitarian sense, but that's no consolation to those who get the short end of the stick. If the system doesn't leave everyone better off then it's not unquestionably superior to the status quo.

"So we are collectively engaged in a college admission 'arms race' that is almost a complete social waste, for once a set of 'good enough students' or 'good enough schools' has been identified, it probably doesn't matter very much which one you choose; or if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance what the right choice is."

I'm not so sure I agree with the author's premise that there are few meaningful distinctions among top colleges (the issue each applicant has to look at). Nor am I sure that at any particular college, while the college admission office is building a class, there are not meaningful distinctions among applicants (as elements of the overall entering class that the admission office attempts to assemble). What do you think?

I went to a local state school because I did not feel a large gap between Comp Sci there vs say MIT. My sister is trying to get into a program at Cal Arts (http://www.calarts.edu/) that accepts 30 people a year because it's by far the best program in the nation. IMO, the caliber of a top tier school has little to do with the quality of any single program. However, if you want to compete in a highly competitive area then aim for the best.

PS: A friend of mine went to MIT and several years latter we ended up working in the same building making the same amount of money.

I went to a local state school

As did I. I felt that I'd rather spend time working on my own projects instead of staying up all night working on some professors' latest project. Turned out well for me at least, I made far more my senior year in college than my current income at my day job.

I think the more your intended profession relies on doing to gain experience, the less going to a top-tier college matters. On the other hand, if it's through research and access to the top knowledge resources, then a top-tier school matters.

For most of us as engineers / hackers, we learn much more through doing & building.

Anyone applying to a college with the kind of selectivity mentioned in the submitted article would certainly want to apply to State U as a "safety" college while also applying to one of the MITs of the world. For a lot of interesting historical reasons, there probably isn't as large a gap between strong state universities and top private polytechnics as there may be between those state universities and the top liberal-arts-oriented private research universities. But, yes, every applicant has to evaluate some personal set of trade-offs, and I wouldn't expect any two applicants to have the same application list.

P.S. At State U here, there is still a Scheme course that every computer science major must take, which is no longer true at MIT. So much the worse for MIT in that regard, in my opinion.

How, exactly, can a selective college like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc become less selective? By increasing the campus size tenfold? Staffing it with more, though less capable professors? As long as there is a size and quality limit, there always will be exclusivity.

Maybe being the best does not necessarily mean to be selective?

I think that Internet slowly begins to remove the constrains you mention.

I'm all for widening the world and all, but let me think out loud.

Harvard lets really brilliant people meet each other in a place that offers exclusively brilliant people. (Brilliant by Harvard's standards, anyway: I'm aware that that's not a perfect standard.) It gives them some world-class teachers, and it gives them class sizes small enough that students can build relationships with those teachers.

How do you lessen selectivity without also lessening the experience of being in such an exclusive place?

I think that Internet slowly begins to remove the constrains you mention.

You have obviously never graded problem sets. ;) Have fun doing that for a class of 5,000 people.

By admitting students randomly rather than on perceived skill.

There's a bit of a contradiction in the article. On one hand, they argue that among a certain tier, all colleges are basically the same. On the other hand, they argue that this "arms race" to get into the best college psychologically harms kids because they pack their schedules with stuff they don't really want to do in order to get in. But if all colleges within a tier are basically the same, why don't kids just ignore them, do what they want, and let the cards fall where they may?

I did basically that in high school - I blew off classes, picked activities that I wanted to do rather than ones that'd look good, refused to take any SAT prep courses, and didn't even apply to college while I was in high school (I worked a year and then applied). When it came to application time, I picked half a dozen colleges that I wouldn't mind going to, with no clear favorites, and got in at 3 others. I don't think my life has been all that different because of it: in most people's minds, Amherst is as good as Brown which is as good as Rice which is as good as Stanford. (Harvard and MIT people may disagree, but then they end up working alongside us and realize that where you went to school doesn't really matter...)

Social stratification is a game we humans love to play and have been playing since forever.

Sure it might make practical and academic and all kinds of sense to be less selective, but seeking exclusivity is as human as getting high, cheating, fighting, etc.

Stanford could fill their entering class with kids who had perfect scores on their SATs and still have plenty with perfect scores left over.

Just nitpicking - this cannot be true [1]. Stanford enrollments per year are in the 2,000 range, while perfect SAT scores are just in the low hundreds. And not all students with perfect scores apply to Stanford.

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[1] I know, you could construct some weird scenario where one year class would collect people from many years, but let's keep it realistic.

Having just been admitted to a top-tier graduate school after attending a state school for undergraduate (in-state tuition rocks), I'm tempted to agree with the article. Especially for undergraduate work. For me, graduate school will (ideally) be about networking & deep knowledge rather than 'figuring out what I want to do' which is what is true for a majority of undergraduates. Still, the best schools are really just about the best peers, thats it. And that does end up making a difference for some people.

I think college admissions matter more to parents than they do to the students. For the parents, it's a huge insult not to have their "pride and joy" accepted to the Ivy League. The vast majority of level-headed 18- to 22-year-olds don't care that much about this issue. It's a rather pointless obsession.

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