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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
That, of course, should lead to higher acceptance rates again so that colleges don't end up with an empty incoming class.
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.
Many of them are questionnaires now, not just copy+paste.
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.
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.
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-purp...
Steve Hsu: "Defining Merit" http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html
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.
Also, my impression based on things like twin studies is that rich parents's ability give their kids unfair advantages is much weaker than you think. But that's a whole other discussion.
We're not saying kids like Spiegel are wholly untalented. They come from excellent genetic stock. But as discussed above, they are nowhere near the true outliers in terms of merit. Think Putnam Fellows, Math Olympiad Champs, etc.
Yet the Spiegelites' success is so far above that of these far more talented folk in the startup scene, that one cannot help but suspect that merit appears to be worth far less than class as a determinant of success.
Again, I suggest you look into twin studies if you want to see the evidence that class per se is not particularly important. But I'm not going to discuss that here.
His side of the conversation went something like:
"I want to talk to the dean!"
pause....
"No, it must have been a mistake. My son went to Eton!"
pause...
"Well that's the last time I give this school 10 million dollars!"
The colleges don't care if an alum becomes wealthy and successful through their own gumption, or through parental connections. Either way, they reflect glory on the institution. Playing the odds, it makes more sense to bet on the scions of the powerful than the unknown genius.
He's a product, not a leader.
How are those two things exclusive? The next generation of leaders are products of a system that grooms them for power. Elite colleges are a winnowing system and a stamp of legitimacy for America's ruling caste.
IMO medalists have the talent to do much more.
Yes, but only if they choose, and the current incentive structure is all wrong. Unless they have a particular personality type[0] that favors the academic monastery over worldly riches, a rational math genius would go get rich at Goldman Sachs.
Genuine question, had to look him up. Snapchat seems no worse than half a dozen other startups...
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.
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.