Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

dailyprincetonian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 227 posts

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#101

Post by ryan93 »

supernova87a wrote: post #51

First of all, a major issue here is that we don't have enough good universities to accept all the talented kids applying. That holds true for high schools, etc. wherever there is contentious debate over "equity" or merit-based admissions. Just increase the number of good schools (which has not been done in proportion to population growth) and many things are solved. Just like how you never hear people in countries wi…

You are lying. You know most students at top schools aren't capable of doing serious scholarly work or engineering. There are more than enough spots for every good student. State schools like UT Austin have 20,000 students who can barely handle freshman level science and math.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#102

Post by jean_tta »

ModernMech wrote: post #15

When looking at acceptance rates of Ivies, it's good to remember that the concept of a "reach school" that counselors push on students means that almost every kid is applying to some school they are not really qualified to get into. These disproportionately end up being top schools like Princeton and Harvard. If you're going to reach, why not really reach? Is the chance of getting into Princeton 4%? No, if you're wel…

More broadly most applicants apply to several schools. If there are as many spots as applicants and each applicants apply to k schools, you could go as low as 1/k average admittance percentage (rates will be higher when colleges accept applicants that do not come: you could have 100% rate after all). With k = 12, you're at about a 8% lower bound for the average college.

For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low.

If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#103

Post by dolni »

jjk166 wrote: post #87
dolni wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense to group people for education based on ability. If a low performer is in a class of high performers, one of two things will likely happen: * the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities * the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full p…

I don't think that assumption is valid if you look more closely at what is actually happening in a school. Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still fac…

Point taken and I agree with the examples you provided.

I would argue this is not quite the problem you make it out to be, because generally speaking, people tend to be strong or weak in a subject overall.

If you're generally good at math, getting tripped up by vectors is not a death knell for pursuing coursework at that level. But there is a massive divide between the ability of someone "generally good" at math and "generally bad" at math. Tests do a really good job of capturing that, actually.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#105

Post by offtop5 »

endisneigh wrote: post #7

It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself. Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled…

You could probably give a 23 year old a degree from a top school, without him or her actually attending it and still massively improve their life.

If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#106

Post by endisneigh »

slibhb wrote: post #94
endisneigh wrote: post #7

It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself. Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled…

> Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability. > Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the p…

I didn't mention anything about increasing socioeconomic prospects of students.

The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#107

Post by InitialLastName »

brightball wrote: post #97
endisneigh wrote: post #7

It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself. Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled…

The way to get there, IMO, is a lot more freedom to experiment. Not just charters, but something closer to a startup culture. A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired an…

It only takes looking at the responses to the common core to see how resistant parents can be to any innovation in education.

"Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#108

Post by nemothekid »

flavius29663 wrote: post #53
nemothekid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine standardized testing being anything but a low pass filter for these schools. Roughly 2 million students take the SAT every year, which means 100,000 scores in the top 5%; 20,000 in the top 1%. Whittling down 20,000 high scores to 1500 isn't any easier.

But you don't have 20000 applicants from the top 1%, because not all will apply to every top school.

Princeton's SAT score percentile, last year, ranged from 96%-99%. That is still, potentially, 80,0000 applicants. Furthermore, it's not like the applicants are ranked and accepted in order of test scores.

My point is that having test scores doesn't make this process that much easier for a school like Princeton. They were already down weighting test scores after you scored in a certain range; you still needed to pile on extra curricular and recommendations (and maybe donate a building or two if your parents could afford it).

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#109

Post by gnicholas »

scarmig wrote: post #33
gnicholas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? In general they do — either the SAT or the ACT. Only a few big universities don't require them (though COVID has led many/most to change their policies at least temporarily).

In other countries, though, the admissions exams are much more heavily weighted. Here they play a minor role. No one is getting into Harvard on the basis of a perfect SAT score, and plenty of people get in on more than a standard deviation below a perfect score.

You're right that a perfect SAT isn't a guarantee of success, although anyone who nails the SAT will be admitted to a pretty good school (assuming their GPA is commensurate).

Part of the issue is that the SAT is not difficult enough to stratify the applicant population, which means that it's not a super useful tool for schools at the very top. The elite liberal arts college I attended liked to brag that they turned away half of the 1600s that applied — and their overall acceptance rate is much higher than H/Y/S.

It would be interesting to think about what would happen if the SAT were more rigorous (or if there were another test that students could take that offered this stratification). Some schools (think Caltech) would probably put a decent amount of weight on such a test. Other schools, who currently optimize for more variables, would presumably not pay much attention.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#110

Post by csa »

whimsicalism wrote: post #46
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.

It's not entirely inaccurate. There is a trend for top tier universities to pick Black students mostly from prep & private schools for some reason. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976894 Excerpt: "tiny fraction" of low-income black American teenagers who attend private schools "produces about half of low-income black students at Ivy League colleges." Anecdotally, looking at who attended Ivies wher…

> There is a trend for top tier universities to pick Black students mostly from prep & private schools for some reason.

My guess is that this “tiny fraction of low income black American teenagers” are mostly, if not entirely, recruited athletes doing a 13th year to fix grades, SAT scores, and (maybe) study skills.

While folks (of any race) from low income areas can theoretically succeed at elite schools via their own initiative, the education at these low income schools does little or nothing to prepare them for an elite education. This is a very significant handicap that many people underestimate the importance of.

Post reply on HN