Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants • Hacker News Board

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#121

Post by csa » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:28 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #58

1cvmask wrote: post #4

So when we remove the legacies and school fund donators (roughly half) - about 40 to 50 percent of the class, athletes (affirmative action for rich whites with relatively lower credentials and scores) - about 10-20 percent of the class, and regular affirmative action ( about 15 percent of the class and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos). The remainder is the group based on traditional credentia…

Why would we exclude legacies altogether? Legacy certainly gives you an advantage, but I think people also discount the fact that if you are the child of an Ivy grad, you are perhaps more likely to go to a top-tier school of your own merits as well. I say that as an obviously biased Harvard legacy, who also got into other Ivies without legacy, had a 1600 SAT, etc. We never donated anything and I never intend to, we w…

Agreed.

People think legacies are guaranteed admits, and they are not. Legacies get rejected very often (e.g., ~67% at Harvard).

There are many advantages to having a parent who is an alum:

1. Probably smart.

2. Probably knows something about how to get in via academics and extracurriculars.

3. Might be a gifted athlete who was recruited and knows how to share these gifts with their child.

4. Might understand some of the fundamental rigors of an elite education and shares that with their child regardless of where said child actually attends school (interestingly, an elite kid with great pedigree at a shitty school has a huge advantage in admissions).

Add some or all of these things together, and you get a high school kid who will probably have an above average application and should probably get accepted more often than the general population.

While there are some legacy admits who are accepted on the margin and would not have gotten in without being a legacy, I think the number of these folks is relatively small. The overall legacy applicant pool is very strong.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#122

Post by jnwatson » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:29 PM UTC

wkoury wrote: post #104

Last year I made an app for a professor that tells you your chances of getting into Harvard based on your high school circumstances. The results are pretty crazy: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/

That's quite interesting. That's the kind of information that should be provided to high school freshmen.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#123

Post by csa » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #23

1cvmask wrote: post #4

So when we remove the legacies and school fund donators (roughly half) - about 40 to 50 percent of the class, athletes (affirmative action for rich whites with relatively lower credentials and scores) - about 10-20 percent of the class, and regular affirmative action ( about 15 percent of the class and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos). The remainder is the group based on traditional credentia…

It is really uncomfortable to see how much in life depends on the choice of university and how much they have a say in arbitrarily selecting their students. It would really be much better if lots of activities could be decoupled from universities instead of making them mini-nations where people live, find friends, do extracurriculares and everything else.

> It is really uncomfortable to see how much in life depends on the choice of university and how much they have a say in arbitrarily selecting their students.

In the US, this just isn’t the case.

Elite schools produce a lot of elite people because many of the students were already running around in elite circles before they entered the school. They were going to succeed regardless of where they went to school.

Folks from low-SES can achieve wild success through a state school just as much as an elite school. The hard part is putting together the skill set (work habits, study skills, communication skills, social skills, etc.) that leads to wild success when one was not born into it.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#124

Post by gautamdivgi » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #120

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…

So, you think that top schools having top faculty and educators has zero effect on educational outcomes? And somehow they only produce good outcomes because they select good students and that "most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have". It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take. You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to impr…

Do top faculty and top educator correlate well? They may when you do research but probably not at an undergraduate level. Top faculty is generally a top researcher with bundles of grant money. They could be horrible educators. The opposite is true as well.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#125

Post by endisneigh » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #115

endisneigh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not contradictory at all. > 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? I did not equate "academically gifted high school graduates" with "good people". You did! What an insane idea. It's very clear to me that most j…

Why would an employer hire someone for their "good" job that wasn't a "good" student? No matter what criteria you use to define a good job, all things being equal the better students would go to college and therefore employers are incentivized to only select those who went to college to begin with.

Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#126

Post by flowerlad » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions.

Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.

Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.

Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).

Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )

Excerpts:

UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school.

So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#127

Post by jjk166 » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #103

jjk166 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, the problem is more with the schools. At least until post-secondary education, you don't go to school for just a narrow range of subjects. You might be excellent at math but does that mean you can keep up with people who are excellent at history? Unless we expect people to hyperspecialize from a young age (which would have disastrous consequences), we need schools to be able to deal with people at various different levels of proficiency.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#128

Post by el_benhameen » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #117

I wonder how this impacts lower-tier schools. My n=1 data point: my child just received a rejection notice from a middle-tier out-of-state university. Top test scores, top of her class, International Baccalaureate (IB). Obviously not a lot of activities. I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.

Was just reading about how common that trend is this year. It seems that the n is much greater than 1: https://news.yahoo.com/uc-explains-admissions-decisions-reco...

I’m sorry about your kid’s rejection letter. Larger societal trends aside, that’s not a fun experience.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#129

Post by sosborn » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #91

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…

This is the single most important issue imo in modern higher education. It is fundamental to the success of our society that we can provide high quality education to all who want it. If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students. So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can…

For a school to increase admittance numbers, they generally need to a) increase fac/staff and b) create more classroom space. Those two things can be very complicated depending on a school's situation.

I work at a school and we are pretty much tapped out for space, so we wouldn't really be able to add more classrooms even if we wanted to.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#130

Post by csa » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #114

csa wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why is it a handicap? I've seen poor Asians who go to the same types of schools tend to do just fine.

First, I am discussing low-SES schools in the US. It can be very different in other countries, especially Asian countries (first hand experience seeing this).

That said, in the US, many people (Asians included) can go to shitty schools and still succeed. Their success is despite the formal education they got at a low SES school, not because of it.

Generally when you see elite school success from students from low-SES areas, it is due to substantial intervention at home and/or extracurricular education/tutoring.

You ask why it is a handicap. If they could get quality education during school hours, their extracurricular hours could be used for deeper study or more interesting endeavors (e.g., research projects).