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

211–220 of 227 posts

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#211

Post by csa »

busyant wrote: post #204
csa wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would occasionally bump into them when they were about to graduate and I was frequently shocked when they told me stuff like, "Yeah. I'm going to Harvard Med" (or some other illustrious program) and I would think to myself, "You were a good student, but I knew undergrads at my state school who were just as good. And Harvard Med didn't even given them an _interview_." 1. I am not sure what you taught and how much…

> 3. The goal of admitting someone to Harvard Med isn’t having them excel at Harvard Med — it’s having them succeed as significant researchers in the medical field after they graduate from Harvard Med. I'm not sure I would agree with this. I was a postdoc @ Harvard Med, so I knew a fair number of med students there as well as grad students. I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is…

> I don't want to dismiss your assertion out of hand, but I think the truth is a little murky here.

Agreed. It’s not as clean as that, but I think that it’s directionally correct (at least for this particular thread).

I agree with all of your other points as well.

I would be really curious about why the driven and talented students at the state school didn’t even get a look. I imagine there’s a good reason. Probably something like lack of research, studying under a dud professor (this can sort of be a kiss of death in some fields), studying under a prof with Ivy envy (basically crabs pulling their own back down — strange, but it happens), etc.

Any ideas?

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#212

Post by labby5 »

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…

Does it?

I've been to college, and while there is value there, it's mostly not in the education. Virtually everything important I've learned that is directly applicable to my life and career I either learned in elementary school, learned through experience, or learned myself.

The value in college, at least for me, was its environment, social network, and opportunity network. People underestimate how valuable these things are, and similarly fail to realize just how bad the internet is at all three. Online education is stunningly comprehensive, but the internet is a terrible learning environment, just as it is a terrible social and opportunity environment.

The goal of modern society should be to realize that the qualities which make colleges so good at these things are not fundamentally connected to their curriculum, and can be incorporated into society at large. There is no reason why we couldn't create districts in cities which have the same learning, social, and professional qualities for young people as a university. For certain professions we arguably already do, and that is with literally no coordinated effort to create them.

Imagine if we actually tried.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#213

Post by beojan »

finexplained wrote: post #147

It blows my mind that a record-low acceptance rate is held up as an achievement, and not a structural failure. Why is the metric not "we are able to educate X% of students who meet this well-defined bar"? There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible. And they do…

A low acceptance rate just means either there were more applications than usual or fewer places than usual.

A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications.

> There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible

I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#214

Post by azhenley »

csa wrote: post #206
azhenley wrote: post #81

As a prof, I'm terrified of the exploding enrollment in CS. My 2021 enrollment for a juniors/seniors course is up 70% from recent years and still growing. Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.

I’m not sure what the leadership of your department and university want your enrollment to be, but a very tough (reasonable, but tough) required weeder class early in the CS sequence will clean out the people who like the idea of being a CS major/grad more than the actual reality of being a CS major. This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level…

Weeder classes mean less tuition dollars flowing in...

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#215

Post by InitialLastName »

brightball wrote: post #210
InitialLastName wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's entirely different when the teachers and the parents "choose" something like common core. My kids went to a private school for elementary in the middle of the common core dust up in public schools, so before we enrolled them the one of the first questions we asked about was common core. They told us they were also adopting the approach but that their teachers had been discussing it for years, had a complete tran…

That's fair, but I think it serves my point: you weren't interested in experimenting with your childrens' education.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#216

Post by laverya »

InitialLastName wrote: post #107
brightball wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This assumes that common core was a good thing, and that the resistance to it was thus incorrect. Which is controversial at best - retrospectives are not generally positive.

> A decade later, scant evidence exists that Common Core produced any significant benefit. One federally funded evaluation actually estimates that the standards had a negative effect on student achievement in both reading and math. Fortunately, the overall impact is quite small.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/04/05/common-c...

> By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/4/29/21121004/nearly-a-decade...

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#217

Post by nemothekid »

flavius29663 wrote: post #201
nemothekid wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This sounds to me like such a non-problem that is blown out of proportions. Somewhat typical for American way of handling politics. Back at home for example (in Romania), there is an SAT equivalent (that is also much tougher). The universities can each choose to use just that in the admission, or they can choose to give another test on their own. These admission tests are usually setup around the country such that la…

You can’t compare American universities to Romania. A school like Princeton is attracting candidates internationally - if they just used a perfectly objective math exam they would likely have 50,000 applicants with perfect stores, but then what do you do about the students who don’t want to be math majors? These schools are operating on a completely different scale in terms of potential applicants and still only have 3000 seats.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#218

Post by [deleted] »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #56
ep103 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet, solve two birds with one stone. Pass a law that caps the maximum percentage of a person's income that can be paid to college loan (minimum) payments. Just like that you would have stopped the primary source of collegiate tuition inflation (the fact that students believe they need college to enter the workplace, but cannot discharge loans due to bankruptcy, and loans are guaranteed by the gov). And you wou…

Your solution is called income based repayment, and already exists - the US has about a dozen different IBR / PAYE (Pay As You Earn) plans. Generally speaking, people with student loan debt can opt into them. Obama's version from his first term even has debt forgiveness for those who have made 120 monthly payments while working for a nonprofit / government (PSLF - public service loan forgiveness). Though the Devos Ed…

[deleted]

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#219

Post by phobosanomaly »

akvadrako wrote: post #47
debacle wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have too many smart people for capitalism in its current form to support. If you look for them, you will see artificial barriers erected throughout society to stymie real meritocracy.

Capitalism has lots of opportunities for smart people to create wealth. It's hard to just be a "worker" or "researcher", but if you are smart and determined you should be able to create a business that makes the whole world richer. I do agree though there is a lot of wasted talent and effort.

That requires lots of risk that may not be feasible to students funding their education with debt, and with skills in spaces that have regulatory overhead.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#220

Post by phobosanomaly »

ryan93 wrote: post #187
pradn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bio 101 at UT gets like 500 students per class, with 3-4 sections for the fall semester. If students fail then, is it because they are not capable of learning the material, or is it because they've been thrown into a totally new environment, where some extra guidance and close attention from TAs would help? There are a commensurately higher number of TAs for these classes, but the quality of teaching and energy they…

I don’t think actually smart people would get weeded out at the bio 101 level. If you need hand holding you definitely shouldn’t be a surgeon or scientist.

It really depends on the curve. Weed-out classes are famous for having extremely aggressive curves. You can be perfectly smart, be intellectually curious, and have a great grip on the material, but due to the competitiveness wind up with grades too low for, say, medical school. You need those A's and A+'s in the early courses to pad your GPA so that you can take the hit from taking harder more intellectually-demanding courses later-on if you're in a demanding major.

A potentially brilliant scientist isn't necessarily the best at memorizing every single idiosyncratic, arcane detail that the professor uses to differentiate an A+ from a B.

I got some pretty darn good grades in undergrad, and whenever I explained to a research PI how the sausage was made they were pretty disgusted by it, because it involves zero intellectual curiosity. Just dissecting and memorizing massive amounts of minute details from the lecture that have zero relevance to the real world. I didn't get those grades because I was the smartest guy in the class (I wasn't by a long-shot), I got them because I was a machine that resided in the same cubicle on the second-floor of the science library 7 days/week. There are plenty of people with lower grades than I got who would be magnificent surgeons or scientists. But, that GPA is a huge gatekeeper to those professions.

For example, the infamous med school STEP 1 exam is going pass/fail next year, because students have stopped caring about learning about how to practice medicine in the real world, and have started grinding thousands of ANKI cards every day to memorize infinite details about weird autosomal recessive diseases that like 4 people on the planet have, and game the test. The curve is tight, and performance on the test has stopped reflecting ability to actually perform the jobs the test is gatekeeping for.

Post reply on HN