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.
Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
81–90 of 227 posts
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#82[deleted]
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Minor role is unfair. It's more like a good score is necessary but not sufficient. Basically, you can have a perfect SAT score and GPA from high school but you have no hobbies or other interests than studying and your essays are unimaginative, you're probably not getting admitted. But you do need to demonstrate some base level of academic ability.
Well, you can also have a perfect SAT and GPA and lots of interesting hobbies and extracurricular successes, but then get rejected in favor of other applicants with significantly weaker applications simply because subjective evaluations, under the direction of admissions offices, tend to claim that people of your racial background are all unimaginative drones...
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#84Earlier 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'll have to find the research, but this generally is not true (at least with K-12). From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them. This wou…
Good K-12 schools _do_ batch people by ability, though. The inner city schools -- the ones that are struggling, they do a poor job putting underperforming students into remedial courses. They similarly do a poor job putting high performing students into honors and AP/IB courses.
Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet.
I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
I believe there’s research that shows elite schools do not improve ones life prospects, with the exception of those from lower income households. They looked at those who were accepted to elite schools and went to “lesser” schools. Those people did not have worse outcomes, indicating the elite schools are selecting those who would have done well regardless. I do think this makes an interesting case for admitting more…
[deleted]
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#86Earlier 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.
Spent a year at an Ivy League. I met dozens of affluent, politically connected racial minorities, mostly from Northeast prep schools. I met exactly 0 poor kids from the South, or inner city Chicago or Detroit, or some other such background. It was pretty obvious what was going on.
Dozens vs 0 would be an overstatement, but the disparity is still there.
I suspect it was exacerbated by what social circles you were traveling in.
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#87It'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…
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 faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
I believe there’s research that shows elite schools do not improve ones life prospects, with the exception of those from lower income households. They looked at those who were accepted to elite schools and went to “lesser” schools. Those people did not have worse outcomes, indicating the elite schools are selecting those who would have done well regardless. I do think this makes an interesting case for admitting more…
It's behind a soft paywall but this article describes what you're saying very nicely. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
Apparently college is almost useless for rich white guys but it's progressively more useful if you're not rich, white, or a guy.
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
re: admittance rate trends. Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel. Disclaimer: Princeton alumnus.
Personally I think absolute number of admitted students is a more useful metric, since you can't really control how many people apply, and your capacity is more or less fixed. From the graph in the article, that is also in decline, but not as sharp (except the outlier of this year, which is caused by other factors).
Absolute number admitted is probably decreasing because the admissions committee is more effective at offering admissions to people who are more likely to accept the offer. There are a number of ways to do this.
Without looking, I would guess that that the entering classes of Princeton and other elite schools largely stay fairly steady over time for a variety of reasons.
As for the number of people who apply, this can be increased via outreach programs, marketing, etc.
Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants
#90First 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…
Indeed, I don't think there's a social or economic reason why higher education should be a scarce good. Likewise health care.
There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities.
The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty.
I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.