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

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#91

Post by nvarsj » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

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 only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1]

It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space.

Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory.

[1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#92

Post by debacle » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

fullshark wrote: post #35

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.

Agree, we have an abundance of capital and labor but a dearth of opportunities for both. At least compared to the Post WW2 era.

Well said. It's going to cause us to re-think the capital/labor relationship.

UBI will almost certainly be a necessity, but then the question is who will mop the floors and what is the impetus of progress.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#93

Post by dolni » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #72

adamhp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes sense to group people for education based on ability Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though. Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and coun…

Same here. It sounds to me like every test trying to measure "ability" ends up testing for a specific kind of ability instead of the presence of ability in general. US college admissions today are basically a joke though, given universities mostly admit upper-middle class kids with perfect grades who can write an essay where they pretend that their life was hard.

I think we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good, here. Yes, ability measurement is sort of fuzzy and it's not perfect. It at least gives you a starting point.

There would be no doubt in anybody's mind that we shouldn't take a kid whose mathematical abilities are counting to 10, and adding and subtracting one digit numbers, and toss them into a calculus course.

So given that there is some boundary, that ability is meaningful in _some_ way, we can start to narrow it down. We can think about methods for measuring ability. What knowledge and understanding is required before you can tackle algebra II?

Again, not perfect, but certainly necessary and better than nothing.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#94

Post by slibhb » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

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 persons educational prospects.

This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.

At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#95

Post by endisneigh » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

dolni wrote: post #84

endisneigh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which good schools are you thinking of? Most schools don't really do any analysis to show that they're good or not. The others are either exam schools or schools in areas that are expensive. Given the correlation between socioeconomic status and school performance, that's also just selection bias.

I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail.

Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#96

Post by adamhp » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #76

adamhp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes sense to group people for education based on ability Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though. Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and coun…

Ability (not innate, but current) to learn a particular set of things. How well you are prepared, motivated, and maybe even have some innate bonus points. This ability may vary wildly across subjects (maths vs biology vs history), and with time (acute cases of interest / commitment, or distracting factors like romance or gaming). In any case, batching people by the level of current ability is helpful. This is a compl…

> Ability (not innate, but current) to learn a particular set of things. How well you are prepared, motivated, and maybe even have some innate bonus points.

Again, you have kind of a chicken-and-egg problem here. Ability is typically measured by standardized testing, which is a poor proxy. The same way engineering interviews are a poor proxy for actually measuring engineering ability or ability to add value as an SDE.

Unfortunately, measuring ability this way also captures your socioeconomic status, family stability, medical conditions, and many other things that adversely impact your "ability" to perform well on a standardized test.

We could argue it's not on Princeton or other institutions to account for that, but as a society I think we could probably do better in that regard, by offering a variety of solutions to this complex problem.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#97

Post by brightball » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

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 and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.

E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.

This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#98

Post by OliverJones » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

As a long-ago grad of one of these fancy-schmancy schools with vast endowments and big revenue streams from application fees, I have this question, and complaint:

Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections.

They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population.

So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#99

Post by throwawayboise » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

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…

Exactly. As I said in another reply, remediating a poor K-12 education is not the point of going to college.

Re: Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

#100

Post by NDizzle » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

zkid18 wrote: post #13

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…

As a non-US citizen I was always surprised US universities doesn't require any examination test for the admission.

They do. Well, most do. Well, some do. With the modern day race quotas (harsh phase, but that's the reality) in place it turns out that suddenly admissions exams are racist. It's wrong think to believe that you have to pass an exam to be accepted to the highest of higher level learning.