Gladwell: Getting In, The social logic of Ivy League admissions

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

by frisco • 17 years ago

86 111 17 years ago

gladwell.com

villageidiot• 17 years ago

I'll wait for Cliff Notes version. Gladwell is so goddamned longwinded.

physcab• 17 years ago

The Cliff Notes version is as such:

- College admissions is a horrible, flawed process.

- Standardized testing is a horrible, flawed process.

- Education is being treated like a commodity.

- It's not the school you go to; its what you do with the time that you are there.

time_management15• 17 years ago

I've often thought that America's goofy and somewhat unfair admissions system is actually a blessing in disguise.

Most countries have only a handful of excellent colleges, and the vast majority of the bright people end up at a small number of them. This means that it matters a great deal, in these countries, where you went to school.

In the US, partly as a consequence of the silly admissions system, the talent's much more widely spread around. So there are more colleges worth teaching at, and consequently we have 50-100 excellent schools. It also doesn't matter, because of this, nearly as much where one goes to school; it's almost irrelevant after the first job.

brandnewlow28• 17 years ago

I was an admissions officer at Princeton 4 years ago when this came out. It caused a bit of a stir in the office.

Here's the best bit, in my opinion:

"But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience."

unalone12• 17 years ago

Would you agree with the things that Gladwell says? Are the admissions processes that Byzantine?

brandnewlow28• 17 years ago

It is, by design, a black box process.

Colleges live and die by who they admit. The elite admission process is designed to give them the largest selection pool possible and total control over who gets in out of it. They hold all cards and will never give that up.

There are great advantages to this. If you need 5 viola players one year. You can take 5 viola players. No sweat. Those five kids will never find out that's why they got in, but that might have been the case. Certainly, these are awesome kids. But in a pool of 12,000 awesome kids, sometimes the viola swings the committee's vote.

If you need some kids from Western Michigan, you can take some kids from Western Michigan. Maybe there's a donor there. Or an influential alum who's mad that no one from that part of the state has been admitted in years. Who knows? These kids are jokingly called "area adds." Again, these are great kids. But their point of origin and perspective on it might just be the thing that swings the vote in a sea of 12,000 awesome kids. I'm fairly certain that's why I was admitted and I only think this because I spent two years admitting thousands of kids. I was a strong applicant able to talk interestingly about my origins. My grades and scores sure didn't show the firepower that the kids out east had, but they've gotta take someone from podunk Michigan now and then.

The top colleges are skeptical of all the standardized tests and most of the high school curriculums. This is both because of arrogance but also because they have data that the public doesn't. Every year we'd get a very sophisticated, confidential briefing from the folks at one of the big companies that showed the latest trends in their data. This was always somewhat shocking and fascinating, too. I can't say much about it other than this: the kids you think would do well on the tests do incredibly well. The kids you think will do badly, do very, very badly. Across the board. Everywhere. No matter what.

The things that I couldn't handle, personally, were the minority admissions and the elite prep school admissions. This is not because anything particularly underhanded or amoral or unethical was happening, but because the debates and arguments about how these cases should be handled simply required intellectual bandwidth that I didn't have. I couldn't plot a course that would carry me through how to deal with these kids and didn't much feel like making the effort it seemed I'd have to make to do so. There were times when it just seemed so unfair to admit a student with crummy grades and crummy test scores (relative to our applicant pool) because of her racial background. But there were other times when I was so impressed by other qualities in a student's application that I fought for them harder than anyone.

I visited some scary high schools in Philadelphia one year and met a kid who'd been corresponding with the foremost authority on Bram Stoker's Dracula via e-mail, on his own. I told him I wrote my senior thesis about the novel and his face lit up. I think mine did a bit, too. It's not often you get to talk about your specialty with someone else.

This was an African American student at an inner city school. All the teachers had been telling me all day that he was "the one" I needed to talk to, because it was so ridiculously apparent to them that he was sincerely, legitimately, maybe desperately trying to transcend his circumstances. And now he's able to talk about the plot structure of Dracula with someone.

Sure enough, his credentials were average for the applicant pool, but he was as easy a case as any. To speak to the audience here, he was hacking his social circumstances and we were interested in that.

So yes, it's very byzantine. It's a mess. You'd read applications for 7 days a week for 4 months all winter, annotating them, scribbling in the margins, knowing that very, very few of these kids were getting in.

Then you block out a whole month of sitting around a table eating catered food, sweeping across whole states worth of applicants in 15-hour days, debating, discussing, arguing, fighting over kid after kid after kid in committees of 5-6 people. I always enjoyed that part, but we had one officer who would cry at some point almost every day during committee. She believed we were slamming the door on a lot of these kids.

Personally, I believe they'll do fine wherever they end up if they/re as good as they say are. It'd be great to dump a bunch of resources on them so they can live "the life" for 4 years, but you can't celebrate every kid.

P.S. While I've got the floor and your ears about college admissions, I run the web's only independent directory of College Admissions Consultants at http://CollegeConsultantReviews.com. I created this many moons ago and there's a lot of interest in it from consultants who find it appearing for searches for their names. I think there's a business in there somewhere but don't have the time or technical skills to build the killer directory site that would be needed. Hit me up if you're interested.

ajju2• 17 years ago

Do you know if this is this also true for gradschool admissions? (even business schools?)

brandnewlow28• 17 years ago

I have no direct experience there.

But think about a few things. There's a general sense of what an undergraduate education looks like, 4 years, prerequisites followed by picking a major, etc.

"Grad school," on the other hand, is kind of meaningless. Is it a master's program? PhD? Is it in a hard science? English? It it in a trade a la journalism?

So my assumption is that every program is different and every school does it differently for grad programs. They're small and weird enough that they have to.

I do think there's a lot more faculty involvement in grad school admissions. I also think that master's programs are much, much easier to get into than people suspect. I went to the one of the top journalism schools in the country, and as far as I could tell, it had about a 50% admission rate. 50%!!!!!

HSO• 17 years ago

2 points, based on personal experience: One, particularly in PhD programs, faculty must ultimately associate itself somehow with the student. And not as an institution but as an individual professor, as supervisor or co-supervisor of the thesis. The places are fewer. The demand on the time of the professor is higher, per head. So there is virtually no room for "legacy" or "bring home the doughnuts" type of admissions. Think about it: the professor must ultimately sign his name on that kid's thesis or, even more publicly, publish together. Perhaps some professor profits individually and then makes a strong case for such a student because he figures his reputation is worth X amount or because he thinks the student is OK anyway, but institutionally I'd say no. Two, in master's programs, the likelihood of such admissions is higher. And within master's programs, I'd say MBA has a pretty high incidence. But don't forget, in particular in this setting, MBAs are not there for "education" in terms of books or skills or intellect. It's there for making connections. And so, legacy "kids" are kind of legitimate because they bring, almost by definition, already a very valuable asset with them.

tokenadult10• 17 years ago

What do all of you hear about QuestBridge

http://www.questbridge.org/index.html

in this regard? It appears that there is an effort now by colleges to look more proactively for another kind of prospective student.

karl11• 17 years ago

One of my professors, at an ivy league school no less, mentioned how he thinks admissions would get the same quality student body if they admitted every fifth candidate, as long as they didn't tell anyone they were doing things that way. I'm inclined to agree.

unalone12• 17 years ago

I'm certain that at the very least that would make a lot of applicants feel better about themselves.

Our valedictorian spent 12 years of her life doing everything she could to be a "Yale candidate." She took classes she didn't like, extracurriculars she didn't like, just to fit to this billing. When she got rejected it was a pretty tragic week for her.

yters4• 17 years ago

Yeah, life must suck for all the many, many kids whose childhoods are completely erradicated for a remote shot at something that people only consider valuable because people have to dedicate their lives for even a remote shot at it. The icing on the cake is that those who don't dedicate their lives to getting in probably have a better chance of getting in.

wallflower3• 17 years ago

"As the number of applicants has soared in recent years, premier schools admit as few as 1 in 10 students, a far more selective rate compared with a generation ago. To make room for an academically borderline development case, a top college typically rejects nine other applicants, many of whom might have greater intellectual potential."

http://www.projo.com/education/content/projo_20060917_brown9...

brandnewlow28• 17 years ago

That's not how it works, though. The development case is getting in so the school can pay the piper. If you don't admit those kids, then you don't have a kickass school that everyone wants to go to. Think of it as a reality tax.

screwperman3• 17 years ago

I'm aware that there was a discussion about the other extreme on HN a month ago -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257 -- but I need to vent off a little. Forgive me if I go off on a tangent.

I've recently graduated from a high school in India and I haven't spent a day thinking about how idiotic the education system is here. I wish I could have been a part of a culture that encouraged well-roundedness and recognized passionate kids, rather than one that exclusively rewarded academic performance. Having spent some time at an elementary school both in the US and in India, I can assure you that there is a great disparity in pedagogy even at that level.

My school wouldn't give a rat's ass about those who didn't get awesome grades. And doing so required one to allocate a disproportionate amount of time to rote learning. I would always rather spend time hacking (and perhaps slacking), like I have being doing ever since I was 8.

It's hilarious to see what gets passed for extracurricular activities here. All "club presidents" are just required to set up a 15 minute inter-house quiz containing 10 or so questions.

For four straight years, I was never picked by my teachers to be president/secretary of the computer club, even though I was known by my peers as "the comp guy", and had won competitions, etc., etc.. Some four random sycophants who got better grades than we were chosen instead. The shit really hit the fan last year, and my parents decided to talk to the principal about this. The principal was overly defensive, and said the faculty was looking for "leadership qualities" (for conducting a stupid quiz, yeah right). Of course, they never did anything in the first place to create these "leadership qualities". A month later, during a parent-teacher meeting, my parents and I were taken to the principal, who blamed my parents for making me a complete introvert. She couldn't see that possibly the school's fault, considering that I had been there for 11 years. And whenever I've won some sort of a competition, teachers would tell me "you're wasting my time, and shouldn't have any hobbies at this young an age". I've qualified for my country's training camp for the IOI this year, and I'm fairly confident I will get a medal. Will any Indian college notice this? Nope. Hell, even my school won't notice that.

Thankfully, I have parents who can afford to send me to a college in the US. I've been accepted by some decent but not-so-selective public universities, but I don't think the really good schools will admit me, because I have mediocre grades and no "leadership qualities", and I respect their decision: in this discussion, brandnewlow has reassured that the admissions process, despite a few idiosyncrasies, is pretty good. Plus, there isn't really much of a cut-throat competition for getting admission. Hell, I learned a lot just by applying. For instance, writing a few essays, showing them to others for advice on how to improve them, and repeatedly editing and proofreading them were things I had never done before.

Sorry for this terribly incoherent rant.

brandnewlow28• 17 years ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's pretty good across the board. I was proud of the work I did at my employer, but who knows, maybe they pick names out of a hat at Yale! Evidence suggests as much :) Die Yalies.

I read a good number of Indian applicants during my short stint in admissions. They were, for the most part, completely indistinguishable from one another. Perfect scores. Perfect grades. They all faxed in 20 pages of certificates, honors and awards. They all had the same list of leadership positions in school clubs.

We had a few folks on the team who had traveled over there and were able to parse through these applicants to find the really good ones, but it was crazy how similar all the applicants from India were.

I figured the schools had imperfect data about what we were looking for, so they had all constructed some sort of a rubric and were sending kids of type X to Princeton, Y to Harvard, Z to Williams, etc.

If I were to meet a 16-year-old promising student in India, my advice to him would be the same advice I'd give to the asian students in the U.S. Go to clown school. Join a circus. Build a rocket. Do SOMETHING that could not have come from your parents or teachers.

screwperman3• 17 years ago

Wow, Princeton's admissions process seems to be more thorough than I could have imagined. However, you seem to be referring to those expensive international schools where most Indian applicants come from. Typical Indian schools like the one I used to attend are quite different: only 5 (out of 120) of us from this year's graduating class have applied to American universities (though I know that at least 2 students in the past 4 years were accepted by Princeton).

Nevertheless, it's quite insightful.

Raplh2• 17 years ago

The good news is that an Indian student from an American college has a much easier time getting in to good American graduate programs (with 100% aid) then an Indian student from an IIT. This was definitely true at University of Rochester EE Dept when I was on the admissions committe, and I would be surprised if it were not somewhat generally true. In the sense of getting in to an American graduate program, you are "hacking the system" by going to American undergrad. (Of course, you are hacking it for an Indian admit. Americans get that advantage for free, which in pg essay lingo is a form of corruption).

screwperman3• 17 years ago

Good point. Having rich parents seems to be a big ace in the hole here.

Raplh2• 17 years ago

Caltech and Swarthmore (conflict of interest notice: I have degrees from both) are luxury brands with good success (as brands measured by endowment). They are quite different from the ivies as described by Gladwell.

I was always surprised that Caltech had the highest SATs of entering students: surely Harvard, Princeton, etc. had the ability to outdraw Caltech. Now I understand it: highest SATs is part of Caltech's luxury brand but not that of the ivies, just as high (er) performance is BMW but not Mercedes, or Lamborghini but not Rolls Royce.

Another feature of Admissions that Gladwell doesn't mention in this article is one I discovered when reviewing 400 applicants a year for perhaps 15 spots in the Electrical Engineering PhD program at University of Rochester. Your job is to create a great department, NOT to find the 15 most deserving of the 400. My own evolution on the graduate admissions committee was from poring over the details of hundreds of applications, to using numerical screens to bring myself down to perhaps 60 that I would look at in some details. One of the great things about having so many applicants is I could afford to be wrong about some of my filter metrics. Perhaps limiting myself to 4 or 5 universities in China (for Chinese applicants) was not necessary, but having done so I still had 10X as many good applicants as we could admit.

Is interpreting the admissions job as creating a great university rather than "fairly" picking the top applicants a feature or a bug? On reflection, I think it is clearly a feature. If you were hiring for a startup you would instantly recognize this approach to your selection process as the only one that vaguely made sense. Why would it be different when trying to create quality at older bigger places? But the kicker that makes it a sure thing as the right policy is this: it is IMPOSSIBLE to identify the best few % of a large pool of excellent applicants. When of two policy choices, one is impossible, it is likely it is not the optimum.

Gladwell: Getting In, The social logic of Ivy League admissions

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