Category Archives: College Process

So I did.

Friend: "A college is going to think you were retarded freshmen and sophomore years."

At least I contributed to Southwest Airline’s generous profits during those years…

Link: Sick of hearing about Harvard? So is everyone else–except Harvard-educated journalists.

This is a few-month old free article from the Wall Street Journal on why Harvard still makes headlines despite its diminishing importance as an ideas factory. Some nice play for the U of Chicago, too.

I haven’t been able to get to my next book because I’m drowning in periodicals and print-outs, in large part due to my discovery of Arts and Letters Daily, a massive aggregator of all the interesting articles on ideas, criticisms, books, politics, academia, etc. I also discovered Political Theory Daily Review which is another meta aggregator of similar kind.

If you don’t already subscribe to The Atlantic, well, shame on you, you should, and if you did you’d read their college admissions survey. So instead I will point you to a free article online in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. When I read the title and saw the author I knew I’d love it – it’s about "social logic of Ivy League admissions." I love sociology and college admissions is relevant!

Go read the whole thing. Gladwell starts by pointing out the ridiculousness of the old Ivy League admissions system, as recent as the 1970s ("applicant is short with big ears"). He then makes a clear point:

Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful.     

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. Fuelling the treatment-effect idea are studies showing that if you take two students with the same S.A.T. scores and grades, one of whom goes to a school like Harvard and one of whom goes to a less selective college, the Ivy Leaguer will make far more money ten or twenty years down the road.

Then, we learn that a couple economists published a study questioning the common assertion that Ivy League grads make more money later on. "They found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears."

Later it discusses an interesting dilemma for admissions officers: do you admit the "best-graduates" or the best students? "We tend to think that intellectual achievement is the fairest and highest standard of merit…" yet the "only thing that matters in terms of future impact on or contribution to society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has." Elite law schools tend to admit on the best-students model, Gladwell says, even though L.S.A.T. scores have little to do with how good a lawyer he will be. If you support a best-graduate model, then you should support a bit lower standards for athletes because athletes are far more likely to go into the high paying financial services sector "where they succeed because of their personality and psychological makeup." And a successful alum will donate to the school. Finally:

In the 1985-92 period, for instance, Harvard admitted children of alumni at a rate more than twice that of non-athlete, non-legacy applicants, despite the fact that, on virtually every one of the school’s magical ratings scales, legacies significantly lagged behind their peers. Karabel calls the practice “unmeritocratic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst,” but rewarding customer loyalty is what luxury brands do. Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them. Aren’t the tremendous resources provided to Harvard by its alumni part of the reason so many people want to go to Harvard in the first place? The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in—that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. 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.

Not a lot new in this Wash Post book review about the stupidity of college admissions mania. "Curiosity, self-discipline, effort, imagination, intellectual verve, sense of wonder, willingness to try new things, empathy, open-mindedness, civility, and tolerance for ambiguity are some of the qualities that define and give value to being a student. They are the same qualities that colleges say they seek in admitting prospective students. Yet they are also qualities that have been betrayed and repressed by the business models that now guide much of college admissions."

Craig Newmark of Newmark’s Door adds: "The prestige purveyors of higher education are now charging $125,000 [actually, $160,000] and more for their product. I’ll wager that the average American makes no more expensive purchase, except for his house, in his life."

I appreciated the many comments to my post Why is College (4 years, $160k) the Default?. The points were varied but steady in theme: don’t write off college! Technology educator Richard Kassissieh encouraged me to think about who works at colleges and why – ie professors are paid to make their minds available to you. Entrepreneur Chris Yeh admitted that he’s overly educated but couldn’t imagine life without it (I will address this in a moment). He makes the good point, “It is very seductive to believe that just doing what you’re passionate about is enough. But the world works in a certain way, and even if you decide not to follow those rules, it’s important to know and understand them.” Venture Capitalist David Cowan remarked that he learned the most in college by accident in the moments when you’re not “supposed” to be learning. He concluded, “Can you reproduce the experience without enrolling? I doubt it. You’ve got only one short life–why screw around with it? Seize the opportunity that people your age across nations and centuries have only dreamed of. You’ll love it.” The best comment in my opinion came from investor and civic leader Richard Springwater (excerpt): “The one thing that college can give you that you can never get anywhere else is a foundation in the basic literature of our culture. I find myself using my college education every day because all ideas are connected and they all go back to sources. The right school for you will operate in a purposeful way to introduce you to the canon of essential works. This is harder than it sounds because it cannot be self-assembled – you need an institution that understands its mission in this light and organizes its curriculum with a focus on the linkages. Over the past 40 years, most schools have pandered to the demands of their students for more electives, and to their faculty for more freedom to teach their specialties, and the result has been a directionless in education. The fact is that the consumers (students) have a variety of goals, most involving careers or killing time, with a small minority actually interested in what you describe as “learning to learn.” Someone who learns throughout his life for no reason other than abiding curiosity is called an intellectual. If you recognize yourself, than you need to find a place that will appreciate and understand you.”

Let me make one general point, first: I have not written off college. Indeed, as I have chronicled in my College Process posts or School posts I am visiting schools and will be applying to many in the fall. On the surface, a university environment seems like it would be a chocolate factory to me: tons of super smart people, guest speakers, a Yellow Pages thick course catalog of engaging courses, and so forth. These are all prime drivers in my excitement about college – I know I will milk its resources to death. On the other hand, I fear many of the reservations I have about high school (and the formal education system in general) only continue at the higher ed level. Given the extraordinary cost and time that one needs to devote to obtain a degree, I’m embracing alternative methods to acquire the same knowledge and experiences.

When Chris says above that “he couldn’t imagine life without it” (Stanford/Harvard education) this crystallizes a key point in my mind: for any kid who wants to go places, an official college degree seems so automatically essential that anything to the contrary seems beyond our imagination for how it could work. Along these lines, Kathy Sierra did a follow up post to her “Does College Matter?” post which prompted this discussion. In it she cities a cognitive scientist at Northwestern (previously chair of the CS department at Yale) who, after complaining that most of his Yale students weren’t there to get a strong education and mostly to party, get a good job afterwards, etc., says: “A good deal of cognitive dissonance is at work here. Because people labored so diligently at school for so many years, they convince themselves that there must have been a lot of learning going on.”

It surprises me that a Yale prof would say this – for I suspect this is less the case at the very top universities in the country. I think you will often hear similar things at middle tier colleges like where Seth Godin taught when he told me most of his students were there to get a degree. Because of the trade-offs I have made in high school (lower grades, run a company) I most likely cannot get in to the very top tier schools. There are tons of great schools out there, but many of my blog readers email me and say things like “Harvard’s a great school” or “You can go anywhere you want, why pass up?” Simply not true.

Finally, David Cowan above asks “You’ve only got one short life – why screw around with it?” The rebel in me says, Why NOT screw around with it? It seems to me that the world’s most preeminent thinkers and doers who literally moved the human race forward were those who wanted to screw with the status quo. People called ’em crazy at the time, but history has thanked them. And I look up to those people who thought different.