Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Highlights From the Comments on College Admissions


Listen Later

HalTheWise discusses a factor I missed (until I sneakily edited it in, so you may have read the later version that included it):

One very powerful contributor that Scott did not mention is that in many cases schools are directly or indically intentivized to have a low admission rate. US news & world report released the first national college ranking in 1983, and donors and board members at various schools have increasingly been using national rankings performance, which directly includes low admissions rates, as a measure of how well a school is doing.

These rankings and metrics also heavily incentivize having high yield (a large fraction of students that are admitted end up attending) which for a fixed size applicant pool also encourages accepting as few people as possible. This has led to the death of safety schools, because they would rather reject a high performing student than admit them and have them not attend.

These factors might also be a driving force behind the rise of common app, since schools are trying to get as many applicants as possible, even if it hurts the quality of their pool.

kaakitwitaasota points out that consulting is an exception to the “where you go to school doesn’t matter” principle:A lot of top firms these days won’t even look at you if you didn’t go to the “right” college. My mother did her MBA at Northeastern, and recently had lunch with an old classmate who ended up at a top consulting firm. My mother’s classmate’s résumé would end up in the trash unread these days–Northeastern isn’t considered good enough.

So while it’s probably true on the macro level that smart kids will do just fine anywhere they end up, there is a subset of extremely prestigious, extremely well-paid jobs which will not even look at you if you didn’t get into the right institution at the age of 18–which, in practice, means that the élite are chosen on the basis of who they were at the age of 14-17. When viewed in those terms, it’s completely nuts.

I’d heard this before; my impression is that a big part of consulting is having prestigious-looking people tell you what you want to hear. If what they’re actually hiring for is prestige rather than competence per se, that could make it a special case

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Astral Codex Ten PodcastBy Jeremiah

  • 4.8
  • 4.8
  • 4.8
  • 4.8
  • 4.8

4.8

123 ratings


More shows like Astral Codex Ten Podcast

View all
EconTalk by Russ Roberts

EconTalk

4,233 Listeners

Robert Wright's Nonzero by Nonzero

Robert Wright's Nonzero

584 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,395 Listeners

Odd Lots by Bloomberg

Odd Lots

1,789 Listeners

Future of Life Institute Podcast by Future of Life Institute

Future of Life Institute Podcast

105 Listeners

ChinaTalk by Jordan Schneider

ChinaTalk

269 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

89 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

88 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

426 Listeners

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg by Spencer Greenberg

Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg

128 Listeners

Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist by Joe Lonsdale

Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist

164 Listeners

"Moment of Zen" by Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, Antonio Garcia Martinez

"Moment of Zen"

91 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

75 Listeners

"Econ 102" with Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg by Turpentine

"Econ 102" with Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg

146 Listeners

Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11) by Patrick McKenzie

Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

123 Listeners