Fundamentally altering the admissions process will also fundamentally alter the institution and what graduates of it look like. If we alter selection for Navy SEALs -- because SEAL school graduates are known to be athletic, motivated, and team-oriented, and we want more people like that -- I have a feeling that we'd simply destroy the image of the SEALs rather than increasing the number of people with those personality traits.
Back to my point: It always starts with the notion of focusing on merit, but devolves into checkboxes and quotas and arbitrary preferences, because those are easier to measure than actual merit. The end result is an institution that still fails to reward merit, and no longer creates the generous benefits it did at the start of the exercise. It also creates a group of bitter, resentful people who feel wronged by the changes that will significantly reduce any prior public goodwill towards the institution.
To be even more explicit, a lot of the reason that these colleges are so strongly correlated with high incomes and high achievement is that they allow attendees to network with people whose parents and family members have already reached the upper echelon. Refactoring admissions to replace that will shred that benefit altogether. Colleges are not a totally isolated system; the value of a degree does not derive solely from the lectures the individual receives there, nor perhaps from the name-prestige of the university, but largely from the networking people are able to do there and the companies that visit and recruit from the school because of that network.
Over four years, there's a big difference in your future prospects if you were meeting people with ties to Google, Berkshire, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Meta, et al., vs meeting people from Garmin (<$100k/year for fresh CS grads, when I graduated) and small local midwestern companies. Even if you don't get direct referrals to those big-name places, you're talking to people who know what a resume that can get in there looks like, rather than having to blindly follow whatever advice you can find online.
Harvard has a page about it: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2025/04/04/how-t...
The wikipedia page on Legacy Preferences is illuminating. Note the Larry Summers quote:
Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has stated, "Legacy admissions are integral to the kind of community that any private educational institution is."
This isn't to say that there aren't exceedingly competent people going into these elite institutions, only that my personal experience is such that the "magic sauce" beyond all the life history, accomplishments, test scores, grades, and so forth, is often bias or distributed gatekeeping.
Looked at differently, let's say you have an institution that aims to be elite, but the information provided by your selection criteria hits a wall, and the number of actually qualified individuals by prediction exceeds your capacity. In that case you have to either (a) basically do a lottery, which is honest but weakens the rationale for your institution over others, or (b) create criteria that are essentially useless but have a false veneer of rigor.
I'm not sure I think diversity quotas and so forth are the way to go either, but I also believe we need to stop pretending that these selection criteria are perfect or even near perfect, and that there's no bias either. I feel as if these discussions always proceed the same, that questionable or even objectively harmful (to the institution) criteria are pointed out, and then there's some outcry that lowering them will decrease standards, even as alternatives are never tested.
secondly, have you ever heard of the Pygmalion effect? people aren't static. If you introduce somebody to a high performing environment and tell them they're meant to be there, many of them will rise to the challenge. Of course, there is room for natural aptitude -- but nobody is proposing the schools take entirely random people. They'd still be selecting the best of the cohort. People who were able to succeed dramatically enough to be noticed, just in different environments.
Because of this, I always wonder about how many more "geniuses" were missing out on because of this. I'm pretty confident that in an elite university if you threw out the bottom 50% (or fewer!) of candidates and then just randomly selected you'd end up with a pretty similar if not identical outcome. The gap is small and shaped by environments. At college admission time the gap is just so small compared when looking from a PhD level.
I think the admissions systems are fucked up. It's become an arms race over things that don't matter. The root of the problem is just that we're trying to measure systems with lots of noise in them. At some point you're fitting noise, not meaningful data. It'll look successful but it's not successful do to your metrics, it's successful because an arbitrary metric would have sufficed. That doesn't mean don't use metrics, but rather to use cautiously. Data and measures are meaningless without context. In this context we're talking about kids. What, they can't ever fuck up? If they don't fuck up in high school they're more likely to in college. Ultimately we're dealing with humans, who adapt, change, and where it's hard to predict their futures. Personally I'd rather those kids to figure out how to be human easier. I don't know about causation, but there definitely is a strong correlation between their ability to cross these gaps when they've already learned those soft skills (those kids come to college and don't need to learn skills like taking care of yourself, cooking, or other forms of independence. They often are more clear about their desires and not just going through the motions). Unfortunately these are often inversely correlated to grades (like B's, not F's).
We can't have meritocracy if you believe merits can be measured without noise. The irony is that often the pursuit of meritocracy hinders its progress. The unfortunate reality is that there are things you just cannot measure. We should always try and seek to improve but that can't happen without deep understanding of limitations.
I'm also reminded of a scene from Silicon Valley. Richard gets into an argument about the marketing team and Jack Barker says because they're the best you gave to give them easier things to sell. There's a lot of ways to interpret that in this context so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.
mrangle•7h ago
Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic.
While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.
What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools.
Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness.
lolwow1234•3h ago
kjkjadksj•3h ago
aabhay•3h ago
What sells the colleges the most is the sense that successful people tend to be there. So while admissions profit can be a very short term goal, any admit counselor knows that the long term goal is to create admirable leaders and change makers.
This is not impossible for publicly funded schools. Berkeley has put out consistently top AI researchers and engineers, more so than Stanford in my opinion.
mistrial9•3h ago
SilverElfin•3h ago
mistrial9•2h ago
SilverElfin•2h ago
musicale•48m ago
> However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two
This is true. Stanford isn't too far removed from Berkeley by grad student enrollment (10K vs. 12K) but the undergraduate enrollment is tiny by comparison (7.5K vs. 33K).
jvanderbot•3h ago
This really strains credulity. Decision criteria may not be purely based on academic merit (e.g., SAT), or even significantly based on it. It may also be true that they seek candidates likely to succeed b/c why not? Successful alumni are a self-perpetuating advertisement for your school.
But to say they have never refused admission to a candidate that will "truly" go on to succeed is trivially falsified, if only by having limited admissions slots. It's an imperfect game, and I think you're giving them too much benefit of doubt, and playing a "no true scottsman" game here.
darth_avocado•3h ago
aabhay•3h ago
SAT is almost always read in terms of the deviation from the school or community average. So its not the case that having a decent score from a shit school is worse than a slight-better-than-decent score from an elite school
SilverElfin•3h ago
But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports.
By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination.
fn-mote•1h ago
> But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools.
The only way you could make this assertion would be if you knew "high level candidates" who were being refused admission "to elite colleges". And do you mean one? Or talking collectively? So a counterexample would be an high-level candidate who was admitted to NO elite colleges.
I do know examples. It happens all of the time. It doesn't even bother me. Colleges only have so many space. Unqualified rich kids getting in: undesirable and irritating. Qualified kids not getting in: a necessary consequence of the math.
The easiest way to find examples is to look in poor communities, where kids don't even know that Harvard would be free for them instead of $87k/year. Can't find any exceptional candidates there? Look harder.
The idea that there is some fictional "high-level" to begin with is crazy. Reducing all of a young person's humanity to a single metric ("level")?
cool_dude85•1h ago
The paper says that the three main causes for Ivy-plus admission rates among the 1% are:
"The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families"
But are these oh-so-important factors what make for successful students? Let's ask the authors.
"Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success."
Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse.