But I do think that this model is starting to fall apart. Firstly, everyone is in such a frenzy about getting into top schools that this process, which kind of held together only because no one was thinking about it, is out in the open where it looks really bad.
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Being rigged is not good for an elite reputation. The schools now have an additional constraint: they have to somehow seem fair and reasonable arbiters of who gets to attend them. Since the whole system is unfair and unreasonable, this will be hard.
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Secondly, it's such an enormous hassle to get into Harvard, Stanford, etc. that I am not sure it's a good deal for the best kids out there anymore. The last generation of tech founders went and dropped out. Will the next gen even go?
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Like I said earlier, high school grades and high school volunteering have high opportunity costs. There are two groups of students whose grades and 'extracurriculars' won't reflect their potential: poor students, who have to work, and exceptional students of every background.
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Elite colleges should care more about the poor students, but there are financial incentives not to and the fight to change admissions to help poor students has been an uphill battle. Elite colleges *do* care about the exceptional students and want their process to attract them.
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For exceptional kids, the opportunity costs of the college gauntlet are really high. They could jump through the elite-college hoops, which are getting more time-intensive every year, or they could have an interesting job. Teach themselves to code. Write a book. Start a company.
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I used to work at Triplebyte, and sometimes we'd see brilliant kids with acceptances at top schools do Triplebyte the summer before they went off to college. They'd get great six-figure jobs. Some would then defer college. Did they ever actually go back? I don't know.
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I said earlier that the elite schools are trying to pick winners. But what if their process is getting so burdensome and their value add so tenuous that winners won't participate in the four-year grind to make it there?
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The measurable signs that this is happening are limited so far. High school students are definitely needing to spend more and more time on college applications. Anecdotally some definitely aren't bothering, but the vast majority still are.
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But I'm keeping an eye out, because I think it's the only limiting factor on how life-consuming the elite college app process gets. It will happily consume an arbitrarily large number of children as long as it's picking winners. If it stops being a way to pick winners, it's over.
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A strategy elite colleges use is to produce winners by providing them with a ton of resources, reputational currency, network, etc. This makes stringent admission less important, and a lottery among the top x% of applicants would do as well
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Replying to @mesolude
hmmm I think I might disagree depending what x is. I'm sure there's a lot of random noise but I think selecting people who will already succeed is also a lot of the formula and I don't know that you'd do as well if x was larger than 10%
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