I think you might fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of admission systems. To be frank, admissions is set up to benefit the university and the university alone. If getting good test scores was the bottleneck, you would see shifts in strategic behaviour until the test became mostly meaningless. For instance, you can freely retake the SAT, so if you just selected based on that people would just retake till they got a good result.
The university has strong preferences about the distribution of students in classes. They have decided that they want different things from their applicants than “just” being good at tests.
They get this exactly through account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference for children of alumni, and a bunch of ill articulated selection actions in admissions offices and in other various places.
stable-marriage system would require a national system, which would require universities as distinct and competing organizations (mostly for prestige) to coordinate for the benefit of students. They obviously should do things wiht that general description, but they tend not to.
You’re phrasing this as though it’s rebutting some remark I made; if so, I’m not sure what remark that is. I know that admissions offices are admitting students according to an intentional system.
The phrase “Robbers don’t need to rob people” is generally accurate.
But saying “Robbers don’t need to rob people,” and writing a long argument in support of that, makes it seem like you might be confused about the thought processes of robbers.
If robbers had a lot of cultural cachet and there were widely-disseminated arguments implying that robbers need to rob people, I think there would be a lot of value in a piece narrowly arguing that robbers don’t need to rob people, regardless of your views on their thought processes.
This is about your top line claim, and your framing.
If you try to say that if you exclude the reason a system is competitive, it does not need to be competitive, this is obvious.
The system you propose does not fufill the top line purposes of the admissions system.
there isn’t a huge oversupply of talent at all for these spots,
Misses the fact that the complexity of the admissions process does not come from competition over talent (universities would be willing to accept most people on their waitlist if they had more slots, and slots are limited by other factors), but from highly multidimensional preference frontiers which require complicated information about applicants to get good distributions of students.
Basically, the argument about talent is wrong directioned for talking about admission systems.
At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:
But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.
This is the argument that I’m responding to and refuting.
You are wrong. The article does not refute that argument because (2) is about exactly the large dimensions of types of talent demanded. (Since universities want a variety of things)
You are assuming the consequent that there is not a large variety of things a university wants.
Saying if you relax a problem, it is easier, is not an argument that it can be relaxed. That is your fundamental misunderstanding. For the university, they do really find value in the things they select for with 2, so they have a lot of valuable candidates, and so picking a mixture of valuable candidates with a large supply of hard to compare offerings is in fact difficult, and will leave any one metric too weak for their preferences.
University cohorts are basically setup to maximally benefit the people who do get admitted, not to admit the most qualified. For this purpose universities would rather have students that make the school more rewarding for other students, and not the smartest possible students. This is combined with a general tendency to do prestigous/donor wanted things. And donors want to have gone to a college that is hard to get into (even though they did not like applying). The challenge of application (and with that admit rates over yield rates) is a signal.
I think you might fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of admission systems. To be frank, admissions is set up to benefit the university and the university alone. If getting good test scores was the bottleneck, you would see shifts in strategic behaviour until the test became mostly meaningless. For instance, you can freely retake the SAT, so if you just selected based on that people would just retake till they got a good result.
The university has strong preferences about the distribution of students in classes. They have decided that they want different things from their applicants than “just” being good at tests.
They get this exactly through account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference for children of alumni, and a bunch of ill articulated selection actions in admissions offices and in other various places.
stable-marriage system would require a national system, which would require universities as distinct and competing organizations (mostly for prestige) to coordinate for the benefit of students. They obviously should do things wiht that general description, but they tend not to.
You’re phrasing this as though it’s rebutting some remark I made; if so, I’m not sure what remark that is. I know that admissions offices are admitting students according to an intentional system.
The phrase “Robbers don’t need to rob people” is generally accurate.
But saying “Robbers don’t need to rob people,” and writing a long argument in support of that, makes it seem like you might be confused about the thought processes of robbers.
If robbers had a lot of cultural cachet and there were widely-disseminated arguments implying that robbers need to rob people, I think there would be a lot of value in a piece narrowly arguing that robbers don’t need to rob people, regardless of your views on their thought processes.
This is about your top line claim, and your framing.
If you try to say that if you exclude the reason a system is competitive, it does not need to be competitive, this is obvious.
The system you propose does not fufill the top line purposes of the admissions system.
there isn’t a huge oversupply of talent at all for these spots,
Misses the fact that the complexity of the admissions process does not come from competition over talent (universities would be willing to accept most people on their waitlist if they had more slots, and slots are limited by other factors), but from highly multidimensional preference frontiers which require complicated information about applicants to get good distributions of students.
Basically, the argument about talent is wrong directioned for talking about admission systems.
At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:
This is the argument that I’m responding to and refuting.
You are wrong. The article does not refute that argument because (2) is about exactly the large dimensions of types of talent demanded. (Since universities want a variety of things)
You are assuming the consequent that there is not a large variety of things a university wants.
Saying if you relax a problem, it is easier, is not an argument that it can be relaxed. That is your fundamental misunderstanding. For the university, they do really find value in the things they select for with 2, so they have a lot of valuable candidates, and so picking a mixture of valuable candidates with a large supply of hard to compare offerings is in fact difficult, and will leave any one metric too weak for their preferences.
University cohorts are basically setup to maximally benefit the people who do get admitted, not to admit the most qualified. For this purpose universities would rather have students that make the school more rewarding for other students, and not the smartest possible students. This is combined with a general tendency to do prestigous/donor wanted things. And donors want to have gone to a college that is hard to get into (even though they did not like applying). The challenge of application (and with that admit rates over yield rates) is a signal.