LW - Changes in College Admissions by Zvi

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Changes in College Admissions, published by Zvi on April 24, 2024 on LessWrong. This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned. Application Strategy and Difficulty Paul Graham: Colleges that weren't hard to get into when I was in HS are hard to get into now. The population has increased by 43%, but competition for elite colleges seems to have increased more. I think the reason is that there are more smart kids. If so that's fortunate for America. Are college applications getting more competitive over time? Yes and no. The population size is up, but the cohort size is roughly the same. The standard 'effort level' of putting in work and sacrificing one's childhood and gaming the process is dramatically up. So you have to do it to stay in place. There is a shift in what is valued on several fronts. I do not think kids are obviously smarter or dumber. Spray and Pray and Optimal Admissions Strategy This section covers the first two considerations. Admission percentages are down, but additional applications per student, fueled by both lower transaction costs and lower acceptance rates, mostly explains this. This means you have to do more work and more life distortion to stay in place in the Red Queen's Race. Everyone is gaming the system, and paying higher costs to do so. If you match that in relative terms, for a generic value of 'you,' your ultimate success rate, in terms of where you end up, will be unchanged from these factors. The bad news for you is that previously a lot of students really dropped the ball on the admissions process and paid a heavy price. Now 'drop the ball' means something a lot less severe. This is distinct from considerations three and four. It is also distinct from the question of whether the sacrifices are worthwhile. I will return to that question later on, this for now is purely the admission process itself. The size of our age cohorts has not changed. The American population has risen, but so has its age. The number of 17-year-olds is essentially unchanged in the last 40 years. GPT-4 says typical behavior for an applicant was to send in 1-3 applications before 1990, 4-7 in the 1990s-2000s, 7-10 in the late 2000s or later, perhaps more now. Claude said it was 3-5 in the 1990s, 5-7 in the early 200s and 7-10 in the 2010s. In that same time period, in a high-end example, Harvard's acceptance rate has declined from 16% to 3.6%. In a middle-range example, NYU's acceptance rate in 2000 was 29% and it is now 12%. In a lower-end example, SUNY Stony Brook (where my childhood best friend ended up going) has declined from roughly 65% to roughly 44%. The rate of return on applying to additional colleges was always crazy high. It costs on the order of hours of work and about $100 to apply to an additional college. Each college has, from the student's perspective, a high random element in its decision, and that decision includes thousands to tens of thousands in scholarship money. If you apply to a safety school, there is even the risk you get rejected for being 'too good' and thus unlikely to attend. Yes, often there will be very clear correct fits and top choices for you, but if there is even a small chance of needing to fall back or being able to reach, or finding an unexpectedly large scholarship offer you might want, it is worth trying. As colleges intentionally destroy the objectivity of applications (e.g. not requiring the SAT, although that is now being reversed in many places, or relying on hidden things that differ and are hard to anticipate) that further decreases predictability and correlation, so you have to apply to more places, which f...