(I promised I’d publish this last night no matter what state it was in, and then didn’t get very far before the deadline. I will go back and edit and improve it later.)
I feel like I keep, over and over, hearing a complaint from people who get most of their information about college admissions from WhatsApp groups or their parents’ friends or a certain extraordinarily pervasive subreddit (you all know what I’m talking about). Something like “College admissions is ridiculous! Look at this person, who was top of his math class and took 10 AP classes and started lots of clubs, he didn’t get into a single Ivy, he’s going to UCLA!” I think the closest allegory I can find for this is something like “look at this guy, he’s 7 feet tall, didn’t even make it to the NBA!” There’s something important that they’re both missing, some fundamental confusion of a tiny part of the overall metric from reality.
(I promised I’d publish this last night no matter what state it was in, and then didn’t get very far before the deadline. I will go back and edit and improve it later.)
I feel like I keep, over and over, hearing a complaint from people who get most of their information about college admissions from WhatsApp groups or their parents’ friends or a certain extraordinarily pervasive subreddit (you all know what I’m talking about). Something like “College admissions is ridiculous! Look at this person, who was top of his math class and took 10 AP classes and started lots of clubs, he didn’t get into a single Ivy, he’s going to UCLA!” I think the closest allegory I can find for this is something like “look at this guy, he’s 7 feet tall, didn’t even make it to the NBA!” There’s something important that they’re both missing, some fundamental confusion of a tiny part of the overall metric from reality.