Imagine a high school where the only goal was to get into college. You attend classes only insofar as they look shiny on your transcript; you’re spending every waking moment optimizing extracurriculars for “well-roundedness” and getting A++s. You constantly compete to get the highest score on a random Spanish test halfway through the semester, and you severely judge anyone who has even the tiniest bit of slack to hang out with their friends or start a project whose purpose is something besides looking good on a resume. This is the dark ideal of perfect competition, where anything deviating from a total focus on college admissions is destroyed by the supplicants of Moloch.
I would argue that this isn’t very far from the high schools we have now. The “good” high schools; the ones in New York, the Bay Area, and right next door to MIT; these high schools contain some of the brightest, most talented high schoolers in the country—and are hopelessly distorted by their status as “feeder” schools for the Big Important Colleges.
People have paid $1.5 million, not to get their child into college, but instead to get college admissions advice. Someone paid four times the cost of an entire college education for their kid, to sit with a woman in a room for thirty hours and have her explain how to get into Ivies. From an economic perspective, they sure seem to be behaving like the expected lifetime value of this credential is worth a lot more than $1.5 million. And this isn’t even counting the families that pay $40 million to get their kids into Harvard through the back door.
So why is college admissions such a massive industry? Why is it that otherwise-intelligent high school students spend this much time on college, and assign arbitrarily large amounts of status to it? Why is it that, when people hear about high-school-aged Olympic winners, the first thing they say is not “wow, this person is the fastest person alive”, but rather, “she’s going to have a great college application”?
College is weird, in a way that warps traditional high school students’ lives pretty strongly. Barring exceptional circumstance, you only get to apply once, which makes a 4% acceptance rate terrifying. Even the most selective real-world jobs aren’t this bad: Jane Street has an acceptance rate an order-of-magnitude lower, but if you don’t get in, you can just try again. Whereas if you don’t get into Harvard, that’s basically it—you could try to take a gap year and reapply, but you’ve already poisoned the well.
Moreover, colleges don’t really have career-track specialization—basically every top student applies to the top colleges. This means that if you’re a Harvard student, the non-Harvard people you meet probably got rejected by Harvard, further contributing to the status glow of these universities.
On top of this, universities as institutions have wildly outsized power in society. Because they have a stranglehold on research—with basically all research being done by either universities or the government—running in “highbrow” circles means you’re always hearing about Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. Point in fact, you can probably name the universities that Mark Zuckerburg or Larry Page dropped out of, just by guessing. This is fucking wild. If you worked at Google once, this is cool but drops off after a few years—if you went to Harvard, this stays with you literally forever. And the opposite is also true; if you went to Pretty Decent State School #24, then you didn’t go to Harvard.
I think most of the ink that has been spilled about how ‘Harvard is a dumb signaling game’ misses the point. I think that this is the core fact about why people assign so much value and status to universities—they’re a one-shot game, and if you fail, it’s over. College is useful because, when you go to a college, you can signal that you went there for the rest of your life. And if you have the money, it actually plausibly is the optimal choice for you to spend $1.5 million getting in.
College Admissions as a Brutal One-Shot Game
Epistemic Status: Beset on all sides by Moloch
Imagine a high school where the only goal was to get into college. You attend classes only insofar as they look shiny on your transcript; you’re spending every waking moment optimizing extracurriculars for “well-roundedness” and getting A++s. You constantly compete to get the highest score on a random Spanish test halfway through the semester, and you severely judge anyone who has even the tiniest bit of slack to hang out with their friends or start a project whose purpose is something besides looking good on a resume. This is the dark ideal of perfect competition, where anything deviating from a total focus on college admissions is destroyed by the supplicants of Moloch.
I would argue that this isn’t very far from the high schools we have now. The “good” high schools; the ones in New York, the Bay Area, and right next door to MIT; these high schools contain some of the brightest, most talented high schoolers in the country—and are hopelessly distorted by their status as “feeder” schools for the Big Important Colleges.
People have paid $1.5 million, not to get their child into college, but instead to get college admissions advice. Someone paid four times the cost of an entire college education for their kid, to sit with a woman in a room for thirty hours and have her explain how to get into Ivies. From an economic perspective, they sure seem to be behaving like the expected lifetime value of this credential is worth a lot more than $1.5 million. And this isn’t even counting the families that pay $40 million to get their kids into Harvard through the back door.
So why is college admissions such a massive industry? Why is it that otherwise-intelligent high school students spend this much time on college, and assign arbitrarily large amounts of status to it? Why is it that, when people hear about high-school-aged Olympic winners, the first thing they say is not “wow, this person is the fastest person alive”, but rather, “she’s going to have a great college application”?
College is weird, in a way that warps traditional high school students’ lives pretty strongly. Barring exceptional circumstance, you only get to apply once, which makes a 4% acceptance rate terrifying. Even the most selective real-world jobs aren’t this bad: Jane Street has an acceptance rate an order-of-magnitude lower, but if you don’t get in, you can just try again. Whereas if you don’t get into Harvard, that’s basically it—you could try to take a gap year and reapply, but you’ve already poisoned the well.
Moreover, colleges don’t really have career-track specialization—basically every top student applies to the top colleges. This means that if you’re a Harvard student, the non-Harvard people you meet probably got rejected by Harvard, further contributing to the status glow of these universities.
On top of this, universities as institutions have wildly outsized power in society. Because they have a stranglehold on research—with basically all research being done by either universities or the government—running in “highbrow” circles means you’re always hearing about Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. Point in fact, you can probably name the universities that Mark Zuckerburg or Larry Page dropped out of, just by guessing. This is fucking wild. If you worked at Google once, this is cool but drops off after a few years—if you went to Harvard, this stays with you literally forever. And the opposite is also true; if you went to Pretty Decent State School #24, then you didn’t go to Harvard.
I think most of the ink that has been spilled about how ‘Harvard is a dumb signaling game’ misses the point. I think that this is the core fact about why people assign so much value and status to universities—they’re a one-shot game, and if you fail, it’s over. College is useful because, when you go to a college, you can signal that you went there for the rest of your life. And if you have the money, it actually plausibly is the optimal choice for you to spend $1.5 million getting in.