Re: Collisteru on Elite College Admissions

Currier House: Where Bill Gates recruited Steve Ballmer

Collisteru (another Inkhaven resident) recently published a post on admissions to elite schools. His main argument is that good students who are not absolutely exceptional need to avoid “wasting time, energy, and mental effort on schools that don’t care about them.” Collisteru shared a draft of the post with me for feedback, which I was happy to give. This is my longer response to his thesis.

First, background: I ended up applying early to and attending Harvard, but I was not in Collisteru’s targeted group of students. I went to a well-off public high school in a coastal state with guidance counselors who knew how college admissions worked. Plus, my parents met at Harvard, and legacy still gives you a bonus even though it’s now far from a guarantee. Most of my insight comes from interacting with my university first as a student and now as an alum, and from conversations with other students about their admissions process.

I agree with Collisteru that many high school students are spending too much time, attention, and worry on elite colleges. For these students, their time would be better spent focusing on schools that are less prestigious but that can offer a similar education to their best pupils. There are some caveats that might be worth discussing in the future, but right now I want shed some light on his thesis from the colleges’ perspective. Specifically, elite universities want to see that you are a worthwhile investment of their prestige.

Universities want prestige

To understand admissions, we need to know what elite universities want. Elite universities have two main assets they want to grow: prestige and money. Of the two, prestige is usually the more significant, because the elite schools have so much money that it’s usually not in short supply – all of Collisteru’s top 20 example schools (from the QS World university rankings) have endowments over $1 billion, and all the private ones have several billions.

Money and prestige can be traded imperfectly. A rich university can poach top professors and fund headline-making research. A prestigious university can get billionaires to put their name on a building for a hefty sum. So one way to acquire more prestige and money is through trading the two – by buying low, and selling high, like everything else. Hire professors when you get a windfall, start a fundraising campaign when you make headlines. But plenty of ostensibly nonprofit institutions can do prestige/money arbitrage – hospitals, museums, and charitable foundations are good examples. So why are universities different?

Prestige venture capital

Elite universities are special because they act as venture capital for prestigious careers.

Venture capital, compared to normal investment, is high risk and high reward. Most of the startups a VC firm invests in will produce no returns, but a few will multiply your initial investment a thousandfold or more. Fund too few companies, and you’re likely to miss out on the rare successes. Fund too many, and your returns get diluted with all the startups that crash and burn.

When you apply to college, you are offering a stake in your future prestige in exchange for an initial prestige boost. Getting to put a Harvard or Yale or Caltech degree on your resume enables you to be considered seriously for jobs in the best science labs or law firms or tech startups. And if you win a Nobel or get appointed to the Supreme Court or start a Silicon Valley unicorn, some of that reputation gets sent back, and the school makes big returns on its investment.¹

Like VCs, the colleges expect most of their return to come from a few huge success stories – they just don’t know with certainty which students those will be in advance. That’s why there are so many hoops to jump through: any small advantage in getting those future world leaders adds up over thousands of students.

And the top colleges have no shortage of students they could invest in instead of you. If you are the last student they admit, they still expect to receive some return, but the next thousand who didn’t get in would have all been decent substitutes. That’s why admissions are a game of odds even for most students who have the skills to succeed at an elite school.

Explaining Collisteru’s advice

Here’s how Collisteru’s requirements fit in to this model of universities.

• Getting all A’s in hard classes and a top 5% GPA proves that you have the capacity to deliver in a prestigious career at the high level that top schools need to reach.
• Being the best person in your state at something proves you already have some prestige to work with, and the university can jump in on a proven investment.
• Being well rounded or “T-shaped” lets you hedge your prestige potential across multiple sectors.
• Being charismatic proves you have good marketing, and your potential prestigious accomplishments will become more widely known.
• Being humble proves you’re not going to defraud your investors.

This also applies to Collisteru’s actionable advice. You should spend the most time on the sources of prestige with the highest expected value – how likely you are to get that prestige times how much that prestige helps you.² This is probably not an elite school, unless you are particularly likely to get admitted.

Why slightly less “elite” schools are different

All universities deal in money and prestige, but they deal in them in different ways. Elite universities don’t have much flexibility. For them, a degree is basically an all or nothing investment. They can’t invest just a tiny amount of prestige in a student with a good but not great chance of making it big. Their prestige pool is spread evenly among every student. Each additional student both dilutes their investment in everyone, and slightly lowers the school’s prestige from the acceptance rate. So, these schools only make big bets.

The second highest tier of schools, like a flagship state university, have more freedom. Each admitted student costs a smaller investment of prestige, but if they want to up their investment they can admit you to an honors program or give you an award. So if your prestige-investor pitch from high school is great but not exceptional, and you think you can convince a school to invest prestige in you later on, these schools give you a chance to make that second round pitch.

And it doesn’t stop at second tier colleges. Even if you go to a school that’s a total unknown, a degree at all is still prestige that you can use to start a career. And of course, you tend to learn actual skills and knowledge while you get that degree, which help your career and your life in other ways.

Transactional vs. transformative experience

Rakesh Kurana, former dean of Harvard College, talked a lot about having a transactional college experience (where you put in work and get rewards) vs a transformative experience (where college allows you to grow as a person).³

This post focuses intensely on the transactional side. The transformative side is also really important. Universities as collective entities want to give you a good education so their investment has the best chance of succeeding. But people at universities, like Rakesh, often do actually want you to become a wise scholar who improves the world. This is true of any university, though. You can still get a transformative experience at a less prestigious college or a vocational school or in the workplace.

College is a huge investment of time and money for you as a student. Prestige usually matters much less to individual students than it does to universities, with some exceptions like applying to law school or medical school. This is healthy and wise.

Applying to college is a huge decision. You should make that decision based on what you can afford, how much time you can devote, and what you think you’ll get out of your education – both as a transaction and as a transformation. Hopefully, by seeing it from the school’s perspective, you can make the decision that’s right for you.

Coming soon: Being judgemental about geometric shapes