Getting Into College the Old Fashioned Way: With Money

Businessweek (in a story spotted via Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution) profiles ThinkTank Learning, a college-admission consultancy founded by Steven Ma, and largely catering to ambitious Asian immigrants like Ma, and their offspring — kids who'd like to go to elite schools, and can afford to have Ma's firm help them navigate the path to getting in. It's a statistics driven system, and backed by a money-back guarantee, so long as the applicant meets certain requirements: ThinkTank will refund their tens of thousands of dollars in fees if they don't make it into the sort of school that the ThinkTank algorithms say they will. Basically, they've reverse engineered the admissions policies at schools, particularly elite schools like MIT, Stanford, and the Ivies, and done so well enough to know which factors in a student's portfolio can be tweaked to increase their odds of getting into the big-name schools. A slice: [Ma's] proprietary algorithm assigns varying weights to different parameters, derived from his analysis of the successes and failures of thousands of students he's coached over the years. Ma's algorithm, for example, predicts that a U.S.-born high school senior with a 3.8 GPA, an SAT score of 2,000 (out of 2,400), moderate leadership credentials, and 800 hours of extracurricular activities, has a 20.4 percent chance of admission to New York University and a 28.1 percent shot at the University of Southern California. Those odds determine the fee ThinkTank charges that student for its guaranteed consulting package: $25,931 to apply to NYU and $18,826 for USC.

Comments

Not worth it

[plopez]

Universities are pretty much McUniversities these days. Arguing whether MIT is better than a state engineering school is like arguing whether Applebee's is better then Burger King. The food all comes frozen in a box, is cooked up by grill monkeys, and served by service droids. Having a degree from a state school hasn't hurt me as I am close to making upper management wages at a prestigious McCompany. And don't kid yourself, there are only McCompanies and McJobs left these days.

Re:Not worth it

[mick88]

At first I wanted to write off your post as just typical, cynical slashdotterism. But I re-read it and - well, I realize that you are probably right, particularly in the IT field (it could be argued that if you want to work in academia, school names _do_ matter).

Reading your post carefully, I see you aren't saying that "college is worthless, blah blah blah" but rather that the differences between the universities for undergrad ain't what they used to be. As another commenter here noted (paraphrasing) information has been liberated by the Internet so University isn't the only way to attain subject matter knowledge anymore, closing the gaps between schools.

However, I continue to believe that if a person goes through 4+ years of accredited university experience, learns how to follow directions, learns how to deal with smart people & foolish people, and discovers that they have a passion for something (be it computer science or otherwise) is a person better prepared to be effective in the working world than otherwise. And if that's university's main benefit, then dammit I guess I have to agree that it matters less where you do it.

Grad school is probably a different story but for undergrad & the kind of jobs you will be getting with an undergrad degree - I think you got it right.

Re:Smart People

[plopez]

I did fine. With far less debt. Besides, you are surrounded by "normal" people, if there is such a thing. If you surround yourself with abnormal people you never learn to deal with the rest of the world. Which amounts to a bad education.

Re:Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You"

[rsilvergun]

Or we could, you know, just restore the massive State and Federal funding that was cut 15-20 years ago that was the _actual_ reason tuition was as cheap as it was.... You know, all those tax cuts we keep voting for have a cost, right?