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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.
Competition and expense at elite colleges is really tough for my kids. Today, I don't think I would have gotten into the colleges I attended 30 years ago. And I hear most of the parents of my generation griping about competition from incoming foreign students.
No, I say this is good. The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees. Students are paying for the lavishness. MOOC (massive online open courses) have been proposed as the solution, providing the education without the cost of the colleges' overhead.
As this would trend, the smaller and middle reputation colleges would fold and get privatized (which has not worked well at all). Colleges like, say Hendrix in Arkansas or St. Mike's in VT, are fine schools with good professors, and they'd be the victim if it weren't for an increase in students who can afford to pay the full tuition. If the country club and reputations of US colleges didn't attract foreign full-tuition paying students, the only solution would be more college debt, which is already unsustainable. So if my kid (with better grades, scores, and languages than I had) didn't get into the "A-List" college I attended, I'm satisfied she'll find more people as smart as she is at the less prestigious school, and that all the foreign tuition coming into this program will float all boats.
The only two things most people remember about college are 1) the interesting people they met (friends, faculty, etc) and 2) the debt they leave with. MOOC's only address the latter. More wealthy foreign students paying full tuition addresses both.
Gently reply
I really despise the way college admissions in the US works (I have a Ph.D. from an Ivy, but did my undergrad in Europe). The problem is that all your hobbies are turned into some form of merit that you use to apply for college. In order to get some documented evidence for this, everything has to be officially done through a club or some other nonsense, where you can find someone to write a recommendation letter for you. As a Finn when I was in high school, we used to hop on the train with some friends and go up to Northern Finland to hike through the wilderness. Once during Winter break in -30 degrees (C) for a week in pitch black darkness on skis. I value much more having to plan for everything independently.
I attended college in California about 30 years ago, studying biology. Back then, the student body was an ethnic mix of whites, Hispanics, blacks and Asians. Yet most of us were third or more generation Americans. We were born and raised in America, our parents had been born and raised in America, our grandparents had been born and raised in America, and only then did we start getting to ancestors who came from overseas. We spoke English as a native language, and culturally we had a lot in common. Most of our professors had a similar lineage and background, as well.
30 years later, my nephew (American born and raised) is attending the same college I did, and he also chose to study biology. What he describes is completely different from what I experienced. He's told me about how many students there are wealthy foreigners who have absolutely no ties to America, and often a very limited grasp of the English language. This is even true for some of the professors, apparently.
He's told me horror stories about group work he's been forced into, where there will be maybe two American-raised students forced to work with several foreigners. In one case he said that he and an American woman had to work with Chinese, Somali and Arab students on a project. The foreigners struggled to communicate with one another, and with the Americans. Some of the foreigners apparently just didn't even bother to do any work, since they were there just because their wealthy parents had sent them over, and didn't have any initiative whatsoever to succeed. In the end, the project was a near disaster for the two American students. They ended up doing the bulk of the work. They considered complaining to the professor and administration about the situation, but decided not to as they feared being labeled as "racists", even though the American woman was black.
I understand that colleges benefit financially from accepting these foreigners, especially when they can charge them many times what an American student is charged. But it sounds to me like this is absolutely destroying the learning experience for the American students. The American students are forced to work with sub-par foreign students who are only there because their parents have money. Then these middle-class American students need to take on the work load of the foreign students, in order to avoid failing group work assignments. It shames me to think how bad my nephew's experience is with the same college I attended, in the same field I studied, a mere 30 years later.
Statistical analysis is useful, but the interview process itself has enormous weight and is not easy to numerically manage this way. My interviewer for MIT was someone who'd known me since I was one year old, and wanted to make sure I was at least 1000 miles away from his daughter. No sane Ivy League or top notch school should have taken me on my numbers: they had to look past that to the piece of paper from the state that said "emancipated minor", realize I had *no* money or family support, and take me anyway on the grounds of "lord, if he's survived all this craziness, what could he do with *encouragement*".
It worked out: I built for NIH and MIT at least 3 patent worthy hardware inventions. (NIH grants don't cover the fees for patents, and it's all effectively public domain anyway, so I never got patents. I'd have liked the patents, even if I paid for the legal fees out of my own pocket. The lab wouldn't let me do that, darn it.) But if I'd been spending my time "working the numbers" for maximum college entry success, I'd have never learned to *explore* science, and equipment, and done some of the politically dangerous work but reviewing equipment and finding farcical measurements from other people's labs. And lord, did it pay off when I found old data that was misanalyzed because it was misrecorded or miscompared. Scientifically, and and in engineering terms, it was invaluable.
Anyway: micro-analyzing the odds and cooking the numbers would have wasted my resources, and guided me, as a student, away from actually learning vital subjects. Who would have anticipated that taking medieval history would have led me to the SCA, and the networking for weird science and engineering jobs among that geeky medieval re-enactment crowd?
> With far less debt.
You don't seem to be aware that top schools generally have very generous need-based tuition+expense assistance -- so generous that people with families at any point on the income spectrum can generally graduate completely debt free.
Example: Harvard is a full ride if your family makes $65k/yr, and the aid gets prorated until your family makes ~$150k/yr. And yes, they do take into account having multiple kids in school, etc.
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid
anecdote IS data. Gather enough anecdotes and you can start to do statistics on them. If you are scientific you will follow up with a well randomized survey. But usually inquiry begins with anecdotes. Or didn't you take Statistics 101?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I had a similar experience when I was in school a few years ago.
Group project with two German foreign exchange students--copy/pasted their part from another website. I caught it early and after some "clarification" from the professor, they redid it.
Another group project--with a white guy, white girl, African immigrant, and a Chinese exchange student. White girl didn't contribute anything at all, Chinese didn't contribute anything (informed us "I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do" two days before the report was due), and the African immigrant contributed one slide (the project was a slide and a paper). White guy and I ended up writing the entire paper, and we were not pleased.
I was the group leader for both projects. The lesson I learned wasn't that foreign students are worthless, but rather that people needed to be treated differently. For any project, I map out the pieces and dependencies that need to be completed in a shared spreadsheet, and let team members choose what they work on. This works out very well for motivated students, and functional procrastinators since the dependencies are also worked out. Unfortunately, simply telling everyone what needs to be done is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If I had assigned tasks to specific individuals early on and followed up regularly, I would have obtained better results. If output was poor or non-existent, we could have adjusted expectations ("you need to turn this in earlier so we can correct for ESL") or escalate to the professor if necessary.
If you are an "A" student, working with other "A" students is the easiest way to keep that A. Learning how to get the most of B and C students is likely more valuable than a slight downtick in your GPA.