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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.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Its about the connections, and fellating egos.
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.
Would you rather be surrounded by smart people or by normal people?
Better schools give you smarter peer groups, and you learn from and with smarter peer groups.
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?
but its not racism. Racism is only practiced by white people.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Its racist to acknowledge language barriers? ITs racist to expect that people attending an American university be able to speak English to participate in group assignments? Or do you expect the American students to learn Arabic, Mandarin and Somali?
Good-bye
The approach mentioned here may get you into college, and it may cost money, but it is not old-fashioned. The old-fashioned way to get into colleges with money goes something like this: "My dad is a trustee at Princeton, so I knew I would get in." If you have 2 million dollars to spend, endowing a faculty chair at a university is a much better bet than paying for high-priced consulting services.
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.
Basically they're providing insurance that pays out based on the odds that you don't get into a college they say you can get into. The fee they charge is the premium for that insurance. It doesn't affect your odds of getting accepted in any way compared to if you'd applied on your own. The only thing the information they provide you may change is which schools you decide to apply to. It's actually a pretty clever way to monetize on the risk and uncertainty of applying to colleges, though I suspect the steep price to play will discourage most applicants.
To put it another way - they're letting you place bets on whether you'll be rejected by a school. And like all good bookies, they've crunched the numbers to make sure that statistically they come out ahead. But based on those odds they've crunched, you can drop or add schools you apply to to increase your ratio of acceptances to rejections, making it a marginally useful service whereas just plain gambling would mean on average the client loses.
Your definition of rich is a poor man's definition. Owning a Lexus doesn't make you rich whether you paid cash for it or not. Lexus is, for the most part, a middle-class car brand.
Having a million dollars doesn't make you rich. It makes you middle class, with a loooong way to go to rich. Having a million dollars doesn't mean you can quit working unless you're about 80 years old, especially if you live in the US where the healthcare system is designed to bankrupt you before you die.
Nice. You learned the fundamentals of being a good manager, which are sadly lost on many who are given the position.
Mostly connections
Connections are crucial, but, there is a very BIG but, if one solely relies on the connections he or she fosters when the individual was in the college, then that individual is a loser
I did what I did, from a refugee, into someone who have thousands of co-workers all around the world, partly because of the connections that I have fostered through all the stages of my life
The kicker is, over 90% of those connections that I rely on are the connections I've made _after_ I came out of college
Connections I have from the Silicon Valley enable me to enjoy a certain "respectable" position when I am in Asia, which open a lot of doors for me, even the doors to foreign governments
Which is why I am always amused by those who stress so much on the connections that they foster through their alma mater --- life does not only evolve around college
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When I landed in the States I found myself amazed with all the grizzly things and I found myself, a refugee fresh from communist China, being the dumb one, as everybody else was smarter than me
Later on as I enrolled into college, I found that my professors were very smart, because they knew things that I didn't know
And more later on when I got out of college I found many other people, people of the company I worked for and people outside of the company but still in the same job field, were much smarter than me because there were so many things that I could learn from them
I have worked with some legendary programmers in the more than 30 years I have been in this field, and yes, there were all much smarter than me
So, how do you define "smart" ?
For me, that goal post of "smartness" kept on shifting, as I grew from a stage of my life to another - For example: those Americans whom I found so smart when I first arrived in America, in hindsight, were not smart at all. They were lucky to be born in this country, that's all
Plus I sincerely doubt that the students from elite universities are "smarter" - In my own experience, most of those who came working with me with sheepskin issued by elite universities are not really smarter than those who came without any official sheepskin
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !