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.

Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You"

[retroworks]

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.

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?

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

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

THIS. Whenever the topic of college tuition increases comes up, the assumption is that it must have to do with the cost of instruction (i.e., faculty salaries) or maybe lab equipment or something.

In reality, the biggest factor for many colleges has been this "arms race" (great term) to make sure all the new dorms have a swimming pool and a climbing gym and whatever. New buildings and facilities keep going up, which have ongoing staffing and maintenance costs. You could often fund many endowed professorships with the cost of a new building.

After campus facilities "improvements," the biggest reasons for increased costs are often enlarged administration bureaucracies and sports programs. College administration staff in many colleges has increased by 50% or so at many universities in the past few decades, even as faculty size remains roughly constant. High-profile sports at big athletic schools are often thought to bring in the cash, but actually most schools lose huge amounts of money on them. It's only a precious few that win that gamble.

But, as the parent says, it's great that we can have wealthy foreign students throwing in the cash so our kids can have the new climbing gyms, a boatload of administrators, and great sports coaches that often earn a lot more than college presidents.

Oh, wait? You were concerned about better education? Hah! There's where we need to cut costs. Let's put everything online and create MOOCs, so we can reallocate the buildings with classrooms for more climbing gyms, have professors record their lectures so they can then be dispensed with (along with their pesky salaries -- think of how many administrative staff we could hire by getting rid of that endowed chair!) and have the courses "taught" by adjunct drones who respond to emails, and without those annoying "class schedules" where you might have to actually show up and interact with real people to learn and discuss deep ideas, we can use online classes to meet whenever and have more flexibility to schedule athletic events whenever we want!

I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but these are really some disturbing trends. I'm not saying that traditional college lectures were always the best way to teach information, nor that higher ed couldn't be improved in general. But the pressures which are creating the tuition cost often have little to do with education... but I guess we have foreign students to pay for it (which is ironic since most foreign students are coming to the U.S. because of its educational reputation at universities, not for the climbing gyms).

What I hate about the American college admissions

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Smart People

[plopez]

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?

Re:Impact of foreigners on the education of Americ

[Hunter-Killer]

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.

Re:Smart People

[AthanasiusKircher]

Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics.

[citation needed]

Well, sure, if you insist. I actually participated in the founding of the discipline of combinatorics, partly to discuss issues of probability and statistics of distributions. See my treatise Ars Magna Sciendi sive Combinatoria (1669), for example.

If you dig into my earlier treatises, you'll find I actually considered a number of issues in this sort of mathematics even before Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria (1666) (he was actually a bit of a fan of my work, I exchanged some great letters with him about it back in the day), and well before all those young Bernoulli whippersnappers got involved.

(What's that -- you wanted a serious answer? You want me to give real-world information about myself to a guy who hides as an AC?)