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.

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: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: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?)