Craziest Admissions Stories

sakky
Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:04:11 +0000

Kevtrice, well, if anything, I hope that what I have had to say has perhaps cleared up some of the confusion. Contrary to popular belief, the true purpose of an admissions committee is not to admit the best possible class. The true purpose is to matriculate the best possible class, which is not the same thing as admitting the best possible class. If you admit the best students you possibly can, only to have lots of them choose to go elsewhere, you risk ending up with a worse matriculated class than if you had simply offered your seats to students who were not only good, but also had a high probability of actually coming.

For example, if you have one seat left, and you have the option of admitting person A, who is a superstar, and person B who is good, but not a superstar, but you have strong reason to believe that person A is probably going somewhere else, then should you really offer the seat to A? By the time person A has turned your seat down, person B may have already committed somewhere else. So now you end up with neither person A nor person B - that’s the worst of all possible worlds. You may be better off simply by rejecting A and instead offering the seat to person B. Like I said - it’s not about admitting the best possible class, it’s about matriculating the best possible class. Who really cares if you admit a great class, if the class you end up matriculating is mediocre?

And to Garland, of course they cannot be absolutely 100% certain that a particular person wants to go somewhere. But that’s not the point. The point is, you have only a limited number of admissions seats to go around, and you shouldn’t waste them. Because you have a finite number of seats, you have to play the percentages. You basically have to ask yourself, “Should I use this seat on this person who is really good, but probably isn’t going to come?” At some point, you have to say no. Sure, you will never know for sure what would have happened, but that’s what it means to play the odds. Nothing is guaranteed, but you can do things to maximize your odds of success. Just like choosing not to smoke doesn’t guarantee that you will have good health, but it increases the odds.

So if you say that NJ is whining about the best students leaving, well, then NJ will simply have to sweeten the pot a little. I think what is happening is this. NJ is probably in the experimental stage. NJ sets up an honors program, with a limited number of seats, and then offers those limited spots to certain students to see how many take them. Then with that data, they then adjust the future selection of honors admittees accordingly. If they keep offering those spots to superstars who keep turning them down to go to Harvard instead, then clearly that’s a waste. If NJ really wants to get students like that, then the state will obviously have to really sweeten the pot - probably offer not only full scholarships, but stipends as well and other privileges. Even then, I think it will still be difficult to convince a lot of people to turn down Harvard. But in any case, it’s all about finding out the optimal way to get the best possible honors students you can to matriculate, while giving away as little money as possible.

The point is, it doesn’t mean that you simply admit the best students you can. There’s no point in offering a scholarship to somebody who isn’t going to take it. Sure, you never know with a 100% certainty who is going to take it or not, but after you’ve done it for a few years, you start to learn who will take it and who won’t. Once you’ve figured out with a high probability who isn’t going to take it, you simply don’t offer it to people like that anymore. That might end up screwing over some people who don’t fit your probability model, but since you only have a limited number of scholarships to hand out, that’s the risk you have to take.