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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Colleges such as Harvard that base admissions decisions on grades, standardized test scores, traditional social/leadership signals (club x, sports team y), alumni connections, geographic/ethnic background, and writing/storytelling skills (i.e., the “personal essay”) are going to miss a lot of brilliant, innovative people and future leaders. The 17-year-old Steve Jobs (free spirit), Barack Obama (slacker), and Jack Ma (failed entrance exam) would never be admitted to a place like Harvard, at least as undergraduates.

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Yup. The thing is, they get so many applicants that they have no reason to care if they miss some good ones. The ones they end up taking are just as good. Any of the elite schools could throw out their entire admitted class, admit their next 2k choices, and no one would be able to tell the difference.

The schools have a huge incentive to admit students who will succeed. They have no incentive to admit all such students. This results in the admissions process that we have today.

> The ones they end up taking are just as good

I disagree with this sentiment. humans are individuals and unique. none is "just as good" as another. each is different. the college admissions process treats human beings as fungible commodities. like ears of corn at the grain silo.

> The schools have a huge incentive to admit students who will succeed. They have no incentive to admit all such students.

what does succeed mean? some of the most well-regarded members of our society were poor students, or dropped out of college when they were young. some of our most damaging criminals were excellent students and graduated from Ivy League schools with honors.

"Just as good" in the sense of "equally viable on the scale used by admissions", not in the capital-G sense of Good or in a hypothetical "equally valuable as human beings" sense. Yes, they are different, but those differences are often not relevant to the task set before the admissions committee.

@Metaphorm, Good post. A good example of damaging criminals from an Ivy League School is Marc Dreier (Yale for undergraduate studies and then Harvard Law). In the 45 minutes interview "Unraveled", he said there is so much pressure to succeed when you graduate from such top schools that you do all sort of things just to prove you have made it. But then again, you wonder how true that comment is.. :)

Barack Obama went to Columbia, which is literally in the same league as Harvard. He also went to Harvard Law after undergrad, so I don't think he fits your narrative.

We don't need to include how an elite university selects their students to claim that they are going to miss a lot of brilliant and innovative people. The mere fact that they admit only thousands of people a year make this necessarily so.

Didn't he start at Occidental and transfer to Columbia?

Correct, but Occidental is still considered today to be a fairly selective liberal arts school.

George W. went to Yale. I think they could do better.

Every college and university has a strong incentive to attempt to select the best applicants. It is safe to assume that the best schools have thought a lot about how to pick the best candidates and it is also safe to assume that the administrations have figured out criteria that highly correlate to future applicant success.

I did not grow up in a big city. I grew up in a place where a state degree from a good college was enough to show aptitude and I did not understand the value of attending and paying for a school like Harvard. Now that I am older, I have moved to a few big cities and currently live in SF. Unfortunately, in SF, having a Harvard degree is pretty standard / common and people that did not attend a 'top university' are regularly passed over for funding (YC) and positions at top companies etc.

I understand why. If I am a hiring manager and everyone in the world is applying to my company, I might as well pick people who went to Harvard / MIT / Stanford. But... it does mean that a decision someone made when they were 17 years old will keep them out of a lot of interviews regardless of how successful they were after they attending XYZ state college.

I attended a state college 15 years ago that most people on the west coast do not pay much attention to. I have now worked at some of the top companies in the world and I have noticed a really, really strong pattern.

People who attended no name schools and worked to get an offer at a great company are typically the best performers at the next company.

If I were looking to hire / fund someone, I would always look favorably on those that attended a top institution, then had a track record of success. In addition to the 'standard' applicant, I would look really hard at those that attended a lower tier school and 'outperformed' their peers.

Well of course: they prescribe an enormous laundry list of things you must do to be accepted and they accept the ones who restructure their entire lives and personalities (or their parents force them to do this) so they may obey. They select for obedience to authority and so they get the obedient.

This is a great point and illustrates that Harvard tries to get people at the peak of their academic/intellectual careers.

By comparison, a lot of the people they miss out on, tend to develop later in life. Steve Jobs didn't turn Apple around until 1997 when he was 42. Obama didn't get serious about public service until he was in his 30's after being a lecturer at the University of Chicago.

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