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Comment by DC1350 | Hacker News Reader

A huge generational change is that young people can just google "best X" for every life decision instead of caring about what they're exposed to organically. What job to do, city to live in, how to dress, etc. They can also find a community and detailed guides for achieving pretty much anything they want, so the special in-group knowledge isn't a barrier anymore. Anyone familiar with the whole tech interview prep culture should be able to understand that similar cultures exist for everything from academia to online dating. The downside is that the upper tier of everything is a lot more competitive so it's harder to win without gaming the system.

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This comment has a critical undertone but I think it's pretty much right. Thinking back, when I was 17 and applying for college, deciding what schools you should apply to was a really murky process. Most people pretty much depended on reputation & word-of-mouth, and nobody even talked about schools outside the state. On top of that, a 17 year old has had little time to accrue knowledge of various schools. Whereas today you can find an endless trove of information from your bedroom to feed your decision.

the information available and advertised to most 17-year-olds (back when I was browsing: US News, College Confidential) isn't much of an improvement. In my case the former relies on a bunch of bunk data and weird metrics for evaluation, while the latter mostly revolved around very coarse word-of-mouth reputation.

I have a hard time believing this. Information was murky and information asymmetry was a big reason lots of people seemed to just apply to a flagship state u rather than look at more far flung or prestigious options, though the state u is prestigious in it's own right. There's certainly more noise now, but there's also a lot more signal (maybe the ratio is the same though). I suspect there's really fantastic info out there that's way more than I had applying to colleges way back when in 2010.

I'd be interested in doing an experiment to act like I'm in high school and want all the info on college applications and to see where I end up.

The info was available to me back in 1992. Somebody at your high school, typically called a "guidance counselor", would have it. It was available in a thick paperback book. I could also use an Apple II program if I preferred.

From there I picked: Rice, Rutgers, MIT, Worchester Polytechnic, UMass Amherst, Virginia Polytechnic. Clearly, that was not just one state.

After picking, phone the schools. Ask them to send applications. More applications may arrive by surprise if you do well on the SAT or ACT.

When an application arrives, put it in a typewriter and carefully type into all the fields in the form. Send it by mail, physically, and wait to get mailed a response.

What is an improvement is information about income and job placement from various institutions and degrees.

It's almost trivial to chart one's income possibilities based on where you graduate from and what degree you get. The knowledge about how to get into a tech job, or a high finance job, or get into medical school, or get hired by a top legal firm is available to everyone whereas it was limited before to those who knew people who knew these things.

We know what cities and suburbs of those cities will lead to maximal probabilities of "success", we know which schools have the highest achieving kids (or the ones with the richest parents), etc. It saves a lot of time to be able to filter real estate listings by greatschools.org metrics before.

This is a really big deal for things like personal finance or financial independence that required knowledgeable networks to understand important early decisions and the right thing to do.

Now I can read about this stuff on reddit and learn the basics of how everything works.

A bright kid with an internet connection can leverage that even if they're in a social network or community that doesn't understand any of these things.

The remaining problem is unknown unknowns. If you don't know what exists, it can be hard to know what to ask. You can't search 'Best X' when you don't know what X is. If you're online though, you may be able to see someone mention it and go from there.

100% great comment. This even extends to consumer products

> it's harder to win without gaming the system.

I would argue that the people who succeed at that are pretty bright anyway, but are just applying their skill in an undesired way.

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