thoughts

The College Information War

thinkthoughts:

Every year in the United States seniors in high school begin filling out forms and writing essays for their undergraduate applications. The process has been historically increasing in complexity with time. Today it is so hard to understand that there are entire industries based around manipulating applicants by offering help or preparation. Generally it is a pervasive problem with few exceptions, one that proves to be a great stressor in the lives of students, parents, and administrators. But from the perspective of economics and game-theory, it makes perfect sense.

There is an information war going on, with college institutions trying to pick the best applicants, and high schools attempting to place their students in the best colleges. Colleges want effective students, and high schools want the best reputation they can muster because money and flexibility comes with it. With the two forces having mutually exclusive goals, the only result can be rising inefficiency as both sides of the fight increase their ability to foil the other’s tactics.

Colleges, in order to pick the best applicants efficiently, want their comparisons between students to be as standardized as possible, especially the metric systems they use such as transcripts, standardized tests, essays, and applicant procedures. High schools, on the other hand, want to individualize and separate its students from their own class and other high schools as much as possible.

Grade Point Average is probably the most straightforward metric for predicting future success. And today, it has been rendered almost completely incomparable between high schools by their own systems. Factors that play into comparing GPAs include: whether each high school uses a credit or pure average system, whether there is honors weighting, there is AP/IB weighting, the specific type of weighting systems used (an admissions officer from one elite eastern college told me they receive over 35 different systems at the last count), the type of original grading system used, grade inflation, the classes’ valedictorian’s score,  and even the distribution of the original grades. The proliferation of all these factors may not be deliberate actions to trip colleges up, but rather the attempt of high schools to “set themselves” and their students apart.

Colleges responded to GPA differentiation by asking for a class rank of students, along with the class size. This removes inconsistencies from comparing students in-class, and most of the problems with comparing applicant between high schools. This provides a disadvantage to high schools trying to place their students: only 45% of high schools provide the metric to colleges.

Standardized testing: SAT and ACT, SAT II, AP/IB. Almost all of it has been shown to provide rather unpredictable correlation to college and adult success. High schools quickly adopt new standardized tests while colleges try to resist using new ones, to encourage consolidation into one test (the SAT is predominant, but losing market share and respectability to the ACT). Colleges recently have begun weighting standardized tests heavier when no class rank is provided, further complicating the choice high schools have to making in what to provide and encourage to their student body.

The common application is an interesting apparent exception to the rule. It allows students to fill out one unified application and submit it to each college, which reduces the stress and amount of work required overall to apply to college. However, this increased efficiency in the path of the never-ending decrease in efficiency is a sign that someone is beating the other team: the colleges hid their normal tactics in a wrapper of helping applicants. The common application is actually a detriment to applicants: it makes it more difficult for an applicant to tailor each of his applications to specific colleges with the information he has about their admissions process. Not only that, but it not only guarantees consistent information like race to be provided to all colleges, but also encourages applicants to conform to formulaic responses to standardized questions, such as the activities a applicant regularly participates in, and personal essay questions that it provides, such as:

Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

There are multiple prompts that can be chosen for the personal essay, including “Topic of your choice”. Nevertheless, undoubtedly this format encourages similar responses.

The college application process appears to be an closed-information game in which there is no apparent possibly evolutionary-stable equilibrium and therefore students should pray for the process to be as difficult and time-consuming as possible—because this inefficiency is most likely a sign of neither side getting the upper-hand, and it is very likely for high schools to ever gain the advantage considering their excess of government and managerial bureaucracy.

A Note On Objectivism

thinkthoughts:

Objectivism is a philosophical framework conceived and developed by Ayn Rand, a contentious but popularly-acclaimed Russian economist, philosopher, and novelist. Ayn Rand was a hyper-logical thinker, believing strongly in the process of identifying and analyzing assumptions and debating from that point on. Famously she would start conversations with, “What are your assumptions?” Objectivism was her life’s work, in which she pulled together a foundation of axioms for creating her views on ethics, morals, and life’s purpose.

The framework is incredibly self-coherent, but is frequently criticized as an ideological movement rather than a practical philosophy. In my opinion, even more drastically, it suffers from a pervasive feeling of secular religion. It seems Ayn Rand’s hyper-logic served not to make her a more reasonable person, but drove her to such perfect logic that she ignored the fact that even slight changes to her assumptions, which are not simple, would drastically alter or even reverse her end syntheses. Although at many times she argues from very basic axioms that are undeniable, she quickly pressed through the arguments which take her axioms and translate them into her general ideas without sufficient deliberateness. She then contends that they are irrefutable.

I do think, however, that there is something to learn from her idea of “rational egoism”, despite the fact that Objectivism as a whole is generally not taken very seriously by mainstream philosophers and academics. Her idea of rational egoism is that it is natural and logical to pursue maximizing one’s own happiness and self-interests. I think it is important because it deals with the selfishness less in moral terms, and more from a practical standpoint. Many times philosophers over-moralize acting egotistically or altruistically, when they seem to be more of descriptors of motivation than moral judgments on the actual actions themselves.

It is important to note that the idea that all persons act only in their own self-interest, which from a philosophical perspective is exemplified by Machiavelli’s framework, and which in recent times has found evidence in evolutionary theory and modern psychology, is flatly incorrect. Even if one ignores what many consider to be strong evidence in history for people acting purely selflessly, as well as psychological evidence for some types of irrational altruism in split-decision-making, modern evolutionary theory when examined under the lens of information theory yields an interesting and very difficult-to-contest rebuttal, the strongest of hard theory and evidence to date in support of altruism. The selfish gene theory, popularized by Richard Dawkins, argues that natural selection applies to information stored in genes rather than to entire organisms. The perspective is many-fold, but essentially it notes that Darwinian natural selection points to organisms as the smallest unit of the approach to survival to be selected against when a smaller unit is the approach stores in the information of a single gene. A strong example is that some collections of organisms, like Bees, sacrifice reproduction for all organisms (they are sterile or sexually undriven) except one which the rest protect and serve, therefore it must be the genes that reproduction favors genes rather than individuals. Altruism exist in nature; it stands to reason that it exists at some level in humans, probably partially motivated by psychological egoism but I would think in some form truly selfless at times—the examples from history and day-to-day life are there, and it now has an evolutionary explanation to back it up.

So real altruism exists. This is important because one therefore can’t deflect today’s cultural view that altruistic actions are the more “noble” motivation, which carries a weight of courage, virtue, and integrity as well as its typical flavor of selflessness. Can we really say that an action performed with an altruistic motivation is more courageous, virtuous or reflects that the person has more integrity? Even in a non-unilateral analysis as presented, this seems to not be the case. Both altruism and egoism come from gene evolution. Both increase the chance of (part of) you continuing to be propagated. So, it appears, altruism is selfish.

So what? It is not to say that motivations are irrelevant; a motivation is just as morally judge-able as the action itself. Yet almost all cultures have some conception of or cultural equivalent to chivalry: Japanese Bushidō, the Greek Hero, Buddhists’ selfless Nirvana, etc.

Cultural moral-elevation of altruism is probably just a consensus-equilibrium favored because it prevents excessive selfishness, which is the primary evolutionary tendency. Altruism isn’t morally “better”, humans just tend to pretend so because it prevents rampant egoism that most would agree would destroy a society. Although Ayn Rand would consider this perfectly selfish society to have realized maximized efficiency, I doubt many others would like to live in such a society. Ironically in the end, that is what she has showed us.

an essay

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