We have been down this road from an academic perspective. But I had a discussion with someone at Google and he said they were now restricting applicants based on the schools they attended. I was wondering how pervasive this is, or going to be.

Any input?

Bit of a conspiracy, but a friend once pointed out that courses at elite colleges are much more in-depth than what you'd receive at other schools, even when you're talking about something as simple as Biology 101 or Calculus 101, where you wouldn't think there'd be a lot of discrepancy.

I earned a 5 on the AP Calculus BC exam. When I went to Harvard, I glanced a few times at the homework and exam questions being given to Harvard's "regular" calculus class (the one taken by biology, economics and other non-math majors). The questions were on material I had seen and were not above the level of my high school calculus class. In fact, the calculus textbooks authored by Harvard instructor Deborah Hughes-Hallett have often been criticized for their lack of rigor. I started with multivariable calculus and was not hampered by not having taken single-variable calculus at college.

I doubt that Harvard's "regular" calculus class is much more difficult than that of other colleges. Its Math 55 course probably has counterparts at only a few selective schools. Harvard et al. are so expensive that it makes sense to take courses at them which are not offered at other places (including high schools).

What are your thoughts on the "extras" at the elites versus state flagship. Do you feel these "extra" opportunities are things that give applicants advantages?

Really is that new? Is that even legal? I talked with a google recruiter last year and that wasn't the official line, nor one that other were talking about. In addition I have friend who were hired by google in the past year that went to university with me. I have no idea if it's on the list but it's not a "top" rated university. Now this was someone with 20+ years experience and not someone fresh out of university. Perhaps that is what they are talking about.

There is no question that elites give advantages. In addition to the more tangible ones you suggest, there is simply the fact of being surrounded by people who got into elite schools.

In a famous study, two economists tackled this question nearly a decade ago and concluded that Ivy League graduates did not enjoy an earnings advantage monopoly. And now the same economists—Alan Krueger at Princeton University and Stacy Dale at Mathematica Policy Research—have revisited the question with even more compelling data that has led them to an even stronger conclusion.

To appreciate the researchers' latest findings, you need to understand why the original study, which has been cited repeatedly over the years, caused such a commotion. In the first study, the economists noted that students who graduated from elite schools like Swarthmore College and University of Pennsylvania earned higher salaries than students from less selective schools. This conclusion was no different from conventional wisdom.

Here, however, is what was explosive: Dale and Krueger concluded that students, who were accepted into elite schools, but went to less selective institutions, earned salaries just as high as Ivy League grads. For instance, if a teenager gained entry to Harvard, but ended up attending Penn State, his or her salary prospects would be the same.

In the pair's newest study, the findings are even more amazing. Applicants, who shared similar high SAT scores with Ivy League applicants could have been rejected from the elite schools that they applied to and yet they still enjoyed similar average salaries as the graduates from elite schools. In the study, the better predictor of earnings was the average SAT scores of the most selective school a teenager applied to and not the typical scores of the institution the student attended.

The researchers originally looked at students who started college in 1976, and in the new study they revisited what happened to these graduates. With the passing time, the salary advantage for the now middle-aged graduates, who attended elite schools, as well as those who gained admission, but passed on the chance, remained. The new study also looked at students who entered college in 1989.

In an E-mail exchange with Krueger and Dale, the researchers made this observation: "The consistency of our findings across nearly 30 years and for two cohorts makes the findings more compelling. In contrast, our earlier study was based on the earnings of students during a single year for those who attended colleges during the 1970s."

As with the earlier study, there were some students who did fare better financially if they attended elite schools. The students who fell into this category were Latino, black, and low-income students, as well as those whose parents did not graduate from college.

In an E-mail, the researchers explained these exceptions: "While most students who apply to selective colleges may be able to rely on their families and friends to provide job-networking opportunities, networking opportunities that become available from attending a selective college may be particularly valuable for black and Hispanic students and for students who come from families with a lower level of parental education."

When I asked Dale and Krueger whether the latest research would quell the pervasive belief that the Ivy League schools represent the ticket to a prosperous life, they responded: "It certainly might make some parents and students less anxious about the admissions process."

Let's hope so.

Whether those advantages translate into higher income is debatable. A recent paper found that controlling for an applicant's SAT scores, the SAT scores of the most selective schools he or she applies to -- a measure of ambition according to the authors -- predicts future earnings, but actually getting in does not.

I have heard Harvard and Yale have 2 tracks: 1 for those who pay the bills and the other for those who deserve to be there.

On average, freshman respondents took the SAT 1.85 times, earning an average highest composite score of 2237. Students were more likely to take the SAT, and most respondents never took the ACT.

Standardized test scores varied along racial lines. East Asian and Indian respondents reported SAT averages of 2299, the two highest of the seven ethnic groups considered in the survey. Respondents who identified as Black and Native American reported the lowest average scores, 2107 and 2142, respectively.

Respondents’ highest SAT scores tended to go up with an increase in income bracket. Of the six income brackets represented in the survey, respondents who reported household incomes of more than $500,000 or between $250,000 and $500,000 earned the highest average SAT composite scores.

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

We see K-12 schools and colleges differently because we’re looking at two different yardsticks: the academic performance of the whole population of students in one case, the research performance of a small number of institutions in the other.


Instead, Piaac suggests that the wide disparities of knowledge and skill present among American schoolchildren are not ameliorated by higher education. If anything, they are magnified. In 2000, American 15-year-olds scored slightly above the international average. ... While American college graduates are far more knowledgeable than American nongraduates, creating a substantial “wage premium” for diploma holders, they look mediocre or worse compared to their college-educated peers in other nations.

While American college graduates are far more knowledgeable than American nongraduates, creating a substantial “wage premium” for diploma holders, they look mediocre or worse compared to their college-educated peers in other nations.

This article in today's NY Times seems to be appropriate for this thread.

No, since income is positively correlated with IQ, and IQ is highly heritable, a disproportionate number of the smartest and high school students come from rich families, who are paying full freight. That's why even though 29% of Harvard students came from families with incomes of $250K+, including 14% from families with incomes of $500K+, the richest kids had the highest SAT scores on average, according to a survey of Harvard freshman:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/9/4/freshman-survey-admissions-aid/
Freshman Survey Part II: An Uncommon App
The Crimson’s Survey of Freshmen Shines Light on Admissions, Financial Aid, and Recruiting
By LAYA ANASU and MICHAEL D. LEDECKY
September 4, 2013

SAT correlation with IQ? Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator.

For a few thousand dollars, an SAT coach can teach your child to generate their own BS.

SAT scores and IQ were correlated with socioeconomic status even before there was an essay section on the SAT. Dude.

Some of those schools have had great success improving their students’ MCAS scores — a boost that studies have found also translates to better performance on the SAT and Advanced Placement tests.

The researchers calculated how much of the variation in MCAS scores was due to the school that students attended. For MCAS scores in English, schools accounted for 24 percent of the variation, and they accounted for 34 percent of the math MCAS variation.

However, the schools accounted for very little of the variation in fluid cognitive skills — less than 3 percent for all three skills combined.

Yes. And now there's an essay section, so the correlation between IQ and SAT score is broken.

Looking at the SAT Total Group Score Report http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/2013/TotalGroup-2013.pdf , the correlation of household income and SAT score is similar for the three sections of the SAT, so if the correlation IQ and composite SAT score has been broken (which I doubt), it was not by adding the writing section.

Meanwhile, while all these changes are going on, everyone is still citing statistics of SAT/IQ correlation as of 2003.

Meanwhile, while all these changes are going on, everyone is still citing statistics of SAT/IQ correlation as of 2003.

What this all means is that the SAT measures something—some stable characteristic of high school students other than their parents’ income—that translates into success in college. And what could that characteristic be? General intelligence. The content of the SAT is practically indistinguishable from that of standardized intelligence tests that social scientists use to study individual differences, and that psychologists and psychiatrists use to determine whether a person is intellectually disabled—and even whether a person should be spared execution in states that have the death penalty. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on IQ tests—so highly that the Harvard education scholar Howard Gardner, known for his theory of multiple intelligences, once called the SAT and other scholastic measures “thinly disguised” intelligence tests.

But we only have the rear view mirror!

These massive compilations of data take time to assemble and filter through the system, ultimately incorporating them into the entire corporate world system so that adequate adjustments to the college student processing and sorting system can be made in order to improve efficiency, and ultimately, competitive profitability.

That's not the only factor. I frequently defend the SAT, but the College Board, which produces it, is increasingly dishonest or at least willfully uninformed about why the SAT is predictive. The SAT used to stand for "Scholastic Aptitude Test", and "aptitude" sounds a lot like intelligence. But they dropped the term "aptitude", because retaining it raises the question of whether groups have different average scholastic aptitudes, since their SAT average scores differ. Since the College Board does *not* want to talk about that, it will *not* do any research correlating SAT scores with IQ. At the same time, if it eliminated the g loading of the SAT, its ability to predict college grades would decline substantially. So the College Board tries to make the SAT look like less of an IQ test (dropping analogies, and soon, "obscure words") while still being enough of one to retain value.