23
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Inventing the perfect US college applicant – For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait
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- Title
- Inventing the Perfect College Applicant
- Authors
- Caitlin Moscatello
- Published
- Jan 29 2024
- Word count
- 7418 words
I always thought college names were stupid, till I moved to the bay and saw how incestuous MIT grads were. I've heard groups trying to do get togethers from my alma mater and thought, "why would I want to spend time with people who went to school when I wasn't there?" But they love it. They hire each other. They talk about teachers and say "I dont think we should hire him because he was an RA with professor <blank>". They'd stand around and read the college rankings every year as if they were real.
There's people whose whole lives revolve around where they spent college and they're responsible for hiring some really good paying jobs. It's still baffling to me.
I hate hiring pipelines that care about colleges. But I've actually asked this question to a few hiring "deciders" and I kind of get it now. Even if I disagree.
If you get a ton of applications, more than you could ever reasonably read or consider (or you're lazy), alma mater provides SOME useful signal in the noise. In software development, it's useful to know that some schools teach low-level concepts needed for your job, or that other schools have better programs for teaching modern front-end development. Or it's useful to know that the Master's program at a certain school is basically a degree mill that doesn't signal any meaningful skills. If you recently attended the school, you might be able to ask specific questions about specific classes and projects to sniff out bullshitters and find the strongest applicants.
Of course, it all falls apart when people make strong assumptions about a school based off of a couple of anecdotes, or ignore applicants because they didn't go to some pie-in-the-sky perfect school like MIT or Stanford. At that point you're just discriminating. And worse, you're contributing to an exclusive and likely homogenous workforce... like a lot of tech companies have today. So I personally don't feel the benefits are worth the risk. And most hiring pipelines are not so fat that a competent screener can't filter out 80% of the applicants based solely on their resume (I still feel that broken English and obvious errors are a reasonable filter -- for the love of god, have a friend edit your resume!), or simply give most people a screening interview if the field is small.
This is the major crux of almost all horrific hiring practices. How do you weed out the legions of people applying while still following all the laws that are there to stop the assholes but also wind up being just as big of a hurdle for the well meaning?
There probably are solutions but it's going to require most nations to seriously rethink how they handle hiring, and it would disadvantage those who use college to get above their skill level so it's never going to happen.
Why does anyone discriminate based on membership of a select group, which they are part of? Because it benefits the graduates of these universities to do so.
If I had a million dollars to throw at college prep, I'd certainly not be going to college.
Fully agreed, with a sizeable added helping of: if I needed to spend a million dollars on coaching just to get in, it probably wasn’t the right fit in the first place.
But if you were making a million dollars a week in interest alone, and care primarily about the cachet and prestige for whatever reason, I imagine the equation changes somewhat. There are a good couple of thousand families in the US alone that’d fit the bill there, plenty more in China and the Middle East. Some people are terrifyingly wealthy.
indeed. It really comes down to status and peer expectations. If all the people you consider to be your peers are going to Ivy League or upper Tier 1 schools, then you'd feel pressured to attend the same schools to fit into your own socioeconomic stratum and niche.
(This dynamic applies for every socioeconomic stratum, including even the poorest. People absorb their community/stratum's norms and then conform to them.)
You're absolutely right, although it's a topic that touches a nerve for me. The crab-bucket anti-intellectualism I was surrounded by growing up frustrated me about as much then as the blithe superficial privilege I run into more often nowadays.
I get how hard it is to go against the flow, and I've sure as hell failed on that count myself a few times, but I do wish more people acknowledged that there is a specific set of norms they're going with and that those aren't the only option out there.
And things that perfectly normal to insiders will appear absurd or stupid to outsiders.
I've come to realize that each school is its own subculture, and that we should pick—for ourselves or our children—schools (from elementary to college) not just for their supposed quality, rankings, or teacher-to-student ratio, but also for their norms.
Anyway, it's too late for me to go back in time and change my schools, so now I'm trying to pick adult social groups for their norms. I'm trying to build a group of friends whose norms are centered around what I think I want out of life.
Any time I think about the money these people spend on unnecessary luxuries I get upset. They should be giving it away to people dying, getting evicted, unable to pay medical bills, unable to afford college. I know they could do both, but wasting a million dollars at any point is too much.
I think it’s important to consider that rich people go to college for very different reasons than the rest of us. And in fact, for most of the history of higher education, it’s mostly been rich people going who don’t need jobs because they own productive assets that provide an income regardless of employment. It’s pretty obvious that the concept of “college” as an institution whose primary role is to prepare a young adult for finding a career is an extremely young idea.
I think it’s important to ask ourselves what the people who originally went to college were getting out of it, and if there’s not anything valuable we are losing in this transition to a focus on vocational training.
I imagine having a fancy diploma and the associated connections helps a lot in making any business venture successful. So if you are slated to inherit a company, you probably have the money for college prep, and a need to secure the degree for the non-skill benefits.
To be honest, I don’t really find this explanatory or satisfying, if it was just about making connections, why was there any academic component involved at all? I really think that everybody should learn about the history of the concept liberal arts education going back to the middle ages with the founding of the universities of Oxford and Bologna. Why these places were created and what lessons they were trying to instill on their students. You have to keep in mind we’re literally talking about a period of nearly 1000 years here, you really can’t apply naïve understanding of the world as it currently exists to try and understand the origins of higher education and its original purpose.
By the way, this isn’t to say that higher education hasn’t pretty much always been incredibly rife with nepotism and corruption, or that the people who had all the power didn’t actively try and make it as inaccessible as possible. But all of that stuff is secondary, to keep all of the benefits to themselves.
Not to put an overemphasis on etymology, but it's kind of telling that the German word for education is bildung - the same element found in bildungsroman, a literary genre concerned with character growth during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Education, especially higher education, has traditionally been seen as a key component of intellectual maturation and moral growth. Traditionally, vocational training happened "on the job" - people would formally apprentice in the urban trades or would informally learn the family trade by e.g. participating in farmwork from an early age. Education was about your personal and moral development.
When school for commoners was introduced and made mandatory in Northern Europe, at least, a primary motivation was religious instruction. And I don't think that's an exclusively European phenomenon: traditional education in China was dominated by the Confucian classics, and as such was very much concerned with moral development and character building.
Which is just to add on to what you said, I agree. I don't think social connections or even prestige alone can account for the desire of people who don't need an education for vocational reasons to get one.
Of course that doesn't mean this ideal was always practiced. But education has always had a strong element of what we today might call personal development or personal growth (which in the past would amount to religious instruction and reading the classics, but which probably has different forms today).
Ok, to be clear I didn't mean to explain the historical significance of university degrees here, more the importance of "elite" universities to "elite" people in maybe the last 100 years or so. To them, university is hardly about the education, when historically that was undoubtedly at least part of the appeal even for the elite who could afford it. Nowadays, my impression is that elite universities supply elite offspring with their own network. You can't really continue the family legacy if you're just using your father's connections, you gotta make your own, practice how to do that in a low-stakes environment, maybe branch out your connections into more currently relevant fields.
People who own businesses (especially those which generate enough revenue that $100k a year isn't a particularly noticeable expense) generally have lots of connections – they know their bankers, suppliers, customers, etc. All of these people will throw events (e.g. parties, dinners, etc) where they will get together and connect. The parents will probably be members of a yacht club or golf club, or something similar. Going to university doesn't necessarily help you very much when your parents are already so fantastically well integrated into useful networks.
The prestige (and status element) of the degree is a major factor, and for a lot of people it's a few years of fun in which to hang around and not do very much. For example, I know someone going to do an MBA at Harvard whose family are extremely well connected – they previously worked at a consultancy and a tech firm but got bored and wanted something a bit more relaxing and fun.
The degree and status that go along with it are still a major help.
The son of a rich exec getting a nepotism job at McKinsey making $500k a year after graduating from Wharton looks far different than that same person getting the same job after fucking around in highschool and partying for a few years.
The first at least has a veneer of qualification even though they've been helped and offered a massive leg up every step of the way, and still may be dumb as a box of rocks.
The second does not, and the prestige of the family is damaged because of that. That prestige is the real currency that these people care about, and is directly translatable to more wealth. Because of that, even though from a tangible ROI standpoint it doesn't make sense to spend $1m to end up getting a $500k a year job you could have gotten anywhere, the perception of having a qualified, intelligent son vs a fuckup who is just taking his parent's handouts is worth far, far more than that.
I think we're talking about different kinds of groups here – there's a qualitative difference between your parents being executives at a company and your parents owning a business. Of course executives (of S&P500 companies) may end up being wealthy enough to establish a family office, but in that case the children are quite likely to end up running it.
I also think people overestimate the importance of degree prestige, and wildly underestimate the significance of the ability to network. Sure, most families want to send their children to university as a prestige thing and because parents generally care about their children, but if you are going to take over the family business it doesn't really matter if you go to Harvard or a small private liberal arts college or a state university. Being moderately charming and able to get your way is long-term much more significant.
Depending on how far back we are going I always got the impression that people in higher social strata were often obliged to attend higher education not for career opportunities, rather for the maintenance of tradition / deocorum, to become more 'learnèd', and really just to maintain the status quo of separation of the classes. The main distinction between the upper class and the labourers for the longest time (probably post 12th century ish? at least for what is modern day England) would be that upper-class peoples need not 'labour', they have complete time for leisure (or at least the appearance of not needing to work). Of course, I am looking at this as a student of literature and not history, and while I have learned much history in my studies it is not the primary focus of them and I could be very wrong.
Considering this, I don't think we are losing much in the transition to more vocational training. But at the same time Universities aren't exactly just 'vocational training' yet. Perhaps it's more so vocational training in STEM fields, but outside of them I still get the sense that there's really an attempt to craft critical thinking skills and creating well rounded individuals.
So this is exactly actually what I’m talking about, but I think it’s kind of ironic that you say it in this manner, like being extremely aware of a diverse range of fields is just some silly thing that can’t profoundly transform somebody’s life, when I guess my whole thing here is trying to convince everybody that it does transform almost everyone’s life who actually is able to achieve it.
The liberal arts education was always about trying to help the student become well-rounded a critical thinker, who has all the tools to analyze any sort of thing they might come across in their life that they don’t initially understand, and address it in an ethical and considerate manner.
And that all requires a pretty deep understanding of everything from math, the natural sciences, the structures of the institutions we rely upon, history, literature, and even art appreciation.
Edit: somehow I failed to consider your last paragraph. Let me fix that: you’re right that there are areas in college where the liberal arts are still actually valued. The ironic and unfortunate thing is that these programs are always the first on the chopping block, and to pursue them you have to accept that many people will ridicule you for not going to college to learn something “real”. And on the other side, l do feel like the programs which are still actually trying to do the liberal arts, for some reason don’t consider the natural sciences and mathematics to be part of the liberal arts, when they always have been. I think that’s a big problem, too.
It's often a status thing – you drive a Bentley, own a Patek Philippe, wear expensive clothes from luxury brands, go to the Ritz to feel high-status. In the same way for UHNWIs (ultra-high net worth individuals) university is another consumable.
This was a really fun article, thanks.
I thought his argument regarding ethics was interesting - "we're giving some students an unfair advantage, but it's helping one billionaire over another billionaire so who cares?"
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/zZcGc