During high school, students learn skills that will help them in their future careers. This can be referred to as building human capital. They also build up a record of grades, standardized test scores, and extracurricular activities that colleges use to assess whether to admit them. This can be referred to as signaling quality to colleges.
High schoolers engage in valuable activities that fall outside of these two categories, such as personally enjoyable activities and helping others. This article focuses on building human capital and signaling quality to colleges, for the sake of simplicity, rather than because I think that these are the only two things that matter.
In an ideal world, building human capital would be perfectly aligned with signaling quality to colleges. In the real world, this is not the case. Consider the following story:
Kevin is an ambitious high school student who aspires to become a molecular biologist.
Kevin attends a competitive high school, where a student is awarded an extra GPA point for each honors or AP course that he or she takes. The maximum number of grade points that a student can get taking a “regular” course is 4.0 and the maximum number of grade points that a student can get for taking an honors or AP course is 5.0 A student who gets all A’s and takes at least one honors or AP course gets a GPA that’s greater than 4.0 so that taking a “regular” course reduces his or her GPA. GPA determines class rank, so taking a “regular” course lowers such a student’s class rank.
Kevin’s school offers a molecular biology elective during second semester, which is not an honors or AP course. Kevin would like to take the elective during the second semester of his junior year, in addition to his other coursework, but he knows that doing so would lower his GPA, so he decides not to. Kevin ends up with a class rank in the top 1%, contrasting with a class rank in the top 5% if he had taken the molecular biology course. Because he’s in the top 1%, he’s accepted at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT, and this would not have happened had he only been in the top 5%.
Kevin chooses to attend Stanford. The summer after his freshman year there, he works as a molecular biology research intern, and performs worse than he would have if he had taken molecular biology in high school.
This story shows how there can be a tension between building human capital and signaling quality to colleges. Kevin’s choice enabled him to get into a better college than he would otherwise have been able to get into, but it came at the cost of lowering the quality of his future work.
Imperfect measurement and perverse incentives
In Kevin’s story, the class ranking system was poorly designed: it rewarded some students for achieving less rather than for achieving more. The colleges that Kevin applied to were relying on a faulty measure of quality.
All measures of quality are imperfect to varying degrees. Because they’re imperfect, they sometimes assign somebody higher quality for making a choice that actually lowers his or her quality relative to what it otherwise would be. Once people catch on to this, they feel pressure to make such choices.
Imperfections of measures of college applicant quality
Class rank at Kevin’s high school is an imperfect measure of the strength of students’ academic transcripts. This is only one of many examples of imperfection in the measures that colleges use to assess student quality. Some more examples come from:
- Academic transcripts being insensitive to academic achievement in subjects that aren’t taught. There are many academic subjects that are not taught courses that high school students have access to. Colleges give heavy weight to academic transcripts when they assess students’ academic achievement, so studying subjects that aren’t taught in school is given relatively little weight.
- Course grades being insensitive to unusually high achievement. Course grades are capped: it’s generally true that the highest grade that a student can earn is an A. When the threshold for earning an A is below that of subject mastery, students aren’t awarded for developing subject mastery. In practice, the thresholds for getting top grades are often below that of subject matter mastery. For example, one can get the highest mark on some AP exams by answering a relatively low percentage of the questions correctly: low enough so that it doesn’t correspond to mastery.
- Individual teachers' grading schemes being imperfect. Teachers often assess student achievement via measures that differentiate students based on factors other than how well students have learned the subject. For example, in a chemistry course, a teacher may design tests that give heavy weight to computational accuracy to the exclusion of knowledge of chemistry.
Each factor gives rise to situations in which students aren’t able to signal quality to college by doing certain activities that would raise their human capital more than the activities that do signal quality to colleges.
Some activities that build human capital also signal quality to colleges. But it’s important to recognize that building human capital isn’t the same thing as signaling quality to colleges. Many activities that build human capital don’t signal quality to colleges, and many activities that signal quality to colleges have negligible value from the point of view of building human capital.
What to do about it?
Having acknowledged that there’s a tension between building human capital and signaling quality to colleges, one is faced with the question of what to do about it. Concretely, in the story above, did Kevin make the right choice? Should he have taken the molecular biology elective?
Exploring other options can sometimes resolve tensions
Of those activities that build human capital to a given degree, some signal quality to colleges more than others. Of those activities that signal quality to colleges to a given degree, some build human capital more than others.
Sometimes when there seems to be a tension between building human capital and signaling quality to colleges, one can resolve the tension by being imaginative and resourceful. In the story, Kevin could have considered possibilities such as
- Auditing the molecular biology elective
- Studying molecular biology on his own
- Taking an online course or a course at a local community college
- Looking for a school year internship in a molecular biology lab so as to learn some molecular biology outside of the academic system.
If Kevin had been able to do these things, he could have learned some molecular biology without having to sacrifice his class rank.
Tradeoffs between building human capital and college admissions
Sometimes there’s no possibility of resolving the tension, so that imagination and resourcefulness don’t suffice. One does have to make tradeoffs.
In Kevin’s situation, the choice isn’t just “molecular biology vs. no molecular biology,” but “molecular biology vs. everything else that could be done within that time slot.” Putting aside the issue of taking molecular biology lowering Kevin’s GPA, there might be other activities that would signal quality to colleges better than learning molecular biology.
There are two inputs into thinking about how to make tradeoffs in this context:
- The relative value of building human capital vs. getting into a better college. This depends very heavily on the details of a given person’s situation.
- The size of each tradeoff. Even when it’s necessary to sacrifice opportunities to build human capital for the sake of signaling quality to colleges, some activities involve smaller sacrifices than others, whether because they take less time and energy, or because they simultaneously build human capital (even if not as much as possible).
The answer to the question of how a given individual can best balance building human capital and signaling quality to colleges depends very heavily on the details of individual’s situation: his or her values, his or her goals, and the opportunities that are available to him or her.
Though there’s not an easy answer to the question of how to best balance building human capital and signaling quality to college, it’s helpful to explicitly recognize the distinction between two things, and the tradeoffs involved. The first step to resolving a tension is recognizing that it’s there.
For commenters
I’m primarily interested in feedback involving signaling as it relates to undergraduate admissions (as opposed to, e.g. signaling in the context of romantic courtship), but I’d welcome related observations about signaling to graduate school or employers based on high school or college coursework.
What’s an example from your own life where building human capital and signaling quality to colleges have come into conflict? How did you resolve the conflict? Do you think you made the right choice? Is there anything you would have done differently?
Thanks to Vipul Naik for conversations that lead to this post, and to Luke Muehlhauser for feedback.
As a family with a highly aspirational high school student and as a public school board member in a community where we have recently extensively debated AP grade weighting, we have had many conversations on this subject. In my opinion, the energy in the debate is indicative of a society overly focused on simplistic quantitative measures. "Simplify and Exaggerate" is a media trend that dilutes rational thought on complex issues in many areas.
In my recent conversations with admissions departments and faculty of highly selective schools, the feedback we have often received is "follow your dreams", almost to heck with the scores. This is easier for them to say than it is for students to live based on the perceived pressure to show high signaling quality numbers, but I think it's worthy advice. It seems that admissions departments strive to be less formulaic (although there may be certain cutoffs). For example, I don't think that a highly selective university would necessarily reject a student not in the top 1% GPA if the rest of the application were compelling. A passionate and honest essay by Kevin about a desire to do great things in Micro Biology with supporting demonstrated activities and extracurricular studies may weight more than the 1% vs. top 5% (but probably not get a 50%er into Harvard).
On GPA weighting, this is an area where a guidance counselor letter of recommendation can be used effectively. If the recommendation stated that Kevin pursued a course in Micro Biology even knowing that it would damage his GPA, that would look very favorable. Guidance counselors can be sympathetic to this and effective to communicate unique academic records circumstances.
It seems that the constraint in finding great students (and for many of our successes) is not an issue with having inadequate human capital, but rather lacking the vision and motivation to follow our dreams. The top 1% will always apply to the best schools, but my sense is that great schools would rather have a top 5% student with a demonstrated passion to pursue their dreams rather than someone with high book smarts and human capital that was only focused on GPA. The key in successful college applications these days seems to be to share a portfolio to demonstrate the potential for future success as much as formulaic scores.
The choice for Kevin to take that Micro Biology class would be the one with more integrity to pursue his dreams and I'm sure that would have come out in other ways in the application. Great university admissions departments are not fooled by GPA pumping strategies, they strive to seek for other underlying qualities of future success. More often than not I think we all have a tenancy to do what we think will get us high signaling quality to others rather than take risks to pursue our dreams that often would have resulted in better ultimate success or at least educational failures that are more personally valuable than perceived external rewards.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
I agree that factors other than quantitative measures play a role in admissions, and that elite colleges often take top 5%ers who are strong on activities/extracurriculars over top1%ers who aren't. And the hypothetical that I gave involving Kevin might be unrealistic.
There are still tradeoffs. What if Kevin had been just on the cusp of the top 10% in class ranking? (My impression is that the 10% threshold is more significant in admissions than the 1% threshold.) What if the molecular biology elective was slotted at the sa... (read more)