I favor efficiency of discourse over tact
You'll notice "efficiency of discourse" is not my strong suit with this topic. My apologies—I have a lot to blather about that has been held in for too long. I've bolded the occasional important phrase to help the LW-skimmers of the future parse through my dense stuff. :)
I should amend my preface before continuing: I'm writing solely from the perspective of and about the top ~5% of a high school class. I assume that students taking the time to weigh the human capital growth prospects vs. the signaling benefits of an opportunity belong to this class. Among this group you can expect to see something close to (if not exactly) 4.0 unweighted GPAs.
I would have thought that getting into the top 1% of a high school class would require at least some choices that compromised personal development for the sake of signaling. Did you never encounter such choices?
These choices came up many times over. It's definitely tempting to seize at all opportunities that present themselves—I'd say the mere environment encourages such overinflated ambition. I've seen club advertisements and even heard teachers saying "It'll look good on your resume" as a major benefit of a program. Obsessive concern over signaling is widespread among honors students, and it's so common that they'll blatantly capitalize on the idea when trying to market a new club or class.
I ignored this common concern in my own major decisions. I took non-honors Intro to Graphic Design and Intro to 3D Graphics classes where I could've fit in extra APs. I dropped cross country (a great activity to have on a resume) in my senior year in order to dedicate more time to my work (something that wouldn't show up on a list of extracurriculars).
Within classes, of course, I had to make sacrifices for the Numbers (GPA and class rank). There was the occasional ridiculous English project I had to push myself through and chemistry lab I needed to rewrite. I didn't often connect this work with college admissions, however. I retained some amount of loyalty to the Numbers just because I felt it was the high-utility thing to do. [1] Going through the motions on silly projects could often earn the respect of a teacher, a useful thing to have when times got tough.
Why do you think that the admissions officers were telling the truth?
Good question. The situation was one where there was little incentive to speak untruthfully: a group discussion between incoming students and a regional admission officer (who knew that we had all been accepted). Admittedly, there is a chance that the officer had to hold her tongue due to internal policy about sharing admission strategies.
What information did you get from your classmates that gave you this impression?
No student saw grades as a central factor in getting accepted (I asked this of quite a few people while I was there, as I'm curious about much the same things as you are!). Of course, this is low-quality anecdotal evidence at best. I don't have anything more definitive to provide on this point.
According to Stanford's profile of the class of 2013, 7% of applicants who got a 4.0+ GPA were admitted, while only 1% of applicants with a GPA of <= 3.7 were admitted. Under some weak assumptions, in order for this to be consistent with written responses playing the dominant role, the odds of people in the in the latter group having sufficiently good written responses would have to be 7x the odds of people in the former group. Do you believe that this is the case?
I made a mistake in my previous post in not being clear enough about my scope. I mean to restrict the statements more in this post (see the first paragraph). The process I've built is likely to be useful to high-achieving students—the kind who are considering human capital growth prospect vs. signaling benefits, i.e., the kind that are likely already near a 4.0 GPA.
I don't mean to discount high school academics entirely. It's vitally important for a student to find subjects within the high-school curriculum which he / she enjoys and dedicate him/herself to them. What I'm against (and what is currently part of the norm for the top students, from what I've seen) is a student using signaling benefits as a deciding factor in any amount when selecting extracurriculars, classes, etc.
Why do you think that high schoolers do what they do if it's so poorly optimized for college admissions?
I see it as a long-term case of the "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" fallacy. There might be a better name for this, or I might be using the wrong idea altogether—let me explain. (Forgive me for the imprecision… I'm new to contributing to this wonderful site.)
High school counselors often give presentations to 8th-graders at local middle schools and freshmen at their own schools. They describe the process of college admission and the various steps that need to be taken over four years at a high school. They often also present "strategies" for building up an impressive resume / transcript. Most, if not all, of the options provided in these strategies involve school-run programs: advanced classes, clubs, special STEM activities, and so on.
It's very easy to build a cozy box using all the opportunities offered. I might call this planning a "bounded ambition." Students measure their success and the success of others [2] by how many activities they can take on and how well they can do within those activities. Over time, their real passions are clouded over by the idea of taking that extra course, of joining that extra club.
I feel I'm getting ranty and too aggressive in my statements once again. I'll sign off for now.
[1]: Admitted possibility of post-hoc rationalization here.
[2]: Competition between students is a huge issue at this level and undoubtedly plays a role in making signaling effects more attractive than human capital effects. Gosh, we could write a whole book on this stuff.
Why do you think that high schoolers do what they do if it's so poorly optimized for college admissions?
I affirm your wise decision not to be much moved by the force of this question - People Are Crazy, The World Is Mad.
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:
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
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 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.