The Ancient God Who Rules High School

Do Ivy League schools actually provide for better education or it's just signalling and status?

Both, as well as forced socialization with an impressive peer group. But Lumifer has this one right - both are scarce resources, and this particular mix of the two is a scarce resource, but it's not being burned because it's not a commons. They are successfully accepting only those they think will do well there and improve the environment for each other.

It's a plain old competition, and I've seen no evidence of suboptimality. Are there other highly-competitive endeavors which you think are optimal? You mention Olympic medals - I've known some Olympic hopefuls, but they burned out or were injured before making the team. That's not pleasant, but it's not suboptimal, it's what has to happen in order to identify the best performers.

It's a plain old competition, and I've seen no evidence of suboptimality.

Yep. Basically, the "waste" of competition is the price you pay to acquire information about performance.

1bogus9y

What's being burned here is not the benefits of being accepted to an Ivy. It's the wasteful effort involved in, e.g. the marginal hours of intensive preparation on the SAT, that will affect the final score by a handful of points at best. (No one denies that some amount of test prep can be very useful for anyone, both academically and in terms of improving the test outcome!) To a first approximation, the positive payoff of the former is exactly offset, in expectation, by the negatives of the latter.

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The Ancient God Who Rules High School

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