Ding ding! That's them!

***THE LIE DETECTOR TEST DETERMINED THAT WAS A LIE***

My son is currently a senior in HS and currently awaiting college decisions. It amazes and mystifies me how crazy getting into a university has become.

For my amusement, I looked up the admission stats for my school Carnegie Mellon way back in the day I applied (80's):

They had 5500 students apply, 3200 accepted and 1200 enrolled. That's over a 50% acceptance rate!

These days STEM acceptance rates at T20 universities are 5%-15% It's hard to grasp the change from then to now.

Even SAT's scores... In the 80's with a 1300-1400 SAT you were set for almost anywhere. These days, that's a score that may get you in at your state school.

And SAT scores really haven't inflated over the time.

I really don't understand it.

I thought this was neat....

It is neat

I also thought this was neat:

That was pretty cool. It seems like something xkcd author Randall Munroe would write about.

I hear there are people you can hire to help out.

i bought a plane ticket to sf, and then just stayed in bed instead of going to the airport

Of all the ways to light $49 on fire, that's not so bad.

$290

We really need to get you enrolled in Mark K's "How to Get Max Value in Everyday Life" seminar. $290 for that route is highway robbery.

i bought the ticket friday for sunday travel. spirit airlines too, no bags obviously. i was gonna wear 5 tshirts

I liked this. Also liked part 2.

That's what happens when you sleep on a 10K bed. I hope lesson learned.

BTW, A note to myself: I need to get the 10K bed meme rolling on Reddit.

I didn't know Spirit had a 1st class section?

i ****ed up man. i should have went to sf ugh

I dunno, personally I value not flying Spriit Airlines at ~ $350.

The adults look ok, although their horns are weird, but they're less cool as lambs, it when shorn. They're too long and stringy for sheep.

Yeah it's cool. A note of caution though: for the only city I really know about, Tokyo, it's out by a factor of two for like 250 years.

I always teach my students to be fairly skeptical about most stats' origins, and to be *really* skeptical of any stats from before about 1800.

In the UK, offers come with a requirement to achieve certain grades at A Level exams (say 2 As and a B, or whatever), and the level of that offer is used as a metric for ranking the quality of programmes, from AAA at Oxford and Cambridge on down. So you're incentivised to set high bars for the league tables, but when the exam results come in, competition over student numbers is so high that you're nuts to not accept people, so aiui you basically accept more or less everyone anyway. So there's this odd half secret that loads of students are going around thinking they were really lucky to get in, when in reality it was a foregone conclusion.

Also, the finances are so bad that everyone is trying to increase student numbers all the time, which puts downward pressure on everyone's standards, but no one is really prepared to admit it.

This is what a real sheep looks like.

I still can't believe people have to convince someone to let them pay them/go into years of debt to attend their ****ty liberal arts higher education programs.

The UK seemed to be more geared towards actually studying some sort of practical skill, not sure if still the case.

And this is why I didn't get a liberal arts degree.

Accounting/finance ftw.

USC:
Tuition - $56K/year
Room and board - $14K/year
Misc/Books - $5K/year
Entrance "Fee" - $500K

Here's the thing:
Letting celebrities pay their way into college for their kids is just them overpaying. Which essentially subsidizes the cost of other students id the money goes to the Universities. The university can then just expand their offerings.

If it goes to some 3rd party then it's less beneficial.