Meritocracy, SAT Scores, and Laundering Prestige at Elite Universities — #43

Steve discusses 10 key graphs related to meritocracy and university admissions. Predictive power of SATs and other factors in elite admissions decisions. College learning outcomes - what do students learn? The four paths to elite college admission. Laundering prestige at the Ivies.Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n-nwoeKe_DcA5tJxTwqTeZBEY7nObxkujKLxVfAzRAY/edit?usp=sharingCLA and College Learning outcomes:https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/01/measuring-college-learning-outcomes.htmlHarvard Veritas: Interview with a recent graduatehttps://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/08/harvard-veritas-interview-with-recent.htmlDefining Merit - Human Capital and Harvard University:https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.htmlChapter markers:0:00 Introduction 1:28 University of California system report and the use of SAT scores admissions8:04 Longitudinal study on gifted students and SAT scores (SMPY)12:53 Unprecedented data on earnings outcomes and SAT scores15:43 How SAT scores and university pedigree influence opportunities at elite firms17:35 Non-academic factors fail to predict student success20:49 Predicted earnings24:24 Measured benefit of Ivy Plus attendance28:25 CLA: 13 university study on college learning outcomes32:34 Does college education improve generalist skills and critical thinking?42:15 The composition of elite universities: 4 paths to admission48:12 What happened to meritocracy?51:48 Hard versus Soft career tracks54:43 Cognitive elite at Ivies vs state flagship universities57:11 What happened to Caltech?Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.--Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.