Highlights From The Comments On College Admissions
Read the original on Slate Star Codex →
Follows up on
↳ Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know — MMTYWTK · Apr 2019
Summary
A Highlights-From-The-Comments companion to Scott's college-admissions post. The curated comments are strong — low-admission-rate incentives (US News rankings), consulting as a prestige exception, Dale & Krueger caveats, financial-aid unpredictability driving more applications, AP-exam inflation data, the tiny-elite-schools point (top-10 US schools educate only ~62k vs Canada's top-3 at ~144k), and the arms-race / zero-sum-competition model (the Latin→violin→Everest escalation; Sam Altman's growth-vs-zero-sum-competition). Scott's own contribution is light — mostly interjections plus the candid admission that his original post fell victim to a streetlight effect (Harvard is best-documented but doesn't generalise).
Why this score
Quality 60 · Strong. 60 — Solid/Strong boundary. High-value curation of genuinely informative comments, but Scott's original contribution is thin (like the Kuhn highlights), so it scores as good curation rather than a first-order contribution.
Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. 40 — Moderate floor. The novel content is in others' comments; Scott's frame is a curation post.
Real-world impact 1 · Negligible. 1 — negligible. A comments-companion post; no material reach.