EA - Most Ivy-smart students aren't at Ivy-tier schools by Aaron Bergman

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Most Ivy-smart students aren't at Ivy-tier schools, published by Aaron Bergman on August 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note for the Forum: I've decided to share this here because it seems relevant to EA hiring and community building strategy and practice. I don't address/argue the normative claim that EA should focus less on college rank at the individual (e.g., hiring) and/or community (e.g., which schools' EA groups to invest more resources in developing) levels, but that would indeed be a non-crazy takeaway if the post makes you update in the direction I expect it to, on average! Anyway, here's the post: Intro First, a few points to get out of the way: 1) High-minded (but totally sincere) disclaimer Intelligence isn’t a moral virtue. One’s intelligence is attributable almost entirely to luck of one kind or another, and thus is a form of privilege like any other. In a more just world, being called “unintelligent” or even “stupid” wouldn’t bite any more than being called “colorblind,” and being told that you’re “brilliant” wouldn’t leave anyone gushing with pride. 2) No bullshit faux modesty This post is neither about me nor for me, but it is inspired by my experience, and it would be silly and a bit disingenuous to pretend otherwise. In short: My high school transcript was pretty damn good—almost as good as one can get in terms of grades, course rigor, and AP/SAT test scores. I got rejected from all five Ivy-tier colleges to which I applied (and yes, I probably should have applied to more.) 3) This is (probably) totally fine - at least at the individual level It at least might be totally appropriate that I got rejected; there’s no law that says colleges are “supposed” to be a ruthless academic meritocracy. I personally find my own set of rejections mildly selfishly unfortunate, but not a moral injustice. I got into some excellent colleges, including Georgetown, which is where I graduated a few months back and was extremely very fortunate to attend. Hoya Saxa! I could be convinced that, in fact, it was some sort of personal injustice, but if so I’d nonetheless find it a relatively quite minor one. Upper middle class ivy rejects like me are doing just fine. Even at the societal level, such a blemish on the meritocratic veneer of higher education itself isn’t an issue. What might be, however, are individuals’ (e.g., high school me), groups’ (e.g., performance-focused organization) or society’s failure to grasp the situation. All this is to say that I’m trying to get some facts on the table so they can be recognized—not (necessarily) so they can be “corrected.” 4) A key assumption: test scores and intelligence For this post, I’m going to take as given that: SAT scores are a pretty good proxy for intelligence, and Intelligence (even when proxied by a single number a lá IQ) is a meaningful and important individual-level characteristic. A lot of ink has spilled on these topics, and I’m sure as hell not going to add anything important to those object-level debates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you think this is wrong, this post is likely going to seem wrong or misguided. Sorry. Anyway, on to the substance! Forbidden knowledge I’m also writing this post because the information I’m going to present to show isn’t publicly available - at least to the best of my knowledge. I’m only able to access it because my Naviance account from high school (somehow) hasn’t been disabled, and gives me access to micro-level college admissions data from my high school (alone). Namely, I can see scatterplots like the one below of anonymized individuals’ (weighted) GPA + SAT/ACT scores and college application outcomes. Secret questions Search online, and you’ll find a thousand statistics tables detailing admissions rates and 25th and 75th SAT score percentiles for students. You’ll find that “selective...