More on Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Collegs

Tyler Cowen comments on this recent article:

Let us say your kid is smart but has a small chance of making it into a top school. At Yana's high school (Woodson, in Fairfax) I've seen folders of students with 4.0 and 1600 SAT scores who did not get into Harvard or Yale. Getting into those places has elements of a crapshoot. You are gambling, with the odds against you, and a payoff varying only at some threshold level of success (i.e., getting in is what matters; if your kid doesn't get in, it doesn't matter how close he came.) Those are the classical conditions where the gambler prefers to take more risk. On the upside, your chance of getting in goes up and on the downside, the longer left-hand tail doesn't hurt you.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 7, 2006 6:25 AM
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