The Signaling Model of College Admissions
What economics can teach us about getting into selective colleges.
When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get into an Ivy League school. Unfortunately, I can’t say I came up with very many good ideas. In the end, I think I was a fairly boring applicant and my admission to Yale was some combination of luck, good test scores, and being a regional diversity pick.
Being on the other side of things has given me some more perspective, and I like to think I have had at least a little bit of insight into the process. This isn’t a foolproof admissions program; if it was, I certainly wouldn’t be writing about it on the internet. I would probably be selling it to families in Fairfield for just under the price of a bribed soccer coach. That being said, I hope my thoughts on this have some value.
My core idea is that college admissions are best modeled by the economic concept of signaling. In contract theory, signaling describes the idea that two agents can get around the problem of asymmetric information by having one agent give credible signals to the other in order to reduce the information gap. This model maps well on to the admissions process: you know a lot more about your talents and preferences than colleges do. As a result, they ask for an application in an attempt to reduce that gap.
A key insight from signaling theory is that costly signals (that is, signals that are hard or expensive to fake) are most credible. For instance, a founder keeping a large chunk of a company during that company’s IPO would be very costly to the founder if the company were actually a bad investment, and is, therefore, a good signal of company strength. The founder telling everybody about how great his company is, on the other hand, doesn’t prove much of anything; talk is cheap. This is why listing ten extracurriculars on your resume isn’t particularly valuable. It would be easy to fake this signal, even if you actually did go to every meeting and participate in all the activities. A verifiable award or some other real-world accomplishment is a much costlier signal.
The second key insight of the signaling model is that you should understand exactly what information you are trying to convey. In the college admissions context, this means you must do two things—signal that you will be valuable to the college, and signal that the college will be valuable to you.
Signaling that you will be valuable to them
The key to this step is to understand what colleges want. I frequently see people describe selective college admissions as some kind of deservingness contest, where the colleges (at least in an ideal world) try to identify and admit the students who deserve it most. What exactly it means to “deserve it” is nebulous but usually involves lots of AP classes, playing an instrument, and competing in a sport.
I think this view gets the whole thing backward. The truth is, U.S. colleges (for better or worse) are not under some mandate to pick the most meritorious candidates. They are trying to pick students that will serve their particular needs, which may be as idiosyncratic as an oboist for the student orchestra. In general, they use metrics like AP classes and extracurriculars to guess who might best satisfy their needs, but if they could see four years into the future they would happily ignore these factors. Instead of trying to maximize their score on some perceived scale of deservingness, applicants should focus on signaling to schools that they will meet the needs of the institution.
This is, of course, hard to do without knowing exactly what the needs of the institution are. These can be hard to predict, but I think there are a couple of safe bets:
Money: If you come from generational wealth, you represent a potential windfall for the institution. Of course, if this describes you, I assume you stopped reading when I reminded you that soccer coaches can be bought for the low, low price of $50,000.
Major Real World Accomplishments: When alumni do things like start a successful business, write a popular novel, or make a scientific discovery, it builds a school’s prestige. The best way to signal that you might do one of these things is to start doing them (for instance, you might start a business, or write a novel, or do scientific research). Because passion is a key element of entrepreneurial success, signaling passion for your chosen activity is important as well.
Conventional Post-Graduate Success: In the same way that it’s good for your high school when you get accepted to a prestigious university, it’s good for your college when you get selected for prestigious postgraduate opportunities, like spots in top grad programs or professional schools, high-paying positions at exclusive firms, and international fellowships. The best way to signal to colleges that you might do these things is to express interest in them and do things that make you competitive applicants for them (for instance, volunteering at a hospital if you express interest in med school). You should also signal that you are intellectually curious enough to want to do this sort of thing (for instance, by reading lots of books). Having excellent grades and test scores helps as well.
Contributing to the College Community: Colleges benefit when you make their community more vibrant and attractive to potential students by doing things like joining sports teams and clubs. The best way to signal that you might do this is (obviously) to join extracurriculars in high school. Ideally, you would show that you have the potential to be a key member of the particular activity as a leader or a specialist (for instance, the electrical engineering expert on a robotics team). Bonus points if your high school activities map on to activities at the school you're applying to. Again, signaling passion for your activities is important: colleges want to make sure you will actually follow through with extracurricular participation once accepted.
Keeping Up Academically: The least important but also most required thing colleges are looking for is an assurance that you will be able to keep up with the pace of their classes. Having students do very well in their classes is not particularly important (except as it applies to 2 and 3 above) but they are very keen to avoid students flunking out. For this reason, you absolutely must meet their (fairly high) minimum requirements for test scores and grades.
My best advice on how to signal to a college that you will be valuable to them is to perform the following exercise: imagine that you are four years in the future, and your time in college has been a roaring success. What did you do? Did you found a club, do important research, land a spot at a top law school? Now prepare your application materials in such a way as to suggest to the admissions committee that you will definitely, 100% do those things.
Signaling that they will be valuable to you
This is the part of the equation that I was clueless about in high school. One of the ways colleges compete with one another is with their yield, which is the percentage of accepted applicants who choose to attend. This means that all the signaling you do about your own value can actually work against you: if Harvard finds you a competitive applicant, they can assume that Yale and Stanford will as well. How can they be sure that you will choose Cambridge over New Haven or Palo Alto? This is why colleges are so keen on assessing your level of interest in them.
Despite being fully aware that my Harvard interviewer would ask me “why Harvard?” I still managed to give a horrible, stumbling answer about academic rigor when the question came up. To me, the answer was obvious—it was Harvard! But what Harvard really wants to know is not whether or not you want to go there, it’s whether or not you want to go there instead of Yale (or Stanford, or Princeton, etc.). In your frame of reference, pre-acceptance to any school, comparing Harvard against your baseline safety seems like a no-brainer. From Harvard’s point of view, the choice between themselves and their very best peer schools is no longer so obvious.
This question is so important to colleges that they have developed the ultimate costly signal of intent: early decision. Because this is such a strong signal of interest, I encourage you to make use of it. Choosing a selective college and applying early decision is a good strategic move.
Signaling interest outside of the early decision process is much harder. My best advice is to imagine that you have been accepted into every college to which you are applying. Then, for each of the schools, figure out which factors might actually lead you to choose that institution. Hopefully, this helps get out of the mindset of “of course I want to go to Yale, it’s in the Ivy League!” and into the mindset of “Yale, Harvard, and Princeton are all excellent universities, but, unlike the others, Yale has a great natural language processing lab that would support the kind of research I want to do.”
It is very hard to send costly signals of this kind, precisely because you must send them to multiple schools! That being said, any way you can find to make your signals of intent costlier will improve your chances. An example would be finding a connection between unique university resources and your demonstrated research interests or noting that the university supports an unusual extracurricular you participated in during high school.
Conclusion
Hopefully viewing the often emotional and irrational process of college admissions through the lens of signaling theory lends a little bit of clarity to the subject. The key points of this analysis are that one should design their application to signal both their value to and interest in an institution and that costly signals are much better than cheap ones.
This philosophy should guide you in crafting your essays and preparing for an interview, if applicable. I would recommend explicitly deciding what signals you are trying to send, and then ask someone you trust to read your essays or conduct a mock interview. Without telling them what your intentions are, see what impression you give them. In the highly stochastic world of college admissions, the best any individual can hope to do (setting aside bribery) is cut through the noise.