Article URL: https://sorting-machine.pages.dev/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900796 Points: 21 # Comments: 24

A domestic student at a given academic percentile has a far smaller chance of landing a seat at an elite university, and of paying for it, than an identical student fifty years ago. Admissions are fundamentally zero-sum, so where did these seats go? Every applicant is sorted into a lane before the file is even read, and the gates on those lanes are not the same size. A recruited athlete walks through an opening five-sixths of the way open. The unhooked domestic applicant faces a pinhole. Same university, same year, a roughly 17-fold gap in the odds of getting through. The most-cited number from the Harvard trial comes from a counterfactual. The plaintiffs' economist modeled one applicant profile and swapped only the race field. The model's predicted probability of admission moved from 25% to 95%. This is a modeled probability rather than a real admit rate, and Harvard's experts disputed the specification. But no party disputed the direction: at equal academic strength, the personal-rating and race adjustments did not fall evenly across groups. The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays. The real price is computed per household from a federal-and-institutional aid formula. This is textbook first-degree price discrimination: the same product, the same seat, sold to each family at the maximum the formula thinks it can extract. Here is the machine that sets your number. Why the upper-middle class gets hit hardest. The formula's design does the damage: income above a modest protection allowance is assessed at steep marginal rates, and the CSS Profile that elite privates use counts what the federal FAFSA does not: home equity in your primary residence and the non-custodial parent's income. The 2024 FAFSA overhaul also removed the reduction for having two children in college at once. Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing. Dept. of Ed (SAI) · CSS Profile. Treat this as an accounting question. Follow each group across three steps: its share of the country's 18-year-olds, its share of all U.S. college students, and its share of an elite private class. If admission were neutral the three bars would stay level. They don't. Some groups expand sharply at the elite tier while others contract: Asian students roughly quadruple, international admits go from zero to a sizable slice, and several domestic groups shrink at every step. Here's the counterintuitive part. A group that leans heavily on legacy and recruited athletics doesn't get those hooked seats for free. They come out of the group's overall footprint. So when you strip the hooks away and look only at the unhooked "merit" pool, that same group can be crowded out of it: its own hooked admits have already spent the seats. First, who actually fills each track: