Tag Archives: careercounseling

Doing the simple math in college admissions 🧮

46,000 applicants apply to a top-tier university in a given year. The university has only 2,000 seats for the incoming freshman class. The university’s statistical model based on historical measures implies that 40 students will enroll in a typical year out of 100 students admitted to the university.

How many students does this university need to accept so that beds and classrooms are filled at full capacity?

What is the admit rate of this university?

The same university wants to move up in the college rankings. One tactic the university could utilize is to increase selectivity and enrollment. So, the university rolled out a binding early decision (ED) round in addition to its regular decision rounds for the next admission cycle. That year, the university received 5000 ED applications and admitted 1000 students. In the regular decision rounds, the university received 41,000 applications. The class size for the incoming freshman did not change, staying constant at 2,000. The yield rate for the regular decision was expected to be 25%.

What was the overall rate of admission and yield for that year?

Did the university improve its yield and admission rates compared to those in the previous year?

Forward-looking or backward-looking 🏫

‘The irony of college admissions is that the decision whether to admit someone is based on the future, not the past. It ultimately hinges on a judgment about the potential of that teenager over the next four years on a college campus, not what they’ve done the previous four years in high school’

Taken from Jeff Selingo’s ‘Who gets in and Why’
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Does not this apply to all admissions (college, grad, and the professional schools)?

This is a domain in which predicting the future through the reliance on the past data may not work well.

Story of Paola: Things to consider after getting a new job offer

Paola has many abilities. She is smart, hard-working, ethical, and amiable. She graduated from an estimable institution and has been working at a decent company that puts her skills to test every day. Recruiters have been contacting Paola for some time and after completing numerous interviews with different companies, she is now contemplating accepting an offer from a top global company. The company she is planning to join is ranked higher compared to her current company. Her total compensation in cash will increase by 70%. Even if she needs to relocate, the company will reimburse her for these expenses and offered her a hefty signing bonus. She will not receive any RSU or RSA but that is OK for her because her current compensation plan does not include such stock compensation schemes. On the cusp of accepting the offer, Paola actually needs to research more. What are the many other aspects she needs to know?
Hint: Even all the information I shared above, i.e. things she thinks that she knows certainly, may turn out to be bad for her. For example, as she dug more, she might find out that her hourly rate would decrease, compared to that in her previous company, despite the 70% increase in absolute salary (Some people are still OK with that considering that they do not have any side hustles or family commitments or they want to earn and save more money regardless of how many hours they work).
What else? There are many other things to consider. To be continued…

On disposable income being less and less meaningful 🪙

Disposable income as a measure of one’s earning power loses its meaning given the rampant inflation and new taxation schemes.

One observation is that there has been a tendency of wages converging to one another. Tenured employees are more likely to take the brunt of this convergence, feeling more insecure.

Wage earners who are identical in their hourly rates and salaries may differ greatly in their real purchasing power; nonetheless, many are sleepwalking.

Corporate salarymen are in distress. Furthermore, this seems to be only the beginning.