“I asked an Ivy League admissions officer: if we admitted 50 people and 45 of them worked out and five got in fights in the common room, is that success or failure? I said that's a resounding success. He said, 'I view that as failure.'”
Conversations with Coleman · Ideas & Essays · September 2026
Context
Fryer, the Harvard economist, is arguing that elite admissions are built to avoid embarrassment rather than to take good bets — his phrase is that if you're going to take someone low-mean, you should want high variance. The admissions officer's own example was Olympiad gold medallists who get passed over because one of them once trashed a common room. Fryer's point is that a school that admits on a different standard then owes those students the developmental support to make the bet pay off.
Transcript
…people to a line. Let me give you one clear example. I was talking to an Ivy League admissions officer, the head of an Ivy League Admissions School. And I said, look, I have this intuition. A 1,200 SAT coming from the Atlanta Project. Is more impressive than a 1,300 coming from a private school. I
have the same intuition.
That's my view. I said, but can we test this? And the admissions officer said to me, Roland, let me get this straight. If we admitted 50 people and 45 of them worked out and five got in fights in the common room, I was told, would you think that's success or failure? I said, that is a resounding success, in my view. He says, I view that as failure. And said, look, it's not about race. You know, we don't, sometimes we don't admit the Olympiad gold medalists because we're worried that they're going to, you know, a few years ago, someone couldn't figure out a proof and they trashed the common rooms or something like that. So that is the issue, which is if you're going to have a different standard at the time of admission or what have you, then again, it is on you to figure out developmental opportunities for them to show that they were worth taking a bet on. And I think that's what's gone, that's what went wrong in the RDA case and likely many others.
That's very interesting. So in the case of those 50 admitted students, we're going to admit 50 students on the intuition that their lower test scores represent more potential than meets the eye because of their background. In that hypothetical, 90% of them were great successes and ended up by some…
Yes, great question. Just one tiny thing, because I'm a nerd. It's 10%, so it would be 90 and 10%. Oh, sorry, yeah. But I think it is minimizing, you know, it's downside risk protection. I think, and look, I don't know. This is one, you know, one person I chatted with a few years ago, but since…
That what would be a rational choice?
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