Well to me the most valuable things are knowledge, practice and discovery. After all that is how progress is made. And we study hard to be able to make discoveries and do things which will change the world.
And I firmly believe that almost all studying is at its core autodidacty. You get out of college what you put into it.
That is to say, self-motivation is necessary to acquire knowledge in and out of a formal academic setting.
But clearly where you are and who your peers are, is a huge influence on the human social animal. And because you might love learning but hate the rather heavy hand of authority at the pre-college education level, you might still want to co to college.
Specifically, potential to change the world may be intimately related to an almost pathological love of reason and hatred of unreasonable rules, methods, approaches and behavior.
I believe Caltech wants students who will do great things. But I may be wrong? That may not be the goal, actually I am quite certain that is not the only goal.
The way Caltech evaluates students is by using a proxy of academics. There are other proxies but clearly formal schooling is a main component of the evaluation proxy.
I will not go into the proven dangers of optimizing the proxy instead of the thing that the proxy is proxy-ing for.
School prior to college is well known to not just impart knowledge but also things like arbitrary rules and enforced discipline over agreed upon cooperation, etc.
College has some of that as well, although much less so then pre-college education.
Assuming someone has proven both a disdain for formal schooling and also a love of learning, knowledge, and scientific discovery, we could speculate that is a person with an extreme love of logic and hatred of lack of logic, who might to well in an environment with more knowledge and less B.S.
We all know anecdotes about great geniuses and the trouble they got in at school. Beyond that there is a lot of formal work done on "gifted" children and learning environments.
So an argument could be made that exceptional academic success at the pre-college level is a bad predictor of truly exceptional success in changing the world.
But I don't think formal academic success is just a proxy for Caltech. I think Caltech is specifically looking for kids who will work well within the system.
Caltech's filter for students proven to do exceptionally well within the academic systems is I suspect a goal in itself.
Actually I find Caltech's laser like focus on proven academic success refreshing. Because it is honest, open and complete.
Other schools make use of the same proxy but don't do it as well as Caltech.
So in my opinion, Caltech is pursuing a low risk/high reward strategy of potential Nobel prize winners who don't make a lot of trouble in school and don't tax their advisor's schedule too much.
There is an alternative slightly higher risk which might have a better chance of picking up real-far outliers.
tl;dr: Does Caltech value academic potential over intellectual potential?
And I firmly believe that almost all studying is at its core autodidacty. You get out of college what you put into it.
That is to say, self-motivation is necessary to acquire knowledge in and out of a formal academic setting.
But clearly where you are and who your peers are, is a huge influence on the human social animal. And because you might love learning but hate the rather heavy hand of authority at the pre-college education level, you might still want to co to college.
Specifically, potential to change the world may be intimately related to an almost pathological love of reason and hatred of unreasonable rules, methods, approaches and behavior.
I believe Caltech wants students who will do great things. But I may be wrong? That may not be the goal, actually I am quite certain that is not the only goal.
The way Caltech evaluates students is by using a proxy of academics. There are other proxies but clearly formal schooling is a main component of the evaluation proxy.
I will not go into the proven dangers of optimizing the proxy instead of the thing that the proxy is proxy-ing for.
School prior to college is well known to not just impart knowledge but also things like arbitrary rules and enforced discipline over agreed upon cooperation, etc.
College has some of that as well, although much less so then pre-college education.
Assuming someone has proven both a disdain for formal schooling and also a love of learning, knowledge, and scientific discovery, we could speculate that is a person with an extreme love of logic and hatred of lack of logic, who might to well in an environment with more knowledge and less B.S.
We all know anecdotes about great geniuses and the trouble they got in at school. Beyond that there is a lot of formal work done on "gifted" children and learning environments.
So an argument could be made that exceptional academic success at the pre-college level is a bad predictor of truly exceptional success in changing the world.
But I don't think formal academic success is just a proxy for Caltech. I think Caltech is specifically looking for kids who will work well within the system.
Caltech's filter for students proven to do exceptionally well within the academic systems is I suspect a goal in itself.
Actually I find Caltech's laser like focus on proven academic success refreshing. Because it is honest, open and complete.
Other schools make use of the same proxy but don't do it as well as Caltech.
So in my opinion, Caltech is pursuing a low risk/high reward strategy of potential Nobel prize winners who don't make a lot of trouble in school and don't tax their advisor's schedule too much.
There is an alternative slightly higher risk which might have a better chance of picking up real-far outliers.
tl;dr: Does Caltech value academic potential over intellectual potential?