I think your claim is directionally correct all-else-equal; I just don’t think the effect is big enough in context, with high enough confidence, that it changes the top-line calculation you’re responding to (that 4-5x) at the resolution it was offered (whole numbers).
The naive assumption that scholars can be arranged linearly according to their abilities and admitted one-by-one in accordance with the budget is flawed. If it were true, we could probably say that the marginal MATS scholar at selection was worth maybe <80 percent of the central scholar (the threshold at which I would have written 3-4x above rather than 4-5x). But it’s not true.
Mentors pick scholars based on their own criteria (MATS ~doesn’t mess with this, although we do offer support in the process). Criteria vary significantly between mentors. It’s not the case, for instance, that all of the mentors put together their ordered list of accepted and waitlisted scholars and end up competing for the same top picks. This happens some, but quite rarely relative to the size of the cohort. If what you’ve assumed actually had a strong effect, we’d expect every mentor to have the same (or even very similar) top picks. They simply don’t.
MATS 6 is both bigger and (based on feedback from mentors) more skill-dense than any previous MATS cohort, because it turns out all else does not hold equal as you scale and you can’t treat a talent pipe line like a pressure calculation.
I think your claim is directionally correct all-else-equal; I just don’t think the effect is big enough in context, with high enough confidence, that it changes the top-line calculation you’re responding to (that 4-5x) at the resolution it was offered (whole numbers).
The naive assumption that scholars can be arranged linearly according to their abilities and admitted one-by-one in accordance with the budget is flawed. If it were true, we could probably say that the marginal MATS scholar at selection was worth maybe <80 percent of the central scholar (the threshold at which I would have written 3-4x above rather than 4-5x). But it’s not true.
Mentors pick scholars based on their own criteria (MATS ~doesn’t mess with this, although we do offer support in the process). Criteria vary significantly between mentors. It’s not the case, for instance, that all of the mentors put together their ordered list of accepted and waitlisted scholars and end up competing for the same top picks. This happens some, but quite rarely relative to the size of the cohort. If what you’ve assumed actually had a strong effect, we’d expect every mentor to have the same (or even very similar) top picks. They simply don’t.
MATS 6 is both bigger and (based on feedback from mentors) more skill-dense than any previous MATS cohort, because it turns out all else does not hold equal as you scale and you can’t treat a talent pipe line like a pressure calculation.