Creative Distillation - Transcript for Episode 32: Ethan Poskanzer (CU-Boulder) on Legacy Admissions
Jeff 0:00
Welcome to Creative Distillation where we distill entrepreneurship research and actionable insights. I'm your host, Jeff York, research director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am joined as always by my co host,
Brad 0:15
HF. I'm Brad Warner, you know that the title is so long, right? The Leeds School of Business at the UK. So which part should we drop bread? I don't know, we need, we need to figure out who's paying the bills first, and then we'll decide who we dropped.
Jeff 0:26
That would be the Deming center. So I am the research director at the Deming center over entrepreneurship. It's somewhere in space and time
Brad 0:34
isn't Colorado. It's in a great freakin place in Colorado. And we have a new member of the team here today. Really excited to talk to him a while I'm reading the title of the paper. Oh, wait, we've again, a second. All I'm saying is I'm reaching for my beer.
Jeff 0:47
So first of all, this is our new format. We are still at beyond the mountain brewery and mostly Boulder, Colorado. If you've listened to the first episode of this season, you heard a great discussion we had with Chuck Hickson, who's the founder here. And once again, I just want to mention what beer have we moved on to now like, what this is the culture. Okay, so you guys more of the coach? Yeah. So Brad is such a fan of the Colts. He went and bought some. And it was free. It was free.
Brad 1:13
Yeah. It was like oh, that pointing to the table over there. So we might be hanging over the wire
Jeff 1:17
for a really long time. And we're lucky because we have a friend joining us. So Ethan paws cancer has just joined the faculty at the Leeds School of Business and is working very closely with the Deming Center. Welcome anything.
Ethan Poskanzer 1:28
Thank you very much, Jeff. Thanks, everybody for having me here. I've listened to this podcast in the past so well, to be honest,
Jeff 1:36
do you hit the subscribe button?
Ethan Poskanzer 1:38
I think I did. The podcast. So you want
Jeff 1:41
to make up for Ethan's lack of sureness and make sure you hit that subscribe button right now. Because that helps us an awful lot we really appreciate. So even Welcome to Boulder, Colorado.
Ethan Poskanzer 1:52
In addition to it being good to be here on the podcast, it's good to be in Colorado, good to be in Boulder. So I finished my PhD in May I moved out here actually a few weeks before I graduated. So we're new Colorado, and it's been four months. So I'm
Brad 2:09
looking, I'm looking at the career path. Let's hang out at Goldman for a while and then go into academia, what the hell.
Ethan Poskanzer 2:15
So the Goldman Sachs period was that was always going to be short term. So I started I went to college, Syracuse University, and I was in a history education program. So I wanted to be a teacher. I hadn't really been exposed to college professors. So that was really only teachers I knew about really
Jeff 2:34
well off. You weren't your life was on a great trajectory. Everything was going? Well, you were sure yourself confident young versa.
Ethan Poskanzer 2:41
Yeah. And then I paid a lot of money to go to Syracuse. Yeah. Oh, sure. But so then I got there, I was a research assistant for Dr. Mary lovely, who was still a role model of mine. And I got the idea that I want to be an academic. That's all she was my advisor on some research I did and everything. So she was obviously really influential for me. And she pushed me really hard. She kind of even said, you know, I mean, she would have written the recommendation, but like, I won't recommend you for a PhD program until you try working just for a little bit. It's actually the taste of the real world. So I did it probably about two hours into my orientation when I was 22 and picking out health insurances. I did want to do the grad school thing. That's awesome. I committed to my my two year commitment to her. And then I applied to PhD programs. That's a great story system.
Jeff 3:29
Oh, that's good. I mean, I really think that's important. Yeah, I think a lot of times, I mean, I'm not trying to throw any of my colleagues under the bus or anything. I will. I'm sure you Well, Brad. So I think it's important to go work in like a large corporate setting, if you're going to teach in a business school. So you know, like both the good and the bad. Of that. Yeah, I
Ethan Poskanzer 3:51
think it's also useful even the the knowledge and the legitimation factor of like, if I'm gonna spend my life studying organizations, it's useful to have been a part of a traditional organization, wait for a little watch organization
Brad 4:02
is more cutthroat academia, or Goldman,
Jeff 4:05
who, you know,
Ethan Poskanzer 4:06
there's a lot of competitiveness all around. I think it's hard to say it comes out in different ways. That's amazing, right?
Jeff 4:14
I think a corporate saying is more cutthroat. I really do. I've never been there. Well, okay. So people always talk about like, not politics and academia are so vicious and never have people fought so hard when the stakes are so low. And I'm like, Okay, I don't know, man, my corporate experience was basically people were looking to blame someone else for anything that went wrong before they could get blamed. And the only way to keep from getting fired, was to make sure you had enough on other people where they knew not to.
Brad 4:47
Yeah, that's ridiculous. So I mean, I come from a culture of startup worlds and growing organizations. Well, that's very different and totally different. Thank God. I haven't had to experience that and with academia, I don't care
Jeff 4:59
but on the other hand, what I thought was wonderful about it was, you work with a lot of really smart people, you have virtually endless resources to do whatever it is you're trying to do. And if you fail, but execute well, you get promoted. I failed utterly in all of my initiatives I ever had my corporate career. I got promoted when I was sitting at home for six months with a broken neck.
Brad 5:23
I think it was the meds, Jeff, that's what took the edge off the personality. That
Jeff 5:27
was that was the kung fu film festival and watching All The Sopranos. See, anyway, I don't know what your experience
Brad 5:34
I love the pathways here. That's actually what led me to be
Jeff 5:40
painkillers and Kung Fu.
Ethan Poskanzer 5:41
I had a good experience, I don't think I would have been able to work for six months, probably. But hell I did for four years. Fortunately, my legs weren't injured during my time as an investment banking.
Jeff 5:54
But now you're in academia. So you did your PhD at MIT.
Ethan Poskanzer 5:57
At the end, I went to the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge.
Jeff 6:01
What was that? Like? People always had this vision of MIT being like this place where there's all these people with like building robots and things like that. And
Ethan Poskanzer 6:08
you know, that's not wrong, in a sense, you do in your social life, meet a lot of engineers out of people who are interested in technology. For someone like me, who knew I wanted to study entrepreneurship pretty much when I got there, Cambridge, Kendall Square, obviously really a cool place to do that happy to be transplanted into another place that's like that, where there are people around doing the thing that we're going to study. Yeah. But I don't know, I only went to one Ph. D. program. So it's hard to say how
Brad 6:34
I will tell you, I gotta tell you from this technology in my company, that I'm a co founder of came out of MIT. I've been in the MIT engineering that many times my partner is a PhD in optics from MIT. And I have to tell you, going through the engineering Museum is one of the coolest things. With all the submarines and all this kind of stuff. There's I mean, it's really amazing
Jeff 6:55
space in the name, what's the name of the lab there? Everything's like Media Lab. Yeah, that's yeah, that place is incredible. Walk through there. And you have no idea what the people are. Like, that looks really cool. Whatever they're doing over there.
Ethan Poskanzer 7:09
There's a lot of cool stuff. I don't know if this is actually an MIT thing. Or just if you're there, you spend a lot of time with like scientists, hard scientists, right? Every now and then like, you make a friend and you go to their dissertation, and like, they made progress on curing cancer or something. So like, those things are fun to see.
Jeff 7:26
So we have this renewable and sustainable energy institute here at CU. And we have the National Renewable Energy Lab right down the road. And this institute is multidisciplinary. I think it's me, there's an economist, and there's a sociologist, we're the only social scientists in the thing. And so there's probably like, 200 fellows, so we go to these presentations. I follow like the first two slides, like, Okay, I understand the problem. And I understand, Oh, they're doing some science to solve it. And then I'm just totally lost.
Ethan Poskanzer 7:57
That's what we do, though, we can come in and, you know, in the beginning and the end and think about
Jeff 8:02
me a little bit of the willies, though, because they totally understand when I present everything. And I'm just like, wait a minute, there is a little bit of a disbalance here where I can't understand anything about what they're doing. But they get what I'm doing perfectly fine. Perhaps what I'm doing is not as difficult. But they gives me a little bit of a complex
Brad 8:19
different types of brains to commercialize. Yes, you're right. You can't you can't let an engineer just run away and design AI forever. Right. There needs to be some some sensibilities built in here. I'm really a firm believer in the liberal arts education as well.
Jeff 8:34
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Ethan Poskanzer 8:35
I have been to talks without naming which ones they are where there's a technology. And I don't feel confident that the inventor has thought through what people are actually going to do when they get access to it. I totally agree with that. And it's usually not as altruistic, as the inventor has in
Jeff 8:51
mind. So would you guys say there's an actionable insight to be pulled out here
Brad 8:54
that Facebook started out by rating girls looks?
Jeff 8:57
Oh, there you go. That's actionable.
Brad 8:59
I mean, but think about this, right? I mean, you think about these people that, that come into great power, though, when their inventions really take off. And it's terrifying.
Ethan Poskanzer 9:06
And you don't know what's gonna happen when somebody gets out there into anybody's hands.
Jeff 9:11
So as per the instructions of the director of the dimming center, to distill that into an actionable insight, I would say, perhaps this isn't so much for entrepreneurs, but for those that are stakeholders in entrepreneurship, not be dazzled necessarily by technology. It's really easy to see some kind of like amazing technology without a real team behind it.
Brad 9:33
Well, that's the thing, Jeff, right. You need this diversity in teams to really make things more robust.
Jeff 9:38
Well, which is cool, because that's what we try to do in a lot of our educational offerings. And I
Brad 9:42
think that's a real insight that hopefully our listeners will take to heart
Jeff 9:46
thing a lot of schools embrace. I think MIT is one of them. We know from talking to chuck easily that Stanford is one of them. Yep, we know we're trying to do it that Brad's is getting ready to take over a class where by definition, the teams have to be comprised of entrepreneurs and engineers like they can't get into class otherwise. And it's basically an accelerator program, which is something that Ethan has studied. So tell us a little bit about your research anything you've been studying accelerator programs, right,
Ethan Poskanzer 10:09
accelerator programs have been my main research site, although the site in the paper that we're going to discuss a little more today is fairly different than that, right. So what I my overarching goal in my research is to understand why of all the ideas out there that people have, why some of them come into the world and come into our lives and get used. And I'm interested in how we can design organizations that both increase the opportunity to innovate and be an entrepreneur, not just for the sense of starting new business, but in the sense of identifying a problem in the world that affects people and coming up with a solution that helps fix that problem, right. And I study how organizations that can be structured to help facilitate innovation, and also to make the opportunity to innovate, more democratic, more inclusive to groups that don't traditionally innovate, right. And I've especially focused so far on how organizations select people, both for entry into the organization like hiring, or to join a team, and also the ways that organizations affect people's social networks, and how they can put people in a position to make the relationships and the connections that they need to turn their ideas into reality.
Brad 11:14
I think it's really interesting. But I also see like this pathway of startup and scaling, and all sudden, you can have a bunch of founders that really have this social DNA, what you're referring to, to change the world and all that. But that can change over time. And how do you set up the culture from the beginning that actually passes the scrutiny of VC investors and all these things? And where does that kind of identity Have you found a place where it changes or starts to morph, and they lose the original mission.
Ethan Poskanzer 11:42
So I've focused on usually studying entrepreneurs that have some semblance of an idea. But I think a useful Collision Course that happens in accelerators, like Jeff talked about just a big part of my research is when they get hard feedback for the first time, when the first time they're exposed to somebody, which in a lot of entrepreneurs, life is probably an investor or some type of competition that they don't do well. But a big feature, I think, of an accelerator is the opportunity to talk to people who are going to critique you, in a loving way, or if they want you to be successful or something like that. But I think that's often often a big pivot point for change. Yeah, so I
Jeff 12:18
don't do this anymore. But for a while, in my classes, I had like, this competitive aspect. And I was trying to like really embrace the idea of trying to actually let the students experience a little bit of what it's like to be an entrepreneur. And so they had a weekly competition where they would explain their proposal and they'd be ranked, forced ranking, speaking of corporate saying, gee style, up or out. And if you finished in the bottom, you were the last place team more than three times, you could not pursue that idea anymore. And you would be shocked. Like this is undergraduates, they've invested nothing but going to a class which they have to do anyway to graduate, people would break down in tears. It's like, they never had heard negative feedback. Or they'd heard negative feedback, I guess. There's never any consequence to it. And I don't mean, these kids today, or some crap like that, but it's like, really was powerful
Ethan Poskanzer 13:15
people, I think, like reasonably love their ideas. They're proud of them. They've worked hard on them. And sometimes it's hard to get feedback from the market. So
Jeff 13:22
Innovators Dilemma, they're in love with their idea. It makes complete sense to them. They've thought through it dozens of times. Yeah, they don't realize they're gonna talk to other people who have anything
Ethan Poskanzer 13:30
hate it might not want to use it in that way.
Brad 13:33
I have handfuls, handfuls and handfuls of crying students, a student last year, I think was the first time he actually had real feedback, who was a computer science major, who put his right hand through a while and then couldn't do computer science for six weeks, because he was in a class. I mean, this craziness happens through honesty, right? It's not about to beat these folks up. But you got to be honest, you got to be honest.
Ethan Poskanzer 13:55
Yeah. And I think like, an important thing to note on that is, like, so many of you guys, these ideas fail. That's normal. Right. Okay. And, you know, I think there's something to be said for spray and pray approaches, for lack of a better term of like, as long as we give a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people the opportunity to try and create something, some of them will, will make it through the tight save at the end of the process.
Brad 14:14
So on behalf of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Ethan
Jeff 14:18
Wow, you got it all in Nice job, right? Like the marketing is going to be so pleased. Yes, they
Brad 14:22
are. Let's let's talk about the paper in front of us. Okay. Okay. So how did this come about? Tell me where you're at and kind of talk us through?
Ethan Poskanzer 14:31
Yeah, so this came about a long time ago for any PhD students listening to this. This project started I was doing this morning in the summer of 2017. So we're coming up on five years working on this paper from the
Brad 14:44
standard practice for an academic let's think about this for five years. Pretty much I mean,
Ethan Poskanzer 14:48
six of my life
Jeff 14:50
yeah, no, I mean, it's, but it is like, I mean, at some point this season, I'm not going to talk about well, my own papers, my mother and my co authors come talk about paper, that paper so My dissertation, and it was published. It's impressed this year. Wow, that's insane. 2010
Ethan Poskanzer 15:08
I was 18.
Brad 15:09
So a sixth of your life was dedicated to through the front door legacy organization for legacy applicants. Seriously.
Jeff 15:20
Brad's a real stickler for titles. What would you have done?
Brad 15:23
You know what I look at these titles, right? First of all, I don't know, if I would have spent a sixth of my life. Trying to figure this out. I'm sure he did some other things I would have
Jeff 15:31
picked like getting a PhD that happened during that time to accomplish,
Brad 15:37
what problem was really sticking your head.
Ethan Poskanzer 15:39
So there are two things here. This is this is work with the admissions department at a elite US college. And so there's a substantive and a broader theoretical thing. So
Brad 15:49
you didn't get declined at some college and you're pissed.
Ethan Poskanzer 15:52
I did get declined from my fair share. But I understand. I understand I wish I would have counted his legacy at University of Albany, Indiana. You know, I didn't apply to those. So I
Jeff 16:07
just real quick, I graduated my MBA from the University of Tennessee. And I realized the effect of this very quickly when I went to work on my first day, and my boss just graduated with her MBA from Wharton. Oh, what is the difference? Oops, I honestly didn't know that till I graduate, because every MBA program tells him, you are the best and the brightest, you are very great students, you've made it through this selective process. And that's true. If you're an NBA student, you have made into a great process. But understand there's a pecking order.
Ethan Poskanzer 16:35
That's a good segue into one of the things that we found interesting about this. The first is that this is an interesting theoretical site to study the role of family connections and nepotism in selection organizations, right. The other is substantive that for better or worse, you know, a lot of people have a lot of thoughts on how the world works in this way, and I will make a statement on them. But admission to elite colleges, is a choke point to a lot of opportunities. And who gets to pass through that selection process? Come
Brad 17:01
back to seven years and make that statement, though?
Jeff 17:05
What do you what do you say that right? I've
Brad 17:06
just just just picked a number.
Jeff 17:08
You think it is? Yeah, I
Brad 17:10
think I think that he's not being honest. Why? So I think that you actually, I think you believe something that you're not saying? Like what? I don't know, I'm not gonna put words in your mouth. I just I just have a feeling that you're not being totally transparent here. All right.
Jeff 17:25
I believe you, Ethan, I believe that you believe that? admissions to top tier universities is a choke point
Ethan Poskanzer 17:30
for people. Yeah, I think we can all relate to to Jeff's point, opportunities are not distributed, distributed equally across the status hierarchy of colleges and universities.
Jeff 17:40
I mean, like, you must get these things from Chicago like, so we went to all the various schools, and I get these things saying, hey, if your child is interested in attending, we'll be having this session in your area. You know,
Brad 17:52
what I get from University Chicago, truthfully, is if you know any qualified candidates, we'd love to hear from you. It's never aimed at family. It's aimed at your network. They don't do anything family wise. I've never seen it. Really. That's a Chicago not a legacy school. You're the researcher here, man.
Ethan Poskanzer 18:07
Yeah. So what do you mean by? I'm not sure at the University of Chicago in particular, but it's not a universal practice. Oh, interesting.
Brad 18:16
We were I learned so takeaway for the Deming center, there is
Jeff 18:19
when you're applying if you're applying to elite universities find out their legacy score. Not Yeah, wait. So arguably, you would increase your odds? If they're not, I think, I mean, that's not really what your research,
Brad 18:31
comparative analysis between legacy and non legacy schools at all in any of any of your research beyond the paper.
Ethan Poskanzer 18:36
So at this school, we do a lot of legacy non legacy comparisons. Our conclusions are this is the research side is is the admissions record at one school. So everything is local to that one contexts. But there are a handful of elite schools that are upfront about the fact that they don't do legacy admissions.
Jeff 18:52
That's probably a good thing that I mean, they don't do it. I don't know. But not but it's
Brad 18:57
not a good thing. And Ethan is looking at you like you're
Jeff 19:01
not a good thing for there. You used multiple logics in the paper, its endowment,
Brad 19:07
I'm thinking, well, there
Jeff 19:08
you go. We will.
Ethan Poskanzer 19:09
Yeah. So without making an overall judgment. Yeah. I guess legacy admissions. We can see how legacy admissions sideline other objectives of the admissions department that some people think are very important and are reasonable to think are very important.
Jeff 19:26
What I took away from the paper you told me if I got right, basically what you guys find is that for schools that employ a legacy system, it turns out Yeah, that's actually not a bad idea if you're interested in having contributions and donations and procuring your alumni base of donation.
Ethan Poskanzer 19:49
Yeah, that's fair to say. Because,
Jeff 19:51
I mean, let's make no bones about it. Certainly at CU Boulder. We do that. I mean, every every university has to do that because every American University has to But European schools do it too. But but we don't receive a ton of funding from the
Brad 20:04
state SMU a legacy school do we know?
Jeff 20:07
That's a great question. I have no idea.
Ethan Poskanzer 20:10
I actually don't know, either.
Jeff 20:11
I don't think so. I think I should now but I'm just gonna I mean, we don't know. But I don't think it is. Could be, but I've never seen anything formal. I work a lot with our development, folks. But what you don't achieve through that. This is why the the paper really is quite interesting. What you don't achieve is any higher academic appearance. That's right. And you definitely don't achieve any of the goals University has around diversifying backgrounds, or different viewpoints, whichever university has a goal of diversifying their student body at this point. Yeah, I can't think of a university that's like, we aren't trying to diversifier our student body. Right. So is that fair to say? Like what the papers conclusions are?
Ethan Poskanzer 20:51
That's a pretty spot on SunRype. Wow, I'd say overall, as the advantage that legacy students get admissions is really, really big, just the sheer magnitude of it is pretty striking. And then we see that legacy admission satisfies some objectives, not others. So legacies go on to donate more. They're more supportive alumni, they come from families that are more likely to be flagged as high donor families. They don't do any better academically, so we see no case that they're better performers in any way. Either. They do. It's close to No, it's pretty comparable.
Jeff 21:23
Not significant. The deathmatch Yeah.
Ethan Poskanzer 21:25
And they're they're far less diverse. And the the advantage from Legacy admissions is primarily given to rich students from wealthy areas, right, white students.
Brad 21:35
So here's a couple takeaways that I found. First of all, I think Ethan got his PhD in diplomacy. Number two, though, okay.
Jeff 21:43
Oh, hold on. Now he's I think what Ethan is saying no, is he's trying to state clearly and without editorializing, his actual findings, which is an important thing for researchers to do, right? I mean, we need to like make sure that we editorialize a lot here
Brad 21:58
on the sides, but I'm looking for takeaways, right? Yeah. Okay, so diplomacy. Ethan's a great guy. I'm glad he's on the team. So he's welcome back anytime, and we'll talk about the boss or the East Coast, you might even buy a beer, I might actually buy him a free beer. But the bottom line though, no big surprise. It's all about the money. I mean, that shouldn't be shocking to anyone. But six of your life, Ethan a sixth of your frickin life.
Ethan Poskanzer 22:21
Well, okay, here's another thing. I don't know if research necessarily needs to be shocking to be publishable. I think this puts a strong magnitude on a important phenomenon. And society gives us a lot of insight into a topic of a lot of controversy, a lot of public interest, and is also an interesting case and how an organization's priorities can be sidelined in favor of others. I think there's something to be said for I agree that as universities are coming into more challenging financial situations, a lot of reasons demographic change, the pandemic, that decisions that are made in the interest of maximizing financial gain will, in some cases, sideline other goals that are important to university. My point
Brad 23:00
is, we could have talked about this over a beer, you could have gone with one of your MIT buddies and cured cancer by now.
Jeff 23:09
That's a pretty high frickin Barbara. Your research paper cured cancer. I'm just teasing the guy
Ethan Poskanzer 23:17
gets into elite colleges matters.
Brad 23:19
I guess my question is, there's
Ethan Poskanzer 23:20
a lot of research that would say that's not true.
Brad 23:22
So I think it matters. My question is, do you think that this research will change the practices of any university? I don't know. But that's not my job. Yeah, but I'm looking for in my life, I look for impact, right? What can I do?
Jeff 23:35
Okay, so let me let me try to if you don't mind me, then please.
Brad 23:40
I might write he would say, I'm not against the paper,
Ethan Poskanzer 23:46
but you weren't necessarily our desired audience. And we were writing this, we were trying to make a theoretical contribution to contribute to the sociology of stratification.
Jeff 23:56
This is forthcoming in American sociology review, which is the preeminent journal in sociology. How many articles from that journal? Have you ever read? Zero?
Brad 24:04
I didn't Don't even I've never heard of the magazine. That's not true. No, I read I've read the first paragraph.
Ethan Poskanzer 24:10
I mean, I think there are a lot of substantive takeaways that I would be really excited if policymakers took whether they will or not, absolutely, it's a little bit out of my head.
Brad 24:18
So what would be your recommendation to policymakers
Jeff 24:21
actionable insight,
Ethan Poskanzer 24:23
my actual insight is to consider which priorities are being sidelined when you make a certain decision that an emissions department has a lot of diffuse goals, not unlike an entrepreneur that are not always in concert with one another and that there are trade offs, a lot of decisions, specifically when abstract goals like we want to admit talented students. We also want to raise money get thrust up against one another, you know, in a concrete situation like are we going to admit these legacy students? I think that it's important to consider the counterfactuals and what's being left behind when you make the decision in med surg students.
Brad 24:54
Cool. Are there are there legacy colleges or universities that are not legacy universities anymore? It is Practice evolving.
Ethan Poskanzer 25:01
It's evolving, not as quickly as a lot of people would like. So there are universities that have recently come out and pretty sure Johns Hopkins is the one that recently eliminated legacy admissions, there's a lot of movement to eliminate legacy admissions, which is why the still is in the title is why do they do this, despite all the criticism they get? There's an op ed in the times, you know, in the Boston Globe, a lot. People have strong opinions about these things, and they persist. And that was one of the motivating questions was, was why did this this practice persist through the strong public critiques or
Brad 25:35
legal jeopardy for these universities that continue to practice?
Ethan Poskanzer 25:39
Not to my knowledge, as of now, I mean, higher education admissions, is being litigated to a very prominent degree right now. And I don't think a lot of us don't know what's going to come of that. But I think, right now, there's no legal ramifications.
Jeff 25:54
To me. Yeah, Bradley. I mean, a lot of the research we do is not shocking. But it's evidence based. So you and I could say, you know, you and I could go drink a beer here and under the mountain, which is a lovely place, and we'd have a great time. And we could be talking about our kids trying to get into school. I want to ask you about that. Because that's important. So we could be talking about that. And we could say, like, Oh, I just feel like my kid would get in to this school if I'd gone there or whatever. Right? Well, social science research does, broadly speaking, that I think is important, is it provides us now whether or not people get that evidence and whether or not gets to the right people. I totally agree with your critique there. We got to do more to make sure people get that and we do our best. But it gives us like some very careful, well done, peer reviewed, which is his close. I mean, you know, I don't know there's no truth with a capital T. I'm not gonna get all philosophical. But you know, the best we can do. Yes, peer reviewed research, in my humble opinion. So this gives us a source to Gotcha. Yeah. You know what? That's right. And not only that, it's not helpful to these universities, except for monetarily, which is really important politically, because academia is under the gun, man. Have you noticed this has become a professor like people are like, whoa, Professor, you know, you're gonna sit in your ivory tower, and I'd actually read all this crap. Alright, obviously, I'm biased here. But I feel like academia and science itself is under attack. So I think it's important to do this.
Brad 27:22
I look at this, though, the benefit is to the university. In a big way financially. I'm thinking about the student. And it seems to me that the benefit is also to the ego of the parents.
Ethan Poskanzer 27:34
Oh, yeah. As you the other parents of the students. Yeah, sure. Ego, perhaps or their desire to keep their children on the high status, high class lifestyle.
Jeff 27:45
Right? Yeah, really, I'm sure you've never, you've never flattered investors ego,
Brad 27:51
never. It's only been a day.
Jeff 27:58
I want to make sure we bring this around to like how this applies to entrepreneurship. I think Ethan was onto something there. I think it's really interesting. He talks about these competing different goals that a university has. And I think that's a sort of, it's sort of a unique thing for a public private entity, like a university. But I don't know when we start thinking about entrepreneurs, that are trying to actually, as Ethan was talking about earlier effect, a real problem. I see this all the time with my students. They're like, we're creating this product, or the service that actually helps people. But we find something that actually will get us bigger profitability, or there's a bigger margin, or we can get into market faster. You see that and you're
Brad 28:39
talking about my life. So let me let me talk about the life and this companies that I've started in the fundraising we've done. There is a point where companies, early stage companies need cash. Yeah. And so I understand this paper completely there. But there's also a difference between cash and smart cash, right? Smart Money is different than just money. But I bet in my career, I will honestly say that I've been in this stage where flattery and all those types of things to get someone to invest in, whatever you're doing is, is necessary.
Ethan Poskanzer 29:13
Yeah, there is the one difference that some of the organizations that do this Harvard might be the most late stage organization in the entire country. Right. And they're very well established. Yeah. But yeah,
Brad 29:24
I'm just trying to make a connection to entrepreneurs. Totally agree. I have a beef with some of these very elite universities, I'll actually I'll just say it and joke, unedited, if it's if it's inappropriate, but I don't think that they reach enough people.
Jeff 29:37
Well, I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement.
Brad 29:40
But I mean, right, they, they have this process, so they it's very insular in a sense, and the degree of of cutting edge thinking that's coming out of these institutions should reach far more people than it does that really, that really bugs me?
Ethan Poskanzer 29:55
I agree. And I think that we can look at Legacy admissions as one process that can Strange that, that these are people who would have had access to, you know, these are these are the children of people who went to the elite university, so not to a tee. They are fairly wealthy, they went to good high schools already, it's not out of line for them to have gotten into this college on their own.
Jeff 30:15
Awesome. So I would say personally, the actual insight that comes out of this paper is, look, you're an entrepreneur, and you're trying to make choices, you're trying to meet competing goals. First of all, there's a whole slew of research we could talk about this shows how difficult that is. But there is an emerging stream of research that shows that actually can also be a competitive advantage. And that's not what Ethan's talking about in this paper. But I think what it translates into is, if you've got those competing goals, always going with the monetary, may very well accomplish your monetary goals, but you're gonna sacrifice dangerous. It's a dangerous path to go down. Yep. Ethan, we can't wait to hear more about your research on accelerators. I know you're working on a ton of fascinating field research, where you're going in and doing experiments with these folks. And I'm really excited. You're gonna be in the classroom applying this stuff to our students.
Ethan Poskanzer 31:10
I'm excited about that, too. We're thrilled to have you
Brad 31:13
and they help me come back. I really, I want to eat them to be kind of a regular reoccurring guest because he's fun to drink with.
Ethan Poskanzer 31:19
I hope I publish enough papers to get invited back.
Jeff 31:23
Just publish enough paper so you can be on like, you know, I don't know, every other month. I'll do I'll do my best five year lead time. So again, the paper is through the front door. Why do organizations still prefer legacy applicants? It's co authored by Emilio Jake Hestia at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ethan J Paz cancer who is now at the University of Colorado Boulder. And it's going to be an American sociology review. It's not impressed yet right.
Ethan Poskanzer 31:49
Not impressed yet getting the proofs back sometime next week. Hopefully, so excited to see it in.
Jeff 31:54
We'll link in the in the doobly doo to the to the paper if people want to check it out. And thanks for joining us.
Ethan Poskanzer 32:01
Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it.
Jeff 32:03
Awesome. So here we are beyond the mountain. What's our favorite beer from behind the mountain boys?
Brad 32:08
For me? I'm going with the call sheet bases puffs.
Jeff 32:11
Yeah, the reason I bring these into I'm tempted to say the IPA to get us around cogeneration with as a coach is good. The Reese's cup is the hipster. But it's not. It's not the point where it's like a gimmick beer that's
Ethan Poskanzer 32:25
unpleasant. Because it's the one I'm going to talk about later on.
Jeff 32:29
That's right. That's right. All right. Well, thanks for joining us on creative distillation brought to you by The Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. I'm Jeff York, your host, the research director over there and I'm joined with
Brad 32:39
I'm Brad Warner, it was great to see you again. Jeff. Ethan, thanks for joining us today. Thank you, the whole team being here. We're excited for season four. is gonna be really
Jeff 32:48
cool things in the pipeline. We've got some awesome guests. We're gonna be going on a road trip. Oh boy, that's gonna be crazy. Thanks for joining us. If you like the podcast, hit subscribe, send us a review. Right, Brad
Brad 32:59
at CD podcast@colorado.edu
Jeff 33:03
Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Cheers.