What Mark Zuckerberg’s clothes teach us about applying to college
Dressed in a grey t-shirt and dark jeans, Mark Zuckerberg took questions on a wide range of topics in front of a friendly crowd.² It was 2014, years before he would step in front of Congress to discuss how foreign actors were able to influence the 2016 election using user data gathered over Facebook.
“Why do you wear the same T-shirt every day?”
Zuckerberg replied, “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community”
This answer went viral, and it’s easy to see why. It seemed appropriately insane that the man with the vision, skill, and execution to create one of the largest companies in the world would have a fanatical desire to optimize his entire life and use his brain power where it was most needed. Yet, for everyone who, in pre-COVID days, would stand dumbly in front of the closet wondering what to wear for another Wednesday at the office, Zuckerberg’s statement rang true. The reason is that making decisions between large numbers of similar options is actually pretty challenging.
This is a phenomenon that has been widely studied by economists.³ It’s called bounded rationality, and can be connected to a broader set of theories under the umbrella of behavioral economics, which stands in contrast to classical economic theory. In classical economics, humans are perfectly rational beings that will consistently make decisions that optimize their likelihood of achieving their most preferred result in any situation. A perfectly rational person faced with an optimization problem needs to have 1) complete information about the available choices; 2) perfect foresight into the outcome of each choice; and 3) the capacity and willingness to examine all choices, no matter the complexity.
In practice, this is ridiculous — our environment, emotional state, cognitive ability, cultural background, and psychology can all impact decision-making in a way that doesn’t always lead to optimized choices. This is the point of the theory of bounded rationality, which was introduced by David Simon in 1957. Simon believed that people are limited in our ability to wrap our heads around an optimization problem, particularly a complex one. Our rationality is “bounded” by our capacity to process information and understand the consequences of our actions. The theory makes sense — if we were all perfectly rational, decisions would be easy. Yet our lack of rationality is obvious at every turn. We can’t decide what to wear to work because we don’t know how to compare every combination of clothing options and understand how each option will make us feel — am I going to feel really full from lunch and wish I wore stretchy pants? What about if that cute co-worker invites me to happy hour — will I wish I wore the most flattering shirt possible, even if it’s less comfortable?
Zuckerberg has solved this problem — he wears the exact same thing every day: no data to process, no foresight required. He uses a heuristic — a mental shortcut, or rule of thumb that makes decisions easier — by buying just one kind of outfit.
While this might seem silly, the idea of bounded rationality can have more serious implications when applied to a more important decision, such as where a student applies to go to college.
Unlike picking the clothes to wear to work, where a student goes to college can have huge implications for their future. In college, students build essential networks that will sustain them for their professional lives, meet friends and spouses, and, if they graduate, earn a degree that will greatly enhance their future employment opportunities. Making a sub-optimal choice can lead to consequences — poorly-matched students may not engage with their college experience as effectively, and may struggle to finish at all. While transfer opportunities abound, transferring is a challenge in and of itself, and often leads to lost credits, lost time, and lost money. With high stakes, you might assume that rational students and parents would approach college search like an optimization problem, looking to maximize a combination of factors to find the best possible place for school.
The challenge is that finding the perfect college is a very difficult optimization problem. With more than 4,200 degree-granting institutions participating in federal financial aid programs, the number of choices is immense and the factors to consider (program quality, size, location, dorms, etc.) are complicated.⁴ As predicted by the theory of bounded rationality, students often use heuristics to pick their college destinations. They look at schools attended by their relatives and schools they’ve heard of in the media. As far as heuristics go, these are not particularly effective if students are trying to find schools that fit their personal needs as fully as possible.
This is why I believe the most effective strategy is to filter down the options to a small enough number, so that students can run an actual optimization process where they understand the factors at play and rank options systematically. This means picking a few criteria that are especially important (location in a mild climate, access to D1 sports, and a strong chemistry program, for example) and using them to eliminate schools that don’t fit. After each round of eliminations, students take stock of their remaining options before proceeding. Once students get down to about 10 schools, decisions on where to apply become simpler and writing essays that are personalized to each school becomes less daunting.
Ultimately, this method works because it clears away as much noise as possible and helps students focus on making decisions that best serve the pursuit of their goals. Now that sounds like the kind of process that 2014 Zuckerberg would appreciate.
[1]: “File:Mark Zuckerberg (24937769800).jpg” by Alessio Jacona from Rome, Italy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
[2]: Saul, Heather. “Why Mark Zuckerberg Wears the Same Clothes to Work Everyday.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 26 Jan. 2016, www.independent.co.uk/news/people/why-mark-zuckerberg-wears-the-same-clothes-to-work-everyday-a6834161.html.
[3]: Wheeler, Gregory, “Bounded Rationality”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/bounded-rationality/>.
[4]: “IPEDS Data Center.” The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, 2020, nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data.
