This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation and not a single person is required to go there or hire someone from there.
Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".
> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument.
I think you missed the point of the article, which was "Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic, and it does that while subsidized by everyone else."
> Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies.
The author discusses this: "The hardest part of Harvard is getting in." "High-stakes college admissions means that much of the value of a college degree is determined before students even start college. If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?"
On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money. This was decades ago, so perhaps things have changed recently, but my higher education was gated on my family's wealth, i.e., lack thereof. Was it a "meritocracy"? No fucking way.
> “On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money.”
This does fit my hypothesis that the outliers at state schools are likely undervalued in the market by recruiters. The averages at selective schools are a lot higher (work a few career fairs where you ask basic technical questions and this is obvious), but everyone is competing over them and the outliers at state schools are people like you with extenuating circumstances. Since the actual education product isn’t that different (though there is some difference), there’s probably opportunity in trying to recruit the best students from state schools companies tend to ignore.
> The averages at selective schools are a lot higher
This is what I expected when I went from undergrad at a solid but not elite shool (top 100, ~50% admission rate) to grad school (top 10, single digit admission rate).
It's not what I experienced. The undergrad students I taught and TA for at the elite school were no better, on average, than my peers at my undergrad school. They were more ambitious and entitled. They were not smarter or harder working or more engaged or motivated.
My observation from doing hundreds of interviews at career fairs was the fancy schools (Stanford) had students that were way better at basic questions. This isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s signal.
If your peers in undergrad were your friends, you were probably selecting a non-representative group (smart people you liked) and your job as a TA shows you a more random sample (or even skewed negative, poor students grubbing for grades).
At least that’s my guess (selection bias).
Of course if I’m wrong there’s an even bigger opportunity in undervalued students, but I’ve done enough interviews to believe that’s not true.
I agree and have noticed this too. Even the median kid from Stanford, Harvard, etc., has a level of elevator pitching skills that are unmatched by anyone below the 90th to 95th percentile at 'lower ranked' schools.
In terms of raw smarts I wouldn't make so bold a claim, but in terms of what folks can realistically assess in a single minute of interaction...
Your reaction to the parent was wondering at selection bias in schools, which was a nice context to me wondering at the selection bias you have in interviews. Thanks.
Yeah there's definitely a selection bias in an interview setting too, but since I was doing the same thing in both locations (career fair interviews as a company employee) there was more in common between the groups and me (imo) as opposed to undergrad peers/friends when you're an undergrad and students you TA when you're a grad student.
This word choice surprised me as well. The average Big 10 tuition for nonresidents is approaching $40,000. It is better for in-state tuition, but locking students into wherever they happened to grow up also seems unfair.
I just meant things like couldn’t afford tuition, don’t know how or can’t get loans, or couldn’t move from family, or w/e - someone who was accepted but didn’t go due to stuff unrelated to getting in (my dad was also in this category). Some large percentage of people think they’re middle class so it’s hard to know what that means without specifics.
A lot of elite schools do cover tuition now if your parents are below a certain income, but it’s imperfect and doesn’t scale with number of siblings etc.
Recruiters and HR people are usually not subject matter experts, so they don't have the expertise to select great people from among outlier groups or from the larger population. They end up relying on indicators like top schools or top prior employers.
I've hired outstanding people for dev roles with all kinds of backgrounds including self-taught, low-mid tier state schools, unfinished college, etc., but that's because I am a developer and I can tell who knows things and who doesn't. I couldn't do the same for, say, a mechanical engineering position since I am not an expert in that field.
Yeah, this is one reason why I think the outliers at state schools are undervalued. These heuristics are indirect and lead to inefficient selection, competition over the same scarce resources.
If you’re a startup there’s a strategic advantage in trying to look for talent where others aren’t and leveraging your own subject matter expertise to do so.
In moneyball the scouts selected on stupid stuff rather than on base percentage - if you know what to actually look for you can find stuff mispriced.
> If you’re a startup there’s a strategic advantage in trying to look for talent where others aren’t and leveraging your own subject matter expertise to do so.
That's the huge take-away, and why startups and other small to medium sized businesses are so critical for class mobility.
>Yeah, this is one reason why I think the outliers at state schools are undervalued.
What I've always heard about the big state schools is that you can get in (probably relatively easily) and then you can either spend your days doing a lot of doing sports and partying (not that there's anything wrong with that in moderation) or you can get a pretty world-class STEM degree.
The best way to get the elite school benefits as a state school undergraduate is to attend a graduate program at an elite school. The financial ROI on a Yale JD or Harvard MBA will be really strong, and if you want a paid-for program you can do a PhD.
The “Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic” idea is repeated a couple of times, and the article doesn’t seem to make any argument at all that it’s correct.
An alternative hypothesis, entirely consistent with the author’s arguments, is that Harvard exists to educate its students (and to do research and have fancy sports and pretty buildings and cultural events, etc), that it’s quite good at this but not necessarily substantially better than its lower class competition, and that its gating function developed over time and is unfortunate.
> its gating function developed over time and is unfortunate.
It seems like you're mistaking the article for some kind of historical origin hypothesis?
Harvard as it currently exists has the function of making society less meritocratic, while society continues to subsidize Harvard in various ways. How Harvard came into existence originally and its function in the 17th century are not particularly relevant to the argument.
No, I’m reading the text of the article as written. It says:
“Harvard would still be an organization designed to reduce meritocracy…”
“Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic”
These are statements about Harvard’s purpose or intent, not about its effect. And I think it’s more likely that the original intent, as well and the present intent of those involved, is to foster meritocracy: admit the best students (for some, fairly clearly extremely flawed, concept of “best”), give the best ones the best grades (again, there are flaws here), and hopefully let the best ones succeed.
The article argues that it fails at this, and perhaps even that it can’t succeed, but the article states, without justification, that it was not intended to succeed.
> These are statements about Harvard’s purpose or intent, not about its effect.
Yes, the current purpose or intent. Harvard was established 387 years ago; what was its original purpose or intent? I don't know. In fact, I don't care. It's not relevant to the current argument. Institutions change over time, and we're talking about hundreds of years at Harvard.
… is to make society less meritocratic? Where’s the evidence that this is what the institution is currently driving at as its mission? Versus this being an emergent effect, subjectively?
OK. But the problem here is that people disagree on what Harvard does. That has to be established before we can even work backwards to a purpose, assuming this framework you suggest is even valid, which I separately doubt.
My a priori assumption of the purpose of a car is to transport people. Cars kill thousands of people each year. Is the purpose of a car then to kill people?
The 6 comments before accepted for discussion's sake at least a view on what Harvard does. Why stop now?
The dominant purpose of a car is to use a system of car centered infrastructure. Why did some places replace car centered infrastructure with other systems and some not?
This is always such an interesting argument people make when nearly every 'next step' after undergrad is more selective than Ivy League schools.
Tier-1 Tech/Banking/Consulting/Law School/Med School all reject plenty of people from Harvard because they didn't do a good enough job there. Plenty of Harvard grads languish.
It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in, but doing something with it still has capability-based gates.
If they only accept the very best academically there is probably a bias: it may not be that 'simple' to get a degree once you're in but since those who are in are very good they have a high graduation rate.
>It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in
Historically, that was at least somewhat true of undergrads in general. But wasn't necessarily the case for the top law schools and Big Law still, as far as I know, has something up an up or out career ladder.
The Ivy League schools have extensive financial aid now. Stanford for instance will have zero cost for people from families making $150k or less, no need for student loans.
Looking back, that's not a bad life lesson to get into your system early. I think it's also important for those to not place too much of their worth in college and realize that there are many "Stanford qualified" students who don't get into Stanford for one reason or another.
Exactly, I had to go to a junior college and transfer later on due to funds. Plus driving to and from out of state is expensive so I was stuck being a commuter at local institutions. Not to mention some kids that are good at sports can’t afford to play either and possibly get a scholarship.
That’s life though, but most of the upper class and higher don’t realize it.
As the parent of two exceptionally-achieving children who were rejected from the "elite" colleges - I've become a lot more sympathetic to the mindset behind this line of thinking. My kids literally couldn't have done more or tried harder - since kindergarten - than they did. They both graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, scored in the top 99% of the SAT, did sports, did clubs, volunteered, worked, studied... and when they applied to the ivy's, they didn't even get waitlisted. When I see that somebody like, say, Jared Kushner graduated from Harvard... yeah, it makes me mad. I'm mad on behalf of my two kids who tried so hard for so long.
But - I don't really see a "solution" besides some sort of "populist revolt" _against_ these "elite" institutions. The solution is - just stop assigning so much importance to colleges like Harvard. This isn't Harvard's problem, it's all of us that are doing it.
It’s a similar problem to the scientific journals that extort scientists.
The elite universities are not primarily selling education they’re selling prestige. In academia it’s worse because prestige is the metric for getting grants and status since the pay is bad.
It’s also not great in private companies since institutional prestige is used to filter inbound interest, but it’s better because at least there are other ways to prove ability - it’s just harder to get the opportunity.
The prestige is also available for direct sale - I think you could pay $5M for a building or something and your kid could go to Stanford (I was told this off the record by a student that worked in admissions) That was the irony with the whole “famous people cheating their way in” news cycle, the schools were angry they were getting a discount on the fee (and probably that this hurt their prestige).
Schools like Harvard also hold spots that help their own prestige, in Lisa Brennan-Jobs (great) book Small Fry she talks about her Harvard interview and the woman was basically an ass ignoring her until she mentioned her dad founded a computer company. When the interviewer realized her dad was Steve Jobs she literally got up and left for a moment, then came back with an entirely different demeanor. Lisa expected it to help (she was counting on it), but even she was surprised by the obviousness of it. She was accepted.
If you read the admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case you can see how messed up it is. [0] This kind of high status selective scarcity creates perverse incentives.
If the goal was actually educating smart people, the behavior of the institutions would be different (probably more ISAs and such), but that’s not the primary goal and the behavior reveals it.
Yes very much like showing up for a meeting and your defense attorney worked with the prosecutor and gets a case dropped after a conversation about golfing.
do you have a link to the "admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case"? That sounds very interesting. I found a report on the entire case but its near 300 pages long
Holy shit I hadn’t read the cert petition and hasn’t seen the quotes. I never believed the assertion that “all white people are racist” because I honestly thought the white people around me didn’t “see race.” This has been extremely eye-opening.
I'm referring to that statement because it's something people say, hence the quotes. I'm not saying I agree with its full scope now. But I get where it's coming from more than I did before.
While university admissions people aren't representative of white people, they're in the class of people I had always assumed didn't see people in terms of race. I knew affirmative action was a thing, but I kind of assumed it was a mathematical, maybe computerized process. I didn't realize they were sifting through applications saying "oh, here's a hispanic, and that one's a black kid, shoot this one's an asian."
I think it's a big (and likely incorrect) assumption that all of (or even a plurality of) the people making these comments working in admissions are themselves white.
It's not just that they're not representative of an entire group of people, many aren't members of that group at all.
It's also not necessarily entirely on the admissions people - the argument made in that substack (and ultimately the conclusion of SCOTUS) is that affirmative action is a euphemism for racial discrimination.
Ultimately you have to be doing something like this somewhere if that's the policy since that's explicitly what it means, the internal comms just show the reality of the policy that's often not said in public communication (because imo it seems obviously bad to most people).
My kid is only in middle school and I recently been readjusting my opinion towards 'elite' colleges. Being from the Bay Area we have friends and family who graduated from Stanford and Cal and up until recently I thought those were good schools for my kid to set their sights on.
What I've seen in the last year or so is making me reconsider. I see the profiles of the top graduating seniors in our newsletters and they read like parodies. 4.9 GPA - check. Sports teams - check. Competitive academic club - check. Social clubs - check. Musical instrument competitions - check. Leadership roles - check. Volunteer roles- check. It's just so cynical after a while. You know some consultant has been hired with a todo list and they've dutifully filled in every box.
Then the kids I know who've gotten in and gone to these elite schools are really struggling. Struggling in ways that I didn't see when my peers and I were going to these schools. There's been a sea change in expectations and requirements.
In the meantime it's the kids I know who got into the "second-tier" schools who are doing well. They aren't under such high expectations, they aren't surrounded by classmates under such high expectations. If some day they don't get hired by a FAANG or a some Wall Street firm than maybe that's for the best too.
I was talking to a couple of high school seniors from Germany recently and it all sounded so sane. All the state colleges are free and all are good. You fill out one application, rank the ones you want to get into, and wait for your letter.
I can make guesses as to how it all got so insane in the US but it doesn't matter much. I don't want to play. I don't want my kid to play.
I totally agree that the legacy and nepotism needs to be dropped. But there's some caveats to consider:
* It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
* Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.
* It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.
And I agree with you, there's schools just as good, if not better, than the Ivies. You just have to shop around looking for the field you're interested in. For instance, UIUC is a top choice for computer science and engineering, and it's a state-funded school.
> * It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
One of the biggest factors for success is zip code; that needs changing too. And in any case, if you can graduate valedictorian in a shitty school in a shitty neighborhood, that's a big achievement nonetheless. Ivy League schools would be well served taking those students in, and not just for reasons of basic fairness.
> Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.
The difference between 99% and perfect has little to do with ability, and everything to do with the ability to spend time/money hacking a metric beyond reason.
> * It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.
That doesn't actually follow. If it's a popular major, then there ought to be more slots made available for students. It's not like Harvard doesn't have the money to make that happen.
... We may disagree on these, but I also agree that legacy and nepotism is a major problem, and that there are better schools, from an academic / learning standpoint.
> but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
Which scheme of things is this?
> Top 99% of SAT is nothing.
I got 99pct on my SAT too (1500/1600). I didnt have a chance at a top school. What do you suggest people like me do now? I went to an undergrad with a 50% acceptance rate, not exactly UIUC CS. I can't sleep most days because I don't feel like I have anything to hope for.
Sounds like you need a serious adjustment on your world view if you currently believe you don't have anything to hope for simply because you and your 1500 SAT score didn't get into an elite school.
This isn't what the rest of these comments would indicate (which say that people that get into top schools are fundamentally more qualified and intelligent than people that do not)
Your comment is the only one in this thread that uses the word "fundamentally." The other comments I've read suggested that school can be an indicator of talent/diligence/etc. especially in the absence of a lot of other signal. It's also true that Big Law and Big Management Consulting are pretty educational pedigree focused especially for new grads but that's not everyone.
OK, but it's a pretty big indicator, and apparently justified in being so because the people at top schools are just that much better than people like me.
I don't think so? I think I'm just surfacing the implication. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it appears like the pretty clear implication of defending Harvard and elite schools is to believe that the rest of us should remain in a lower social caste, forever, and that we deserve it because of meritocracy.
I have very little direct experience with Harvard but do have a lot of experience with grads from other East Coast Ivies and related schools--other liberal arts colleges, seven sisters--and have rarely encountered that type of school-centric snobbery except maybe in jest or football rivalry.
Telling people who are experiencing dread at the classist social prospects available to them to just "adjust your world view" isn't exactly a refutation of their cause for that dread.
To a Northern European, this is all very weird. Especially once you bundle in the sports business..
What I grew up with:
- Universities are tax funded
- there's no tuition (there's an option to pay something like $500/year for being a member of the student organization, which gets you meal discounts, social events, etc; strictly not related to your studies)
- approval process is a direct function of high school grades and entrance exam, top N pass (exchange students were separate, and closer to scholarships, but still the criteria was scoring well in some test)
To someone who grew up in a different setting, many American systems can be summarized as institutionalized corruption.
For this reason there's a pretty good argument to be made that legacy and donation status shouldn't be taken into account when determining admissions. Ditching standardized testing, however, is going in the wrong direction.
Why does it matter if your kids go to "elite" colleges or not? They're probably going to be successful in their own way anyway with those stats. shouldn't your concern be the objective success they achieve, not their attendance of an "elite" institution?
I know people who want to say University of Virginia who have had better outcomes than some folks I know who went to Harvard College - just to cherry pick a single set.
Maybe it does help if your goal is to attend a top 3 medical or law school, and then go on to equally impressive practices after, or if you want to go into very very high level investment banking or something. It's shouldn't be a terribly controversial statement to say that if you want to be one of the top in the world in a given field you probably need to go to one of the top universities. Even then you'll find plenty of people from University of Whatever in those classes.
I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a boring suburban part of a boring state for a company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone from Harvard is killing it.
I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from
Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a
boring suburban part of a boring state for a
company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone
from Harvard is killing it.
I... don't think that anybody is claiming that literally every single individual who went to Harvard is successful. Surely you see that this discussion is about trends and aggregates?
look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with.
Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges".
In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition.
I worked at Stanford admissions many years ago. Over 15% of every incoming class are students admitted due to nepotism.
At Harvard, that nepotism number is closer to 50%, according to my colleagues at the time.
The remainder are chosen from those with strong academics, nearly at random, with a very strong bias against students who don't visual demonstrate diversity on campus.
Basically, if your family name isn't in that list, you have a massive reduction in your probability of being accepted, regardless of merit. If your name is in that list, then you likely will be accepted regardless of merit.
People don’t talk about it because they don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. We act like the descendants of English/Dutch north-easterners, who profiteered from slavery (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/04/slavery-probe...) are in the same group as German immigrants who came to the Midwest as indentured servants or Italian immigrants who came here in the 20th century. The false concept of “white people” totally obscures the fact that there are different groups, with different histories, origins, and cultures, who are very differently situated.
These are very likely not true especially the second part but since specific ethnicity is not tracked it's much harder to disprove. But I would wager this is is not true at all.
This is utter shite nonsense dude. I know literally hundreds of ivy alums. Pretty sure none of them are in the register.
Social register is barely relevant for many years and of no consequence to Ivy league admissions.
I'd be very skeptical. I know a ton of people who went to East Coast Ivies. Many are not from the East Coast. Many are not literally WASPy and I can't imagine most of them being in a Social Register--and it's not like I especially have known an out of the mainstream crowd.
This is why I wrote in another comment that making it about Harvard somewhat muddies the discussion because Harvard probably is more likely to admit at least a slice of students that are far more about pedigree than anything else.
But as you say, you need to not only have the credentials, something else that sets you apart, and even then the Teela Brown luck gene. When you're being that selective, there's no way that you're realistically finding strong signals in all but the most exceptional circumstances to admit specific individuals.
(And things have only gotten more competitive. I would be shocked if I would get into my undergrad school today.)
There's a great Veritasium video about this. The idea is that if there are far more applicants than positions, then even if luck plays a small role - say, 5% of the outcome - successful applicants are overwhelmingly likely to be extremely lucky as well as highly qualified. Since so many people are close to that 95% competence factor, only the luckiest - by whatever metric of "luck" you like - can succeed.
Because higher education is objectively not a meritocracy. The mere existence of legacy admissions proves this.
Of course those with degrees from Ivys and other selective schools don't want to acknowledge this - it devalues their degree. Same for those who aspire to attend these schools - whether they have an 'unfair' advantage or not.
That's simple: Ivy schools are mostly for $$$ to schmooze with other $$$, with a thin veneer of actually talented kids that had to pass insurmountable odds to get in. The talented kids are there to make the $$$ think they're also talented and had to pass the same rigorous criteria. Smoke and mirrors all of it.
People parrot this point a lot but it doesn't make any sense. The average SAT/ACT at the Ivy's are near perfect, the number of mediocre rich kids paying their way in is a small fraction of the student body.
And yes test scores aren't the best metric for "talent" but it is one of the better signals you get in a college application.
Yeah, but the money paid by that small fraction of the student body is colossal.
They're not numerous enough to change any GPA/SAT averages, but they likely pay many times more in tuition & donations than the rest of their class put together. That's why they're the main focus of these places, even if their numbers are small.
All the schools lie about their average test scores to boost their rankings(source, president of northwestern when I took his econ class). We have no idea what the ivies averages are.
Second, maybe we overproduce good students. Either the curriculum is too easy (imagine compared to Chinese high schools). Either everyone wants to be in the tertiary sector and society doesn’t need so many, and rejects people who are perfectly fit, randomly without fairness.
Although it looks like you were downvoted for suggesting such a thing exists, I actually do believe that it happens - but in their case no, they're actually hispanic.
I've seen research suggesting that the schools aren't necessarily great, the students are. They were already great which is how they passed the admissions criteria, and their career success can be attributed to the qualities that they arrived at e.g. Harvard with. They would have been as successful regardless of where they attended. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Given the argument that the wait-list students that didn't get to actually attend did worse in life than wait-list students that did get to attend, how does your implication that the "students were already good and that's why they did well in life" hold up?
Is that what the data shows, though? I've read summaries of papers describing the exact opposite and linked them here before.
Here's one such example, with a followup comment describing a study that contradicts the argument you lead with. (I'm merely saying it contradicts it; I'm not vouching that the contradiction is correct.)
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
The link to the article and the followup is in the only 2-deep chain linked above.
> Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation
It used to.
Now when I see someone went to Harvard, I imagine they had rich parents or were part of Affirmative Action. Not to mention their cheating scandals and forged data.
Heck, I talked to a Harvard law grad last week and asked them for specific points on their speech and they had no follow up, they regurgitated. This was no AAA student, this was someone that benefited from Affirmative Action + had 2 physician parents.
> Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies.
They are very decent proxies to evade anti-discrimination laws, as well. Just look how many jobs these days require higher education credentials for paper pusher jobs. Sounds innocent on paper - but the reality is that wide swaths of society can now be perfectly legally discriminated against.
Poor people or people of color? No way. People with disabilities of all kind? No way. People who have to raise children they got at a young age? No way.
All of these people simply (virtually) filtered out from a lot of employment opportunities, simply because their classes are highly likely to never reach higher education.
> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument.
It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class.
Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power.
Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power.
And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.
> Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible.
Jamie Dimon went to Tufts — Harvard-adjacent? — with an MBA from Harvard.
"Inequality tends to be greater in developing countries than wealthier ones. The United States is an exception."
"In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065 – less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively."
> 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite?
How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.
> This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed
I didn't bring up the figure - I was just remarking on how I had a different reaction to it. And the remainder is also distributed in a non-diffuse manner.
> If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are
Do the majority of people have "a high quality of life"? I'm not sure that's true, but assuming it is true, then one issue is the massive power imbalance in terms of control over society: small numbers of people having huge influence over politics, the media, social tech companies etc.
> Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold
Which I was not doing. I'm not sure what would be the best distribution - but if I can't look at it quantitively, I think we can consider it qualitatively. Would we be in a better place if we moved towards more wealth inequality or less?
Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it. In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%. And even in the top 1%, a lot of the owners are like retired dentists or early employees at Microsoft. They don’t exercise meaningful power over these companies by virtue of ownership.
That diffusion of ownership means that capital usually has much less power than the managerial class in terms of actually running the company. Jamie Dimon owns something like 0.1% of JP Morgan. In a traditional Marxist analysis, he’s actually an employee. He makes money from his labor. Even after 20 years the dividends from his JPM stock are less than his compensation as an employee.
You have this class of people now whose wealth and power doesn’t derive from owning the means of production, but by having credentials that persuade a diffuse group of shareholders to appoint them as managers of these corporations. And Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
> Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it.
It's unclear why you even mentioned the US specifically. The so-called "modern corporation" and "the traditional Marxist scenario" are both US. Although Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, he emigrated to the US at age 12, and Carnegie Steel was a US company.
> In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%.
This definitely makes a lot more sense than "Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth."
Of course, I'm just quibbling here. I don't disagree with your main point:
> Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
Harvard's not purely private: it receives massive structural tax advantages, & lots of government funding via many kinds of tuition & research subsidies.
Harvard's supposed "excellent reputation" is significantly maintained by the cartel of graduates from it, & its close peers, preferentially touting, publishing, hiring, and funding class-similar people – even when they are no better on objective measures than non-graduates.
Your hiring observation is nearly fully driven not by Harvard providing any "educational lift", specific to its educational product, that would justify its state-granted advantages, but simply by Harvard getting "early pick" (pre-career) to place its brand on people who are already talented, ambitious, or highly-prepared before they arrive at Harvard.
Honestly, leading with Harvard is probably a distraction. There are quite a few good schools that don't have the same level of baggage but are pretty competitive with respect to admissions standards. (Of course, the details likely matter depending on the field in question to at least some degree.)
Certainly undergrad school is far from a perfect filter but I agree that if that were really all you had to go on, there is signal there whether one likes that fact or not. (And how could there not be? A lot of people who get into top schools could, shall we say, not super-concentrate on academics as undergrads and many will still do pretty well--although others will flame out.)
right well, the problem is people are not iphones, they're human beings. we can throw away our cheap android phones and get iphones, but as a society, we might decide that we should not be throwing away humans who don't come from the right "brand"
> I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
This is my exact opposite experience. Degrees are meaningless unless you've literally just left college. Even then, it tells you their scores in particular subjects, it does not tell you their attitude, work ethic, general problem solving ability, etc.
I ignore qualifications unless you've just completed it. Experience is a better guide and, I know this is controversial, just talking to the candidate - it's amazing what people will expose once they feel comfortable that they're having a friendly chat.
Not all jobs require attitude, work ethic and problem solving ability. Some require skills like dress sense, eloquence, table manners, and a refined taste in fine wine and art.
> Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
What do you recommend those of us who didn't get into any top schools do then? If clearly we're destined to be inferior for life?
I don't think so, but life will be harder. Life is harder if you are born poor. I graduated from an unknown university (in the US) overseas, so I started in lower places and climbed my way up through hard work, study, luck and skill development (which include social skills). You are not destined to be inferior, but if the cards are not stacked in your favor, you will just have to make up for it somehow.
It's not sarcasm. I'm told that I'm lesser because I didn't get into any top schools or "deserve" the respect they get - clearly I'm doing worse than Ivy+ folks.
I think yours is less a problem of how to keep up with the joneses and more a problem of realistically evaluating your circumstances and expectations.
Whoever is telling you that you aren’t good enough is trying to pull something over on you at this point. It works well on people that can never be satisfied.
I think the people that told me that aren't good enough are the admissions committees of the 2 elite schools I applied to that rejected me (I only applied to 4 schools in total). They've already decided that I have no "merit".
To put it in another way, if you genuinely expect to be one of the world's major decision makers, wealthiest, etc., then yes there's close to zero prospects, given the stated background and age.
But if your expectation is to have a happy life, a nice house in a decent neighbourhood, etc., then there's no reason to listen to them and self-flagellate.
Yeah, but it’s still within the realm of possibility for anyone that got into Penn or Brown or Columbia or Princeton or MIT because they are just inherently better.
For the record I doubt I can have a happy life or a house in a decent neighborhood too.
> Yeah, but it’s still within the realm of possibility for anyone that got into Penn or Brown or Columbia or Princeton or MIT because they are just inherently better.
Not really, even the 50th percentile Harvard Law graduate, let alone Ivy league undergrads, has minimal chance of being a big shot in the world.
Sure, it's many times more then someone from Iowa State, statistically, but that's idle fantasizing either way.
They're a lot closer to any random office worker then supermen destined for the royal road.
If, after some reflection, your still worked up about not enjoying a few tenths of a percentage chance instead of a few hundredths or thousandths, then you can always seek solace in religion/meditation/etc.
Hardly a solid basis for self-worth. Revenge is living well, you need to get some perspective to realize you already are. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen or habitat for humanity, and don’t forget to actually talk to the people who work those jobs full time and the people they are serving.
I have no idea who is telling you that unless it's yourself. Contrary to the impression that some people here may give you, making millions a few (or even many) years out of school is not the norm wherever you went to school. And while connections do matter to some degree among Ivy and related grads I know (and those are mostly for what many here would consider low-paid jobs in the literary industry), connections from people I've worked with at jobs have always mattered to me more or even exclusively.
As I wrote, there is pedigree in some professions/positions but I'm assuming you're not looking at clerking on the Supreme Court, working for a white shoe law firm, and maybe getting a Federal Court of Appeals seat. Nor working for McKinsey.
There's lots of pedigree in working in software, even if it's not as obvious as law. Amazon does not have pedigree, but Google does, Stripe does etc. It's also not surprising that the people that graduate from MIT CS and Harvard CS go to Google and Stripe and Facebook as their "backups" and not Amazon or Capital One or Northrop Grumman.
Honestly, you're way too obsessed with pedigree in terms of companies. I've probably never worked for (or even applied for what people here would consider) a "high pedigree" (though not necessarily unknown) company over a long (and I think pretty successful by my standards) career.
I somewhat surprisingly got into a really good school undergrad and good ones grad. But got rejected by plenty too.
You win some. You lose some. You seem to be taking every long odds dice roll you lose as a personal affront.
I mean it feels like an affront - these people go to top schools because they want people like me out of eyesight because I don’t have “merit”. It does frankly feel personal.
I would have never gotten into a good school for undergrad and have no chance at a top grad school. It just feels like it’s all over for me.
Trust me. I have educational credentials that would be considered immaculate. I've done fine. But then I've never had an obsession with earning millions a year because some people are. You probably make more at 27 than I have much later. Which is fine. You'd be much happier if you stopped obsessing about how someone else may be making more money than you.
Sure, but not enough for Jane Street or Citadel Securities (not the hedge fund which did give me an offer) or DE Shaw or HRT. Aka, the firms actually offering $350k+ to new grads while I make far less.
I see. I have no consolation to offer you. No amount of money or prestige will satisfy you. Someone will be wealthier than you no matter how much you acquire. And old money families look down at new money.
How is your social life? Do you consider most people around you beneath you?
> Do you consider most people around you beneath you?
Several of my friends are crypto millionaires who also have higher total compensation than me and they certainly think I'm beneath them. I know a lot of people that got into top schools or have higher SATs/more "merit" than me. I'm probably the person with the least merit in my social circle.
> Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple.
So I disagree with the analogy, when we're talking about people who went to big-name schools vs. everyone else.
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't
as good of quality as Apple.
I don't want to get too deep in the weeds w.r.t. this analogy, but generic stuff is very often as good as Apple.
It's just that with Apple (substitute another high-prestige name brand, if you prefer) you are typically getting a certain guaranteed level of quality.
I've had Apple-branded phone cases. They are always top-tier. I've had generic ones that were just as good or maybe better. Also had some godawful ones. I can afford to experiment with phone cases because I can tolerate a $15 failure that takes a small amount of my time. But this isn't as true for potential hires so companies gravitate toward those "big-name" schools.
When you are in a hiring role, it's often impossible to avoid this kind of bias. If you hire a Harvard grad and they don't work out, at least you made the safe choice in your manager's eyes. Much easier to defend than taking a chance on some rando wildcard person.
> Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees
You missed the central point of the article about causality.
Of course this will be the case on average, because Harvard gets smarter people on average!
Harvard serves no additional value here other than to be a gatekeeper.
> selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
That's... a bullshit argument, and should get called out as bullshit? It's an easy approach, and beats other approaches for HR but says absolutely nothing about whether the person is a good person (both in the "are they a sociopath?" and "are they a good fit for the role we're filling" sense). In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. They're on a fast track career path, no matter what job you're offering them, you're going to have to rehire for it 2 or even 1 year down the road.
That's an atrocious cost-benefit ratio: that's not an investment, that's intentionally hiring for the short term and intentionally preventing institutional knowledge from ever building up. If you're a startup, good for you, your goal is to get valuable fast and then cash out. But if you're a real business, and your plan is to own yourself and the market you operate in, it's downright idiotic.
I'm okay with using anecdotal data to refute anecdotes. So, source: me, I've seen loads of high achievers come in, get promoted, stick around for half a year, then job hop to the next company in order to "start without baggage" but at a higher rung.
(And of course, while it should go without saying, it very much needs saying because people are very bad at logic: that doesn't mean I claimed that no high achievers stick around, and it also doesn't mean I claimed that people who do stick around are low achievers. Reading the latter would require making not just one but _two_ mistakes)
I’ve hired 100+ people with around a 97% hit rate on hiring great employees and great engineers. I don’t look at whether they have a degree or not, I don’t care what school they went to. In my experience it provides no indication of whether they’re good or not.
The question is, could you do a similar filter by asking each applicant about their parents wealth? Perhaps ultra-wealthy parents is the decent proxy for productivity?
Conformity is not scientific, using a university to stealth filter for obedience to (data) authority is both lazy and a fancy dressed deceitful gang mentality on display.
There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing. What I really don’t get is the conclusion which suggests tearing it all down. Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? Yeah, it’s a tall order, but much more practical (not to mention positive) than getting rid of top schools.
> There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing
Because it argues for meritocratic rewards in society? Because it pointed out that capital is a gatekeeper? What makes it seem "Marxist" to you?
> Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table?
I think the argument against subsidizing anti-meritocratic institutions such as Harvard is exactly this. The money is better spent on lifting up people regardless of their ability to get into Harvard.
I find the ending ambiguous, less "Harvard should be burned to the ground" and more "Harvard shouldn't get subsidies."
I think Harvard would survive just fine without subsidies. It's Harvard.
It’s the same folk-interpretation of Marxism that always goes around. Now that Marxism is dead and can’t defend itself, it’s whatever anyone wants it to be.
States that were far closer to Marxism, like the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decimated their universities and dispersed their faculties over the countryside, or to labor camps.
This article is not on the same planet as that madness.
Now I'm seriously confused - a major criticism, by communists, of the Cultural Revolution was the blow back against all intellectuals and the destruction of the education system in the PRC. In what was was that Marxist? I mean, I know the arguments the red guard made, but there were other Marxists that disagreed. Are you just saying the red guard interpretation was the correct one?
I’m saying that on the continuum of Marxism, the PRC circa 1965 is somewhere to the middle-far-left and the article above (that OP claimed was Marxist) is all the way on the far right.
I’m not super interested in whether or not their Marxism was “authentic”, and neither is anyone who goes around, as OP did, randomly labeling things they don’t like as Marxist.
A Marxist tone would be more focused on getting rid of the elite class doing the owning things part. (which has proved difficult...)
Meritocracy is actually nearly as awful as aristocracy in practice. A better society would just be more equal across the whole population regardless of birth, merit or whatever.
i.e. CEO pay is now 300 times average employee pay, something more like 5 times would be a very different society and still have room for some merit element
And having wealth above a reasonable level shrink exponentially rather than grow exponentially through some kind of share ownership tax
I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit.
But if we're serious about a liberal/conservative "equality of opportunity" vs a progressive/socialist "equality of outcome" reality, then we should consider that children have very little consent over the kind of education and familial upbringing they get, yet that childhood education and familial upbringing has profound implications as to whether they can get admitted to a school like Harvard or not.
If we're serious about equality of opportunity society, then we should take a lottery admissions policy for young adults seriously. But it's fine if you don't care about equality at all, at least be explicit about it.
> I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit.
From the article:
"Some people say Harvard is a private institution and it can do what it wants. These people are wrong."
"private universities are non-profits."
"When John Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard, that was tax-deductible. If we assume his marginal tax rate was 25%, that’s equivalent to him donating $300 million of after-tax money, and then having the government kick in an extra $100 million. Ivy-league universities also earn insane profits on endowments tax-free and are exempt from local property taxes."
That's true. But dysfunctional families come at all income levels, and making sure kids have enough to eat and somewhere safe to do homework is 100% possible without fixing all of society's problems.
I would like what you envision to exist but to be remotely effective the game has to be played before college.
Otherwise the results will be similar to if any 18 year-old could “win” a place in the NFL. Either they have a rough time and get spit out or the system is forced to change to accommodate them.
>>I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit.
I would agree to this under 3 conditions
1. The university can not accept any federally backed student loans, grants, etc
2. The university must self finance any financial aid given using their massive endowments
3. Those loans must be discharged in bankruptcy
I dont even care about their non-profit status as others do. I care they are getting billions in federally (tax payer) backed loan, with no accountability for the money, and no skin in the game at all
If we truly consider children's consent, then we would need to actually ask them what they want before bothering with any adult-born ideas. Otherwise, they're still trapped in a system they never designed, only being given the options chosen for them.
In doing that you're also buying into an exclusionary system that benefits the extravagantly wealthy.
These institutions hit a critical mass, then they get powerful alumni and have dynasty that self perpetuates. Everyone knows you don't go to college to get an education... at least not if you're trying to win the US capitalist game (which most educated people realize is their best bet), you go to college to network, and sometimes for hands on experience, which can be gained anywhere. The academic material itself is usually useless.
So what you end up with amounts to a privilege factory. Sure you also might have extra opportunities to gain wisdom from exceptional people that don't exist elsewhere, but this is quite rare, and a substantial percentage of students never see it (ie. nuggets of wisdom they couldn't get by grabbing a random engineer with knowledge of the subject).
Mostly you're just getting a chance to rub elbows with the elite. See how they function and hopefully gain some allies with power. I think it may often be true that employees from elite schools can do better. You're hiring based on pedigree, which works in many cases, but it's questionable how it impacts society.
BTW, I've also heard the opposite about ivy league employees. They tend to be entitled, unwilling to get in the trenches, and always seem to think they could be doing better. Also, I've heard lots of complaints that the personality issues tend to be worse.
P.S. I wanted to explain why I think most intelligent people eventually decide to "play the game" and go for money / power. No matter how meaningful your career, you will probably just end up doing the same thing: making the world worse, by helping your corporate overlords, only with far less money.
This is very true for almost any calling / "just cause" professions.
* Police - spend most of your time ruining poor peoples lives for an injustice system
* Doctors - again ruining poor peoples lives, otherwise abusing patients, and trying to prevent them from getting health care
* Nurses - Pretty much the above, with less evil decisions, more thankless work, less money
* Mental health / psych - Watch people slowly be bled to death by a system that cannot help you. A substantial percentage of your patients will see you as like a horrible witch poisoning them (not just the psychotic ones!). You will "help" by stripping them of rights.
* Social worker - you will have all of societies problems dumped on you, overworked and make no money. You also get to play the role of cop and ruin peoples lives (people with horrific upbringings), who will now hate you. It's your job to get the drug addicted SA survivor into jail, sometimes through shady means.
* Nonprofit - worse corporate politics and guilt when you realize how much money goes to perpetuating the organization instead of helping.
* Engineer - no matter how brilliant you are, you will be implementing someone else's idea. You will be expendable. You will be undermined and blamed. You don't get to own anything and it's mostly thankless busywork.
Anyway THIS is why most people eventually decide that they should just maximize money/power. It would arguably be hard to decide if the work lived up to reality. When it's just as hollow and empty, yeah just go for $$$.
>Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees.
There is a better method for selecting candidates: IQ testing. For better or worse, that's illegal. In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data.
Problematic/controversial but not necessarily illegal. They can probably ask for SAT/ACT scores which are probably a pretty good proxy as well.
>In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data
Disagree to a fair degree. The college degree (and grades/other experiences) tell more than how well you do on a multiple choice test. One can of course argue how much more.
I find the Harvard angst interesting. I’ve never once felt someone else going to Harvard impacted my life in any way whatsoever. I’ve advanced further than everyone I know that went to Harvard in my career and not once did someone wink at the Harvard guy and pass me over.
I’m sure it happens, and I’m sure there are secret clubs I don’t get invited to (well the Harvard club is pretty nice and I was invited there by a great uncle who went to Harvard - they have these really great puffy dinner rolls). But it’s never caused me a moment of anxiety, suffering, doubt, or jealousy.
I have worked in an environment where it really did seem to matter. An organization set up by Harvard folks where other Harvard folks seemed to have advantages in (a) getting in and (b) getting ahead. It wasn't ever really addressed explicitly (though "credentialism" was occasionally mentioned by others as well, I wasn't the only one who noticed). It definitely played a role in my leaving that organization.
Edit - I do feel like I should mention that the organization was improving on this front when I left.
I live in a non US country so we can for once have the counterfactual, as for us harvard does not exist.
I have worked in an environment where {maths degrees} really did seem to matter. An organization set up by people with {maths degrees} where other people with {maths degrees} seemed to have advantages in (a) getting in and (b) getting ahead. It wasn't ever really addressed explicitly (though "credentialism" was occasionally mentioned by others as well, I wasn't the only one who noticed). It definitely played zero role in my leaving that organization.
The company was (lab based) biotech - zero maths needed - but management liked the way mathematicians think. Their brand / religion was maths and it beat out domain experience every time.
Do you really think the way someone thinks is just a brand? That the ability to think mathematically is... a religion? I think our worldviews are too far apart for us to make sense to each other here.
I agree with this {affinity} theory. I've been working 30+ years since my Physics degree. I learned programming on the job as there were no web sites or YouTube to learn from. I love meeting other Physics majors in the software industry because we can connect with similar stories. I noticed every hiring manager has bias towards candidates with their background. They will prefer people from their home country, their university, their social connections.
I'm from a non US country, so the concept of a Harvard is foreign to me as well. And yes, I've also worked for selective employers where maths degrees mattered a lot. It never bothered me.
Not sure what you're trying to say. Hiring people based on individual merit and skills is not the same thing as hiring people based on an exclusive network. The Harvard employer favored Harvard folks over others who otherwise had the same (or better) skills.
I doubt anyone anywhere ever has been the "best" hire - even / especially the greatest hires of all time, there was someone who had the same (or better) skills.
There are ~8 billion others, rounded to the nearest meaningful number ~8 billion people never saw the job ad or applied for it or were eligable because of the exclusive network of "countries".
Unless there is an epidemic of Harvard Art Majors being made Head of Brain Surgery upon graduation on the back of their credentials, their merit and skill is still contributing something.
I believe none of them have - they all went to Oxford / Cambridge, why would they step down to an inferior institution that would only hold them back in life?
It seems like if something doesn’t affect you personally, you don’t have any overriding sense of fairness regarding what’s clearly a separate academic and career track for elites.
That’s right. I live my life only, and will never live another life. My energy is applied to my life, family, friends, community in the present and the fact someone else’s life is easier than mine doesn’t bother me much.
There are plenty of things I think are unfair or unjust, and the existence of Harvard is so far down that list it’s not even funny. War, poverty, the destruction of the environment, racism, sexism, and many other things that are absolute negatives for people bother me more than a positive someone else has.
> That’s right. I live my life only, and will never live another life. My energy is applied to my life, family, friends, community in the present and the fact someone else’s life is easier than mine doesn’t bother me much.
Yes, ignorance is bliss.
> There are plenty of things I think are unfair or unjust, and the existence of Harvard is so far down that list it’s not even funny. War, poverty, the destruction of the environment, racism, sexism, and many other things that are absolute negatives for people bother me more than a positive someone else has.
What if the same mechanisms that cause the destruction of the environment/poverty/racism/sexism/etc. negatives are the same mechanisms that allow an institution like Harvard to exist? Do you think those who combat poverty/racism/sexism don't see them as an overarching socio-political problems that permeate all parts of our society? Harvard does not exist in a vacuum.
> Sounds more like acceptance of something they are not ignorant of.
I can see it both ways, but OP basically said "I'm sure it happens to others, but it doesn't happen to me, so I don't care" which is fine, but also not helpful and is also missing the point of the article.
It's like reading an article about the water crisis in Flint and saying "water quality is great here in Miami, so doesn't bother me"
> Ok but are they? This hypothetical isn’t useful if they aren’t, and I’m not convinced they are.
I think it is worth considering. I won't force you to consider it if you don't want to, though.
You’re comparing someone not caring about others getting into Harvard to someone not caring about people getting lead poisoning from their water.
Can we at least agree that not envying others’ higher status is not the same moral ground as not caring about suffering?
On that note, you can’t force everyone to care about every bad thing that happens in the world. It’s not reasonable to care about each such thing because, since you can’t control or change all of them, that mindset will simply wear you down and consume all of your time and energy, yet produce no results. It’s a matter of focus.
I did consider your question, but I don’t have enough information to make a determination one way or the other, and since you provided none, I dismissed the speculation out of hand.
> You’re comparing someone not caring about others getting into Harvard to someone not caring about people getting lead poisoning from their water.
No, I'm giving an example of not caring about something that does not affect you personally, yet you acknowledge it affects others.
> Can we at least agree that not envying others’ higher status is not the same moral ground as not caring about suffering?
This was never contended.
> On that note, you can’t force everyone to care about every bad thing that happens in the world. It’s not reasonable to care about each such thing because, since you can’t control or change all of them, that mindset will simply wear you down and consume all of your time and energy, yet produce no results. It’s a matter of focus.
This was never contended either. But different folks have different energy, and are fine reading the news everyday for example. Some don't read the news (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews). There is no one right way. No one's forcing anyone though.
> I did consider your example, but I don’t have enough information to make a determination one way or the other, and since you provided none, I dismissed the speculation out of hand.
I posed that hypothetical because OP implied they do not care about Harvard (or presumably other elite universities), but they do care about "more important" things like racism. However, elite universities like Harvard have complicated histories with institutional racism, segregated dorms, and admission scandals.
These articles tend to show a divide in the HN community (speaking in broad terms here, HN is incredibly diverse).
One one hand, there are people that love coding, or are not from the US, or have made themselves successful, or generally don't care about fitting into molds, etc. Think those Kevin-Kelly greybeards in the back sever rooms that know everything and don't really care about the pata-gucci. The guys that used to go to Def-Con and Burning Man when it had guns.
On the other hand, you have people that really really care about FICO scores, about planning for the future, about daycare ratings, about where to put the active cell in an excel sheet when you send it to a client, etc. These are the people in the front of the office who network like crazy and will jump to another company at a whiff of an extra 1/2 percent of bonus. They are the guys that see the eggshell white with Romani type, and think it's really something.
The world needs both types of people, full stop. We need scaffolders and detailers. But it's the second type of person that really cares about what Harvard is doing. It's okay to let those people hack away in a comments section and not have a clue as to what they are 'wasting' their time on. It's their boat, they row it like they want to.
>I’ve never once felt someone else going to Harvard impacted my life in any way whatsoever
Eight of the nine current sitting Supreme Court Judges are either Yale or Harvard Law graduates. It's pretty likely Harvard has had an impact on your life in a lot of ways because a lot of people who govern you went there.
Degrees from those schools are basically licenses to occupy the highest positions in the country's administration, it matters a pretty big deal who gets funneled through those institutions.
> It's pretty likely Harvard has had an impact on your life in a lot of ways because a lot of people who govern you went there.
And, in addition, because at least presently, anyone who didn't do Ivy+ is essentially never going to be a SCOTUS judge.
The obvious objection is that given there are only 9 justices at a time, essentially nobody is ever going to be a SCOTUS judge anyway.
But that misses the important gating function (as TFA puts it) which begins with Ivy+ schools. Yes, the chance that you or your neighbor will ever be a SCOTUS justice is essentially zero. But the 9 have to come from somewhere, and the current process essentially guarantees that they must have passed through Ivy+. It's far from clear that this is desirable.
Now notice that the same issue applies to the other fields showing massive Ivy+ over-representation.
As TFA says, maybe a gating function is required (sometimes), but the justification for it operating at 18 and not later (22, or later still) is weak to non-existent.
> And, in addition, because at least presently, anyone who didn't do Ivy+ is essentially never going to be a SCOTUS judge.
For your example, you need to do a post-graduate degree (law) from the Ivy+. This article is talking about the gating functions of the undergraduate admissions departments.
The graduate school admissions officers are far more likely to consider strong candidates from "normal" universities than their undergraduate admissions colleagues are to consider strong candidates from "normal" public high schools.
Also, consider Harvard Extension. People shit on it constantly and call it the backdoor, not-so-honest way to get associated with Harvard. But in reality, it is more of a front door into a "make of it what you will" program. A significant number of the people that actually graduate use it to get into high-quality PhD programs that would have otherwise completely ignored them based on their past and their lack of "proper" pedigree.
In my mind, the undergraduate portions of these universities are pretty much lost causes. But their graduate schools are far more meritocratic and, much more importantly, fixable without burning everything to the ground. Because if you want to burn it all down and start over you are going to have to fight against all the rich and powerful people, and probably aren't going to win.
> For your example, you need to do a post-graduate degree (law) from the Ivy+. This article is talking about the gating functions of the undergraduate admissions departments.
6 of the 9 nine current justices did undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
25% of the current Ivy+ SCOTUS judges did not go to an Ivy+ for undergrad? With additional reforms of the graduate programs would you expect that future numbers would increase or decrease?
EDIT - for some reason it will not allow me to reply to your reply...
There are 8 current judges from Ivy+ law schools and 6 of them went to Ivy+ undergrad programs. That's how I got to 25%.
I guess I question why increasing the number of judges on the Supreme Court would change the percentage of (non-Ivy+ undergrad --> Ivy+ JD) justices. I would think that the only way to do that is to increase the number of non-Ivy+ undergrads admitted to the Ivy+ JD programs.
I mean, increasing the number of balls you randomly draw from a bag of balls increases the odds of getting one of the rare balls. But increasing the proportion of rare balls in the bag such that they aren't rare anymore increases the probability more, with the added benefit for every formerly rare ball that wasn't selected for the bench.
> People shit on it constantly and call it the backdoor, not-so-honest way to get associated with Harvard.
This sounds like it's not actually going to Harvard, and you'd only get the slimy Harvard benefits by pretending you did a different program at harvard
The Bachelors program via the extension school very much is "going to Harvard" college, and taking the same classes alongside students who were admitted the traditional way. What you're describing is a more appropriate critique of the 'professional certificates' that they sell people to brandish their resumes and LinkedIn profiles.
I don't know if it's intentional but you're conflating mutually exclusive lines of thought.
The argument that such decisions should be made at age 22 instead of age 18 doesn't support — in fact contradicts — your argument that trajectories toward SCOTUS should not be related to law school admissions (which do indeed happen at age 22 instead of age 18).
So, according to Wikipedia, 18 justices graduated Harvard, 9 Yale, and 39 some other law school. Yes, it helps to go to Harvard or Yale. But most justices didn’t.
I’d challenge that the person as an individual is more important than where they went to school. Perhaps there are others who were excluded due to not having gone to Harvard along the way, and in some abstract sense that’s unfair, but in a very real sense your school doesn’t make the person, the person is the person and they went to a school. I am curious if any of the justices are legacy students or if all were admitted via a standard merit based selection process. It so, and given Harvard law and Yale law are regarded top law schools on their own merit, what is specifically the issue? I would definitely expect a statistical weighting to the top schools in any field for the top positions in that field, no?
What becomes concerning is when legacy students dominate the court. That is categorically unfair by structure, and it would speak to a hereditary elite in power. This was, as I’m sure you remember, the distinguishing factors of GWB vs Obama. Obama walked in those circles by earning his chair. GWB… well…
There's a somewhat solid argument that law school is of massively diminished relevance for SCOTUS than it is for, say, a fed appeals court judge. You can (and do) have very knowledgeable clerks providing appropriate factual legal guidance, but most SCOTUS decisions, by the very nature of the court, are not really tied into "what the law is".
The core problem here, which TFA outlines at some length, is that while there is nothing particularly wrong with wanting "the best people for the job", it isn't clear that Ivy+ education is the right metric/gatekeeping to use for this task.
I don’t say that Harvard, or Yale, or MIT, or Stanford, or Princeton, or CMU, or Chicago, or any number of top private schools don’t influence my life in some indirect way. What I said was it hasn’t directly impacted me, and I have never felt any angst about their existence. I think legacy admissions is unfair and should end, and I think they should be extraordinarily selective and not be swayed by birth or wealth. But I don’t get upset over it, life is too short, too rich, and too little of it has to do with the school you went to, the grades you got, or any of that past your first job.
I would say I’d suggest if you plan to be a Supreme Court judge your chances are better if you went to the top law school in the land, just as going to one of the top engineering schools in the world (public!) helped my career for sure. Getting highest honors at a top engineering school that rarely gives summa cum laude helped too. But it only helped at the beginning and on the margin. What I learned at that school is what made the difference when things got real. And I learned more than the kids who got gentleman C’s at a top private school, because at a top engineering public school they hand out gentleman F’s like candy. I eat the Harvard kids for lunch in my career because I do know more, do better work, earn more revenue, and change my organizations for the better. At a certain point in your career that matters a ton more than what school you went to.
To me that’s a better way to focus your life than the advantages someone else has, because that is surmountable and has nothing to do with what you need to do next in your life.
Corporate management has more effect on most people than local laws. It’s where we are employed, and where the primary economic decisions are made. And Ivys are over-represented in corporate management.
Really, it’s an argument about whether you agree in meritocracy or elitism.
probably nobody felt Salomon Brothers impacted their life but he changed your life more than Michael Jordan, the iPod and YouTube put together. -Big Short
Given I’ve spent a long time on Wall Street that quote doesn’t quite jibe with me ;-)
I’d also say it’s false for almost anyway - YouTube directly impacts most people considerably more than Wall Street shenanigans, and that I lived the plot of the big short and know what actually happened for a first hand fact, I can assure you the big short is extraordinarily short of accuracy.
Maybe this is veering off-topic, but as someone outside of that industry who understands the basic ideas around repackaging loans, etc., I’m very curious to hear which aspects you think are inaccurate!
The big short basically painted it as a naked cash grab by cackling Wall Street traders. My experience was it was fairly prosaic at the banks, essentially trying to construct products our customers wanted to buy. There was a lot of stuff that was going wrong, a lot of it was at:
At the micro level:
* local and regional banks stuffing mortgage pipelines with garbage, colluding with appraisers and others to make outrageous loans with fabricated or otherwise fraudulent docs
* loan officers effectively tricking ill equipped borrowers into unsuitable products against suitability requirements
At the macro level:
* rating agencies were ill equipped and were rating structured products AAA despite them paying junk bond returns - we tried to show them models demonstrating their ratings were too rosy but they kept us at arms length - as they should - but we felt it was really important they reassess. They wouldn’t.
* Large institutional investors seeking juiced returns but were restricted to AAA investments were eager for the junk returns, and were aware that these products were very risky despite the rating
The banks weren’t angels in this, but it’s been sold as a Wall Street issue. It was far greater than the street.
Also, “the big short” was taken on because Goldman stopped using theoretic models for valuing CDO’s and used fundamental models that showed they were extremely long subprime mortgage risk. As market makers they have risk limits on their books by internal policy and were required by their risk officers to short subprime to bring them within neutral risk with respect to their subprime mortgage exposure. It wasn’t a nefarious plot to screw the American mortgage holder - it was the bank functioning properly with proper risk management, the problem wasn’t the “big short” - it was the “big long.” Market makers are not speculators - their whole purpose is to stay neutral in the market and facilitate anyone who wants to trade long or short by quoting both sides.
So, I think I agree with everything you said except the first sentence! My takeaway from the movie was pretty much what you wrote in the bullets. Specifically, that the set of folks who ultimately profited from betting against the mortgages were the only ones not asleep at the wheel. Moreover, if more people had correctly clocked the risk earlier on (especially the rating agencies), we wouldn’t have ended up in that situation in the first place.
I thought the movie mostly portrayed the bankers sympathetically, e.g. the scene with Brad Pitt: “Just... Stop f**in' dancing.”
I think it depends on where you live and what you do. In high school, I considered the Ivies priggish and didn't apply. My high school colleagues who went didn't disabuse me of my prejudice, and looking back after 20 years on Facebook, they aren't especially more accomplished than the rest of us. (Our most famous alum went to NYU and made it in Hollywood.) That said, in DC, Boston, and parts of NY, going to an Ivy is an unwritten requirement for a lot of jobs, so it generates a lot of ill will from those who didn't go. I think the solution is to just not live on the Northeast Corridor, and you can totally ignore it.
I think that’s fairly extreme. I don’t think structural racism and Harvard are analogous, I grew up in eastern Tennessee in a time of extreme racial strife and saw things with my own eyes and felt the reality of things you likely only saw on tv or read about. Comparing rich kids going to rich kid schools and living rich kid lives to people being terrorized in their homes for being born and watching their friends hung from trees isn’t the same thing at all.
Agreed, but the current class of rich people exist only within the context of those terrible racist things happening. Generational wealth was impossible to achieve for entire races of people, redlining isn't even that old. It's related.
> I’ve advanced further than everyone I know that went to Harvard in my career and not once did someone wink at the Harvard guy and pass me over.
I'm only 27 and I definitely have - basically every Harvard CS grad from the year I graduated from my state school makes at least $200k more than me a year if they're in the workforce instead of academia and has a significantly higher net worth as a result!
Harvard is a pretty mediocre CS school. I would expect MIT, CMU, Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, and the other (last I looked) 30 better schools for CS to do better on average.
I don’t mean this as unkind, but Harvard is very hard to get into and very selective and state schools generally are neither. This often means the people that get in, other than legacy, are very capable people. State schools also have very capable people, but as a percentage it’s the vast majority of Harvard and the vast minority of state school students are equally as capable. This gives a leg up on the first jobs for sure - one, they’re likely to be more capable in general, and they have an achievement on their resume to prove it. Admission to Harvard IS an achievement in life.
But these advantages disappear quickly if you’re as capable or more, especially if you’re aggressive in locking in achievements and seeking better opportunities. After maybe 10 years into your career what school you went to matters almost not at all, and it’s entirely based on what you did with that opportunity. Many Harvard grads start strong due to the achievement on their resume then top out quickly in their careers because they’re just not very commercial, and many rely on their brand too much.
But you should -still- expect someone capable of getting into Harvard to be just as capable in their careers. That’s simply life. If it weren’t for Harvard, they would find other ways to differentiate.
The truth is, labor markets are not egalitarian. They reward people differently for different reasons, and their ability to compensate based on contribution is highly inefficient. That rewards people with achievements like a top school early when nothing else differentiates resumes. But it fades quickly, and it’s up to you to make a stronger resume if it matters to you.
But I think it shouldn’t matter. That was my point. Someone else doing better than you shouldn’t matter. What should matter is if you’re happy with what you’re doing yourself ignoring all other people. Anything else is petty, unhelpful, and at odds with how life and reality actually is.
> and the vast minority of state school students are equally as capable
OK but I don't think anyone would say I'm even close, since I didn't even get into any top schools (somehow people only talk about the few that got into top schools but didn't go. Seems like everyone got into at least one top school but me). What do I do? Where does that leave me?
> After maybe 10 years into your career what school you went to matters almost not at all, and it’s entirely based on what you did with that opportunity.
I don't know. I'm 5 years out and I'm just an SDE2/mid-level. Harvard CS (and yes I'm including that in the upper echelon with MIT and Stanford regardless of rankings because education isn't what's really rendered at these institutions as the original post argues) graduates from 2018/2017 are all staff and senior engineers at Google and FB making $200k more than me at minimum, or have YC funding because they were Senior engineers at Facebook years ago.
> and it’s up to you to make a stronger resume if it matters to you.
I'm genuinely unsure if that's even possible. I don't think anybody in this tier of humanity would consider a career that started with 3 years at Amazon good enough to differentiate me from anyone else.
> What should matter is if you’re happy with what you’re doing yourself
Why would I be happy if I'm going to be "behind" for the rest of my life, no matter how much effort I exert, and I'm going to be seen as lesser for it?
Okay but the Supreme Court has just one person who didn’t not Harvard or Yale. The majority of Biden’s cabinet went to Harvard or Yale. You might not believe that Harvard acts as a gatekeeper in practice, but it does.
But yes, it’s something I place no value on being able to go to whenever I want. I’d rather join a makerspace, and the people there are a lot more interesting.
That's the right attitude to have. We can still do better. Trchnology like chatgpt can help close the equity gap. It's still left to be seen how much the elites will plunder it.
The existence of billionaires and millionaires negatively affects everyone else's standard of living via gentrification. Imagine you live in a community of 1000 middle class people, all making, say, $30K/yr to $60K/yr. You make $45K/year so you're about average. You can all afford homes, goods, and so on. Suddenly, 10 millionaires move in. Housing prices start to rise a little bit, grocery stores get a little more upscale and more expensive, car dealers see $$$ and jack up their prices. Then, a billionaire moves in. The market responds again. Suddenly, you're not doing so good anymore, despite earning the same as you were before the millionaires moved in. Now scale that up country-wide or world-wide. The more wealthy people there are, the higher the average cost of everything.
The gentrification argument has always felt a little off to me. Like it's missing the point somehow. It's less about billionaires moving in next door, and more about billionaires buying up thousands of "investment properties" that they never intend to live in and being rent-seekers and causing negative externalities that affect the local neighborhood that they never even go to. It's less about local businesses jacking up their prices because they "smell money" in the neighborhood, and more about local businesses getting fucked by the lack of anti-trust enforcement and by local government on the take from billionaires. It's less about the billionaires themselves being the source of the problem, and more about the winners-keep-winning systems that allow people to accumulate so much wealth in the first place.
I guess the reason I make these distinctions is that many reactions that seem like they could be solutions to "gentrification", like running those rich boys outta town, or even something like rent control ... they just don't feel like they're really solving anything. It's an entrenched systemic problem, and the system is huge and interconnected. You can't fix it locally. We need to actually tax the rich. We need to actually enforce anti-trust and consumer protection laws. We need big taxes on properties number 3 through N that go toward subsidizing affordable housing ... or something to that effect. I'm sure others have better ideas than this too. But what we don't need is neighborhood signs that say "no rich people".
> Imagine you live in a community of 1000 middle class people … Suddenly, 10 millionaires move in.
I’m not an economist and there are countless reasons for that, but I can’t imagine that 10 millionaires in a community of 1,000 people would materially change life for the other 990 in the way that you’re suggesting.
Gentrification and unbalanced income strata are real things and real problems, but the 1% aren’t causing them simply by existing.
Gentrification and unbalanced income strata are real things and real problems, but the 1% aren’t causing them simply by existing.
This hits the nail on the head. It's tautological to say "the problem of inequality is caused by there being rich people that cause inequality". It pins the blame on individuals rather than the system they exist within.
Not wanting a class of wealth to exist speaks more about the system than the people.
99% of people who hate billionaires wouldn’t care about a specific person as long as that billionaire wasn’t actively trying to screw over the rest of us in their attempt to win more points.
> Now scale that up country-wide or world-wide. The more wealthy people there are, the higher the average cost of everything.
The average income and wealth is higher too.
> The existence of billionaires and millionaires negatively affects everyone else's standard of living via gentrification
Gentrification benefits property owners and is bad for renters. Believe it or not, bad neighborhoods have homeowners too and most of them would love for their bad neighborhood to become better. So it's not like the effects are uniformly negative. Even renters who are able to afford higher rents, or have rent-controlled housing, benefit from living in a safer, cleaner, more prosperous area. Their children's schools will have more involved parents, more funding.
The real issue with wealth inequality is the disproportionate amount of political influence the wealthy have. I have no problem with people being disgustingly rich as long as they don't use their money to influence laws.
> The real issue with wealth inequality is the disproportionate amount of political influence the wealthy have. I have no problem with people being disgustingly rich as long as they don't use their money to influence laws.
Yea, I didn't even go down that path, but you're absolutely right--the fact that money and political power are trivially convertible (both ways) makes the problem even worse. Who doubts that the billionaire in my analogy and the town's mayor instantly become best buddies?
Gentrification is a word that has lost all meaning; and this entire paragraph is a load of nonsense. Not only that, but it wouldn't have anything to do with the parent comment even it it were true. It's a complete rambling non sequitur.
> Suddenly, 10 millionaires move in. Housing prices start to rise a little bit, grocery stores get a little more upscale and more expensive, car dealers see $$$ and jack up their prices
Except that no; prices would almost not budge at all. Each millionaire will buy 2, maybe 3 houses. But they will target the nice and expensive home; the price/demand for middle/low class houses will not change at all.
Same for car; the demand for Rolls Royce will increase and the price there might increase as well if they were being discounted because nobody was buying them. But they will not even look at the Toyota Prius and I don't see the car dealer there saying thinking "This billionaire will definitely buy all my Prisues, so I will increase their price". He will just shrug it off and keep selling his cars to the middle class whose purchasing power didn't move by an inch. The main difference he will see is that maybe the Rolls Royce dealer who could not afford a car himself because he was not selling anything will now be able to buy a Prius. So it's one more customer.
This sounds more like a problem with real estate than with people. The old Georgist schtick of a ~80% land value tax coupled with a citizen's dividend (i.e., UBI for those affected by improvements upon said land) would nip this problem in the bud, eliminating the rent-seeking that causes gentrification.
Keeping with your analogy, we might similarly eliminate rent-seeking on prestige by banning legacy admissions and making applications more quantitative (i.e., test-based) and less subjective.
Well existence of Europeans negatively affected native Americans. More generally existence of humans negatively affected most other species on earth.
Claiming superiority on narrow conditions like Modern American middle-class-ness is still claiming superiority. I don't see how it is an essentially a morally better position.
Downvotes notwithstanding, if you make $45k but you can afford an actual house, you're pretty much a unicorn at this point in time in the western world (US, Europe, doesn't matter, everywhere's pretty much unaffordable now). Or you gave up on civilization and you bought a property out in the sticks of course.
Either way, you're not going to get 10 millionaires just moving into an area with houses that are so cheap they ignore them as "too cheap" on a realty listing. Even if you're talking about an investment purchase and then they don't move in, themselves. You might have a property developer though, looking to create the next HOA hellscape.
> There’s a reasonable argument for putting the top professors together in one school, sure, and maybe even PhD students.
Who's "putting" the professors there? The entire thing seemingly hinges on the idea that Harvard's role in society is somehow intentional and planned, as opposed to emergent and organic. I just don't buy it.
The institution's stated objective may be the creation "citizen-leaders", but the influence Harvard has, and the harm this causes, is entirely predicated on our willingness to buy that narrative.
Make an argument that Harvard's importance and credibility is vastly overrated, go ahead. I'm fully on board with that. But don't go blaming the institution itself for it. There's a ton of organizations with similarly lofty goals and aspirations, but we don't consider them harmful. That's because the harm is coming from without, not within.
Harvard doesn't need to not exist for us to be able to ignore it.
These ideas have a lot of following - that things are planned, intentional, designed to be that way. We might hear "why is that job worth so much money and that one isn't?" or here "why Harvard, at all?". And this is worth countering. Society as a whole rarely plans "one more Harvard" - and when it tries, it rarely succeeds. Many people did work hard to make Harvard (or anything that exists now) into what it is now - while from society's point of view, it just happened. At some stage these are the fruit of a market economy: some people put in their effort and now Harvard is what it is. In that case ironically, "putting the top professors together in one school" is pretty universal. High prestige institutions are attractive - for their colleagues, pay, facilities, projects, etc. The good news for the US is that there are many such "top institutions".
This is not true of any FAANG and I've worked for all of them. Go to any of them and you will see that most of the SWEs are some combination of MIT, Cal, Stanford, and tier-1 public schools and top 20 (by US News Report) private schools.
I worked at Amazon and I didn't meet a single person in the L4-L6 engineering set that went to an Ivy or other top school (except for one or two that went to CMU). The rest went to state schools including myself.
Now I'm at a somewhat well regarded startup and most of the people around me went to Cal States, Arizona State, or UC's.
Similar to banking, I doubt FAANG doesn’t filter out apps by school to save time. Another confounded being FAANG now also naturally attracts the preftige chasers
From my experience the best people are usually state school undergrad (e.g., Berkeley / UIUC / UNC / UW / GTech) plus selective grad school (Harvard / Stanford / MIT / CMU). At the graduate level those schools are much more meritocratic and it's usually a better indicator of ability. Plus doing well at one of those undergrads is actually really hard.
Does that include CTOs? I've been around quite a few companies, and this ivy/oxbridge thingie mostly involves working in areas with a strong prestige element to them.
I.e. there get-shit-done areas, and there are showing-off areas, with very different ruling classes in them, different problems too.
Yes. I see people promoted to elevated managerial positions not on merit but were they went to school. We deal with this by "managing up", it's exhausting.
It has fallen out of favor but I am a massive proponent for graduated drivers licenses. Free toll roads would be silly but higher/removed speed limits seem 100% ok to me as long as it's coupled with an actual assessment of driving ability, semi-frequent required reassessment, and stiffer penalties for things such as DUI when driving in the graduated speed limit range.
Interesting idea, not sure how enforcement would work. That being said, this pretty much already happens in practice. Many people go their whole lives driving (safely) over the speed limit without ever getting a ticket, because they aren't being reckless about it.
Generally police officers will ignore you if you're just going with the flow or slightly faster. It's when you start going a lot faster or weaving or being otherwise reckless that they start to care.
That's true as long as the officers don't have other reasons to pull you over (like race) and the city is being overly strict, and like a bunch of other conditions.
On a related note, I consider paying for toll roads to be a form of health insurance. I know the newest teen drivers out cruising with their friends aren't paying $6 to race each other down the toll road and likely crash with me.
I've seen some crazy stuff on the freeways and much safer driving on toll roads.
Now imagine how much even more safe you’d all be if you were riding on a train, and those youths were harmlessly racing each other on bikes on a nearby separated bike path.
Post made some good points but in the end it's pretty nihilistic to say that elite spaces shouldn't exist merely because they tend to cultivate elites and other elite spaces. Also very reductive to say that Harvard exists just to perpetuate elitism (no, it has a genuine educational and research mission, whatever its various flaws, that's patently clear).
The world is flawed and imperfect and perfect things don't really emerge from it. Harvard is glorious. Our best and oldest (in the US) university is bad because it's not sufficiently egalitarian, and let's destroy it? It's an engine for our society and other universities have followed in its footsteps. Stanford, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, the Claremont schools, etc etc - none of these were in the original ivy league, all are imperfect to some extent in their admissions and embrace and fulfillment of egalitarian ideals. They are also glorious though. They make our country a dynamic, innovative, intellectually vibrant place and attract students from around the world. They absolutely are key to our (staggering) economic and cultural success (in the US).
Elite clubbiness is an unfortunate side effect of success, but it doesn't mean we should then intentionally obliterate the engine of that success out of distaste for the cose of it.
This article misses the simple fact that the type of fellow students you have will impact how well you do as a student. Humans are social creatures and will influence each other's behavior. That's not even getting into negative pressure from things like bullying.
edit: Also their point on the curriculum being similar misses the fact that the standard for doing well differs. Barely learning some material is different from understanding it well. I've had the experience of taking various college math classes from a variety of institutions. There is a very large difference in the effort I had to put in to do well at a top school versus a middling school. This is of course related to my first point on the quality of students mattering as you simply cannot have the same bar given such different student populations.
Isn't this what is suggested below the second picture?
> Really, it’s harder than this picture suggests, because many experiences are based on other students. If I want you as my project partner but you want to forget I exist, then something has to give.
Doesn't that enhance the effect of the gate rather than detract from it? If, ceteris paribus, being around the shiniest of gold stars helps you shimmer a little brighter, that seems likely to make the gating-function effect more pronounced, not less.
My criticism of the article is that there's no alternative solution given. You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function . . .
> You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function
If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead.
What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?
One of the points of the article seemed to be to do gating latter rather than earlier. I'm saying that this is detrimental as being around the dullest stars will make you a dull star more often than not.
Perhaps I missed it but I didn't see the author put forward a mechanism for how the "gate later" approach was supposed to work. Did I miss it?
To your point though, absent an implementation of "gate later", it's not clear to me that what the author would want would put you near the "dullest stars". There's no way Harvard (or any other Ivy+) would accept a "gate later" implementation that would give them the dullest of stars. The differentiators between folks with any non-zero chance of acceptance are already pretty small, and I don't think "allow everyone in" would be feasible as they would not have room to put all of the people who want to be there.
Stratification is inevitable but efforts to disintermediate lifetime quality of life from status (Ivy) is warranted (depending upon your viewpoint on merit).
The thing that gets me is that nearly every single podcast or article that talks about admissions and how fair/unfair they are focuses almost solely on Ivy League schools and leaves out the state and local colleges/universities that actually churn out 99% of college graduates in the US. Maybe we tax payers need to do better about steering the conversation towards those institutions that we fund as opposed to those that function almost solely in a closed legacy-admissions environment (regardless of what pretty/diverse narratives those schools would like to have us 'normies' believe).
Many (most?) state schools don't do significantly competitive admissions, and many have state mandates in the vein of "Anyone who graduated in the top half of their in-state high school gets admitted with the following terms." For most students and employers, they are largely interchangeable except for in-state tuition being cheaper (and to be clear, I think that is a good thing).
It's actually a bit of a problem in other ways though. The school I teach at gets an alarming number of students coming in as pre-engineering who have dramatic math or literacy deficits and would be better served with a year or two at a cheaper-for-everyone community college (or a not-broken highschool, but that's way harder to fix) instead of slamming into their first couple technical classes and failing because they don't understand variables and/or don't have the reading comprehension for the course materials unless/until they finish a pile of remediation. Universities have a profit motive to encourage this, since having a student take two years of high-margin large service classes while paying for room and board, then never consume any lower-margin resources, is a financial win for the university.
Agreed, the lack of respect for yet another thing that we all pay into (Community Colleges) is appalling. I remember that in high school, if you said you were going to Community College, you would be looked at as some kind of failure when in reality it was a great way to sober up and ease into adult life after high school, at a tiny fraction of the price of 4-year university...truly shameful that the majority of us willingly ignore one of the solutions to the whole issue with college degrees sometimes being viewed as not being useful, as well as the issue with excessive student loans.
That's an 80/20 or I guess 99/1 though.
The actual quality of most local colleges is poor and is basically just a loan servicer subsidization program. If you want to be the lead engineer of a Fortune 500....you went to the 1%...not the 99. I think your argument is super solid and highlights what I'm saying here..but also the Ivy League club is basically just a billionaire boys club to keep the others out.
> But we agree on the ideal, right? In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist.
If I grew up in this ideal, I'd be a bum. I was a lazy and arrogant teenager; my ideal path was to go "oh, sh*t, I need to work hard or I won't get into a good school"
I'm not saying our system is perfect (or even good). But it's easy to critique a system when you acknowledge exactly 0 of its benefits.
I agree that there are many aspects of how elite universities work that are not what's best for society. I don't think this is the best thinkpiece on it though. One small thing that jumped out at me is the bit about "we don't have to sort kids at 18, because most colleges teach the same stuff". To support this point, the author compared Harvard Math 1a to SIUE Math 150.
This is a bad comparison, because these are introductory math classes for first-year students who aren't math majors, used to satisfy distribution requirements or give math background for non-math-intensive courses. There's a placement system to decide what math class to take, probably at both universities, but here is Harvard's (2020-2021):
As you can see, first-year Harvard math or physics majors sometimes take Math 21, but more likely Math 23, 25, or 55. (Math 55 is weirdly fetishized, but that's another story.) These classes are significantly more rigorous than Math 1.
Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars.
> Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars.
OK, and? How does this change anything? You have to be a PhD to be a mathematician anyway.
I've become negatively polarized against this rigor fetishization, which serves exclusively to otherize normal folks in increasingly esoteric ways
> OK, and? How does this change anything? You have to be a PhD to be a mathematician anyway.
I don't understand your objection. Comprehensive math training is useful in areas other than academic research math, and it's not like PhD programs erase or overwrite all math instruction from before you entered that program.
I don't think it matters at all, actually. Covering 10% less material in a real analysis class at Wayne State vs. MIT has basically no bearing on society, or even the students at either.
> [We should maximize individual potential even if this causes more variance than we have now]... But we agree on the ideal, right?
Some people absolutely disagree with this ideal. One argument against gifted classes is roughly "Those kids will do alright regardless of the classroom, so we should ignore them and focus resources on less gifted kids"
There's nothing wrong with having "elites," so long as there is strong social mobility in society in both directions (progressive taxation, no bailouts for the rich, aggressive inheritance tax, lots of social services). In that case, the initial playing field would be a lot more balanced and people who are elites would have had to actually earn it themselves, rather than being recipients of an eternal legacy.
I agree. As long as there are personal differences in motivation, intelligence, energy level and moral compass, there will be classes of some sort or another.
Wow, that's a strong claim. There are various counterexamples to this, so I'd say it's definitely not a law of nature. And anyway, nature by nature (lol) is essentially lawless. It's all random collisions of tiny molecules.
So, if anything, I'd say the one law of nature is that there are no laws of nature. Thus, no, there isn't always a ruling class. It doesn't have to be that way.
I never understood why the "at reasonable scale" is presumed.
What happens if I reject that presumption? Why do we assume "millions of people" operating in the same social order is a good thing? Because iphones? Is that reason enough? Do we presume that having millions of people under the same social order is required to make advancements in medicine? It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.
Anyway, there are many counter examples of egalitarian and fluid societies throughout our many thousands of years of being speaking humans. David Graber's final book, I believe "Origin of everything," explores some of these. No, they didn't have iphones, but some of them lived so well that early American colonials would abandon everything they know to join the alien cultures. Must have been doing something right!
>It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.
Maybe it didn't take millions of people to build those things, but it did take millions of people to create an environment in which building those things could be considered a productive use of time.
The people who built Linux and Wikipedia didn't build it just for themselves, and indeed neither Linux nor Wikipedia would survive (in their current form) if they were not useful to millions of people.
You get a commune that has no real power, off in the middle of nowhere, which dies out when the original generation involved does. It can't be hard to understand that systems which work for a few hundred struggle to work with billions?
> Anyway, there are many counter examples of egalitarian and fluid societies throughout our many thousands of years of being speaking humans. David Graber's final book, I believe "Origin of everything," explores some of these. No, they didn't have iphones, but some of them lived so well that early American colonials would abandon everything they know to join the alien cultures. Must have been doing something right!
I read that book, and just a nitpick, it's David Graeber and David Wengrow. I'd also add that those societies described in the book weren't just pre-industrial or pre-iPhone, they were in the literal stone age.
I was thinking of millions, because that's the order of magnitude of the educational system. You could give examples of groups of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands instead if you like. I'm just trying to set a reasonable lower bound for a "society" as a opposed to a small group. Lots of organizational structures work for small groups, but break down when applied to larger ones.
What are some of those examples you're thinking of that he mentions in the book?
> Lots of organizational structures work for small groups, but break down when applied to larger ones
A key feature of many early human organizational structures was flexibility and creativity. Maybe it's time to do some more experiments. The current structure doesn't really permit that, which is a shame.
Anyway some examples come from Native Americans. One of the arguments in the book is that this idea that social complexity necessitates inequity is false and that its origins are the meeting of Europeans and native Americans. People like Kondiaronk, as depicted by an explorer whose writings disseminated extensively, had deep critiques of the European system of organization, specifically it's focus on profit motive, its punitive justice system, patriarchy, and hierarchies. The enlightenment defense was to cast the egalitarian lives of the native Americans as naive, youthful, ignorant, undeveloped etc. Notice in this thread many doing the same - "sure they were egalitarian, they lived in the stone age!" The book rejects that social inequity is a requirement to leave the stone age.
"Ok but you need hierarchy once you leave society the size of a tribe of 200 people," nope not really, they demonstrate how Teotihuacan started with a rigid hierarchy and transformed itself into an egalitarian society, demonstrating that dense urban society doesn't require inequity and also demonstrating that we can have flexible social systems.
Anyway the book offers no solution, just reflects on three major losses to our global society that we should consider investigating further: the freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey arbitrary authority, and the freedom to experiment with fluidic social structures.
Imo the current social order has already broken down. There's a class of people on this earth that wield unfathomable resources (billionaires). Throughout human history I can think of only a few individuals that had that kind of power, and they at least were responsible for running empires lest they be torn apart suddenly by a mob. Yet today we have thousands. We also seem to have created simple artificial intelligence algorithms/hiveminds and propped them up as infallible and immune-to-ethics (you gonna blame Shell for turning a profit?), and are slowly letting them supplant our liberal democracies as our new rulers (through lobbying and the like) (try to start your own ISP in certain cities).
I feel like it's as valid to say "we just shouldn't try to encapsulate tens of millions under the same social order, it leads to suffering" as it is to say "in tribes there are no iphones." We don't really know, do we? We can't really experiment anymore, can we?
The question was whether there were animal species that do not have internal hierarchies. I gave an example.
I don't myself believe that the question is relevant to social relations among homo sapiens, but it's better that people be aware of the variety of animal behavior.
I'd be interested in some of those counterexamples you mentioned, I can't think of any that weren't transient/temporary on the way to the hierarchy which normally emerges after even the most severe disruption.
There were plenty of agricultural societies that were also fairly egalitarian. One interesting bias we tend have is that we identify "advanced" societies by how much they look like our own. This leads to a general bias towards deeply hierarchial, stratified societies being described/perceived favorably in media against their less familiar neighbors.
The ones I was specifically thinking about were the Puebloans of the American Southwest. There's a famous old paper whose title summarizes the situation pretty well:
"Although they have petty captains, they obey them badly"
Hierarchies in society get stronger, deeper, and more complex the larger the societies are. There is a function to hierarchy, it doesn't exist for its own sake. In small groups those hierarchies are not as useful so they aren't as pronounced.
Think of the neural complexity required for an amoeba to navigate with flagella vs a fly to navigate with wings. Even the fly's complexity is dwarfed by, say, the neural complexity of an elephant's control of his trunk. And that pales in comparison to the neural complexity required to get a spacecraft into orbit.
Complex behavior requires complex systems and complex systems require the simplicity that hierarchies provide.
I think the argument that “1% of the pre-agricultural humans didn’t hoard 90% of the bronze” is more of an issue of logistics than desire. Even apes and chimps have hierarchies.
It is much easier these days to interview for top jobs that would have excluded you 20 years ago, because you went to the wrong schools.
If you're a smart and ambitious student, don't let your alma mater be the deciding factor in your life. It is true, you may have to work much harder than those that can coast on their HYPS-pedigree, but as the saying goes: You can't keep a good man down.
The anxiety of not getting accepted into a top school is mostly a juvenile phenomena.
> I think the answer is: Each kid gets whatever experiences maximize their potential. That’s not controversial, is it? Ideally, they’d learn whatever subjects, in whatever style would best help them flourish into rich, happy, successful adults.
Actually, that isn't what people want.
If your ideal is "what each child receives is what that child deserves" then the only inputs that determine what the kid receives are from the kid themselves. What is missing from that equation? Parents. One of the fundamental goals of almost all parents is help my kid. They want to increase the opportunity and resources their kid has regardless of that kids' potential relative to others or whether the kid deserves those extra resources in any general or moral sense.
This is just another way to think of Pinker's trilemma, which is one of the most insightful things I've ever read about human society:
"No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."
By "give their wealth to their children", Pinker doesn't mean "when they die".
He's referring to the more general observation that parents want to take care of their kids as well as they can. But they do that in a strictly unfair way: they prioritize their kids over all other kids simply because they happened to have spawned them, a property the kid has zero control over.
> But we agree on the ideal, right? In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist.
Aren’t “path” and “track” essentially synonyms? And why wouldn’t there be advanced classes? Somebody who wants to become a tradesperson needs to know math, but doesn’t need the same level of advanced math that somebody who is interested in particle physics would need.
Right. And what do you think a path is if not separating students by academic interest into groups?
Now, I'll concede there's a difference between interest and ability, but it will probably come out in the wash, as failure to keep up will typically result in a loss of interest
Country clubs have a specific business model and are definitely not exempt from federal income taxes. The Freemasons are exempt from income taxes as an organization though.
Gating as late as possible was precisely the philosophy of the OMSCS program of Georgia Tech. They reduced the bar for admission and admitted as many as they could (given they didn't need to fit everyone in physical classrooms) but kept the same academic rigor.
I benefited greatly getting this program, but would have never bothered to apply by taking GRE first (in my 30s, if I may add) otherwise.
The issue is that American academic institutions have adopted the inherited-wealth / social-class-based model that was so prevalent in Britain in the early 20th century. Elite schools are not centers of education so much as they are centers of networking for feeding the anoited few into positions in government and business, regardless of what actual skills and talents and abilities they possess.
Eliminating legacy admissions and ensuring that K-12 schools across the country are of uniform high quality (in particular in the STEAM fields, yes that includes Art) would do much to reverse this trend, along with reducing college tuition costs.
It's like wild salmon vs. farmed salmon - pampered students who never have to swim upstream don't develop the best qualities.
Harvard is obviously a problem. Does any institution work against the interests of the people that fund it? Rich people fund Harvard. Harvard will work in the interests of rich people. Meritocracy is not in the in the interests of rich people.
You could base a society on randomly selecting people at a young age to be elite. It would still have advantages over a society with no elites at all.
The goal of having an elite class is to make better collective decisions about how society should organize itself. Decisions are best made by people with the best information, and elites (regardless of any intrinsic merit) have better information. By virtue of being elite, they get better educations and more inside access to new information.
The classical way of doing this was through inherited privilege. Whatever intrinsic merit first-generation aristocrats may have had to win their position is mostly gone after a few generations, so for example 19th century English aristocrats had little genetic advantage over the average population. But they were selected at birth to receive the best educations and inside access to each other, so they made better decisions than if you chose random citizens in adulthood to put in charge.
Part of what Harvard does is to say "You are now an elite. You will shape the future of society." Most students take that seriously and try to become worthy of the challenge.
No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge. The closest natural experiment is societies that select leaders based on physical strength and courage. They seem to make fairly bad decisions.
>No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge.
This is a practice called 'sordition'. As evidenced by the fact it has a name and a Wikipedia article, it is not something you just invented. It was famously used in Athens and is how American juries are selected today,
I think I would support a revival of sordition. Perhaps we could start small, perhaps by selecting one representative for each state at random.
Sortition happened in adulthood, though. The interesting (and untried) experiment is to designate people early in life, so they can grow up being educated and prepared for their future responsibility.
> What would happen in schools if we lived in a magical dreamworld? I think the answer is: Each kid gets whatever experiences maximize their potential.
That answer sure does sound like the stuff of magical dreamworlds.
Whatever experiences maximize their potential is the province of families, not the stuff of society-paid education. It's not that it couldn't be provided by the latter, but the daunting expense means that it will never be funded to a level that maximizes on an individualized basis.
What would that require? One teacher for every 4 kids, maybe you could stretch it to 6 or 8. On top of that, a multitude of specialists to ensure that any special needs are addressed in an individually customized fashion to maximize the potential of every kid. In many districts, we can't get agreement that we should feed every kid, let alone agreement that there should be roughly one professional adult in total for every 2-3 kids.
> In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist.
Those concepts would absolutely exist, just under a different label (and maybe not even that), because kids at the very top of the range would be taking something that would be readily recognizable as the close equivalent of today's advanced classes.
One can argue that this argument is actually what the Soviet Union actually did always.
It worked, at least at first. They beat the US to orbit on the back of that despite the US technically having better people. Eventually the US got the game plan in order and got to the moon first but since then the exact argument that the article makes happened. The people in the classroom became the people with the best connections rather than the best abilities.
A lot of these responses seem to think that Harvard is better to go to because the education is better there, which is explicitly if lightly addressed in the article.
The article's thesis is that the benefit of going to Harvard is mostly derived from just from having gone to Harvard irrespective of the education itself. That could accrue just from the credential, or from the enormous and powerful social and support networks that graduates benefit from.
The most galling part about these institutions is that they have the capacity to teach many, many more students, and they don’t. They can’t expect me to keep a straight face when they prattle on about their "genuine educational mission", while their class sizes are artificially tiny so they can preserve The Brand and make sure The Club doesn’t get so big as to be unwieldy.
Endowments are not meritocratic. While I can't quote data, I imagine that wealthy students provide much more growth for endowments, which in turn contribute not only to reputation, but also research, and ratio boosting hiring capacity. While Princeton and other Ivies, do have aggressive financial aid programs, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/09/08/princeton-will-enh..., it is important for the elite schools to admit the wealthy, particularly students whose families will donate generously initially upon admission, and also throughout the student's life. Less wealthy students are less attractive fiscally, but reputation is influenced by a schools willingness to admit lower income students.
The problem is that the current elites hate the people they rule over, and conspire with capital to rob everyone.
The dreamworld is not a classless society. But rather one where the leaders love those they lead and work for their betterment.
That being said, I’ve met enough Harvard and ivy types to have a low opinion. They’re no smarter than anyone else. These networks are powerful though. They will eventually collapse due to the crushing weight of their own incompetence and greed, but such corrections to the natural order take generational time.
The depth of the subject is much too great for an article. But, there's certainly some interesting discussion to be had around the relationship between people's general work outcomes and a strong gating mechanism evaluated earlier in life.
I really hope we soon see innovation around education. When the entire corpus of human knowledge became available freely - surely we would've seen changes in higher education by now (if they were/are ever going to happen).
this article had so many terrible takes I don't know where to begin. the simplest refutation of the entire thing is the extensive evidence that people who are accepted to top schools, but do not attend have similar achieves as those who go.
this lends credence to the idea that the top schools are simplest triaging the successful and do not create them, in general. Of course there are specific exceptions to this, such as Supreme Court Justices, but in general it seems to be true.
The paper (https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...) is ultimately flawed because it doesn't (and cannot) evaluate the simplest thing:
look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with.
Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges".
In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition.
the stratification of society is an emergent phenomenon.
> the simplest refutation of the entire thing is the extensive evidence that people who are accepted to top schools, but do not attend have similar achieves as those who go.
This completely misses the point because 95% of the people that apply do not get in. Please think of the rest of us!
The existence of these institutions hinges solely on the reputation we assign to them. If we collectively recognize them for their role in perpetuating economic inequality, catering primarily to privileged white adults whose parents bought them a ticket to attend, their worth will diminish rapidly over time.
"We don’t need to sort and classify 18-year olds. It’s absurd. Stop trying to fix it and get rid of it."
Would the OP make the same argument about athletics? That 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo and 18-year-old Frankie Fatass, instead of being sorted and classified, should be put into the same soccer program?
Which soccer program are you referring to? At age 18, Cristiano Ronaldo was not attending a nonprofit school, he was a member of a for-profit professional team.
No. This is why I said "Cristiano Ronaldo was not attending a nonprofit school, he was a member of a for-profit professional team."
Harvard is a nonprofit school, financially supported by the government in various ways. The standards are different. If Harvard wants to act like a business, then it needs to give up its nonprofit status, forsake government support, and pay taxes as a business.
Working at NYT isn't as gated as the article suggests. I know two people who work there. AFAIK, neither went to an Ivy. (Old joke: How do you know if someone went to an Ivy? They tell you.) You do need a college degree, but you can work at a smaller paper first and get recruited from there.
Harvard exists for strategic reasons. It helps maintain the establishment (that ambiguously defined collection of people and processes that keep the US running and a major world power). Getting rid of it would likely have a very negative effect in the medium-term.
This article is actually quite good. Too bad some on HN are too blind to their own life circumstances to examine their biases and perform some introspection.
Equality is one value out of many important values of a society. Looking for ways to over-optimize society for this one thing leads to many silly conclusions.
A few years ago I read a book called "Listen Liberal." It was a book written by liberals, for liberals.
One of the criticisms it made of the Obama Administration's cabinet was that it was far too heavy in choosing Ivy-League graduates. The book pointed out that the cabinet was racially / ethnically diverse, but because the vast majority of the cabinet was Ivy-League educated, it had all of the biases that come with an Ivy-League education.
I don't think Harvard is the problem: They are an organization that exists, and the selection criteria they use is to choose people who they believe will graduate. Granted, someone could argue that they should take more risks on applicants, but that's not my argument to make.
In part, the value of these institutions is that they are exclusive. Many people argue that the advantage of an Ivy League education, compared to an equivalent, less exclusive school, is the people you meet while on campus. This difference can only be maintained if the schools maintain their selection criteria.
I think the bigger problem is that far too many people / organizations put too much weight on an Ivy League education. It's generally unobtainable, even if you "check the boxes," because these schools get far more applicants than they can ever accept. Which is why I don't want to argue that they should change their selection criteria: Who is to say what is the best selection criteria? Everyone will try to argue that it should be changed in a way to benefit the person making the argument.
IMO: We need some new institutions to displace the Ivy League as the "best." Perhaps, if there are enough schools with differently selective admission criteria, everyone will be able to find a selective school that they can get into?
I think once a schools endowment goes over a certain amount they should simply be required to educate more students -- I think Harvard should just admit 10x the number of students that they currently admit.
The OP (original post) describes what we
might call problems, issues, or challenges
in US formal, academic education, say, K
through 4 year college. Here is a theme
of a rough solution, necessarily "rough"
if only because US education and the
problems are not precisely stated or
understood.
(1) Learning, Knowledge, Understanding.
Yup, for doing well in life, learning, ...
is usually (being "rough" here) from
somewhat useful to crucial. Some of the
knowledge is explicitly taught in the
education, some is taught outside that
education, and still more an individual
has to pick up, ..., discover, on their
own. E.g., on my own I had to learn the
fast Fourier transform and discover office
politics.
(2) US Academics. The US K through
college emphasizes learning. In an old
joke the teacher has a full pitcher of
knowledge, pours it into the student's
empty pitcher, on tests has the student
pour back what they have learned, and
determines the grade from the fraction
that comes back.
From this "emphasis" and "process", there
can be a LOT of struggle, strain, lost
sleep, hard work, anxiety, etc. for a
student and their family.
(3) Surprise. After 4 year college, US
academics no longer much cares what the
student has learned and, instead, cares
almost only about what the student can DO,
especially in delivering new research
results. For more, do well in such
research and all the student did in
education will be forgiven, forgotten,
ignored, etc.
So, if want a degree from a famous
research university, get a graduate
degree, Master's and/or Ph.D. Generally
admission to such university's graduate
school is much easier than to their 4 year
college -- also much cheaper. For such
admission, doing well on the GRE (graduate
record exam) can help. Having done well
in an early career can help. Some
research can help a lot more, really
close the deal, giving the student
admission, no tuition, and maybe some
money for doing some ugrad teaching, work
on some prof's research project, etc.
Summary: For a degree from a famous
research university, go for a graduate
degree and there emphasize research.
Or, what US research universities care
about, more than nearly everything else,
is in just one word research.
In my case, while in grad school, I picked
a problem, for two weeks did some
research, and found a solution, clearly
publishable (later did publish the
solution). Presto, bingo, magic, I was
regarded as a star student in the
department, and everything else about my
work was irrelevant. I went ahead and did
some dissertation research, also clearly
publishable, while doing that work was
beyond any criticism, had a shiny halo,
was untouchable, got my Ph.D., and with
great joy LEFT.
The OP mentions Harvard; I got into
Princeton and Cornell but never applied to
Harvard. Sure, going to any such
university for any degree can involve more
than just "research", but might want to
critically evaluate the "more".
One more point: Research that finds
mathematical solutions, mathematizes the
subject, is relatively highly regarded.
For that approach, a big issue is learning
the math, but in grad school beware of
advanced math courses: Commonly the
teaching is poor and the hidden agenda
is to set up a competition to filter the
students. But if mostly know the math
before the course, then can be 10 yards
from the finish line in a 2 mile race, be
by a wide margin the best student in the
class, and greatly reduce the chances of
being filtered. Yes, doing so well can
cause some of the profs to resent you and
become hostile.
With math, doing the learning before the
class is relatively easy: Just get some
of the best books, usually from famous
authors, study the theorems and proofs,
work the exercises, try to find intuitive
views of the material, reasons for the
particular definitions and theorems, and
examples.
Beyond calculus, I'd suggest: Abstract
algebra, linear algebra, ordinary
differential equations, measure theory,
Fourier theory, differential forms, the
Gauss, Green, and Stokes theorems,
differential geometry, probability based
on measure theory, and statistics based on
that probability. Some good authors
include Halmos, Nering, Coddington, Rudin,
Royden, Breiman, Neveu, Cinlar. To boil
it down to just two books to study
carefully I'd recommend Halmos for linear
algebra (Finite Dimensional Vector
Spaces) and Breiman for probability.
The university was a place of learning, education, and becoming a better person. It was focused on the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Then it became noticed that smart educated people went to college, and so the idea then became if you went to college you to must be smart and educated.
Then because that was accepted as true many people saw college as the path to a better life. Then after WW2 because college was seen as the path to a better life the US Govt. decided that everyone should get the chance to go to college with the GI Bill.
Then college morphed from a place you went to learn to study and to understand to a place you go so you could get a job.
Then because that is why people were going colleges started optimizing as places to get a job.
Harvard became optimized for getting certain types of jobs, namely CEO, politician, etc, essentially seen as the jobs of "the elite". But remember for every person who went to Harvard and is now an overqualified CEO there are also 10 Andy Bernards out there.
So the whole purpose of the university and higher education has been gutted, as thanks to the introduction of the Business and Communications degrees you can actually be college educated while learning nothing of real value, or of beauty or science or anything that the traditional colleges existed to teach us.
Very true. After basic needs are met, the majority of people will spend the majority of their efforts pursuing status. So anything that confers status will become focused on that alone to the exclusion of other goals.
Seems like you've got your rose tinted glasses on. The first universities were established by religious leaders to organize/control priestly power. Basically the same as today.
Seems like your off. The first universities were the Acadamy of Plato and the rehtorical schools of the ancient Greeks.
During the middle ages the universities were associated with the monastaries because those were the few places where literate people congregated.
Plus there were only 5 areas of study in the early university.
- Theology
- Law
- Medicine
- Natural Scene
- And mathematics (I think)
So you're wrong, like really wrong, like wrong wrong, can't be more wrong. But hey I'm sure if you go back to /r/athiesm you'll get some more good talking points.
The author is pontificating on some very fundamental things without considering reality.
8 Billion human beings cannot be jammed into the same exact university. It's as simple as that. Sorry for being reductive but that's the reality. Naturally, you have to have more universities. Naturally, some will be better than others.
The author tries pushing some marxist ideas about how everything can be exactly equal but even in a marxist utopia you are going to have some neighborhoods/schools/universities/hospitals that are better than others.
I have no issue with Harvard existing. However, it should be taxed on its endowment and it should not receive taxpayer support like student loans unless it commits to being a purely meritocratic institution.
That fails to address the main thrust of TFA: even if Harvard were to be purely objective in its admissions, it would be anti-meritocratic because of the boost of the credentials and the imperfections in any gating function.
I disagree that imperfect gatekeeping is worse than no gatekeeping.
I also disagree with his point that gatekeeping should come as late as possible. That's how you get graduate students loaded down with debt who can't get a job in the field. Gatekeeping should come as soon as possible to allow the people who don't pass the gate the best opportunity to find some other path to succeed in.
Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".