> Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.
What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that academics raise academics, doctors doctors, Olympians Olympians, teachers teachers, etc.
It’s equally unsurprising that the ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families themselves pursue such a similar path and achieve similar outcomes. I’m an engineer and my spouse a scientist. Our kids have commensurately higher chance to pursue one of those or a closely related field due to exposure and biases.
Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7 times as likely to have the same job as their
fathers. [0]
From the General Social Survey[1]:
If your father was a legislator, you are 354 times more likely to be drawn to that career, too. Kids whose father was a doctor are 23 times more likely to follow in his footsteps. If your father was a lawyer, you’re 17 times more likely to become one, as well.
Jobs in the trades figure into these statistics, as well.
- The sons and daughters of plumbers are 14 times more likely to pursue a job in this field.
- The sons and daughters of electricians are nine times more likely to pursue a job in this field.
- The sons and daughters of carpenters are five times more likely to pursue a job in this field.
And, maybe it’s all that brushing and flossing – but the sons and daughters of dentists are 13 times more likely to become one, too.
I was just going to look for data on plumbers and carpenters. One common theme to all these jobs is that they tend to be quite stable, and require a life-long set of skills.
My father did metalwork before moving to an office job in the civil service. He was the son of a die pressman. Who was the son of a blacksmith. Dad taught me how to weld and cut and so on before my teens. My intellectual interests went to math and computers early on, and he did encourage me to go wherever that might lead. Yet after university and exploring the world I end up in a job where I make circuit boards. It's nearly all automated now but I still do far more welding in my job than most people with a degree.
Sometimes it feels like our life scripts are often sketched out by circumstance and trends long before we're even born.
I went into software dev while my father was a construction worker.
He is really proud of buildings he was working on and that he was able to build things with his own hands.
Even though I have an engineering degree and work in totally different environment I think that something I took from him is that I am really happy with the systems I have built and ability to create things on my own.
I did it with keyboard while he did it with hammer.
So I don't think it is "cartels" it is still a lot of what you experience in your childhood. If your parent is a dentist he will talk about that and you won't have problem to understand things in that area, maybe you will visit his practice and be able to play with the tools even. Well it still is some kind of upper-hand but not every child can have the same exposure to dentistry and I am fine with that.
Looking back, I think that one superiority of construction over software is that your work has real permanence.
Now and again I'll see a very expensive thing I worked on on eBay for a penny on the dollar. Maybe it's time to build a Museum of Me in a spare bedroom.
I wonder if I'm the only kid who expressly did not do what their parents did in this thread.
Of course I also sit in a cluster, knowing several other kids who also did not want to become restaurant workers. It was simple really, our parents would say "I'm serving fried rice to people so that you won't have to." None of my family friends have taken over the family business. It's nearly an insult to suggest it, I remember seeing an article about my friend's dad having his anniversary at one of Copenhagens most beloved Chinese grillbars. The FB comment section made it clear she had no intention of taking that over, his hard work had resulted in a cushy white collar job for her and she was thankful for that.
Oddly my wife, a doctor's kid, also got put off being a doctor by her dad. He had long become cynical about working in the NHS and let his kids know when they got to the age where you think about this.
> I wonder if I'm the only kid who expressly did not do what their parents did in this thread.
My father and my father's father were both anesthesiologists. I'm a software developer with a degree in mechanical engineering.
Growing up, I saw a lot of my dad's frustration butting his head against hospital and regulatory bureaucracy and decided to steer clear. (His biggest headaches came because it's not uncommon for one anesthesiologist to cover 3 simultaneous low-risk operations, circulating among the operating rooms while each surgery has a dedicated nurse anesthetist. There was one billing regulation that was ambiguous in a corner case for such simultaneous services, where one reading indicated that they weren't allowed to charge any fees at all in a corner case. His company inquired for clarification from the government regulator and got no response. Years after their inquiry, they got sued regarding corner-case billing of the government for services provided to low income patients. The legal discovery process found internal government memos where regulators joked with each other over my dad's company's inquiry about how it would be great to have zero-cost healthcare at the expense of physicians. The laws were later clarified to avoid the ambiguity to essentially match my dad's company's interpretation, but unfortunately, the lawsuit was over the laws at the time the billing was made. They were actually sued by a third party on behalf of the government, in exchange for a percentage of the money recovered for the government. Some of the key pieces of evidence were shown pre-trial to be "mistakes" where the other side had "accidentally" photocopied several bills twice and redacted the two copies of each bill slightly differently. There were some "anonymous whistleblower" faxes that were traced to an office service center across the street from the other party's offices (conveniently preventing the whistleblower from having to answer questions under oath), and all kinds of other obvious dishonest evidence submission. Most of the complaints were thrown out pre-trial, the rest they settled out of court rather than risk a jury trial pitting "rich doctors" against a government program for low income folks, over ambiguous wording. There were also anti-trust allegations made by defining a market as the area right around the hospital's where dad's company operated and conveniently ignoring some hospitals in-between those included hospitals. At least the anti-trust stuff was dropped pretty quickly, but the whole ordeal was a high-stress multi-year situation for my dad when I was in elementary school.)
>rather than risk a jury trial pitting "rich doctors" against a government program for low income folks, over ambiguous wording.
Well, were they following the standard of American healthcare in price-gouging patients because it was technically legal to do so? Which would not necessarily be a strike against your dad, but simply an acknowledgement of the way health care costs are "managed" in this country.
> standard of American healthcare in price-gouging patients
They were charging MediCare, not patients, and they were charging MediCare according to the price schedule dictated by MediCare, which was significantly less than insurance companies paid. The problem was there were poorly worded rules for adjusting prices when one doctor was simultaneously treating multiple patients, particularly around how multiple discount factors should compound.
I don't remember the exact details from 30 years ago, but IIRC, it was something like under one interpretation of the rules, if a doctor were treating 2 private insurance patients and 1 MediCare patient simultaneously, then the MediCare discount factor was reasonable. However, if a doctor were treating 3 MediCare patients simultaneously, under one interpretation the discount factors compounded additively such that the doctor's fees went negative and the doctor was best off doing the 3rd case pro-bono. The real trouble came when a doctor was treating 1 patient with private insurance and 2 under MediCare, where the incorrect reading resulted in discount factors unreasonable compounding, but not to such a degree that it was so clearly an incorrect interpretation.
When MediCare didn't respond to their request for clarification, my dad's company went with the interpretation that gave sane results for 3 MediCare patients, and applied that same interpretation to the 2 MadiCare patient case. It would have been immoral and illegal for them to refuse to treat the patients, so they went forward in good faith with the most sensible interpretation. This despite (as discovery showed) MediCare officials acting in bad faith by intentionally not responding to their inquiry and privately joking about it. They presumably realized the correct interpretation resulted in higher fees, but avoided responding in hopes the lower fees would be charged.
Whichever bureaucrats had written the original billing rules were clearly aware that some doctors simultaneously treated multiple patients, but had clearly hadn't sat down and tried calculating a bill for one hypothetical situation for each of the possible corner cases.
The rules were later amended to be unambiguous. The lawsuit was filed a few years after the rules amendments, and all of the allegations of wrongdoing were for billing prior to the rules amendments. Everything they did was always clearly correct under the later rules. The only question was if the earlier and later rules were equivalent. My dad's company's assertion was that the earlier ambiguous rules should be interpreted as being equivalent to the later rules. The opposition's assertion was that the rules change wasn't in fact a clarification, but instead a meaningful change that allowed doctors to bill more.
The billing rules were so complex that in the late 1970s, my dad's company of 15-ish doctors hired some developers to spend months sitting down with the doctors coding up the billing rules. Even the mid 2000's they were making more on licensing the anesthesia billing software than they were on providing anesthesia services.
Don't go into medicine unless you really like helping people.
My dad studied hard enough to get very high MCAT scores and went to med school after 3 years of undergrad, so he never got an undergrad degree. (Med school was less competitive in the 1970s, and he didn't go to a top-tier med school, though he did well enough that he did his residency at the Mayo Clinic.) I'm pretty sure there were plenty of other things my dad could have done that would have been roughly as lucrative, but lower stress and left him with more time with family. I think part of it was that he felt a duty to carry on his father's career that was cut so short.
I saw my dad's paycheck one month in the mid 1980s. He made 10k/month, which was good money for the 80s (about 300k/yr in 2021 dollars), but he also had to pay malpractice insurance and med school loans out of that (Grandpa drowned when dad was 9 years old and Grandma had to go back to being a school teacher). He and many of his colleagues had stress-related acid reflux. Hospitals need anesthesia 24/7, so he was on a rolling shift work schedule. Sometimes I wouldn't see him for a week because he'd either have the evening shift and be out before I got home from school, or he'd be working the graveyard shift and wouldn't wake up until after my bedtime. Anesthesiologists have pretty high rates of suicide and drug abuse. You occasionally pull some genuine miracles out of your hat and save a doomed person, but you also carry with you forever the names of those you couldn't save.
Thank you for speaking frankly about your dad's situation. It doesn't confirm what I thought, but speaks to the spirit of it in that the presence of private insurance unnecesarily complicated what should have been a simple fee-for-service. Likewise, I'm sorry to hear that your father and other anaesthesiologists, as well as many other American workers across many fields, fell and fall victim to a systemic deficiency in labor management practices. I worked a night shift warehouse job for barely half a year before I couldn't stand the negative effects it was having on my health; I can't imagine doing it for years on end. Your father was paid well, but I imagine that it barely covered the costs of the negative health outcomes he experienced from prolonged and chronic sleep deprivation, as well as limited contact with his family. So many of our businesses are in need of process advancements that would allow for larger workforces working shorter hours, so that we're not putting so much on each individual worker. And as far as healthcare goes, we really, really just need to go to a single-payer system. I'm afraid that our unwillingness to make the decision to make those shifts means that we'll see more situations like this in the future.
Having lived in Hong Kong for the past 9 years, the US medical insurance situation is the main thing that gives me pause about moving back to the U.S. The whole situation is a tragic mess.
It's not even a free market run amok. There's essentially zero price transparency, which is necessary for an efficiently operating free market.
Re this thread specifically, I suspect medicine is viewed differently in the US than in the UK. There's certainly an impression, imo, of the profession in the US that's derived from the upper percentiles of the earning potential here; I've heard (but am not sure) that the range is less extreme in countries with superior healthcare systems.
Yeah, I happen to have relatives who are doctors in the US. I think they get paid more than my father-in-law did, but they talk about malpractice insurance taking up a lot of that income, so I'm not sure how it nets out.
My dad was a telecom salesman, I became a software engineer. I do remember seeing big stacks of dBase binders in his closet, and he taught me how to use a command line, but a developer he was not.
It's a test for most union trades. To those interested, call the union hall where you live. So, it's usually a test, and a interview. The interview counts for 1/2 of the hiring process. The test is usually an 8th grade, or high school equivalency test. It's not hard, but in certain high paying markets, like San Francisco, a 1000 guys might show up to take the test, so you need to get most questions right.
Once you get into the union, it's kinda a cake walk. You can achieve a middle class income, health, and retirement.
It wasn't for me, but a lot of people like it.
(answering the top question. I never wanted to do what my father did. We had a strained relationship the minute I stopped agreeing with him. Even as a kid, I loved my father, but didn't want to be like him in any way--including career.)
>Once you get into the union, it's kinda a cake walk.
Knowing people in the highly unionized film biz, getting your next job always seems to be the order of the day so it seems to depend. It actually sounds pretty tough compared to a 'normal' gig at a company, but you do end up with good stories to tell.
Pretty obvious when you think about it. My Father was an engineer, although a different one than I am. As a child you pick things up when you grow. The fact that I had a computer at home back 3 decades ago, automatically meant I already had an upper hand and a better understanding of how computers work than most of my classmates who only got to see a computer almost a decade later for an hour every week in school. Also having an engineer as a father meant you had these weird books full of knowledge that you could browse through and get immersed in, for free, since I was basically a toddler. He could help me with homework, even if it was to explain integral calculus, which I could not comprehend before. Not saying that I couldn't choose any other profession, just that I naturally had the upper hand and years of experience in certain things even before going to college. I'm sure its the same for pretty much every profession as long as parents stay involved with their kids.
I still resent my parents for not keeping any books in the house apart from the dictionary. I can't remember how many times I flipped through the dictionary out of boredom growing up. Whenever I'd go to my grandmother's place, I loved to take random books off the book shelf and read through them.
I honestly feel like a great way to educate kids is not to teach them anything directly at all, but to instead leave lots of material around for them to discover themselves.
My father had a big book shelf in his office room in our house which spanned two of the walls. As a kid I loved to browse the shelf and pick up different kinds of literature. I remember reading Jules Verne's “Journey to the Center of the Earth“ around the age of 10 and although it was a rather tough read, I was blown away.
Why anyone is surprised? Parents are the most powerful role models for children, especially at early age. Also they have good opportunity to teach they kids and what they will teach depends on what they know. This limits social mobility, but all proposals to fix this so far IMHO will do more harm (to high acheivers) than good (to under achievers). This is a difficult problem to tackle so I don't expect easy solutions to work here.
So, looks like contacts and internal knowledge are much more important for a PHD than it is for most professions, but the situation is still much better than for politicians.
I'd say that means the PHD job market has a large problem. When politicians are the ones you can compare yourself to look good, it's because things are not good at all.
That is one interpretation. Another interpretation is that in pursuing academic career requires a certain attitude towards studying which people growing in a family of academics are a lot more likely to have. In STEM it makes a lot more sense financially to enter the workforce after graduation so staying in university for another 5+ years requires some real love for science. In my experience people with parents in academia are more likely to get financial and moral from their family while they are doing phd.
It is pretty well established that educational attainment is significantly heritable [1]. Although less studied, there is evidence of significant heritability of interests as well [2]
Twin studies, adoption studies, and now GWAS studies are quickly putting an end to the idea of some significant but elusive environmental effect that accounts for heritability measures in exclusion to genes. Regarding the articles, I don't find them compelling. The author of the first one identifies himself as an emergentist, which is conceptually vacuous. The critique in the second article doesn't target the strongest of heritability studies regarding IQ, educational attainment, etc, which have been widely replicated.
All behavioral genetic studies heretofore rely on statistical analysis to draw correlations from datasets. Even ones that identiy specific SNPs are often unable to identify the physiological mechanism by which, say, Gene X influences intelligence. Without that, it's impossible to conclude that expression of Gene X isn't environmentally-influenced, and only has positive effects on intelligence when a certain diet is consumed, or sleep schedule kept, or common childhood illness avoided, for example. Another trait influenced by complex genetic and environmental factors, variability in adult height, has similarly been held to be highly heritable based on flawed studies with flawed construction, methodology, and assumptions, despite the fact that the average in many countries has changed on a time scale incompatible with a purely or even highly genetic basis. And height is easy to measure: get a ruler. Models of intelligence have shifted over the years because, speaking frankly, we don't really know how to measure it objectively.
Your objection to the first is ad hominem, to the second erroneous.
Belief in genetic determinism, as we conceive it, is at odds with the principles of skepticism and scientific inquiry. Like eugenics before it, it really, really wants to find a scientific basis to justify the state of the world we live in even as that state shifts under us. There are massive holes in both the execution of studies and the underlying rationale, and it's impossible to speak in good faith on the topic without acknowledging that.
>Without that, it's impossible to conclude that expression of Gene X isn't environmentally-influenced
Conclusions do not require certainty. Science is about converging to the best explanation, not about unimpeachable conclusions. But when there are no plausible causal paths to explain measured correlations aside from, e.g., gene->phenotype causation, then causation along the available causal path is a valid tentative conclusion.
> variability in adult height, has similarly been held to be highly heritable... despite the fact that the average in many countries has changed on a time scale incompatible with a purely or even highly genetic basis.
I don't know how you can possibly think this supports your argument against genetic heritability. Height has a heritability measure of around 80%, which leaves 20% for environmental factors. There is no contradiction in noting that average height has increased over time when the current best analysis leaves significant room for variation due to environment.
>despite the fact that the average in many countries has changed on a time scale incompatible with a purely or even highly genetic basis.
Nothing you've said demonstrates this claim.
>Your objection to the first is ad hominem
Nope. Emergentism is his avowed conceptual framework, a lens through which he analyzes evidence and draws conclusions. But if the conceptual framework is vacuous, which it is, then that undermines the value of conclusions based on that framework.
If certainty has not been achieved, then you should remain skeptical. The lack of a causal explanation is a massive discontinuity in logic which suggests that our conclusions may be very wrong ("retrograde action" wrong).
>Height has a heritability measure of around 80%, which leaves 20% for environmental factors.
This is what I mean. The studies that determined this used datasets from wealthy Western countries that are more ethnically homogeneous than average. Similar studies done in less wealthy countries found measures of environmental influence as high as 40%. In countries of similar wealth, average height can be predicted by measuring the level of economic inequality, suggesting that environmental factors such as healthcare, nutrition, and fitness access are all significant inputs.
>Nothing you've said demonstrates this claim.
Dutch average height for men grew 8 inches in a century. For comparison, average height for men worldwide has grown around 3 inches in the last millennium. There is evidence to suggest that pre-agricultural male height was similar to where it is now, if not taller; the structure of our civilization is the difference between the average man being 5'6" and 6", i.e., more than one SD from today's average in either direction.
I understand that it is harrowing to think that even our basic physiological attributes may be determined in no small part by the way we're treated by society (that is to say, that decisions could be made to improve your quality of life but are not), but it is very much a possibility.
>Nope. Emergentism is his avowed conceptual framework, a lens through which he analyzes evidence and draws conclusions. But if the conceptual framework is vacuous, which it is, then that undermines the value of conclusions based on that framework.
You are literally invoking a textbook ad hominem fallacy.
>If certainty has not been achieved, then you should remain skeptical
This is like saying you should be skeptical of all scientific claims. But such a claim is in tension with the obvious successes of science and engineering despite the inherent tentativeness of scientific conclusions. Clearly we need something more nuanced. We can draw tentative conclusions and move forward with knowledge while also acknowledging the tentative nature of said knowledge. Global skepticism regarding all scientific results is paralyzing.
>The studies that determined this used datasets from wealthy Western countries that are more ethnically homogeneous than average.
It has to be for any such measure to be meaningful. For example, if you put a toddler in a box and starve it to death, its development stops completely. But this doesn't mean that environmental influence is 100% for all phenotypes. Heritability is a blunt measure for something highly multidimensional. As such, care must be used in its interpretation. What heritability tells us is that given similar environments, what variation in measurable traits is due to variation in genetics or variation in environment. An ideal measure of heritability is a function of environment and would be proportional to the rate of change of environmental influence at every step change in environment.
Of course, such a measure is impossible and so we're left with our current blunt measure. But we can reason about some features of the ideal measure. For example, environmental influences have diminishing returns, thus there comes a point at which the rate of change of environmental influence is zero, meaning better or worse environment has no bearing on the trait and genetic variation dominates outcomes. On the other extreme, environmental influences are dominant. The relevant questions for the validity of heritability is whether the rate of change of environmental influence is steep at the current average environment. If it is steep, then it invalidates drawing conclusions based on measured heritability as the value is unstable.
But your point about Dutch average height does not bear on this. The heritability measure is blind to global average changes in quality of environment. The fact that average height grew so substantially implies that the average environment changed substantially over that period. The Flynn effect is another example, where the average IQ across the population grew substantially over a similar time period. But this doesn't have any direct relevance to the heritability measure of IQ. The question is whether current measures of heritability are stable for typical variations in environment. Regarding height, I would guess yes as calories are abundant in the western world, even among the poor.
>You are literally invoking a textbook ad hominem fallacy.
Notice the word fallacy. Identifying logical fallacies by name is to help recognize patterns of invalid arguments. Ad hominem is only relevant if the argument is not valid. But my point a vacuous conceptual framework leading to specious conclusions is a valid argument.
Hmm. My mother was a university lecturer in mathematics and I don't think contacts etc helped at all with my PhD in maths and academia. What did help was the enthusiasm she passed in for her subject when I was young and the encouragement she gave me. Our house was full of mathematics books.
My sister on the other hand had no interest in mathematics whatsoever!
What’s the difference between a senior faculty and a politician? In both cases, you’re more of an icon than and individual contributor. The difference gets even smaller if faculty become dean.
For those who don't know, the Varna system, also known as the caste system has long been justified as the 'natural order' of a scholar's child being a scholar, a warrior's child being a warrior, a tradesmen child being a tradesman and the lowest class of a menial worker's child being a menial worker.
The fact that so many are willing color the discussion with - observable trends seem to suggest this is a natural fact of life is only elementary is both disgusting and unsurprising.
I think there's a difference between cramming someone into a caste in perpetuity and ... them having a childhood where they're exposed to job skills and study habits that somewhat favor a certain career because that's what their parent does.
My kids saw a whole lot more of "how technology works" and mathematics during elementary school than most kids. A lawyer's kid probably heard a lot more of argument, rhetoric, and legal reasoning than mine did. They still could do something completely different-- the lawyer's kid could go do technology and my kid could grow up to be a lawyer-- it's just a somewhat less likely outcome.
> the lawyer's kid could go do technology and my kid could grow up to be a lawyer-- it's just a somewhat less likely outcome.
And what would be the likelyhood of the child of a single mom working 2 unskilled jobs to be either of those? Like I mentioned in a different comment, Systematic barriers exist without being consciously built and are then perpetuated as just the natural way of things.
Obviously paths out of poverty need to be improved-- and everyone given as much of a hand up as possible.
And, what you're saying is a bit orthogonal to what was discussed here: attaining social mobility for everyone doesn't need to erase familial proclivities towards certain professions. In your eagerness to speak harshly to everyone else here, I think you're missing that what others are discussing is not what you're attacking.
Indeed, uh... I left a tech career where I averaged making 7 figures a year to run youth programs and help kids from non-engineering backgrounds-- including a large share of disadvantaged kids-- into having many of the same kinds of advantages my kids do in being able to imagine an engineering career and learn basic skills and the details of the path at an early age.
So, please don't lecture me about systematic barriers. You don't need to tear down family traditions and passing down of skills to greatly reduce inequity: you just need to ensure that everyone gets a reasonable chance at a path upwards. Some can show up in my programs and become engineers and mathematicians; others can go in someone else's speech program and become marketers and lawyers; other, more fortunate people, can lean on familial upbringing; and yet others can choose something other than the path of least resistance and do something less probable.
Where exactly did I attempt to tear down family traditions?
This entire thread of conversation began with my highlighting the parallels of how the Varana system, supposedly of divine origins, accepted and prevalent, even today in Silicon Valley[1], is not dissimilar to what the original article and the parent comment spoke about.
Though sure, please do go ahead and argue the things that I allegedly said.
You went on the attack vs. someone who pointed out that you were likely to follow in the footsteps of your parents.
It's not a social justice or caste issue to have a probability distribution that says, say, within the trades, that a plumber's kid is more likely to be a plumber than an electrician, and vice-versa of an electrician's kid, when the two professions are of equal status.
If there's a whole lot of people below the class of tradesmen who have no real path to moving up-- that is a social justice, class, or caste issue. But surely not all manifestations of not-quite-equally likely outcome are social justice, class, or caste issues.
> Though sure, please do go ahead and argue the things that I allegedly said.
Seriously, the rush to sarcasm/abrasive language is not helpful to actually figuring out what you're arguing or to having a productive conversation.
Someone I know is an illegal immigrant from Central America. She cleans houses for a living. Her husband is also illegal immigrant and he paints houses. Her daughter is going to one of the top private schools in SF, on a full scholarship. She dreams of Yale, and I would bet that she gets it easily.
If you are dedicated to education, there is plenty of opportunity to succeed. It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make it out of poverty easily, but that’s just how the world works. For those that make the effort, it’s very available.
That’s not actually “just how the world works” that’s “how people have chosen to organise society”. Other places work differently with different outcomes.
Too bad, "I have no other [ways to organize society] for you" (Stalin [my edit]). In a paradise there is no shortage of anything and everyone has whatever they wish. Not the case for the real world we live in. Take it or leave it.
Well that’s a non-sequitur. The idea that the only other approach is an unattainable paradise is nonsense. There are so many different approaches in operation on this planet right now after all.
It’s only varnana if you think of yourself as a victim. Those that choose to not think of themselves as victims can succeed unfettered if they focus their efforts in the right direction.
Ah ok, so if the daughter of the person you mentioned doesn't get into Yale on a scholarship where as the boy who has Yale alumni parents and didn't need scholarship did get in, then it is perhaps because the girl didn't think of herself as a Yale student. It's all clear to me now.
I think that’s a bit facile. When you look at other traditional cultures, or unmodernized cultures offspring still likely follow their parents’ footsteps, but that doesn’t mean those are caste systems. People are permitted to pursue alternatives and aren’t forbidden.
> People are permitted to pursue alternatives and aren’t forbidden.
Systematic barriers are seldom built consciously, yet they exist and without conscious effort to break down continue to be perpetuated.
From the point of view of opportunities/privileges available to an individual, is there really a difference between the caste system and a class system?
I think there is a difference. As I understand the caste system, it’s inherited durably. If I’m X, not only will I always be X, but my kids and grandkids will also be X, so there’s no point in trying to become “not X”.
Not so for socioeconomic class. My grandfathers milled steel and mined coal. They made sure their kids became the first generation in the family to attend college. My parents became teachers and made sure their kids focused on education and we all attended “good colleges” and have built careers. My generation is saving for college while the kids are still in diapers.
That’s still systemic advantages from the family, but it’s marked change in economic class in just two generations, which is IMO dramatically different from the Indian caste system. It still matters who your parents are, but in a significantly different (and I think more fair) way.
> It still matters who your parents are, but in a significantly different (and I think more fair) way.
It amazes me when people think the current socioeconomic structures are fair.
You do realise that most people here, including perhaps you are, economically speaking, closer to being poor than being part of the 1% rich, right? The economic gap between those you might consider poor and yourself is a rounding error magnitude of the gap between yourself and the super rich. This is not an accident.
God forbid, but you and your kids are perhaps one or two medical, legal or natural calamities away from that few generations of advancement you talk about.
I don’t care that someone has well over 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than I have. It doesn’t materially negatively affect my life in the least and, on the contrary, their inventions make my daily life better by wildly more than any negative impacts their houses, yachts, airplanes, or rockets could possibly have.
I’m here to spend my life energy and time pursuing the things that are important to me: raising and loving my family, doing work and hobbies I find stimulating, traveling and learning about the world. Bellyaching that I’m not a literal or figurative monarch is not among the ways I choose to spend my time and energy.
> I don’t care that someone has well over 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than I have. It doesn’t materially negatively affect my life in the least and, on the contrary, their inventions make my daily life better by wildly more than any negative impacts their houses, yachts, airplanes, or rockets could possibly have.
Wait, are you under the impression that people with extreme wealth typically got it by inventing something?
It's called capitalism because the owners of capital reap most of society's economic rewards. Which is in the form of more capital.
IOW, the rich get richer.
The optimal wealth investment strategy to grow a large pile of money into a larger pile over the long term is pretty simple too (rebalance your portfolio annually, buy and hold), and attempts at a 'smarter' strategy tend to fail pretty miserably.
The American story used to be rags-to-riches-to-rags, but not anymore. These days once you've reached 'riches' your descendants are fairly likely to stay rich, and laziness on their part (ie. leaving the money pile on autopilot) is actually an asset (eg. Donald Trump would be a wealthier today if he had invested his inheritance and just left it alone).
Conversely, it is harder than ever to go from rags-to-riches in the first place.
You do not benefit from the wealthy in society pulling the ladder up behind themselves.
Not sure what you mean by “institutional victim mentality” but I would say that your example is a great example of institutional failure. Ideally kids would get good career advice from many other places (schools etc) which would rectify a lot of the negative damage caused by the bad advice from their parents.
The thing many of these have in common is that connections help you. In other words, if your parent is in x career, it means that you get a starting bonus if you do the same. On top of this, most children have some knowledge of the job conditions: Familiarity seems to lessen risk (even if it doesn't - it is the reason showers seem safe but airplanes might not).
Legislators seem to get more done if they are well-connected, for example, and a parent introducing you to their connections makes you a better legislator, probably at a younger age than your parent. Yes, you can do some job shadowing at this other dentist's office: I can put in a good word for you at the electrician's union so you can get into the schooling they offer. Yes, you can work at my plumbing company and learn - it isn't like this state requires licenses, so you'll be just fine.
I’d be interested to see what the rate increase is for Athletes. I think of landing a top research as the equivalent of getting a spot on an NBA team (or other major sports team).
Both are extremely competitive with only a select few spots in the entire country. Additionally, starting at a very young age is a huge advantage for both athletes and aspiring academics.
There are plenty of current professional athletes whose parents were also professional athletes. Pat Mahomes's son may be familiar to you, Patrick Mahomes.
Peyton and Eli Manning are the sons of Archie Manning. Ken Griffey Jr. and his dad played on the same team at one point. Jr.'s son "Trey" made it into the NFL as a wide receiver.
It does seem to matter to a degree. It's not a guarantee though.
For me, the progression has been: software engineer, software engineer, railroad engineer, railroad engineer, farmer. I will be very interested to see what my son picks and I very much plan to allow him to pursue his own interests.
It is a little off subject, but I agree. I am watching my kid develop with great interest and while I do have preferences, I recognize she will need to play to her strengths.
Unless she turns out to be an idiot, in which case I may need to force a path.
so it seems that the better paying a field is the children of parents in that field are more likely to choose that field as well.
on edit: by paying I also mean all the perks you get as well (just as when I negotiate on a job I also negotiate the perks), when you're growing up and see you have a pretty good life that would be something that might attract you to the field your parents are in. So academics might not get paid as much as the private sector but at the higher levels there are some pretty sweet perks.
> It’s equally unsurprising that the ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families themselves pursue such a similar path and achieve similar outcomes.
That kind of misses the point. You want to train as many effective engineers and researchers as you can. The point of the article is that most Ivies can comfortably train more people, but doing so would reduce some of the scarcity "value" of an Ivy League degree. Who cares? The goal is building.
Claude Shannon and Kelly Johnson both got their start at Michigan. The Michigan model of "train as many engineers as you can without compromising substance" is a great. If the Ivies want to create artificial scarcity to avoid "diluting brand value", then their ability to access public subsidies should be curtailed. Give it to Michigan instead.
But are Ivy League universities really that much better at training people or is their success mostly due to skimming from the top of the applicant pool? If the latter, then it seems like those students would do just as well if they didn't exist and nothing's really lost or gained either way by their exclusivity.
If they have a magic recipe for creating success, why can't other universities copy it? Does it depend on scarce elite professors? In that case, they probably can't scale themselves up either.
There’s been research on this point and it supports your thesis. After adjusting for applicant scholastic aptitude, the additional benefit from attending an elite school is “generally indistinguishable from zero.”
Excerpt from article*: In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper** by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. 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.
Their magic recipe is putting a bunch of smart, mostly rich, people in one place and then telling them they are part of an exclusive community. Then they give them access to the older successful members of the community and constantly remind them that once they are the older successful members they need to help out the recent grads.
Its funny, my co worker insisted that his children shall go to MIT so they can have all the opportunities he did. He didn't see any irony is saying this to me, his peer, a first gen engineer from University of Midwest Farm Community.
And I agree, its not surprising kids learn by example and inherit so much from their parents.
Even your undergrad (which I’m interpreting as UIUC) is elite compared to most state schools for CS, and is very selective for direct to major. People like me are doubly screwed.
UIUC is a fairly huge assumption. Are you sure you want to do that?
I think you're imaging a person that has more advantages than you do (or I did -- UIUC wouldn't have me). That's very likely not the case, at least not nearly as much as you think. Don't sweat it.
You're not screwed, and it's not a competition anyway. I came from humble academic beginnings and failures and managed to get a job I love that pays the bills and helps me save for the future. It was the passionate people I met that got me through it, not the credentials of the university (by quite a long shot)
Perhaps I don’t! I also went to an ag school, except one that’s objectively unimpressive.
I honestly can’t save as much as my peers, make a pittance compared to the Ivy Leaguers and have never achieved a fraction of what most of these hyper accomplished folks did even while being much older. Sometimes I feel like I should just wither away because there’s not much hope of ever achieving anything at this rate if I’m just innately inferior.
Well, don't feel that way. That's some poor story telling about yourself. And how you frame issues is everything. [1] At least you can save, which puts you over a huge % of Americans, and 99% of the world I'd bet. You have an education (I assume?) which is a huge leg up. I wouldn't bother saying all this, except I was a very late start myself, with lots of debt, zero education, and not even a high school degree. It took time, but that's something we all still have.
There was a guy in the warehouse (3rd shift) that worked with me before all the re-invention. He was +20 years my senior, working two jobs. He gave me a talk similar to above and it was a wake-up for me. That helped me. Nowadays, my peers help me by being supportive and inspiring.
Hey by the way, i always thought CBT was rubbish, until the intersection with that, Stoicism, and Meditation was made clear in the book Happiness Hypothesis. How dumb / arrogant was I to write off stuff that seemed to help millions of others ... Another thing I had to learn the hard way.
Also, what is this “has become” language for? It implies that the this elite group is more self-reinforcing than it used to be, but there’s no evidence for that. Harvard’s 1940s admission rate of 85% was certainly not a more meritocratic time.
The ratio you ask for is almost certainly decreasing over time, not increasing, right?
So for instance the story is that Cambridge University was founded by people who were disgruntled at Oxford. Also there's a number of institutions that were founded due to religious affiliation, IIRC UCL in London.
Nowadays there's an entrenchment that makes it hard to just go and do your own uni. It's not illegal, but you need to find supporters who won't just say "hey why don't you just go to X existing uni". And there's already a uni for whatever speciality you're into, plus the big names that are the specialists for every subject.
Science needs to advance more so that we can determine nature vs. nurture. It's all genetic (nature) in the end - but I think being able to say "x lacks the genetic makeup to dunk a basketball" vs "x was malnourished as a child so they wont grow enough to be able to dunk a basketball" is useful. I think articles looking at outcomes of the children of successful people are unhealthy and will focus too much on environmental impacts. We will see uneven breakdowns (by race, sex, height, etc.) and think that means something needs to be fixed...but we aren't able to fully explain how the breakdowns got to where they are.
I think it's been fairly well established that genetics determines the max values -- max IQ, max height, max athleticism, etc. and then nurture determines if you reach the max.
This seems overly reductionist. You have at least two cases that contradict:
1) The fact that biological processes tend not to have hard limits and "kill switches" at those limits, but rather feedback loops which increase or decrease in efficacy due to a number of factors, which are themselves factors for further downstream processes
2) The tendency towards physiological plasticity to facilitate functional homeostasis (e.g., there was a case of an athlete whose smaller blood vessels enlarged in order to maintain blood flow following an embolism; this was disabled athlete who walked on her hands in lieu of her non-functional legs)
I think what is more likely is that that there is a level of a given quality which your genes will have you tend toward (with environment determining how much you will overshoot or undershoot it), but also that the human form is very adaptable and will often respond to pressures by routing around lower-functioning systems, which may require unconventional support but also create unconventional and exceptional achievement (the aforementioned athlete is a paralympian with arm-based muscular strength and endurance - a neurological matter - which outpaces most abled athletes).
There's plenty left to be directly determined by nature after setting maximum values.
You've got far more food than you need. You can't get any taller -- what do you do with it? Should you eat it at all?
How resilient should you be to less-than-ideal input? Say it's unseasonably cold for a few months. Should you get shorter, or is it better to just give up and die?
You don't have enough food. You're not in any danger of starving, but you're not going to reach maximum height, IQ, _and_ athleticism. Which trait(s) should be lowered? By how much?
Genetics doesn't just specify the maximum outcome. It specifies the entire set of possibilities, and how those possibilities are reached.
I would add into the mix that it's also about access and resources which give maybe a bigger leg up.
Engineers, college educators, etc make more money, their kids presumably go to good schools, they presumably have more hands on time available to help their kids succeed and more connections, legacy admissions etc.
I see this in my sport. One of the olympians for climbing for US comes from climbing 'royalty.'
being literally born into the sport from day 1 makes a huge difference. plus having access to a groundbreaking gym and youth training program your mom literally created ;0
Not to take away achievement. strength is strength, intelligence is intelligence. it's all very impressive and doesn't come without work.
but I think opportunity and access to resources are important factors to consider.
You likely don’t realize that your kids will also have an easier chance at succeeding because of other privileges they enjoy, aside from the merits of having intelligent and educated parents.
Take a similarly educated family who happen to live in Gaza, for instance, and it’s obvious that the children will have a different set of opportunities available to them.
Most of all your kids are likely to have IQ's close to the median of you and your wife. This is likely the most important factor of all as heart-breaking and unfair as this is.
Definitely seemed very true during my PhD. Many of my peers had PhD or professor parents (I don't). I think the primary reasons for the increase are valuing the career through parents and having a mentor who knows the admissions game. I blundered my first couple times applying because I lacked good mentorship in preparing my applications.
I don't get this. Why does one need mentorship in filling out an application. I got mine in the mail, filled them out, and sent them in. It never occurred to me I needed someone to guide me.
My dad (MIT) did tell me many years earlier what was necessary to get into MIT: 1. straight A's 2. high SAT scores 3. an achievement in extracurricular activities
(MIT rejected me.)
It's like the Boy Scouts. I talked with an Eagle dad a couple years ago, who talked about shepherding his boy through the Eagle program to get the badge. He was very proud of his son. I mentioned that I was an Eagle, too. He asked me how it was with my dad helping me. I said he never did a thing, and it didn't occur to me to ask. I just decided I wanted one, got the list of requirements, and did them one by one. None of them were hard, it just required time and persistence.
> I don't get this. Why does one need mentorship in filling out an application. I got mine in the mail, filled them out, and sent them in. It never occurred to me I needed someone to guide me.
> My dad (MIT) did tell me many years earlier what was necessary to get into MIT: 1. straight A's 2. high SAT scores 3. an achievement in extracurricular activities
Yeah, so many of these arguments about who comes from what category seem to assume that talent and inclination is randomly distributed among 18 year olds and that university where you find yourself.
> What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that academics raise academics, doctors doctors, Olympians Olympians, teachers teachers, etc.
Actually, I suspect that most teachers discourage their children to follow in their footsteps ...
And your points about doctors, olympians, academics, etc. have a common point:
Large, up front expenditure of money.
A child of a steelworker simply isn't becoming a doctor short of a very, very small number of paths (generally involving military service).
A child of a high-school teacher simply isn't becoming an Olympic figure skater. The monetary investment is far too titanic.
Engineering used to be one of the few fields where you could transition from blue collar to white collar even if you were a child from a poor family. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be very true, anymore.
> A child of a steelworker simply isn't becoming a doctor short of a very, very small number of paths (generally involving military service).
This wasn’t true in Ireland in the 70s or 80s, a far poorer country than contemporary America. The US system of funding higher education has many, many problems but not allowing smart people to study more is not among them. If you can get admitted to medical school you will get a loan to cover the costs.
> A child of a high-school teacher simply isn't becoming an Olympic figure skater. The monetary investment is far too titanic.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever, is the child of a middle school principal and a police officer. Tiger Woods is the son of an infantry officer. Money is not the limiting factor on more people becoming elite level athletes. It’s some combination of talent and insane, deluded commitment.
> Engineering used to be one of the few fields where you could transition from blue collar to white collar even if you were a child from a poor family. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be very true, anymore.
The average US college graduate has $35,000 in debt. Engineering is one of the fields where your college matters least. More people attend college than at any time in US history.
> Engineering used to be one of the few fields where you could transition from blue collar to white collar even if you were a child from a poor family. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be very true, anymore.
It seems more true than ever before. Software engineering in particular is probably one of the least credential sensitive careers in existence, and is huge and growing faster than just about any other job market.
I sometimes wonder about all the complaining that goes on about software engineering interviews. In many (maybe most) other fields of comparable earning potential, the gatekeepers are 4-12 years of schooling and professional unions, not a few hours of awkward whiteboarding.
Yup. I know successful ones without even a high school diploma. I have no academic education in CS.
> all the complaining
I do, too. One thing never mentioned is that a lot of people apply for software jobs with fraudulent resumes and just having memorized some jargon. The job interviewer needs some way to filter out these people before committing to 6 months of a high salary. Sure, they'll miss a few diamonds in the rough, but it's likely better than hiring a team of frauds.
Quite a few teachers enjoy being teachers. When my younger brothers moved out of the house, my mother decided to become a school teacher to occupy her time. She can yak for hours about the school board blundering or administration being dicks or her colleague being a weirdo but make no mistake; she loves that job. Every summer, all she can talk about is how she can't wait for the school season to start again.
I guess you mean that teachers do a lot of lobbying, and take that to indicate job dissatisfaction. But if so, that's a mistake. Thinking that you aren't receiving enough funding and simultaneously enjoying your work are not mutually exclusive.
> recirculating resources among the most exclusive and wealthy while chanting social-justice keywords
Indeed, Harvard aggressively defends its admissions program as "holistic" while rating Asians as having lower personal ratings that they define as measuring "likeability", "courage", and "kindness" [1]. You might ask yourself how an institution which claims to be anti-racist exhibits behavior of the opposite kind.
What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. It appears to be collusion either of the sort discussed in the article or the informal sort where each college copies their competitors' quotas.
College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a magnet school in Virginia, often ranked the top high school in the US. Admissions is (or was) based mostly on an admissions test, with a smaller portion based on middle school grades. In recent years, the student body was 70% Asian, 20% White, and the rest other minorities. Despite literally decades of trying to increase percentages of Black and Hispanic students at the school with outreach programs and tutoring, percentages have never exceeded single digits.
So what did the school board do? They scrapped the admissions process altogether, in favor of a "holistic" one [1]. Lesson? Be careful if you're in a minority group that over-achieves your population demographics, because you will be punished for it.
Importantly, the proposal that activists sought was not a "holistic" process but instead a merit lottery. For all of the whinging that people have calling the activists racists, they wanted a system that still would have overrepresented asian students compared to the local population and had minimal opportunity for creeping bias through subjective systems.
And there were programs that successfully increased representation of black and hispanic students at TJ several decades ago - but these programs were halted.
"Under the new rules, Fairfax will first identify all eighth-graders who meet certain academic criteria: those who achieve an unweighted GPA of at least 3.5 while taking Algebra I or a higher-level math class, in addition to math and science honors courses and either an English or social studies honors course."
"In a bid to ensure geographical diversity, a certain number of seats will be allotted to every middle school in Fairfax County, to be filled by eighth-graders at that school who meet criteria."
Doesn't seem very meritocratic to me. Doing a lottery among everyone with a 3.5 is basically saying select every student that isn't failing. High school GPAs are highly inflated to the point that most people who would be competitive in the current application system have above a 3.9. The geographical diversity quota is de facto a race quota due to redlining and cultural enclaves. I don't know how you can possibly argue that accepting students from all over the district objectively through merit is worse than a geographic quota per middle school.
And what happens when you diversity admit these students who, by the admissions test, are not as competitive? The vast array of clubs and other high school competitions become dominated by the most competitive students, i.e. they're going to look like what TJ looks like now: 70% Asian according to the article. In effect you're tossing unprepared students into the deep end to get screwed for the college application process because they have 0 chance at securing any sort of extracurricular activity for themselves.
The real kicker here is that by the article's quoted data, 70% of the school is Asian. If you really wanted racial diversity in line with the population you'd also be pushing for increased white representation along the lines of a 150% increase in # of white students admitted. But that's not what these activists are talking about, which is how you know their ideas are just politically motivated garbage.
I attended TJ. I remember the test prep and the BS extracurriculars to pad resumes. I am not convinced that a student who has a 3.5 and has taken accelerated courses is unprepared to attend.
Extracurriculars at TJ (at least many years ago) were also tremendously diverse. Sure, somebody who has only taken Algebra 1 in 8th grade is less likely to end up with the top scores in the math olympiads out of the whole school (though who knows, loads of students didn't attend a school that offered algebra 1 in 7th grade so maybe they were brilliant and didn't have the option), but when I attended I did stuff like play bridge, watch rock concert footage, or rehearse a play during 8th period. This does not feel like a meaningful concern.
I am not, but I went to a public high school with a similar atmosphere as what I hear TJ is like. At least at my school, if you decided to do a lottery for students from across the city and set 3.5 as a threshold for lottery entrance, the competitiveness of my school in national competitions would have suffered severely. Anecdotally, the people I knew with 3.5-3.6 middle school GPAs were just uncompetitive when doing team tryouts and olympiads and also got lower grades in AP courses compared to straight A students. When college admissions came around they made it into much less prestigious and less competitive schools compared to the straight A students.
Anyone can play bridge or watch a rock concert. Not everyone can make the AIME and do math at a college sophomore level when they're a HS freshman. Schools like TJ and my high school should cater to the latter, not the former. The entire point of these schools is to _reward achivement above and beyond the norm_. Yeah, a student with a 3.5 can probably make it through TJ or any other competitive high school's courseload, but the point of these schools is that you put all the best of the best in the same place and network effects happen and push them to even higher levels of achievement _outside the classroom_. By admitting less competitive students (even if the application process isn't perfect) you prevent those levels of achievement from even happening at all.
All I can do is share my experience. I do find it weird how many people who have never interacted with TJ have developed incredibly strong opinions about it (so much so that several of my friends regularly receive hate mail from strangers who don't live in virginia).
> the point of these schools is that you put all the best of the best in the same place and network effects happen and push them to even higher levels of achievement _outside the classroom_.
This is the difference between you and me. I don't believe that the existing system admits the most meritorious students. Tons of people insist that I hate education and that I want to sabotage the most qualified students. But I don't believe that the test, with its entire cottage industry of prep (my parents were told that they should prepare for TJ when I was five), actually admits a more capable group of students than alternatives.
The reason I believe this is that I've seen this happen in earlier education. I went to an accelerated program starting in 3rd grade. It was wildly inequitable. After noticing that there were some schools that literally never sent a student to the accelerated system, my parents looked into it and discovered that the process was clearly not evaluating merit but instead admitting people who understood how to navigate the application structure. Relatively small changes in the process rapidly made things much more balanced geographically and the changes have stuck. Students who enrolled in the accelerated program from the previously absent schools did not fail.
I also think that the culture of prep damages people. A ton of my friends who are TJ alumni now share stories (well over a decade later) of how TJ was the most toxic learning ecosystem they have ever been in. These are people who are now faculty members at top universities, founders of successful startups, and more. The bulk of my friends from high school believe that they should have focused less on competitive schooling and spent more time on other things. Replacing bridge and drama with math competitions causes more harm, in my opinion.
TJ is also not the only place to get an accelerated education in northern virginia. If a student wants to partial differential equations in high school, most high schools in the area have attachments with George Mason, which enables access to these curricula. In fact, TJ does not offer those courses to high school freshmen, so the students at TJ that want to do what you say are stuck going to Mason anyway.
I also think that there are some extremely qualified students who'd be much better served by the IB programs offered at nearby schools. AP is just truly awful, in my opinion. You take smart kids and crush them into rigid curricula rather than letting them explore. All of us got deficient humanities educations at TJ.
> All of us got deficient humanities educations at TJ.
Perhaps. For those of us who didn't even receive a mediocre STEM education at our take-all-comers schools and still certainly got a significantly worse humanities education than you, it engenders bitterness and anger that you're arguing for pulling up the rug behind you and preventing the next generation of children from having access to a high quality education.
> A ton of my friends who are TJ alumni now share stories (well over a decade later) of how TJ was the most toxic learning ecosystem they have ever been in.
Is it more toxic than having classes where kids turn up drunk and threateningly brandish knives?
> Perhaps. For those of us who didn't even receive a mediocre STEM education at our take-all-comers schools and still certainly got a significantly worse humanities education than you, it engenders bitterness and anger that you're arguing for pulling up the rug behind you and preventing the next generation of children from having access to a high quality education.
My wife went to a public school in Fairfax County. Her humanities education was much better than the one I received at TJ. I believe that this is the least controversial thing I've said on the topic. The humanities at TJ was just bad. Only two years of history. Curricula rigidly defined by the College Board. No approaches designed to really stretch students, since faculty were told that the humanities were a second class citizen and students should have more work time allocated to STEM. I know at least one teacher who resigned in protest (from what was otherwise a dream job) because of how terribly the humanities were treated.
Even if you believe that the only way to get a quality education in northern virginia is to attend TJ (which is just false), the proposed changes do not change the number of people who are able to attend. Different children would attend TJ, yes. But nobody is taking a stick of dynamite to blow up the school.
> Is it more toxic than having classes where kids turn up drunk and threateningly brandish knives?
I'm not sure you are super familiar with the rest of FCPS. The other public schools offer a large suite of AP or IB classes (depending on the program) that make it very very easy for smart students to avoid what you are describing. If you are actually concerned about this, go complain about the accelerated middle school programs - which are largely designed to stick accelerated programs in the lowest performing schools so they can bring the grades up.
TJ also had its fair share of this stuff. I know some people a few years off from me who had class with a kid that would regularly masturbate in class. I know students who were preyed on by teachers.
Most students benefit from getting admitted to prestigious institutions, even when they are unprepared. Because education is not about persistent, transferable learning, it's a signalling game where you can learn some skills on the side, and the hardest part of the game is the admission. It's really hard to not get your creds if you're just decent, and there are a loot of decent students.
Certain most students would benefit. That much is obvious. But would the institution and the country benefit? Would the other students going there benefit? All of the smartest people I know went to prestigious institutions. The learning taking place there has never been the big draw; it's the student body and associated ecosystem of alumni, corporations, faculty, etc. You can learn anything by yourself off YouTube but you can't meet a large body of very intelligent people anywhere other than a prestigious college. The level of ambition, drive, and intelligence is incomparable to any corporation short of probably DeepMind or an early stage startup.
You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets.
The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ.... This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total police encounters. While it's tragic that the count is nonzero, any rational person should be amazed that the incidence is so vanishingly low, given the uncertainty inherent to policing. It's truly remarkable that it isn't much much higher. I couldn't find statistics about police killings of unarmed White people, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is higher than 31 since 2014.
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people is because the media has worked very hard to maximally exploit cherrypicked cases to get you to believe that.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence:
> A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 [2020] surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area.
The reason for this is obvious. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has had the same devastating impact within Black communities as it has had everywhere else in the world: increased criminality.
You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets.
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people [...]
This is unfair - note that the comment you are referring to didn't specially mention police unarmed shootings of blacks, the comment was about disportionate policing and killings (which presumably includes, but is not exclusive to shootings of unarmed citizens). I mention this because police shootings are not the only manifestation of institutional racism. There are also unjust arrests, accusations, beatings (remember, Rodney King wasn't shot), convictions, and general mistreatment. You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.
As a relatively well-off, straight-laced black man, I'm not overly afraid of getting shot by police (although I think I got close to catching a bullet once), but I am terrified of a stop going bad in some way, not because of what I observed in the media, but because of my own personal experiences.
I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence
Absolutely true, and that reflects my feelings as well. But that is not the same as saying black communities trust police.
I agree with everything you're saying save for this:
> I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
I understand there's a meme that exists about Black people needing to fear being murdered by the police. The entire point of my post is that, from a statistical point of view, this is almost as irrational as being afraid of terrorism, a plane crash, a shark attack, or being struck by lightning.
I was also focusing very narrowly on the topic of police killings of Black people, as you noted. I want to be very clear that I understand that Black people are victims of racism and socioeconomic inequality in other ways.
Yep. A lot of people who’ve been hurt by racism in the past, engage in loose pattern matching. If the story is a police officer shot a black person, to many it’s automatically racism, despite whatever the facts are.
That said, I’m black btw, the problems in the black community are not down to any one thing, but certainly the lack of two parent households is a biggie.
I was fortunate to grow up in California with two parents who could afford to send me to a private school.
Even absent more government intervention, just having more stable households will do a lot to fix the inequalities.
You raise a very important point and one that is difficult to discuss.
I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to leverage educational opportunities and had the stability of a supportive family.
When we talk about culture and the Black community, many people become understandably wary. It's a fine line between invoking culture and being seen to blame Black people for their own problems. Not to mention that, in doing so, it can be easy to lose sight of the richness of Black culture and its extensive contributions to so many aspects of the American experience e.g. in music, sports, entertainment, art, literature, and cuisine.
Perhaps a better way to frame it is that when a particular community has suffered so much injustice and attendant compounded stagnation, it's very hard to find an expedient solution to bring that community to parity that doesn't involve constructing fresh and even revolutionary internal narratives around achievement (and not just academic). Without that sort of effort, it might take many more generations for a combination of government intervention and the natural course of progress to fully remedy the imbalance.
And there's also the problem of exacerbating racial animus in the course of addressing that imbalance.
While I understand the need for it intellectually, I have substantial misgivings about preferential treatment being extended specifically to Black (or Hispanic or Native American) people along racial lines. There is something that feels deeply wrong about attempting to cure racial injustice by inflicting new racial injustices on people whose only fault was being born a particular race at the wrong moment in history, especially when we are purporting to be an enlightened society that has learned its lesson in this regard.
The position is unpopular with many here, but it is my opinion that we should not be devising a society that argues that a boy from an underprivileged neighborhood in Philadelphia is more deserving of opportunity than a girl from a disenfranchised part of the Rust Belt because he's Black and she's White. Rather, we should be saying that they are nearly equally in need of help from society because they are both disadvantaged. While this is not perfectly fair insofar as it does not factor in race, I believe it is a policy position that on balance would help the Black people who are most in need of it without leaving anyone of another race feeling as if (s)he's experiencing undue discrimination.
Unfortunately I believe that quandary is even more fraught than the issue of police killings and therefore at present resistant to the possibility of honest discourse.
Purely hypothetically, if there are string indications that parental socio-economic status influence the chances of their children. And that socio-economic status is somewhat (to strongly) correlated with previous race-influenced policies, is a generation or two of compensating for that "inflicting racial injustice"? Is a failure to compensate for it not explicitly "continuing racial injustice"?
I mean, I literally have no answer. Except, possibly, "yes" and "yes", and "the former is on the whole a lesser evil than the latter"?
> Purely hypothetically, if there are string indications that parental socio-economic status influence the chances of their children. And that socio-economic status is somewhat (to strongly) correlated with previous race-influenced policies, is a generation or two of compensating for that "inflicting racial injustice"? Is a failure to compensate for it not explicitly "continuing racial injustice"?
This makes two assumptions that I would challenge: that affirmative action as it exists at present is benefitting the most socioeconomically vulnerable underrepresented minorities and that the problem you're describing cannot be tackled with race neutral wealth redistribution and other need-aware policymaking.
Also, if you want to go down the racial grievance accounting rabbithole, then the Irish, Japanese, Jews, etc would like a word as well. You're be hard-pressed to find a race that doesn't have some such claim.
I am specifically NOT trying to go down "redress historical grievances", only "try to correct for currently existing imbalances".
There's probably also something to be said for having policies trying to get some geographic rebalancing in place as well. But, what I am trying to say is that redressing recent-past wrongs MAY require slight over-compensation.
To make anything other than sweeping generalisations, I would need numbers. Oh so many numbers.
The problem is that when you sign up for a tribe, you experience an emotional obligation and social pressure to adopt its beliefs wholesale, even if that means jettisoning rationality along the way.
This is an affliction that beleaguers both sides of the aisle.
There is no nationwide effort to classify killings based on whether an individual was armed at the time. It's better to just look at killings because those are significant enough to record.
The suggestion that there is some significant number of police killings that are going unreported - especially in the environment of the past several years - is categorically conspiratorial thinking. It fails the barest of sanity checks when you consider just how 'deep state' an effort would be required for that to be conducted at scale.
Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.
EDIT: Poster changed the link and added a comment. The below is a response to the modified comment.
> There is no nationwide effort to classify killings based on whether an individual was armed at the time. It's better to just look at killings because those are significant enough to record.
Sure. You can look at the total number of police killings and not only are the numbers still shockingly low as a percentage of arrests and encounters, but there is also no overt sign of an extraordinary racial bias: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de....
> The suggestion that there is some significant number of police killings that are going unreported - especially in the environment of the past several years - is categorically conspiratorial thinking. It fails the barest of sanity checks when you consider just how 'deep state' an effort would be required for that to be conducted at scale.
> Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.
Axios is one of the most credible outlets to both the GOP and the Democrats. Then-WH spokesperson Sarah Sanders has praised Axios as a worthy outlet.
The Raza database just looks at newspaper reports for deaths by police. There is no nationwide standard for how police deaths should be recorded.
You are the one suggesting bizarre conspiracy. A nationwide conspiracy of local newspaper outlets reporting deaths.
There are organizations dedicated to trying to ascertain the error in reported police shootings. They have found what is logically self-evident but that you refuse to accept: no reasonable suspicion of outsized error.
> A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,104 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.
And I will once again reiterate that the suggestion that there are some great number of police killings going undetected in the present highly charged environment is itself a crime against reason.
Asians are remarkably vulnerable to dying by police. They are also extremely under-represented in the police force, unlike black Americans. In the Bay Area, police officers are paid very well. These are stepping stones to middle class membership.
Also, discussions of racism in education may just completely exclude Asians, as if they aren't even worth mentioning even once.
> surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism
Are they disproportionately killed & policed? It depends on how you cut the statistics for your narrative. As a % of population vs % of Violent Crime vs % of Homicides etc etc. This is not to say there are no benefits about going into an encounter White.
Actually statistical studies usually don’t find racial discrepancies in the lethal use of force even when they don’t use control variables. However the differences exist in non-lethal use of force even when you account for various control variables (time of the day, location, income of the civilian, etc.)
It's not a contest. You don't "fix" anti-black racism with anti-Asian or anti-white racism. Racism is wrong wherever it's found.
I'm most concerned about anti-Asian racism because the problem is serious and unacknowledged. Anti-black racism is, at the very least, now acknowledged as a problem. I tend to focus my efforts where others don't.
Honestly, anybody that says Asians are institutionally discriminated against because they are a slightly lower percentage at Harvard, even though there are a lot of Asians at Harvard, is basically saying people of all kinds, including other Asians like me that can’t get into any kind of elite school don’t matter and are inferior. It’s insulting, at this point, and the anti-AA Asian groups that further this ideology are marginalizing themselves for it.
If you read the article I linked, you'd know that they aren't just a slightly lower percentage but are systematically rated lower on the "personal" axis by Harvard admissions officers simply because they are Asian. It's insulting, at this point, that people like you continue to claim there's no systemic discrimination despite _court discovered evidence_ to the contrary. The only other explanation for the gap in personal ratings is that you think Asians as a group have less of those traits than other races, which is racist in itself.
That is irrelevant. The degree to which some people state the importance of this is extremely insulting to Asians like me that went to state schools that are not terribly selective.
I am an Asian who went to a state school and I don't think it's irrelevant. Regardless of Harvard's prestige giving a whole class of people lower "personal" ratings because of their race is racism, pure and simple. I even see startups like Canvas/Jumpstart [1] that explicitly allow recruiters to filter applicants by race. I don't know how this isn't illegal and I hope someone sues them.
I took a look at your post history and it seems very bitter about lost opportunities due to "elite" schools being preferred. As a fairly recent grad from a state school I offer my own perspective: private schools like Harvard offer much better support and less cutthroat competition, but if you can rise to the top in state schools then you have the same opportunities as everyone else. Making 300k at Facebook is more than accessible to half the UC's including ones you wouldn't consider elite at all. I know many people working at Big 4 accounting, bulge bracket banks, big tech, startups, VC, etc.
I work at Amazon, so being an elite is either years away or impossible on account of my IQ. It seems I’m stuck in the coach class...
My gpa was only acceptable at my state school too - never heard of anyone getting into a good grad school with a 3.9something in CS out of my institution.
I wouldn't characterize Facebook as being all that different from Amazon. I'm sorry you view it that way. And Amazon is hardly "coach class". You make more money than my parents did combined as a SWE and with far less education. I suppose if you think being an elite means making millions it isn't happening at Amazon, but you aren't making millions at any salaried job short of being a C level exec. Just graduating from Harvard isn't making you millions. It takes 10+ years to reach that level regardless of what school you went to.
If your GPA was only acceptable then why are you blaming elitism for what you characterize as failures? Is that not a direct result of your own failure to study and succeed? (I'll also add that everyone I know who got into a good grad school aggressively pursued research and had multiple publications in top conferences by the time they applied; the standards are high and I wouldn't consider a 3.9 without research sufficient).
> but you aren't making millions at any salaried job short of being a C level exec. Just graduating from Harvard isn't making you millions
I mean it is happening at Google - look up how much Liz Fong Jones made as an ex-Caltech, ex-MIT engineer. Definitely happens to the MIT to Jane Street crowd and also happens to the people that can get offers at the IPOing startups I can’t even get interviews at. Not like I have the intellect to pass those interviews even if I got them though (I blame my parents for that).
> If your GPA was only acceptable then why are you blaming elitism for what you characterize as failures?
I definitely blame myself too, it’s why I have the dark thoughts whenever I cross a bridge. I should have done research in high school and I should have gotten at least two first author papers to a top conference in undergrad - instead I got 2 2nd author papers to medium tier conferences because I could never come up with any compelling research ideas. All of my work is ultimately meaningless because it just wasn’t enough - it’s extremely depressing.
The company I work for now pays substantially more than Google/Facebook/et. al and most people on my team are from random state schools, many with no experience at FAANG. You can certainly make millions from a pre-IPO startup (and I have 2nd degree knowledge of many people that did get rich off IPOs), but you're not making that at the Google of today.
I'm sorry you feel that way about your past. You should consider seeing a counselor. I've found that a growth mindset is important to ensuring you keep succeeding because there's nobody you can just copy once you've made it this far. Failures shouldn't be depressing but motivating instead. All this "I should have" thought should be "Now I know I should" instead. In your case, "I should have aimed higher" -> "I will aim higher now that I know". I can definitely empathize with you - I played video games all day in high school and only got into CS because of playing video games 5 hours a day and wanting to work with them. I screwed around freshman and sophomore year and destroyed my GPA. I came back and grinded and brought it back up the rest of my years.
Good luck. I'm sure you're more brilliant than you think if you made it to Amazon. If you ever need motivation go read the Reddit threads on people saying how hard it is to make it to Amazon.
> The company I work for now pays substantially more than Google/Facebook/et. al and most people on my team are from random state schools
That's...interesting, because it's certainly not the way the LinkedIn pages of most folks at Hudson River Trading, 2Sigma, Stripe or Citadel would imply (I did get into Citadel, but for a 2nd tier role). Of course, it would make sense for Netflix, which has a more Amazon-like hiring strategy.
> I've found that a growth mindset is important to ensuring you keep succeeding because there's nobody you can just copy once you've made it this far. Failures shouldn't be depressing but motivating instead.
I've had a lot of people say that, but after being beaten down and called stupid for 25 years it has worn on me.
Hi, I'm Asian, graduated from a state school with a humanities degree, worked my way from tech support at a tiny startup into engineering, and now (several jobs later) work as a software eng at Stripe. I've met plenty of other engineers here with non-traditional backgrounds.
I think you're:
1. way too hard on yourself. If you broaden your scope just a bit, you'll see that Amazon is an elite engineering organization.
2. buying way too much into phony credentialism. I don't make a big deal out of it, but personally I consider being able to hold my own engineering-wise while having gone to a state school as a badge of honor.
3. giving way too much headspace to comparing yourself with others in envy. There's always someone better, smarter, etc. I find them around me all the time. I choose to see them as mentors and role models, rather than rivals or competitors.
> I should have done research in high school and I should have gotten at least two first author papers to a top conference in undergrad - instead I got 2 2nd author papers to medium tier conferences because I could never come up with any compelling research ideas. All of my work is ultimately meaningless because it just wasn’t enough - it’s extremely depressing.
I don't think you're ever going to be satisfied if this is your definition of success. You should try to find meaning in the work itself, not in the recognition or status that comes from it.
I’m a 50 year old Asian software engineer. Let me give you some advice because you sound angry and miserable.
You must have been beaten down by your parents over the last several decades and it has rubbed into you. I get it. Back in the 70s when I grew up, it was worse because they could legit beat me with a belt if they wanted and it was socially acceptable.
You need to understand that you are doing great. You have a job at Amazon that will help you get jobs for the rest of your career. The Amazon name pops on a resume. Stop worrying about others that got into Google or Facebook or Jane Street. All you are doing is reinforcing a circle of self hate. Fuck it.
I failed getting into Google 5 times. I failed getting into Facebook 3 times. I flunked at Amazon twice. Fuck, I haven’t gotten into any FAANG at all. That doesn’t measure your self worth. Who the fuck cares. I think you are probably jealous at all those that got in but stop thinking about it. You can forge your own path and be extremely successful without ever working at a FAANG. I worked at Uber but besides that it was all two-bit startups and shitty companies. and I did okay but you will probably make more from Amazon than I ever did at Uber. But I really made the most money in real estate. I’m semi-retired at this point because of that.
There’s nothing more important in life than being happy. Stop worrying about money. Worry about being happy. Go spend money on shit that makes you happy every now and then. Take vacations. Get a girlfriend and go traveling. Stop worrying about money and worry about proficiency. If you are programming because you think it will bring you money and not because you love it, then your life will be miserable.
Let go of the trauma that your upbringing brought you. It’s toxic and you are suffering for it. I get it. My parents wanted me to be a doctor and when push came to shove I told them no. They were furious for years but I never felt so free in my life. I stopped caring about them and what they said and just moved on.
You’re still young. Don’t waste your life stewing over others that got into better schools or better companies. Take what you have now and leverage it as you move up the ladder. Make smart decisions for your career based on what interests you, not just because of FANG or money. If you are happy and are progressing, money will coke and it will be on your own terms, not your parents and not from killing yourself while working at Jane Street like a slave.
The fact that she was at Caltech (and then MIT) alone is an indication that she is objectively superior to people like me though, and I have little hope of achieving even a fraction of that sort of success. I can't even get an interview at companies like Stripe because of my school, for instance.
I have worked with lizf (well, we worked in similar roles, but in different teams, for the same company). My sum total of university accolades are "2 terms of evening courses in electronics", "two terms of philosophy", and "just short of a third of a Master in computer science & engineering".
I dropped getting a full degree, instead deciding to go back to the industry and working (I'd spent 3 years in the industry working before I went to Uni, and having money again sounded like an excellent idea).
Now, that was me working myself up, as it were, through a variety of jobs (more on the "run things" than "write things" side, but theres a lot of "write things" involved in running things in a scalable fashion), with a few actual dev jobs along the line.
Would I be able to get my CV in front of someone at Stripe? Honestly, don't know. If all they look at is schools, I suspect my chances are vastly lower than yours. If they look at previous job history? Probably, yes.
At this point, it seems to me that the main blocker for you is depression, it MAY be worth consulting a professional about that.
They're saying it's the most explicit form of institutional racism, since it's (1) so blatant and out in the open and (2) centrally mandated instead of a byproduct of a few renegade individuals.
That's not to say that it's necessarily the most impactful form of institutional racism.
All told, I'd rather get into an inferior school over discriminatory treatment by police for life, with an outside chance of a genuinely horrific situation occuring that'd cost me my life.
But the discrimination against AA applicants is institutional and intentional in a way that police discrimination against blacks is not. For AAs, the solution is simple: stop discriminating against someone just because they're Asian. The question of how to get more equitable policing is endlessly discussed and debated, because it's subtle and relies on personal psychological biases, not policies intentionally constructed to discriminate.
I found it very interesting during college I drove a beater car. I got pulled over by cops ALL THE TIME. For some reason all that magically changed when I managed to purchase something nice. Curious? no?
Nobody knows if a specific pullover is a DWB pullover (i.e. one motivated by racism, unconscious or conscious) or a legitimate outcome of a random draw. That kind of phenomenon can only be teased out with a lot of data.
And somehow, bullshit notions like systemic racism, which could for once be used for real, is suddenly not used at all. This shows what "anti-racism" really is: a political discourse serving the interests of a few groups, to the exclusion and detriment of others.
Same with the UC system, if you look at the Asian/Asian-American demographic it's in some cases close to double that of comparable non-race blind institutions. When I was going through the college application process in my day, the unspoken Asian/Asian-American quotas for top private institutions were accepted as a given rule of the game which led to some pretty vicious rivalries among my peer group (whether accurate or not, there was a notion that our district was allocated a sub-quota of the overall quota, so it was perceived to be a zero-sum game as to who would get HYPSM offers each year). Even if the recent court rulings weren't in their favor, it's heartening to see newer cohorts of Asian-American applicants start to challenge the rules directly instead of solely focusing on their internal competition
>What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now.
To clarify for those who don't understand your point, Caltech is unique among elite universities for not using affirmative action in undergraduate admissions.
So then the smart choice for any applicant would be to select whichever race checkbox on the form gives the greatest advantage. Since race is an artificial social construct with no clear objective definition there's nothing wrong with hacking the system to your advantage. Or just leave it blank.
They’ll just look at your family name and make an educated guess based on school demographics and your hobbies, or look you out or parents up on social media. They’re not stupid. They know who they’re discriminating against
But they don't really care about what the applicant's race is.
What they care about is how that person contributes to the metrics they're trying to maximize, or in the case of Asians, minimize.
To them, a 1/4 Black person 3/4 Asian person, and a full Black person, are exactly the same thing, as long as they're both incrementing the same number in their diversity report.
Ah but they do. See this person that was Indian (but raised in Nigeria!) but pretended to be black to get into med school [1].
"I was always in a state of terror that I would be found out. During one interview at Case Western Reserve University, I was confronted by a black doctor and admissions committee member. He barraged me with questions about my family and personal background. I said that my family came from Nigeria. It was technically correct because my Indian parents had lived in Nigeria before moving to the United States.
Finally he said, eyes cold, in more of a question than a statement, “I read your application. It says you’re black.” I nodded."
I think this whole debate is centered on the shallow idea that "going to an Ivy League" in and of itself is what ordains "elite-ness". To unravel this, you first must consider the actual value proposition of Ivy Leagues relative to other schools.
Firstly, undergrad in America, especially at private schools like the Ivy Leagues, is more a daycare for rich kids, than it is a place of scholarship and learning. The education is certainly good, but there are plenty of other schools with rigorous academics. At these schools the children of the rich fraternize, drink and come of age with other children of the rich. The schools themselves are well connected as well but it's in large part through these bonds with their rich and powerful peers that the graduates of these schools go on to become "the elites". If you reduce the number of kids from rich and powerful families going to these places, you are going to drastically reduce the networking potential amongst classmates and start to erode school level affiliations. In short, you can't just limit admissions to solely "academic merit" without destroying a big part of what makes prestigious schools valuable. Ultimately, if the children of the rich and powerful are excluded, they will congregate elsewhere and all the prestige and kingmakers will follow.
I have studied and taught (as a graduate TA) at some of these institutions so maybe I am not objective, but some of your premises are flatout wrong. Especially when it comes to money: it is not the majority, but a substantial portion of undergrads in these institutions are from lower middle class or lower (economically) backgrounds. The rest are upper middle class and few are actually from rich families. The higher steps of the economic ladder are overrepresented simply because having money implies better K12 education in the US, which makes it easier to get into these schools. (Some more elitist policies like legacy admissions are slowly getting removed and "donations to get in" has not been a thing in recent history if ever)
And while the extracurriculars available are quite great, it is not a "daycare" and the rigors of education are very high.
> but a substantial portion of undergrads in these institutions are from lower middle class or lower (economically) backgrounds.
"69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% American Families" [1].
So the bottom 80% makes up 30% of Yale. Thats quite the under representation.
> donations to get in" has not been a thing in recent history if ever
Did you miss the Varsity Blues scandal? Official donations are uncommon and more reserved for the Ultra High Net worth, but they are a thing, Jared Kushner was the literal poster-child for it.
The most prevalent and whitewashed pay to play path is getting your child do an expensive specialty sport (Lacrosse, Fencing, Crew, Equestrian) & hiring college advisors & SAT prep.
> "69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% American Families" [1]. So the bottom 80% makes up 30% of Yale. Thats quite the under representation.
This is still very different than the image painted by your GP, at least in my mind.
I must have misrepresented my opinion then. My thesis lies not in the absence of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds but in the clustering of students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and the value in exposure to such circles.
They are arguing that elite institution's goal is to prepare entry into polite society not to provide a liberal education.
"A finishing school is a school for young women that focuses on teaching social graces and upper-class cultural rites as a preparation for entry into society" [1]
"a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement ... characterised by challenging encounters with important issues, and more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study" [2]
> They are arguing that elite institution's goal is to prepare entry into polite society not to provide a liberal education.
Not quite what I'm getting at. My point is more that the value proposition of the undergraduate programs of Ivy Leagues is partly the elite social circle you buy into.
Secondly, some of these ideas of "fixing" Ivy League admissions would just send those circles elsewhere, because rich families send their kids to schools with the children of other rich families.
This tight coupling of social and economic class is the real issue and radically changing a few schools' admission policies isn't going to dismantle that.
> Not quite what I'm getting at. My point is more that the value proposition of the undergraduate programs of Ivy Leagues is partly the elite social circle you buy into.
Being trained for an elite social circle is the entire value proposition of a finishing school, not sure where you see a disagreement.
> Secondly, some of these ideas of "fixing" Ivy League admissions would just send those circles elsewhere, because rich families send their kids to schools with the children of other rich families.
These days it's less about meeting your spouse and more a gateway to future income and prestige opportunities; IB, MGMT Consulting, Big Tech or to Law School (Politics). Those tracks and opportunities will still be there and be attractive if more poor people were admitted.
>Being trained for an elite social circle is the entire value proposition of a finishing school, not sure where you see a disagreement.
Gaining access to elite social circles is not the same thing as being trained for those circles. There are plenty of institutions that enable elite networking that have nothing to do with finishing school, so it's a false equivalence.
> These days it's less about meeting your spouse and more a gateway to future income and prestige opportunities; IB, MGMT Consulting, Big Tech or to Law School (Politics). Those tracks and opportunities will still be there and be attractive if more poor people were admitted.
Unless there are specific reforms to talk about it's hard to argue further. However, clearly the "Ivy League Cartel" is colluding to limit enrollment of poorer people.
Varsity Blues scandal: where a coach was defrauding the university by being paid by parents to falsly recommend students. Then got fired and criminally charged when this was discovered. How is this an example of donating to the university in exchange for admission?
Edit: more importantly though, your last paragraph is spot on. The rich (or simply upper middle class) paying for an exclusive better education, retaking expensive exams, and "fancy extracurriculars" during the K12 period is not a fair way to structure a society.
It was a whole network, not one coach. College advisor, Rick Singer, would facilitate what he called 'side door' donations. In some cases these were bribes to coaches, or admission staff. In other's they were donations to fund programs ie; the Stanford sailing coach was charged for accepting money that went to the Stanford sailing program, not to them personally.
Sorry, I was thinking specifically about the Yale case. Still, all these cases are something that these institutions were vigorously against and unaware of. Bribing someone is not a donation (and is illegal).
That is the universities marketing & legal defense. But in reality "getting creative" is encouraged to find funding for speciality programs that run at a loss, like sailing. The Universities will take money to "specially consider" an applicant, 500K is just not enough for Stanford or Harvard these days that price tag is in the tens of millions.
> some of your premises are flatout wrong. Especially when it comes to money: it is not the majority, but a substantial portion of undergrads in these institutions are from lower middle class or lower (economically) backgrounds.
I don't find the existence of students from middle class or lower backgrounds to be contrary to any of my premises. My point is more around the network effects. The children of the elite do attend these schools. The children of the elite are by definition already elite. Exposure to these social circles, even through something like the alumni network is a massive value proposition and massively increases ones chances of becoming an elite. If the children of the elite were to go elsewhere, the social network and value goes along with them.
This is not to say Ivy Leagues don't have other merits as undergraduate institutions, such as great staff and academics.
> The higher steps of the economic ladder are overrepresented simply because having money implies better K12 education in the US, which makes it easier to get into these schools.
It's not just K12 education, it's extracurriculars, it's SAT prep, it's high schools paying recruiters to visit campus, etc. It's a virtuous cycle. But again there are also network effects to consider. Rich and powerful families want to send their children schools with children from their socioeconomic class, so they cluster.
> And while the extracurriculars available are quite great, it is not a "daycare" and the rigors of education are very high.
My point on undergrad being akin to "daycare" is not unique to Ivy Leagues. In my experience in the US, there is a certain type of student that doesn't work a job, lives in a supervised environment (dorm), doesn't pay their own bills, doesn't cook for themselves, studies occasionally and who's main focus is fraternizing with their peers. This lifestyle is what I am comparing to daycare, and I don't believe this is uncommon esp. in places that cater to those of higher socioeconomic class.
Fraternizing with the rich is the real value add that ivies provide. The education is nice, but it's absolutely not what makes those schools the best. The brightest poor people attend in order to gain access to said rich and powerful young adults.
Quantitative concentrations in Harvard are probably the ones that are the least affected by legacy admissions and “holistic” reviews.
I guess you are more likely to see such applicants in sociology, WGS, VES and other concentrations stereotypically seen as easy. I doubt people who get a ride based on their athletic achievements in spite of their low GPA flock to CS and physics.
Student athletes at these schools are generally smart. No reason to think there aren't enough athletic smart people to fill up a relatively small number of spots.
> Firstly, undergrad in America, especially at private schools like the Ivy Leagues, is more a daycare for rich kids, than it is a place of scholarship and learning. The education is certainly good, but there are plenty of other schools with rigorous academics. At these schools the children of the rich fraternize, drink and come of age with other children of the rich. The schools themselves are well connected as well but it's in large part through these bonds with their rich and powerful peers that the graduates of these schools go on to become "the elites". If you reduce the number of kids from rich and powerful families going to these places, you are going to drastically reduce the networking potential amongst classmates and start to erode school level affiliations.
I went to an Ivy and transferred out to a UC and I can definitively say that this is a highly romanticized take.
As others have said, there are many other good schools for everyone, even for the Ivy Leaguers. But with the Ivy League you get cachet and connections.
I don't begrudge them. They can have them. They will have them regardless as you said. Why want to be the thing you don't like anyway.
At least it's not as bad as having to have attended the Sciences Po, or have to have attended Eton/OxBridge and the like.
The bad part of the higher education system is the skyrocketing costs facilitated by loans secured by the gov where you cannot dispose the loan due to bankruptcy, as you can most others.
I don't think a 4-year undergrad tuition should be more than the median of a first year graduate's full-time earnings of the degree you're pursuing.
A curiosity for me is that the Ivies are among some of the few universities where you get need-blind admission and financial aid. I have many acquaintances that did not pay a penny in tuition. But that does not fix the larger issues with the system.
A college that my daughter was accepted at claimed to meet 100% of need, as I think a lot of private colleges do. It meant that after we filled out the FAFSA and an additional form that some private colleges use, they figured out how much we could "afford" to pay, and it was about 100% of full freight. We're a middle class family, let's say supported by 1.5 professional jobs, since one of us works part time. We didn't have a quarter million dollars jangling around in our pockets, and were greatly relieved when our daughter chose the nearby public university instead.
Also, it's often expected that "need" will be partially met by working a campus job, and taking out loans.
It's great if the college wants to curate a student body including some low income students, but I think there's a pretty big swath of the middle class that's neither poor enough nor rich enough for one of those colleges.
I'm not devastated. The state university is damn good, and hobnobbing with the influential is only useful if you happen to be skilled at hobnobbing.
Yeah, I give you, this is a problem that should be fixed. For what is worth, if you get admitted, you have ~4 years in which you can request to view your admission paperwork, which includes some pretty interesting and weird notes from admission officials on why you were accepted. There are multiple articles on the internet of students doing that and sharing what was considered "holisticly nice" about them.
Costs will go even higher if graduates are allowed to dispose of loans via bankruptcy. Simply because the responsible ones will have to pay for the irresponsible.
Right now colleges can charge whatever they want and students will happy sign up not comprehending they have to pay back loans. It’s a complete gravy train.
No one in their right mind will give a loan to a student that isn’t going for a high income degree. Doctor/engineer Etc. Even these will be harder to get.
So colleges won’t be able to charge 50k a semester since few can afford that.
> Firstly, undergrad in America, especially at private schools like the Ivy Leagues, is more a daycare for rich kids, than it is a place of scholarship and learning
Way to stereotype thousands of people you don’t know at places you’ve never been.
> If you reduce the number of kids from rich and powerful families going to these places, you are going to drastically reduce the networking potential amongst classmates
Disagree. The biggest "network benefit" comes from the Alumni Network, the established recruiting channels & the prestige from the degree. These would remain if they took more poor kids.
This is a good point, and I'm not sure how it would play out. Depending on the specific reforms it may be self sustaining. But prestige and recruiting channels are not in and of themselves self sustaining.
Honestly, if the admissions committee decides you’re good enough to get into any of the top schools you’re already an elite of some kind (in math, rowing, “activism” etc). All of these elites need to be knocked down a few pegs.
I’d go as far as to say all MIT admits are fundamentally, inherently elite (especially compared to a low IQ sap like me) and should be punished regardless. They’re rich because people like me are poor.
What is the author's thesis? I skimmed and read and re-read, but didn't figure it out.
It's well known that elite universities are elitist in their admissions and have over-large endowments. And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different. And it's well known that the rest of the U.S. educational system is underfunded.
> Sen. Tom Cotton, of all political leaders, suggested taxing private colleges with large endowments, and redirecting funds to vocational training.
It's not a surprise. Cotton and his party see Ivy League universities as institutions of the political opposition, whom they attack and want to punish and diminish.
The article was all over the map and didn't have anything inciteful to say. I was amused to see the college admissions scandal brought up since only one of the several colleges involved was Ivy League.
In case it helps, I found out about the article from this interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Aji9tl2D8. I hadn't heard of Sam Haselby before, but Matt Stoller is an interesting antitrust-oriented critic of big tech.
>> And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different.
> No less elitist though. The idea of a selective college is elitist.
What does that mean? By that definition, everything selective is 'elitist', including my high school wrestling team. By non-elitist, we generally mean it's not biased in favor of the people who are already in society's elite.
Some top colleges now admit much more economically and ethnically diverse students. I've seen the applications, and they've reduced processes that select for children of the elite (such as standardized tests). In other words, they aren't admitting the children of elite (or not as much) - I think that is meaningful.
(I wish I could provide some citations, but I don't have time or anything at my fingertips.)
> All the progressive talk is cant.
Am I responding to nothing more than mindless anti-progressivism?
> Some top colleges now admit much more economically and ethnically diverse students.
Yes, there are lots more black and Hispanic students than before, and since the universities refuse to share the data we can’t be sure that this increase in diversity mostly means more children of Nigerian doctors and Colombian lawyers, mostly paying full international student fees but that’s the way to bet.
Regarding economic diversity.
Harvard[1], Yale[2], Princeton[3] Stanford[4] all have average family incomes above $160,000. Less selective colleges with smaller endowments that need the money from fees more are not going to be more economically diverse if they can possibly avoid it.
Selecting by standardized test scores would result in a substantially less socially elite student body than the current system. A more Asian one. Stopping that is why there’s a movement to get rid of the SATs. Asians are being discriminated against now as Jews were in the early 20th century, for similar reasons.
[1] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% of students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households. About 15% come from families in the top 1% of American wealth distribution.
[2] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Yale is $192,600. Roughly 69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households.
[3] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Princeton is $186,100, and 72% come from the highest-earning 20% of American households
[4] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Stanford is $167,500
> Harvard[1], Yale[2], Princeton[3] Stanford[4] all have average family incomes above $160,000.
That doesn't tell us if the economic diversity is increasing or decreasing. My understanding is that it is significantly increasing for (at least some) elite schools, but I don't have cites so ...
> Selecting by standardized test scores would result in a substantially less socially elite student body than the current system.
That is certainly counter to the general wisdom, which is why (as I understand it) they stopped requiring the tests. The tests were considered biased toward the socially elite, and IIRC there was plenty of research behind it, because the elite have the time and money (tutors, classes, etc.) to prepare test-taking skills - which is not a skill the colleges seek - and the questions were written about elite culture (e.g., 'You are sailing your yacht into the wind ...').
I’m aware of the general wisdom. If you can find any research supporting it my email is in my profile. Selecting by SAT and GPA alone would be very much against the interests of the socially elite. They wouldn’t be able to stop so many Asians getting in. See what happened in California after ending affirmative action in college admissions, a 20% jump in Asian admissions. That is the reason for the big push against the SAT and ACT. You can pay for higher grades by selecting the school with lower standards, you can pay for all the extracurriculars you want, you can lean on your connections for letters of recommendation but the gains from SAT tutoring and coaching are trivial no matter how much you pay. Holistic admissions is for the less gifted children of privilege.
The SAT, GRE, LSAT and similar lightly disguised IQ tests are designed to be as close to culture fair and uncoachable as possible and they do pretty well. Mostly the children of the well educated and rich get higher scores on them than the less fortunate for the same reason the children of professional basket players are tall. People resemble their parents.
The anecdote you recount about a question with a yacht never happened. The analogy question was removed in 2005[1].
> Selecting by standardized test scores would result in a substantially less socially elite student body than the current system. A more Asian one. Stopping that is why there’s a movement to get rid of the SATs.
Except the most elite schools are the ones that are clinging to keeping standardized tests in their admissions processes, they only dropped it for the incoming class because of the pandemic.
> Less selective colleges with smaller endowments that need the money from fees more are not going to be more economically diverse if they can possibly avoid it.
Why does it matter? They are less selective so anyone has a better chance of getting in.
While I agree, I don't see being selective as necessarily being about a team competition. They have 100 applications for each spot; they have to select them.
FWIW: I recently saw the applications to several American elite colleges. All asked, one way or the other, 'how will our institution in particular help you in particular?', and 'how will you in particular contribute to our institution in particular?'. They seemed focused on the finding students who would benefit most and contribute most, not on a contest to see who gets the best credential.
> What is the author's thesis? I skimmed and read and re-read, but didn't figure it out.
Same. I think they are hoping Biden will put more money into public schools and stop preferential tax treatments for the large endowments.
> It's not a surprise. Cotton and his party see Ivy League universities as institutions of the political opposition, whom they attack and want to punish and diminish.
Tom Cotton... Harvard University BA , JD
You are right that it fits the public narrative & rhetoric, but many (perhaps most) of them went to elite schools. It is probably just posturing.
On that note, the liberal cry of student loan forgiveness will overwhelmingly favor people who went to expensive private colleges. Taxing big endowments seems pretty senseless and doesn't create any positive incentives either. More support and less stigma against state schools would probably do the most good.
What if we dropped the inflammatory political attack and just talked about loan forgiveness? Can an idea or anything else be depoliticized.
And it does have some benefits, in addition to that drawback. I'm not sure about the extent or nature of it - many leading colleges reduce their prices to get the students in the door - has anyone studied it?
I count myself as a liberal but also a wonky liberal. The fact the progressive agitators don't have sound evidence for the validity of their ideas beyond number of retweets bugs the hell out of me. Student loan forgiveness would most likely be a net positive it's just going to be quite expensive for relatively little reward. Incremental wins on health care and progressive taxation will be much simpler and more beneficial.
You're a "wonky liberal", but it's the lack of sound evidence for progressive ideas that bothers you? Issues like climate change? Mass incarceration? Racism? Universal health care? Vaccinating people and wearing masks (not a position limited to progressives)? There's not another part of the political spectrum that lacks sound evidence?
That's a bit mind-boggling, but not the first time I've seen it. My hypothesis: Middle-ground liberals are intimidated by abusive conservatives, but they feel safe criticizing progressives. You won't get flamed on HN, for example, for what you posted.
This is correct, and one of the many reasons why I’m very glad President Biden came out against blanket loan forgiveness at the high end of $50k even though Schumer, AOC, Warren support it
Forget elite universities: IIRC exactly one of the last eight Presidential candidates (from the two parties that matters) in the general election didn't attend a private prep high school. (Hillary Clinton, is the one who didn't).
[EDIT] I know Cotton isn't one of them, I'm just pointing out that this elitism sure as hell appears to be a driving factor in who's on top in both parties.
And maybe it’s not people pulling the ladder up behind them - it’s that the ladder has become more visible and desirable without expanding or changing.
I do have some hope with Coursera and EdX. There are now blended programs starting online that allow students to start remote and show they can do the coursework, before completing the rest on campus: https://scm.mit.edu/program/blended-masters-degree-supply-ch...
I’d argue the knowledge is becoming more open and freely available, but the network is not. Maybe the value of the network would drop if it was less personal and more people were there. There is some optimal program size and it’s possible some programs could hold more. At the same time, do we really need more Cal tech grads? Not a slam at Cal tech (I chose the smallest), but how many people with those skill sets do we need vs. graduates from other less specialized schools.
There is something special about Cal Tech’s community, and I don’t know I would want to dilute it just because other people should have the ability to go there to meet some arbitrary “fairness metric”.
The value these institutions have brought, and bring, to the country by making us the top in the world in a number of fields comes from how selective they are and their massive resources they can put toward problems. This makes them attractive to the world’s top talent and gives them the freedom to work on some things without economic constraints, and that’s a societal benefit. Pulling money away because they’ve managed it well could hurt us long term. And it’s not like the Harvard endowment of $40B is just sitting there - it is invested into the economy like other funds until it is needed for investment in the community.
Lastly - just because you didn’t go to one of those institutions doesn’t mean you can’t be successful or attend one for grad school. And I’ve found grad school admissions to be meritocratic.
Just to add to your point, in 1940, Harvard (and most other universities) had its own exam and its own application. The person who was going to spend the time to try for Harvard was a boy (and only boys) who had finished high school (an accomplishment achieved by less than half of all students back then), had book smarts (a common quality today but not in the past), and some form of "noteworthiness" (whether that was in family prestige or science fair awards). As you can see, all these things put together make for a very low denominator with which Harvard could have easily achieved an 80%+ acceptance rate. These factors were already self-selecting for the "Harvard Man." Now they aren't. You are correct in your point that the ladder has become more visible. That visibility has bred more competition and more metrics to suss out who should have a seat at the College.
Also prestige whoring wasn't always as pervasive as it is now. Even as recently as the 90's when I was applying to college, the ivy league proudly proclaimed their lack of merit or athletic scholarships... so I didn't even consider applying there. I think the location of schools was a bigger factor to most of my fellow students than the reputation. New England winters were scary. And my high school actually advised against the nearby elite university because of their recent student suicides. The solid state flagship school was where normal people aspired to go.
It's bizarre to compare the world back then to now. My parents' number one concern was they wanted me out of the house and able to support myself.
I don’t think it’s a magic wand. I think it’s a lot like any place and you get what you put into it. But diminishing returns (academically) start at a higher level than other locations.
The network is nice, and people will never wonder if you’re smart or not, but yeah - people don’t pay you because you went to one of these schools.
It can also limit choices and career paths. And have some people may have chips on their shoulders because they didn’t get in to that school.
There's only four times as many people in the USA now as there were in the early 20th century, and still only about a thousand slots for Harvard freshmen.
Why do you think that's relevant? The post you replied to was talking about Harvard, and the article was talking about the Ivy League. Has the number of Harvards increased? Has the Ivy League expanded very much?
True. But we weren't talking about getting an education. The article is about Ivy League, and the immediate antecedent was about Harvard. Sure, you can get an education anywhere. But Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League are all about prestige and social connections. You aren't going to get that at A&M.
Ah. You're not wanting to change to multiple Harvards, you're wanting to change to zero Harvards. And I kind of sympathize with that position. Education is helpful for society as a whole. Letting "elites" network so that they can position themselves to have outsized impact? Maybe not so much.
Correct. Even making UTAustin guaranteed acceptance to the top 14% of the class instead of 7% would be better than adding another Harvard in Texas.
The non linearity of the rewards is the problem. I’m orders of magnitude worse off than my valedictorian, who went to an Ivy, because I didn’t get into any good schools. Abolish all of the top schools.
I don't know for certain, but I bet the number of universities has decreased. There were thousands of small colleges in every small town. Many have gone out of business. The state colleges have really increased in size but many small colleges have disappeared.
Used to have this argument regularly with executives of startups I've worked for who had worked in more "traditional" industries. The number of times I've had to interject around "pedigree" being "useful" is.. sad. (Most)Everyone I've hired from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, etc have been the worst performing, and the most far behind in relevant skills. RIT, Rutgers, etc, waaaay far ahead. It got to the point where I started to move those people to the bottom because the curriculum they studied was so dated most of the skills became irrelevant; I don't need you to set up some complex excel spreadsheet that shows me the KPIs, and only you know how to update it, I need you to know how to set up mixpanel. I don't need you to program Java, I need you to set up k8s, etc. However, more importantly, these grads(recent or not) often come with an attitude of knowing, vs an attitude of learning.
Interestingly, all the "pedigree" obsessed folks who (all) graduated from ivy league schools went on to found one of the most mediocre and poorly focused VC firms I've seen.
Maybe the problem is you're hiring CS/engineering students to "show KPIs" or "set up mixpanel" or "not program"? I can't imagine any competent student from those disciplines, never mind a student from a top tier school, being happy at any kind of job like that. Especially if they were sold a job that would use their full abilities. Sounds like a recipe for otherwise talented people half-assing your job while looking for a new one, resulting in you thinking they suck rather than just don't care about doing trivial stuff.
This is a common anecdotal example of Simpson's Paradox. Even if work performance is positively correlated with college ranking, a subset of selected grads can have a negative relationship with the same variables.
The mechanism is the selection criteria. Presumably, college ranking and demonstrated aptitude are both metrics used for hiring. Thus, if the variables are evaluated additively, and the examined firm occupies a single tier of the ranking+aptitude space, the hired employees will have a ranking/aptitude that falls along a negatively sloping line, similar to a budget constraint.
Yeah elite undergrads are striving to be entrepreneurs, CEOs, or wall street/consulting types, not code monkeys. Going to encounter a lot of resistance with standard coding jobs where need to roll up your sleeves for obvious motivation/identity reasons.
I have a funny anecdote here. In competitive parliamentary debate, almost every school "plays by the rules" and doesn't do some relatively easy and hard to detect cheating. Not RIT though - they cheat blatantly and hard. They come in with pages and pages of evidence that they simply could not have hand written in the 15 minutes they're given for preparing. I have a slightly more poor opinion of any RIT graduate as a result of this experience. I know nothing about the school but I can sure tell you that being unscrupulous is not reserved only for the ivy league elite.
I've long thought the same. I've often thought that the University system in Europe, in particular Germany, is a much better model for higher education.
From what I gather, admissions is entirely merit based there and money isn't an issue.
It isn't just the Ivies that cater to the rich and elite. Many other private universities also do so and promise alumni connections and wealth, think Vanderbilt, Williams, etc.
Even when I was applying to colleges as an undergrad I found it a bit off-putting and instead only applied to public universities.
Seems like there's an emerging paradigm for ignoring universities but still doing something of value in the "academic" space. This is just a dumb strategy but based on many examples I've seen recently.
1. Customise a curriculum engaging with younger tutors in niche areas (e.g. youtube, teachable or if theres others comment).
2. Do this for a few years and make sure to meet people/do appropriate things and publish them online. E.g. do a good podcast/lecture series.
3. Publish on Xiv like sites with high quality results/arguments/original ideas or demo/explain things on youtube. If a preprint site doesn't exist for you then make one and contact people.
This might get you x100 the exposure of your average PI and eventually funding will come around to your ideas as universities become a total farce. 10 years down the line the tepid overtures to gitlab and github turn into a full on rejection of high overhead university education. Rental or pooling services for expensive equipment or access to resources would also help immensely.
That's pretty much my stance, the universities are obsolete garbage. I did give them another shot and took as many math classes as possible, but they screwed up and drove me away.
I now do all my math research independent, as the universities are unable to facilitate my math research activity.
Something usually amiss with the current talk of universities is that they are an immigration racket.
Universities make most of its tuition money from foreign students, but foreign students go to american universities to get visas they can use to get into the labor market. The F1 visa is unlimited, contrary to the H1B one, and allows for a transition out of university.
Also for the H1B and multiple categories, one key criteria is having a college degree.
College Education: so valuable you need the law to justify they are worth something
The US should staple a green card to the PhD degree of any foreigner who comes here to complete their doctorate. It increased US competitive potential by shifting the best & brightest away from their home countries and toward here. Likewise, I’d expect all foreign nations to follow similar policies.
I think is especially true of MS programs in technology areas. Schools compete to require the fewest courses possible while including capstones and internships to pad resumes. They basically operate like immigration agencies that will get you a visa and an H1b job in return for $30k or so.
What would happen if Harvard were required to accept 40 percent of all applicants as before?
I think it would be pretty amusing if they got 50000 applicants, admitted 20000, and then said "guess what Cambridge, we're building 200 new dormitories, here, there, and everywhere."
Either it would have to expand its undergrad programs, or student quality (as Harvard measures it) would decline.
Joseph Heath has a very interesting article comparing US elite schools (tiny undergrad program) and Canadian elite schools (massive undergrad programs, bigger than Ivy League)
I've seen this before, and I think it's ridiculous to assume that there's some arbitrary cutoff about top 10 colleges. Why is not percentile based?
For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any way?
Rephrased, what if we instead classify the Ivy League as a single college with eight campuses? What's the difference?
It’s because for cultural reasons US people ascribe elite status to precisely those ten colleges. Or T14 in some cases.
If the US ascribed sainted elite status to the top 100 colleges to the top 100 colleges, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. By contrast in Canada if you went to UBC, McGill or UBC people assume you are smart.
That’s in the same article where they compare the value of an endowment (measured in dollars) against the GDP of three random countries (measured in a different unit: dollars per year [per country]). Analytic rigor is not high.
I've seen this comparison in a few articles. It makes no sense at all. It's like if I said Microsoft's market cap ($1.942T) is larger than the GDP of Russian ($1.7T), or Apple's Market Cap ($2.125T) is double the combined endowments of every single US university altogether (about $1T). Complete nonsense comparisons.
But...we already have elite large undergrad programs, they’re called the UCs and the UT systems and the rest of the systems that support public ivies (both flagship and secondary campuses). UToronto, Waterloo, and UBC are all public. Our public ivies are big and produce equivalent talent while being accessible to nearly everyone through CC transfer agreements.
I don’t think there’s a bottleneck here. The real bottleneck is that people who don’t go to top schools are considered to be inherently inferior and objective failures like myself.
I don’t think school really figures into people’s thought process in Canada. UofT and UBC are massive, and as long as you check the boxes you get in. People in the Saskatchewan may prefer URegina because it’s closer to home, someone from Newfoundland may go to Memorial.
Faculty positions are so competitive that I don’t think there’s a huge difference in the quality of the younger professors, just the bigger schools will have more profs and bigger research groups.
This is the case for 90% of applicants to college (in general) in the states too, including my undergrad (which happened to exist in the city I was born and grew up in). I hardly went to a prestigious undergrad but I had several brilliant professors that had significant pedigrees, educationally speaking.
I think the unique thing about Canada is that students “fall into” prestigious institutions by virtue of being good students who grew up in the area. Basically every student in Toronto with a 90% average in high school can go to UofT. This is very achievable for anyone from a stable middle class family whose parents care about education.
Were harvard required to accept 40% of applicants at some point? (Google fails me)
I was part of an experiment where the physics department at my uni admitted everyone who applied. Even those without the required prerequisites. Most of the "extras" dropped out or transfered or failed etc. But about 20% graduated.
I think in one way this proved the normal application system was mostly effective. But it also gave people chances they never would have had. I was insulted (I'd got my grades!) initially but it taught me something about opportunity. Maybe we'd be better doing this everywhere?
Not required, but the clear implication of the article is that things were more "fair" when the admit rate was 40%, and thus I'm asking what if we mandated that Harvard accept a "fair" portion of applicants.
>The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the country’s elite colleges and universities, including five in the Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1 percent of income earners than from the bottom 60 percent. The computer scientist Allison Morgan recently released a study examining 7,218 professors in Ph.D.-granting departments in the United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the faculty come from families almost 34-percent richer than average and are 25 times more likely than average to have a parent with a Ph.D. Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.
This is like the 'branch cut' equivalent of the social sciences, but rather than making the integral easier to compute, makes the argument sound more convincing than it actually is or supported by the evidence.
If one looks aat the actual data, admitees of elite colleges are hardly among the elite, but just somewhat wealthier than average.
We're not taking Rockefeller-level of wealth here.
But this holds even for non-elite colleges. It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests.
Is the median the right central tendency estimator to use? We're talking about a distribution with a huge amount of skewness. The top 20% of the class could all be from billionaire families and it wouldn't impact that chart.
I'm not surprised that Yale picked the median to plot, though, since it paints themselves in the best light.
> It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests
Oh, my. This is such a straight-textbook example of not seeing systemic bias.
Generations ago, elite colleges had quotas preventing or discouraging certain groups from applying. Those barriers have been removed. As it turns out, selecting for intelligence yields more for endowments and other benefits than selecting for prestige or lineage. This may not be completely fair, but is more fair than the old way.Tons of people apply to these schools. The SAT is still a useful despite being an imperfect filter.
It's easy to find seemingly well informed smart people who claim that, and also those who claim the opposite.
Outside physics, there is always a study that supports whatever you want to believe, so we can all keep believing whatever feels good, while being supported by Science!
I like to think I'm different. But odds are I'm not...
The reason why the SAT is "going away" as you noted, or at least the cited reason, is precisely what I noted.
If you want to take the position that there is no truth (or even just a better approximation thereof), that "we can all just believe what we want to believe", then there's no way to ever progress on such matters.
All serious research I have seen says that the SAT correlates to wealth, and not to college success. Indeed GPA is a much better predictor of college success.
These are the dream hoarder class, the upper middle class. The rest of us can’t compete and are instead destined for a life of poverty and mediocrity.
The rest of us that haven’t been intellectually or genetically blessed still have a place in society. I’m sick of being treated like a subhuman because I went to a state school and don’t make $300k a year at Facebook.
I'd be more interested in reading a complaint about richly-endowed universities if I were not faced with the necessity to pay to continue reading past the first screenful.
I'm disinclined to pay, because history indicates that the HN comments are likely to be more useful than the linked item.
What metrics should be allowable for admissions? (I suggest making legacy admissions and favoring race-/gender-/etc. attributes illegal.)
Why not get bright minority and poor students, and girls for STEM, supported with mentoring, admissions coaching, resources/funding, and other assistance that makes a massive impact? This way, admissions standards can, and should, be minimized to merit, rather furthering victimhood or privilege.
It's like: If we throw away the SATs, ACTs, and other rank-able tests, what's left to compare students? Essays?
Another reason why children of academics, doctors and other professionals are likely to have a better shot is simply the age at which their parents had them.
I don't have any data, but I'm sure there aren't a ton of grad students with kids.
Having kids when you are young, kind of puts a limit on how much you can devote to your career.
It’s time to break up the education system from all the extracurricular fluff. The universities are fostering identities around themselves: students join debate teams, sports teams, religious groups , orchestra, etc under the aegis of their universities and attach their personal identities to these things.
To me personally it seems kind of ridiculous. What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you want to play in an orchestra. You can’t access an orchestra (there are seven of them in Harvard!) of any of your local universities. You can’t even join a university gym that probably has far cheaper fees than any other gym in your area. You want to take classes in Shaolin Kempo Karate? We are sorry but you can’t because you didn’t pass “holistic” assessment of your personality by Harvard. What a weird situation where your whole social life as a young adult completely depends on assessment of your personality by gerontic professors who need to fill some quotas.
>>> What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you want to play in an orchestra.
Play the bassoon. ;-) A friend of mine who was a school music teacher told me that getting good at the bassoon was pretty much a ticket to a generous college scholarship. Not necessarily at your first choice of scholarship, but somewhere.
If they can't get a student to play bassoon, then they have to hire a ringer from the community. So you could also do that.
>Play the bassoon. ;-) A friend of mine who was a school music teacher told me that getting good at the bassoon was pretty much a ticket to a generous college scholarship.
Reminds me of Oxford and Cambridge's organ scholarships, which are also the only way to apply and be admitted to both universities for undergraduate study.
Maybe it's different in public universities (or just the universities that I've seen), but I went to one and the on campus activities are pretty available to the general public who don't attend the university. There are few things that are locked down to students only and I know cases where non-students talk to the club organizers to get exceptions.
Maybe we could fund the arts more easily if we properly taxed the billionaires in our society. Harvard can afford it, there's no reason we can't afford elsewhere in our modern era of unimaginable wealth and plenty. We instead find it preferable to allow some people to hoard that wealth and plenty like fantasy dragons in caves instead of using it for the benefit of all of society.
They essentially want institutions to be less involved in their community and social circles. Why should educational institutions be allowed to monopolize social groups in the first place?
Well, once upon a time, likely not too long ago, politicians that were voted in decided to establish a framework in which this was possible/prevailed.
For those who personally don't like it, I don't know what to tell you. Your ideology is clearly a minority, and the only way minorities will get what they want in a capitalistic system is through large amounts of money.
> But reform will not come from within the Ivy League,
It's ironic that the article is written by two harvard ivy leaguers. They have to replace the Ivies with something else. It's hard to envision that from within.
It would be interesting to know the mix of degrees produced over time by those schools. My guess is that 100 years ago you largely saw the children of the elite receiving general educations centered around classics, the post-war period would have seen an engineering emphasis, and (perhaps) now a push for finance and law.
It's hard to have an opinion without knowing the product of the system.
Wasn't able to read past the first paragraph due to paywall, but the first 2 sentences stuck out:
> Power in the U.S. flows through the gates of the Ivy League and a very small tier of other top universities. These institutions set and sanction the boundaries of knowledge, including what kinds of political and social views are welcomed in prestige cultural spaces.
Is that really the case anymore? If the last year has shown us anything, its that technology has further empowered grassroots ideas and activism, and that technology companies themselves are furthering their own influence in politics and knowledge (the free flow of information that is true and not true) way beyond what influencers in academia alone can do right now.
"Influencers" .... who runs the actual governments? Whether your answer is "an unelected wealthy oligarchy" or "officials appointed by the administration", both ranks are filled with people who came up through the elite university systems.
A merit-less screed that amounts to a bunch of name-calling about "liberal Brahmans" and complaining that the top institutions actually have influence. Of course the top institutions have influence - even if they somehow 'broke up the cartel', the new top institutions would also have influence.
Tearing down a society's top achievers & institutions is not a way to achieve a useful equality (see Harrison Bergeron).
That said, the encouragement at the end for supporting students going to a far wider range of colleges and universities, including Bernie Sanders' plan for free tuition for students of families under $125k is a great idea.
the main thesis of this piece as far as I can tell is that Ivy League schools and similar institutions are harmful in their outsized concentration of wealth, ability to set the cultural narratives, dominate the social elite, etc. all while act hypocritically advancing many "leftist" ideas
I wonder what the deal is with such a large percentage of submissions being paywalled sites. Do the submitters have subscriptions to everything and just don't realize? Does everybody reading HN have anti-paywall extensions installed? Sure there's always the archive.is link but someone has to see the article in the first place.
I'm sure they're quaking in their boots upon reading this sternly-worded letter! To change things would take this, plus the slightest hint of conviction on the part of those currently living fat lives working in and leading those same institutions - not just academia but others that were supposed to safeguard society against such excesses, such as the press, the media, organized labor (sorry who?), and the vibrant American communist/socialist movement (LOL JK). They've all been neutralized and their brightest individuals bought off in subtle ways e.g. they just happen to make more money and get invited to more parties by agreeing with the elite party line. Or disagreeing with it in principle but crucially misattributing the blame to protect those actually at fault and/or cui bono-ing from it, that's a popular tactic. Ironically if you've got tenure (as increasingly few do) you ought to be able to speak out all the more loudly, and you can, and still make money, but you won't get invited to the parties anymore.
I wonder if a President sometime should pledge in the interest of diversity only to appoint and nominate people who did not go to Ivy League universities for Cabinet and judicial positions.
I strongly disagree. Having elite schools is far far better for upward mobility.
Being a poor kid and going to Harvard is a far more effective ticket to the upper middle class than any alternative the author proposes.
Sure, you could theoretically dilute academic signaling strength, by force, to the point of homeopathic levels - but who does that help? Whose life completely changes for the better by attending such an institution?
EDIT: If you disagree, please feel free to express why. Not complaining about the downvotes, but dialog would be preferred over drive-bys.
I disagree because you’re succeeding at the expense of the rest of us. Have you considered 99.5% of people will never step one foot on an elite school campus? I’m sick of society being catered to your whims while the rest of us are dismissed as stupid and innately less qualified.
Objectively speaking, my life is absolutely terrible BECAUSE of elites like you hoarding opportunity and people like me getting nothing because I only got a 1500/1600 and didn’t know about research opportunities in high school. I’m barely 25 but my life is already irretrievably broken because the elites want to segregate themselves from “my kind” so bad.
I worked hard in high school to get a scholarship to a third-tier state school, where I worked hard to get good grades and improve my logical reasoning skills enough to do very well on the LSAT.
Nothing about society was ever catered for me. I had to fight very, very hard.
And yes, I know others work just as hard and don't get the same opportunities. I'm not claiming the current system is perfect. "Ya gotta take care of business, ya gotta go to school, ya gotta get good grades to even have a chance... I'm talkin' about a chance! You might not make it, but you sure as hell won't if ya don't try." ~Hillbilly Elegy
For all its imperfections, it's a lot better than the proposed alternative.
I see. My apologies, I should have specified “undergraduate” because that’s what makes the most difference in my particular field (not law). I have no idea what law progression is like after undergrad or what it takes to get into an elite law school that can offer upward mobility, but I do know it’s not uncommon to go to a top tier law school after a mediocre undergrad (Tim Kaine comes to mind off the top of my head) I personally know a handful of people from my undergrad at HLS (though they were full scholarship students who were overqualified to go to my undergrad and stayed away from the the simpletons like me).
It’s not just that. It’s knowing that whatever I do I cannot have social mobility or the happiness the typical Googler* has because of the state of my life from 14-17 (and the state of my genes that determine intelligence, which is more relevant than school for Google in particular).
There is a large supply of scholars and teachers ready, willing, and able to work. Public universities, colleges, community colleges, and HBCUs have for decades been starved. The Biden family understands public education, and Jill Biden is an educator. With something like a Works Project Administration program to bring arts and sciences education to Americans, the administration could restore democratic education in the U.S.
This makes the mistake of accepting that college is about education. It isn’t. If it were those that barely graduate college and those that barely flunk out would have about the same outcomes, having learned about the same amount. They have very different outcomes because college is about the endless treadmill of credentialism.
I had a similar discussion with a young colleague considering grad school recently. My two cents is now, with nearly 25 years post Ph.D. under my belt, that it is a union card for some jobs, and irrelevant for others. The degrees don't make the person. The content of the character and drive do.
I got a Ph.D. as I had the goal of being a physics prof someday. I knew that was an essential milestone on the path to this. Now, my goal is to save for retirement, and do what I enjoy doing while doing this, and maybe after retirement teaching physics/math/etc. at a local uni/college.
The treadmill of credentialism is an apt phrase though. I don't need a Ph.D. in my current job. Or most of my previous ones.
> One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of the Ivy League. It is a bastion of privilege and power, and yet full of left-leaning professors who one might imagine would favor the redistribution of wealth.
Re-imagining social norms -- not a conservative predisposition -- has nothing to do with redistributing wealth. It is precisely the requirement for a shared mindset, or a demonstration of willingness to adhere to ideological dogma, that requires generational and selective admission. As the re-imaginings take to greater heights of fancy, the distance from the non-indoctrinated society at large (which generally feels and thinks via principles and not ideology) increases and this requires and motivates a greater degree of insularity by an establishment.
It is certainly true that some children of the ideologically and/or culturally "unwashed" masses will arrive at the 'acceptable' socio-economic conclusion (due to their superior intellect) -- whether they acknowledge this consciously is not germinal -- but the risk to an establishment (regardless of their leaning on the fabled 1 dimensional L/R spectrum) to an 'open admissions and integration' policy are simply too great.
Hey @eternalban, this is completely unrelated but I've been wanting to get in touch with you for some time regarding Viewstamped Replication. We've exchanged a few comments about it in the past, and there are going to be some developments around VR that I think you would be really excited about.
