"Nevertheless, Yale continues to commit this elitist view of change-making, closing the doors of the university to anyone who isn’t deemed capable of becoming a world leader. Yale’s acceptance rate keeps ticking downward as the years progress. In last year’s admissions cycle, only 4.6 percent of applicants were offered a place in the incoming class. Though Yale acknowledges that a vast majority of its applicant pool is qualified to attend the University, and though Yale has the money and power to expand its student body, it continues to manufacture scarcity for spots on campus."
[There are hyperlinks under "money" and "power" in the original text worth clicking.]
Yale isn't interested in improving the world through providing a high-quality education to the largest number of people possible. It's a hedge fund with university attached, where admissions are done with an eye toward creating future donors and political/business/technological leaders, whose fame can be leveraged for prestige and money.
You are swinging way too far to the opposite extreme in your last paragraph. Ivies are elitist and frequently hypocritical when it comes to their mission statements. But them being flawed does not mean they are not fulfilling some more material non-idealistic parts of their mission statements. They provide stellar education, surround you by motivated colleagues, and provide a base for world-class research (even if not all of these stellar researchers are interested in teaching). Look at Fields medalists and Nobel laureates stats for instance. They certainly have to become much better than they are today, but "hedge fund with university attached" is beyond hyperbolic.
I agree that the graduate education and research at such schools is generally world-class. I'm less convinced that the undergraduate education at Harvard or Yale is substantially better than, say, the University of Michigan or any other top 20 school, especially in domains with a relatively standard curriculum like math and physics.
Also, don't confuse the outputs with the causal effects of ivy PhD problems. Some of the learning environments are terrible but graduate leading researchers because they use the name brand to attract the top applicants. Their inputs are amazing, so the outputs are excellent even with subpar value-add.
> Their inputs are amazing, so the outputs are excellent even with subpar value-add.
This is exactly it. The people I know from going to Ivy leagues (or similar) are exceptional people to begin with. They were doing well before they got admitted. When I compare them to my peers from more accepting schools - they’re above marks in almost everything. This isn’t because Yale made them a better person - it’s because they were to begin with. (Usually due to differences in upbringing)
Seeing an Ivy League degree, I usually just think, “oh, good for them. This person probably came from a good family.” Whereas when I see some other unknown university I don’t give it much thought other than - “probably didn’t come from as good of a family as the Ivy League folks”. Where “good” in this case is something that enables one to go to such elite universities - quantify that however you like.
That said - I don’t hold up Ivy league graduates very much - I’ve met a lot of dumbasses who got their degrees from them. Being good at getting into a school doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at everything else - lol.
>This isn’t because Yale made them a better person - it’s because they were to begin with.
There’s actually been research that corroborates your hunch. They looked at students who were accepted to top schools and attended lower schools for a variety of reasons. Those students did as well as the cadre who attended top schools, indicating it was the schools selecting students who were already on track to be successful rather than helping those students become successful.
The one exception was students who came from a low socioeconomic class. They did benefit from attending top schools.
> I'm less convinced that the undergraduate education at Harvard or Yale is substantially better than, say, the University of Michigan or any other top 20 school, especially in domains with a relatively standard curriculum like math and physics.
I agree with you but would probably go further than other top 20 schools which are also incredibly elite places and exclusive places.
I've also heard enough stories about undergraduate math/physics at Harvard that I would be surprised if it were better. They aren't selecting for faculty that necessarily excel in teaching. Sometimes you don't want a Nobel Prize winner to be your introductory teacher, because they might throw out the curriculum and teach whatever they want.
It’s difficult to support undergrad without good researchers and an accompanying grad school. Or rather, it is superficially possible, but in a couple generations (academic ones, i.e. in a decade or two), as graduates of the school assume teaching positions, a kind of vicious circle of degeneration sets in where the curriculum discards connections to the actual state of the field and successive iterations of courses fossilize while working out more and more minuscule kinks of an ultimately flawed pedagogical approach, usually that of the “founders” who last had contact with actual science. (Nothing against those founders—most pedagogical approaches are flawed in one way or another—the wrong part is doubling down on those flaws.)
It’s a not uncommon (if also not universal) thing to happen to applied maths departments, especially those where mathematicians aren’t allowed or encouraged to do their own thing. Bad high school maths is essentially the ultimate endpoint of this process, see e.g. Quinn on the “revolution in mathematics” in the Notices of the AMS[1]. A more high-brow example is perhaps how no undergraduate physics major in a Russian university includes group theory(!)—because Landau thought it useless and annoying (he was not the only one among the greats to think so, though perhaps the last,—look up “Gruppenpest” for more), and that was when official university physics programs in Russia detached from actual research.
Unfortunately, the amount of places in the world doing fundamental maths, places diverse enough that you can stand in the hallway and find someone who can explain to you a subject far removed from your own (that’s essentially what counts as “world-class”), is perhaps a couple dozen, certainly not in the hundreds. As long as they exist at all, there’s hope that with enough cross-pollination the whole thing will not die out, but losing even a single one is literally, through these kinds of knock-on effects only visible over a period of a couple of decades, a blow to the collective knowledge of humanity.
(As a late-Soviet—early-Russian apocryphal story goes:
“Why are you not emigrating?”
“I have people to talk to here.”
[Ten years later]
“Why have you emigrated?”
“There was nobody left to talk to there.”)
"It’s difficult to support undergrad without good researchers and an accompanying grad school. Or rather, it is superficially possible, but in a couple generations (academic ones, i.e. in a decade or two), as graduates of the school assume teaching positions, a kind of vicious circle of degeneration sets in [...]"
I don't agree with this. First, because there are a bunch of elite liberal arts colleges in the US that serve as direct counterexamples. Second, because the teachers at these schools are not typically drawn from graduates of the school, but from PhD graduates of mid- to high-ranking research programs.
To give one example, Francis Su (who writes a lot about math education) teaches at Harvey Mudd – an excellent institution with no graduate program – and earned a PhD from Harvard.
Also:
"Unfortunately, the amount of places in the world doing fundamental maths, places diverse enough that you can stand in the hallway and find someone who can explain to you a subject far removed from your own (that’s essentially what counts as “world-class”), is perhaps a couple dozen, certainly not in the hundreds."
This is just wrong. Diversity is not really essential to the ranking or quality of a department. Plenty of top places eschew certain subjects (logic, combinatorics) or have relatively narrow tastes (NYU Courant, Princeton ORFE). Building strong groups in a few focus areas is much more important for research productivity. It sucks to be the only person doing Subject X at a certain place.
> Harvey Mudd – an excellent institution with no graduate program
It is one of the Claremont Colleges though, a consortium of 5 undergraduate schools and 2 graduate schools in Claremont that share many facilities and programs. 6 of the 7 have adjacent campuses.
Students in the Claremont undergraduate schools can take classes at the graduate schools (an at the other undergraduate schools).
I'd expect that this gives Harvey Mudd students most of any advantages that going to an undergraduate school that has a graduate school does.
I don’t think it’s hyperbolic at all. The elite universities in the US are massive investment companies with a college side hustle. Do you think the boards spend more time discussing the quality of the fund’s investments or the quality of the school’s education?
The boards definitely do not concern themselves much with the investment strategy. This is someone else job (usually a pretty small fairly independent office). The board concerns themselves with "should we approve the new dorm/theater/gallery/lab building suggested by the administration".
Literally none of this is true. The elite universities have companies to manage their endowment that compete for talent with the top hedge funds. These are not “small fairly independent offices” in any sense of the term. They’re major players in the industry and they’re far from independent. They’re usually a wholly-owned subsidiary with a board that reports directly to the university’s board. And any university board member who “isn’t concerning themselves much” with the financial situation of the university they serve isn’t fulfilling their duty.
Look up “Harvard Management Company”, for example.
Yale has unique historic and ongoing ties to the bureaucratic apparatus of the country. These have been/are exploited for the unique benefit of the institution and its associates. Harvard, (in particular some elements of the law school), are getting in on this game more on the direct "policy" level than ever historically. Take, for example, Harvard's new institutional bias toward "Lawfare."
I personally don’t think they need to do either, but one argument is that since they receive public funds, they have some duty to serve the public’s best interest.
They’re are some colleges that won’t even accept the GI Bill because they won’ don’t want those entanglements.[1] At least they put their money where their mouth is.
I do not know anything about Yale specifically, but I don't think it is reasonable to expect that every organization must grow all the time. A bakery, software org, or a factory may decline to grow even if they have "money and power" to do so. This is especially true for universities - there are a lot of them and they are mostly interchangeable, I have not seen a job listing which requires specifically Yale and nothing else.
As an aside, I think that "acceptance rate keeps ticking downward" is not a good argument. Rate depends on applications submitted, whicb is not directly controlled by university. The real question is "what is the freshman class size".
This is something all elite universities will need to address in the near future. It will take a growing amount of cognitive dissonance to, on one hand, have mission statements that talk about broad goals of improving humanity, and on the other hand serve as one of the primary markers and controller of elite status in the US. I say this as an Ivy alum.
While I don't necessarily agree with abolishing elite universities, the current admissions system is fundamentally corrupt, and the only reason universities don't abolish it is that doing so would require admitting a degree of luck in admissions, which would kill the facade of a strict meritocracy. My proposal would be to have clear, binary criteria for admission (some combination of grades, test scores, perhaps even something for extra academic success if that could be done objectively), and if that resulted in, say, 20000 people being eligible, then use a random lottery to get down to the number of spots in a class.
Or they can just scale up with population growth. Funding is hardly scarce at their level. We have more billionaires right now than ever. A few building names and libraries will easily pay for the next decade.
I totally agree if the solution is just to say "we automatically will admit anyone who hits our bar, and we'll grow the university as needed to accommodate anyone that hits that bar."
At some point, though, it seems like you might get into pure physical constraints at a place like Yale.
And you just proved my point, look at the distribution of Congress, the SCOTUS, the majority of elite government executive bureaucracy and tell me that they don't overwhelmingly favor certain institutions. Just ask your namesake's old boss.
> There’s something unsettling about Yale, about the way it operates, about its very existence.
I am a New Haven resident, have been for over a decade and spent most of my social time for the 5 years before that in the city. This analysis is quite spot on. I often say that even if you don't go to Yale, Yale comes to you. Yale New Haven Health System is actually the largest employer in the entire state of Connecticut. The University, Health System and Hospital occupy three spots of the top five employers in the city.
Yale is not a campus on its own at the outskirts of the city (like Southern CT State University, or to a lesser extent University of New Haven). Students and residents alike walk next to each other on city streets from one building to another. The University buildings are on major roads downtown. Unlike universities in large cities (NYU comes to mind), Yale doesn't suddenly get lost in a forest of other buildings. It is the city in many regards.
As a result, the Yale Police Department is deputized by the New Haven PD. They carry guns, have their own lockup, and have the ability to operate in pretty much every area of the city, whether officially "Yale" or not.
And the Yale Corporation owns a significant amount of commercial real estate as well, regularly raising rent to drive local businesses out and bring larger chains in. Small restaurants, diners, record and book stores replaced by Barnes & Noble, Urban Outfitters, Tarry Lodge and the like.
Yale doesn't pay taxes on the majority of its property. Instead, it makes a voluntary contribution to the city that is significantly less than the tax value of its properties. Meanwhile, it has a $42 billion endowment that the University proudly says had a 40.2% return on investment over the last year.
And still as the author writes, people are hungry and homeless on the New Haven Green a block away from Yale's historic buildings and fancy shops. The unions of Yale workers along with community residents have fought admirably for Yale to commit to training and hiring more workers from New Haven itself, but the University has pushed back and lied at every opportunity.
The question for many of us isn't about tearing Yale down, though. It is making Yale subservient to the City rather than the other way around. "change has been made by groups instead of individuals" absolutely rings true of every struggle we see here that directly or indirectly involves Yale. It's not about getting Yale to be better on its own - Dunson is absolutely right to suggest that's an impossible task.
Not so long ago, Oxford University elected its own MP. The University appears to have a stranglehold on the planning committee. During term-time the population of Oxford is dominated by students (the resident population is only about 140,000).
I really like this town; but I'd really like it more, if political control were returned to the permanent residents. This isn't going to happen; most of our political leaders and senior civil servants went to Oxford or Cambridge, so those two schools are favoured over their native populations.
Incidentally, when I refer to Oxford as a "town", I am referring to the custom that you get to call yourself a city if you have a cathedral and a bishop. Well, the Bishop of Oxford doesn't live in Oxford; the cathedral is in fact the college chapel of Christ Church college; and if you want to visit the cathedral, apparently you need a note from your parish vicar confirming that you are a practising christian.
I despise elite Universities.
/me graduated at London; colleges like Kings and UCL have elite reputations, but I went to a lesser college, one that no longer exists.
Very interesting! Yale doesn't have a Congressional or state representative (directly, anyway) but take a look at this map [0] and zoom in on Ward 1, in the center. That is pretty much all Yale territory.
Two blocks (Chapel to Elm, Church to College) are taken up by the New Haven Green, which isn't residential (though many homeless residents do live at/near it). From College through Park Street, as well as between Elm and Wall Streets are Yale dorms and academic buildings. Chapel to Crown are primarily restaurants, clubs, and a bit of shopping with some expensive apartments above them.
People who live there are extremely likely to be Yale-affiliated in some way.
2020 election results [1] show that there are 728 people who are eligible to vote in that ward, of which 173 or 23.76% did. They get one of 30 representatives on the Board of Alders. Another thing about New Haven is that nearly all of the Board is people who relate to Yale in some way, including members of unions.
> doesn't have a Congressional or state representative
Nor does Oxford any more; any such arrangement would be howled down nowadays. It would be disgraceful.
> They get one of 30 representatives on the Board of Alders
Kay, so I don't know what the Board of Alders is. I suppose it's like the city council? 728 sounds like a really small ward, if Aldermen are like Councillors.
Students in the UK get to say where they live (in digs, with their parents) for the purposes of voting. I think that's OK, as long as they don't vote in both places (I think this is most uncommon, but I assume it happens). [Edit to add] Quite a lot of students that come to Oxford end up settling here, at least for a while. I don't see why they shouldn't get to vote here.
The problem, as I see it, is that Oxford and the colleges are just so RICH. Saint John's College alone is said to own half the land between Oxford and London. It's very difficult for a resident population of 140,000 to resist the will of an institution with massively more wealth and more income than the residents (and which also happens to own the entire city centre).
What I mean is that you don't have to get representatives elected; it's enough that you are standing on the sidelines, with suitcases full of potential tax revenue. You can get your way just by people knowing you are fabulously rich.
Ah, sorry - yes, a Board of Alders is an elected legislative body. We have the Mayor of the city as the executive while the BoA makes laws and such.
I also agree that students should be able to vote where they live, by the way!
> It's very difficult for a resident population of 140,000 to resist the will of an institution with massively more wealth and more income than the residents
At about 134,000 residents (and I believe this includes ~30,000 Yale students, faulty and staff), this statement does resonate with me.
Tertiary education at the elite level is rarely about the quality of education. The difference between Georgia Tech and Columbia or Harvard's CS program is not that stark. However, the story is completely different when it comes to alumni network, access to funding, future opportunities. Prestige and network effects compound and an argument can be made for whether we should allow academia to be the gatekeepers of social mobility at the highest level.
Certain Ivies favour grade inflation yet their students do not suffer dilution of their degree value, this is not a privilege extended to many other institutions.
The Ivy League factor plays a smaller role for CS than for other disciplines, due to less gatekeeping. Yale is about University of Minnesota level across multiple computer science ranking measures: https://drafty.cs.brown.edu/csopenrankings/
You are not forced to pay attention to a Yale degree, though? If it affects government funding, OK, you can discuss it.
Building networks is also not a bad thing. It is good if people know and trust each other and know who to turn to for help. It is a stupid idea of modernism or whatever that there should be no networking.
What are the strict "levels" of education? Why is obtaining a "Yale" level of education in and of itself a good thing, especially if we're not seeing society-wide positive change driven solely by individuals with that level of education?
The article's point is that historically, large-scale change is driven by groups rather than individuals. And the groups are not cabals of HYP grads, their compositions are wide and varied. So it's worth revisiting exactly what your comment assumes: that there is a strict hierarchy of individual capacity to drive change, and we need to segregate people according to said hierarchy in order to push society forward.
> Also what is wrong with giving people the choice to go to Yale?
99.999% of people don't have the choice to go to Yale. That would be true even if everyone in America were given "equal opportunity" from birth -- it's how scarcity works. The article answers this question for you in case you want to give it a second read.
"Why is obtaining a "Yale" level of education in and of itself a good thing, especially if we're not seeing society-wide positive change driven solely by individuals with that level of education?"
If you don't think obtaining a Yale level of education is a good thing, simply don't go there? What would be the point in abolishing it?
"The article's point is that historically, large-scale change is driven by groups rather than individuals."
That would be the a) option, people can achieve the same things without Yale.
"99.999% of people don't have the choice to go to Yale. That would be true even if everyone in America were given "equal opportunity" from birth -- it's how scarcity works. The article answers this question for you in case you want to give it a second read."
Most people just decide not to go there. That doesn't imply that they don't have the choice.
"The article answers this question for you in case you want to give it a second read."
If their argument is it should be abolished because not everybody has the choice to go there, it is a bad argument. If b) holds, you would still want people to go to Yale to achieve the things that could not be achieved otherwise. And in case of a), it seems irrelevant.
I have read it. Their argument about groups making many advances is rather weak, though. It only links to a list of 100 allegedly most important advancements in human history.
If you need a good brain surgeon, a group and its advancements won't help you much. You need somebody with a very good education.
I also don't assume there is a strict hierarchy of capabilities.
You can still do your group advancements while Yale exists.
The article simply does not make a very good argument.
I don't see a way to not quickly devolve into socialism with that line of thought? You have to reject the notion that people should be allowed to spend their money as they see fit.
If you want to convince people that their money would be better spent elsewhere, fine. But to demand they should not be allowed to spend it on a Yale education is authoritarian and socialist.
I was talking about the people giving them money, for example by paying them for their education.
If the discussion is about removing charity status from Yale, it would be a different thing. As I see it, Yale is offering a service and people voluntarily decide to pay for it, so removing that option would be authoritarian.
I don't have a response to the meat of the article, but I admit that the author is quite brave posting that as a Yale student in the Yale paper with their byline clearly at the bottom.
There's nothing brave in the "This thing wrong, abolish it!" social justice rhetoric. We've been hearing this for the last 20 years and it has become meaningless.
If we've raised a generation that thinks that abolishing something will always do good, then we've done a terrible job for the next generations.
The student should certainly be commended and I do subscribe to their opinion, but be aware that they would probably find plenty (but not universal) support from professors and colleagues. Universities are not some monolith where the administration governs with an iron fist. The student's opinion is not too far from the mainstream, and even part of the university administration is self-aware and feeling similarly.
I’m glad this was written, because I know for a fact this wouldn’t be discussed at all if it was written by a Virginia Tech or University of Connecticut student
Or by any of the conventional media. This student is very brave in highlighting Yale's past, even the founder's name itself has a darker past.
Whether if anything will be done about that is extremely unlikely. Goes to show that the university knows it won't do anything serious about it, despite it having all that money and preaching their so-called 'social justice' or 'Diversity' and 'Inclusion' nonsense; whatever all of that means these days.
In a sense, Yale is an extension of the American political superstructure. I'm not sure if true social justice is, or should be, a political goal. Historically, this niche has been best served by religious organizations such as the Catholic church.
I don't know about Yale as a whole, but their current art dept website needs to be abolished for sure https://art.yale.edu , it appears no amount of funding will fix that.
Elite universities serve some combination of the world's smartest and wealthiest individuals. They even ensure that the if the smartest individuals are poor, that they will get a full ride and come for free. But what do we know very well on this site?
> If the service is free, you are the product.
Because corporations are unable to do interviews, they rely on the university to do selection. If you are an individual who is getting a full ride to an Elite university, you are selling your services to the wealthy individuals who go to that university, so that when these corporations HR do their retrospective on if individuals from that university are worth their salaries they find it to be true.
If you are incredibly gifted, I know the prestige is alluring, I know when you run the numbers it makes the most sense, I know it's a Prisoner's dilemma with no ability to iterate with the rest of the other gifted individuals. But it's really the only way we get out of this. Don't pick universities that select based on gifts. Don't select universities that select based on legacy status. But really, you have all the power. It is up to you to change this.
Why do so many people jump straight to “abolish” rather than reform? Seems like an extreme and impractical reaction.
I’d buy the authors argument if he was pushing for reform. It’s hard to take someone serious when they’re advocating for the destruction of some institution which they are actively part of.
Either be a part of the school and change from within or leave and preach for abolishment.
Of course, simply put, the far left (but not far left enough according to some comments) ideology embraced by the elite universities contradicts the existence of those universities.
I don't see how a union-busting institution which has produced and continues to produce some of the leaders of capitalist society, can be construed as 'embracing far left ideology'. As the author rightly points out, their commitment to 'social justice' is entirely superficial.
Yes. They are superficial. If they truly believe what they claim to believe, they should already no longer exist. It's like all the leftists living in industry countries. If they truly care about the poor, they would have already all moved to the poorest countries on the planet and help the poors in there already.
No clue about physics, but an undergraduate degree from Yale in chemistry makes one a technician in biotech/pharma. Assuming you have good lab skills. Who you work for in grad school and what you get your PhD in determines how you are perceived. Big name people end up at schools like Yale, but wherever they are they are big name people and their family tree tends towards success.
The author is free to leave Yale anytime he wishes.
No sale? I see.
Either stick around long enough that you can rise to the top of the institution, to a position where you can actually make a change, or recognize that there are plenty of ways to make a difference in peoples' lives that don't involve tearing down the Establishment. Tearing down the Establishment doesn't force Establishment money to fund worthy causes, it just causes Establishment money to flow elsewhere. But you can always decide to focus your own energies on projects that are noble and worth your time.
Yale is kind of where you go if you're part of the American establishment but not too bright. The lesser Bush went there. The ones who are both well-connected and smart go to Harvard or Stanford, or maybe Princeton.
"Not too bright" is very relative. Even W Jr. is a genius compared to the average American. Even with legacy considerations Ivys aren't accepting truly incapable people.
How about having an explicit exam only transparent admissions policy with overt extra points for say preferred disadvantaged groups? India has a similar system for entrance to universities with quotas for the lower castes. Or is that much more radical than Abolish Yale because rich white elites can’t get their children in through fencing and rowing teams?
This author has largely nailed it. There are simply no other institutions that celebrate elitist, establishment puppetry of the rest of the population like Yale. Both Harvard and Princeton celebrate academic achievement, growth beyond the walls of the schools. Yale remains an incestuous pool of collusion, circumventing meritocracy by design.
It seems that Yale is the the epitome of modern neoliberalism: incestuous, deeply capitalist, superficially woke but not in any meaningful way that would affect the balance of economic or political power.
All while being dismissive towards anyone not in their circles.
Sure, abolish it. Maybe that would help get us out of this political logjam we’ve been in for half a century.
Abolish universities in general. Strip federal grants and funding of all forms. Sell off the land. If education is worth it the private companies benefitting will fund it. Make them pay their fair share if they really have a shortage of workers. Employees of public companies are not incentivized to create efficient business that output expected results. Currently, they're there to collect a paycheck and hand you a piece of paper. The system was at one time great and has slid down the hill. It's time we abolish a system thats stuck in the 50's and stop stealing money from people to fund their jobs and budgets.
"Nevertheless, Yale continues to commit this elitist view of change-making, closing the doors of the university to anyone who isn’t deemed capable of becoming a world leader. Yale’s acceptance rate keeps ticking downward as the years progress. In last year’s admissions cycle, only 4.6 percent of applicants were offered a place in the incoming class. Though Yale acknowledges that a vast majority of its applicant pool is qualified to attend the University, and though Yale has the money and power to expand its student body, it continues to manufacture scarcity for spots on campus."
[There are hyperlinks under "money" and "power" in the original text worth clicking.]
Yale isn't interested in improving the world through providing a high-quality education to the largest number of people possible. It's a hedge fund with university attached, where admissions are done with an eye toward creating future donors and political/business/technological leaders, whose fame can be leveraged for prestige and money.