I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit:
> what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs
I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school. If the same money was put toward social mobility, the most successful people in our country could be folks who grew up in poverty. Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.
> toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades ... where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch...
That's been happening for much longer than four decades, lol
> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.
That must be part of the answer, but it can’t be the whole answer, or close to the whole. There’s huge variation in educational outcomes among those who get the access that you describe. What explains why some people in this group have such good outcomes, while most have relatively lackluster outcomes?
A lot of the comments here come from a place of ignorance...
I've had the unique experience of private tutoring many "elite" students in high school for math and physics for nearly a decade in Los Angeles a while back. Basically both rich kids and less fortunate kids who can only afford my tutoring rate every once in a while vs rich kids who can if they wanted to afford my help every day.
It's not simply "better textbooks" or "better schooling", the difference in education is VERY DRASTIC and being in LA I was able to see kids from drastically different backgrounds. Rich kids with having tutors for every class, maids for every other side chore so parents can actually pay attention to their kids, private high schools and middle schools that cost nearly $30-50k per year can buy you so many advantages most people can't even comprehend.
The biggest advantages I saw was better resources, better textbooks, curriculums that are ACTUALLY made with care and time, and most importantly teachers who were paid very very comfortable (ie, 6 figure salaries) who have the luxury to not be overworked, and can actually attend to their students as needed. Imagine every one of your teachers in middle school and high school, putting top notch effort into providing a great learning experience for you? Most people probably only had one teacher like that in their entire lifetime. And not to mention if the school was lacking in any area, many of the rich parents would hire their own private ex-olympian or ex-superstar specialist of whatever they desire.
People here are DRASTICALLY underestimating what extra educational resources can buy.
I don’t know why this was flagged, because to me it rings very true. I’m from a different country but I have been on the receiving end of poverty and teachers who at least tried to give a damn about their pupils, and some tutors too. At some point I was very surprised to learn that being not fucked up by life and having a teacher who gives a shit can work wonders on you, if circumstances allow.
It’s all about incentives and availability of resources, time and attention. When life gives too many shit lemons to both students and teachers, there’s no breathing room left for any of them to care a little bit more about any taught subject. When teachers are overburdened and children not supported by their environments, they just want to get rid of each other ASAP, and then it’s on parents to berate their kids for not wanting to study because whatever reason.
But if you can unburden both a teacher and a student from hardships of life even just a little bit, somehow a lot of attention and time free up to care about any subject, and explore it in different directions, not necessarily by what’s included in curriculum. Suddenly learning about something and practicing it can be actually fun.
Fun and joy of exploring stuff is so important yet so missing. Having some not even too fat stacks of cash can help with that drastically.
I vouched for this comment and brought it back from being flagged/dead/whatever because I think you're making a great point, and not calling anyone specific out. I would caution you from calling folks ignorant, even indirectly, as it can be taken the wrong way and can cause your comment to be flagged.
I saw that you copied this comment and replied to another comment below with it. I'm concerned that folks might see that as against HN guidelines. Again, I agree with what you're saying, and I just don't want you to be seen as a spammer.
Respectfully, I think you're missing the point too. You are right that many folks who get access to these top resources don't then go on to become so successful, however you might define success. But a larger proportion of them do compared to other groups. I'm not saying that an individual is guaranteed success if they're born into a wealthy family. But I am saying that a wealthy neighborhood of kids who have access to more resources growing up will have a much higher rate of Ivy League admissions than a poor neighborhood across the railroad tracks.
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteins brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould.
Srinivasa Ramanujan would be a counterexample. He grew up poor with no formal training in mathematics but was nonetheless one of the world's greatest math geniuses.
He certainly was brilliant. But compared to his contemporaries he died really young, at age 32.
He did also go to school and even tried to go to college, he even got a scholarship! He had a lot of issues with the non math coursework however and did not finish any degree that I am aware of.
The reality of his life is a bit more complex than "oh a poor boy found a basic math text book and taught himself to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history"
What is more interesting here is to imagine if he grew up with wealth and formal training, would he have died at 32? Would he been given the time and resources to actually become one of the greatest math geniuses out there?
Ramanujan had a lot of raw talent, but it wasn't honed, and ultimately it was cut extremely short and wasted.
What Ramanujan's potential could have been is a different question than whether Einstein's equals are dying undiscovered in cotton fields.
By definition, we know of zero examples of geniuses who were never discovered due to poverty, which makes it hard to extrapolate the rate at which this happens. But we do have examples of geniuses who grew up poor but were discovered nonetheless, which gives us hope that exceptional people in similar situations will be discovered. Especially today with global primary school enrollment rates close to 90% [1], and secondary school rates around 76%.
Without randomized controlled trials, there's no easy way to separate the effects of increased educational spending and tutoring from hundreds of other factors that might affect someone's admission rate. Clearly we expect it helps or we wouldn't spend money on it. But it's not clear if educational spending is the dominant factor in academic success or a small factor among many.
In at least one study I've seen, smaller class size didn't have much effect, but private tutoring did.
As someone who has privately tutored many rich kids vs poor kids for nearly a decade, I don't think I need to see a study to see how much more advantages they have. It's pretty apparent the advantages.
Yes a really "dumb" kid will still be "dumb" academically, but people here are severely underestimating what money can buy in education. I've seen really "dumb" kids be brought up to the level of "passably smart" simply because of resource access.
When you have teachers who are not overworked and are paid lovely salaries (ie 6 figure salaries), imagine every teacher you have actually cares and invested in your education? Imagine every class has recordings of every lecture as well as a curriculum that has a lot of forethought and time put into it? And imagine if the school has a lacking teacher, than the parents hire some ex-olympian, or ex-superstar coach or teacher to make up for that? I've seen parents hire ex-olympic athletes to get some untalented rich kid to close to olympic level.
Honestly, I think it's really understated how much educational spending can affect a kid. Most people will not see what I've seen, and even from someone who came from a middle class background who used to believe wealth does not matter when it came to education, even I was shocked by what money can buy in "academic success" and my opinion changed. I at this point, don't need to see a study because it was that drastic.
Anecdotally, I heard a story from a teacher I worked with who spent a lot of time with a student who was lagging behind their peers in school and was given extra support through the special education program. Their family decided to move away, so the school put together a file about how the student's progress. They later heard that the receiving school system found that student to be far ahead of their peers and put them into a gifted program.
There is such a difference in environments in this country's education system. I was doing math in my sophomore year of high school that some don't see until college (or ever). Was I inherently smarter? Of course not. I had good teachers and books, I didn't have to work a job at night, etc.
These people won the genetic lottery and can do anything they want, this includes doing nothing.
A lot of people don't really care about doing much more than the minimum. Even talented people are like this. I'm sure a lot of us know (or, let's be honest, are the) people who busted their ass when they were younger, only to hit their 30s-40s and coast.
Who says these people would have kept busting their ass out for so long if they had a pot of gold waiting for them right after college?
I've been in a run-of-the-mill state school and an elite Ivy, and I can tell you that yes, a lot of the students in the latter were born extremely smart. Yes, there are smart people in the former, but the difference in the distributions is not small. IMO
The long and short of it is that when it comes to education, the US needs equal opportunities. This means paid-for education and an equalization of education knowledge / lessons, and less emphasis (in hiring) on what schools you went to. A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at.
Personally, I've benefited from the Netherlands' older equal opportunity system; my parents weren't rich (working class, single income, house bought at inopportune times) so they wouldn't have been able to put me through college, but thanks to a government funding - only a few hundred per month - plus affordable colleges - iirc it was €1500 per year + a few hundred tops in books but the books felt optional since piracy was a thing - meant that I could get a college degree and a subsequent job in a highly desired field (software development) and comfortably move up to middle class.
Of course, thanks to inflation and whatnot, I'm not significantly better off than my parents were - I bought a house ten years later in life than they did, half the size and twice the price, and I got lucky - but I'm still fortunate that we had this opportunity.
Some years ago, the government sliced into this equal opportunity program though, turning the 'free' government student funding into a loan so there's a generation now starting out with a college degree and 15-25K in debt and a completely inaccessible housing market even if they were to combine incomes with a significant other.
> A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at.
There is no inherit weight, but humans are drawn to shiny things. Similarly, someone who turns up in a Ferrari is going to be seen differently than someone who shows up in a rusty old farm truck. If someone establishes an emotional connection to a school, perhaps because they are alumni themselves, that just might be the shiny they need to see, whether it is meaningful or not.
> A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at
A big issue here is that all degrees with the same title are not equal between universities. If nothing else; as long as MIT is more selective than Indiana University of Pennsylvania, you're going to have a a general average quality of graduate produced.
> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.
The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional. The schools filter so harshly that just getting admitted already means you are exceptional. And they can do that because of their good reputation, which is mostly based on tradition and perception.
> The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional.
You see this all the time. People think it's the institution that makes the person but it's actually the person that makes the institution. It's the problem with admitting people into an institution that can't play at the level of everyone else there. A lot of people actually think that by simply going to the elite institution that the non-elite person will somehow end up with the same abilities as the others.
You can give me all the resources an elite athlete will have access to but at the end of the day I'll never be able to play at their level. For some reason this is widely understood. But when it comes to intellectual capacity, many people think everyone is the same and it's access to the institutions that they are lacking.
Unless you're a legacy or a child of a donor or professor. (There are a lot of legacies and children of donors, somewhat fewer children of professors.)
I believe that ascar is arguing that when you're Harvard you don't actually need particularly good teaching, because you've already recruited students who are good at studying, taking tests, motivating themselves and suchlike. Don't you need to be a straight A student just to get in?
After all, if someone came in a straight A student, and graduated a straight A student - can the school really claim credit for that?
I went to a state school and studied CS. I have done OK for myself; started at a startup and have made steady progression.
A friend of mine went to a ~top 5 CS school - started at same startup I did, same month, for ~50% more $$. Did he learn more than me in school? Honestly talking through course loads and the like - he really did. I had to learn a ton independently/in the field that he had showed to him in a sophomore CS class.
That doesn't mean he was inherently a better engineer than me (~10 years later) - but it did mean he had a big leg up Day One.
I agree that toxic elitism isn’t new, but I do also agree with the author that it has intensified.
Only a few colleges matter. A degree from the others is “actually a dunce cap” according to Peter Thiel.
Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities, which of course have developed completely ludicrous property prices. Nothing happens anywhere else, so if you want a good career you have to at least spend time in one of these.
Markets are winner take all with one or maybe a few companies taking each vertical.
I have asked older people about this, especially the urban elitism of only a few cities matter. Most of them have confirmed what I have observed (I am 45) namely that these trends massively accelerated roughly after the year 2000.
It could be due to the Internet, historically low interest rates redistributing wealth to those that can easily net investment or cheap corporate debt, or some other factor, but I do think it’s real. I also suspect it’s a hidden driver of our political hyper polarization.
The urban elitism seems to have been dented a little by telework and COVID, and we seem to be entering an unbundling phase with social media. Maybe the trend is reversing.
Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs all recognized that the value proposition was not there and moved on. They did not stick it out to receive the graduate/dunce cap just to sooth their sunk cost pangs. Indeed, had they continued with it just because they started, that would be dunce-worthy.
Thiel suggests that the "colleges that matter" offer more, e.g. research labs, that bring more to the table. That may justify greater investment. Certainly researchers at Harvard have done a lot of ground breaking things. The role it played in those discoveries is why it is considered a college that matters. Can Reed College say the same?
Thiel's perspective may very well be distorted, but I am not sure these examples show that. More telling, if we want to play with anecdotes, would be to look at a graduate of Reed College, not someone who ran away as fast as possible because he felt the college was not offering him much.
OK on Steve Jobs, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at Harvard. And they decided the value still wasn't there - even with Harvard's "ground breaking things" and "college that matters".
> Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at Harvard. And they decided the value still wasn't there.
No, they realized that they had a limited time-window opportunity on their hands that has a potential for a lot more value than the degree, as long as they executed on that opportunity well and had a bit of luck.
Neither Gates nor Zuck just dropped out with nothing going on for them, and only then started their respective companies. IIRC Zuck quit because he was busy running Facebook during its explosive growth phase, and he had to make a choice between allocating his time to running FB and school.
Most people who decide to drop out don't have an explosively-growing business on their hands that they have a limited time-window to execute on. And while this is a pure guess, but I don't think Zuck would drop out just because, without something like FB fighting for his time and attention.
The idea isn't that Harvard magically gives you value just by showing up, but that there is opportunity to extract value there. An early investment in Harvard may lead you to joining the ranks as a researcher, for example. Gates and Zuckerberg realized that wasn't their future, so they aborted and got on the right track for themselves. But Thiel suggests that there is a possible future for those who wish to strive to join a Harvard "Old Boys Club".
In contrast, he suggests that a Reed College has no such opportunity. Let's say Jobs did graduate from its hallowed halls. Then what? Maybe he'd become a professor there? What can one really get out of Reed College? More likely he would have just ended up back in industry, at which point it was a waste of resources to invest in academia. Thiel would see such waste as being a boneheaded move. Sure, if you are in college for personal enjoyment, or what have you, rather than some kind of financial investment then such waste is less of a concern, but then you are also not Thiel's intended audience.
And let's not even pretend race doesn't factor into this. The reason so many Asian students excel is that they're the children of (reasonably) high status immigrants. Even if the wealth in the country of origin doesn't directly translate, the social status still carries over. Likewise the reason so many Black students underperform or only gain access via Affirmative Action is that they largely originate in families of lower social status with little access to education, carried over ultimately from slavery but more directly a familial legacy pruned by centuries of racism.
Social mobility is not universally seen as a good thing by everyone in society. Specifically to those at the top of the social hierarchy it can be a threat because a wide gap and inequality helps maintain a position of power: if everyone has equal power, noone does.
So it's silly to expect elite universities to follow a broader economic incentive when it comes to who gets in, who graduates and who receives preferrential treatment. There are certainly economic factors at play but ultimately the entire system is heavily built around nepotism (which in this case is hardly a modern invention given that universities used to be very much run by and for the hiearchial elites of society). Sure, the more direct incentives may be financial (e.g. donations) but ultimately power and hierarchies are a better lens than the economist one of the article if you want to make sense of this.
> The reason so many Asian students excel is that they're the children of (reasonably) high status immigrants.
That's not true. For instance, in NYC Asians have the highest rate of poverty. And yet they also have the highest rate of advanced placement in schools. [1] And many of these kids are from these poor families. It's because their culture values this and Asian students tend to put more effort into school. Many Asian cultures believe in the connection between effort and achievement and it shows. [2]
The first explanation suggests that Asian-American youth’s academic advantage can be attributed to advantages in socio-demographic factors. Relative to whites, their parents tend to be better educated, and they are more likely to live in stable, two-parent families with higher incomes (5). This explanation, however, is insufficient because advantages in socio-demographic factors only partially explain the achievement gap (2, 3, 5). Moreover, Asian Americans are not uniformly advantaged in terms of family socioeconomic background. For example, the poverty rates of Chinese and Vietnamese are higher than they are for whites (5). However, the disadvantaged children of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant families routinely surpass the educational attainment of their native-born, middle-class white peers (6, 7).
> I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school.
Sounds like a good investment opportunity. Fund a child into wealth now and take a cut of their much greater wealth created by their talents later on.
Investors have certainly flirted with the idea before, but it has never caught on. Perhaps it isn't the sure ticket you make it out to be?
Yeah, at the individual level this isn't cut and dry. When I wrote my comment I was talking about aggregate groups of students, apologies if that wasn't clear.
None of the subsections in that essay do much more than “point”; in classic Scott Alexander fashion he makes a lot of noise and gestures at. . . something. . .
* Privilege
> “One obvious answer would be “privilege”. It’s not completely wrong; once the first talented individual makes a family rich and famous, it has a big leg up.”
But this answer isn’t politically viable for him so he glosses over it.
* Genetics
> “The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk.”
He spends a lot of time trying to make this one work but of course it has all the well-known problems that all the eugenicists of the past ran into (e.g., assortative mating doesn’t completely explain Ashkenazi Jews).
* Education
> “Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird.”
> I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school.
I think a lot of people, myself included, want to believe this. It's nice to think that all humans have great potential inside of them!
Unfortunately, reality might not respect our perfectly reasonable sensibilities. After having a child, I began to research the things I could do to enrich her environment, maximize her intelligence, etc. One depressing thing I learned is that intelligence is more-or-less a purely genetic trait. Your intelligence is highly correlated with your biological parents' intelligence, to the same degree as something like height.
> Results: Parents who read 1 picture book with their children every day provide their children with exposure to an estimated 78,000 words each a year. Cumulatively, over the 5 years before kindergarten entry, we estimate that children from literacy-rich homes hear a cumulative 1.4 million more words during storybook reading than children who are never read to.
This study just says that kids who are read to are exposed to more words. It's basically like saying kids who go outside more are exposed to more sunlight. Sure, this is definitely a true fact. But does it matter? This study says nothing about how reading effects outcomes in childhood or in life.
> Various studies have estimated the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.
One thing that is interesting is that children have very random IQs that eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs. Perhaps this is explained by things like an early-life word gap that eventually gets filled with age.
Yes, it does. It matters a lot. "The Word Gap ... has important consequences for children’s later vocabulary, literacy and school performance" [0]
Even if this whole line of research gets debunked, reading to your kids won't hurt!
> eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs
I haven't read much about this research, maybe it holds more water than I think. But does it matter? Do you really think disadvantaged youth are such because of genetics?
I think there are two types of properties: intrinsic and extrinsic. Your intelligence is intrinsic. It’s internal to you and is highly correlated with your genetics. Your success in life is extrinsic. It’s based on factors outside of you, like the circumstances of your family, etc.
So, no, I’m not saying success is purely genetic. But, I also think there is a strong genetic component to one’s intrinsic ability and so not everyone can reach the top even if they work really hard.
> it would be nice to know which interventions actually affect adult intelligence
sure, that would be nice. it does seem pretty clear that as a general rule, well-resourced students are more likely to get accepted into, and graduate from, elite schools. Happy to back that claim up with some research if you like.
> The word gap research isn't a randomized trial
No, its a growing body of research including many studies. [0] And it was an example I used to illustrate how well-resourced students achieve more in school, even from a young age.
> well-resourced students are more likely to get accepted into, and graduate from, elite schools. Happy to back that claim up with some research if you like.
We agree on this, but it's also a major confounder for observational word gap studies. And though we try, it's very difficult to fully control for confounders.
The holy grail would be interventions that can improve adult intelligence but unfortunately a lot of interventions that look promising in short term studies see their benefits disappear by the time the children reach adulthood. There don't appear to be any long term studies on this yet (I know this is a big ask).
FWIW, most Ivy League and other top schools (MIT, Stanford) offer extreme discounts on tuition for students with household income under around $150K. Often times they'll pay somewhere between 0-10% of the actual tuition. If your family makes less than $75k, I think you can go to most or all of these schools for free (in tuition at least, not sure about room/board/food).
I'm glad they do that. But those kids still have to get in. Which is much more difficult for a kid graduating from an under-resourced high school.
I went to a very privileged high school. There were so many eyeballs on my class' test scores, recommendations, personal essays...of course we were going to succeed. Most of us got into our top choice schools. You often need a lot more than money to get into these schools.
For competitive students, private universities often are substantially cheaper than their state institutions.
And the benefits are growing. Duke, for example, will waive tuition for all students from NC and SC whose families earn less than $150k. Automatic Room and board and supply support kicks in at $65k. Davidson was one of the first, but a lot of schools don't include loans in their aid packages any more*.
These aren't special named scholarships either! These are automatic benefits to all admitted students. If the school wants a particular student, there are extra pots of discretionary money available as scholarships, prizes, etc.
If you're in the top 10% of your HS class and you can afford to leave home and study full-time for a few years, you really should swing for the fences. The best private schools tend to have higher 4-year graduation rates, so you win coming (out of pocket) and going (opportunity cost).
*) Middle-income houses probably need to take out loans to match their obligation.
So do you believe these schools are unbiased regarding admission to students that require such aid (nonprofitable) versus wealthy students that require no aid (profitable)? This article is pointing out that these (and likely lower ranked schools) are biased toward the profitable candidates. Given that is the case, it is a long-shot on top of a long-shot to be admitted to Ivy League without paying out of pocket.
You're assuming that people who are admitted to Ivy League schools a) have higher IQs than average and b) have parents with higher IQs than average.
Neither of these need to be true. It's a incestuous system where it's easy to believe that people of average IQ have been born into privilege for generations and succeeded only because of their family wealth and connections.
Are you saying that say MIT and Caltech students don't have higher than average IQ? It's almost a certainty that they do and I'm sure it extends to the Ivy league and other elite schools.
I'll bet that most students with good grades who are applying to elite colleges have higher than average IQs.
MIT and Caltech are not Ivy League but even then I'm sure they have a lot of students who benefit from private schools, private tutors, and pricy college prep programs. What differentiates the ones who get accepted from the ones who don't?
Hereditary is not the same as genetic. Non-genetic inheritance exists; gene expression can be affected by trauma or want experienced by immediate ancestors. The traits that result from this inheritance can be modified through therapy; the framework for the unmodified trait continues to exist in the organism, barring catastrophic environmental circumstances.
The ability and willingness to perform well on IQ tests is a metric which deserves adequate analysis.
Taking it out of scope by conflating it with "potential" and "heredity" is a lack intellectual rigor.
IQ is not "intelligence". Low IQ closes many doors. Normal and above IQ aren't correlated with anything. For example in "Zagorsky JL. Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress. Intelligence. 2007 Sep 1;35(5):489-501." https://gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/2007-zagorsky.pdf There is no relationship between IQ and wealth. And income after an IQ of around 100 barely goes up.
About heritability, that doesn't say that if your parents had an IQ of X you will have an IQ of ~X. It says, two people with "identical" DNA will have IQs that are very similar! There's also the big caveat that many scientists think these studies have confounds that overstate the results. But even if they are real, they don't mean what you think they do.
That article does not say what you seem to think it says. Heritability and IQ are both fairly complex topics and citing a single article out of context doesn't do the subject justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
That said, your statement does not follow from your argument. The heritability of IQ is unrelated to whether people's potential is wasted by being denied access to a nepotistic college system. The school system is not a meritocracy either.
I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT.
I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most important as it's crucial to your "personal brand" (A "Harvard trained" lawyer). With doctors it seems less important and with most other professions it seems almost irrelevant.
> I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT.
Yes but for many the reason they were at Google was because of the MIT degree. So not only do you get a great education, but then you go on to do solid work (hopefully) and get good experience. It's acceleration on ROI of the degree.
Exactly this. I now work in a team with a bunch of Ivy League UK equivalents (Oxford/Cambridge), but I'm about 5 years older working at a similar grade/comp ratio. I had to hop around 4 different teams at 2 companies, and build a pretty extensive portfolio of work, before I got a foot in the door they did straight out of university.
After graduating from a bog standard state school, it took me 20 years of job hopping from one non-name-brand company to another before I finally got into a FAANG company. And once you're inside, you can see why this is: You're surrounded by a monoculture of Stanford and MIT and Berkeley graduates, because those (and a few others) are where they do all their university recruitment. Not to pick on graduates of those great schools in particular. They're generally very smart and capable folks! It's just that big tech seems to focus on a small number of schools and practically ignore all the other ones.
Overall it does work like that though. Google (or other tech companies/elite institutions) attends MIT engineering career fairs, it doesn't attend others.
Corporations are not good at identifying promising talent outside of their traditional (Ivy League, etc.) recruiting grounds so they stick with their traditional recruiting grounds and then they'll favor "diverse" students from their traditional recruiting grounds. That's why they (corps) haven't made any substantial progress in "diverse hires" IMO.
For example if "Google" wanted to make a difference it would actually ban hiring from Ivy League or top-20/30 universities (wiggle room on details here) and instead focus on universities that have higher admission rates (50% or so), large public universities, big time diverse populations relatively speaking.
I'm not denying that, but you are ignoring the fact that Google would open that booth at a LOT of public schools as well. Just off the top of my head - UC Berkeley, UCLA, Mich, Iowa State, UIUC, UW, UW Madison, UCSB, Oregon State, UMass Amherst, etc.
And honestly, I really don't think you understand how hiring whas changed at a traditional corporation.
For management track roles, these companies (eg. Danaher, Abbvie, P&G, Coca Cola) would hire undergrads from regional schools for management track LDP programs.
Traditionally (aka the 70s and 80s) they would recruit from Ivies only, but that basically ended by the 2000s when they saw they couldn't compete on the package.
Berkely, UCLA, Michigan, Washington, are some of the best universities in the country. They exceed Ivy League schools in some fields and compete across the board. These aren't great examples in this context.
UIUC, Wisconsin (CMU as well for example) have really strong engineering programs and "fit the mold".
UCSB (UCI too for example) and Oregon State are based on the west coast. You can get the kids who didn't get in to Stanford or Cal for one reason or another here. I'm guessing UMass fits this profile as well but for MIT/Harvard/etc.
Iowa State is the only one here that's surprising and I'd be curious to find any sort of info online about Google attending their career fairs. It's probably an experiment on Google's part. They typically do not recruit at these types of universities or the footprint is minimal.
Overall the point isn't "has Google ever sat foot on this campus? I guess they recruit there!!" it is "Google primarily recruits at Ivy League Universities (and of course the top 10 or 20 or so universities including public) and that is their bread and butter so to speak. Are you suggesting that Google recruits Harvard the same way it recruits Iowa State?
You initially said "Google didn't recruit my four friends", but Google still goes to campus in-person and recruits there. Google didn't show up at any of the career fairs for my big public universities in Ohio, though I've interviewed a few times based on my own sheer will and luck.
(just to be clear, I'm not picking on Google specifically and these comments can be applied generally to all the top hedge funds, tech companies, non-profits, etc.)
Iowa State has a strong STEM program because of Ames National Lab.
They also have on campus recruiting at UTD, UMinn, Purdue, BYU, ASU, and Stony Brook.
And when did you attend college?
And, to be fair, if it wasn't Ohio State I doubt they would have been there.
> (just to be clear, I'm not picking on Google specifically and these comments can be applied generally to all the top hedge funds, tech companies, non-profits, etc.)
What school you go to does matter, but it's doable for most students to attend a semi-selective program and still have plenty of doors open. Indiana Tech or Wright State aren't one of those and probably won't be.
It's going to be very hard to convince me that Google puts the same amount of recruiting resources into Iowa State or similar as it does Harvard, MIT, Michigan, etc. It's not a matter of "they went to campus at least once, therefore it's the same thing" which is what you're implying here.
> And when did you attend college?
I went to Ohio University (close to the same enrollment numbers as Iowa State actually) 2012-2015, and then went to Ohio State 2018-2020. I did a fair amount of campus recruiting on behalf of my employer, helped Ohio University some with getting companies on campus, and created a hackathon with a career fair element to it as well.
> Indiana Tech or Wright State aren't one of those and probably won't be.
Yes... which further strengthens my original point.
CMC has no reputation out East, but has a massive west coast PE/IB alumni network.
Danaher's GM Development Program (leadership track program) targets Carnegie Mellon
You need to attend an elite university to succeed, but an elite university doesn't have to be an Ivy. Selective public schools like Cal, Mich, UVA, UT Austin, UCLA, etc are feeders as well as Selective Privates like Tufts, UChicago, BYU, CMU, CMC, NYU, USC, etc.
Yes, but it's not an Ivy, as you mentioned in your comment. Unless you are using Ivy to represent the 50+ top universities in the US which are a mix of public and private schools.
I was a part of GE Aviation's Leadership Program and they definitely started looking towards especially more local schools towards the end of my program. They found that people who were from more local schools were more likely to stay longer term after the program finished. Most of the people they hired from the larger schools would leave pretty quickly after finishing the program.
> For example if "Google" wanted to make a difference it would actually ban hiring from Ivy League or top-20/30 universities (wiggle room on details here) and instead focus on universities that have higher admission rates (50% or so), large public universities, big time diverse populations relatively speaking.
I would love to see a company do this experiment. It would really put their self-proclaimed focus on diversity to the test! Too many companies helplessly say "Oh, we really want to hire a diverse workforce, but by golly it's so hard and we just can't find diverse candidates from our candidate pipeline of only Ivy-league and top-tier schools!" Focus on hiring from mid-tier state schools and see if that's still true.
New grad talent is a huge pipeline for Google or any other FAANG, and they'll recruit at every well-rated and large engineering program they can find, the large majority of which aren't just MIT. And tons of engineering programs that aren't those, though they may just do all their recruiting through the colleges' online resources, since they have a limited number of humans to physically travel.
Online recruiting isn't the same as in-person recruiting though. Note that Google (just using them as a stand-in) recruits in-person at MIT but doesn't at other places where they "recruit online" from.
While I agree it doesn’t matter much 1-2 jobs into your career, Ivies are really good at getting you through that first door. I wouldn’t be surprised if that MIT degree got someone to their first technical screen at Google, or gave them the right resources they needed to pass the interview.
>I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.
I would like this to be true, but I think it varies a lot. I have seen execs be very excited by name-brand degrees well past that point. And then do the same thing with name-brand companies, without inquiring much as to what a given developer did at, say, one of the FAANGs.
When I've asked, the stated theory was that those places were good at filtering for smart people, so we didn't really have to evaluate actual competence. And that is one of the theoretical functions of things like degrees, so I get what they're saying, however horrifying I find it personally.
> I would like this to be true, but I think it varies a lot. I have seen execs be very excited by name-brand degrees well past that point.
I have seen executives (in startups and small, private companies) effectively stable PhDs and others with graduate degrees because of where their degree was printed. They pay these people a lot of money to keep them on payroll because it is, whether true or supposed, a strong signal to potential investors, etc.
Ostensibly the value of Ivy league as it pertains to tech is in making connections and partnerships with people who have cash-flow and ambition to match. Maybe this is overstated or tech entrepreneurs are more likely to find investment some other way.
If the goal is just to get in at FANG, well, better show some astounding grades, a grab-bag of portfolio items, a knack for communication, among other things. That isn't contingent on Ivy league.
> the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.
but it does matter for a first job, which then has trickle down effects. If you have a better shot at a high-paying company with a good brand name and/or a better shot at "prestige" teams on those companies, that influences the next few years.
Nothing is guaranteed, but these marginal gains snowball.
This is path dependency though. They got into Google because they went to MIT and they'll get their next job because they were at Google and so on. Sure, you could have gone to some terrible college and then ended up at Google, but that's a much more difficult path to break into.
I think this is both true and not true, especially as Facebook/Google/similar get less selective. Having Ivy + Google has a stronger halo effect compared to other colleges, speaking from personal experience compared to peers who went to less selective colleges.
Because Google is similarly valuable to MIT in your scenario.
But if you worked at a random startup after college, or three in a row, it's very likely that MIT on your resume will still be the thing that gets you in the door for an interview for your next job.
> I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.
Anecdotally that isn't true. I am not trying to come off like a dick here but hiring manager is (probably) rarely on the level where people care about this stuff.
I was well over a decade into my career as a software engineer before HR types and executives stopped (openly, outwardly) giving a shit about the fact that I didn't have a degree. I made it through the front door based on my network, which I sincerely lucked into.
I absolutely believe (based on analyzing conversations and remarks made with these HR types and executives but also managers over the years) that I was passed over for promotions and given smaller starting salaries and pay bumps because of this. Yes, that did eventually stop. Where I am today, I know for a fact (if you can trust Blind, levels.fyi, and personal anecdotes, etc.) that I out earn some of my peers with equal education and tenure because of my specific experiences and skills, but it came at a cost for a long, long time.
The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of the top 7 are Ivies[0]. I bet you'd see the same with CEOs.
You could argue that it is a reflection on the already rich getting in (although you would overlook those like Thomas, who grew up very poor), but that is also part of the problem. Many times these schools are finishing schools, which prepare their students to take their places as Masters of the Universe.
At least in my friend group (mostly White, Asian, and Latiné who attended the Top 50 ranked US News schools), most of us already knew each other via competitive high school extracurriculars (eg. Debate, Sports, DECA, MUN, Science Olympiads, Quiz Bowl, SAT Bootcamp, Intel Science Fair, Cyberpatriot, etc) and because we all attended the same 200-300 high schools nationally, did the same 5-7 majors, and are working in the same 3-4 industries.
Flagship Public Schools are becoming elite as well now that they are becoming much more selective, as well as the fact that STEM is increasingly valued outside the STEM industry (eg. PE/IB loves hire CS and Applied Math grads from target schools due to their analytical background)
Y'all boomers are arguing over a tree while ignoring the forest.
You already knew your friend group because you attended the same "2-300" high schools?
Flagship Public Schools have long been limited elite. Hence the concept of the "Public Ivies".
Ivy does STEM, but STEM isn't the point of going Ivy. Public Schools will continue to be fine institutions for technical workers, who were and will never considered to be elite in the class sense. Real elites tend toward history and art majors, if any college at all. Even medicine is middle class.
Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia are all Top 10 CS programs.
For natural sciences, all the Ivies top the charts.
For med school, same story.
> Real elites tend toward history and art majors.
Some children of HNWI do major in history and art. Others will gladly major in STEM. Look at people like Bill Gates or half my hs.
This isn't the 80s or 90s anymore. Post-2008, top public schools have gotten as selective as Ivies were in the 2000s (7-15% acceptance rate [actually around 15-25% as BlackJack below points out]) while Ivies and Ivy Adjacent private schools (eg. UChicago, CMC, etc.) have dropped to the 1-6% acceptance rate.
Also, "elite" industries like PE, IB, Management Consulting, and VC all bias hiring in favor of STEM majors, which automatically prioritizes selective public schools like Cal, Mich, UCLA, etc.
> You already knew your friend group because you attended the same "2-300" high schools?
Pretty much. I had 2nd degree connects at just about every top university and I myself attended a top uni.
We all ended up working in the same handful of industries (Government, Media, Finance, Tech, Management Consulting, Politics) in the same handful of cities (SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston, DC) which further enhances the general alumni network as there are only a handful of top employers in each of those.
I agree but want to correct you on the public school point. Excluding the service academics, there are 2 or 3 schools with sub 20% acceptance rates, and every other public school is above that.
See [1] and [2]. And these are the best public schools. The average of the top50 public schools is probably 40%ish, and the average of all public schools is 70%.
At the macro-level this is true, but at that point we'd also end up selecting based on major.
For example, the acceptance rate for a BSBA@McCormick will reach the 7-15% range.
Attending an elite private school, an elite public school (UCB, UCLA, UMich, UVA), or an elite program at a selective public school (Accounting@UCSB, CS@UIUC, Business@McCormick) will give you enough of a path to mingle with the elite.
FWIW, the parts of those "elite industries" that STEM majors are hired into are more upper-middle class than you might believe, in terms of their capacity for the accrual of significant wealth/status. I'm not saying they're not well-paid or that they can't buy a house, but it's a cut below anything that might be called "ruling class".
If you study the backgrounds of capital allocators, a disproportionate percentage of the top ones had a combination of privileged backgrounds and technical educations, but the vast majority have privileged backgrounds and no technical educations.
Yes, and the issue is the "capital allocators" of today graduated in 1980-2000.
The "capital allocators" of 2030-2050 will have attended a more diverse set of schools for their undergrad, but will have still attended the same handful of High Schools. I'm saying this from experience as someone who went thru the college application process only 10-13 years ago and with a sibling who went through it 3-5 years ago.
Then again, most people in top industries in their 20s and early 30s aren't on HN. The CTO of Loom was right about HN tbh.
Read "Class" by Fussell. Or don't and continue to guess where the lines are. Class distinctions and behaviors aren't intuitive. That book will help you.
It's certainly a lagging indicator for 1/N of the people at those schools.
For the other 1-(1/N), it's more like the "last" of the leading indicators – i.e. their last shot at a significant step change in career outcomes before beginning a career.
The ability to get a great technical education is more a function of who your parents are and how involved they want to be in your education than anything else, me thinks. "Top N schools" at any stage from pre-K to college is a lagging indicator of that.
By lagging indicator I mean traditionally less selective public schools have become extremely selective now.
When I was in elementary school, I assumed I'd get into Cal because everyone did in the 90s and 2000s. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, it's selectivity dropped to the 10-20% range and is dropping further. This is the same at other flagships as well (eg. UCLA, UVA, Mich, etc).
With this drop in acceptance rate, programs also shot up in US News Rankings. Everyone took UChicago's playbook and copied it.
> What do you think the forest is?
Inequality at the K-12 level.
In my age group (20-35) we're already socially stratified largely because we attended the same 200-300 elite HSes which were feeders to the handful of top colleges nationally.
Most Americans won't be able to attend such high schools as they are expensive af - either directly via Tuition if they're private, or indirectly by having houses starting at the million mark for public schools.
The elite of society has become much more diverse racially, but this is very shallow as most Americans
1. Don't attend college
2. Don't attend college track high school programs
3. Don't attend high schools with enough ECs to be competitive
4. Don't attend high schools which provide the level of guidance and counseling needed to apply and get selected at one of those top colleges.
This kind of social stratification already exists in the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia, and is starting to occur in the US again.
I see and agree that education and support at the earliest levels of education are heavily correlated with inequality in elite outcomes. However, I think this has always been the case in American history, no?
There were brief periods where this wasn't true for the richest people in the US, but the majority of the top 1% has always been bred for the top 1%. If you accept that it's more or less constant and think that the magnitude of inequality is the bigger issue, this isn't necessarily a bad thing: as long as the top 1% continue to allocate capital effectively, and don't get too greedy (i.e. leave enough wealth for the rest of society to lead fulfilling lives / don't exacerbate the inequality gap).
For what it's worth, I think the primary issue today is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to live a "dignified life" (i.e. free from debt or peonage), unless you fall on the right side of the inequality distribution. That quality-of-life-burden is less severe of an issue in the other countries you mention. Unfortunately, expanding higher-quality education does not solve this problem.
I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League?
I suspect it's much more of the former than the latter. It's not that you have to go to an Ivy League school to run the country. Instead, the people born into the families that run the country have no reason not to go to Ivy League schools.
You have unlimited tuition money, and you're guaranteed to be accepted into Harvard since you have passably average grades and your legacy family donates to the school. Would you not go to Harvard?
Some prestigious companies hire mostly/only from Ivy Leagues, but ultimately those are mostly just upper-middle-class salary jobs (e.g., MBB consulting companies).
Ivey leagues do a lot to enable the propagation of generational wealth. Considering that many equally smart and talented individuals don’t get into Ivies because there simply isn’t enough space, one can view Ivies as primarily a tool to enable generational wealth by providing an environment where a hand curated selection of exceptional people (and curated diversity) is admitted to the environment to give your elite kids a well rounded education.
I guess it boils down to do the Ivies really move the needle on upward mobility or is it really just doing it just enough to create the ideal student body for wealthy participants? Is it easier to guarantee entry by merit or through money?
Lots of elites never go to college. Lots go to non-Ivies. The top liberal arts schools have Ivy level tuition for that reason. Lots of elites go to Ivies, but the Ivy league's primary value will always be the possibility of an upward class mobility gateway. In the social sense, which is impossible to achieve otherwise generally speaking. In other words, your trailer park upbringing suddenly becomes much less relevant to a true elite job. Some liberal arts colleges can probably achieve near the same effect, but generally speaking the Ivies serve as the only true possible class ceiling penetrators. Actual elites don't need to go to college at all.
> I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League?
Obama went to columbia and harvard. Trump went to UPenn. Neither are from ruling families.
It's simply a matter of the ivy league representing some of the oldest institutions in the US and the ruling elite being entrenched members of these institutions. So those who want to serve the ruling elite need to go to these schools to get themselves vetted.
What I said wasn’t “everyone at the Ivies is in a ruling family,” what is said was “ruling families go to Ivies.” There’s a big difference in logic between those two statements.
Ivy League schools have other students besides legacy admissions, but if you’re not very smart/driven (Obama) or very rich (Trump) your chances are not so great.
(You should read Obama’s biography on his Wikipedia page. He transferred to Columbia as a junior, and between his undergraduate studies and law school he had a bunch of pretty unique accomplishments, the exact kind of “extracurricular activity” that would get you into Harvard. As far as Trump, he’s the son of an extremely wealthy landlord.)
You're arguing a different point though. OP's point is that you'd have a much greater overall benefit to society by increasing access to more accessible places. The issue of elitism is not a refutation of this.
One of the things that is fascinating about America is that their obsession with race draws attention away from Class. The value of getting into Harvard- sure, you'll get a good education. You might even get a great education! But what you're also going to get is membership of a club that is going to offer you opportunities for the rest of your life.
Once you view it that way then changing the composition of the elite universities takes on a completely different perspective. Because if you break that old boys club, suddenly access to great job opportunities and high political office become 1000x more meritocratic.
Do we really think that Harvard and Yale have such a fantastic admissions process that they managed to spot and select every single future Supreme Court Justice at the age of 20? No don't be silly. Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you. And the role of Harvard is to zealously nurture this in-group, because that's what creates their value, and the core of that is legacy admissions.
>Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you
This is the key to the Ivies' brand.
And it's not really covered in the article, but the reason we care about the Ivies is because whatever fad catches on in the Ivies goes on to become government policy. And why not? They are the best and the brightest, the great and good, destined to guide the benighted masses into the future.
Bill Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard. Interestingly, this somewhat reflects the idea behind Free Software, where many eyes make bugs shallow. If you were trained in an Ivy, everybody you work with came from an Ivy, all of the potential eyes work the same way, so the bugs remain deep.
He suggests we should increase the number of spots at top schools. Perhaps. But I’m reading “End Times” by Turchin and this suggests “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability. Maybe that’s wrong, but if so it would add an important reason to instead focus on the well being of “the productive class”, perhaps through expanding trade schools etc.
> “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability
I'm ambivalent about Turchin's work, but there are corroborating theories on this; see the idea of "change merchants"[0], which posit that as more people (and especially more people with higher social rank and influence) deal in the virtual as opposed to the physical, there is an increasing amount of personal incentive on those involved to make sure that things change rapidly.
I guess if learning a trade could guarantee the kids a future (or at least make it look like guaranteed) I bet many people would go that way without any need for extra nudges. Picking up the trade of your parents was earlier a pretty fine plan in life. But today we are where we are and political influence seems like the only safe bet... "bet" because learning to gamble it is.
This is from a German perspective but learning a trade in Germany can be a ticket to good income and good life.
There's unfortunately the perception that trades are worth less than academics in Germany from a societal standpoint. I suspect it's somewhat similar in the US. That's part of the reason why we have a massive shortage of any skilled tradesperson in Germany. If you're an electrician or plumber you can basically pick your work.
The other part of course being that the apprenticeship salary and treatment is utter shit.
My brother completed an industrial electrician apprenticeship recently. Right out of the gate he received offers for 50-60k salaries. In Germany that's a really good salary.
It's about the same in the US, where being in the trades isn't exactly widely and highly regarded, but it will get you a middle-class lifestyle. The difference is that for the most part it's a lot harder work than an office job with an equivalent pay; you don't get paid if you don't work, you will have to work in 120ºF attics in the middle of the summer, and it will leave a toll on your body after decades.
Wow okay then the government (I know, the horror) would only need to work on the image issues and smoothing out the first steps. Or the trade schools need, or whoever cares about people getting a safe and very useful job - we all, I guess. (insert rant about traditional parties getting out of touch with such basic needs thus leaving room for extremists to grow)
America does not have low economic mobility. Last I looked at the statistics, it's not top of the pack, but it's not low, either. Another thing: The primary driver of low economic mobility, at least in the US, is lack of that ticket to ride - a degree from a good university - and the poor kids who do go to an Ivy league university end up having high economic mobility, again, due to receiving a degree from a top university. This is really just a nitpick of the part of the article where they said that low economic mobility is a reason why Ivy league universities don't want to admit poor kids. Low economic mobility is not a factor. What they meant to say, probably, is that starting with family money will mean that a rich kid will end up with even more money than the poor kid, on average, and that would be correct AFAIK.
The issue with the Ivy League and its elitist gatekeeping is its rising pattern of rubber-stamping deeply unimpressive people. These schools are supposed to actively seek out the best and forge them into the most capable people who have ever existed. Instead, they're lifelong credentials and status for heirs who are missing the talent and discipline of their forefathers.
And then, as others have mentioned, they have spread a false culture of using those credentials as a lifelong door-pass into anything someone might want to do, when this is deeply untrue for anyone who hasn't gone to the Ivy League. For most people, a bachelor's gets them past a resume filter for their first job; from there, future employers only care about the value they created at the last job.
A great summary, there is a dramatic mismatch in what the ivies suggest they do, and what they actually do and this has horrible consequences for society.
People who understand that higher education quality is basically at parity and what matters is your peers/connections fostered in college + the doors that open for you based on what school you went to. The perceived elite schools give you a leg up in life, this is true for every country on the planet, and a lot of parents/kids work extremely hard to try and get into them for a reason.
No, it's a cultural thing. There's really two points in that article:
- (1) people are overestimating the actual lifetime effects of attending an elite school.
- (2) people are obsessing over attending (or their children attending) elite schools.
That second one is a spiritual failure, not just one of ignorance. That upper middle-class obsession with the brand of education may not be uniquely american (i read similar horror stories about china for example), but it is certainly very pronounced here. It is in no way similar to how kids and families choose universities in say western europe imho.
People in similar socioeconomic circumstances band together. If you stopped the successful doing it at Harvard they'd just find another way, whether it be geographic location, specific jobs, parties, the country club, whatever.
The author doesn't get the first thing about the education system, and complains that the elite schools are too small. That's exactly the point. They are small in order to keep them elite. If everyone got into Harvard, many would decline. They'd go to a new, more selective school instead.
Because universities are not in the business of education but the business of credentialing. It's about being different, more elite. That's what they sell.
The top students across a population are hurt more from interacting with below average students than the below average is helped by interacting with them.
Hollywood cares, for one. I think almost every movie (or book) I read that involves a smart person with good credentials involves Harvard or mit or sometimes Stanford. It’s getting old. Be more creative, people
That's mostly because movies are a condensed media ... Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories
Which is why all of the creative energy has moved into serialized TV shows. Movies are almost completely creatively bankrupt these days, having become a never-ending stream of CG-spectacles and superhero plots.
>a rough estimate of about 100,000 undergraduates at top private schools in the U.S. That might sound like a lot, but it’s compared to 22 million total undergraduates in the country. In other words, top private schools are educating less than half a percent of Americans. The entire Harvard undergrad student body could fit into the University of Michigan football stadium more than 15 times over.
Those figures are completely irrelevant. The proportion of those 22M undergraduates who will need to make use of any specialized knowledge or skills acquired during their student-hood is also miniscule. They are simply following a social convention by going to these schools. There is no equivalence between these populations, except by sloppy word-based reasoning.
If you're involved in hiring in the tech industry, the particular school doesn't matter as much as it used to, unless you're super focused in research or something arcane like quantum computing. Post graduate vs undergrad is a different ball game. But from my experience, MIT is special, but other Ivy's, not as much. I'm a big fan of schools like RPI, Drexel, Waterloo, Virginia Tech, etc. The co-op program produces very strong engineers. Ivy's may produce better product managers though.
> It’s as if the inequality of income and wealth is mirrored in a general inequality of status, where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch the glitterati from the cheap seats.
The author almost gets the point -- and even mentions the substantive reason people care in this sentence -- but then veers off a cliff in the last half of the sentence.
Huge portions of our economy are winner-take-all, with a very small number of winners. And the organizations that win are also increasingly winner-take-all.
The obsession with access to elite institutions makes more sense if you re-write these two sentences:
> We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs. Our economy is dominated by superstar companies.
like this:
> We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs BECAUSE our economy is dominated by superstar companies.
Is is that people are obsessed with status? Or is that people feel their basic needs -- housing, food, a sense of worth -- are at risk as long as they're not on top? And if they feel that way, are they wrong?
If you want to know why people are obsessed with becoming an Elon Musk, then look at how the man talks about his employees at Twitter. If the world is full of leaders who will stomp on you and lemmings who get stomped out, then you better try to claw your way as high as you can.
Ivy League schools may not have the best research facilities or opportunities in terms of being on the cusp of the latest cutting-edge technological and scientific developments. Their facilities are often a bit old and funky, with some notable exceptions. In terms of cost to value ratio, ($80K - $90K per year seems to be the media-reported range) there are likely equivalent learning opportunities elsewhere for much less.
However, I think most people know undergrads go to Ivy League schools simply to make connections with wealthy people that will lead to lucrative post-college appointments, that's why legacy admissions are not going away. It's become like the British public school system of 100 years ago in that respect - a social club for aristocrats.
i think these analyses tend to focus on the impact of education on earnings because earnings are easy to measure. i would wager that it's more common for high achievers to chase after prestigious schools because they are high achievers and they are driven by being 'the best' rather than chasing some expected lifetime value/return on investment.
that, or that they think it'll look good on their tinder bio (college applicants are teens after all).
The reason elite roles are elite is because they're focused on directing the activities of other people. Management consultants, executives, finance, entrepreneurs, politicians, to some extent tech - what these all have in common is that they make decisions influencing what problems all the other people in society will solve. By definition, there can only be a limited number of these roles in any complex society, because the roles are structured as the top of a pyramid. If you don't have a large number of people following you, you're not really an elite.
The true purpose of the Ivy League isn't necessarily to train elites to do better at these roles. Everybody sucks at these roles, regardless of how much training you've had. Executives make boneheaded company-destroying and job-destroying decisions all the time, finance people make bad investments, politicians make bad laws. This is because the complexity of understanding and directing thousands to millions of people is more than any one person could conceivably do, regardless of how much training they've had. In fact, one of the reasons liberal democracies have generally done better than communism or fascism or feudalism is because they try to devolve as many of these decisions as possible to non-human systems like markets, elections, and algorithms. But having some selection filter for the people who will occupy these roles, whether it's the Ivy League or imperial China's civil service exam, seems to result in less braindead decisions than having absolutely no filter.
More importantly, the Ivy League also functions as a way to take potential counter-elites and assimilate them into the existing system so that they can take roles that preserve it rather than destroy it. The most dangerous thing for a socioeconomic system is a leader who can convince a majority of people that the existing system needs to be cast down and replaced with a competing one. Ivy League universities work like an escape valve, trying to identify people that may be poor but smart and give them the connections and education (indoctrination?) to believe that they can make themselves less poor within the existing system without having to destroy it.
> More than half of Stony Brook students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution make it to the top 20%! That’s amazing!
That is really impressive! And look, more schools should focus on this metric.
As an Ivy League grad, you can get the "education" anywhere. Ivies, State Schools (ha, ome Ivies are State Schools!), Community Colleges, Udemy, Khan Academy, YouTube... once you learn how to learn, the sky is the limit. And learning how to learn on your own, and in a way where your failures as you learn aren't life threatening... I'd say that's the real key to life-long success.
But there's nothing going to an Ivy taught me that was unique to that school. For the most part, I found the "famous" professors to be miserable during my undergrad. Like they may know the material inside and out, and their books may be used by other schools, but that doesn't make them good lecturers. In fact, most of them kind of sucked at it, and you could tell it wasn't how they'd spend their time if the university didn't say, "Oh, thanks for the book, keep 'em coming, but you also have to teach an undergrad class too..."
Outside of education though, that's the real benefit. The network there... the opportunities some of my peers had, and I had, because of their connections... And it's a mind shift. Higher expectations, to be sure -- for myself, and others around me. (And, over time, that leads to the ability to teach others ways to improve their game.)
And look, as a kid starting out, getting a few wins in early on makes the world seem a lot less uphill. Even small things, like being able to make a good first impression when I looked for jobs as a new grad (or even 20 years on), people giving me the benefit of the doubt because of the school I went to -- small things turned out to be huge. That initial first impression "I bet this kid is good..." is so valuable. Creates a nice confidence feedback loop too.
All things being equal, I sure am glad I went to an Ivy. I didn't learn anything at school that I couldn't have learned other places. Its was just nice to have that networking opportunity. I look through my friends and I have a huge range of highly successful people in my network. And not all of them went to Ivys, but I will say that having that "starter network" allowed me to connect with other successful people, offer them opportunities, build relationships... like attracts like. And having high expectations seems to attract others with high expectations.
(I fully understand now that my going to an Ivy League school, even as a financial aid recipient, really had more to do with my parents than me. As an 18 year-old kid... what do you know? You're just along for the ride, and taking the ramp my parents set up for me -- I took the opportunities I could, but I didn't realize it until much later how my perceived choices were really because they busted their asses to make sure the I had good options in front of me.)
Anyway, for a kid who grew up on a cattle ranch... going to an Ivy was huge for me. Huge. Like opened all kinds of doors that never would have been accessible to me.
Also - it looks like your account has been using HN primarily (exclusively?) for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against*. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so I need to ask you to stop doing this.
It's fine to occasionally post on divisive topics as part of a general mix, but we ban accounts when they are primarily used for that, and single-purpose accounts are definitely not ok here. We want curious conversation, which is quite the opposite.
* i.e. it's not about your views - it's about not using HN as intended
Formal education is a great tool, however the organisation that delivers it is irrelevant.
Brilliant people are brilliant. They're the people you want to hire. And those people will be learning from everything, not just their Ivy League school.
IMO large amounts of students topping IT classes at these schools are doing majority of the learning on their own at a faster pace.
> what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs
I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school. If the same money was put toward social mobility, the most successful people in our country could be folks who grew up in poverty. Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.
> toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades ... where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch...
That's been happening for much longer than four decades, lol