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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

This is the reality:

1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1]

2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area).

Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways. Picking kids who were already predisposed for success is not education. Unfortunately, many disagree.

A real school would have 100% of their kids admitted at random and then, through some criteria, show how they created an environment that allowed those kids to succeed. This contrasts with the current system, which is basically survivorship bias anyway.

EDIT: I just want to add any many of these elite schools (high school and college) only recently began to admit women and minorities in particular.

[1] Some schools with high amounts of kids going to "elite schools"

- Stuyvesant

- Boston Latin

- Brooklyn Science

- Brearly School

- Spence School

- Harvard-Westlake

- Lowell High School

- Saint Ann's

- Andover

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> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways.

Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about.

For better or worse, the 'elite' schools have money. That means they can hire teaching-track professors. These are professors whose sole job is to teach and advise (i.e., they don't spend all their time doing research). And they do a really good job at it. Much better than overworked professor that is more focused about research and grants.

Edit: People are conflating "teaching" versus "research" professors, so I want to provide an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS50

This course is taught by David Malan. He has dedicated a lot of his life to this course to make it be awesome. The reason why he can do this is because he is a teaching professor. If you look at his CV, you will see that he does not have any PhD students. His main job is to teach undergrads at Harvard and he can put more of his time to it than a professor that has to also worry about research. He doesn't bring the university as much money because he's not writing research grants, but they can still afford to keep him around. This is the point that I was trying to make.

> These are professors whose sole job is to teach

No, no it really is not. It's getting grants, advising grad students, etc etc. From my experience, professors spend very little time on classes besides lectures.

> No, no it really is not. It's getting grants, advising grad students, etc etc.

You are talking about tenure-track or research professors. A teaching-track professor (typically) does not have PhD students so they do not have to get grants.

https://www.cmu.edu/policies/faculty/appointments-teaching-t...

I had a very different experience, going to an "elite school". Basically kids teach themselves most things, and professors are there for clarification, in my experience. Also, are you suggesting that professors at elite schools are not overworked? haha.

EDIT: I saw your edit. That's true, but is irrelevant. Most people lecturing are not in that position, unfortunately. Liberal art schools try to address that though. I tried to look up some stats for you, but unfortunately many schools do not publish. I tried to look for the distribution of classes being taught and the types of people teaching them.

What we would have to see is the percentage of students being taught by a person whose primary purpose is to teach.

>> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways.

> Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about.

I'm not sure that that's fair. Granted I didn't go to a great school; I went to community college because it was what I could afford. But I know many who have attended other, "elite" schools and most of them, barring a few exceptions, told me they basically learned out of the book and the only "hard part" about the school was a high frequency of difficult testing.

A few have told me about great professors but even they said most of their other classes was almost just reading out of a text box and doing typical work around it.

So, no first person information here but what I've been told by several friends and former colleagues is they're like most schools they just push students a little harder with more testing. Hell one of my friends dropped out of Stanford and went right into quite an important job at Microsoft stating he wasn't learning anything by just reading books.

> they basically learned out of the book and the only "hard part" about the school was a high frequency of difficult testing

I went to Arizona State. This is basically how I learned. That said, the most valuable moments in my college experience were when I made an effort to develop a relationship with my professors (and certain brilliant peers).

The insights from those interactions sound silly in words (e.g. "have your slightly neurotic friend or employee read securities' footnotes with you" or "you can model anything as an option" or "flow separation can be desirable"). That might be why they aren't taught in class. The moments preceding them (missing game-changing information in a footnote, struggling with yet another wonky security, or going crazy trying to control every factor between my computer and metal models) made them memorable. The bigger lessons (use your and your peers' stereotypically "negative" personality attributes as strengths, it's okay to master one thing and bend your universe of problems to look like it, and it's okay to let go of control) would not have been learned, as they were, without them.

As somebody who got a PhD from Cornell I've found that the opinions people have about the classes at Cornell are across the board.

I was involved in teaching introductory physics classes and I was proud of what we did. If you took a class oriented towards engineers you'd wind up with lectures in a big class with absolutely great demonstrations (we had a full time guy to maintain the hardware) and a large amount of material and support available so that a new prof could take it over pretty easily. Usually you'd get an experienced prof who was pretty good at it and maybe even a Nobel Prize winner to boot. On top of that you had sessions of maybe 20 students led by a young graduate student, a lab class, etc. Lots of office hours and the prof and grad students are very accessible.

We also had a (rare) autotutorial class aimed at premeds that works people very hard, forcing them to take each test multiple times until they get a passing score. Students who take this class do very well on the physics section on the MCAT. In particular, many students struggle silently through a conventional physics class and end up passing with a D or a C and have little mastery of the subject. The autotutorial class will kick the same students in the butt, make them work very hard, and they often end up with a B+ and a pretty good grasp of the subject. I've seen students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds struggle with the course but ultimately succeed in a way that they would not have in a conventional course.

A friend of mine got a PhD in computer science at Cornell and he teaches now at a Jesuit college and he was not so happy with the state of undergraduate education. I told him that I liked Jon Kleinberg's new algorithm book and that I thought he was taking undergraduate education seriously and my friend seemed skeptical of that.

That's a lot of conclusion from one data point. I went to Stanford, the teaching was top-notch and the students motivated and upbeat. Had guest lectures from Silicon Valley stars, had Stanford facilities to visit (they have their own particle accelerator!) and clubs everywhere.

However my youngest tried to attend Cleveland Institute of Music (a well-respected conservatory). Depressed and burnt out in 1 year. They forgot somewhere that young people are actually living there. The only thing on the online student calendar was Weight Watcher's meetings. No karaoke nights, no community visits (students were instructed to never leave campus), dark dormitory like a submarine. He lost weight and ultimately gave up on the career that led him there.

So I guess that's just 2 data points. Anybody else got a story?

That's Cleveland. I went to Case/CWRU once. Freshman orientation started by covering where the high crime areas were.

the primary reason to go to any ivy league school is network. The universities dont magically turn someone around to be an amazing student if they didnt already have it in them. you make your own education it doesnt make you.

>> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways.

> Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about.

On the mean these schools have more knowledgeable professors, and regardless of teaching talent will push a course as far as the class can take. So, I found that when reaching grad school students coming from the Ivy's simply covered more in their courses (though not necessarily with more effort or better technique).

State schools aren't always better teaching wise: at many research universities a teaching award can be a kiss of death for gaining tenure, and gaining it tends afflicts professors in the same way.

Really the reason you want to go to an "elite" university is for two things: networking and opportunity. Teaching quality will average out over any reasonably good university. Research quality is totally different, but doesn't matter much as an undergrad unless you get lucky with your dissertation supervisor. At my university our dissertation choices were essentially random, though you could specify your top three.

Opportunity? The best universities can afford to ship in TED-class speakers every week, you get an instant boost in job applications and some companies directly headhunt the best students. Shedloads of funding means world class sports facilities, heavily subsidised student societies and entertainment. Depending where you go, you can hobnob with people who are highly likely to be successful [1] if that's an area you want to go into.

This is, I think, subtly different from top high schools. The difference there is that often the teaching is significantly better than at state/public funded schools. On top of that you have the opportunities that those schools can afford.

I'm not disagreeing that this is elitism, but that teaching quality should probably be a middling priority for most people.

[1] The classic example is PPE at Oxford: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford...

> MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways.

This is true, but there's a lot of value in being surrounded by peers who are at your level or a little better who push you to become better than you would otherwise.

Value for who, the people paying or the people attending?

Value for students. Skewed norms influence behavior in crazy ways. This is an unfortunate truth.

Everybody involved, I would think: the students themselves, their parents (who presumably care about their kids), and any taxpayers who benefit from having a minority be more productive members of society.

Why do you leave out the entire administration of the schools who receive the majority of the hard dollars? They have the sure bet, the money up front tied to people who will be dragged down by huge loan amounts I would imagine (not everyone receives a scholarship.). To everyone else it's more of a wager in my mind, maybe the kid will do something in the field of study, most of the time they won't.

I left them out because the purpose of schooling is not to serve the administrators.

In any event, MIT grads may graduate with debt, but I think (as a whole) they'll probably manage just fine.

I agree, that's the purpose, sadly many don't feel that's the reality

>This is true, but there's a lot of value in being surrounded by peers who are at your level or a little better who push you to become better than you would otherwise.

Totally this. I went to a mediocre undergrad and a top 5 school for grad. The only thing the undergrad was missing were those kinds of peers. Everything else was either better or the same in my undergrad university.

Some of the schools you mentioned, such as Stuyvesant, have an extremely competitive (and meritocratic) admissions process. The fact that Stuyvesant sends a lot of students to MIT, is just as logical as Stanford sending a lot of its undergrads to MIT's grad school. In fact, given how socioeconomically diverse schools like Stuyvesant are, their representation at the elite universities is actually a good sign.

https://outlookzen.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/481/

A few questions need to be answered (that I couldn't find trivially on Google):

1. What's the average income of parents whose students get in?

2. What's the discrepancy in the admittance rates compared to the city on a whole? [2]

3. What's the discrepancy in the likelihood of admission as a function of the parents' income?

Black people and women only recently were able to go to school at all. Is it shocking they are not able to succeed at a test that judges them on skills that haven't been as cultivated as their majority peers?

Also, competitiveness is not fairness.

[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2016/03/11/new_york_matc...

1. Check out the link above. Roughly half of the students come from poor/lower middle class families.

2. If you're talking about racial discrepancy, Blacks/Latinos are certainly under-represented. If you're talking about socioeconomic discrepancy, roughly half the students come from poor or lower-middle-class families, which I would consider to be a huge win for a elite school.

3. How would you propose remedying the underepresentation of Blacks/Latinos without harming the socioeconomic diversity? If these elite schools adopted an ivy-league admissions system, you would surely see a student body that resembles ivy-league student bodies.

1. Yup, I did check out the link. I completely agree with its conclusion -- that Stuyvesant's model need not be scrapped for something like Harvard's. Though, I never claimed that.

2. I'm in complete agreement.

3. I'm a fan of the lottery. Fair and to the point. It has its own issues, though.

Overall, Stuyvesant was in retrospect, a poor selection to emphasize the overall point I was trying to make. Though, one must wonder why Asian's prosper in that situation and not Blacks and Latinos. It's something I'll have to do research on later. Thanks for the link, it had some good sources, by the way.

The survivorship bias is kind of the point. An employer can't administer an IQ test, but they can hire from MIT or Stanford. They can't pull employees from the good old boy's network, but they can recruit from Harvard.

This is only because schools are so crappy to begin with, by design. If a degree actually meant something it wouldn't matter what school you attained it from.

Thats how university accreditation is meant to work: industry and state/gov agencies are supposed to certify an institution's graduates meet certain minimum standards.

Given that university is becoming the new high-school, is there merit to the idea of just having all universities follow the same curriculum and standardised assessments and exams? Like the University of California system, but nationwide - if not international.

Absolutely. However, because of the current issues there are a lot of politics involved in education, so it's hard to change anything. For example, even if you wanted to implement a "random" system, which is objectively superior for most parents (who wouldn't get in otherwise), it would be shot down quickly.

Similarly, a nation wide curriculum would be shot down because it would make school way more difficult for a lot of parents' kids.

> If a degree actually meant something it wouldn't matter what school you attained it from

National graduates can't--and shouldn't--be fungible. Harvard, for example, selects and trains for team players. Its graduates can reliably be dropped into client-facing roles with minimal training. They're also extremely responsive to hierarchy. Their campus tradition champions the Socratic method [1] and deëmphasises individual performance. (The joke I've heard is an A is an A-, an A with a glare is a B and an A with a talk is a C. B means you effectively failed.)

Yale, on the other hand, is extremely competitive in terms of grading. Its graduates are ruthlessly ready to challenge hierarchy. This makes them great for internal situations where you need to inject disruption. They need polishing, however, before being placed in front of clients.

High achievers in a field should be diverse, in terms of how they work and approach problems. This is healthy. Degrees mean something. It's just that there's a lot else that's difficult to test for or assess in an interview that matters. What that "else" is varies.

[1] http://casestudies.law.harvard.edu/the-case-study-teaching-m...

> Yale, on the other hand, is extremely competitive in terms of grading

Nonsense.

'A YDN survey of the Class of 2006 found the median GPA to be about 3.6'

http://yaleherald.com/news-and-features/features/grading-inf...

All the ivies (and all US news top25, really) have grade inflation.

Yale's graduate business school doesn't even have grades.

Fair enough. I should have said "more competitive". Individual performance, e.g. being ranked against one's peers, is prized more at Yale than at Harvard. I have mostly hired Yale undergraduates and lawyers--no visibility into their B school.

Yale's law school doesn't have grades (neither does Harvard, anymore). How is that emphasizing competitiveness?

Interesting! I've found Yale's to be more intellectual, although also less practical. Any other schools that (anecdotally) fit a profile?

Ah, Stuyvesant. I have fond memories of competing against them in regional/national Speech & Debate tournaments. Great school.

Incidentally, if you want another metric that makes the Ivies jump over themselves to admit students, it's placing in basically any extracurricular contest/tournament they sponsor or host. For example, placing in the top six at Harvard Nationals for Speech & Debate essentially guarantees you admission if you have decent grades. For some categories, this is less difficult than you'd think.

That said, two of the most intelligent people I have ever known placed in Harvard Nationals and later went to the school. I can't speak empirically to the correlation vs causation of placing in these sorts of tournaments, but I think those two in particular could have gone to any school they wanted. One was a student at Stuyvesant.

On the other hand, I also knew someone who was a concert pianist in addition to a nationally ranked Speech & Debate competitor. He also had excellent grades and was admitted to five Ivies and MIT. I don't think he applied to any safety schools. He was someone I would consider extremely capable in the sense of time management and executive functioning, but in raw intellectual capacity (such as critical thinking), he never stood out to me.

But I could be mistaken in these value judgements. It's hard to even define intelligence rigorously. I think that's part of the problem with these discussions. How do we qualify intelligence, then set out to design a meritocracy that controls for the nature (having intelligent parents) component of intelligence, if we can only limit the nurture aspects (socioeconomic and parenting)?

I worked at a private K-12 school overseas for a few years which was brutally competitive. We would very excitedly publish our excellent college admissions results and would always be featured prominently in lists ranking private schools in the city and the country.

The dirty little secret is that only about 70% of kids who enrolled in the first-year of the HS would actually graduate from the school. I do think the teachers we had were excellent and did a phenomenal job, but the school was designed to be impossibly difficult. The thing is, with the high reputation, the spots made available by these kids were easily filled by families wanting to send their kids in. It created a nice self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyone who has looked at school (K-12 or universities) carefully and is being honest with themselves, this sort of selection -- in all the many forms it takes -- is the real driving force behind the difference in outcomes observed in student's life-paths post-graduation.

> High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented.

It goes further back than that. I went to one of those high schools - certain middle schools are disproportionately represented because those middle schools can prepare students better for the exams. (I didn't attend one of those middle schools, so I can't comment on the presence of feeder elementary schools and feeder preschools, but one can imagine...).

This has been sort of done with Charter schools that use a lottery based acceptance system.

The problem with even random systems is that parents that are willing to fill out the many forms required are usually more involved in their children's life then the median in poor communities.

Also - many charter schools don't provide federally funded free lunches which means that the poorest students who rely on these lunches are unable to attend these schools.

Here's the reality. My uncle taught at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn in the 90s. He had a class section with 90 students, which sounds crazy except that he met 30 and regularly saw 9.

One kid was selling crack. Another held him at knifepoint over a Twinkie. The rest were either there for lunch or just trying to scrape by, living in terror.

Those kids sent going to function at MIT.

Anecdotal and unrelated.

you are of course right but unfortunately good teachers don't scale.

my oldest is in 2nd grade Success Academy in brooklyn, they actually do lottery ( there is even a documentary about them on Netflix called the lottery)

in my view there is only one thing that allow kids to do well in school and that is parents who care.

once my son reaches 4th or 5th we are going to send him to a private school, cause thats when it starts to matter if they want to go the educational route.

to be honest though short of getting the most fundamental skills like reading and math and music i am kind of hoping he will just educate himself with things he care about his whole life.

there is something not very futureproof of sending your kid into an educational system that teaches everyone the same while expecing them to stand out.

i managed to do quite well for myself and i am mostly autodidact, but its hard to know if i was just lucky.

bottom line is you cant make the right decisions for your kids.

Are public schools in Brooklyn that bad? I know they're very segregated[1], but the concept of a private school being of better quality than a public school is horrendous. In Seattle that isn't the case, but that is mainly due to the $10k pay gulf between private and public school teachers, nevermind the benefits differences and religious/of moral character requirements of most private schools. The major reason to go is if you want to be in the clique, outside of that its a slightly worse education for a few grand to a few tens of grand a year.

Portland meanwhile has notably worse public schools, often making it appear that you should pay for private schooling. That being said, quality is still lacking in private schools there, I saw many students left behind that would have learned how to read months earlier in Seattle.

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-gr...

As with everything in New York location matters. I live in Williamsburg on the water probably one of the richer areas of wburg. But just 10 years ago this was a dangerous area and so the public school we are zoned to isn't good. It will be in 10 years when gentrification is complete.

Other places like Tribeca public schools are great because it's completely gentrified, but for now its SA for us and then private in a couple of years.

I'm from Dallas, and we have an interesting split here.

Dallas ISD is notoriously terrible on probably every single axis; as a result, anyone who lives in Dallas ISD sends their kids to private school if they can afford it because it doesn't take much to run a school better than DISD. Seriously, every time I look at the local news, there's another DISD scandal. It's an embarrassment.

On the other hand, the suburban school districts are all excellent. Richardson ISD and Plano ISD are fantastic, as are a bunch of other school districts in the northern suburbs (I remember a friend telling me she wished she could afford to move to Prosper so she can send her kids to the excellent schools there). Not many people in the suburban school districts send their kids to private school, though it does happen occasionally (I don't know whether or not the private schools in the area are better than Plano ISD).

And here's the confusing part: school districts and cities aren't coterminal, even though the school districts are named after the cities. This is for two reasons: 1) Texas doesn't allow school districts to cross county lines (with very few exceptions), but cities cross county lines all the time (Texas counties are tiny and laid out on a grid; it doesn't make sense to limit cities to a single county), and 2) the school districts were laid out decades and decades ago based on predictions of what the cities will eventually annex, and those predictions turned out to be wrong (e.g. Dallas annexed huge swaths of territory that Richardson was expected to annex). As a result, the northern parts of the City of Dallas, which have a distinct suburban feel, are part of the suburban school districts and not Dallas ISD; most of Far North Dallas is part of Richardson ISD, and the part that's in Collin County is part of Plano ISD.

>1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] > 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area).

True, but there's nothing MIT can do about it except stop being MIT.

At MIT, freshman calculus (if you didn't AP out of it - which you need a 5 on the BC to do) is not one year, but one semester. Multivariate calculus is also one semester, and if you're not done with it by the end of freshman year, you're not likely to graduate.

Yes, it's unfair. But it's not MIT's fault.

> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways

I strongly suspect you are not in a position to provide empirical backup to that assertion.

> I strongly suspect you are not in a position to provide empirical backup to that assertion.

Not that I agree with parent, but given selection bias they can't empirically prove the opposite either (that elite schools teach well given that they select the best students). The lack of proof for the positive of course doesn't prove the negation, but I wish someone would do this experiment (admit a bunch of students randomly into a bunch of universities, compare academic performance over 4 or so years).

At my University, there were Calc I, II and III - roughly AB, BC and Multivariate. Calc I is a review of the high school curriculum (at least for local students). I think having a quick review of the chain rule and proceeding from there would be much less of a waste of time. I can't imagine anyone who got through HS Calc failing the first calculus course (although I'm sure it happens) and I think passing the Calc II course on the first try is a good test of the kind of intelligence needed for CS/Engineering. Doing Calculus at MIT's pace doesn't seem unfair at all.

That said, plenty of people repeat Calc II and go on to graduate (often in 5 years instead of 4). My University has a strict rule where if you fail a required course twice, you get kicked out of your program.

What is unfair is that too many high schoolers don't get the opportunity to be MIT-ready when they graduate, and thus MIT does indeed get many incoming freshmen from the elite schools the parent comment is complaining about.

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