A recent study of Harvard’s admissions practices
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Put differently, the main goal of an institution is survival. Profit (or a huge endowment, or close connections to the wealthy or those in power) is the primary factor in ensuring survival, and institutions know it.
Harvard has been focused on power over ethics for...well, I'm not sure, but certainly over a hundred years. As much as I would like to believe that admitting better-qualified candidates over "better-connected" candidates (heavy quotes here) will be better for their survival in the long run, I wouldn't put money on it. And, it turns out, neither would Harvard.
And yes, it's highly ironic that the current fashion for identity politics and all the other "post-modern" ideologies were started and perpetuated by these institutions, which don't actually engage in said ideologies outside of hiring humanities professors that say whatever they please. Even within that behavior, the hyper-left trend of said professors is much stronger outside of the Ivy League than in it. The tip-top institutions are quite conservative when the rubber meets the road.
I read about someone that was a recruited athlete for sailing the year I was rejected. The guy had just a ~2100 SAT and no real other hooks to speak of. Really changed my perspectives on how much racial affirmative action actually impacts Asian Americans like me.
Do you think that you have a right to an MIT education based solely on merit or intelligence? That's not how prestigious universities have accepted students for like 100 years.
Prestigious universities typically want, in part, a diverse student body, represented by both sexes and multiple races and cultures.
Let's grant for the sake of argument that Asians are just smarter than everyone else. The consequence of this is that all the best universities would be 100% Asian if they accepted students based purely on aptitude.
But the goal of prestigious universities is not to be such a pure meritocracy that this would ever be the case. Not for Asians, nor any other race or culture.
I made it into MIT, but at the time I was at something of a disadvantage demographically. I was a White male in 1980 from an economically advantaged city and area of the country. If I'd been female, or non-White (and maybe non-Asian), or from an underrepresented part of the country, my chances of getting into MIT would have been much greater. I knew this when I applied and planned my backup applications accordingly.
As for SAT scores, at least when I applied, MIT claimed that SAT scores were way down on the list of what they considered to be most important for successful applicants. (Though I'm sure that SAT scores were not ignored.)
I had an SAT score of 1500, which at the time was very high. I.e., it's equivalent to an IQ of 155 or so. (According to the people who do such correlations.) I also had, litterally, straight A's in high school. Not a single B in four years. I had a perfect score on my Chemistry achievement test. And yet I was not accepted via "Early Action".
Just how high does your IQ have to be to get in via Early Action? Well, there is no answer to that question, because that's just one of many things that MIT is considering when they admit students.
I feel like you're taking the opposite of what my opinion on this issue is. I think the issue those AA lawsuit plaintiffs have is silly and entitled! (I should clarify the applicant was white in this case - sailing isn't a terribly diverse sport by my understanding).
I actually agree with you, but I am actually becoming convinced nobody has a right to an MIT/Harvard/etc education. If it wasn't clear, 2100 is shockingly low for a HYPSM admit, lower than even my mediocre SAT (also a 1500/1600).
I'd rather take the power back instead of whining about not getting into Harvard and hiring lawyers because you only got into Duke (another school I got rejected from!)
As I mentioned, when I applied to MIT, MIT said that they didn't really weigh SAT scores all that heavily. MIT has graduate departments that don't even require GRE scores at all. (Or at least that was the case at times in the past if it isn't now.)
I once read an interview with the head of Harvard admissions where he said that it's a misconception that Harvard's ideal student is someone who is well-rounded. He said that Harvard would much prefer to admit someone who has done something truly remarkable, even if they are lacking in other respects.
I don't know about this MIT sailing guy. I attended MIT and I never met anyone who had been admitted due to athletics, but Googling reveals that MIT claims they consider athletics along with everything else. For all that's been said here, this sailing guy might have been truly remarkable at sailing, and an excellent student in other respects. MIT may have wanted a good student to help lead their sailing team, and what is wrong with that?
If this guy wasn't a good student, there's no way that he'd end up graduating. It's not as if you can major in basket weaving at MIT.
I just looked up what a 2100 equates to in terms of current scores. It equates to 1470, which is not shockingly low for MIT. Admittedly, it's not near the top of MIT scores, but it's well within the accepted range.
MIT looks at all sorts for things when it admits students. You don't know what other qualifications this student had. He could have had straight A's, max scores on all his Advanced Placement exams, stellar recommendations from teachers, award-winning science fair presentations, etc.
Like I said somewhere else, I also think a lot of people would graduate from MIT if they were admitted. A 75th percentile student at my undergrad (someone the admissions committee would definitely consider consider "inherently inferior") would probably get a 3.5/5 at MIT and graduate. That's my bet at least.
You're talking about a single student admitted at a school that has an active sailing program and then making a huge extrapolation from it about MIT catering to the "elite at the expense of everyone else".
Also, the sailing program at MIT is tiny little sailboats. The kind that any middle-class person can rent for reasonable rates if they live near a big enough body of water. E.g., the Charles River. We're not talking about yachts for the rich here.
MIT doesn't exist to maximize fairness. It exists to perpetuate itself and to provide a beneficial experience to its students. (Which includes having a diverse student body.) Since it has a sailing program, having a good sailing program is good for MIT's students.
I don't know what school you went to, but MIT is actually quite challenging, and, unlike Harvard, has resisted grade inflation. MIT does do a lot to help students graduate, however. E.g., you can easily change majors if the one you originally chose is not suited to you. And you can come back 20 years later and finish, should you not graduate on time.
But I'll give you one example of how MIT compares to the typical school: I had a visiting Psycholinguistics professor from some big university in Arizona. (I don't remember which one.) It was the easiest class at MIT I ever took. I mean, really, really easy.
The professor was impressed by us MIT students, however, because, according to her, she could make the class much more difficult than she would usually teach it, and we could still keep up.
So, at least from this one data point, it seems that psychology and linguistics majors at a typical college would not be able to handle MIT.
Yeah, I'm aware that it doesn't. Maybe it shouldn't exist then? I don't think we should be putting institutions that aren't in the national interest on a pedestal like this. Let them lose non-for-profit status and have their massive endowments get taxed.
> I don't know what school you went to, but MIT is actually quite challenging,
My undergrad is also challenging to some people, most colleges are. I don't really know how you can really measure challenging fairly across institutions with just anecdotes.
Unless you're arguing that folks that get into MIT are just inherently superior (which I'm sure you aren't, because that wouldn't be terribly politically correct and would be downright insulting to 99.9% of folks that didn't get into an elite undergrad like myself) I don't really understand your point.
I can't even begin to express how nutty this idea is. MIT's existence is certainly in the national interest. MIT is the world's best university for training engineers and the world needs good engineers. The more, the better. The better they are, the better. MIT is also excellent in other fields as well. I.e., stuff that the world needs.
> Let them lose non-for-profit status and have their massive endowments get taxed.
More insanity!
Look, I work at a famous research institute that is affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Our goal is to do fundamental research aimed at treating and curing cancer and other genetically-based diseases. Many people want to work here because it is so prestigious. And it's a non-profit because it makes no money.
But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.
So now you'd want to take away our tax-free status? The consequence of doing this is that some terrible diseases that might otherwise be cured might not be. And the same thing is true if you were to take away MIT's and Harvard's tax-free status, because the research institute where I work has close research ties to both MIT and Harvard.
You seem to have lost sight of the purpose of research universities. They do research! Valuable research. And students get to come and be with the researchers and learn from them.
At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.
Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?
Let's get rid of the tennis courts and the swimming pool and the bowling alley while we're at it!
> Unless you're arguing that folks that get into MIT are just inherently superior
Inherently superior? No, of course not. But MIT's difficulty level is "calibrated" to those in the top 1% of scholastic aptitude. If someone doesn't have an aptitude somewhere in this ballpark, MIT is probably not going to be a rewarding experience for them.
In the US, the last I checked, 50% of high school graduates went on to college. MIT's difficulty level is clearly calibrated to only a few percent of these college students.
Also, clearly, if we crunched the numbers, we'd quickly determine that there are lot more students in the country who are at an appropriate aptitude level for MIT than MIT can actually admit. Well, such is life. There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can.
Life isn't always fair, nor can it be. Just like not everyone can work at my research institute that might want to.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education. And there are plenty of other opportunities in the world for those who wish to do genomics-based disease research.
Yup! The world needs American engineers and scientists. MIT is a fantastic school. I'm failing to see how it's irreplaceable compared to University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, UIUC, my alma mater...
> But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.
Sure! Nothing wrong with that! I'm sure that can still happen if it was affiliated with UMass Boston. Public, less-selective institutions like UNC Chapel Hill do lots of fundamental research too.
> At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.
That's great! I did undergrad research and I'm sure lots of undergrads do!
> Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?
Interesting aside, but that's actually a lot more than I expected for a sailboat on the Charles and I was looking into it earlier. I know a few people that sail and it seems like an awesome hobby. Guess I'll have to re-evaluate.
> There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can. On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education.
Yup! I went to a lower tier institution and got an OK quality education. But if you're really going to claim that other schools also provide high quality engineering educations without the social engineering, hate to say it but I don't think you're making a great case for it!
Look, the way I see it is:
1) Either the "MIT woman/man" is so much better than everyone that doesn't get in (like myself) that the cost of re-evaluating the influence of these selective institutions would be enormous to world productivity or
2) These schools are good, but them being selective isn't actually that beneficial to the national interest more than brownie points in a credibility name drop and the specializations that exist there because of the added credibility.
I simply don't see this argument working without admitting to being fundamentally superior.
MIT IS a fantastic school. I'm not sure what you mean by "irreplaceable". MIT is irreplaceable only in the same sense that Picasso's art is irreplaceable. There's nothing else quite like it, but there's plenty of other great art in the world: Dali, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Calder, etc. If there never was a Picasso, the world would have been fine. It just wouldn't have been as good as a world with Picasso's art in it.
You're also irreplaceable, as is everyone. Since everyone is different.
Re where I work, there are plenty of other labs that do similar things, but none of them seem to do it as well. It used to be part of MIT but eventually decided to be its own thing. Much of of the original sequencing of the human genome was done here when it was part of MIT. Would that have been done at UMass Boston? I think not. Might it eventually have been? Who knows? Would the human genome eventually have been sequenced anyway? I'm sure. How much longer would it have taken? Who knows, but I do know it would have taken longer.
If MIT hadn't existed this lab would not exist. Why do so many biologist want to work here? Because there are few other places like it, and if knowledge on how to cure various diseases comes to fruition, it's likely to happen here. If and when that day comes, how many lives will be saved and how much suffering will be prevented that might otherwise not have been? I don't have any crystal balls, but these things matter.
In addition to going to MIT as a student, I worked at MIT for quite a few years. I got to redesign the computing and network infrastructure for a world famous lab. I wrote software that was essential for the operation of an X-ray telescope. 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers were published using results from the telescope and my software.
I got to adapt brain imaging software to visualize radio astronomy data for star-forming regions of space. Now I work on software to design CRISPRs to help bring on the zombie apocalypse. Or at least I can dream, can't I?
Could I have done all this somewhere else? Who knows? My backup school was Johns Hopkins. They have a cool physics lab. Who knows what might have happened if I'd gone there instead? Would I have done such interesting things at Chapel Hill? Maybe, but I doubt it.
If I had gone to Johns Hopkins, my life would have been different. But it probably would have been just fine. I got into MIT, where I wanted to go. I consider myself lucky. If I'd gone to Johns Hopkins I would also have been fortunate. If Picasso paintings had never existed, I wouldn't have missed them. As I mentioned, there's plenty of other great art. But in that Picasso works do exist, isn't it just so unfair that I can't afford to buy one! I demand a fair and equal distribution of his art, or it's really not a good thing after all!
Your #1 doesn't parse to me. Who said anything about any person being better? MIT choses its student body to be beneficial to itself, the student body, and the world. Considering MIT's success, it seems to be doing a fine job at this. But you would rather fix something that isn't broken?
Re #2, again you want to fix something that isn't broken. How about MIT just admits students via a completely random lottery of everyone who applies? Do you think that would work out well?
Re fundamental superiority, once again I find you clear as mud. I'm certainly not claiming to be fundamentally superior to anyone. I was just lucky enough to be born smart enough to do very well in high school and then lucky enough to be admitted via MIT's secret sauce selection methodology.
If your question is whether or not MIT is fundamentally superior, I don't know about "fundamentally". It's long been considered the world's best engineering school. As it turns out Harvard has better astronomy due, in part, to its close ties to the Smithsonian. I originally went to MIT for astronomy, and if I had only known at the time, I suppose I would have preferred Harvard. Oh, well. And maybe Caltech has better astronomy too. It turns out I settled for third best.
On the other hand, I got to learn SICP before the book was even published, and that changed my life. That couldn't have happened anywhere else.
I mean, I wasn’t so your first statement contradicts the next. It seems like you’re saying the ultimate value of a person’s accomplishments is decided when they choose a college. That certainly has disturbing implications for me if that’s the case!
Ultimately this appears to just be beating around the bush. If this institution is so special a random lottery wouldn’t be that different of an outcome. Some folks have proposed that at other institutions [0]. Personally I disagree because I genuinely don’t think who they admit actually matters for 99% of the country. Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.
[0] https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2019/01/08/why-harva...
That's nonsense. I never said anything of the sort.
I've been engaged in another debate here concurrently, which you can easily track down. The originator of that debate posted about a study showing that where you go to school has little impact on your lifetime income. My response argued that income isn't the only benefit that one gets from an education. But I'd readily admit that income is certainly one of the most important benefits.
Unless you have a hankering to work on a small team developing, maintaining, and operating an X-ray space telescope, or to become a prestigious researcher, I'm sure that your education is just fine. That's what the data shows. Also, if you go to graduate school for a PhD, the graduate school you go to is way more important than the undergraduate school you go to. There are plenty of people I know who went to non-elite undergraduate schools but then went on to elite graduate schools.
Personally, I wanted to go to MIT for CS grad school, but I didn't get in. (Despite good grades and excellent GRE scores. How unfair!) I got into BU's PhD program, but BU wasn't doing the kind of research I wanted to do. So I bailed and just got a job at MIT. Though I learned incredible stuff as an undergrad at MIT, it was also difficult to distinguish myself, other than in a few classes for which I was particularly well-suited. Why? Because before I went to MIT, I was the best student out of a thousand. And my SAT scores were the best out of 5,000.
At MIT, though, I was just average. If I had gone to a school where I could have been a bigger fish, maybe I would have gotten into MIT's CS Phd program. Or maybe not. Life is too short to try to second-guess all the maybes. But I have a friend who went to UMD for both undergraduate and graduate school and now he's an Associate Professor at UPenn. Now that he's doing scientific research and applying for grants, etc., it certainly helps him to be a professor in a research lab that has some other very fine minds working with him.
> Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.
Society values research universities based on the quality of the research they do. This is determined largely by the volume and quality of their peer-reviewed publications. Also, I imagine by the publication of influential textbooks, like SICP. Etc.
When the P99 produce results that match that of the P50, then your dream will come true, and not before that. But that's unlikely to happen since universities that are more selective are more likely to attract higher quality researchers. Which will affect their ability to get research grants. Etc.
As for where one should get an education, this is clearly a personal choice. I've gotten to do some interesting things in life due to my education and by staying at or near MIT. But my brother, who went to BU, and never worked on anything of note (other than running Westchester's slam poetry team) is a lot happier than I am, no doubt. Why? Because he found a loving, supportive relationship with a great woman.
This has alluded me. At this point, I'd trade everything I've ever done in life for a job that pays me well enough and a lasting, harmonious relationship.
Did my brother going to BU and me going to MIT result in him ending up happier? Who knows? But ultimately, he's won. At least for what's most important in life.
Regarding my suggestion for where kids should go to school today, I'd probably recommend that if they have enough discipline, they should just get their education from Coursera and/or edX. For whatever reasons, a college education has just become too expensive these days, leaving many students with a terrible debt load that will harm their wellbeing for decades. Whatever benefit you'd get from MIT or Harvard or even University of Arizona might be offset by suffering from crushing debt.
I've taken a bunch of classes on Coursera and edX (including the original machine learning and database classes that were offered online by Stanford for free before there was a Coursera), and they were excellent experiences.
Though actually going to college has a lot of benefits that self-learning in your parents' basement doesn't have. E.g., making life-long friends, getting nookie and learning to navigate sexual/romantic relationships, developing relationships with professors and other researchers, etc. It would be interesting to see data on how the lives of people who take these two different approaches turn out comparatively.
Where exactly did I express that? The other MIT admits from that year I know that aren't privileged sailing athletes from Connecticut, got 2350's on their SATs and performed at Carnegie Hall!
Here's the big difference between the upper-class kids and everyone below when it comes to admission's fairness.
Everyone else says "I worked hard as an individual, therefore i deserve to get into a good college."
Upper-class kids says "MY FAMILY worked hard, therefore i (as an individual) deserve to get into a good college."
The emphasis is WHO worked hard. Upper-class kids tend to ride on the coat-tails of their parents and grand-parents.
No one sees themselves as evil. I'm sure that "they" just differ in terms of what they consider ethical. If I may play the devil's advocate: Why is it more ethical to favor those born with ability than to favor those born with connections?
I don't have a quarrel with either form of discrimination, but I do have a problem with the dishonesty about how things actually work.
The point of meritocracy isn't that it's more fair or ethical, the point is that we give the most important (on the margin) jobs to the people most capable of doing said job. The fact that money, status, and power flow to the people doing important jobs is an incidental side effect.
Now universities aren't exactly jobs, but the point stands. Universities are supposed to educate people, so that those people can do stuff. Letting in people with connections and not ability means we are not making the best use of our limited educational resources. Note that this is an argument for affirmative action as advertised and an argument against affirmative action as practised.
The primary goal of most research universities is to conduct research. Educating people is not the goal, or is an auxiliary goal.
Related: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...
> But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. ...
> This is not a value judgment, nor is it a particular complaint about Harvard. It’s true of any top-ranked private research university, including Caltech. ...
So in this case, I personally would say it's more ethical to favor those born with ability rather than connections because it rewards the behavior you're ostensibly trying to instill (hard work, overcoming odds, etc.). But again, I'm not surprised by these sorts of admissions policies, and I think swinging the other way so radically that they self-destruct is probably more ill-advised than the status quo.
Because this is the land of opportunity. See for yourself how a privileged spoiled brat from Ivy league universities behaves in this country [0]
Folks need to be clear about calling this out.
He is also charming and funny and by his third year was friends with influential enough people that he was attending THE White House Christmas party.
Now he works where and for whom he wants because he has connections in the upper level of society that like him and know his competence. Without legacy admissions for him to make friends with, all that might not have happened.
Merit admissions give the legacies legitimacy. Legacy admissions give the superhumans opportunity.
This is simplified and certainly not the only way to let people achieve escape velocity. But it's what I saw happen to one of the most impressive people I know.
Taking you at face value your superhuman friend is going to White House parties, while you have the legacy admissions, such as G.W. Bush's of the world, running the White House.
I'd rather see this system and cycle broken than a few well deserved people get invited into the inner circle.
Social engineering to benefit the current elite while selecting a few token representatives from the real world doesn’t do a thing to help 99% of this country.
For example, GW Bush isn't just a spoiled rich kid and son of a former President, he went to Yale and Harvard, thus he can be marketed as smart and hardworking because those are the top institutions in the country.
Yet, no one ever accused GW of being a Rhodes scholar, and those Ivy League credentials are nearly impossible for non-elites, but essentially given to the ruling elite and qualifying these people for the best jobs, even being President of the US. Legacy Admissions are a fraud on the working class, and indicative why the US has the lowest social mobility of any 1st world nation.
Anyways I doubt anybody from India with "no money" can get into Harvard. ("No money" in India means begging on the streets or subsistence farming..)
That doesn’t mean “no money”, it just means “probably upper middle to upper class”.
Sounds nice.
Who decides?
On initial inspection, this seems like a really sensible explanation.
Unfortunately, it does not match reality. Studies show that those who get into top schools and don't attend do as well as those who do get in and attend. In other words, the admissions itself serves as an indication that this person is top-notch and capable of great things.
With this in mind, legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students. Merit students clearly get no benefit. Thus, the only conclusion is that merit students exist so that legacy students can continue to uphold their family's hegemony.
Study: https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/...
You're basing this conclusion based on an earnings study? That's pretty questionable reasoning!
I received an incredible education from MIT (and I was admitted based on merit), but I took that education and went to work for non-profit research institutes, because making as much money as possible was not my primary objective.
That's a fair criticism if my comment was made in a vacuum. However, my comment was in response to an anecdote that claimed that legacy admissions are good because they offer a way up the social ladder for those who get into the same school through hard work and merit.
While there are certainly ways up the social ladder via non-profits, etc, the fact of the matter is that those at the top of the social ladder -- those making decisions, etc -- are much richer than the rest of the populace, and money typically buys influence. Even Bernie Sanders, critic of capitalism that he is, has a net worth substantially higher than the typical American.
Thus, I'm going to dismiss your critique as perhaps morally right, but realistically irrelevant.
As to whether legacy students would have helped me rise higher on any ladders, I can't say, since I climbed whatever ladders I did via some combination of merit, having a good education, having a prestigious education, and "white male American privilege". I have no idea how things would have turned out if some rich kid had been my roommate.
I have gotten jobs due to connections, though, and more and better connections might have allowed me to get better jobs. Though I pretty much got the jobs that I wanted anyway, so it's not clear if better connections would have made much of a difference.
Personally, my guess would be that legacy admissions exist mostly for a university to increase its stream of loyal donations from the well-to-do.
If MIT doesn't do legacy then none of my criticism applies to it. Nowhere did I diminish the value of college connections. I did diminish the value of connections between intelligent students and the well to do as being unnecessary to the success of those students. Your experience at MIT supports my claim because MIT graduates do very well despite having no legacy admissions.
Thus we can dismiss the idea that legacy admissions are necessary to help merit students. Please don't try to derail the discussion
The conclusion that your reasoning leads us to here is clearly germane because it is absurd. Consequently, I can't accept your argument as presented.
See, my MIT education was useful for something. I knows fancy logic things.
To elaborate a bit more on why I think that equating income with educational value is a non-starter, using a direct argument rather than a reductio ad absurdum argument: my MIT education instilled me with values, passions, and interests that could very well be in opposition to maximising my income. I.e., if I'd gone to a lesser school, I might very well make more money because my values, passions, and interests would be different. I.e., not necessarily for the better, but perhaps oriented more towards increased income. E.g., without certain passions and interests that MIT instilled me with, there would have been a lot more jobs–some of them high-paying–that would have been appealing to me. But with the passions and interests I ended up with, these jobs were not appealing to me. E.g., I could have gotten a very high paying job right out of college programming in Cobol. But that certainly was not for me after groking the beauty of Scheme.
Consequently, a study showing that I would have statistically made as much money if I had received my education at a less prestigious school, is utterly irrelevent to how I value my MIT education.
Wow. Nice misapplication of a logical fallacy. My claim was that forging connections between legacy students and merit students was not particularly beneficial to merit students. You then claimed that this would lead to the supposedly absurd conclusion that your MIT education is valueless.
You cannot apply reductio ad absurdum here, because you cannot conclude 'an MIT education is valueless' from my claim that 'merit students do not need to be friends with legacy students to succeed'. Since MIT does not have legacy admissions, my claim does not apply to it. You cannot conclude anything about MIT from my claim. Nowhere have I claimed anything about college friends / connections in general, only those between legacy and merit students, which, again, do not exist at MIT.
Moreover, you have committed the fallacy of petitio principii (popularly known as 'begging the question' -- you don't need to go to MIT to have an understanding of grade school logic). You have already concluded that your MIT education is worthwhile (and perhaps it is, I don't know; you certain have not proven it), and have used that to mistakenly conclude that you could apply reductio ad absurdum to my claim which -- again -- does not apply to MIT in any way whatsoever.
So, we see that you've (1) misapplied a logical fallacy, (2) attempted to argue against a strawmanned version of my claim, and (3) used petitio principii in an attempt to persuade everyone of the value of an MIT education.
I did not downvote you, but I am unsurprised that you were downvoted.
This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.
Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.
> you don't need to go to MIT to have an understanding of grade school logic
You don't need to go to MIT to understand a joke either. Especially when it is followed up with, "I knows fancy logic things."
No that is not at all what my argument is. My argument is (quoting from a previous comment)
> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students
I used a study asserting
> that those who get into top schools and don't attend do as well as those who do get in and attend
You are attempting to attack the study over my usage of the term 'top school', which you believe applies to MIT. That is far. However, if you read the study (which you clearly did not), it is actually talking solely about Ivy League schools not any 'elite college'. Actually, if you didn't read the study at all, but had only clicked the link and read the title (as most HNers are apt to do), then you still would have known it's about the Ivy League, because it's titled The Ivy League Earnings Myth. All the ivy league schools have legacy admissions. The use of the word 'top school' was my invention. However, using that word versus just using what the study used (Ivy League) does not change the core of my argument which again is
> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students
You are attempting to attack the study by giving your own anecdote about your experience at MIT. Attempting to extrapolate global truth from your anecdote argument is yet another instance of logical fallacy. However, even admitting your use of fallacy as an actual argument, the argument itself would fail to actually refute the study, because again -- as a non-Ivy League school -- the 'success multiplier' of an MIT education has nothing to do with that of an Ivy League one.
I suggest you go back to my first comment and replace the word top school with 'Ivy League schools', and see that the arguments still follow. I apologize if my use of the term 'top school' to mean 'Ivy League' was confusing.
> This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.
That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but is actually orthogonal to the one you are continuing to make about 'elite schools'.
> Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.
Well... no. An argument based on false premise is false. In mathematics, unsoundness is a property of a logical system, not particular statements in that system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness
> No that is not at all what my argument is. My argument is (quoting from a previous comment)
> legacy admissions does nothing other than to help the legacy students network with the merit students
In support of the above statement, you made this statement:
> Studies show that those who get into top schools and don't attend do as well as those who do get in and attend. In other words, the admissions itself serves as an indication that this person is top-notch and capable of great things.
Everything else you assert would seem to follow from this assertion of yours which is immediately above. You have provided no evidence for this claim, however, other than as measured in financial terms.
> However, if you read the study (which you clearly did not), it is actually talking solely about Ivy League schools not any 'elite college'.
OMG. You are too much!
This is the actual study:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322
It has absolutely nothing to do with Ivy League schools. From the paper itself, it is about "elite" schools (in the paper's own words), and eliteness was measured largely using "selectivity (as measured by the school's average SAT score) and net tuition".
> Actually, if you didn't read the study at all, but had only clicked the link and read the title (as most HNers are apt to do), then you still would have known it's about the Ivy League
:facepalm:
Even in the summary article you linked to it says, "or other super elite college".
> You are attempting to attack the study
I am not attacking the study. I am stating that "doing as well" and accomplishing "great things" (your terms) and financial earnings cannot be equated.
It's a tautology that they cannot be equated, but it would be a long and expensive philosophical, psychological, and sociological/anthroplogical slog to attempt to prove that they are not very strongly correlated. But the burden of proof is not on me; it is on you. It is you who are claiming that a study that only looks at income somehow can be extended to a larger context of "doing as well" and accomplishing "great things".
> by giving your own anecdote about your experience at MIT. Attempting to extrapolate global truth from your anecdote > argument is yet another instance of logical fallacy.
I provided an example of benefiting that is divorced from financial gain. Only a single instance of such in the entire world is enough to refute the claim that financial gain and benefit can be equated.
> However, even admitting your use of fallacy as an actual argument, the argument itself would fail to actually refute the study, because again -- as a non-Ivy League school -- the 'success multiplier' of an MIT education has nothing to do with that of an Ivy League one.
This is a strange hole you want to dig yourself into. What is so different about Ivy League schools from other elite colleges and universities? Nothing except that Ivy League schools are all in the same football league. Schools (both elite and non-elite) are all different from each other. Which is one of the reasons that we have lots of them. So that students can attend a school that matches their abilities, interests, and disposition.
Not to mention that if you had actually followed your own advice and actually read the study, you'd know that it says nothing about Ivy League schools in particular.
> I suggest you go back to my first comment and replace the word top school with 'Ivy League schools'
I suggest that you follow your own advice and read studies that you cite as evidence for your arguments.
>> This premise is false, as I have argued, because income alone is not a good measure of benefit.
> That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but is actually orthogonal to the one you are continuing to make about 'elite schools'.
How so? My position is that elite schools can provide significant benefits that cannot be measured financially. This assertion is certainly true. As to whether such benefits frequently exceed such benefits from less elite schools: I clearly am in no position to perform the kind of study that "proving" this would require. I can speak about my personal experience, however, which informs my beliefs on the matter.
>> Any argument based on a false premise is an unsound argument. Consequently, your argument is unsound.
>Well... no.
Well, YES!
> An argument based on false premise is false.
That is just wrong. There is no such thing as a "false" argument. You can make no conclusion about the truth of the conclusions of an argument that is based on a false premise. An argument is "valid" if its conclusions follow from its premises and "invalid" if its conclusions do not follow from its premises. An argument is "sound" if it is valid and its premises are true, and unsound if it is either invalid or if it has a false premise.
A sound argument necessarily has true conclusions.
> In mathematics, unsoundness is a property of a logical system, not particular statements in that system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness
That's a different usage of the term "soundness". Words can mean different things in different contexts. I should think that you would know this.
These links will help inform you about how the term "sound" is typically used by philosophers and logicians in the context of logically deductive arguments:
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sound_argument
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/281208/what-is-the-...
> That is just wrong.
It is completely backwards, in fact. An argument of the form of P -> C (if premise, then conclusion) is (vacuously) true if P is false, regardless of the conclusion.
Yes, that's exactly right! If you write out an argument in the form of a single logical proposition and any of the premises are false, then the proposition itself is true.
That's one of the things they beat into your head a lot in Logic 101 since it's rather counterintuitive that a material conditional with a false antecedent is always true. GIGO.
My only nit would be that terminologically one wouldn't normally use the terms "true" or "false" to describe an argument, since if you did, then you'd have to say that all arguments with a false premise are true, and that's just too confusing. So usually one speaks of arguments in terms of validity and soundness instead.
P.S. Another thing that's confusing to Logic 101 students on day 1, is that an argument can be valid and yet the conclusions can still be false.
In math, this usually doesn't come up, since you wouldn't typically have valid proofs in math that started with a false premise.
If the merit students have talent and not so much money, wouldn't you want them to rub elbows with legacy students who maybe have lots of money but not so much talent?
Entrepreneurs need investors.
> Entrepreneurs need investors.
Investors also need entrepreneurs to create the mechanisms of wealth creation. Aside from angel investing, most VC money is via institutional funds (perhaps with substantial contributions from individual accredited investors). The VC, as a steward of others money, needs to find entrepreneurs who are able to drive a high enough possibility of a great rate of return.
Actually, given that there are entrepreneurs who were able to make it without large substantial investment, whereas there are no investors able to make it without the involvement of entrepreneurs, I'm going to hazard to say that investors need entrepreneurs more than entrepreneurs need investors, even if marginally.
Banning is harsh. Top universities are tax exempt institutions. If they want to continue their legacy programs, fine, they're a private institution. But then they--and their endowments--don't get to keep their non-profit status.
Simple change that could even be effected at the state level by way of referendum.
Government banning private institutions from doing things?
I'd prefer an alternate approach, in that government starts legitimizing other paths to education than the collage system. Its mildly absurd that the "keys to upper class society" are held by these private systems and this is reinforced via legislation.
For perspective, the demographics of all Harvard students, not just ALDC [1,2]:
Asian American: 25.3%
Jewish: 25%
non-Jewish white: 22%
African American: 14.3%
Hispanic or Latino: 12.2%
Native American: 1.8%
Native Hawaiian: 0.6%
[2] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
Also, not all Jews -- even in the U.S. -- are Caucasian. [3]
[1]: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...
[2]: https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty...
Not long after, people will be shocked that such a thing ever existed.
I don't think Ivy Leauge schools are deserving of their current reputations or valuations (in terms of quality), the systemic rot at MIT (having an ice cream social to celebrate Aaron Swartz, happily taking money from convicted criminals), Harvard and nearly every other Ivy League stems from an idolization of money over all else, education and research are only present at these institutions as window dressing.
None of these institutions should qualify as a non-profit, given their abject failure and continuing refusal to act equitably as every other (non-church) non-profit must.
1 - https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloom...
Oh, puh-lease! This is just utter nonsense.
Not that MIT and Ivy League schools don't deserve serious criticism (like just about everything else in the world) but your characterization is either extremely biased or completely uninformed.
Even if the answer to that question is nothing, that does not justify the conclusion that "education and research are only present at these institutions as window dressing".
Btw, are you oblivious to the fact that RMS invented the GPL and wrote the GNU C compiler and Emacs and formed the FSF (among other very useful things) while he was employed as a research scientist at MIT. And that, as far as I'm aware, for much of this time he had no other responsibilities than doing these things?
Also, are you aware that his undergraduate education is from Harvard, which certainly must have had some sort of effect on the interests that he chose later to pursue? (He's on record as stating that he enjoyed much of his education there.)
Stallman also maintained the MIT version of Lisp Machine Lisp and the MIT Lisp Machine OS for some of this time. It is working on this and seeing MIT's research "stolen" by Symbolics and other companies that in no small part led to his beliefs about free software.
MIT & Harvard have not been affecting change in the world around them like they did in prior decades.
And how does this claim translate into "education and research are only present at these institutions as window dressing"?
I currently work at a famous MIT and Harvard-affiliated research institute that aims to eventually cure cancer and other genetically-caused diseases. Or at least find better treatments for them. Is this not important research? Is trying to treat and/or cure terrible diseases merely "window dressing" to you?
Before working on this, I worked at an MIT research lab that developed an X-ray space telescope. Software that I wrote was essential for the publication of about 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers.
Is 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers "window dressing"?
The article talks about the huge endowment Harvard has, and I wonder how much of the incredible research going on around me would be possible if the university were to "take a hit" financially by reducing or banning legacy admissions.
In 2016, $1.6 billion was disbursed for university operations.
http://www.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/content/20160401_...
"Using conventional financial reporting standards, 84 percent, or $31 billion, of the $37.6 billion in the endowment is restricted by the terms of original gifts."
"Of the endowment that is restricted, the leading restrictions include (1) support for professorships and faculty salaries (32 percent), (2) financial aid (21 percent), (3) support for teaching and research programs (8 percent), (4) program initiatives (e.g., cross-faculty programs, global and international programs, and women’s studies) (5 percent), (5) support for libraries and museums (4 percent), and (6) maintenance of the physical plant (1 percent)."
I know there may be uneven annual funding levels due to when a gift was given, but as an estimate 84% * 8% = 6.7% of disbursements are restricted to teaching and research. That's about $0.11 billion dollars in 2016.
In comparison, Harvard received $1.08 billion in research funding from the federal government in 2016.
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingbysour...
So federal sources of money for research dwarf the disbursements from the endowment.
If Harvard's endowment were to begin dwindling, I am not sure what would be cut first of the 16% that is not restricted by donor intent, but levels of research funding would appear to be mostly intact.
Much easier for a Harvard candidate to have connections that could lead to a successful angel investment. Once Legacy admissions go away, the value of Harvard my dropped by a large margin.
Crazy world but all these things need to be taken into account.
Sounds great to me! I worked hard to get into my degree program and get my undergrad too and it has negligible worth - honestly, if the same could be said about the HYPSM+ folks we would all be better off.
There are millions of tax paying, patriotic, and effective citizens that did not get into HYPSM schools and are overlooked in the media in favor of a few thousand people who have the virtue of a HYPSM+ degree. [0]
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/
I am saying we are not valued. We are thought of as inferior individuals, as you've described several times on HN. I'm honestly sick of it - America was made for everyone, not just the folks judged to be the best in a nebulous definition of "merit".
I’ve worked plenty hard in my life and compared to the average top school grad I haven’t achieved much according to the folks on HN.
Yikes.
Ivy league is just a brand, some people get branded by it and some are not, some people because they were born to the right family, some because they got very high marks and some because they got the right skin colour. There is no "justice" as it is just a lottery winning thing, if you got branded your life would be better after. For any one who get accepted there are 100 who could replace him.
You could study the exact same program and acquire exactly the same knowledge in a different university but you won't get branded, so how is it fair? There is no fair, it is just pure luck that your combination of various parameters didn't get you into an ivy, if they changed it it would be someone else bad luck.
At the end of the day, who is going to be branded to be part of the elite is up to the elite, if you force them to change the rules they will just remove the branding, this branding only worth if the people who are already branded accept the newly branded.
Genuinely curious, what are you talking about ?
He's talking about almost anyone engaging in ideas typically labeled "postmodernist" "poststructuralist" "critical race theory" "theory" "literary theory" and a couple of others, as well as persons engaging in fields called things like "ethnic studies" or "gender studies."
>But dressed up in sufficiently confusing language—see the Butler passage from earlier in this essay—no one can tell what if anything is really being argued.
As someone who has a cursory interest in critical theory, the passage was perfectly readable to me, especially if you're familiar with what the structuralists such as Althusser were arguing in the first place. The idea that it's only some ideological force that keeps deconstruction in play is false, since Althusser himself was sympathetic to the political goals of many deconstructioists - he was literally a Marxist and is heavily cited in critical theory even today. For that matter, one of Althusser's closest partners, Etienne Balibar, very frequently takes on issues of capital, race and gender from a structuralist perspective in new books he writes every year. Could the passage have been expressed in clearer terms? Maybe. But it's a mistake to charge it as not being able to tell what Butler is arguing.
As an aside, this same criticism is leveled against Hegel, but the most progressive thing you'll find in Hegel is his takedown of phrenology. Confusing language is not at all limited by ideology. On the other hand, there are very clear writers such as Marcuse and Althusser who form the bedrock of critical theory today. As Adorno wrote in response to a criticism of his literary style:
>"Now, from what you write about my language, to be honest, I find it very difficult to imagine that you mean it seriously. Your argumentation shows a true obsession with the thought of the reader. With my stuff you obviously didn't even come up with the idea that I'm not interested in him, neither in catching him, nor in snubbing him, but only in the most adequate and rigorous presentation of the matter possible. That is probably the only linguistic thing that can be done seriously against the cultural industry."
You say confusion, Adorno says rigor. I have a hard time seeing why I couldn't have substituted your Butler passage for a passage from a paper in recent abstract mathematics or type theory.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unfortunate-f...
Stanford Philosophy provides a more detailed description of its history:
"It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man, and prompts him to say in secret at the sight of another suffering: 'Perish if you will; I am safe.'"
[0]http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Epistemology_Integrati...
1. That differences between individuals or groups of individuals is better explained by "nurture" rather than "nature."
2. That society is constructed in such a way that it benefits certain traits over others. Some benefits may be superficial- ex: whites are the most attractive. Others may be structural- ex: programmers make more than teachers because programming produces more value because capital is invested more in things that programming affects rather than things that teaching affects. This contributes to men making more money than women.
3. That it is possible to reconstruct society to avoid creating "nurture" originating differences between individuals and groups of individuals. Ex: Men are more likely to hit on women than women are to hit on men. Perhaps by teaching men to be less aggressive, this disparity will be avoided.
4. That society's structure is not a necessary development but rather an accidental one. Ex: America eats a lot of meat, but this only happened because the government subsidized corn, which made feed for cattle very cheap.
5. That society may be reconstructed in such a way that structural benefits are not present. Ex: Perhaps we should defund corn subsides and encourage people to eat bugs and plants rather than large animals?
6. That the reconstructed society will be "better." Better probably being less income inequality, more freedom, less violence, suffering, etc.
7. That when someone does something "wrong" in society, they may be "excused" since their behavior was nurtured, and they didn't know better. Additionally, since society is arbitrarily constructed, perhaps the "wrong" they committed is not an actual wrong. Ex: a student arrives late to class and receives a 0 for attendence. Perhaps this attendence should be excused because they come from a society where timeliness is not needed? Perhaps we should reconstruct society to make timeliness in class unnecessary?
8. That there is more than one right answer or truth. Ex: "Some physicists subscribe to the Many Worlds Theory. Others subscribe to the C[sic: I've forgotten the alternative] Iterpretation. Both can be right and there is no real need to reduce them down to a single correct answer."
While I certainly see how these individual things could be true, I don't see how any of these individual things are proven to be true. Further, while people seem to operate politically using these ideas under some grand unified model of progressivism, I don't see any evidence that the grand model will ever be realized.
'Let the experiment be made.' -- Benjamin Franklin
That is to say democracy is, or ought to be, at its essence all about discovering, through experience, which institutions best serve the common good. "Laboratories of democracy" is another phrase that comes to mind.
It's sad we have yet to find a way to run more than a single experiment
I didn't know there was an Ivy League member in France!