It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that academics raise academics, doctors doctors, Olympians Olympians, teachers teachers, etc.
It’s equally unsurprising that the ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families themselves pursue such a similar path and achieve similar outcomes. I’m an engineer and my spouse a scientist. Our kids have commensurately higher chance to pursue one of those or a closely related field due to exposure and biases.
Take a similarly educated family who happen to live in Gaza, for instance, and it’s obvious that the children will have a different set of opportunities available to them.
Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7 times as likely to have the same job as their fathers. [0]
From the General Social Survey[1]:
If your father was a legislator, you are 354 times more likely to be drawn to that career, too. Kids whose father was a doctor are 23 times more likely to follow in his footsteps. If your father was a lawyer, you’re 17 times more likely to become one, as well.
Jobs in the trades figure into these statistics, as well.
- The sons and daughters of plumbers are 14 times more likely to pursue a job in this field.
- The sons and daughters of electricians are nine times more likely to pursue a job in this field.
- The sons and daughters of carpenters are five times more likely to pursue a job in this field.
And, maybe it’s all that brushing and flossing – but the sons and daughters of dentists are 13 times more likely to become one, too.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/learning/will-you-follow-...
My father did metalwork before moving to an office job in the civil service. He was the son of a die pressman. Who was the son of a blacksmith. Dad taught me how to weld and cut and so on before my teens. My intellectual interests went to math and computers early on, and he did encourage me to go wherever that might lead. Yet after university and exploring the world I end up in a job where I make circuit boards. It's nearly all automated now but I still do far more welding in my job than most people with a degree.
Sometimes it feels like our life scripts are often sketched out by circumstance and trends long before we're even born.
He is really proud of buildings he was working on and that he was able to build things with his own hands.
Even though I have an engineering degree and work in totally different environment I think that something I took from him is that I am really happy with the systems I have built and ability to create things on my own.
I did it with keyboard while he did it with hammer.
So I don't think it is "cartels" it is still a lot of what you experience in your childhood. If your parent is a dentist he will talk about that and you won't have problem to understand things in that area, maybe you will visit his practice and be able to play with the tools even. Well it still is some kind of upper-hand but not every child can have the same exposure to dentistry and I am fine with that.
Now and again I'll see a very expensive thing I worked on on eBay for a penny on the dollar. Maybe it's time to build a Museum of Me in a spare bedroom.
Once you get into the union, it's kinda a cake walk. You can achieve a middle class income, health, and retirement.
It wasn't for me, but a lot of people like it.
(answering the top question. I never wanted to do what my father did. We had a strained relationship the minute I stopped agreeing with him. Even as a kid, I loved my father, but didn't want to be like him in any way--including career.)
Knowing people in the highly unionized film biz, getting your next job always seems to be the order of the day so it seems to depend. It actually sounds pretty tough compared to a 'normal' gig at a company, but you do end up with good stories to tell.
Of course I also sit in a cluster, knowing several other kids who also did not want to become restaurant workers. It was simple really, our parents would say "I'm serving fried rice to people so that you won't have to." None of my family friends have taken over the family business. It's nearly an insult to suggest it, I remember seeing an article about my friend's dad having his anniversary at one of Copenhagens most beloved Chinese grillbars. The FB comment section made it clear she had no intention of taking that over, his hard work had resulted in a cushy white collar job for her and she was thankful for that.
Oddly my wife, a doctor's kid, also got put off being a doctor by her dad. He had long become cynical about working in the NHS and let his kids know when they got to the age where you think about this.
My father and my father's father were both anesthesiologists. I'm a software developer with a degree in mechanical engineering.
Growing up, I saw a lot of my dad's frustration butting his head against hospital and regulatory bureaucracy and decided to steer clear. (His biggest headaches came because it's not uncommon for one anesthesiologist to cover 3 simultaneous low-risk operations, circulating among the operating rooms while each surgery has a dedicated nurse anesthetist. There was one billing regulation that was ambiguous in a corner case for such simultaneous services, where one reading indicated that they weren't allowed to charge any fees at all in a corner case. His company inquired for clarification from the government regulator and got no response. Years after their inquiry, they got sued regarding corner-case billing of the government for services provided to low income patients. The legal discovery process found internal government memos where regulators joked with each other over my dad's company's inquiry about how it would be great to have zero-cost healthcare at the expense of physicians. The laws were later clarified to avoid the ambiguity to essentially match my dad's company's interpretation, but unfortunately, the lawsuit was over the laws at the time the billing was made. They were actually sued by a third party on behalf of the government, in exchange for a percentage of the money recovered for the government. Some of the key pieces of evidence were shown pre-trial to be "mistakes" where the other side had "accidentally" photocopied several bills twice and redacted the two copies of each bill slightly differently. There were some "anonymous whistleblower" faxes that were traced to an office service center across the street from the other party's offices (conveniently preventing the whistleblower from having to answer questions under oath), and all kinds of other obvious dishonest evidence submission. Most of the complaints were thrown out pre-trial, the rest they settled out of court rather than risk a jury trial pitting "rich doctors" against a government program for low income folks, over ambiguous wording. There were also anti-trust allegations made by defining a market as the area right around the hospital's where dad's company operated and conveniently ignoring some hospitals in-between those included hospitals. At least the anti-trust stuff was dropped pretty quickly, but the whole ordeal was a high-stress multi-year situation for my dad when I was in elementary school.)
Well, were they following the standard of American healthcare in price-gouging patients because it was technically legal to do so? Which would not necessarily be a strike against your dad, but simply an acknowledgement of the way health care costs are "managed" in this country.
They were charging MediCare, not patients, and they were charging MediCare according to the price schedule dictated by MediCare, which was significantly less than insurance companies paid. The problem was there were poorly worded rules for adjusting prices when one doctor was simultaneously treating multiple patients, particularly around how multiple discount factors should compound.
I don't remember the exact details from 30 years ago, but IIRC, it was something like under one interpretation of the rules, if a doctor were treating 2 private insurance patients and 1 MediCare patient simultaneously, then the MediCare discount factor was reasonable. However, if a doctor were treating 3 MediCare patients simultaneously, under one interpretation the discount factors compounded additively such that the doctor's fees went negative and the doctor was best off doing the 3rd case pro-bono. The real trouble came when a doctor was treating 1 patient with private insurance and 2 under MediCare, where the incorrect reading resulted in discount factors unreasonable compounding, but not to such a degree that it was so clearly an incorrect interpretation.
When MediCare didn't respond to their request for clarification, my dad's company went with the interpretation that gave sane results for 3 MediCare patients, and applied that same interpretation to the 2 MadiCare patient case. It would have been immoral and illegal for them to refuse to treat the patients, so they went forward in good faith with the most sensible interpretation. This despite (as discovery showed) MediCare officials acting in bad faith by intentionally not responding to their inquiry and privately joking about it. They presumably realized the correct interpretation resulted in higher fees, but avoided responding in hopes the lower fees would be charged.
Whichever bureaucrats had written the original billing rules were clearly aware that some doctors simultaneously treated multiple patients, but had clearly hadn't sat down and tried calculating a bill for one hypothetical situation for each of the possible corner cases.
The rules were later amended to be unambiguous. The lawsuit was filed a few years after the rules amendments, and all of the allegations of wrongdoing were for billing prior to the rules amendments. Everything they did was always clearly correct under the later rules. The only question was if the earlier and later rules were equivalent. My dad's company's assertion was that the earlier ambiguous rules should be interpreted as being equivalent to the later rules. The opposition's assertion was that the rules change wasn't in fact a clarification, but instead a meaningful change that allowed doctors to bill more.
The billing rules were so complex that in the late 1970s, my dad's company of 15-ish doctors hired some developers to spend months sitting down with the doctors coding up the billing rules. Even the mid 2000's they were making more on licensing the anesthesia billing software than they were on providing anesthesia services.
Don't go into medicine unless you really like helping people.
My dad studied hard enough to get very high MCAT scores and went to med school after 3 years of undergrad, so he never got an undergrad degree. (Med school was less competitive in the 1970s, and he didn't go to a top-tier med school, though he did well enough that he did his residency at the Mayo Clinic.) I'm pretty sure there were plenty of other things my dad could have done that would have been roughly as lucrative, but lower stress and left him with more time with family. I think part of it was that he felt a duty to carry on his father's career that was cut so short.
I saw my dad's paycheck one month in the mid 1980s. He made 10k/month, which was good money for the 80s (about 300k/yr in 2021 dollars), but he also had to pay malpractice insurance and med school loans out of that (Grandpa drowned when dad was 9 years old and Grandma had to go back to being a school teacher). He and many of his colleagues had stress-related acid reflux. Hospitals need anesthesia 24/7, so he was on a rolling shift work schedule. Sometimes I wouldn't see him for a week because he'd either have the evening shift and be out before I got home from school, or he'd be working the graveyard shift and wouldn't wake up until after my bedtime. Anesthesiologists have pretty high rates of suicide and drug abuse. You occasionally pull some genuine miracles out of your hat and save a doomed person, but you also carry with you forever the names of those you couldn't save.
It's not even a free market run amok. There's essentially zero price transparency, which is necessary for an efficiently operating free market.
I'd say that means the PHD job market has a large problem. When politicians are the ones you can compare yourself to look good, it's because things are not good at all.
Behavioral genetics is fairly controversial for being an entire field which begs the question.
https://www.wichita.edu/academics/fairmount_college_of_liber...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/my-problem-...
Your objection to the first is ad hominem, to the second erroneous.
Belief in genetic determinism, as we conceive it, is at odds with the principles of skepticism and scientific inquiry. Like eugenics before it, it really, really wants to find a scientific basis to justify the state of the world we live in even as that state shifts under us. There are massive holes in both the execution of studies and the underlying rationale, and it's impossible to speak in good faith on the topic without acknowledging that.
Conclusions do not require certainty. Science is about converging to the best explanation, not about unimpeachable conclusions. But when there are no plausible causal paths to explain measured correlations aside from, e.g., gene->phenotype causation, then causation along the available causal path is a valid tentative conclusion.
> variability in adult height, has similarly been held to be highly heritable... despite the fact that the average in many countries has changed on a time scale incompatible with a purely or even highly genetic basis.
I don't know how you can possibly think this supports your argument against genetic heritability. Height has a heritability measure of around 80%, which leaves 20% for environmental factors. There is no contradiction in noting that average height has increased over time when the current best analysis leaves significant room for variation due to environment.
>despite the fact that the average in many countries has changed on a time scale incompatible with a purely or even highly genetic basis.
Nothing you've said demonstrates this claim.
>Your objection to the first is ad hominem
Nope. Emergentism is his avowed conceptual framework, a lens through which he analyzes evidence and draws conclusions. But if the conceptual framework is vacuous, which it is, then that undermines the value of conclusions based on that framework.
If certainty has not been achieved, then you should remain skeptical. The lack of a causal explanation is a massive discontinuity in logic which suggests that our conclusions may be very wrong ("retrograde action" wrong).
>Height has a heritability measure of around 80%, which leaves 20% for environmental factors.
This is what I mean. The studies that determined this used datasets from wealthy Western countries that are more ethnically homogeneous than average. Similar studies done in less wealthy countries found measures of environmental influence as high as 40%. In countries of similar wealth, average height can be predicted by measuring the level of economic inequality, suggesting that environmental factors such as healthcare, nutrition, and fitness access are all significant inputs.
>Nothing you've said demonstrates this claim.
Dutch average height for men grew 8 inches in a century. For comparison, average height for men worldwide has grown around 3 inches in the last millennium. There is evidence to suggest that pre-agricultural male height was similar to where it is now, if not taller; the structure of our civilization is the difference between the average man being 5'6" and 6", i.e., more than one SD from today's average in either direction.
I understand that it is harrowing to think that even our basic physiological attributes may be determined in no small part by the way we're treated by society (that is to say, that decisions could be made to improve your quality of life but are not), but it is very much a possibility.
>Nope. Emergentism is his avowed conceptual framework, a lens through which he analyzes evidence and draws conclusions. But if the conceptual framework is vacuous, which it is, then that undermines the value of conclusions based on that framework.
You are literally invoking a textbook ad hominem fallacy.
This is like saying you should be skeptical of all scientific claims. But such a claim is in tension with the obvious successes of science and engineering despite the inherent tentativeness of scientific conclusions. Clearly we need something more nuanced. We can draw tentative conclusions and move forward with knowledge while also acknowledging the tentative nature of said knowledge. Global skepticism regarding all scientific results is paralyzing.
>The studies that determined this used datasets from wealthy Western countries that are more ethnically homogeneous than average.
It has to be for any such measure to be meaningful. For example, if you put a toddler in a box and starve it to death, its development stops completely. But this doesn't mean that environmental influence is 100% for all phenotypes. Heritability is a blunt measure for something highly multidimensional. As such, care must be used in its interpretation. What heritability tells us is that given similar environments, what variation in measurable traits is due to variation in genetics or variation in environment. An ideal measure of heritability is a function of environment and would be proportional to the rate of change of environmental influence at every step change in environment.
Of course, such a measure is impossible and so we're left with our current blunt measure. But we can reason about some features of the ideal measure. For example, environmental influences have diminishing returns, thus there comes a point at which the rate of change of environmental influence is zero, meaning better or worse environment has no bearing on the trait and genetic variation dominates outcomes. On the other extreme, environmental influences are dominant. The relevant questions for the validity of heritability is whether the rate of change of environmental influence is steep at the current average environment. If it is steep, then it invalidates drawing conclusions based on measured heritability as the value is unstable.
But your point about Dutch average height does not bear on this. The heritability measure is blind to global average changes in quality of environment. The fact that average height grew so substantially implies that the average environment changed substantially over that period. The Flynn effect is another example, where the average IQ across the population grew substantially over a similar time period. But this doesn't have any direct relevance to the heritability measure of IQ. The question is whether current measures of heritability are stable for typical variations in environment. Regarding height, I would guess yes as calories are abundant in the western world, even among the poor.
>You are literally invoking a textbook ad hominem fallacy.
Notice the word fallacy. Identifying logical fallacies by name is to help recognize patterns of invalid arguments. Ad hominem is only relevant if the argument is not valid. But my point a vacuous conceptual framework leading to specious conclusions is a valid argument.
My sister on the other hand had no interest in mathematics whatsoever!
For those who don't know, the Varna system, also known as the caste system has long been justified as the 'natural order' of a scholar's child being a scholar, a warrior's child being a warrior, a tradesmen child being a tradesman and the lowest class of a menial worker's child being a menial worker.
The fact that so many are willing color the discussion with - observable trends seem to suggest this is a natural fact of life is only elementary is both disgusting and unsurprising.
Systematic barriers are seldom built consciously, yet they exist and without conscious effort to break down continue to be perpetuated.
From the point of view of opportunities/privileges available to an individual, is there really a difference between the caste system and a class system?
Not so for socioeconomic class. My grandfathers milled steel and mined coal. They made sure their kids became the first generation in the family to attend college. My parents became teachers and made sure their kids focused on education and we all attended “good colleges” and have built careers. My generation is saving for college while the kids are still in diapers.
That’s still systemic advantages from the family, but it’s marked change in economic class in just two generations, which is IMO dramatically different from the Indian caste system. It still matters who your parents are, but in a significantly different (and I think more fair) way.
It amazes me when people think the current socioeconomic structures are fair.
You do realise that most people here, including perhaps you are, economically speaking, closer to being poor than being part of the 1% rich, right? The economic gap between those you might consider poor and yourself is a rounding error magnitude of the gap between yourself and the super rich. This is not an accident.
God forbid, but you and your kids are perhaps one or two medical, legal or natural calamities away from that few generations of advancement you talk about.
I don’t care that someone has well over 5 orders of magnitude more wealth than I have. It doesn’t materially negatively affect my life in the least and, on the contrary, their inventions make my daily life better by wildly more than any negative impacts their houses, yachts, airplanes, or rockets could possibly have.
I’m here to spend my life energy and time pursuing the things that are important to me: raising and loving my family, doing work and hobbies I find stimulating, traveling and learning about the world. Bellyaching that I’m not a literal or figurative monarch is not among the ways I choose to spend my time and energy.
Wait, are you under the impression that people with extreme wealth typically got it by inventing something?
It's called capitalism because the owners of capital reap most of society's economic rewards. Which is in the form of more capital.
IOW, the rich get richer.
The optimal wealth investment strategy to grow a large pile of money into a larger pile over the long term is pretty simple too (rebalance your portfolio annually, buy and hold), and attempts at a 'smarter' strategy tend to fail pretty miserably.
The American story used to be rags-to-riches-to-rags, but not anymore. These days once you've reached 'riches' your descendants are fairly likely to stay rich, and laziness on their part (ie. leaving the money pile on autopilot) is actually an asset (eg. Donald Trump would be a wealthier today if he had invested his inheritance and just left it alone).
Conversely, it is harder than ever to go from rags-to-riches in the first place.
You do not benefit from the wealthy in society pulling the ladder up behind themselves.
My kids saw a whole lot more of "how technology works" and mathematics during elementary school than most kids. A lawyer's kid probably heard a lot more of argument, rhetoric, and legal reasoning than mine did. They still could do something completely different-- the lawyer's kid could go do technology and my kid could grow up to be a lawyer-- it's just a somewhat less likely outcome.
And what would be the likelyhood of the child of a single mom working 2 unskilled jobs to be either of those? Like I mentioned in a different comment, Systematic barriers exist without being consciously built and are then perpetuated as just the natural way of things.
If you are dedicated to education, there is plenty of opportunity to succeed. It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make it out of poverty easily, but that’s just how the world works. For those that make the effort, it’s very available.
Right, right, my mistake, this is nothing like the Varana system.
And, what you're saying is a bit orthogonal to what was discussed here: attaining social mobility for everyone doesn't need to erase familial proclivities towards certain professions. In your eagerness to speak harshly to everyone else here, I think you're missing that what others are discussing is not what you're attacking.
Indeed, uh... I left a tech career where I averaged making 7 figures a year to run youth programs and help kids from non-engineering backgrounds-- including a large share of disadvantaged kids-- into having many of the same kinds of advantages my kids do in being able to imagine an engineering career and learn basic skills and the details of the path at an early age.
So, please don't lecture me about systematic barriers. You don't need to tear down family traditions and passing down of skills to greatly reduce inequity: you just need to ensure that everyone gets a reasonable chance at a path upwards. Some can show up in my programs and become engineers and mathematicians; others can go in someone else's speech program and become marketers and lawyers; other, more fortunate people, can lean on familial upbringing; and yet others can choose something other than the path of least resistance and do something less probable.
This entire thread of conversation began with my highlighting the parallels of how the Varana system, supposedly of divine origins, accepted and prevalent, even today in Silicon Valley[1], is not dissimilar to what the original article and the parent comment spoke about.
Though sure, please do go ahead and argue the things that I allegedly said.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=silicon+valley+caste+system&t=fpas...
It's not a social justice or caste issue to have a probability distribution that says, say, within the trades, that a plumber's kid is more likely to be a plumber than an electrician, and vice-versa of an electrician's kid, when the two professions are of equal status.
If there's a whole lot of people below the class of tradesmen who have no real path to moving up-- that is a social justice, class, or caste issue. But surely not all manifestations of not-quite-equally likely outcome are social justice, class, or caste issues.
> Though sure, please do go ahead and argue the things that I allegedly said.
Seriously, the rush to sarcasm/abrasive language is not helpful to actually figuring out what you're arguing or to having a productive conversation.
My parents are not intellectual in the least. The career advice I received from them growing up was all bad. Lucky for me I ignored them.
Now take one kid getting bad career advice and another kid getting good career advice from mom and dad.
After thousands of iterations the asymmetry is going to be huge.
Sorry that doesn't line up with the institutional victim mentality.
I honestly feel like a great way to educate kids is not to teach them anything directly at all, but to instead leave lots of material around for them to discover themselves.
Both are extremely competitive with only a select few spots in the entire country. Additionally, starting at a very young age is a huge advantage for both athletes and aspiring academics.
Peyton and Eli Manning are the sons of Archie Manning. Ken Griffey Jr. and his dad played on the same team at one point. Jr.'s son "Trey" made it into the NFL as a wide receiver.
It does seem to matter to a degree. It's not a guarantee though.
on edit: by paying I also mean all the perks you get as well (just as when I negotiate on a job I also negotiate the perks), when you're growing up and see you have a pretty good life that would be something that might attract you to the field your parents are in. So academics might not get paid as much as the private sector but at the higher levels there are some pretty sweet perks.
Unless she turns out to be an idiot, in which case I may need to force a path.
Legislators seem to get more done if they are well-connected, for example, and a parent introducing you to their connections makes you a better legislator, probably at a younger age than your parent. Yes, you can do some job shadowing at this other dentist's office: I can put in a good word for you at the electrician's union so you can get into the schooling they offer. Yes, you can work at my plumbing company and learn - it isn't like this state requires licenses, so you'll be just fine.
Its funny, my co worker insisted that his children shall go to MIT so they can have all the opportunities he did. He didn't see any irony is saying this to me, his peer, a first gen engineer from University of Midwest Farm Community.
And I agree, its not surprising kids learn by example and inherit so much from their parents.
Fellow alum!
I think you're imaging a person that has more advantages than you do (or I did -- UIUC wouldn't have me). That's very likely not the case, at least not nearly as much as you think. Don't sweat it.
You're not screwed, and it's not a competition anyway. I came from humble academic beginnings and failures and managed to get a job I love that pays the bills and helps me save for the future. It was the passionate people I met that got me through it, not the credentials of the university (by quite a long shot)
I honestly can’t save as much as my peers, make a pittance compared to the Ivy Leaguers and have never achieved a fraction of what most of these hyper accomplished folks did even while being much older. Sometimes I feel like I should just wither away because there’s not much hope of ever achieving anything at this rate if I’m just innately inferior.
There was a guy in the warehouse (3rd shift) that worked with me before all the re-invention. He was +20 years my senior, working two jobs. He gave me a talk similar to above and it was a wake-up for me. That helped me. Nowadays, my peers help me by being supportive and inspiring.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
Hey by the way, i always thought CBT was rubbish, until the intersection with that, Stoicism, and Meditation was made clear in the book Happiness Hypothesis. How dumb / arrogant was I to write off stuff that seemed to help millions of others ... Another thing I had to learn the hard way.
The ratio you ask for is almost certainly decreasing over time, not increasing, right?
Since the 40s, most likely. Since some time in between then and now, I'm not so sure.
Meritocracy - what you’re really saying is, the most qualified people get to do the thing with the scarce stuff - has risen.
Anyway, historically, if you felt wronged by an educational institution, you made your own schools.
Source on this? I doubt that spinning up a whole new school was ever this simple and accessible.
Nowadays there's an entrenchment that makes it hard to just go and do your own uni. It's not illegal, but you need to find supporters who won't just say "hey why don't you just go to X existing uni". And there's already a uni for whatever speciality you're into, plus the big names that are the specialists for every subject.
Actually, I suspect that most teachers discourage their children to follow in their footsteps ...
And your points about doctors, olympians, academics, etc. have a common point:
Large, up front expenditure of money.
A child of a steelworker simply isn't becoming a doctor short of a very, very small number of paths (generally involving military service).
A child of a high-school teacher simply isn't becoming an Olympic figure skater. The monetary investment is far too titanic.
Engineering used to be one of the few fields where you could transition from blue collar to white collar even if you were a child from a poor family. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be very true, anymore.
This wasn’t true in Ireland in the 70s or 80s, a far poorer country than contemporary America. The US system of funding higher education has many, many problems but not allowing smart people to study more is not among them. If you can get admitted to medical school you will get a loan to cover the costs.
> A child of a high-school teacher simply isn't becoming an Olympic figure skater. The monetary investment is far too titanic.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever, is the child of a middle school principal and a police officer. Tiger Woods is the son of an infantry officer. Money is not the limiting factor on more people becoming elite level athletes. It’s some combination of talent and insane, deluded commitment.
> Engineering used to be one of the few fields where you could transition from blue collar to white collar even if you were a child from a poor family. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be very true, anymore.
The average US college graduate has $35,000 in debt. Engineering is one of the fields where your college matters least. More people attend college than at any time in US history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuzuru_Hanyu
> Regarded as one of, if not the greatest male figure skater in history, Hanyu has broken world records nineteen times ...
> Hanyu was born ... the second and youngest child to his father, who is a junior high school teacher
Oh, maybe this doesn't count? After all, his father was a junior high school teacher. /s
The exception merely proves the rule. Not sarcasm.
Who paid for their ice time? Who paid for them to live in Canada? Who paid for Brian Orser to be their coach?
The fact that someone somewhere hits the jackpot on their first pull in no way changes the fact that the majority lose.
And how many children as good or better didn't get this kind of support?
It seems more true than ever before. Software engineering in particular is probably one of the least credential sensitive careers in existence, and is huge and growing faster than just about any other job market.
I sometimes wonder about all the complaining that goes on about software engineering interviews. In many (maybe most) other fields of comparable earning potential, the gatekeepers are 4-12 years of schooling and professional unions, not a few hours of awkward whiteboarding.
Yup. I know successful ones without even a high school diploma. I have no academic education in CS.
> all the complaining
I do, too. One thing never mentioned is that a lot of people apply for software jobs with fraudulent resumes and just having memorized some jargon. The job interviewer needs some way to filter out these people before committing to 6 months of a high salary. Sure, they'll miss a few diamonds in the rough, but it's likely better than hiring a team of frauds.
I guess you mean that teachers do a lot of lobbying, and take that to indicate job dissatisfaction. But if so, that's a mistake. Thinking that you aren't receiving enough funding and simultaneously enjoying your work are not mutually exclusive.
You've got far more food than you need. You can't get any taller -- what do you do with it? Should you eat it at all?
How resilient should you be to less-than-ideal input? Say it's unseasonably cold for a few months. Should you get shorter, or is it better to just give up and die?
You don't have enough food. You're not in any danger of starving, but you're not going to reach maximum height, IQ, _and_ athleticism. Which trait(s) should be lowered? By how much?
Genetics doesn't just specify the maximum outcome. It specifies the entire set of possibilities, and how those possibilities are reached.
1) The fact that biological processes tend not to have hard limits and "kill switches" at those limits, but rather feedback loops which increase or decrease in efficacy due to a number of factors, which are themselves factors for further downstream processes
2) The tendency towards physiological plasticity to facilitate functional homeostasis (e.g., there was a case of an athlete whose smaller blood vessels enlarged in order to maintain blood flow following an embolism; this was disabled athlete who walked on her hands in lieu of her non-functional legs)
I think what is more likely is that that there is a level of a given quality which your genes will have you tend toward (with environment determining how much you will overshoot or undershoot it), but also that the human form is very adaptable and will often respond to pressures by routing around lower-functioning systems, which may require unconventional support but also create unconventional and exceptional achievement (the aforementioned athlete is a paralympian with arm-based muscular strength and endurance - a neurological matter - which outpaces most abled athletes).
What's the difference when you only have two values in the set?
I don't get this. Why does one need mentorship in filling out an application. I got mine in the mail, filled them out, and sent them in. It never occurred to me I needed someone to guide me.
My dad (MIT) did tell me many years earlier what was necessary to get into MIT: 1. straight A's 2. high SAT scores 3. an achievement in extracurricular activities
(MIT rejected me.)
It's like the Boy Scouts. I talked with an Eagle dad a couple years ago, who talked about shepherding his boy through the Eagle program to get the badge. He was very proud of his son. I mentioned that I was an Eagle, too. He asked me how it was with my dad helping me. I said he never did a thing, and it didn't occur to me to ask. I just decided I wanted one, got the list of requirements, and did them one by one. None of them were hard, it just required time and persistence.
He looked at me like I was an alien.
> My dad (MIT) did tell me many years earlier what was necessary to get into MIT: 1. straight A's 2. high SAT scores 3. an achievement in extracurricular activities
> (MIT rejected me.)
Aren't you confirming that mentorship is needed?
Engineers, college educators, etc make more money, their kids presumably go to good schools, they presumably have more hands on time available to help their kids succeed and more connections, legacy admissions etc.
I see this in my sport. One of the olympians for climbing for US comes from climbing 'royalty.'
being literally born into the sport from day 1 makes a huge difference. plus having access to a groundbreaking gym and youth training program your mom literally created ;0
Not to take away achievement. strength is strength, intelligence is intelligence. it's all very impressive and doesn't come without work.
but I think opportunity and access to resources are important factors to consider.
That kind of misses the point. You want to train as many effective engineers and researchers as you can. The point of the article is that most Ivies can comfortably train more people, but doing so would reduce some of the scarcity "value" of an Ivy League degree. Who cares? The goal is building.
Claude Shannon and Kelly Johnson both got their start at Michigan. The Michigan model of "train as many engineers as you can without compromising substance" is a great. If the Ivies want to create artificial scarcity to avoid "diluting brand value", then their ability to access public subsidies should be curtailed. Give it to Michigan instead.
If they have a magic recipe for creating success, why can't other universities copy it? Does it depend on scarce elite professors? In that case, they probably can't scale themselves up either.
Excerpt from article*: In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper** by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
* - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
Indeed, Harvard aggressively defends its admissions program as "holistic" while rating Asians as having lower personal ratings that they define as measuring "likeability", "courage", and "kindness" [1]. You might ask yourself how an institution which claims to be anti-racist exhibits behavior of the opposite kind.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2018/10/19/harvards-own-study-reveals-uni...
Are they disproportionately killed & policed? It depends on how you cut the statistics for your narrative. As a % of population vs % of Violent Crime vs % of Homicides etc etc. This is not to say there are no benefits about going into an encounter White.
Asians are remarkably vulnerable to dying by police. They are also extremely under-represented in the police force, unlike black Americans. In the Bay Area, police officers are paid very well. These are stepping stones to middle class membership.
Also, discussions of racism in education may just completely exclude Asians, as if they aren't even worth mentioning even once.
https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ.... This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total police encounters. While it's tragic that the count is nonzero, any rational person should be amazed that the incidence is so vanishingly low, given the uncertainty inherent to policing. It's truly remarkable that it isn't much much higher. I couldn't find statistics about police killings of unarmed White people, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is higher than 31 since 2014.
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people is because the media has worked very hard to maximally exploit cherrypicked cases to get you to believe that.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence:
> A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 [2020] surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area.
The reason for this is obvious. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has had the same devastating impact within Black communities as it has had everywhere else in the world: increased criminality.
https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Rep...
This is an affliction that beleaguers both sides of the aisle.
https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f...
Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.
EDIT: Poster changed the link and added a comment. The below is a response to the modified comment.
> There is no nationwide effort to classify killings based on whether an individual was armed at the time. It's better to just look at killings because those are significant enough to record.
Sure. You can look at the total number of police killings and not only are the numbers still shockingly low as a percentage of arrests and encounters, but there is also no overt sign of an extraordinary racial bias: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de....
> Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be enough to alter the central thrust of the above argument about the shockingly low incidence of police killings of unarmed persons relative to ~10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total encounters? Almost certainly not.
Axios is one of the most credible outlets to both the GOP and the Democrats. Then-WH spokesperson Sarah Sanders has praised Axios as a worthy outlet.
The Raza database just looks at newspaper reports for deaths by police. There is no nationwide standard for how police deaths should be recorded.
You are the one suggesting bizarre conspiracy. A nationwide conspiracy of local newspaper outlets reporting deaths.
> A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,104 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata
And I will once again reiterate that the suggestion that there are some great number of police killings going undetected in the present highly charged environment is itself a crime against reason.
That said, I’m black btw, the problems in the black community are not down to any one thing, but certainly the lack of two parent households is a biggie.
I was fortunate to grow up in California with two parents who could afford to send me to a private school.
Even absent more government intervention, just having more stable households will do a lot to fix the inequalities.
I'm Asian and I grew up with parents who hewed rather closely to Asian culture. There are two values they championed essentially above all others, well known to most: devotion to family and the intense pursuit of academic achievement. I do feel like I've been a direct beneficiary of that cultural impulse. Much like yourself, I did my best to leverage educational opportunities and had the stability of a supportive family.
When we talk about culture and the Black community, many people become understandably wary. It's a fine line between invoking culture and being seen to blame Black people for their own problems. Not to mention that, in doing so, it can be easy to lose sight of the richness of Black culture and its extensive contributions to so many aspects of the American experience e.g. in music, sports, entertainment, art, literature, and cuisine.
Perhaps a better way to frame it is that when a particular community has suffered so much injustice and attendant compounded stagnation, it's very hard to find an expedient solution to bring that community to parity that doesn't involve constructing fresh and even revolutionary internal narratives around achievement (and not just academic). Without that sort of effort, it might take many more generations for a combination of government intervention and the natural course of progress to fully remedy the imbalance.
And there's also the problem of exacerbating racial animus in the course of addressing that imbalance.
While I understand the need for it intellectually, I have substantial misgivings about preferential treatment being extended specifically to Black (or Hispanic or Native American) people along racial lines. There is something that feels deeply wrong about attempting to cure racial injustice by inflicting new racial injustices on people whose only fault was being born a particular race at the wrong moment in history, especially when we are purporting to be an enlightened society that has learned its lesson in this regard.
The position is unpopular with many here, but it is my opinion that we should not be devising a society that argues that a boy from an underprivileged neighborhood in Philadelphia is more deserving of opportunity than a girl from a disenfranchised part of the Rust Belt because he's Black and she's White. Rather, we should be saying that they are nearly equally in need of help from society because they are both disadvantaged. While this is not perfectly fair insofar as it does not factor in race, I believe it is a policy position that on balance would help the Black people who are most in need of it without leaving anyone of another race feeling as if (s)he's experiencing undue discrimination.
Unfortunately I believe that quandary is even more fraught than the issue of police killings and therefore at present resistant to the possibility of honest discourse.
I mean, I literally have no answer. Except, possibly, "yes" and "yes", and "the former is on the whole a lesser evil than the latter"?
This makes two assumptions that I would challenge: that affirmative action as it exists at present is benefitting the most socioeconomically vulnerable underrepresented minorities and that the problem you're describing cannot be tackled with race neutral wealth redistribution and other need-aware policymaking.
Also, if you want to go down the racial grievance accounting rabbithole, then the Irish, Japanese, Jews, etc would like a word as well. You're be hard-pressed to find a race that doesn't have some such claim.
There's probably also something to be said for having policies trying to get some geographic rebalancing in place as well. But, what I am trying to say is that redressing recent-past wrongs MAY require slight over-compensation.
To make anything other than sweeping generalisations, I would need numbers. Oh so many numbers.
The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people [...]
This is unfair - note that the comment you are referring to didn't specially mention police unarmed shootings of blacks, the comment was about disportionate policing and killings (which presumably includes, but is not exclusive to shootings of unarmed citizens). I mention this because police shootings are not the only manifestation of institutional racism. There are also unjust arrests, accusations, beatings (remember, Rodney King wasn't shot), convictions, and general mistreatment. You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.
As a relatively well-off, straight-laced black man, I'm not overly afraid of getting shot by police (although I think I got close to catching a bullet once), but I am terrified of a stop going bad in some way, not because of what I observed in the media, but because of my own personal experiences.
I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence
Absolutely true, and that reflects my feelings as well. But that is not the same as saying black communities trust police.
> I live in a high-crime city in the northeast and as big component of my job is spending time in high-crime parts of cities all over the US (most recently, Chicago South Side, including Altgeld-Murray projects). The only times in my life where I thought my life or safety was in serious jeopardy involved interactions with police.
I understand there's a meme that exists about Black people needing to fear being murdered by the police. The entire point of my post is that, from a statistical point of view, this is almost as irrational as being afraid of terrorism, a plane crash, a shark attack, or being struck by lightning.
I was also focusing very narrowly on the topic of police killings of Black people, as you noted. I want to be very clear that I understand that Black people are victims of racism and socioeconomic inequality in other ways.
I'm most concerned about anti-Asian racism because the problem is serious and unacknowledged. Anti-black racism is, at the very least, now acknowledged as a problem. I tend to focus my efforts where others don't.
So what did the school board do? They scrapped the admissions process altogether, in favor of a "holistic" one [1]. Lesson? Be careful if you're in a minority group that over-achieves your population demographics, because you will be punished for it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...
And there were programs that successfully increased representation of black and hispanic students at TJ several decades ago - but these programs were halted.
We'll see how it plays out.
"In a bid to ensure geographical diversity, a certain number of seats will be allotted to every middle school in Fairfax County, to be filled by eighth-graders at that school who meet criteria."
Doesn't seem very meritocratic to me. Doing a lottery among everyone with a 3.5 is basically saying select every student that isn't failing. High school GPAs are highly inflated to the point that most people who would be competitive in the current application system have above a 3.9. The geographical diversity quota is de facto a race quota due to redlining and cultural enclaves. I don't know how you can possibly argue that accepting students from all over the district objectively through merit is worse than a geographic quota per middle school.
And what happens when you diversity admit these students who, by the admissions test, are not as competitive? The vast array of clubs and other high school competitions become dominated by the most competitive students, i.e. they're going to look like what TJ looks like now: 70% Asian according to the article. In effect you're tossing unprepared students into the deep end to get screwed for the college application process because they have 0 chance at securing any sort of extracurricular activity for themselves.
The real kicker here is that by the article's quoted data, 70% of the school is Asian. If you really wanted racial diversity in line with the population you'd also be pushing for increased white representation along the lines of a 150% increase in # of white students admitted. But that's not what these activists are talking about, which is how you know their ideas are just politically motivated garbage.
I attended TJ. I remember the test prep and the BS extracurriculars to pad resumes. I am not convinced that a student who has a 3.5 and has taken accelerated courses is unprepared to attend.
Extracurriculars at TJ (at least many years ago) were also tremendously diverse. Sure, somebody who has only taken Algebra 1 in 8th grade is less likely to end up with the top scores in the math olympiads out of the whole school (though who knows, loads of students didn't attend a school that offered algebra 1 in 7th grade so maybe they were brilliant and didn't have the option), but when I attended I did stuff like play bridge, watch rock concert footage, or rehearse a play during 8th period. This does not feel like a meaningful concern.
Are you a TJ grad?
Anyone can play bridge or watch a rock concert. Not everyone can make the AIME and do math at a college sophomore level when they're a HS freshman. Schools like TJ and my high school should cater to the latter, not the former. The entire point of these schools is to _reward achivement above and beyond the norm_. Yeah, a student with a 3.5 can probably make it through TJ or any other competitive high school's courseload, but the point of these schools is that you put all the best of the best in the same place and network effects happen and push them to even higher levels of achievement _outside the classroom_. By admitting less competitive students (even if the application process isn't perfect) you prevent those levels of achievement from even happening at all.
> the point of these schools is that you put all the best of the best in the same place and network effects happen and push them to even higher levels of achievement _outside the classroom_.
This is the difference between you and me. I don't believe that the existing system admits the most meritorious students. Tons of people insist that I hate education and that I want to sabotage the most qualified students. But I don't believe that the test, with its entire cottage industry of prep (my parents were told that they should prepare for TJ when I was five), actually admits a more capable group of students than alternatives.
The reason I believe this is that I've seen this happen in earlier education. I went to an accelerated program starting in 3rd grade. It was wildly inequitable. After noticing that there were some schools that literally never sent a student to the accelerated system, my parents looked into it and discovered that the process was clearly not evaluating merit but instead admitting people who understood how to navigate the application structure. Relatively small changes in the process rapidly made things much more balanced geographically and the changes have stuck. Students who enrolled in the accelerated program from the previously absent schools did not fail.
I also think that the culture of prep damages people. A ton of my friends who are TJ alumni now share stories (well over a decade later) of how TJ was the most toxic learning ecosystem they have ever been in. These are people who are now faculty members at top universities, founders of successful startups, and more. The bulk of my friends from high school believe that they should have focused less on competitive schooling and spent more time on other things. Replacing bridge and drama with math competitions causes more harm, in my opinion.
TJ is also not the only place to get an accelerated education in northern virginia. If a student wants to partial differential equations in high school, most high schools in the area have attachments with George Mason, which enables access to these curricula. In fact, TJ does not offer those courses to high school freshmen, so the students at TJ that want to do what you say are stuck going to Mason anyway.
I also think that there are some extremely qualified students who'd be much better served by the IB programs offered at nearby schools. AP is just truly awful, in my opinion. You take smart kids and crush them into rigid curricula rather than letting them explore. All of us got deficient humanities educations at TJ.
Perhaps. For those of us who didn't even receive a mediocre STEM education at our take-all-comers schools and still certainly got a significantly worse humanities education than you, it engenders bitterness and anger that you're arguing for pulling up the rug behind you and preventing the next generation of children from having access to a high quality education.
> A ton of my friends who are TJ alumni now share stories (well over a decade later) of how TJ was the most toxic learning ecosystem they have ever been in.
Is it more toxic than having classes where kids turn up drunk and threateningly brandish knives?
My wife went to a public school in Fairfax County. Her humanities education was much better than the one I received at TJ. I believe that this is the least controversial thing I've said on the topic. The humanities at TJ was just bad. Only two years of history. Curricula rigidly defined by the College Board. No approaches designed to really stretch students, since faculty were told that the humanities were a second class citizen and students should have more work time allocated to STEM. I know at least one teacher who resigned in protest (from what was otherwise a dream job) because of how terribly the humanities were treated.
Even if you believe that the only way to get a quality education in northern virginia is to attend TJ (which is just false), the proposed changes do not change the number of people who are able to attend. Different children would attend TJ, yes. But nobody is taking a stick of dynamite to blow up the school.
> Is it more toxic than having classes where kids turn up drunk and threateningly brandish knives?
I'm not sure you are super familiar with the rest of FCPS. The other public schools offer a large suite of AP or IB classes (depending on the program) that make it very very easy for smart students to avoid what you are describing. If you are actually concerned about this, go complain about the accelerated middle school programs - which are largely designed to stick accelerated programs in the lowest performing schools so they can bring the grades up.
TJ also had its fair share of this stuff. I know some people a few years off from me who had class with a kid that would regularly masturbate in class. I know students who were preyed on by teachers.
That's not to say that it's necessarily the most impactful form of institutional racism.
All told, I'd rather get into an inferior school over discriminatory treatment by police for life, with an outside chance of a genuinely horrific situation occuring that'd cost me my life.
But the discrimination against AA applicants is institutional and intentional in a way that police discrimination against blacks is not. For AAs, the solution is simple: stop discriminating against someone just because they're Asian. The question of how to get more equitable policing is endlessly discussed and debated, because it's subtle and relies on personal psychological biases, not policies intentionally constructed to discriminate.
I took a look at your post history and it seems very bitter about lost opportunities due to "elite" schools being preferred. As a fairly recent grad from a state school I offer my own perspective: private schools like Harvard offer much better support and less cutthroat competition, but if you can rise to the top in state schools then you have the same opportunities as everyone else. Making 300k at Facebook is more than accessible to half the UC's including ones you wouldn't consider elite at all. I know many people working at Big 4 accounting, bulge bracket banks, big tech, startups, VC, etc.
My gpa was only acceptable at my state school too - never heard of anyone getting into a good grad school with a 3.9something in CS out of my institution.
If your GPA was only acceptable then why are you blaming elitism for what you characterize as failures? Is that not a direct result of your own failure to study and succeed? (I'll also add that everyone I know who got into a good grad school aggressively pursued research and had multiple publications in top conferences by the time they applied; the standards are high and I wouldn't consider a 3.9 without research sufficient).
I mean it is happening at Google - look up how much Liz Fong Jones made as an ex-Caltech, ex-MIT engineer. Definitely happens to the MIT to Jane Street crowd and also happens to the people that can get offers at the IPOing startups I can’t even get interviews at. Not like I have the intellect to pass those interviews even if I got them though (I blame my parents for that).
> If your GPA was only acceptable then why are you blaming elitism for what you characterize as failures?
I definitely blame myself too, it’s why I have the dark thoughts whenever I cross a bridge. I should have done research in high school and I should have gotten at least two first author papers to a top conference in undergrad - instead I got 2 2nd author papers to medium tier conferences because I could never come up with any compelling research ideas. All of my work is ultimately meaningless because it just wasn’t enough - it’s extremely depressing.
I'm sorry you feel that way about your past. You should consider seeing a counselor. I've found that a growth mindset is important to ensuring you keep succeeding because there's nobody you can just copy once you've made it this far. Failures shouldn't be depressing but motivating instead. All this "I should have" thought should be "Now I know I should" instead. In your case, "I should have aimed higher" -> "I will aim higher now that I know". I can definitely empathize with you - I played video games all day in high school and only got into CS because of playing video games 5 hours a day and wanting to work with them. I screwed around freshman and sophomore year and destroyed my GPA. I came back and grinded and brought it back up the rest of my years.
Good luck. I'm sure you're more brilliant than you think if you made it to Amazon. If you ever need motivation go read the Reddit threads on people saying how hard it is to make it to Amazon.
That's...interesting, because it's certainly not the way the LinkedIn pages of most folks at Hudson River Trading, 2Sigma, Stripe or Citadel would imply (I did get into Citadel, but for a 2nd tier role). Of course, it would make sense for Netflix, which has a more Amazon-like hiring strategy.
> I've found that a growth mindset is important to ensuring you keep succeeding because there's nobody you can just copy once you've made it this far. Failures shouldn't be depressing but motivating instead.
I've had a lot of people say that, but after being beaten down and called stupid for 25 years it has worn on me.
I think you're: 1. way too hard on yourself. If you broaden your scope just a bit, you'll see that Amazon is an elite engineering organization. 2. buying way too much into phony credentialism. I don't make a big deal out of it, but personally I consider being able to hold my own engineering-wise while having gone to a state school as a badge of honor. 3. giving way too much headspace to comparing yourself with others in envy. There's always someone better, smarter, etc. I find them around me all the time. I choose to see them as mentors and role models, rather than rivals or competitors.
> I should have done research in high school and I should have gotten at least two first author papers to a top conference in undergrad - instead I got 2 2nd author papers to medium tier conferences because I could never come up with any compelling research ideas. All of my work is ultimately meaningless because it just wasn’t enough - it’s extremely depressing.
I don't think you're ever going to be satisfied if this is your definition of success. You should try to find meaning in the work itself, not in the recognition or status that comes from it.
Good luck!
You must have been beaten down by your parents over the last several decades and it has rubbed into you. I get it. Back in the 70s when I grew up, it was worse because they could legit beat me with a belt if they wanted and it was socially acceptable.
You need to understand that you are doing great. You have a job at Amazon that will help you get jobs for the rest of your career. The Amazon name pops on a resume. Stop worrying about others that got into Google or Facebook or Jane Street. All you are doing is reinforcing a circle of self hate. Fuck it.
I failed getting into Google 5 times. I failed getting into Facebook 3 times. I flunked at Amazon twice. Fuck, I haven’t gotten into any FAANG at all. That doesn’t measure your self worth. Who the fuck cares. I think you are probably jealous at all those that got in but stop thinking about it. You can forge your own path and be extremely successful without ever working at a FAANG. I worked at Uber but besides that it was all two-bit startups and shitty companies. and I did okay but you will probably make more from Amazon than I ever did at Uber. But I really made the most money in real estate. I’m semi-retired at this point because of that.
There’s nothing more important in life than being happy. Stop worrying about money. Worry about being happy. Go spend money on shit that makes you happy every now and then. Take vacations. Get a girlfriend and go traveling. Stop worrying about money and worry about proficiency. If you are programming because you think it will bring you money and not because you love it, then your life will be miserable.
Let go of the trauma that your upbringing brought you. It’s toxic and you are suffering for it. I get it. My parents wanted me to be a doctor and when push came to shove I told them no. They were furious for years but I never felt so free in my life. I stopped caring about them and what they said and just moved on.
You’re still young. Don’t waste your life stewing over others that got into better schools or better companies. Take what you have now and leverage it as you move up the ladder. Make smart decisions for your career based on what interests you, not just because of FANG or money. If you are happy and are progressing, money will coke and it will be on your own terms, not your parents and not from killing yourself while working at Jane Street like a slave.
This is curious. What kind of company do you work for? Like a startup, big established company, small company, etc.
I'm also curious about how many YOE you have.
I dropped getting a full degree, instead deciding to go back to the industry and working (I'd spent 3 years in the industry working before I went to Uni, and having money again sounded like an excellent idea).
Now, that was me working myself up, as it were, through a variety of jobs (more on the "run things" than "write things" side, but theres a lot of "write things" involved in running things in a scalable fashion), with a few actual dev jobs along the line.
Would I be able to get my CV in front of someone at Stripe? Honestly, don't know. If all they look at is schools, I suspect my chances are vastly lower than yours. If they look at previous job history? Probably, yes.
At this point, it seems to me that the main blocker for you is depression, it MAY be worth consulting a professional about that.
To clarify for those who don't understand your point, Caltech is unique among elite universities for not using affirmative action in undergraduate admissions.
What they care about is how that person contributes to the metrics they're trying to maximize, or in the case of Asians, minimize.
To them, a 1/4 Black person 3/4 Asian person, and a full Black person, are exactly the same thing, as long as they're both incrementing the same number in their diversity report.
"I was always in a state of terror that I would be found out. During one interview at Case Western Reserve University, I was confronted by a black doctor and admissions committee member. He barraged me with questions about my family and personal background. I said that my family came from Nigeria. It was technically correct because my Indian parents had lived in Nigeria before moving to the United States.
Finally he said, eyes cold, in more of a question than a statement, “I read your application. It says you’re black.” I nodded."
[1]: https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains...
In a "holistic" system, where they pick whoever they want to pick, pissing the selectors off will not work.
- Animal Farm.
Firstly, undergrad in America, especially at private schools like the Ivy Leagues, is more a daycare for rich kids, than it is a place of scholarship and learning. The education is certainly good, but there are plenty of other schools with rigorous academics. At these schools the children of the rich fraternize, drink and come of age with other children of the rich. The schools themselves are well connected as well but it's in large part through these bonds with their rich and powerful peers that the graduates of these schools go on to become "the elites". If you reduce the number of kids from rich and powerful families going to these places, you are going to drastically reduce the networking potential amongst classmates and start to erode school level affiliations. In short, you can't just limit admissions to solely "academic merit" without destroying a big part of what makes prestigious schools valuable. Ultimately, if the children of the rich and powerful are excluded, they will congregate elsewhere and all the prestige and kingmakers will follow.
I’d go as far as to say all MIT admits are fundamentally, inherently elite (especially compared to a low IQ sap like me) and should be punished regardless. They’re rich because people like me are poor.
I went to an Ivy and transferred out to a UC and I can definitively say that this is a highly romanticized take.
Way to stereotype thousands of people you don’t know at places you’ve never been.
And while the extracurriculars available are quite great, it is not a "daycare" and the rigors of education are very high.
"69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% American Families" [1]. So the bottom 80% makes up 30% of Yale. Thats quite the under representation.
> donations to get in" has not been a thing in recent history if ever
Did you miss the Varsity Blues scandal? Official donations are uncommon and more reserved for the Ultra High Net worth, but they are a thing, Jared Kushner was the literal poster-child for it.
The most prevalent and whitewashed pay to play path is getting your child do an expensive specialty sport (Lacrosse, Fencing, Crew, Equestrian) & hiring college advisors & SAT prep.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/it-costs-75925-to-go-to-yale....
This is still very different than the image painted by your GP, at least in my mind.
"A finishing school is a school for young women that focuses on teaching social graces and upper-class cultural rites as a preparation for entry into society" [1]
"a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement ... characterised by challenging encounters with important issues, and more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study" [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finishing_school [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education
Not quite what I'm getting at. My point is more that the value proposition of the undergraduate programs of Ivy Leagues is partly the elite social circle you buy into.
Secondly, some of these ideas of "fixing" Ivy League admissions would just send those circles elsewhere, because rich families send their kids to schools with the children of other rich families.
This tight coupling of social and economic class is the real issue and radically changing a few schools' admission policies isn't going to dismantle that.
Being trained for an elite social circle is the entire value proposition of a finishing school, not sure where you see a disagreement.
> Secondly, some of these ideas of "fixing" Ivy League admissions would just send those circles elsewhere, because rich families send their kids to schools with the children of other rich families.
These days it's less about meeting your spouse and more a gateway to future income and prestige opportunities; IB, MGMT Consulting, Big Tech or to Law School (Politics). Those tracks and opportunities will still be there and be attractive if more poor people were admitted.
Unless there are specific reforms to talk about it's hard to argue further. However, clearly the "Ivy League Cartel" is colluding to limit enrollment of poorer people.
Gaining access to elite social circles is not the same thing as being trained for those circles. There are plenty of institutions that enable elite networking that have nothing to do with finishing school, so it's a false equivalence.
Sure but this is pedantic and both are aspects of a finishing school or elite university...
Edit: more importantly though, your last paragraph is spot on. The rich (or simply upper middle class) paying for an exclusive better education, retaking expensive exams, and "fancy extracurriculars" during the K12 period is not a fair way to structure a society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...
I guess you are more likely to see such applicants in sociology, WGS, VES and other concentrations stereotypically seen as easy. I doubt people who get a ride based on their athletic achievements in spite of their low GPA flock to CS and physics.
I don't find the existence of students from middle class or lower backgrounds to be contrary to any of my premises. My point is more around the network effects. The children of the elite do attend these schools. The children of the elite are by definition already elite. Exposure to these social circles, even through something like the alumni network is a massive value proposition and massively increases ones chances of becoming an elite. If the children of the elite were to go elsewhere, the social network and value goes along with them.
This is not to say Ivy Leagues don't have other merits as undergraduate institutions, such as great staff and academics.
> The higher steps of the economic ladder are overrepresented simply because having money implies better K12 education in the US, which makes it easier to get into these schools.
It's not just K12 education, it's extracurriculars, it's SAT prep, it's high schools paying recruiters to visit campus, etc. It's a virtuous cycle. But again there are also network effects to consider. Rich and powerful families want to send their children schools with children from their socioeconomic class, so they cluster.
> And while the extracurriculars available are quite great, it is not a "daycare" and the rigors of education are very high.
My point on undergrad being akin to "daycare" is not unique to Ivy Leagues. In my experience in the US, there is a certain type of student that doesn't work a job, lives in a supervised environment (dorm), doesn't pay their own bills, doesn't cook for themselves, studies occasionally and who's main focus is fraternizing with their peers. This lifestyle is what I am comparing to daycare, and I don't believe this is uncommon esp. in places that cater to those of higher socioeconomic class.
I don't begrudge them. They can have them. They will have them regardless as you said. Why want to be the thing you don't like anyway.
At least it's not as bad as having to have attended the Sciences Po, or have to have attended Eton/OxBridge and the like.
The bad part of the higher education system is the skyrocketing costs facilitated by loans secured by the gov where you cannot dispose the loan due to bankruptcy, as you can most others.
I don't think a 4-year undergrad tuition should be more than the median of a first year graduate's full-time earnings of the degree you're pursuing.
Also, it's often expected that "need" will be partially met by working a campus job, and taking out loans.
It's great if the college wants to curate a student body including some low income students, but I think there's a pretty big swath of the middle class that's neither poor enough nor rich enough for one of those colleges.
I'm not devastated. The state university is damn good, and hobnobbing with the influential is only useful if you happen to be skilled at hobnobbing.
Right now colleges can charge whatever they want and students will happy sign up not comprehending they have to pay back loans. It’s a complete gravy train.
No one in their right mind will give a loan to a student that isn’t going for a high income degree. Doctor/engineer Etc. Even these will be harder to get.
So colleges won’t be able to charge 50k a semester since few can afford that.
Disagree. The biggest "network benefit" comes from the Alumni Network, the established recruiting channels & the prestige from the degree. These would remain if they took more poor kids.
It's well known that elite universities are elitist in their admissions and have over-large endowments. And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different. And it's well known that the rest of the U.S. educational system is underfunded.
> Sen. Tom Cotton, of all political leaders, suggested taxing private colleges with large endowments, and redirecting funds to vocational training.
It's not a surprise. Cotton and his party see Ivy League universities as institutions of the political opposition, whom they attack and want to punish and diminish.
Same. I think they are hoping Biden will put more money into public schools and stop preferential tax treatments for the large endowments.
> It's not a surprise. Cotton and his party see Ivy League universities as institutions of the political opposition, whom they attack and want to punish and diminish.
Tom Cotton... Harvard University BA , JD
You are right that it fits the public narrative & rhetoric, but many (perhaps most) of them went to elite schools. It is probably just posturing.
True, but you can be expensive & private & not be elite (most of them are not by definition).
What if we dropped the inflammatory political attack and just talked about loan forgiveness? Can an idea or anything else be depoliticized.
And it does have some benefits, in addition to that drawback. I'm not sure about the extent or nature of it - many leading colleges reduce their prices to get the students in the door - has anyone studied it?
That's a bit mind-boggling, but not the first time I've seen it. My hypothesis: Middle-ground liberals are intimidated by abusive conservatives, but they feel safe criticizing progressives. You won't get flamed on HN, for example, for what you posted.
> You are right that it fits the public narrative & rhetoric, but many (perhaps most) of them went to elite schools. It is probably just posturing.
Oh yeah; I didn't mean to say otherwise. Most of what they say is posturing, IMHO.
[EDIT] I know Cotton isn't one of them, I'm just pointing out that this elitism sure as hell appears to be a driving factor in who's on top in both parties.
Edit: Correction I forgot McCain
Bush - Philips Academy
Gore - St Albans School
Kerry - St Pauls
Obama - Punahou School (On scholarship!)
McCain - Episcopal High School
Romney - Cranbrook School
Trump - New York Military Academy
What makes you think so?
Just because I have degree, then it doesn't mean that I'm not talking shit about academia
No less elitist though. The idea of a selective college is elitist. The more selective, the more elitist. All the progressive talk is cant.
> No less elitist though. The idea of a selective college is elitist.
What does that mean? By that definition, everything selective is 'elitist', including my high school wrestling team. By non-elitist, we generally mean it's not biased in favor of the people who are already in society's elite.
Some top colleges now admit much more economically and ethnically diverse students. I've seen the applications, and they've reduced processes that select for children of the elite (such as standardized tests). In other words, they aren't admitting the children of elite (or not as much) - I think that is meaningful.
(I wish I could provide some citations, but I don't have time or anything at my fingertips.)
> All the progressive talk is cant.
Am I responding to nothing more than mindless anti-progressivism?
I went to CC in high school and a non selective engineering school. I’ve seen non-elitist and non-elite institutions.
I don't understand how the latter implies the former ?
FWIW: I recently saw the applications to several American elite colleges. All asked, one way or the other, 'how will our institution in particular help you in particular?', and 'how will you in particular contribute to our institution in particular?'. They seemed focused on the finding students who would benefit most and contribute most, not on a contest to see who gets the best credential.
Yes, there are lots more black and Hispanic students than before, and since the universities refuse to share the data we can’t be sure that this increase in diversity mostly means more children of Nigerian doctors and Colombian lawyers, mostly paying full international student fees but that’s the way to bet.
Regarding economic diversity.
Harvard[1], Yale[2], Princeton[3] Stanford[4] all have average family incomes above $160,000. Less selective colleges with smaller endowments that need the money from fees more are not going to be more economically diverse if they can possibly avoid it.
Selecting by standardized test scores would result in a substantially less socially elite student body than the current system. A more Asian one. Stopping that is why there’s a movement to get rid of the SATs. Asians are being discriminated against now as Jews were in the early 20th century, for similar reasons.
[1] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% of students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households. About 15% come from families in the top 1% of American wealth distribution.
[2] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Yale is $192,600. Roughly 69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households.
[3] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Princeton is $186,100, and 72% come from the highest-earning 20% of American households
[4] According to The New York Times, the median family income of a student from Stanford is $167,500
Except the most elite schools are the ones that are clinging to keeping standardized tests in their admissions processes, they only dropped it for the incoming class because of the pandemic.
Why does it matter? They are less selective so anyone has a better chance of getting in.
That doesn't tell us if the economic diversity is increasing or decreasing. My understanding is that it is significantly increasing for (at least some) elite schools, but I don't have cites so ...
> Selecting by standardized test scores would result in a substantially less socially elite student body than the current system.
That is certainly counter to the general wisdom, which is why (as I understand it) they stopped requiring the tests. The tests were considered biased toward the socially elite, and IIRC there was plenty of research behind it, because the elite have the time and money (tutors, classes, etc.) to prepare test-taking skills - which is not a skill the colleges seek - and the questions were written about elite culture (e.g., 'You are sailing your yacht into the wind ...').
The SAT, GRE, LSAT and similar lightly disguised IQ tests are designed to be as close to culture fair and uncoachable as possible and they do pretty well. Mostly the children of the well educated and rich get higher scores on them than the less fortunate for the same reason the children of professional basket players are tall. People resemble their parents.
The anecdote you recount about a question with a yacht never happened. The analogy question was removed in 2005[1].
[1] https://www.clearchoiceprep.com/sat-act-prep-blog/the-most-i...
I didn’t realize that was the acceptance rate, but JFK’s application to Harvard is interesting and that acceptance rate adds context: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-v...
And maybe it’s not people pulling the ladder up behind them - it’s that the ladder has become more visible and desirable without expanding or changing.
I do have some hope with Coursera and EdX. There are now blended programs starting online that allow students to start remote and show they can do the coursework, before completing the rest on campus: https://scm.mit.edu/program/blended-masters-degree-supply-ch...
I’d argue the knowledge is becoming more open and freely available, but the network is not. Maybe the value of the network would drop if it was less personal and more people were there. There is some optimal program size and it’s possible some programs could hold more. At the same time, do we really need more Cal tech grads? Not a slam at Cal tech (I chose the smallest), but how many people with those skill sets do we need vs. graduates from other less specialized schools.
There is something special about Cal Tech’s community, and I don’t know I would want to dilute it just because other people should have the ability to go there to meet some arbitrary “fairness metric”.
The value these institutions have brought, and bring, to the country by making us the top in the world in a number of fields comes from how selective they are and their massive resources they can put toward problems. This makes them attractive to the world’s top talent and gives them the freedom to work on some things without economic constraints, and that’s a societal benefit. Pulling money away because they’ve managed it well could hurt us long term. And it’s not like the Harvard endowment of $40B is just sitting there - it is invested into the economy like other funds until it is needed for investment in the community.
Lastly - just because you didn’t go to one of those institutions doesn’t mean you can’t be successful or attend one for grad school. And I’ve found grad school admissions to be meritocratic.
I have a highschooler and I see how students fixate on this number.
So while acceptance rates don't say anything about the quality of the school they are very meaningful to the school's marketing machine.
I think they should build more UCs and more UTs and A&Ms etc but to a great extent they already have and increased the class sizes to boot.
The non linearity of the rewards is the problem. I’m orders of magnitude worse off than my valedictorian, who went to an Ivy, because I didn’t get into any good schools. Abolish all of the top schools.
https://college-education.procon.org/history-of-college-educ...
The network is nice, and people will never wonder if you’re smart or not, but yeah - people don’t pay you because you went to one of these schools.
It can also limit choices and career paths. And have some people may have chips on their shoulders because they didn’t get in to that school.
It's bizarre to compare the world back then to now. My parents' number one concern was they wanted me out of the house and able to support myself.
Interestingly, all the "pedigree" obsessed folks who (all) graduated from ivy league schools went on to found one of the most mediocre and poorly focused VC firms I've seen.
The mechanism is the selection criteria. Presumably, college ranking and demonstrated aptitude are both metrics used for hiring. Thus, if the variables are evaluated additively, and the examined firm occupies a single tier of the ranking+aptitude space, the hired employees will have a ranking/aptitude that falls along a negatively sloping line, similar to a budget constraint.
From what I gather, admissions is entirely merit based there and money isn't an issue.
It isn't just the Ivies that cater to the rich and elite. Many other private universities also do so and promise alumni connections and wealth, think Vanderbilt, Williams, etc.
Even when I was applying to colleges as an undergrad I found it a bit off-putting and instead only applied to public universities.
1. Customise a curriculum engaging with younger tutors in niche areas (e.g. youtube, teachable or if theres others comment). 2. Do this for a few years and make sure to meet people/do appropriate things and publish them online. E.g. do a good podcast/lecture series. 3. Publish on Xiv like sites with high quality results/arguments/original ideas or demo/explain things on youtube. If a preprint site doesn't exist for you then make one and contact people.
This might get you x100 the exposure of your average PI and eventually funding will come around to your ideas as universities become a total farce. 10 years down the line the tepid overtures to gitlab and github turn into a full on rejection of high overhead university education. Rental or pooling services for expensive equipment or access to resources would also help immensely.
Castles in the sand!
^ basically the outcome of a section of a university from one person on a limited budget
I now do all my math research independent, as the universities are unable to facilitate my math research activity.
Universities make most of its tuition money from foreign students, but foreign students go to american universities to get visas they can use to get into the labor market. The F1 visa is unlimited, contrary to the H1B one, and allows for a transition out of university.
Also for the H1B and multiple categories, one key criteria is having a college degree.
College Education: so valuable you need the law to justify they are worth something
I think it would be pretty amusing if they got 50000 applicants, admitted 20000, and then said "guess what Cambridge, we're building 200 new dormitories, here, there, and everywhere."
Joseph Heath has a very interesting article comparing US elite schools (tiny undergrad program) and Canadian elite schools (massive undergrad programs, bigger than Ivy League)
http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...
For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any way?
Rephrased, what if we instead classify the Ivy League as a single college with eight campuses? What's the difference?
If the US ascribed sainted elite status to the top 100 colleges to the top 100 colleges, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. By contrast in Canada if you went to UBC, McGill or UBC people assume you are smart.
I don’t think there’s a bottleneck here. The real bottleneck is that people who don’t go to top schools are considered to be inherently inferior and objective failures like myself.
Faculty positions are so competitive that I don’t think there’s a huge difference in the quality of the younger professors, just the bigger schools will have more profs and bigger research groups.
I was part of an experiment where the physics department at my uni admitted everyone who applied. Even those without the required prerequisites. Most of the "extras" dropped out or transfered or failed etc. But about 20% graduated.
I think in one way this proved the normal application system was mostly effective. But it also gave people chances they never would have had. I was insulted (I'd got my grades!) initially but it taught me something about opportunity. Maybe we'd be better doing this everywhere?
This is like the 'branch cut' equivalent of the social sciences, but rather than making the integral easier to compute, makes the argument sound more convincing than it actually is or supported by the evidence.
If one looks aat the actual data, admitees of elite colleges are hardly among the elite, but just somewhat wealthier than average.
http://yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/admissio...
We're not taking Rockefeller-level of wealth here.
But this holds even for non-elite colleges. It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests.
Oh, my. This is such a straight-textbook example of not seeing systemic bias.
You’re not selecting for “intelligence” when the barriers that were in place for 200 years are what define it.
The SAT, which actually does that fairly well, is on its way out.
Outside physics, there is always a study that supports whatever you want to believe, so we can all keep believing whatever feels good, while being supported by Science!
I like to think I'm different. But odds are I'm not...
If you want to take the position that there is no truth (or even just a better approximation thereof), that "we can all just believe what we want to believe", then there's no way to ever progress on such matters.
More noticing the prevalence of confidently certain people for every opinion.
These institutions exist for the purpose of making money. Why would anyone be surprised they have rich customers to extract money from?
I'm sure if you look at the top hospitals in the USA the vast majority of their customers are insanely rich.
That's not a coincidence, it's by design. These things exist to make as much money as possible.
Ivy League Cartels are not the problem. For profit institutions that should not be are the problem.
I'm not surprised that Yale picked the median to plot, though, since it paints themselves in the best light.
The rest of us that haven’t been intellectually or genetically blessed still have a place in society. I’m sick of being treated like a subhuman because I went to a state school and don’t make $300k a year at Facebook.
I'm disinclined to pay, because history indicates that the HN comments are likely to be more useful than the linked item.
What metrics should be allowable for admissions? (I suggest making legacy admissions and favoring race-/gender-/etc. attributes illegal.)
Why not get bright minority and poor students, and girls for STEM, supported with mentoring, admissions coaching, resources/funding, and other assistance that makes a massive impact? This way, admissions standards can, and should, be minimized to merit, rather furthering victimhood or privilege.
It's like: If we throw away the SATs, ACTs, and other rank-able tests, what's left to compare students? Essays?
I don't have any data, but I'm sure there aren't a ton of grad students with kids.
Having kids when you are young, kind of puts a limit on how much you can devote to your career.
To me personally it seems kind of ridiculous. What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you want to play in an orchestra. You can’t access an orchestra (there are seven of them in Harvard!) of any of your local universities. You can’t even join a university gym that probably has far cheaper fees than any other gym in your area. You want to take classes in Shaolin Kempo Karate? We are sorry but you can’t because you didn’t pass “holistic” assessment of your personality by Harvard. What a weird situation where your whole social life as a young adult completely depends on assessment of your personality by gerontic professors who need to fill some quotas.
Good luck with that...
Why don't you go out and build from the ground up/front money to building a place solely for those "just interested in trades"
For those who personally don't like it, I don't know what to tell you. Your ideology is clearly a minority, and the only way minorities will get what they want in a capitalistic system is through large amounts of money.
Maybe we could fund the arts more easily if we properly taxed the billionaires in our society. Harvard can afford it, there's no reason we can't afford elsewhere in our modern era of unimaginable wealth and plenty. We instead find it preferable to allow some people to hoard that wealth and plenty like fantasy dragons in caves instead of using it for the benefit of all of society.
Play the bassoon. ;-) A friend of mine who was a school music teacher told me that getting good at the bassoon was pretty much a ticket to a generous college scholarship. Not necessarily at your first choice of scholarship, but somewhere.
If they can't get a student to play bassoon, then they have to hire a ringer from the community. So you could also do that.
Reminds me of Oxford and Cambridge's organ scholarships, which are also the only way to apply and be admitted to both universities for undergraduate study.
It's ironic that the article is written by two harvard ivy leaguers. They have to replace the Ivies with something else. It's hard to envision that from within.
It's hard to have an opinion without knowing the product of the system.
> Power in the U.S. flows through the gates of the Ivy League and a very small tier of other top universities. These institutions set and sanction the boundaries of knowledge, including what kinds of political and social views are welcomed in prestige cultural spaces.
Is that really the case anymore? If the last year has shown us anything, its that technology has further empowered grassroots ideas and activism, and that technology companies themselves are furthering their own influence in politics and knowledge (the free flow of information that is true and not true) way beyond what influencers in academia alone can do right now.
Tearing down a society's top achievers & institutions is not a way to achieve a useful equality (see Harrison Bergeron).
That said, the encouragement at the end for supporting students going to a far wider range of colleges and universities, including Bernie Sanders' plan for free tuition for students of families under $125k is a great idea.
Non-paywalled link
Being a poor kid and going to Harvard is a far more effective ticket to the upper middle class than any alternative the author proposes.
Sure, you could theoretically dilute academic signaling strength, by force, to the point of homeopathic levels - but who does that help? Whose life completely changes for the better by attending such an institution?
EDIT: If you disagree, please feel free to express why. Not complaining about the downvotes, but dialog would be preferred over drive-bys.
Objectively speaking, my life is absolutely terrible BECAUSE of elites like you hoarding opportunity and people like me getting nothing because I only got a 1500/1600 and didn’t know about research opportunities in high school. I’m barely 25 but my life is already irretrievably broken because the elites want to segregate themselves from “my kind” so bad.
I worked hard in high school to get a scholarship to a third-tier state school, where I worked hard to get good grades and improve my logical reasoning skills enough to do very well on the LSAT.
Nothing about society was ever catered for me. I had to fight very, very hard.
And yes, I know others work just as hard and don't get the same opportunities. I'm not claiming the current system is perfect. "Ya gotta take care of business, ya gotta go to school, ya gotta get good grades to even have a chance... I'm talkin' about a chance! You might not make it, but you sure as hell won't if ya don't try." ~Hillbilly Elegy
For all its imperfections, it's a lot better than the proposed alternative.
This makes the mistake of accepting that college is about education. It isn’t. If it were those that barely graduate college and those that barely flunk out would have about the same outcomes, having learned about the same amount. They have very different outcomes because college is about the endless treadmill of credentialism.
I got a Ph.D. as I had the goal of being a physics prof someday. I knew that was an essential milestone on the path to this. Now, my goal is to save for retirement, and do what I enjoy doing while doing this, and maybe after retirement teaching physics/math/etc. at a local uni/college.
The treadmill of credentialism is an apt phrase though. I don't need a Ph.D. in my current job. Or most of my previous ones.
Re-imagining social norms -- not a conservative predisposition -- has nothing to do with redistributing wealth. It is precisely the requirement for a shared mindset, or a demonstration of willingness to adhere to ideological dogma, that requires generational and selective admission. As the re-imaginings take to greater heights of fancy, the distance from the non-indoctrinated society at large (which generally feels and thinks via principles and not ideology) increases and this requires and motivates a greater degree of insularity by an establishment.
It is certainly true that some children of the ideologically and/or culturally "unwashed" masses will arrive at the 'acceptable' socio-economic conclusion (due to their superior intellect) -- whether they acknowledge this consciously is not germinal -- but the risk to an establishment (regardless of their leaning on the fabled 1 dimensional L/R spectrum) to an 'open admissions and integration' policy are simply too great.