Ivy League Demographics
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France also had a pretty strong influence on the founding fathers apparently. From what I've heard English are much nicer than we are
In France, for example, you're far more likely to get into a top university if you have a parent that's a teacher. I postulate here: the interdisciplinary learning system, vs. the Anglo subject focused system, that looks good on paper works out quite hard to find success in without knowing success in navigating it and putting the pieces together.
In Germany, good luck becomming the CEO of a large company without the right breeding. It happens, but not a lot. There's turtles all the way down, from managing relationships with other stakeholders (i.e., knowing who runs them) to bank funding (funding from stock is less prevalent than Anglo, it's mainly debt funding, importance of Landesbanks). Screw the well qualified engineers, middle management will squash them sucking up the class divide at the top.
Sweden, prized for community. "So fucking claustrophobic I had to leave", "curtains twitch, everyone watches each other", "if you don't conform to the system, you need to be strong" "a nice place to retire, possibly" not only one Swede has said to me on their experiences on getting out [emigrating], interestingly all from smaller southern towns. [Interestingly, 'Collectivism' being the flip-side of 'Individualism' can mean those on the 'outside' of the collective have a much harder time than when there's no, or a weak, collective. See [1] Geert-Hofstede 'Model of national culture'].
Europe's very class based, it's less transparent, more insidious.
[1] https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...
But this obsession is not without its merits either - some leadership positions are exclusively carved out of the ivy league bunch
Things like Hedge fund CEOs and/or Presidents, Supreme Court Justices[1], Presidents and such.
Europeans are not entirely devoid of some form of elitism either in picking their leaders.[2]
[1] The Road to a Supreme Court Clerkship Starts at Three Ivy League Colleges
The chances of obtaining a coveted clerkship, a new study found, increase sharply with undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
The justices themselves are products of elite educations. Eight of them attended law school at Harvard or Yale, and six of them have undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale or Princeton. And six of them had themselves served as law clerks at the Supreme Court.
[2] Don’t Call Me Doktor
German politicians are obsessed with earning Ph.D.s—but plagiarism scandals tend to catch up to them and derail careers.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/04/germany-politics-higher...
Nobody? I think what you mean is "nobody in the middle class cares". Clearly they are very prestigious universities in Europe (Sorbonne) that open doors other universities don't.
What I've noticed in the US is that the middle class (and even lower) aspire to the top colleges. In Canada? Not as much.
After that you might have heard people mention Canadian options like McGill and Waterloo, and then MAYBE a handful of European options in Germany and Switzerland.
But the Sorbonne was distinctly understood by a majority of peers for its status.
In France, La Sorbonne isn't considered particularly prestigious. Grandes Ecoles (ENS for research across various topics but especially science; Polytechnique for engineering; HEC for business; ENA/Science Po for politics) are considered much more prestigious and elite (getting there is harder than for La Sorbonne, you have to undergo 2 years of prep schools and then take an exam, where only the top scorers get into these Ecoles), and will get you the higher paying jobs.
Outside France, seems that these Grandes Ecoles don't hold much prestige against La Sorbonne which seems to be considered more elite.
Harvard, on the other hand, lets in a few thousand students a year and I am pretty sure that has barely changed for decades. This changes a ivy degree from not just a good degree to a good degree with a high elitism and increasing scarcity associated with it.
Like a lot of things in Canada the bell curve is flatter -- but it doesn't mean there isn't a bell curve.
But the difference is that in the US, it's pretty common for families or students to aspire to the "best". That's true even in middle and low-middle class families. That's something I never saw in Canada.
That kind of thinking in Canada is limited to the upper class and old money in Canada.
These less prestigious schools, lower than state universities, which are often quite prestigious, have drastically lower entry standards. You quickly go from "needs a solid resume, with good academics, and participation in extracurriculars", to "accepts anyone".
Just because a University accepts everyone, doesn't mean it's "bad". I went to a good university with loose entry; they'd let anyone flunk out after the first year. That said, we look heavily at "pedigree" in the US. You need top academics to get into university, and usually have to be somewhat talented to meritfully advance (and we know who succeeded by merits). With pedigree you look at someone's full lineage and accomplishments. In theory you should look at what someone did in university and all these impressive sounding companies, but too often they just look at the letterhead!
I'm astonished by how reliably the "elite" are able to hold their position. In some cases, it doesn't even seem to make sense. For example there was this really insecure, power hungry kid for a Uni group, that wound up getting a pretty high position, quickly. He really clearly succeeded because of these insecurities, only to find that he was very wealthy.
I've become increasingly aware how people at higher levels in software have money, and seem to rise to the level of their wealth. Even I do pretty well, and I'm the grandson of an accomplished chemical engineer. Yet so, many of my managers are just a couple rungs above me, proportional to their wealth.
I've digressed, but I'd argue that in a country like the US, selecting based on pedigree, is not necessarily a bad decision. It's just shitty, discriminatory, even racist perhaps. Still, hiring the "elite" from society probably "works".
If you don't believe me just look at where members of your government went to school.
In CS in Germany this is not the case. There are better or worser schools but it is not a big thing. More important, github profiles, experience etc.
For the Politicians I dont see a common pattern. There are diversity issues (rather male, mostly Lawyers or Political Scientist) but German politicians are quiet diverse by background. Example by chancellors Scholz: Rather worser law university Merkel: Good, but not best Eastern Germany University in physics. Schröder: From a very poor family, but rather good law university.
Except Bucerius law school I am not aware of any university with lots of politicians aspirants. (And Bucerius is not that big)
You see I was very bored for doing research.
White 0.381106
Black/African American 0.0544724
Hispanic/Latino 0.111558
Asian/Asian American 0.414271
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.00100503
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.00261307
Two or More Races 0.0349749
Sources:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_226.10.a...
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r...
https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sa...
This is the mainstream discourse imo. The SFFA case didn't argue against affirmative action for non-white people, they argued against it for white people. They tried to make the case that whites were disproportionately legacy and athlete admits so therefore were dumb. (In my other comments I show that legacy students at Harvard actually had higher SAT scores). The SC of course had an ax to grind against Affirmative Action but the actual evidence, especially in light of the SAT distribution from GP, that there was AA for whites specifically I think is extremely lacking.
It's quite the opposite. Actually, using the same arguments SFFA made, it looks like Ivies discriminated against whites more than Asians. Remember that almost 1 million white students took the SAT in 2021. That leaves a huge number of high scoring students but somehow between only about 25-40% representation at Ivy League and Ivy League adjacent universities.
I think the myth of the privileged, entitled dumb white student with rich parents is pretty commonly used now. The excuse that high scores are a result of having rich parents who bought tutoring only seems to matter when the race of the student is white. It's ironically also the case that whites are the least likely group to take test prep and that test prep only seems effective in the style that East Asians tend to use which is the cram school variety or hagwon.
Could you elaborate on this?
> whites are the least likely group to take test prep
I'd love a source for this, if you still have it.
The SFFA case used some research from Princeton(I was told this so I never verified it was from Princeton) which showed that among Asians with a 1550+ on the SAT, the top one percentile of Asian students taking the test exceeded the number of seats at Harvard, etc. for freshman. The SAT has some stats here https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r...
So the SFFA case argued that the Ivies must be suppressing high scoring Asians. Although ultimately the court case came down to whether or not it was legal for schools to use race for admissions. But, for example, nearly 1 million white students took the SAT in 2020. The top 1 percentile of 1 million is ~10000. Yet the white enrollment at Harvard was only about ~37% that year but discrimination against whites didn't seem to be a factor because SFFA argued that legacy and athletic admissions were secret backdoors allowing AA for white students, without any evidence for this claim.
>source
https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/89/2/435/223527... <- if you can access this article. But here is a quote from a different researcher citing this article (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40984541):
Blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites from comparable backgrounds to utilize test preparation
This paper also shows a similar outcome and includes Asians. Asians are the most likely to take test prep. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283121142560...
There is a fair bit of research done about the East-Asian style "shadow education" as they call it. It's worth looking into. As well, the College Board has historically not done a good job of securing the test especially on the international level where a lot of cheating scandals have arisen. The same test prep companies that operate in China and Korea also have operations in the US. This is worth looking at https://theconversation.com/test-prep-is-a-rite-of-passage-f... because it presents evidence that test prep is only really effective in the way East Asians use it which is for long periods of time.
Asian to Indian, Chinese, Korean, other
White to WASP and other -- maybe geographical
Jewish to observant and non-observant
Hispanic to ?? It's a loose category it seems to me. Is DeSantis Hispanic?
It reads like something someone on 4chan would make to backup their soapbox, not an actual scientific study.
(If you think assuming 100% of college students applied to Yale is sound methodology, maybe you don't need to worry about who goes to what Ivy.)
Very scientific.
And the conclusion:
"Their 100- and 177-point SAT score lead over Hispanic and Black students seems to have hurt, not helped, their chances of admission.
On the other hand, the smaller 73-point lead of Asian students over Whites helped greatly."
They're using scores from across the 100% of college applicants when less than 1% of them apply to Ivy League schools.
If they had used more natural language I'd be charitable and say they didn't know better, but not after they went out of their way to invent numbers to... separate out Jewish people from whites? While also insisting they're a small group so it doesn't matter?
I'm going to guess the admissions numbers didn't show the kind of dramatic gap they wanted so off to town they went.
Doesn't matter for calculating the non-Jewish White SAT is how I interpreted that. Since white_SAT = (2.4*jewish_SAT + 55.4*non_jewish_white_SAT) / (2.4 + 55.4), it means that even if your Jewish SAT estimate is off by ~100 points, it will only change the non-Jewish White SAT estimate by ~4 points.
Is there something non-scientific about estimates? Or do you think this is not a reasonable estimate, i.e. it may be significantly off? The charge of "non-scientific" is very vague - can you be more specific? What do you think is wrong, and by how much?
But, realizing you're OP...
> They're using scores from across the 100% of college applicants when less than 1% of them apply to Ivy League schools.
Respectfully, you need to go back to high school stats if you're trying to salvage this. Or maybe a bit earlier, since I'm pretty sure my 8 year old niece could see what's wrong there.
But then you don't have a reasonable lower bound, and someone trying to debunk the analysis could, instead of throwing un-falsifiable claims of un-scientificness, make the much stronger accusation that the combined white+Jewish mean SAT score is being unfairly attributed to non-Jewish whites alone.
> They're using scores from across the 100% of college applicants when less than 1% of them apply to Ivy League schools.
Seems relevant to me - it would be very surprising if the mean of the SAT score distribution didn't strongly affect its top percentile. If you're not satisfied with reasonable extrapolation, you can find what the SAT scores are for the top percentile of white/Hispanic/Black students. I wager that sorting the SAT scores by mean or by top percentile gives the same order. But as you say, I failed high school stats, so I'm probably wrong.
It's the most linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse bucket imaginable.
This is a distraction.
Breaking it down by race as if it's a zero sum game is a distraction to get people fighting amongst themselves. What is the point in arguing about the relative fairness if most of the spots are taken by people who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise. Open their slots and it relieves most of the pressure on the admissions system, no?
- minority X
- minority Y
- minority Z
- the uncategorized ones
Is going to find weird behavior around the last group, regardless of whether it's skin color or some other feature that's chosen to generate the partition.
Something about remarkableness (being a minority and being in the ivy league are both remarkable traits) not being evenly distributed.
Why is that deflection the depth of the discussion, not everyone is trying to exclude Jewish people or start a pogrom over these observations, but the depth of the discussion seems more like a deflection just in case, and I dont think its that helpful
like, is there something other groups could learn, perhaps even the less privileged Jewish people?
I observe a similar effect in my partner's family. My partner is Vietnamese, and their family placed heavy value on personal success, or the success of who they married. I can't speak for Vietnamese culture, but it may be a cultural value too. The result? One half of the family is incredibly well off, and the other half is supported by them to help raise them beyond their circumstance. It isn't a conspiracy as some posit, it's familial love and mutual support.
One could argue they are doing the same as what Jews who came to the US also did: stick together and help each other, because it's a rough world out there. Some decry it as nepotism, as if those who are wealthy are not allowed to have preference for their own kind simply because they are wealthy. In that same vein, not everyone proves to be successful. It can simply be a matter of statistics or circumstance, but people place the blame on the individual or the group at the wrong times.
I for one avoid any discussion on the matter because all too often it proves non-conductive to actually useful conversation.
Eh, I don’t think it was okay for the WASP owners of the Los Angeles Country Club to “prefer their own kind”.
Maybe the right heuristic is something like: the more power and dominance a group of people have, the less okay it is for them to have preferences for others within that group.
Cornell is consistently seen as "not elite" and in a sense it isn't, same with Berkely. Each of these top 5 schools, besides Harvard, exude a scrappy spirit for challenging the status quo. HYP, is focused on dominating the EXISTING power structure, whereas Stanford, MIT, Berkely, and Cornell are focused on building their own power structure.
https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/top-universities-recent....
"Their 100- and 177-point SAT score lead ... seems to have hurt, not helped, their chances of admission"
There is no information in these charts about the test scores of those admitted.
You'd need the scores their admissions team has, not graphs that include a randomly decided multiplier to determine white vs jewish SAT scores (seriously, read the methodology section at the bottom)
* uses a mix of sources from different years
* a lot of guesses eg. arbitrary calculation with international students and Jewish SAT scores
* Uses Mean SAT Scores nationally, not from Ivies
* "This guaranteed to not unfairly over- or under-count any demographic" lol
* Commentary makes conclusions about entrance based solely on SAT scores despite that not being anywhere near the full picture of an application
The world sends it best and brightest to these institutions.
This changes the under-representation of non-Jewish whites from 0.53 to 0.55.
Is this so significantly different that the entire graphic can be dismissed?