Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".
But if we're serious about a liberal/conservative "equality of opportunity" vs a progressive/socialist "equality of outcome" reality, then we should consider that children have very little consent over the kind of education and familial upbringing they get, yet that childhood education and familial upbringing has profound implications as to whether they can get admitted to a school like Harvard or not.
If we're serious about equality of opportunity society, then we should take a lottery admissions policy for young adults seriously. But it's fine if you don't care about equality at all, at least be explicit about it.
A college admission lottery doesn't seem to be a serious solution.
From the article:
"Some people say Harvard is a private institution and it can do what it wants. These people are wrong."
"private universities are non-profits."
"When John Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard, that was tax-deductible. If we assume his marginal tax rate was 25%, that’s equivalent to him donating $300 million of after-tax money, and then having the government kick in an extra $100 million. Ivy-league universities also earn insane profits on endowments tax-free and are exempt from local property taxes."
Otherwise the results will be similar to if any 18 year-old could “win” a place in the NFL. Either they have a rough time and get spit out or the system is forced to change to accommodate them.
I would agree to this under 3 conditions
1. The university can not accept any federally backed student loans, grants, etc
2. The university must self finance any financial aid given using their massive endowments
3. Those loans must be discharged in bankruptcy
I dont even care about their non-profit status as others do. I care they are getting billions in federally (tax payer) backed loan, with no accountability for the money, and no skin in the game at all
Because it argues for meritocratic rewards in society? Because it pointed out that capital is a gatekeeper? What makes it seem "Marxist" to you?
> Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table?
I think the argument against subsidizing anti-meritocratic institutions such as Harvard is exactly this. The money is better spent on lifting up people regardless of their ability to get into Harvard.
I find the ending ambiguous, less "Harvard should be burned to the ground" and more "Harvard shouldn't get subsidies."
I think Harvard would survive just fine without subsidies. It's Harvard.
States that were far closer to Marxism, like the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decimated their universities and dispersed their faculties over the countryside, or to labor camps.
This article is not on the same planet as that madness.
I’m not super interested in whether or not their Marxism was “authentic”, and neither is anyone who goes around, as OP did, randomly labeling things they don’t like as Marxist.
A Marxist tone would be more focused on getting rid of the elite class doing the owning things part. (which has proved difficult...)
Meritocracy is actually nearly as awful as aristocracy in practice. A better society would just be more equal across the whole population regardless of birth, merit or whatever. i.e. CEO pay is now 300 times average employee pay, something more like 5 times would be a very different society and still have room for some merit element And having wealth above a reasonable level shrink exponentially rather than grow exponentially through some kind of share ownership tax
Then Harvard just wouldn't matter that much
I think you missed the point of the article, which was "Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic, and it does that while subsidized by everyone else."
> Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies.
The author discusses this: "The hardest part of Harvard is getting in." "High-stakes college admissions means that much of the value of a college degree is determined before students even start college. If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?"
On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money. This was decades ago, so perhaps things have changed recently, but my higher education was gated on my family's wealth, i.e., lack thereof. Was it a "meritocracy"? No fucking way.
This is always such an interesting argument people make when nearly every 'next step' after undergrad is more selective than Ivy League schools.
Tier-1 Tech/Banking/Consulting/Law School/Med School all reject plenty of people from Harvard because they didn't do a good enough job there. Plenty of Harvard grads languish.
It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in, but doing something with it still has capability-based gates.
Historically, that was at least somewhat true of undergrads in general. But wasn't necessarily the case for the top law schools and Big Law still, as far as I know, has something up an up or out career ladder.
An alternative hypothesis, entirely consistent with the author’s arguments, is that Harvard exists to educate its students (and to do research and have fancy sports and pretty buildings and cultural events, etc), that it’s quite good at this but not necessarily substantially better than its lower class competition, and that its gating function developed over time and is unfortunate.
It seems like you're mistaking the article for some kind of historical origin hypothesis?
Harvard as it currently exists has the function of making society less meritocratic, while society continues to subsidize Harvard in various ways. How Harvard came into existence originally and its function in the 17th century are not particularly relevant to the argument.
“Harvard would still be an organization designed to reduce meritocracy…”
“Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic”
These are statements about Harvard’s purpose or intent, not about its effect. And I think it’s more likely that the original intent, as well and the present intent of those involved, is to foster meritocracy: admit the best students (for some, fairly clearly extremely flawed, concept of “best”), give the best ones the best grades (again, there are flaws here), and hopefully let the best ones succeed.
The article argues that it fails at this, and perhaps even that it can’t succeed, but the article states, without justification, that it was not intended to succeed.
Yes, the current purpose or intent. Harvard was established 387 years ago; what was its original purpose or intent? I don't know. In fact, I don't care. It's not relevant to the current argument. Institutions change over time, and we're talking about hundreds of years at Harvard.
… is to make society less meritocratic? Where’s the evidence that this is what the institution is currently driving at as its mission? Versus this being an emergent effect, subjectively?
My a priori assumption of the purpose of a car is to transport people. Cars kill thousands of people each year. Is the purpose of a car then to kill people?
The dominant purpose of a car is to use a system of car centered infrastructure. Why did some places replace car centered infrastructure with other systems and some not?
Are we really gonna do this? My point was that intentions can be, and often are, different from outcomes. You don’t throw out babies with bathwater.
You're not quite arguing that it doesn't do that gating function.
"The purpose of a system is what it does"
This does fit my hypothesis that the outliers at state schools are likely undervalued in the market by recruiters. The averages at selective schools are a lot higher (work a few career fairs where you ask basic technical questions and this is obvious), but everyone is competing over them and the outliers at state schools are people like you with extenuating circumstances. Since the actual education product isn’t that different (though there is some difference), there’s probably opportunity in trying to recruit the best students from state schools companies tend to ignore.
Being middle class is an extenuating circumstance? ;-)
A lot of elite schools do cover tuition now if your parents are below a certain income, but it’s imperfect and doesn’t scale with number of siblings etc.
I've hired outstanding people for dev roles with all kinds of backgrounds including self-taught, low-mid tier state schools, unfinished college, etc., but that's because I am a developer and I can tell who knows things and who doesn't. I couldn't do the same for, say, a mechanical engineering position since I am not an expert in that field.
If you’re a startup there’s a strategic advantage in trying to look for talent where others aren’t and leveraging your own subject matter expertise to do so.
In moneyball the scouts selected on stupid stuff rather than on base percentage - if you know what to actually look for you can find stuff mispriced.
What I've always heard about the big state schools is that you can get in (probably relatively easily) and then you can either spend your days doing a lot of doing sports and partying (not that there's anything wrong with that in moderation) or you can get a pretty world-class STEM degree.
That's the huge take-away, and why startups and other small to medium sized businesses are so critical for class mobility.
This is what I expected when I went from undergrad at a solid but not elite shool (top 100, ~50% admission rate) to grad school (top 10, single digit admission rate).
It's not what I experienced. The undergrad students I taught and TA for at the elite school were no better, on average, than my peers at my undergrad school. They were more ambitious and entitled. They were not smarter or harder working or more engaged or motivated.
If your peers in undergrad were your friends, you were probably selecting a non-representative group (smart people you liked) and your job as a TA shows you a more random sample (or even skewed negative, poor students grubbing for grades).
At least that’s my guess (selection bias).
Of course if I’m wrong there’s an even bigger opportunity in undervalued students, but I’ve done enough interviews to believe that’s not true.
In terms of raw smarts I wouldn't make so bold a claim, but in terms of what folks can realistically assess in a single minute of interaction...
That’s life though, but most of the upper class and higher don’t realize it.
I've seen research suggesting that the schools aren't necessarily great, the students are. They were already great which is how they passed the admissions criteria, and their career success can be attributed to the qualities that they arrived at e.g. Harvard with. They would have been as successful regardless of where they attended. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Here's one such example, with a followup comment describing a study that contradicts the argument you lead with. (I'm merely saying it contradicts it; I'm not vouching that the contradiction is correct.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748063 , summarized as:
> 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.
The link to the article and the followup is in the only 2-deep chain linked above.
It used to.
Now when I see someone went to Harvard, I imagine they had rich parents or were part of Affirmative Action. Not to mention their cheating scandals and forged data.
Heck, I talked to a Harvard law grad last week and asked them for specific points on their speech and they had no follow up, they regurgitated. This was no AAA student, this was someone that benefited from Affirmative Action + had 2 physician parents.
Harvard in the modern age hasnt impressed me.
As the parent of two exceptionally-achieving children who were rejected from the "elite" colleges - I've become a lot more sympathetic to the mindset behind this line of thinking. My kids literally couldn't have done more or tried harder - since kindergarten - than they did. They both graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, scored in the top 99% of the SAT, did sports, did clubs, volunteered, worked, studied... and when they applied to the ivy's, they didn't even get waitlisted. When I see that somebody like, say, Jared Kushner graduated from Harvard... yeah, it makes me mad. I'm mad on behalf of my two kids who tried so hard for so long.
But - I don't really see a "solution" besides some sort of "populist revolt" _against_ these "elite" institutions. The solution is - just stop assigning so much importance to colleges like Harvard. This isn't Harvard's problem, it's all of us that are doing it.
Basically, if your family name isn't in that list, you have a massive reduction in your probability of being accepted, regardless of merit. If your name is in that list, then you likely will be accepted regardless of merit.
>and it's largely due to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register
These are very likely not true especially the second part but since specific ethnicity is not tracked it's much harder to disprove. But I would wager this is is not true at all.
They probably reject way more than 50% of the valedictorian/800 SAT applicants they have.
Unless you are super-special, you need to be at that level and be lucky
But as you say, you need to not only have the credentials, something else that sets you apart, and even then the Teela Brown luck gene. When you're being that selective, there's no way that you're realistically finding strong signals in all but the most exceptional circumstances to admit specific individuals.
(And things have only gotten more competitive. I would be shocked if I would get into my undergrad school today.)
(As he dumps half of the hundreds of résumés into the recycle bin)
“Unlucky people don’t work here”
Of course those with degrees from Ivys and other selective schools don't want to acknowledge this - it devalues their degree. Same for those who aspire to attend these schools - whether they have an 'unfair' advantage or not.
And yes test scores aren't the best metric for "talent" but it is one of the better signals you get in a college application.
They're not numerous enough to change any GPA/SAT averages, but they likely pay many times more in tuition & donations than the rest of their class put together. That's why they're the main focus of these places, even if their numbers are small.
I know people who want to say University of Virginia who have had better outcomes than some folks I know who went to Harvard College - just to cherry pick a single set.
look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with.
Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges".
In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition.
I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a boring suburban part of a boring state for a company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone from Harvard is killing it.
I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from
Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a
boring suburban part of a boring state for a
company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone
from Harvard is killing it.
The elite universities are not primarily selling education they’re selling prestige. In academia it’s worse because prestige is the metric for getting grants and status since the pay is bad.
It’s also not great in private companies since institutional prestige is used to filter inbound interest, but it’s better because at least there are other ways to prove ability - it’s just harder to get the opportunity.
The prestige is also available for direct sale - I think you could pay $5M for a building or something and your kid could go to Stanford (I was told this off the record by a student that worked in admissions) That was the irony with the whole “famous people cheating their way in” news cycle, the schools were angry they were getting a discount on the fee (and probably that this hurt their prestige).
Schools like Harvard also hold spots that help their own prestige, in Lisa Brennan-Jobs (great) book Small Fry she talks about her Harvard interview and the woman was basically an ass ignoring her until she mentioned her dad founded a computer company. When the interviewer realized her dad was Steve Jobs she literally got up and left for a moment, then came back with an entirely different demeanor. Lisa expected it to help (she was counting on it), but even she was surprised by the obviousness of it. She was accepted.
If you read the admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case you can see how messed up it is. [0] This kind of high status selective scarcity creates perverse incentives.
If the goal was actually educating smart people, the behavior of the institutions would be different (probably more ISAs and such), but that’s not the primary goal and the behavior reveals it.
[0]: https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/10-notes-on-the-end-of-...
Copying here actual conversation (revealed in the lawsuit) between admissions officers at UNC:
“I just opened a brown girl who’s an 810 [SAT].”
“If its brown and above a 1300 [SAT] put them in for [the] merit/Excel [scholarship].”
“Still yes, give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$.”
“I am reading an Am. Ind.”
“[W]ith these [URM] kids, I’m trying to at least give them the chance to compete even if the [extracurriculars] and essays are just average.”
“I don’t think I can admit or defer this brown girl.”
“perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th”
“Brown?!”
“Heck no. Asian.”
“Of course. Still impressive.”
“I just read a blk girl who is an MC and Park nominee.”....
“Stellar academics for a Native Amer/African Amer kid.”....
“I’m going through this trouble because this is a bi-racial (black/white) male.”
While university admissions people aren't representative of white people, they're in the class of people I had always assumed didn't see people in terms of race. I knew affirmative action was a thing, but I kind of assumed it was a mathematical, maybe computerized process. I didn't realize they were sifting through applications saying "oh, here's a hispanic, and that one's a black kid, shoot this one's an asian."
It's not just that they're not representative of an entire group of people, many aren't members of that group at all.
It's also not necessarily entirely on the admissions people - the argument made in that substack (and ultimately the conclusion of SCOTUS) is that affirmative action is a euphemism for racial discrimination.
Ultimately you have to be doing something like this somewhere if that's the policy since that's explicitly what it means, the internal comms just show the reality of the policy that's often not said in public communication (because imo it seems obviously bad to most people).
I agree the reality hits harder than the theory. I imagined this statistical and detached balancing process, not this.
“perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th”
“Brown?!”
“Heck no. Asian.”
“Of course. Still impressive.”
* It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
* Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.
* It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.
And I agree with you, there's schools just as good, if not better, than the Ivies. You just have to shop around looking for the field you're interested in. For instance, UIUC is a top choice for computer science and engineering, and it's a state-funded school.
Which scheme of things is this?
> Top 99% of SAT is nothing.
I got 99pct on my SAT too (1500/1600). I didnt have a chance at a top school. What do you suggest people like me do now? I went to an undergrad with a 50% acceptance rate, not exactly UIUC CS. I can't sleep most days because I don't feel like I have anything to hope for.
Telling people who are experiencing dread at the classist social prospects available to them to just "adjust your world view" isn't exactly a refutation of their cause for that dread.
You know that and I know that... I just wonder if HR knows that.
> * It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
One of the biggest factors for success is zip code; that needs changing too. And in any case, if you can graduate valedictorian in a shitty school in a shitty neighborhood, that's a big achievement nonetheless. Ivy League schools would be well served taking those students in, and not just for reasons of basic fairness.
> Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.
The difference between 99% and perfect has little to do with ability, and everything to do with the ability to spend time/money hacking a metric beyond reason.
> * It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.
That doesn't actually follow. If it's a popular major, then there ought to be more slots made available for students. It's not like Harvard doesn't have the money to make that happen.
... We may disagree on these, but I also agree that legacy and nepotism is a major problem, and that there are better schools, from an academic / learning standpoint.
Second, maybe we overproduce good students. Either the curriculum is too easy (imagine compared to Chinese high schools). Either everyone wants to be in the tertiary sector and society doesn’t need so many, and rejects people who are perfectly fit, randomly without fairness.
Third, were they victim of white discrimination?
Although it looks like you were downvoted for suggesting such a thing exists, I actually do believe that it happens - but in their case no, they're actually hispanic.
What I've seen in the last year or so is making me reconsider. I see the profiles of the top graduating seniors in our newsletters and they read like parodies. 4.9 GPA - check. Sports teams - check. Competitive academic club - check. Social clubs - check. Musical instrument competitions - check. Leadership roles - check. Volunteer roles- check. It's just so cynical after a while. You know some consultant has been hired with a todo list and they've dutifully filled in every box.
Then the kids I know who've gotten in and gone to these elite schools are really struggling. Struggling in ways that I didn't see when my peers and I were going to these schools. There's been a sea change in expectations and requirements.
In the meantime it's the kids I know who got into the "second-tier" schools who are doing well. They aren't under such high expectations, they aren't surrounded by classmates under such high expectations. If some day they don't get hired by a FAANG or a some Wall Street firm than maybe that's for the best too.
I was talking to a couple of high school seniors from Germany recently and it all sounded so sane. All the state colleges are free and all are good. You fill out one application, rank the ones you want to get into, and wait for your letter.
I can make guesses as to how it all got so insane in the US but it doesn't matter much. I don't want to play. I don't want my kid to play.
https://www.study.eu/article/study-in-germany-for-free-what-...
At Harvard, that nepotism number is closer to 50%, according to my colleagues at the time.
The remainder are chosen from those with strong academics, nearly at random, with a very strong bias against students who don't visual demonstrate diversity on campus.
What I grew up with:
- Universities are tax funded
- there's no tuition (there's an option to pay something like $500/year for being a member of the student organization, which gets you meal discounts, social events, etc; strictly not related to your studies)
- approval process is a direct function of high school grades and entrance exam, top N pass (exchange students were separate, and closer to scholarships, but still the criteria was scoring well in some test)
To someone who grew up in a different setting, many American systems can be summarized as institutionalized corruption.
They are very decent proxies to evade anti-discrimination laws, as well. Just look how many jobs these days require higher education credentials for paper pusher jobs. Sounds innocent on paper - but the reality is that wide swaths of society can now be perfectly legally discriminated against.
Poor people or people of color? No way. People with disabilities of all kind? No way. People who have to raise children they got at a young age? No way.
All of these people simply (virtually) filtered out from a lot of employment opportunities, simply because their classes are highly likely to never reach higher education.
Certainly undergrad school is far from a perfect filter but I agree that if that were really all you had to go on, there is signal there whether one likes that fact or not. (And how could there not be? A lot of people who get into top schools could, shall we say, not super-concentrate on academics as undergrads and many will still do pretty well--although others will flame out.)
That's... a bullshit argument, and should get called out as bullshit? It's an easy approach, and beats other approaches for HR but says absolutely nothing about whether the person is a good person (both in the "are they a sociopath?" and "are they a good fit for the role we're filling" sense). In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. They're on a fast track career path, no matter what job you're offering them, you're going to have to rehire for it 2 or even 1 year down the road.
That's an atrocious cost-benefit ratio: that's not an investment, that's intentionally hiring for the short term and intentionally preventing institutional knowledge from ever building up. If you're a startup, good for you, your goal is to get valuable fast and then cash out. But if you're a real business, and your plan is to own yourself and the market you operate in, it's downright idiotic.
citation needed. (plot twist, this is not true).
(And of course, while it should go without saying, it very much needs saying because people are very bad at logic: that doesn't mean I claimed that no high achievers stick around, and it also doesn't mean I claimed that people who do stick around are low achievers. Reading the latter would require making not just one but _two_ mistakes)
There is a better method for selecting candidates: IQ testing. For better or worse, that's illegal. In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data.
Problematic/controversial but not necessarily illegal. They can probably ask for SAT/ACT scores which are probably a pretty good proxy as well.
>In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data
Disagree to a fair degree. The college degree (and grades/other experiences) tell more than how well you do on a multiple choice test. One can of course argue how much more.
It may be easier to not use it than to produce evidence that it is relevant, but ...
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple.
So I disagree with the analogy, when we're talking about people who went to big-name schools vs. everyone else.
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't
as good of quality as Apple.
It's just that with Apple (substitute another high-prestige name brand, if you prefer) you are typically getting a certain guaranteed level of quality.
I've had Apple-branded phone cases. They are always top-tier. I've had generic ones that were just as good or maybe better. Also had some godawful ones. I can afford to experiment with phone cases because I can tolerate a $15 failure that takes a small amount of my time. But this isn't as true for potential hires so companies gravitate toward those "big-name" schools.
When you are in a hiring role, it's often impossible to avoid this kind of bias. If you hire a Harvard grad and they don't work out, at least you made the safe choice in your manager's eyes. Much easier to defend than taking a chance on some rando wildcard person.
This is my exact opposite experience. Degrees are meaningless unless you've literally just left college. Even then, it tells you their scores in particular subjects, it does not tell you their attitude, work ethic, general problem solving ability, etc.
I ignore qualifications unless you've just completed it. Experience is a better guide and, I know this is controversial, just talking to the candidate - it's amazing what people will expose once they feel comfortable that they're having a friendly chat.
What do you recommend those of us who didn't get into any top schools do then? If clearly we're destined to be inferior for life?
I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now.
I'd like to believe this is sarcasm but it probably isn't.
Whoever is telling you that you aren’t good enough is trying to pull something over on you at this point. It works well on people that can never be satisfied.
But if your expectation is to have a happy life, a nice house in a decent neighbourhood, etc., then there's no reason to listen to them and self-flagellate.
For the record I doubt I can have a happy life or a house in a decent neighborhood too.
This is a pretty common worry for most people. It’s not Harvard’s responsibility to ameliorate it for every one of them.
Not really, even the 50th percentile Harvard Law graduate, let alone Ivy league undergrads, has minimal chance of being a big shot in the world.
Sure, it's many times more then someone from Iowa State, statistically, but that's idle fantasizing either way.
They're a lot closer to any random office worker then supermen destined for the royal road.
If, after some reflection, your still worked up about not enjoying a few tenths of a percentage chance instead of a few hundredths or thousandths, then you can always seek solace in religion/meditation/etc.
As I wrote, there is pedigree in some professions/positions but I'm assuming you're not looking at clerking on the Supreme Court, working for a white shoe law firm, and maybe getting a Federal Court of Appeals seat. Nor working for McKinsey.
I somewhat surprisingly got into a really good school undergrad and good ones grad. But got rejected by plenty too.
You win some. You lose some. You seem to be taking every long odds dice roll you lose as a personal affront.
I would have never gotten into a good school for undergrad and have no chance at a top grad school. It just feels like it’s all over for me.
How is your social life? Do you consider most people around you beneath you?
Several of my friends are crypto millionaires who also have higher total compensation than me and they certainly think I'm beneath them. I know a lot of people that got into top schools or have higher SATs/more "merit" than me. I'm probably the person with the least merit in my social circle.
It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class.
Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power.
Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power.
And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.
"Relatively"? According to what metric? I think the US has one of the world's highest Gini coefficients, at least among Western countries.
"Only"? 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite?
How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.
I didn't bring up the figure - I was just remarking on how I had a different reaction to it. And the remainder is also distributed in a non-diffuse manner.
> If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are
Do the majority of people have "a high quality of life"? I'm not sure that's true, but assuming it is true, then one issue is the massive power imbalance in terms of control over society: small numbers of people having huge influence over politics, the media, social tech companies etc.
> Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold
Which I was not doing. I'm not sure what would be the best distribution - but if I can't look at it quantitively, I think we can consider it qualitatively. Would we be in a better place if we moved towards more wealth inequality or less?
"In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065 – less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively."
https://theconversation.com/why-inequality-is-growing-in-the...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37067736
Otherwise, rayiner's comment seemed fine, but the "diffuse" part was odd.
That diffusion of ownership means that capital usually has much less power than the managerial class in terms of actually running the company. Jamie Dimon owns something like 0.1% of JP Morgan. In a traditional Marxist analysis, he’s actually an employee. He makes money from his labor. Even after 20 years the dividends from his JPM stock are less than his compensation as an employee.
You have this class of people now whose wealth and power doesn’t derive from owning the means of production, but by having credentials that persuade a diffuse group of shareholders to appoint them as managers of these corporations. And Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
It's unclear why you even mentioned the US specifically. The so-called "modern corporation" and "the traditional Marxist scenario" are both US. Although Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, he emigrated to the US at age 12, and Carnegie Steel was a US company.
> In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%.
This definitely makes a lot more sense than "Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth."
Of course, I'm just quibbling here. I don't disagree with your main point:
> Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
Jamie Dimon went to Tufts — Harvard-adjacent? — with an MBA from Harvard.
Tim Cook went to Auburn, with an MBA from Duke.
Harvard's supposed "excellent reputation" is significantly maintained by the cartel of graduates from it, & its close peers, preferentially touting, publishing, hiring, and funding class-similar people – even when they are no better on objective measures than non-graduates.
Your hiring observation is nearly fully driven not by Harvard providing any "educational lift", specific to its educational product, that would justify its state-granted advantages, but simply by Harvard getting "early pick" (pre-career) to place its brand on people who are already talented, ambitious, or highly-prepared before they arrive at Harvard.
You missed the central point of the article about causality.
Of course this will be the case on average, because Harvard gets smarter people on average! Harvard serves no additional value here other than to be a gatekeeper.
These institutions hit a critical mass, then they get powerful alumni and have dynasty that self perpetuates. Everyone knows you don't go to college to get an education... at least not if you're trying to win the US capitalist game (which most educated people realize is their best bet), you go to college to network, and sometimes for hands on experience, which can be gained anywhere. The academic material itself is usually useless.
So what you end up with amounts to a privilege factory. Sure you also might have extra opportunities to gain wisdom from exceptional people that don't exist elsewhere, but this is quite rare, and a substantial percentage of students never see it (ie. nuggets of wisdom they couldn't get by grabbing a random engineer with knowledge of the subject).
Mostly you're just getting a chance to rub elbows with the elite. See how they function and hopefully gain some allies with power. I think it may often be true that employees from elite schools can do better. You're hiring based on pedigree, which works in many cases, but it's questionable how it impacts society.
BTW, I've also heard the opposite about ivy league employees. They tend to be entitled, unwilling to get in the trenches, and always seem to think they could be doing better. Also, I've heard lots of complaints that the personality issues tend to be worse.
P.S. I wanted to explain why I think most intelligent people eventually decide to "play the game" and go for money / power. No matter how meaningful your career, you will probably just end up doing the same thing: making the world worse, by helping your corporate overlords, only with far less money.
This is very true for almost any calling / "just cause" professions. * Police - spend most of your time ruining poor peoples lives for an injustice system * Doctors - again ruining poor peoples lives, otherwise abusing patients, and trying to prevent them from getting health care * Nurses - Pretty much the above, with less evil decisions, more thankless work, less money * Mental health / psych - Watch people slowly be bled to death by a system that cannot help you. A substantial percentage of your patients will see you as like a horrible witch poisoning them (not just the psychotic ones!). You will "help" by stripping them of rights. * Social worker - you will have all of societies problems dumped on you, overworked and make no money. You also get to play the role of cop and ruin peoples lives (people with horrific upbringings), who will now hate you. It's your job to get the drug addicted SA survivor into jail, sometimes through shady means. * Nonprofit - worse corporate politics and guilt when you realize how much money goes to perpetuating the organization instead of helping. * Engineer - no matter how brilliant you are, you will be implementing someone else's idea. You will be expendable. You will be undermined and blamed. You don't get to own anything and it's mostly thankless busywork.
Anyway THIS is why most people eventually decide that they should just maximize money/power. It would arguably be hard to decide if the work lived up to reality. When it's just as hollow and empty, yeah just go for $$$.
I’m sure it happens, and I’m sure there are secret clubs I don’t get invited to (well the Harvard club is pretty nice and I was invited there by a great uncle who went to Harvard - they have these really great puffy dinner rolls). But it’s never caused me a moment of anxiety, suffering, doubt, or jealousy.
The fascination has never made sense to me.
I’d also say it’s false for almost anyway - YouTube directly impacts most people considerably more than Wall Street shenanigans, and that I lived the plot of the big short and know what actually happened for a first hand fact, I can assure you the big short is extraordinarily short of accuracy.
At the micro level:
* local and regional banks stuffing mortgage pipelines with garbage, colluding with appraisers and others to make outrageous loans with fabricated or otherwise fraudulent docs
* loan officers effectively tricking ill equipped borrowers into unsuitable products against suitability requirements
At the macro level:
* rating agencies were ill equipped and were rating structured products AAA despite them paying junk bond returns - we tried to show them models demonstrating their ratings were too rosy but they kept us at arms length - as they should - but we felt it was really important they reassess. They wouldn’t.
* Large institutional investors seeking juiced returns but were restricted to AAA investments were eager for the junk returns, and were aware that these products were very risky despite the rating
The banks weren’t angels in this, but it’s been sold as a Wall Street issue. It was far greater than the street.
Also, “the big short” was taken on because Goldman stopped using theoretic models for valuing CDO’s and used fundamental models that showed they were extremely long subprime mortgage risk. As market makers they have risk limits on their books by internal policy and were required by their risk officers to short subprime to bring them within neutral risk with respect to their subprime mortgage exposure. It wasn’t a nefarious plot to screw the American mortgage holder - it was the bank functioning properly with proper risk management, the problem wasn’t the “big short” - it was the “big long.” Market makers are not speculators - their whole purpose is to stay neutral in the market and facilitate anyone who wants to trade long or short by quoting both sides.
I thought the movie mostly portrayed the bankers sympathetically, e.g. the scene with Brad Pitt: “Just... Stop f**in' dancing.”
But yes, it’s something I place no value on being able to go to whenever I want. I’d rather join a makerspace, and the people there are a lot more interesting.
Eight of the nine current sitting Supreme Court Judges are either Yale or Harvard Law graduates. It's pretty likely Harvard has had an impact on your life in a lot of ways because a lot of people who govern you went there.
Degrees from those schools are basically licenses to occupy the highest positions in the country's administration, it matters a pretty big deal who gets funneled through those institutions.
And, in addition, because at least presently, anyone who didn't do Ivy+ is essentially never going to be a SCOTUS judge.
The obvious objection is that given there are only 9 justices at a time, essentially nobody is ever going to be a SCOTUS judge anyway.
But that misses the important gating function (as TFA puts it) which begins with Ivy+ schools. Yes, the chance that you or your neighbor will ever be a SCOTUS justice is essentially zero. But the 9 have to come from somewhere, and the current process essentially guarantees that they must have passed through Ivy+. It's far from clear that this is desirable.
Now notice that the same issue applies to the other fields showing massive Ivy+ over-representation.
As TFA says, maybe a gating function is required (sometimes), but the justification for it operating at 18 and not later (22, or later still) is weak to non-existent.
I don't know if it's intentional but you're conflating mutually exclusive lines of thought.
The argument that such decisions should be made at age 22 instead of age 18 doesn't support — in fact contradicts — your argument that trajectories toward SCOTUS should not be related to law school admissions (which do indeed happen at age 22 instead of age 18).
Yes, 8 of the 9 went to Harvard or Yale Law.
But 6 of the nine went to Harvard, Yale or Princeton as undergrads.
For your example, you need to do a post-graduate degree (law) from the Ivy+. This article is talking about the gating functions of the undergraduate admissions departments.
The graduate school admissions officers are far more likely to consider strong candidates from "normal" universities than their undergraduate admissions colleagues are to consider strong candidates from "normal" public high schools.
Also, consider Harvard Extension. People shit on it constantly and call it the backdoor, not-so-honest way to get associated with Harvard. But in reality, it is more of a front door into a "make of it what you will" program. A significant number of the people that actually graduate use it to get into high-quality PhD programs that would have otherwise completely ignored them based on their past and their lack of "proper" pedigree.
In my mind, the undergraduate portions of these universities are pretty much lost causes. But their graduate schools are far more meritocratic and, much more importantly, fixable without burning everything to the ground. Because if you want to burn it all down and start over you are going to have to fight against all the rich and powerful people, and probably aren't going to win.
6 of the 9 nine current justices did undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
EDIT - for some reason it will not allow me to reply to your reply...
There are 8 current judges from Ivy+ law schools and 6 of them went to Ivy+ undergrad programs. That's how I got to 25%.
I guess I question why increasing the number of judges on the Supreme Court would change the percentage of (non-Ivy+ undergrad --> Ivy+ JD) justices. I would think that the only way to do that is to increase the number of non-Ivy+ undergrads admitted to the Ivy+ JD programs.
I mean, increasing the number of balls you randomly draw from a bag of balls increases the odds of getting one of the rare balls. But increasing the proportion of rare balls in the bag such that they aren't rare anymore increases the probability more, with the added benefit for every formerly rare ball that wasn't selected for the bench.
And BTW, 3 of 9 is 33%.
This sounds like it's not actually going to Harvard, and you'd only get the slimy Harvard benefits by pretending you did a different program at harvard
However, the current court composition is what we face today, and there are members who will likely be on the court for 30 years or more.
While the historical picture is more encouraging, it doesn't negate the significance of the current makeup.
What becomes concerning is when legacy students dominate the court. That is categorically unfair by structure, and it would speak to a hereditary elite in power. This was, as I’m sure you remember, the distinguishing factors of GWB vs Obama. Obama walked in those circles by earning his chair. GWB… well…
The core problem here, which TFA outlines at some length, is that while there is nothing particularly wrong with wanting "the best people for the job", it isn't clear that Ivy+ education is the right metric/gatekeeping to use for this task.
Really, it’s an argument about whether you agree in meritocracy or elitism.
I would say I’d suggest if you plan to be a Supreme Court judge your chances are better if you went to the top law school in the land, just as going to one of the top engineering schools in the world (public!) helped my career for sure. Getting highest honors at a top engineering school that rarely gives summa cum laude helped too. But it only helped at the beginning and on the margin. What I learned at that school is what made the difference when things got real. And I learned more than the kids who got gentleman C’s at a top private school, because at a top engineering public school they hand out gentleman F’s like candy. I eat the Harvard kids for lunch in my career because I do know more, do better work, earn more revenue, and change my organizations for the better. At a certain point in your career that matters a ton more than what school you went to.
To me that’s a better way to focus your life than the advantages someone else has, because that is surmountable and has nothing to do with what you need to do next in your life.
Edit - I do feel like I should mention that the organization was improving on this front when I left.
I have worked in an environment where {maths degrees} really did seem to matter. An organization set up by people with {maths degrees} where other people with {maths degrees} seemed to have advantages in (a) getting in and (b) getting ahead. It wasn't ever really addressed explicitly (though "credentialism" was occasionally mentioned by others as well, I wasn't the only one who noticed). It definitely played zero role in my leaving that organization.
Maybe the problem is that maths degrees exist.
Not sure what you're trying to say. Hiring people based on individual merit and skills is not the same thing as hiring people based on an exclusive network. The Harvard employer favored Harvard folks over others who otherwise had the same (or better) skills.
There are ~8 billion others, rounded to the nearest meaningful number ~8 billion people never saw the job ad or applied for it or were eligable because of the exclusive network of "countries".
Unless there is an epidemic of Harvard Art Majors being made Head of Brain Surgery upon graduation on the back of their credentials, their merit and skill is still contributing something.
There are plenty of things I think are unfair or unjust, and the existence of Harvard is so far down that list it’s not even funny. War, poverty, the destruction of the environment, racism, sexism, and many other things that are absolute negatives for people bother me more than a positive someone else has.
Yes, ignorance is bliss.
> There are plenty of things I think are unfair or unjust, and the existence of Harvard is so far down that list it’s not even funny. War, poverty, the destruction of the environment, racism, sexism, and many other things that are absolute negatives for people bother me more than a positive someone else has.
What if the same mechanisms that cause the destruction of the environment/poverty/racism/sexism/etc. negatives are the same mechanisms that allow an institution like Harvard to exist? Do you think those who combat poverty/racism/sexism don't see them as an overarching socio-political problems that permeate all parts of our society? Harvard does not exist in a vacuum.
Sounds more like acceptance of something they are not ignorant of.
> What if the same mechanisms
Ok but are they? This hypothetical isn’t useful if they aren’t, and I’m not convinced they are.
I can see it both ways, but OP basically said "I'm sure it happens to others, but it doesn't happen to me, so I don't care" which is fine, but also not helpful and is also missing the point of the article.
It's like reading an article about the water crisis in Flint and saying "water quality is great here in Miami, so doesn't bother me"
> Ok but are they? This hypothetical isn’t useful if they aren’t, and I’m not convinced they are.
I think it is worth considering. I won't force you to consider it if you don't want to, though.
Can we at least agree that not envying others’ higher status is not the same moral ground as not caring about suffering?
On that note, you can’t force everyone to care about every bad thing that happens in the world. It’s not reasonable to care about each such thing because, since you can’t control or change all of them, that mindset will simply wear you down and consume all of your time and energy, yet produce no results. It’s a matter of focus.
I did consider your question, but I don’t have enough information to make a determination one way or the other, and since you provided none, I dismissed the speculation out of hand.
No, I'm giving an example of not caring about something that does not affect you personally, yet you acknowledge it affects others.
> Can we at least agree that not envying others’ higher status is not the same moral ground as not caring about suffering?
This was never contended.
> On that note, you can’t force everyone to care about every bad thing that happens in the world. It’s not reasonable to care about each such thing because, since you can’t control or change all of them, that mindset will simply wear you down and consume all of your time and energy, yet produce no results. It’s a matter of focus.
This was never contended either. But different folks have different energy, and are fine reading the news everyday for example. Some don't read the news (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews). There is no one right way. No one's forcing anyone though.
> I did consider your example, but I don’t have enough information to make a determination one way or the other, and since you provided none, I dismissed the speculation out of hand.
I posed that hypothetical because OP implied they do not care about Harvard (or presumably other elite universities), but they do care about "more important" things like racism. However, elite universities like Harvard have complicated histories with institutional racism, segregated dorms, and admission scandals.
Either way, you're not going to get 10 millionaires just moving into an area with houses that are so cheap they ignore them as "too cheap" on a realty listing. Even if you're talking about an investment purchase and then they don't move in, themselves. You might have a property developer though, looking to create the next HOA hellscape.
This really isn't a good hypothetical.
I’m not an economist and there are countless reasons for that, but I can’t imagine that 10 millionaires in a community of 1,000 people would materially change life for the other 990 in the way that you’re suggesting.
Gentrification and unbalanced income strata are real things and real problems, but the 1% aren’t causing them simply by existing.
This hits the nail on the head. It's tautological to say "the problem of inequality is caused by there being rich people that cause inequality". It pins the blame on individuals rather than the system they exist within.
99% of people who hate billionaires wouldn’t care about a specific person as long as that billionaire wasn’t actively trying to screw over the rest of us in their attempt to win more points.
The average income and wealth is higher too.
> The existence of billionaires and millionaires negatively affects everyone else's standard of living via gentrification
Gentrification benefits property owners and is bad for renters. Believe it or not, bad neighborhoods have homeowners too and most of them would love for their bad neighborhood to become better. So it's not like the effects are uniformly negative. Even renters who are able to afford higher rents, or have rent-controlled housing, benefit from living in a safer, cleaner, more prosperous area. Their children's schools will have more involved parents, more funding.
The real issue with wealth inequality is the disproportionate amount of political influence the wealthy have. I have no problem with people being disgustingly rich as long as they don't use their money to influence laws.
Yea, I didn't even go down that path, but you're absolutely right--the fact that money and political power are trivially convertible (both ways) makes the problem even worse. Who doubts that the billionaire in my analogy and the town's mayor instantly become best buddies?
I guess the reason I make these distinctions is that many reactions that seem like they could be solutions to "gentrification", like running those rich boys outta town, or even something like rent control ... they just don't feel like they're really solving anything. It's an entrenched systemic problem, and the system is huge and interconnected. You can't fix it locally. We need to actually tax the rich. We need to actually enforce anti-trust and consumer protection laws. We need big taxes on properties number 3 through N that go toward subsidizing affordable housing ... or something to that effect. I'm sure others have better ideas than this too. But what we don't need is neighborhood signs that say "no rich people".
Claiming superiority on narrow conditions like Modern American middle-class-ness is still claiming superiority. I don't see how it is an essentially a morally better position.
Keeping with your analogy, we might similarly eliminate rent-seeking on prestige by banning legacy admissions and making applications more quantitative (i.e., test-based) and less subjective.
Except that no; prices would almost not budge at all. Each millionaire will buy 2, maybe 3 houses. But they will target the nice and expensive home; the price/demand for middle/low class houses will not change at all.
Same for car; the demand for Rolls Royce will increase and the price there might increase as well if they were being discounted because nobody was buying them. But they will not even look at the Toyota Prius and I don't see the car dealer there saying thinking "This billionaire will definitely buy all my Prisues, so I will increase their price". He will just shrug it off and keep selling his cars to the middle class whose purchasing power didn't move by an inch. The main difference he will see is that maybe the Rolls Royce dealer who could not afford a car himself because he was not selling anything will now be able to buy a Prius. So it's one more customer.
One one hand, there are people that love coding, or are not from the US, or have made themselves successful, or generally don't care about fitting into molds, etc. Think those Kevin-Kelly greybeards in the back sever rooms that know everything and don't really care about the pata-gucci. The guys that used to go to Def-Con and Burning Man when it had guns.
On the other hand, you have people that really really care about FICO scores, about planning for the future, about daycare ratings, about where to put the active cell in an excel sheet when you send it to a client, etc. These are the people in the front of the office who network like crazy and will jump to another company at a whiff of an extra 1/2 percent of bonus. They are the guys that see the eggshell white with Romani type, and think it's really something.
The world needs both types of people, full stop. We need scaffolders and detailers. But it's the second type of person that really cares about what Harvard is doing. It's okay to let those people hack away in a comments section and not have a clue as to what they are 'wasting' their time on. It's their boat, they row it like they want to.
I'm only 27 and I definitely have - basically every Harvard CS grad from the year I graduated from my state school makes at least $200k more than me a year if they're in the workforce instead of academia and has a significantly higher net worth as a result!
I don’t mean this as unkind, but Harvard is very hard to get into and very selective and state schools generally are neither. This often means the people that get in, other than legacy, are very capable people. State schools also have very capable people, but as a percentage it’s the vast majority of Harvard and the vast minority of state school students are equally as capable. This gives a leg up on the first jobs for sure - one, they’re likely to be more capable in general, and they have an achievement on their resume to prove it. Admission to Harvard IS an achievement in life.
But these advantages disappear quickly if you’re as capable or more, especially if you’re aggressive in locking in achievements and seeking better opportunities. After maybe 10 years into your career what school you went to matters almost not at all, and it’s entirely based on what you did with that opportunity. Many Harvard grads start strong due to the achievement on their resume then top out quickly in their careers because they’re just not very commercial, and many rely on their brand too much.
But you should -still- expect someone capable of getting into Harvard to be just as capable in their careers. That’s simply life. If it weren’t for Harvard, they would find other ways to differentiate.
The truth is, labor markets are not egalitarian. They reward people differently for different reasons, and their ability to compensate based on contribution is highly inefficient. That rewards people with achievements like a top school early when nothing else differentiates resumes. But it fades quickly, and it’s up to you to make a stronger resume if it matters to you.
But I think it shouldn’t matter. That was my point. Someone else doing better than you shouldn’t matter. What should matter is if you’re happy with what you’re doing yourself ignoring all other people. Anything else is petty, unhelpful, and at odds with how life and reality actually is.
OK but I don't think anyone would say I'm even close, since I didn't even get into any top schools (somehow people only talk about the few that got into top schools but didn't go. Seems like everyone got into at least one top school but me). What do I do? Where does that leave me?
> After maybe 10 years into your career what school you went to matters almost not at all, and it’s entirely based on what you did with that opportunity.
I don't know. I'm 5 years out and I'm just an SDE2/mid-level. Harvard CS (and yes I'm including that in the upper echelon with MIT and Stanford regardless of rankings because education isn't what's really rendered at these institutions as the original post argues) graduates from 2018/2017 are all staff and senior engineers at Google and FB making $200k more than me at minimum, or have YC funding because they were Senior engineers at Facebook years ago.
> and it’s up to you to make a stronger resume if it matters to you.
I'm genuinely unsure if that's even possible. I don't think anybody in this tier of humanity would consider a career that started with 3 years at Amazon good enough to differentiate me from anyone else.
> What should matter is if you’re happy with what you’re doing yourself
Why would I be happy if I'm going to be "behind" for the rest of my life, no matter how much effort I exert, and I'm going to be seen as lesser for it?
Who's "putting" the professors there? The entire thing seemingly hinges on the idea that Harvard's role in society is somehow intentional and planned, as opposed to emergent and organic. I just don't buy it.
The institution's stated objective may be the creation "citizen-leaders", but the influence Harvard has, and the harm this causes, is entirely predicated on our willingness to buy that narrative.
Make an argument that Harvard's importance and credibility is vastly overrated, go ahead. I'm fully on board with that. But don't go blaming the institution itself for it. There's a ton of organizations with similarly lofty goals and aspirations, but we don't consider them harmful. That's because the harm is coming from without, not within.
Harvard doesn't need to not exist for us to be able to ignore it.
At some point it doesn’t matter. It’s a self-reinforcing systemic effect now.
almost all of the political class having gone to these Ivys means Ivys have vastly more representation than anyone else.
I.e. there get-shit-done areas, and there are showing-off areas, with very different ruling classes in them, different problems too.
Now I'm at a somewhat well regarded startup and most of the people around me went to Cal States, Arizona State, or UC's.
I've seen some crazy stuff on the freeways and much safer driving on toll roads.
However, until utopia happens and we don't have to use cars or commute I'm thankful for the little improvements.
Generally police officers will ignore you if you're just going with the flow or slightly faster. It's when you start going a lot faster or weaving or being otherwise reckless that they start to care.
The world is flawed and imperfect and perfect things don't really emerge from it. Harvard is glorious. Our best and oldest (in the US) university is bad because it's not sufficiently egalitarian, and let's destroy it? It's an engine for our society and other universities have followed in its footsteps. Stanford, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, the Claremont schools, etc etc - none of these were in the original ivy league, all are imperfect to some extent in their admissions and embrace and fulfillment of egalitarian ideals. They are also glorious though. They make our country a dynamic, innovative, intellectually vibrant place and attract students from around the world. They absolutely are key to our (staggering) economic and cultural success (in the US).
Elite clubbiness is an unfortunate side effect of success, but it doesn't mean we should then intentionally obliterate the engine of that success out of distaste for the cose of it.
edit: Also their point on the curriculum being similar misses the fact that the standard for doing well differs. Barely learning some material is different from understanding it well. I've had the experience of taking various college math classes from a variety of institutions. There is a very large difference in the effort I had to put in to do well at a top school versus a middling school. This is of course related to my first point on the quality of students mattering as you simply cannot have the same bar given such different student populations.
My criticism of the article is that there's no alternative solution given. You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function . . .
To your point though, absent an implementation of "gate later", it's not clear to me that what the author would want would put you near the "dullest stars". There's no way Harvard (or any other Ivy+) would accept a "gate later" implementation that would give them the dullest of stars. The differentiators between folks with any non-zero chance of acceptance are already pretty small, and I don't think "allow everyone in" would be feasible as they would not have room to put all of the people who want to be there.
If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead.
What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?
> Really, it’s harder than this picture suggests, because many experiences are based on other students. If I want you as my project partner but you want to forget I exist, then something has to give.
It's actually a bit of a problem in other ways though. The school I teach at gets an alarming number of students coming in as pre-engineering who have dramatic math or literacy deficits and would be better served with a year or two at a cheaper-for-everyone community college (or a not-broken highschool, but that's way harder to fix) instead of slamming into their first couple technical classes and failing because they don't understand variables and/or don't have the reading comprehension for the course materials unless/until they finish a pile of remediation. Universities have a profit motive to encourage this, since having a student take two years of high-margin large service classes while paying for room and board, then never consume any lower-margin resources, is a financial win for the university.
If I grew up in this ideal, I'd be a bum. I was a lazy and arrogant teenager; my ideal path was to go "oh, sh*t, I need to work hard or I won't get into a good school"
I'm not saying our system is perfect (or even good). But it's easy to critique a system when you acknowledge exactly 0 of its benefits.
This is a bad comparison, because these are introductory math classes for first-year students who aren't math majors, used to satisfy distribution requirements or give math background for non-math-intensive courses. There's a placement system to decide what math class to take, probably at both universities, but here is Harvard's (2020-2021):
https://www.math.harvard.edu/media/Math-for-first-year-stude...
As you can see, first-year Harvard math or physics majors sometimes take Math 21, but more likely Math 23, 25, or 55. (Math 55 is weirdly fetishized, but that's another story.) These classes are significantly more rigorous than Math 1.
Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars.
OK, and? How does this change anything? You have to be a PhD to be a mathematician anyway.
I've become negatively polarized against this rigor fetishization, which serves exclusively to otherize normal folks in increasingly esoteric ways
I don't understand your objection. Comprehensive math training is useful in areas other than academic research math, and it's not like PhD programs erase or overwrite all math instruction from before you entered that program.
Some people absolutely disagree with this ideal. One argument against gifted classes is roughly "Those kids will do alright regardless of the classroom, so we should ignore them and focus resources on less gifted kids"
"Although they have petty captains, they obey them badly"
The rankings correspond reasonably to my intuition too, when I think of which have "elite" universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Think of the neural complexity required for an amoeba to navigate with flagella vs a fly to navigate with wings. Even the fly's complexity is dwarfed by, say, the neural complexity of an elephant's control of his trunk. And that pales in comparison to the neural complexity required to get a spacecraft into orbit.
Complex behavior requires complex systems and complex systems require the simplicity that hierarchies provide.
So, if anything, I'd say the one law of nature is that there are no laws of nature. Thus, no, there isn't always a ruling class. It doesn't have to be that way.
What happens if I reject that presumption? Why do we assume "millions of people" operating in the same social order is a good thing? Because iphones? Is that reason enough? Do we presume that having millions of people under the same social order is required to make advancements in medicine? It didn't take millions to build Linux or wikipedia, just a couple hundred to a couple thousand absurdly dedicated people.
Anyway, there are many counter examples of egalitarian and fluid societies throughout our many thousands of years of being speaking humans. David Graber's final book, I believe "Origin of everything," explores some of these. No, they didn't have iphones, but some of them lived so well that early American colonials would abandon everything they know to join the alien cultures. Must have been doing something right!
You get a commune that has no real power, off in the middle of nowhere, which dies out when the original generation involved does. It can't be hard to understand that systems which work for a few hundred struggle to work with billions?
> Anyway, there are many counter examples of egalitarian and fluid societies throughout our many thousands of years of being speaking humans. David Graber's final book, I believe "Origin of everything," explores some of these. No, they didn't have iphones, but some of them lived so well that early American colonials would abandon everything they know to join the alien cultures. Must have been doing something right!
I read that book, and just a nitpick, it's David Graeber and David Wengrow. I'd also add that those societies described in the book weren't just pre-industrial or pre-iPhone, they were in the literal stone age.
Maybe it didn't take millions of people to build those things, but it did take millions of people to create an environment in which building those things could be considered a productive use of time.
The people who built Linux and Wikipedia didn't build it just for themselves, and indeed neither Linux nor Wikipedia would survive (in their current form) if they were not useful to millions of people.
What are some of those examples you're thinking of that he mentions in the book?
A key feature of many early human organizational structures was flexibility and creativity. Maybe it's time to do some more experiments. The current structure doesn't really permit that, which is a shame.
Anyway some examples come from Native Americans. One of the arguments in the book is that this idea that social complexity necessitates inequity is false and that its origins are the meeting of Europeans and native Americans. People like Kondiaronk, as depicted by an explorer whose writings disseminated extensively, had deep critiques of the European system of organization, specifically it's focus on profit motive, its punitive justice system, patriarchy, and hierarchies. The enlightenment defense was to cast the egalitarian lives of the native Americans as naive, youthful, ignorant, undeveloped etc. Notice in this thread many doing the same - "sure they were egalitarian, they lived in the stone age!" The book rejects that social inequity is a requirement to leave the stone age.
"Ok but you need hierarchy once you leave society the size of a tribe of 200 people," nope not really, they demonstrate how Teotihuacan started with a rigid hierarchy and transformed itself into an egalitarian society, demonstrating that dense urban society doesn't require inequity and also demonstrating that we can have flexible social systems.
Anyway the book offers no solution, just reflects on three major losses to our global society that we should consider investigating further: the freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey arbitrary authority, and the freedom to experiment with fluidic social structures.
Imo the current social order has already broken down. There's a class of people on this earth that wield unfathomable resources (billionaires). Throughout human history I can think of only a few individuals that had that kind of power, and they at least were responsible for running empires lest they be torn apart suddenly by a mob. Yet today we have thousands. We also seem to have created simple artificial intelligence algorithms/hiveminds and propped them up as infallible and immune-to-ethics (you gonna blame Shell for turning a profit?), and are slowly letting them supplant our liberal democracies as our new rulers (through lobbying and the like) (try to start your own ISP in certain cities).
I feel like it's as valid to say "we just shouldn't try to encapsulate tens of millions under the same social order, it leads to suffering" as it is to say "in tribes there are no iphones." We don't really know, do we? We can't really experiment anymore, can we?
https://asknature.org/strategy/cooperative-herding-catches-m...
If anything, this link shows that operating effectively within a hierarchy has clear advantages to survival.
I don't myself believe that the question is relevant to social relations among homo sapiens, but it's better that people be aware of the variety of animal behavior.
That's ridiculous. There are certainly laws.
But I think OP meant more so "natural pressures" that cause things to more often than not to align certain ways.
Taking "law of nature" so literally is pretty dang useless.
There are lots of “laws of nature” we face today that people dare to hope can be changed, like war. I think peace is a good goal even if you could somehow prove it’s in our nature to fight.
If you're a smart and ambitious student, don't let your alma mater be the deciding factor in your life. It is true, you may have to work much harder than those that can coast on their HYPS-pedigree, but as the saying goes: You can't keep a good man down.
The anxiety of not getting accepted into a top school is mostly a juvenile phenomena.
Actually, that isn't what people want.
If your ideal is "what each child receives is what that child deserves" then the only inputs that determine what the kid receives are from the kid themselves. What is missing from that equation? Parents. One of the fundamental goals of almost all parents is help my kid. They want to increase the opportunity and resources their kid has regardless of that kids' potential relative to others or whether the kid deserves those extra resources in any general or moral sense.
This is just another way to think of Pinker's trilemma, which is one of the most insightful things I've ever read about human society:
"No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."
That’s a highly political view of “freedom”.
He's referring to the more general observation that parents want to take care of their kids as well as they can. But they do that in a strictly unfair way: they prioritize their kids over all other kids simply because they happened to have spawned them, a property the kid has zero control over.
Aren’t “path” and “track” essentially synonyms? And why wouldn’t there be advanced classes? Somebody who wants to become a tradesperson needs to know math, but doesn’t need the same level of advanced math that somebody who is interested in particle physics would need.
> Tracking is separating students by academic ability into groups...
Now, I'll concede there's a difference between interest and ability, but it will probably come out in the wash, as failure to keep up will typically result in a loss of interest
Uh... Sure you can? This is literally section 501(c)7; private clubs in general are exempt from federal income taxation.
https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2015/01/22/most-loca... https://www.pugetsound.edu/sites/default/files/file/1359_Fah...
and straight from the horse's mouth, the IRS:
> Typical organizations that may qualify for exemption under IRC section 501(c)7) are: ... Country clubs, ..., Yacht clubs
I benefited greatly getting this program, but would have never bothered to apply by taking GRE first (in my 30s, if I may add) otherwise.
Eliminating legacy admissions and ensuring that K-12 schools across the country are of uniform high quality (in particular in the STEAM fields, yes that includes Art) would do much to reverse this trend, along with reducing college tuition costs.
It's like wild salmon vs. farmed salmon - pampered students who never have to swim upstream don't develop the best qualities.
Harvard is just a pay to play gated community.
The goal of having an elite class is to make better collective decisions about how society should organize itself. Decisions are best made by people with the best information, and elites (regardless of any intrinsic merit) have better information. By virtue of being elite, they get better educations and more inside access to new information.
The classical way of doing this was through inherited privilege. Whatever intrinsic merit first-generation aristocrats may have had to win their position is mostly gone after a few generations, so for example 19th century English aristocrats had little genetic advantage over the average population. But they were selected at birth to receive the best educations and inside access to each other, so they made better decisions than if you chose random citizens in adulthood to put in charge.
Part of what Harvard does is to say "You are now an elite. You will shape the future of society." Most students take that seriously and try to become worthy of the challenge.
No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge. The closest natural experiment is societies that select leaders based on physical strength and courage. They seem to make fairly bad decisions.
This is a practice called 'sordition'. As evidenced by the fact it has a name and a Wikipedia article, it is not something you just invented. It was famously used in Athens and is how American juries are selected today,
I think I would support a revival of sordition. Perhaps we could start small, perhaps by selecting one representative for each state at random.
That answer sure does sound like the stuff of magical dreamworlds.
Whatever experiences maximize their potential is the province of families, not the stuff of society-paid education. It's not that it couldn't be provided by the latter, but the daunting expense means that it will never be funded to a level that maximizes on an individualized basis.
What would that require? One teacher for every 4 kids, maybe you could stretch it to 6 or 8. On top of that, a multitude of specialists to ensure that any special needs are addressed in an individually customized fashion to maximize the potential of every kid. In many districts, we can't get agreement that we should feed every kid, let alone agreement that there should be roughly one professional adult in total for every 2-3 kids.
> In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist.
Those concepts would absolutely exist, just under a different label (and maybe not even that), because kids at the very top of the range would be taking something that would be readily recognizable as the close equivalent of today's advanced classes.
The article's thesis is that the benefit of going to Harvard is mostly derived from just from having gone to Harvard irrespective of the education itself. That could accrue just from the credential, or from the enormous and powerful social and support networks that graduates benefit from.
The problem is that the current elites hate the people they rule over, and conspire with capital to rob everyone.
The dreamworld is not a classless society. But rather one where the leaders love those they lead and work for their betterment.
That being said, I’ve met enough Harvard and ivy types to have a low opinion. They’re no smarter than anyone else. These networks are powerful though. They will eventually collapse due to the crushing weight of their own incompetence and greed, but such corrections to the natural order take generational time.
I really hope we soon see innovation around education. When the entire corpus of human knowledge became available freely - surely we would've seen changes in higher education by now (if they were/are ever going to happen).
this lends credence to the idea that the top schools are simplest triaging the successful and do not create them, in general. Of course there are specific exceptions to this, such as Supreme Court Justices, but in general it seems to be true.
The paper (https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...) is ultimately flawed because it doesn't (and cannot) evaluate the simplest thing: look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with.
Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges".
In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition.
the stratification of society is an emergent phenomenon.
This completely misses the point because 95% of the people that apply do not get in. Please think of the rest of us!
Would the OP make the same argument about athletics? That 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo and 18-year-old Frankie Fatass, instead of being sorted and classified, should be put into the same soccer program?
Harvard is a nonprofit school, financially supported by the government in various ways. The standards are different. If Harvard wants to act like a business, then it needs to give up its nonprofit status, forsake government support, and pay taxes as a business.
Maybe humans are more like other eusocial animals, and things like merit and equality are a comforting charade.
> We should have a Marxist version of Goodhart’s law, something like:
>> When a measure becomes a target, the privileged always find a way to win.
One of the criticisms it made of the Obama Administration's cabinet was that it was far too heavy in choosing Ivy-League graduates. The book pointed out that the cabinet was racially / ethnically diverse, but because the vast majority of the cabinet was Ivy-League educated, it had all of the biases that come with an Ivy-League education.
I don't think Harvard is the problem: They are an organization that exists, and the selection criteria they use is to choose people who they believe will graduate. Granted, someone could argue that they should take more risks on applicants, but that's not my argument to make.
In part, the value of these institutions is that they are exclusive. Many people argue that the advantage of an Ivy League education, compared to an equivalent, less exclusive school, is the people you meet while on campus. This difference can only be maintained if the schools maintain their selection criteria.
I think the bigger problem is that far too many people / organizations put too much weight on an Ivy League education. It's generally unobtainable, even if you "check the boxes," because these schools get far more applicants than they can ever accept. Which is why I don't want to argue that they should change their selection criteria: Who is to say what is the best selection criteria? Everyone will try to argue that it should be changed in a way to benefit the person making the argument.
IMO: We need some new institutions to displace the Ivy League as the "best." Perhaps, if there are enough schools with differently selective admission criteria, everyone will be able to find a selective school that they can get into?
Because success, outside entertainment, is oft detectable through cultural mores; well ingrained and detectable by 18 years of age.
Guys can we move on?
(1) Learning, Knowledge, Understanding. Yup, for doing well in life, learning, ... is usually (being "rough" here) from somewhat useful to crucial. Some of the knowledge is explicitly taught in the education, some is taught outside that education, and still more an individual has to pick up, ..., discover, on their own. E.g., on my own I had to learn the fast Fourier transform and discover office politics.
(2) US Academics. The US K through college emphasizes learning. In an old joke the teacher has a full pitcher of knowledge, pours it into the student's empty pitcher, on tests has the student pour back what they have learned, and determines the grade from the fraction that comes back.
From this "emphasis" and "process", there can be a LOT of struggle, strain, lost sleep, hard work, anxiety, etc. for a student and their family.
(3) Surprise. After 4 year college, US academics no longer much cares what the student has learned and, instead, cares almost only about what the student can DO, especially in delivering new research results. For more, do well in such research and all the student did in education will be forgiven, forgotten, ignored, etc.
So, if want a degree from a famous research university, get a graduate degree, Master's and/or Ph.D. Generally admission to such university's graduate school is much easier than to their 4 year college -- also much cheaper. For such admission, doing well on the GRE (graduate record exam) can help. Having done well in an early career can help. Some research can help a lot more, really close the deal, giving the student admission, no tuition, and maybe some money for doing some ugrad teaching, work on some prof's research project, etc.
Summary: For a degree from a famous research university, go for a graduate degree and there emphasize research.
Or, what US research universities care about, more than nearly everything else, is in just one word research.
In my case, while in grad school, I picked a problem, for two weeks did some research, and found a solution, clearly publishable (later did publish the solution). Presto, bingo, magic, I was regarded as a star student in the department, and everything else about my work was irrelevant. I went ahead and did some dissertation research, also clearly publishable, while doing that work was beyond any criticism, had a shiny halo, was untouchable, got my Ph.D., and with great joy LEFT.
The OP mentions Harvard; I got into Princeton and Cornell but never applied to Harvard. Sure, going to any such university for any degree can involve more than just "research", but might want to critically evaluate the "more".
One more point: Research that finds mathematical solutions, mathematizes the subject, is relatively highly regarded. For that approach, a big issue is learning the math, but in grad school beware of advanced math courses: Commonly the teaching is poor and the hidden agenda is to set up a competition to filter the students. But if mostly know the math before the course, then can be 10 yards from the finish line in a 2 mile race, be by a wide margin the best student in the class, and greatly reduce the chances of being filtered. Yes, doing so well can cause some of the profs to resent you and become hostile.
With math, doing the learning before the class is relatively easy: Just get some of the best books, usually from famous authors, study the theorems and proofs, work the exercises, try to find intuitive views of the material, reasons for the particular definitions and theorems, and examples.
Beyond calculus, I'd suggest: Abstract algebra, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, measure theory, Fourier theory, differential forms, the Gauss, Green, and Stokes theorems, differential geometry, probability based on measure theory, and statistics based on that probability. Some good authors include Halmos, Nering, Coddington, Rudin, Royden, Breiman, Neveu, Cinlar. To boil it down to just two books to study carefully I'd recommend Halmos for linear algebra (Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces) and Breiman for probability.
The university was a place of learning, education, and becoming a better person. It was focused on the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Then it became noticed that smart educated people went to college, and so the idea then became if you went to college you to must be smart and educated.
Then because that was accepted as true many people saw college as the path to a better life. Then after WW2 because college was seen as the path to a better life the US Govt. decided that everyone should get the chance to go to college with the GI Bill.
Then college morphed from a place you went to learn to study and to understand to a place you go so you could get a job.
Then because that is why people were going colleges started optimizing as places to get a job.
Harvard became optimized for getting certain types of jobs, namely CEO, politician, etc, essentially seen as the jobs of "the elite". But remember for every person who went to Harvard and is now an overqualified CEO there are also 10 Andy Bernards out there.
So the whole purpose of the university and higher education has been gutted, as thanks to the introduction of the Business and Communications degrees you can actually be college educated while learning nothing of real value, or of beauty or science or anything that the traditional colleges existed to teach us.
As a final though I leave this article against Tulip Subsidies. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...
During the middle ages the universities were associated with the monastaries because those were the few places where literate people congregated.
Plus there were only 5 areas of study in the early university.
- Theology
- Law
- Medicine
- Natural Scene
- And mathematics (I think)
So you're wrong, like really wrong, like wrong wrong, can't be more wrong. But hey I'm sure if you go back to /r/athiesm you'll get some more good talking points.
Religious studies in other words. That was the purpose of the first universities, to educate religious brass.
8 Billion human beings cannot be jammed into the same exact university. It's as simple as that. Sorry for being reductive but that's the reality. Naturally, you have to have more universities. Naturally, some will be better than others.
The author tries pushing some marxist ideas about how everything can be exactly equal but even in a marxist utopia you are going to have some neighborhoods/schools/universities/hospitals that are better than others.
I also disagree with his point that gatekeeping should come as late as possible. That's how you get graduate students loaded down with debt who can't get a job in the field. Gatekeeping should come as soon as possible to allow the people who don't pass the gate the best opportunity to find some other path to succeed in.