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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> "lets all be poor"

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.

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It’s a similar problem to the scientific journals that extort scientists.

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-...

do you have a link to the "admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case"? That sounds very interesting. I found a report on the entire case but its near 300 pages long

This substack quotes some of the relevant bits: 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.”

What. The. Fuck!? I’m actually speechless.

Holy shit I hadn’t read the cert petition and hasn’t seen the quotes. I never believed the assertion that “all white people are racist” because I honestly thought the white people around me didn’t “see race.” This has been extremely eye-opening.

"All white people are racist" is a racist statement itself. And the Harvard admissions department is not representative of "white people".

I'm referring to that statement because it's something people say, hence the quotes. I'm not saying I agree with its full scope now. But I get where it's coming from more than I did before.

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."

I think it's a big (and likely incorrect) assumption that all of (or even a plurality of) the people making these comments working in admissions are themselves white.

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).

University employees are overwhelmingly white: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/28/black-adminis.... Over 75% in the mid level employee ranks, and over 80% in the administrator ranks.

I agree the reality hits harder than the theory. I imagined this statistical and detached balancing process, not this.

Well, that's not one conversation, except for

    “perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th”
    “Brown?!”
    “Heck no. Asian.”
    “Of course. Still impressive.”

those are selected comments from different chats.

Yes very much like showing up for a meeting and your defense attorney worked with the prosecutor and gets a case dropped after a conversation about golfing.

My kid is only in middle school and I recently been readjusting my opinion towards 'elite' colleges. Being from the Bay Area we have friends and family who graduated from Stanford and Cal and up until recently I thought those were good schools for my kid to set their sights on.

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.

Helps that Germany offers free college for everyone.

https://www.study.eu/article/study-in-germany-for-free-what-...

I totally agree that the legacy and nepotism needs to be dropped. But there's some caveats to consider:

* 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.

> but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.

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.

Sounds like you need a serious adjustment on your world view if you currently believe you don't have anything to hope for simply because you and your 1500 SAT score didn't get into an elite school.

This isn't what the rest of these comments would indicate (which say that people that get into top schools are fundamentally more qualified and intelligent than people that do not)

Your comment is the only one in this thread that uses the word "fundamentally." The other comments I've read suggested that school can be an indicator of talent/diligence/etc. especially in the absence of a lot of other signal. It's also true that Big Law and Big Management Consulting are pretty educational pedigree focused especially for new grads but that's not everyone.

OK, but it's a pretty big indicator, and apparently justified in being so because the people at top schools are just that much better than people like me.

I think you're literally the only person on this thread making statements like that.

I don't think so? I think I'm just surfacing the implication. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it appears like the pretty clear implication of defending Harvard and elite schools is to believe that the rest of us should remain in a lower social caste, forever, and that we deserve it because of meritocracy.

I have very little direct experience with Harvard but do have a lot of experience with grads from other East Coast Ivies and related schools--other liberal arts colleges, seven sisters--and have rarely encountered that type of school-centric snobbery except maybe in jest or football rivalry.

"Thanks, I'm fixed!"

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.

> there's schools just as good, if not better, than the Ivies

You know that and I know that... I just wonder if HR knows that.

Those aren't very good caveats, imo.

> * 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.

To a Northern European, this is all very weird. Especially once you bundle in the sports business..

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.

For this reason there's a pretty good argument to be made that legacy and donation status shouldn't be taken into account when determining admissions. Ditching standardized testing, however, is going in the wrong direction.

Why does it matter if your kids go to "elite" colleges or not? They're probably going to be successful in their own way anyway with those stats. shouldn't your concern be the objective success they achieve, not their attendance of an "elite" institution?

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.

Follow the discussion. It probably shouldn't matter, but it does. Very much so.

But it doesn't. 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.

Maybe it does help if your goal is to attend a top 3 medical or law school, and then go on to equally impressive practices after, or if you want to go into very very high level investment banking or something. It's shouldn't be a terribly controversial statement to say that if you want to be one of the top in the world in a given field you probably need to go to one of the top universities. Even then you'll find plenty of people from University of Whatever in those classes.

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.

I... don't think that anybody is claiming that literally every single individual who went to Harvard is successful. Surely you see that this discussion is about trends and aggregates?

I worked at Stanford admissions many years ago. Over 15% of every incoming class are students admitted due to nepotism.

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.

Why would Ivy schools pass your children over?

Follow the Recent Lawsuit against havard admissions for a clue ;)

Nobody ever openly talks about it, but the East Coast Ivies are still heavily WASPy, and it's largely due to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register

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.

Do you have a source? I’ve never heard of this, and I would be quite surprised if anyone I know or knew well at any elite school was on this list.

I'd be very skeptical. I know a ton of people who went to East Coast Ivies. Many are not from the East Coast. Many are not literally WASPy and I can't imagine most of them being in a Social Register--and it's not like I especially have known an out of the mainstream crowd.

People don’t talk about it because they don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. We act like the descendants of English/Dutch north-easterners, who profiteered from slavery (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/04/slavery-probe...) are in the same group as German immigrants who came to the Midwest as indentured servants or Italian immigrants who came here in the 20th century. The false concept of “white people” totally obscures the fact that there are different groups, with different histories, origins, and cultures, who are very differently situated.

>but the East Coast Ivies are still heavily WASPy,

>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.

This is utter shite nonsense dude. I know literally hundreds of ivy alums. Pretty sure none of them are in the register. Social register is barely relevant for many years and of no consequence to Ivy league admissions.

Because there are far more children who check all those boxes than there are slots at the Ivies?

Ivies have about a 5% admission rate, and they probably have a much higher percentage of valedictorians than the general population.

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

This is why I wrote in another comment that making it about Harvard somewhat muddies the discussion because Harvard probably is more likely to admit at least a slice of students that are far more about pedigree than anything else.

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.)

There's a great Veritasium video about this. The idea is that if there are far more applicants than positions, then even if luck plays a small role - say, 5% of the outcome - successful applicants are overwhelmingly likely to be extremely lucky as well as highly qualified. Since so many people are close to that 95% competence factor, only the luckiest - by whatever metric of "luck" you like - can succeed.

Sounds like the hiring policy of one of my VPs from a job long ago (during a recession)

(As he dumps half of the hundreds of résumés into the recycle bin)

“Unlucky people don’t work here”

Because higher education is objectively not a meritocracy. The mere existence of legacy admissions proves this.

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.

That's simple: Ivy schools are mostly for $$$ to schmooze with other $$$, with a thin veneer of actually talented kids that had to pass insurmountable odds to get in. The talented kids are there to make the $$$ think they're also talented and had to pass the same rigorous criteria. Smoke and mirrors all of it.

People parrot this point a lot but it doesn't make any sense. The average SAT/ACT at the Ivy's are near perfect, the number of mediocre rich kids paying their way in is a small fraction of the student body.

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.

Yeah, but the money paid by that small fraction of the student body is colossal.

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.

All the schools lie about their average test scores to boost their rankings(source, president of northwestern when I took his econ class). We have no idea what the ivies averages are.

This smacks of "once my kids didn't get in I decided these schools weren't that great actually."

First, I’m sorry for your children.

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?

> 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.

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