Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiddencost | Hacker News Reader

At that time they were also incredibly exclusive and mostly the rich.

Yea, and jobs that selected by university degree wanted to implicitly select for class

Making the path to go to a university more accessible is admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy designed to enforce its implications on universities was always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning universities into dysfunctional and corrupt quasi-businesses, and not really causing a significant de-stratification of job opportunities on balance at all

And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools, which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a high federal level.

Yes, like I said before, this hasn't de-stratified the job market. Jobs that want to select applicants by class can find plenty of ways to do so easily

E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't been subsidized, selecting among universities for especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones, baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the interview process, etc

I think that's effectively what a lot of people here are arguing they should be. You're not going to have cheap and quality research institutions (except via financial aid/loans). You can imagine different systems--and they exist to some degree in Europe. It's presumably not a terrible system but it probably does tend to be more exclusive.

You mean if you are wealthy you can afford the best education available and that is a broad liberal arts curriculum.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com