Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

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The weird thing for me is the number of times the word "prestige" turned up in this thread. I don't remember once hearing this word used 25 years ago in high school / college / job pipeline in my friends circle. And some did go onto Ivies, FAANG, HF partners in 20s & retired by 30s, etc.

But it's unmissable how much it is drilled into kids heads now. On some of the job forums I frequent, every other week some kid is asking about "the most prestigious [college / degree / masters program / banking job / bank / team within bank / type of fund / specific fund / specific team within fund].

What's crazy to me is these kids are targeting such a narrow narrow funnel they might as well be asking about "how do I become a quarterback for a team that has won a Super Bowl in last 3 years". Like good luck kid, 1 of those seats opens up per decade (if at all), and theres 100 of you asking about it every week.

To me the whole point of a good college education is that there are thousands to millions of jobs in the field to go after. Why on earth would you fixate on a role that is basically 1-in-a-million?

Part of it is clearly the mentality of kids who have been "on the tracks" since their teens, and having made it thru a 99% rejection college admissions process think they can make into this seats. Which is mathematically literate since even limiting just to Ivys there are 1000-10,000s of you looking for finance jobs each year. So the 1-seat-per-decade fever dream is like a 99.99% to 99.999% rejection rate.

I don’t know if it’s more pronounced now, but I do think it was prevalent before. It may just be a cultural artifact of certain terminology being in the zeitgeist.

Decades ago I remember talking to a classmate about what college we’d go to. They couldn’t fathom why I decided on a “lesser” school when I was accepted into a more prestigious one. When I asked why they thought the prestigious school was a better choice, the only answer was “everyone just knows it’s better.” Now they didn’t use the word “prestige” but the same status-climbing mentality was still nebulously present. So I don’t necessarily think it’s a new phenomenon.

To your point though, in the book “Excellent Sheep” Ivy League students were queried about what kind of people they would like to be. One student stood up and said something to the effect of “we already know who we want to be. We’re the type of people who get into Ivy League universities.” I think that speaks to how much of one’s identity is wrapped up in achievement in western culture.

>To me the whole point of a good college education is that there are thousands to millions of jobs in the field to go after. Why on earth would you fixate on a role that is basically 1-in-a-million?

The view of college as a means to vocational success is also a cultural change. Previously, students were more likely to say their goal in college was to “develop a philosophy of life.”

Besides grad school, ivys largely produce students who predominantly go into a handful of fields: tech, consulting, law, or medicine. That’s even when they explicitly have different, social-status goals during school, like working for a non-profit. To me, that speaks to the fact that many are still on the “prestige” track.

I wouldn’t blame only western culture given the demographics of ivies now

It’s a good point. Buy I also wonder if there’s a sampling bias: those from other cultures who attend western universities may be more likely to have more westernized values?

Maybe elites values are the issue regardless of western or eastern bound

Id agree with the caveat that “elite” may be the status that anybody, regardless of culture, are drawn towards. Maybe we need a tighter definition of what you mean?

Have you considered that maybe metriculative education systems, and the prestige- and status-seeking behaviors they invoke, aren’t exclusively Western at all? You might give “The Scholars” a read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scholars_(novel) tl;dr (it really is quite long): Famous/influential Qing-era comedy novel about “successful” scholars in the Chinese imperial education system, with much of its humor revolving around their prestige- and status-seeking behaviors. (And lots of fart and poop jokes.)

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