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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Well... They probably do, I'd be surprised if they didn't.

But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted.

It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people.

Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?

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There's a study that concluded that Ivy League schools don't really add value (in terms of lifetime earnings) to non-black, non-latino, non-poor students.

Here's a summary: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...

Here's the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159

The study worked by looking at students that got in to a more- and less-prestigious school and chose the less-prestigious one.

In short, being good enough to get in to Harvard is what matters, not actually attending.

Being non-black, non-latino, and non-poor probably helps lifetime earnings, too.

...that's the point.

"The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics"

I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.

The hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.

At the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts.

It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.

In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (http://www.hmc.edu). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail.

edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.

Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too.

(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)

HMC academically is as strong as the Ivies in engineering fields. Not really a good school to make your point with.

I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence. But, if you want to go into politics Yale is a far better choice. Rich may be well educated, but it's got little to do with raw intelegence.

> I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence.

That's extremely funny if intentional, even funnier if not :)

My point wasn't really the amount of smart people that exist at either schools. It is more so that existence of smart people does not equal a more challenging or more educational experience.

Although I agree with you that the further you get in a field, the more likely a prestigious school will be better. But I would credit that to having a more direct relationship with professors. When you are actually helping a professor with their research, the quality of the research matters more than when you are simply being lecture by that same professor.

>It is more so that existence of smart people does not equal a more challenging or more educational experience.

Huh. I don't have any hard data, but I always thought the opposite. I mean, I didn't go to school, but I put a lot of effort into being around people who are better (at things I want to be good at) than I am, and I attribute much of my success to surrounding myself with people who are better than I am.

I mean, I agree about the second bit... my understanding is that undergrad at a prestigious school offers little contact with the (usually very good) professors (thus, my assertion that it's all about the quality of the other students.) - thus, grad school there, where you get more contact with the (very good) professors would be even better.

Perhaps I am unqualified to say, because I didn't go to school. On the other hand, I managed to learn enough without school to get a job that often requires a degree, so maybe I am qualified?

In my experience (Brown undergrad), literally every undergrad I know who wanted to do research with a professor has gotten to. And usually they had plans on working with specific people by their freshman or sophomore year. And this is in fields as varied as Sociology, CS, Chemistry and Comparative Literature. Though, this may not be a function of going to a prestigious school, so much as a school that has 2000 grad students and 6000 undergrads, so professors are forced to interact and teach undergrads.

I don't think that is the case in many engineering fields at least. A greater presence of smart people sets the bar that much higher for grades/tests/projects.

Most engineering courses are based on a curve. If the rest of the class is brilliant, it's significantly harder to compete and get a good grade.

the coursework may be the same, but your peers are smarter and more hardworking.

Which means that exams need to be much more difficult. When I was a grad student Teaching Assistant at Harvard we had a newly hired professor who'd spent the last decade at Cal Berkley. He decided to give the same midterm exam he'd given many times before at Berkeley. When we TA's saw the exam we politely told him he needed to change it or the whole class would ace it. "Nonsense!" he said, "Harvard students aren't that much smarter than Berkeley students." We had to write and administer a second midterm because everyone scored 98, 99, or 100 on his Berkeley test.

This is the problem with anecdotes: your experience seriously does not mirror my experiences with top colleges and UC Berkeley. I took several math classes at Stanford and had to repeat them at UC Berkeley, and they were significantly easier (coursework and testing) than the equivalents at UC Berkeley, even considering the fact that when I took the classes at Berkeley I had already covered the basic foundation of the material at Stanford.

If this was an exam for a freshman/sophomore course, I might believe it since lower-div classes at Berkeley have an exceptionally wide audience with non-uniform levels of prior mathematical experience. However, if this was an upper-div course, I highly doubt your anecdotal experience holds true in general. Source: majored in math at Berkeley, went to MIT for grad school.

This reads like one of the countless anecdotes about atheist professors that get bandied about Facebook.

Berkeley is a top school, and I don't think you'll find much of any evidence to the contrary.

I don't believe you. Who was the professor?

Depends where you draw the line. Compared to a public state school, the Ivy League course cover far more material faster in more depth, because the students are better prepared harder workers and can handle it.

Harvard has 4 levels of Multivariable Calculus, for example, whereas most schools have just 1. The 2nd-highest level is basically Real Analysis, except (a) it is more deep/accelerated than the actual Real Analysis class, and (b) it is only taught to first-years.

The highest-level class was designed for students who were expected to learn an undergraduate math degree curriculum "on their own time" and pursue more advanced topics in clads.

certainly, but those top notch academics are more relevant for graduate research than undergrad courses. with the swarm of ivy graduates going to work on wall st, I doubt the advanced botany course with a medalist in the field is as relevant as the name of the school.

I did go to an Ivy League school, and I didn't go for the top-notch academics, even though I was at the top of my class in my department.

And even if your reason was actually the top-notch academics, you still benefit very much from a strong old boys' network of professors and researchers.

I went to Penn, my sister went to Yale, and our mother went to Columbia and we all had very different experiences from what you describe here. None of us went for the "old-boys network" nor have we really seen that there is that much of one. Yes, there are a lot of monied alumni but I really dont believe that is what many of the students who want to go to top schools are thinking about.

We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.

"and the reputation"

"I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go."

That's what the old-boys-network IS. It's not literally people smoking cigars, it's the preferential treatment you receive for having the brand name on your degree.

No I dont think that's what it is. I wanted to go to Wharton because it is the most rigorous undergraduate finance program in the country. And that is why it has a good reputation.

As someone who works with someone who got an undergrad degree from Wharton, I seriously do not believe you. But I'll assume you are telling the truth - even if so, it certainly does not apply to 90% of Wharton's student body. By my co-worker's own admission, finance is all about prestige, and the primary reason he went to Wharton is because of the name and how it gets you into IB jobs, not because of its rigor. In fact, he didn't want to go to a rigorous school but liked Penn because it was more of a party school than other Ivies.

I'd like to add that there are about a dozen other concentrations at Wharton that are not related to finance. Most people at Wharton dont concentrate in finance partly because there are a lot of very douchey people, like your coworker, who do in an attempt to get rich or something. Most people at Wharton are there for the rigor. Your coworker went to Wharton for the wrong reasons and thinks everyone else did too.

Again, I'd like to point out how useless anecdotes are. Your arguments only reinforce that point.

Business is just as prestige driven as finance (management consulting, Fortune 500, etc.).

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

It's about recruitment. Every IBank and top tier consulting firm recruits heavily from the Wharton graduating class. That's what you're paying for.

You're also getting the opportunity (not guarantee) to get a top tier education - but that can be gotten anywhere. Study for the CFA tests if you really want to know finance. Go to Wharton if you want to get a job.

Was going to jibe about "high paying" job, but that's not really it. It's just any competitive placement benefits from active recruitment.

Would you say that electrical engineers from MIT benefit from an "old-boys-network"?

They must because that is the only reason anyone goes to a top school.

I do hope that is sarcasm. MIT has the reputation of giving a world class, rigorous, education. People who attend MIT attend it because they know they will have the opportunity to receive that education.

Any school that is capable of giving an education of similar quality has a similar reputation. Claiming that the point of an education from a school like MIT is the "old-boys-network" is in essence confusing the effect with the cause.

It is definitely sarcasm. I said that in reference to a conversation I had with someone elsewhere in the comments here about my education at Wharton.

Yes, in the sense that an EE degree from MIT is a heuristic of sorts. It's got some differing qualities, but at the end of the day that heuristic will make a difference for two otherwise comparable job applicants, say.

Konstantin Guericke, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now offers coaching and mentoring to students and would-be entrepreneurs. But because he's deluged with requests, he tends to give preference to students from his alma mater, Stanford's engineering school.

"I don't feel a Stanford student is better than another one," he said. But "since there are so many, I use that as a filter."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49465579

I think we need to separate out the term "old boys" from "network." One of the most valuable things you get from going to a top school, whether MIT, Ivy League, or otherwise - is exposure to a network. They're not necessarily the "old boys" you guys are picturing, with money and power and political connections, but the folks who are starting companies, doing the most cutting-edge research... if you go to a school like MIT, you're surrounded by people like this - and you'll be able to reach out to these people for the rest of your life. And this can be very useful... when you're looking for a cofounder, or a guest speaker in a specific field to talk to a group of students, or you want someone to pass on your resume at company X, for example. If you go to a lower tier school, no matter how smart and motivated you are, it will be much harder to forge the same kind of network.

So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?

The dirty little secret is to rank feeder schools vary highly in the admissions process. Few poor people send there kids to 30+k / year private high schools.

My experience makes me think otherwise. I didn't attend an elite university, but visited friends that did. I saw a disproportionate number of gifted and extremely hard working people. More so than at my college, which itself was highly ranked.

it doesn't matter what you saw there. the point of TFA is there are many equally (if not more) hardworking candidates that don't find their ways to these schools because of existing prejudices and non-transparent admission policies.

>So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?

If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.

Someone has to do the hard work of keeping the rich people rich. It's not easy.

Yeah, no. Did you go to an Ivy or any elite university? My guess would be no, because you're wrong.

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