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It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

chronicle.com

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Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#11

Post by sokoloff »

> Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.

What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that academics raise academics, doctors doctors, Olympians Olympians, teachers teachers, etc.

It’s equally unsurprising that the ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families themselves pursue such a similar path and achieve similar outcomes. I’m an engineer and my spouse a scientist. Our kids have commensurately higher chance to pursue one of those or a closely related field due to exposure and biases.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#12

Post by bradleyjg »

There is a large supply of scholars and teachers ready, willing, and able to work. Public universities, colleges, community colleges, and HBCUs have for decades been starved. The Biden family understands public education, and Jill Biden is an educator. With something like a Works Project Administration program to bring arts and sciences education to Americans, the administration could restore democratic education in the U.S.

This makes the mistake of accepting that college is about education. It isn’t. If it were those that barely graduate college and those that barely flunk out would have about the same outcomes, having learned about the same amount. They have very different outcomes because college is about the endless treadmill of credentialism.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#13

Post by sokoloff »

tedunangst wrote: post #9
graeme wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either it would have to expand its undergrad programs, or student quality (as Harvard measures it) would decline. Joseph Heath has a very interesting article comparing US elite schools (tiny undergrad program) and Canadian elite schools (massive undergrad programs, bigger than Ivy League) http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...

I've seen this before, and I think it's ridiculous to assume that there's some arbitrary cutoff about top 10 colleges. Why is not percentile based? For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any way? Rephrased, what if we instead c…

That’s in the same article where they compare the value of an endowment (measured in dollars) against the GDP of three random countries (measured in a different unit: dollars per year [per country]). Analytic rigor is not high.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#14

Post by b9a2cab5 »

> recirculating resources among the most exclusive and wealthy while chanting social-justice keywords

Indeed, Harvard aggressively defends its admissions program as "holistic" while rating Asians as having lower personal ratings that they define as measuring "likeability", "courage", and "kindness" [1]. You might ask yourself how an institution which claims to be anti-racist exhibits behavior of the opposite kind.

[1]: https://nypost.com/2018/10/19/harvards-own-study-reveals-uni...

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#15

Post by fighterpilot »

tedunangst wrote: post #4

What would happen if Harvard were required to accept 40 percent of all applicants as before? I think it would be pretty amusing if they got 50000 applicants, admitted 20000, and then said "guess what Cambridge, we're building 200 new dormitories, here, there, and everywhere."

It could easily do that, but its status and signaling value would be negatively impacted.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#16

Post by gowld »

sokoloff wrote: post #13
tedunangst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this before, and I think it's ridiculous to assume that there's some arbitrary cutoff about top 10 colleges. Why is not percentile based? For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any way? Rephrased, what if we instead c…

That’s in the same article where they compare the value of an endowment (measured in dollars) against the GDP of three random countries (measured in a different unit: dollars per year [per country]). Analytic rigor is not high.

It's interesting to note that Harvard could fund an entire country for a year.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#17

Post by ttul »

sokoloff wrote: post #11

> Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families. What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that a…

You likely don’t realize that your kids will also have an easier chance at succeeding because of other privileges they enjoy, aside from the merits of having intelligent and educated parents.

Take a similarly educated family who happen to live in Gaza, for instance, and it’s obvious that the children will have a different set of opportunities available to them.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#18

Post by poopypoopington »

tedunangst wrote: post #4

What would happen if Harvard were required to accept 40 percent of all applicants as before? I think it would be pretty amusing if they got 50000 applicants, admitted 20000, and then said "guess what Cambridge, we're building 200 new dormitories, here, there, and everywhere."

Or why do they have to be in Cambridge? Why not expand in Las Vegas or Houston or something?

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#19

Post by jedberg »

sokoloff wrote: post #11

> Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families. What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that a…

From the NYT:

Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7 times as likely to have the same job as their fathers. [0]

From the General Social Survey[1]:

If your father was a legislator, you are 354 times more likely to be drawn to that career, too. Kids whose father was a doctor are 23 times more likely to follow in his footsteps. If your father was a lawyer, you’re 17 times more likely to become one, as well.

Jobs in the trades figure into these statistics, as well.

- The sons and daughters of plumbers are 14 times more likely to pursue a job in this field.

- The sons and daughters of electricians are nine times more likely to pursue a job in this field.

- The sons and daughters of carpenters are five times more likely to pursue a job in this field.

And, maybe it’s all that brushing and flossing – but the sons and daughters of dentists are 13 times more likely to become one, too.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/learning/will-you-follow-...

[1] http://gss.norc.org/About-The-GSS

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#20

Post by bradleyjg »

Causality1 wrote: post #10
jlund-molfese wrote: post #5

https://outline.com/YAPKuj Non-paywalled link

I wonder what the deal is with such a large percentage of submissions being paywalled sites. Do the submitters have subscriptions to everything and just don't realize? Does everybody reading HN have anti-paywall extensions installed? Sure there's always the archive.is link but someone has to see the article in the first place.

Maybe content that has a reasonable revenue stream supporting it is just better.
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