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It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

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

#51

Post by graeme »

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…

It’s because for cultural reasons US people ascribe elite status to precisely those ten colleges. Or T14 in some cases.

If the US ascribed sainted elite status to the top 100 colleges to the top 100 colleges, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. By contrast in Canada if you went to UBC, McGill or UBC people assume you are smart.

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

#52

Post by neom »

Used to have this argument regularly with executives of startups I've worked for who had worked in more "traditional" industries. The number of times I've had to interject around "pedigree" being "useful" is.. sad. (Most)Everyone I've hired from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, etc have been the worst performing, and the most far behind in relevant skills. RIT, Rutgers, etc, waaaay far ahead. It got to the point where I started to move those people to the bottom because the curriculum they studied was so dated most of the skills became irrelevant; I don't need you to set up some complex excel spreadsheet that shows me the KPIs, and only you know how to update it, I need you to know how to set up mixpanel. I don't need you to program Java, I need you to set up k8s, etc. However, more importantly, these grads(recent or not) often come with an attitude of knowing, vs an attitude of learning.

Interestingly, all the "pedigree" obsessed folks who (all) graduated from ivy league schools went on to found one of the most mediocre and poorly focused VC firms I've seen.

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

#53

Post by ozim »

retrac wrote: post #24
jedberg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was just going to look for data on plumbers and carpenters. One common theme to all these jobs is that they tend to be quite stable, and require a life-long set of skills. My father did metalwork before moving to an office job in the civil service. He was the son of a die pressman. Who was the son of a blacksmith. Dad taught me how to weld and cut and so on before my teens. My intellectual interests went to math an…

I went into software dev while my father was a construction worker.

He is really proud of buildings he was working on and that he was able to build things with his own hands.

Even though I have an engineering degree and work in totally different environment I think that something I took from him is that I am really happy with the systems I have built and ability to create things on my own.

I did it with keyboard while he did it with hammer.

So I don't think it is "cartels" it is still a lot of what you experience in your childhood. If your parent is a dentist he will talk about that and you won't have problem to understand things in that area, maybe you will visit his practice and be able to play with the tools even. Well it still is some kind of upper-hand but not every child can have the same exposure to dentistry and I am fine with that.

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

#54

Post by scarmig »

fighterpilot wrote: post #22
b9a2cab5 wrote: post #14

> 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…

What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. It appears to be collusion either of the sort discussed in the article or the informal sort where each college copies their competitors' quotas.

College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.

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

#55

Post by wolverine876 »

What is the author's thesis? I skimmed and read and re-read, but didn't figure it out.

It's well known that elite universities are elitist in their admissions and have over-large endowments. And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different. And it's well known that the rest of the U.S. educational system is underfunded.

> Sen. Tom Cotton, of all political leaders, suggested taxing private colleges with large endowments, and redirecting funds to vocational training.

It's not a surprise. Cotton and his party see Ivy League universities as institutions of the political opposition, whom they attack and want to punish and diminish.

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

#56

Post by LatteLazy »

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."

Were harvard required to accept 40% of applicants at some point? (Google fails me)

I was part of an experiment where the physics department at my uni admitted everyone who applied. Even those without the required prerequisites. Most of the "extras" dropped out or transfered or failed etc. But about 20% graduated.

I think in one way this proved the normal application system was mostly effective. But it also gave people chances they never would have had. I was insulted (I'd got my grades!) initially but it taught me something about opportunity. Maybe we'd be better doing this everywhere?

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

#58

Post by rkk3 »

fighterpilot wrote: post #22
b9a2cab5 wrote: post #14

> 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…

What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. It appears to be collusion either of the sort discussed in the article or the informal sort where each college copies their competitors' quotas.

They have been honing the tactics for 100 years now, originally developed to exclude the Jews from WASP Universities.

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

#59

Post by devnonymous »

namesafe77 wrote: post #29
jedberg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thats Indian Varna system right there.

An underrated comment this.

For those who don't know, the Varna system, also known as the caste system has long been justified as the 'natural order' of a scholar's child being a scholar, a warrior's child being a warrior, a tradesmen child being a tradesman and the lowest class of a menial worker's child being a menial worker.

The fact that so many are willing color the discussion with - observable trends seem to suggest this is a natural fact of life is only elementary is both disgusting and unsurprising.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

wolverine876 wrote: post #55

What is the author's thesis? I skimmed and read and re-read, but didn't figure it out. It's well known that elite universities are elitist in their admissions and have over-large endowments. And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different. And it's well known that the rest of the U.S. educational system is underfunded. > Sen. Tom Cotton, of all political leaders, suggeste…

[deleted]
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