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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

#61

Post by bsder »

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…

> 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.

Actually, I suspect that most teachers discourage their children to follow in their footsteps ...

And your points about doctors, olympians, academics, etc. have a common point:

Large, up front expenditure of money.

A child of a steelworker simply isn't becoming a doctor short of a very, very small number of paths (generally involving military service).

A child of a high-school teacher simply isn't becoming an Olympic figure skater. The monetary investment is far too titanic.

Engineering used to be one of the few fields where you could transition from blue collar to white collar even if you were a child from a poor family. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be very true, anymore.

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

#62

Post by Ar-Curunir »

scarmig wrote: post #54
fighterpilot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?

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

#64

Post by rkk3 »

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…

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

Same. I think they are hoping Biden will put more money into public schools and stop preferential tax treatments for the large endowments.

> 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.

Tom Cotton... Harvard University BA , JD

You are right that it fits the public narrative & rhetoric, but many (perhaps most) of them went to elite schools. It is probably just posturing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cotton

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

#65

Post by jiofih »

paulpauper wrote: post #28
jhayward wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It not that top colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on standardized tests Oh, my. This is such a straight-textbook example of not seeing systemic bias.

Generations ago, elite colleges had quotas preventing or discouraging certain groups from applying. Those barriers have been removed. As it turns out, selecting for intelligence yields more for endowments and other benefits than selecting for prestige or lineage. This may not be completely fair, but is more fair than the old way.Tons of people apply to these schools. The SAT is still a useful despite being an imperfe…

“Selecting for intelligence”. You have the answer under your nose and can’t see it.

You’re not selecting for “intelligence” when the barriers that were in place for 200 years are what define it.

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

#66

Post by smlss_sftwr »

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.

Same with the UC system, if you look at the Asian/Asian-American demographic it's in some cases close to double that of comparable non-race blind institutions. When I was going through the college application process in my day, the unspoken Asian/Asian-American quotas for top private institutions were accepted as a given rule of the game which led to some pretty vicious rivalries among my peer group (whether accurate or not, there was a notion that our district was allocated a sub-quota of the overall quota, so it was perceived to be a zero-sum game as to who would get HYPSM offers each year). Even if the recent court rulings weren't in their favor, it's heartening to see newer cohorts of Asian-American applicants start to challenge the rules directly instead of solely focusing on their internal competition

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

#67

Post by mc32 »

devnonymous wrote: post #59
namesafe77 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

I think that’s a bit facile. When you look at other traditional cultures, or unmodernized cultures offspring still likely follow their parents’ footsteps, but that doesn’t mean those are caste systems. People are permitted to pursue alternatives and aren’t forbidden.

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

#68

Post by LudwigNagasena »

It’s time to break up the education system from all the extracurricular fluff. The universities are fostering identities around themselves: students join debate teams, sports teams, religious groups , orchestra, etc under the aegis of their universities and attach their personal identities to these things.

To me personally it seems kind of ridiculous. What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you want to play in an orchestra. You can’t access an orchestra (there are seven of them in Harvard!) of any of your local universities. You can’t even join a university gym that probably has far cheaper fees than any other gym in your area. You want to take classes in Shaolin Kempo Karate? We are sorry but you can’t because you didn’t pass “holistic” assessment of your personality by Harvard. What a weird situation where your whole social life as a young adult completely depends on assessment of your personality by gerontic professors who need to fill some quotas.

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

#69

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

scarmig wrote: post #54
fighterpilot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a magnet school in Virginia, often ranked the top high school in the US. Admissions is (or was) based mostly on an admissions test, with a smaller portion based on middle school grades. In recent years, the student body was 70% Asian, 20% White, and the rest other minorities. Despite literally decades of trying to increase percentages of Black and Hispanic students at the school with outreach programs and tutoring, percentages have never exceeded single digits.

So what did the school board do? They scrapped the admissions process altogether, in favor of a "holistic" one [1]. Lesson? Be careful if you're in a minority group that over-achieves your population demographics, because you will be punished for it.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...

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

#70

Post by an_opabinia »

zamfi wrote: post #39
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…

Also, what is this “has become” language for? It implies that the this elite group is more self-reinforcing than it used to be, but there’s no evidence for that. Harvard’s 1940s admission rate of 85% was certainly not a more meritocratic time. The ratio you ask for is almost certainly decreasing over time, not increasing, right?

Admissions rates mean a lot less than people think they do.

Meritocracy - what you’re really saying is, the most qualified people get to do the thing with the scarce stuff - has risen.

Anyway, historically, if you felt wronged by an educational institution, you made your own schools.

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