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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

#81

Post by barry-cotter »

bsder wrote: post #61
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 expe…

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

This wasn’t true in Ireland in the 70s or 80s, a far poorer country than contemporary America. The US system of funding higher education has many, many problems but not allowing smart people to study more is not among them. If you can get admitted to medical school you will get a loan to cover the costs.

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

Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever, is the child of a middle school principal and a police officer. Tiger Woods is the son of an infantry officer. Money is not the limiting factor on more people becoming elite level athletes. It’s some combination of talent and insane, deluded commitment.

> 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.

The average US college graduate has $35,000 in debt. Engineering is one of the fields where your college matters least. More people attend college than at any time in US history.

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

#82

Post by tedunangst »

graeme wrote: post #51
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…

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.

Tough break for the Berkeley grads widely assumed to be dumb idiots.

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

#83

Post by rkk3 »

tootie wrote: post #77
rkk3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Uni…

On that note, the liberal cry of student loan forgiveness will overwhelmingly favor people who went to expensive private colleges. Taxing big endowments seems pretty senseless and doesn't create any positive incentives either. More support and less stigma against state schools would probably do the most good.

> the liberal cry of student loan forgiveness will overwhelmingly favor people who went to expensive private colleges.

True, but you can be expensive & private & not be elite (most of them are not by definition).

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

#84

Post by thomastjeffery »

s5300 wrote: post #72
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #68

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…

You essentially want institutions to bend to your will? Good luck with that... Why don't you go out and build from the ground up/front money to building a place solely for those "just interested in trades"

They essentially want institutions to be less involved in their community and social circles. Why should educational institutions be allowed to monopolize social groups in the first place?

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

#85

Post by barry-cotter »

nradov wrote: post #73
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…

So then the smart choice for any applicant would be to select whichever race checkbox on the form gives the greatest advantage. Since race is an artificial social construct with no clear objective definition there's nothing wrong with hacking the system to your advantage. Or just leave it blank.

They’ll just look at your family name and make an educated guess based on school demographics and your hobbies, or look you out or parents up on social media. They’re not stupid. They know who they’re discriminating against

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

#86

Post by threatofrain »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #62
scarmig wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f...

Asians are remarkably vulnerable to dying by police. They are also extremely under-represented in the police force, unlike black Americans. In the Bay Area, police officers are paid very well. These are stepping stones to middle class membership.

Also, discussions of racism in education may just completely exclude Asians, as if they aren't even worth mentioning even once.

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

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

#87

Post by obstacle1 »

neom wrote: post #52

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…

Maybe the problem is you're hiring CS/engineering students to "show KPIs" or "set up mixpanel" or "not program"? I can't imagine any competent student from those disciplines, never mind a student from a top tier school, being happy at any kind of job like that. Especially if they were sold a job that would use their full abilities. Sounds like a recipe for otherwise talented people half-assing your job while looking for a new one, resulting in you thinking they suck rather than just don't care about doing trivial stuff.

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

#88

Post by minikites »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #68

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…

>You can’t access an orchestra

Maybe we could fund the arts more easily if we properly taxed the billionaires in our society. Harvard can afford it, there's no reason we can't afford elsewhere in our modern era of unimaginable wealth and plenty. We instead find it preferable to allow some people to hoard that wealth and plenty like fantasy dragons in caves instead of using it for the benefit of all of society.

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

#89

Post by ugh123 »

Wasn't able to read past the first paragraph due to paywall, but the first 2 sentences stuck out:

> Power in the U.S. flows through the gates of the Ivy League and a very small tier of other top universities. These institutions set and sanction the boundaries of knowledge, including what kinds of political and social views are welcomed in prestige cultural spaces.

Is that really the case anymore? If the last year has shown us anything, its that technology has further empowered grassroots ideas and activism, and that technology companies themselves are furthering their own influence in politics and knowledge (the free flow of information that is true and not true) way beyond what influencers in academia alone can do right now.

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

#90

Post by barry-cotter »

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…

> And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different.

No less elitist though. The idea of a selective college is elitist. The more selective, the more elitist. All the progressive talk is cant.

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