Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 379 posts

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

#221

Post by extra88 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #139
wolverine876 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. What does that mean? By that definition, everything selective is 'elitist', including my high school wrestling team. By non-elitist, we generally mean it's not biased in favor of the people who are already in society's elite. Some top colleges now admi…

> Some top colleges now admit much more economically and ethnically diverse students. Yes, there are lots more black and Hispanic students than before, and since the universities refuse to share the data we can’t be sure that this increase in diversity mostly means more children of Nigerian doctors and Colombian lawyers, mostly paying full international student fees but that’s the way to bet. Regarding economic diver…

> Selecting by standardized test scores would result in a substantially less socially elite student body than the current system. A more Asian one. Stopping that is why there’s a movement to get rid of the SATs.

Except the most elite schools are the ones that are clinging to keeping standardized tests in their admissions processes, they only dropped it for the incoming class because of the pandemic.

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

#222

Post by zumu »

rkk3 wrote: post #211
krastanov wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? I do not really get what you mean.

They are arguing that elite institution's goal is to prepare entry into polite society not to provide a liberal education. "A finishing school is a school for young women that focuses on teaching social graces and upper-class cultural rites as a preparation for entry into society" [1] "a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of values, eth…

> They are arguing that elite institution's goal is to prepare entry into polite society not to provide a liberal education.

Not quite what I'm getting at. My point is more that the value proposition of the undergraduate programs of Ivy Leagues is partly the elite social circle you buy into.

Secondly, some of these ideas of "fixing" Ivy League admissions would just send those circles elsewhere, because rich families send their kids to schools with the children of other rich families.

This tight coupling of social and economic class is the real issue and radically changing a few schools' admission policies isn't going to dismantle that.

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

#223

Post by zumu »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #180
rkk3 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but a substantial portion of undergrads in these institutions are from lower middle class or lower (economically) backgrounds. "69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% American Families" [1]. So the bottom 80% makes up 30% of Yale. Thats quite the under representation. > donations to get in" has not been a thing in recent history if ever Did you miss the Varsity Blues scandal? Official donations are…

> "69% of Yale students come from the highest-earning 20% American Families" [1]. So the bottom 80% makes up 30% of Yale. Thats quite the under representation. This is still very different than the image painted by your GP, at least in my mind.

I must have misrepresented my opinion then. My thesis lies not in the absence of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds but in the clustering of students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds and the value in exposure to such circles.

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

#224

Post by xenihn »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #159
rejectedandsad wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is irrelevant. The degree to which some people state the importance of this is extremely insulting to Asians like me that went to state schools that are not terribly selective.

I am an Asian who went to a state school and I don't think it's irrelevant. Regardless of Harvard's prestige giving a whole class of people lower "personal" ratings because of their race is racism, pure and simple. I even see startups like Canvas/Jumpstart [1] that explicitly allow recruiters to filter applicants by race. I don't know how this isn't illegal and I hope someone sues them. I took a look at your post his…

you can make 300k at facebook or google without a degree at all

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

#225

Post by zumu »

rkk3 wrote: post #181
zumu wrote: post #131

I think this whole debate is centered on the shallow idea that "going to an Ivy League" in and of itself is what ordains "elite-ness". To unravel this, you first must consider the actual value proposition of Ivy Leagues relative to other schools. Firstly, undergrad in America, especially at private schools like the Ivy Leagues, is more a daycare for rich kids, than it is a place of scholarship and learning. The educa…

> If you reduce the number of kids from rich and powerful families going to these places, you are going to drastically reduce the networking potential amongst classmates Disagree. The biggest "network benefit" comes from the Alumni Network, the established recruiting channels & the prestige from the degree. These would remain if they took more poor kids.

This is a good point, and I'm not sure how it would play out. Depending on the specific reforms it may be self sustaining. But prestige and recruiting channels are not in and of themselves self sustaining.

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

#226

Post by lordnacho »

m00x wrote: post #108
an_opabinia wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Anyway, historically, if you felt wronged by an educational institution, you made your own schools. Source on this? I doubt that spinning up a whole new school was ever this simple and accessible.

So for instance the story is that Cambridge University was founded by people who were disgruntled at Oxford. Also there's a number of institutions that were founded due to religious affiliation, IIRC UCL in London.

Nowadays there's an entrenchment that makes it hard to just go and do your own uni. It's not illegal, but you need to find supporters who won't just say "hey why don't you just go to X existing uni". And there's already a uni for whatever speciality you're into, plus the big names that are the specialists for every subject.

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

rebelos wrote: post #129
threatofrain wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The suggestion that there is some significant number of police killings that are going unreported - especially in the environment of the past several years - is categorically conspiratorial thinking. It fails the barest of sanity checks when you consider just how 'deep state' an effort would be required for that to be conducted at scale. > Are there some unreported police killings? Almost certainly. Would there be…

There are organizations dedicated to trying to ascertain the error in reported police shootings. They have found what is logically self-evident but that you refuse to accept: no reasonable suspicion of outsized error. > A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,104 people killed by police…

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by rejectedandsad »

catgary wrote: post #220
rejectedandsad wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But...we already have elite large undergrad programs, they’re called the UCs and the UT systems and the rest of the systems that support public ivies (both flagship and secondary campuses). UToronto, Waterloo, and UBC are all public. Our public ivies are big and produce equivalent talent while being accessible to nearly everyone through CC transfer agreements. I don’t think there’s a bottleneck here. The real bottlen…

I don’t think school really figures into people’s thought process in Canada. UofT and UBC are massive, and as long as you check the boxes you get in. People in the Saskatchewan may prefer URegina because it’s closer to home, someone from Newfoundland may go to Memorial. Faculty positions are so competitive that I don’t think there’s a huge difference in the quality of the younger professors, just the bigger schools w…

This is the case for 90% of applicants to college (in general) in the states too, including my undergrad (which happened to exist in the city I was born and grew up in). I hardly went to a prestigious undergrad but I had several brilliant professors that had significant pedigrees, educationally speaking.

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

#229

Post by rejectedandsad »

xenihn wrote: post #224
b9a2cab5 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an Asian who went to a state school and I don't think it's irrelevant. Regardless of Harvard's prestige giving a whole class of people lower "personal" ratings because of their race is racism, pure and simple. I even see startups like Canvas/Jumpstart [1] that explicitly allow recruiters to filter applicants by race. I don't know how this isn't illegal and I hope someone sues them. I took a look at your post his…

you can make 300k at facebook or google without a degree at all

Yes, but then you’d need the IQ. I don’t have the pedigree or the innate intellect to be successful.

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

#230

Post by lordnacho »

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 wonder if I'm the only kid who expressly did not do what their parents did in this thread.

Of course I also sit in a cluster, knowing several other kids who also did not want to become restaurant workers. It was simple really, our parents would say "I'm serving fried rice to people so that you won't have to." None of my family friends have taken over the family business. It's nearly an insult to suggest it, I remember seeing an article about my friend's dad having his anniversary at one of Copenhagens most beloved Chinese grillbars. The FB comment section made it clear she had no intention of taking that over, his hard work had resulted in a cushy white collar job for her and she was thankful for that.

Oddly my wife, a doctor's kid, also got put off being a doctor by her dad. He had long become cynical about working in the NHS and let his kids know when they got to the age where you think about this.

Post reply on HN