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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

#241

Post by catgary »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #228
catgary wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the unique thing about Canada is that students “fall into” prestigious institutions by virtue of being good students who grew up in the area. Basically every student in Toronto with a 90% average in high school can go to UofT. This is very achievable for anyone from a stable middle class family whose parents care about education.

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

#242

Post by throw123123123 »

Something usually amiss with the current talk of universities is that they are an immigration racket.

Universities make most of its tuition money from foreign students, but foreign students go to american universities to get visas they can use to get into the labor market. The F1 visa is unlimited, contrary to the H1B one, and allows for a transition out of university.

Also for the H1B and multiple categories, one key criteria is having a college degree.

College Education: so valuable you need the law to justify they are worth something

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

#243

Post by tomc1985 »

lordnacho wrote: post #230
retrac wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remem…

My dad was a telecom salesman, I became a software engineer. I do remember seeing big stacks of dBase binders in his closet, and he taught me how to use a command line, but a developer he was not.

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

#244

Post by devnonymous »

mc32 wrote: post #67
devnonymous wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> People are permitted to pursue alternatives and aren’t forbidden.

Systematic barriers are seldom built consciously, yet they exist and without conscious effort to break down continue to be perpetuated.

From the point of view of opportunities/privileges available to an individual, is there really a difference between the caste system and a class system?

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

#245

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jedberg wrote: post #19
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…

so it seems that the better paying a field is the children of parents in that field are more likely to choose that field as well.

on edit: by paying I also mean all the perks you get as well (just as when I negotiate on a job I also negotiate the perks), when you're growing up and see you have a pretty good life that would be something that might attract you to the field your parents are in. So academics might not get paid as much as the private sector but at the higher levels there are some pretty sweet perks.

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

#246

Post by ZephyrBlu »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #178
rejectedandsad wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but you aren't making millions at any salaried job short of being a C level exec. Just graduating from Harvard isn't making you millions I mean it is happening at Google - look up how much Liz Fong Jones made as an ex-Caltech, ex-MIT engineer. Definitely happens to the MIT to Jane Street crowd and also happens to the people that can get offers at the IPOing startups I can’t even get interviews at. Not like I have t…

The company I work for now pays substantially more than Google/Facebook/et. al and most people on my team are from random state schools, many with no experience at FAANG. You can certainly make millions from a pre-IPO startup (and I have 2nd degree knowledge of many people that did get rich off IPOs), but you're not making that at the Google of today. I'm sorry you feel that way about your past. You should consider s…

> The company I work for now pays substantially more than Google/Facebook/et. al

This is curious. What kind of company do you work for? Like a startup, big established company, small company, etc.

I'm also curious about how many YOE you have.

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

#247

Post by devnonymous »

mlyle wrote: post #120
devnonymous wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 there's a difference between cramming someone into a caste in perpetuity and ... them having a childhood where they're exposed to job skills and study habits that somewhat favor a certain career because that's what their parent does. My kids saw a whole lot more of "how technology works" and mathematics during elementary school than most kids. A lawyer's kid probably heard a lot more of argument, rhetoric, an…

> the lawyer's kid could go do technology and my kid could grow up to be a lawyer-- it's just a somewhat less likely outcome.

And what would be the likelyhood of the child of a single mom working 2 unskilled jobs to be either of those? Like I mentioned in a different comment, Systematic barriers exist without being consciously built and are then perpetuated as just the natural way of things.

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

#248

Post by rdevsrex »

rebelos wrote: post #109
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets. The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ... . This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and…

Yep. A lot of people who’ve been hurt by racism in the past, engage in loose pattern matching. If the story is a police officer shot a black person, to many it’s automatically racism, despite whatever the facts are.

That said, I’m black btw, the problems in the black community are not down to any one thing, but certainly the lack of two parent households is a biggie.

I was fortunate to grow up in California with two parents who could afford to send me to a private school.

Even absent more government intervention, just having more stable households will do a lot to fix the inequalities.

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

#249

Post by ZephyrBlu »

selimthegrim wrote: post #190
mlac wrote: post #21

“In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was 85 percent.” I didn’t realize that was the acceptance rate, but JFK’s application to Harvard is interesting and that acceptance rate adds context: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-v... And maybe it’s not people pulling the ladder up behind them - it’s that the ladder has become more visible and desirable without expanding or changing. I do have so…

Having gone there, the degree is not the magic wand you seem to think it is.

In what way is it not? I think that most people will automatically give someone who went to Harvard the benefit of the doubt.

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

#250

Post by bg4 »

jedberg wrote: post #19
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…

For me, the progression has been: software engineer, software engineer, railroad engineer, railroad engineer, farmer. I will be very interested to see what my son picks and I very much plan to allow him to pursue his own interests.
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