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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#161

Post by chipgap98 »

chrischen wrote: post #44
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #28

Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that student…

The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible r…

I think there are a lot of reasons why it can’t scale but none of them are related to the time spent in a Harvard class room.

The social connections and the culture are the key parts of elite colleges. I don’t think you can scale that with online classes.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#162

Post by mrtksn »

isolli wrote: post #140

The situation as seen from France is odd. Here, elite STEM universities are free, and the very best ones even pay their students. Having legacy admissions would be unthinkable; it's the opposite of meritocracy. And you don't need to "socially" prepare since birth with all the right extra-curricular activities.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit?

If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect and the school from political hostilities. The legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?

It's not like the tests for admission can %100 accurately test the talents of the candidates anyway. Maybe diversity in admission is an actual strength that rest of the world lacks?

What makes an institution elite anyways? I would say its legacy(the alumni) and its future(the candidates). There might be a healthy balance of giving up some resources from the future to keep the connections with the past strong.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#163

Post by 21723 »

I think this is a great idea, but for a different reason. "Elite college" is a relative and somewhat zero-sum term, since it refers not to the quality of education but the quality of job and networking opportunities that are available once a person graduates. The embarrassing truth of these elite colleges is that there's not a whole lot of value-add. The classes are good--well, some of them--but you can find classes that are just as good at a decent state university. Elite colleges don't give anyone the ability to beat the job market; they select those who are likely already to beat it.

They also offer a fog of war. Rich dumb kids seem smart because they went to the same place where a lot of smart poors like us went; smart poors experience enough of the wealthy dumb's aura to project themselves as possibly rich (now or in the future). This requires a certain balance. If you let in too many "meritocrats" (smart poors) then the ultra-rich dumb kids who bring the networking opportunities are going to be overwhelmed and go somewhere else.

So, frankly, I don't think this reform would do much for undergraduate education. We already have a great number of schools that are just as good as, or better than, the Ivies... but that lack proximity to power and whose graduates get regular shitty jobs. (Actually, most of the smart poors who graduate from Ivies get regular shitty jobs too, but that's another topic.) Instead, I support it because it would improve the state of research. There are far too few professorships to go around. Whatever these massive endowments are doing, it's not funding a healthy academic job market, and we've become third-rate at everything, and soon China's going to drink our milkshake. Academia's dead and it's dead because it killed itself, and the first step toward reviving it is to fix this gross misallocation of resources.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#164

Post by scld »

chrischen wrote: post #44
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #28

Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that student…

The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible r…

The main reason is that the vast majority of the benefit of the Harvard is not the class but the name on the diploma. Signaling and status do not scale.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#165

Post by burnished »

danrocks wrote: post #158
moralestapia wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing my part here and sharing my experience, as I have done before in this forum. I was a PhD student there until my little daughter (4yo at the time) was kidnapped by academic staff and I had to negotiate our safe return to our home country. I still can't believe the kind of abuse we went through and it baffles me how the people that orchestrated this are still there, no consequences at all, after committing a very…

It is quite the claim to be making without providing any details. I feel it does not strengthen your argument to do so.

A personal anecdote isn't an argument.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#166

Post by 21723 »

mrtksn wrote: post #162
isolli wrote: post #140

The situation as seen from France is odd. Here, elite STEM universities are free, and the very best ones even pay their students. Having legacy admissions would be unthinkable; it's the opposite of meritocracy. And you don't need to "socially" prepare since birth with all the right extra-curricular activities.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them re…

> Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit?

There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy.

> If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?

This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads.

Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded.

If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s.

That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#167

Post by ericmay »

projektfu wrote: post #36

It would make a lot of sense for the top schools to expand like they did in other countries. Oxford and Cambridge have 12,000 undergrads each. University of Toronto has 44,000. Harvard and Princeton have about 5,000 each and Stanford has like 8,000. The US has more top schools, perhaps, than other countries, but not as many seats, I think.

I don’t think the top schools need to expand and perhaps shouldn’t. At all. Instead what we need are employers to stop concentrating their recruiting efforts at these name brand schools (I.e. ladder pulling), at least at the undergraduate level. I’m not sure that there is a different in CS major between Purdue (for example) and MIT. Maybe there is, but expanding MIT just takes engineering students away from Purdue and then employers just recruit at MIT main campus in Cambridge instead of the satellite office. All you’ve really done is changed the logo. Not the dynamics.

I’d rather see these “elite” universities not expand. The world seems more interesting with universities like Baylor, Ohio State, Florida, Oregon, and Nebraska than it does with Harvard, MIT, and Stanford copy/pasted everywhere. There isn’t anything wrong with those schools, but given they don’t have expertise in growing maybe a stronger case can be made for the University of California system to take over Stanford, and Penn State should turn Penn into a branch of Penn State University, etc. Else it’s really hard for me to see how you’re (not you specifically) not just trying to advocate for expanding “elite” universities just for the brand name.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#168

Post by throw0101a »

mrtksn wrote: post #162
isolli wrote: post #140

The situation as seen from France is odd. Here, elite STEM universities are free, and the very best ones even pay their students. Having legacy admissions would be unthinkable; it's the opposite of meritocracy. And you don't need to "socially" prepare since birth with all the right extra-curricular activities.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them re…

> Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit?

Britain had quite a lot of innovation during the 1800s when it coïncidentally also had one of the larger/est economies. As the economy of the US got larger and larger in the late-1800s / early-1900s all of a sudden it also coïncidentally started inventing a whole bunch more things.

How much of the innovation and technology from having the largest economy in the world and the most money/capital to throw around?

Certainly there needs to be a certain culture present, especially individualism and capitalism, but how much is 'brute size' a part of the equation?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#169

Post by cm2187 »

I don’t think breaking up their endowment is the solution to anything. What makes them a cartel is their prestige. Their prestige attracts the best students (and the onus shouldn’t be on them to break the cartel, they have very little leverage), because the college will unlock the best careers, because recruiters (private or academic) will require those credentials, and it makes sense to require those credentials because the colleges attract the best students (so you get a better hit rate when recruiting). So it’s a cycle.

I don’t think endowment funds make any significant difference. The best students don’t pick a college on the basis of the quality of their AV equipment, financing is available through other means. The quality of the education in the best colleges isn’t great either. Publishing academic papers doesn’t make a professor a good teacher. And the base curriculum is more or less the same everywhere anyway.

So prestige is what holds the whole thing together. And I think the elite universities are working hard at destroying their prestige, by alienating half of the population with their political militantism, and pushing ideology over merit in their grades and recruitment. I certainly lost any respect for those institutions myself, despite having graduated from some of them, and have a policy of disregarding university names when recruiting (I typically don’t trust any credential anyway on any other line of a CV).

So to me the solution is let nature and competition run their course.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#170

Post by dfadsadsf »

mmarq wrote: post #130
derbOac wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Just as one example, I've seen here on HN ads for positions that explicitly mention (in not so many words) that they're only looking for grads from elite colleges. The UK just codified this into visa law. Income is a fuzzy thing, and distinct from opportunities. I'm always looking for empirical data to bear on a question, so the studies you're mentioning are important. But at the same time I'm sort of s…

> The UK just codified this into visa law. It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating…

That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area.

3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.

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