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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#171

Post by cm2187 »

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.

Also all the exams are blind/anonymous, and recruitment strictly based on grades. Or at least they used to be.

Despite this the French system has a very low rate of social mobility, and the overwhelming majority of students in top colleges come from parents within the system.

Now there are good reasons for social background to be sticky (not the least because I don’t buy the tabula rasa theory that your genes account for nothing in your intellectual capacity, and for the part they don’t, well how your parent raised you should matter), but it is implausible that such concentration is a natural outcome (the respective size of elite vs non elites in the country is such that even with a high natural stickiness, you should still see half or at least a third of a top college generation coming from non elite families, I think France is in the Having graduated decades ago and not living in France, I follow it from afar, but it looks like the government is actively trying to eliminate the meritocracy part of the system. By preventing elite high school from selecting their own students, by creating as many parallel admissions to colleges that were purely competitive exams based.

I have mixed feelings about it. One one side I like the idea of a cursus to be purely merit based. On the other side the obsession of the French with education is unhealthy, where your career at 50 is still determined by an exam you sit 30 years before, and this tendency of having clubs within clubs for the elite to run the country with little competence or accountability (again an exam you did when you were 20 doesn’t qualify you for everything) has lead to fuck ups after abuses after frauds. I would prefer a decentralised german style system where (from what I understand) what matters is the student, not the name of the college.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#172

Post by pas »

chrischen wrote: post #106
meowkit wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. This is assuming it's a problem that can be solved with simple tweaks or "startup disruption". It's an issue very much related to conspicuous consumption as education >in the Ivy League/cohort Freakonomics[1] just did an episode on this, but I've come across similar data points else where. It's a stamp of not just a goo…

I’d imagine they work nicely for software engineering, but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and might attribute too much ti the brand of college. Some sort of objective skill evaluation that is also officially recognized must be implemented in addition to actual knowledge acquisition. As I understand it if you are a doctor and capable in every way if you don’t have the degrees you can’t even be…

> but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and ...

yes, and that's basically the crux of the problem. this is a social coordination problem, not a problem of education.

the trivial solution is to "outlaw" this by blinding the prestige credentials of the candidate (so only show a standardized thing like 3 year applied maths bsc) and only ask about previous experience (2 years working as data scientist) or whatever

"obviously" people will try to game this (though other universities can then copy what comes out of the fancy universities)

of course this could quickly lead to the rise of alternative prestige/reputation networks, but if the whole job application is standardized (so it becomes very hard to identify the candidate) then at least it gives a chance for folks to get in the door.

then only the usual biases remain, and the usual unfair questions (and typically the most disadvantaged candidates have the least chance to know about what kind of questions are discriminatory, and even if they know most of the time they don't have the time/energy to do anything about it)

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#173

Post by cm2187 »

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…

It would also have the merit of distributing the best students to other colleges and eliminating (at least the perception) that those top college short list are a relevant filter when selecting CVs. The focus will be on the student, not the credentials, as it should be.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#174

Post by LeanderK »

ericmay wrote: post #167
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 an…

I really don't think there's enough difference during your studies for it to be justified. Of course it's nice to have a meeting personally with your professor every week, of course it's nice to have brand new classrooms and free snacks when you get to listen to nobel prize winners giving a lecture about their work. But you can also sit down, anywhere in the world, and just study hard to succeed in your exam. It's not that they have different math at harvard and if you go to a challenging university you get challenging lectures.

This "elite university" brand, is imho, totally overrated. Of course you build great social connections, but if you hire a software engineer you don't hire his connections. But I feel like employers try to derive their prestige from the prestige of the universities. This is different for positions with a social dimension, like entrepreneurs, where your social connections matter.

This, of course, does not say anything about whether the prestige of Harvard itself is justified. I actually think so, because in experience people always overrate the education part of a university. It's a small amount of the total operation, way more money goes into research. Harvard does a lot of world class research, it's very good at it, consistently. Also MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc. This needs recognition and care, it's something special. But just deriving your own prestige because you did your undergrad there is stupid I think.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#175

Post by ajross »

clairity wrote: post #124
ajross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The size and longevity of these enormous endowments is a problem Is it? The largest university endowment in the world is $50B. That's wouldn't even crack the top 100 US companies by market cap. If it's a problem, it's certainly not a big one.

comparing endowment to market cap is misunderstanding basic finance and accounting. endowments are more directly (but not perfectly) comparable to (long-term) assets on the balance sheet. those are typically a small fraction of the market cap of a company. apple, for instance, has a $2.4T market cap, but it's non-current assets are $216B (of which $128B are investment assets).

How so? Universities don't use their endowments like companies use assets either. Assets are returned as dividends or reinvested. University endowments are for income. If anything they under perform the returns that the broader market would use to assign a market cap. A public company with a total revenue /budget of Harvard's would have a market cap rather less than the endowment size.

I'm still not understanding what the problem with these endowments is, except that they represent money in the hands of people you personally dislike.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#176

Post by matthewdgreen »

cm2187 wrote: post #171
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.

Also all the exams are blind/anonymous, and recruitment strictly based on grades. Or at least they used to be. Despite this the French system has a very low rate of social mobility, and the overwhelming majority of students in top colleges come from parents within the system. Now there are good reasons for social background to be sticky (not the least because I don’t buy the tabula rasa theory that your genes account…

The desire to pass advantages to our children is one of the most powerful driving forces in the human psyche. Any system that isn't adversarially designed and constantly-tuned to fight this desire will eventually succumb to it.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#177

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

In my research field (CS), large universities have a big advantage. They have more resources (valuable for systems fields) and more students. Even if Harvard may have stronger undergrad students overall than random-U, their candidate pool of undergrads->potential PhD students tends to be much smaller. This isn't absolutely a rule (some smaller schools do very well in specific areas) but it's definitely a force I've noticed.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#178

Post by Jtype »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #83
ryan93 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endowments would run out instantly. And you would destroy great research institutions. Some people just enjoy destruction

It’s not about destruction but equity. Tax-funded student loans should not be used to grow endowments and should be sequestered. Let donors fund the endowments if they care about the research institutions. Return the people’s money to the people.

Take an economics course.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#179

Post by CuriouslyC »

logifail wrote: post #139
chrischen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures. Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I…

It can, very easily. Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer.

The only thing that doesn't scale is on campus life, and that's meaningless to the degree that college is nominally about.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#180

Post by ryan93 »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #83
ryan93 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endowments would run out instantly. And you would destroy great research institutions. Some people just enjoy destruction

It’s not about destruction but equity. Tax-funded student loans should not be used to grow endowments and should be sequestered. Let donors fund the endowments if they care about the research institutions. Return the people’s money to the people.

Donors do fund endowments. The schools most dependent on tuition have very small endowments. You don’t seem to know anything about this
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