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The non-lagging metric is: how many high-performing students, from non-elite backgrounds, are refusing to pursue academic vocations?
This number has been decreasing steadily since the late 80's, and this has been very well documented in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
Also a lot of lifetime academics are generally insufferable. Hugely important vision of themselves, lack of knowledge of reality, and are totally useless if they had to do a job outside of their hyper-specialized area. I see a lot of value in hard-science / math research. Don’t see a lot of value in yet another 80 page treatise on Proust that only 8 people will ever read. Hopefully everything gets priced so high that…
For a person that isn’t from a wealthy background already, it’s hard to justify the path of academia when a more lucrative path has much more potential to be life changing for them and their family.
Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
And prior to that, education used to be a lot more expensive, and was only for the rich. Your claim is not just cause-and-effect, it's historical fact too.
Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are:
https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-ongoi...
In case you think I'm shilling a link (I'm not, first i've seen of this), here is another:
https://res.cloudinary.com/value-penguin/image/upload/c_limi...
and one more: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-education/
Even being at the edge of a boomer and a millennial, I particularly love that last link.
As someone who got into academia "by chance" this was quite a shock to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a lot of lifetime academics are generally insufferable. Hugely important vision of themselves, lack of knowledge of reality, and are totally useless if they had to do a job outside of their hyper-specialized area. I see a lot of value in hard-science / math research. Don’t see a lot of value in yet another 80 page treatise on Proust that only 8 people will ever read. Hopefully everything gets priced so high that…
Haha. Because math research is so widely read
Interesting. Although US graduate students are only 53% white [1] (while the US is 57.8% white [2]) and women account for 53% of doctoral degrees [3], all 5 of the people in the generic stock photos in the article are white males, despite making up only an estimated 25% of graduates. A striking deviation from the photographic trend if one e.g. google image searches for "phd graduate". [1] https://www.equityinhighered…
But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.
Isn't this to be expected with any similarly weighted network? Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco. Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perce…
The C-suite is a different story: The Ivy Grads are either joining their parents' companies, going into VC, or starting their own companies (YC), not working as lowly "senior" ICs at say Amazon. Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad who spent their school years partying and networking in social clubs instead of studying...
You might further split Ivy into HYPS and others (Stanford is much more like the other Ivies than Cornell). The others like Brown and Dartmouth are more like a Northwestern / U-Chicago, for people who didn't quite make the cut or for good test takers from upper middle class rather than upper class backgrounds.
UPenn and Columbia lean in the middle. Sure, Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to UPenn, but the school itself still mainly graduates "just" worker bees in finance / investment banking. Your coworkers at Google didn't go there, though.
There are always outliers at all of these schools, but by definition, they are the exception rather than the rule...