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People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

washingtonpost.com

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Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#41

Post by cypress66 »

AinderS wrote: post #9

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…

You usually see men hanging with other men, and women with other women.

There are 2 pictures shown.

If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random, it would be completely common for both pictures to end up like the ones in the article.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#42

Post by yellowcake0 »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #35
denimnerd42 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course. they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a h…

Nope, I worked at two FAANG companies and with not a single Harvard or Stanford graduate. I hosted an intern from Stanford once who received a top of band return offer and rejected it for a "better option." I had one coworker from MIT who admitted he should have gone in finance instead. He later left for a prestigious hedge fund and 7 figure compensation. Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top scho…

Your coworker from MIT left to be a quant/software engineer at a hedge fund, or was the role non-technical?

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#43

Post by kepler1 »

Let's play it forward where in some alternate reality we were able to reset the current "inequity" and give lots more people from non-elite backgrounds a good shot at proving their capabilities. Or even have that as an ongoing policy in a very fair way. ("Fair" being the problematic word which will constantly be debated.)

Do you imagine that a new elite of some new type of class would not emerge? Would that new elite be more acceptable?

Is the problem that we just don't like our current kind of elite? That it doesn't provide for "fair" resetting of the system periodically? (or within each generation) Does it unfairly give children of the elite access to things they wouldn't otherwise be qualified for, compared to some other better system? What is that system? Some kind of setup where every kid gets to have equal access to showing his/her value -- yet you don't like having tests to do that?

I am not against the idea of an elite class. There will always emerge people who succeed and pass on their success. The question is, what is the outcome we're trying to achieve?

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#44

Post by smeagull »

oxff wrote: post #40

> People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia Even if your system was pure Meritocracy that'd make 16th century Anglos proud, you'd still expect it to eventually come to this (smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids)

You don't just have to be "smart" to pick academia, you have to care about reputation a whole bunch, and you need to be able to not care about money.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#45

Post by Hydraulix989 »

metadat wrote: post #22
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most of middle and upper management (VP / SVP) also has degrees from no-name schools. If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees (except for Cornell, which is basically a public school). Upw…

> Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad... Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point. My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition. Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling t…

If Harvard went away, I would be VERY happy. Schools like Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 are much more meritocratic. Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible, and given the history of the early US, it's not surprising that this insular Victorian / London culture of poshness also permeated into 17th / 18th century Ivy League schools in the Puritanical US. I'm amazed at what abject conditions Eastern Europeans overcome to earn top international ranks in IOI competitive programming, for example.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#46

Post by blobbers »

oxff wrote: post #40

> People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia Even if your system was pure Meritocracy that'd make 16th century Anglos proud, you'd still expect it to eventually come to this (smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids)

I can't believe this comment hasn't been downvoted into oblivion, but I tend to agree. It's a markov model. Educated people care about educating their children. Uneducated either a) want their kid to be the first to reach higher education (but struggle to do so or b) don't value education.

Pretty rare to find a well educated person who places no value on education. Guys like Peter Thiel (educated, but promote non-traditional routes) are outliers on that spectrum, in my experience.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#47

Post by Hydraulix989 »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #35
denimnerd42 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course. they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a h…

Nope, I worked at two FAANG companies and with not a single Harvard or Stanford graduate. I hosted an intern from Stanford once who received a top of band return offer and rejected it for a "better option." I had one coworker from MIT who admitted he should have gone in finance instead. He later left for a prestigious hedge fund and 7 figure compensation. Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top scho…

Quant trader at a firm that I've never even heard of but routinely pays even engineers 7 figures

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#48

Post by wenc »

metadat wrote: post #3

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…

> 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 an meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco.

No. This has not been my experience working at bigcos -- the opposite is true. This isn't even hard to disprove -- just take a look at any large company (outside of those with Ivy funnels like management consulting). Just go to their websites. Many executives often did not attend Ivy league colleges.

You'll find that most US executives actually didn't go to prestigious schools. This fact surprised me when I first observed it, but it makes sense. Assuming US management is a meritocracy, those who make it to the top are those who are in some way good with people. Ivies optimize for intellect, but this often has a negative correlation with social skills.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#49

Post by vlunkr »

cm2187 wrote: post #32

> In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. > This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degr…

I had the same thoughts. The country is now more educated than it was before, and they want to paint that as a bad thing. And point some fingers at the “elite,” Which is now people who’s parents have a college degree I guess.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#50

Post by WesternWind »

It's interesting that it starts off talking about elite backgrounds by discussing graduate degrees, and only later talks about wealth as an influence.

Wealth seems like such a huge factor in who is successful in this country. Whereas I know quite a few people with college degrees, even graduate degrees, that aren't using that knowledge in their work.

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