71–80 of 334 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been affiliated with MIT in one way or another for more than a quarter-century. What's been astounding is the change in faculty. Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems. New MIT faculty are slick politicians with an increasing sleazy Enron-style vibe. That's true of MIT leadership as well.
Do you know of some place where there are still nerds into neat tech problems?
> 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…
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.
But actual education and attainment of knowledge is cheaper than ever. Just YouTube alone is a massive driving factor. Or Kahn Academy.
But to benefit from things like these, you have to have a culture that values education and actively seeks it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not in the US it wasn't? Costs for higher education have tripled in the past couple decades, to say NOTHING of costs in the 80s or 90s. 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 y…
Life in the US from 1950-2000 will one day be seen as a historical blip, not a state of being the US can ever return to. In that period, the US reaped massive profits from its position as sole industrial powerhouse for the first 20-30 years of that period (thanks to the destruction of the rest of the world's industrial capacity in WW2), and then as the world's bank for the following 20-30 years. It was a privileged position that--combined with the rise of the automobile and the opening up of cheap hinterlands for suburban development, without accounting for the externalities of course--enabled all sorts of leverage and quality of life for the working and middle classes, including massive subsidies for higher education.
Those days are over. Labor has little leverage these days, there's little exploitable land, and the middle class is more or less gone.
We could definitely decide to bring back the massive subsidies for higher ed -- after all, they're present in much of the EU. But it's not clear why one would think that heavily subsidized education would have an appreciably better effect here than it does in the EU.
It's quite a different story when you get to the people who really consider themselves Elite: big consulting firms, white shoe law firms, large media companies, and top echelons of the government. For those people, an Ivy League degree or equivalent is money, if not mandatory.
I think, in addition to the percentage of incoming students who are historically marginalized, those schools should track "percentage of students whose parents did NOT go to college." If they really cared about providing opportunity for upward mobility, those are the people they'd go after.
> 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…
It doesn't scale like that, though. If the % of people with college degrees had increased by 6x, to 24%, would you expect 6/5 of students to have parents with a college degree?
> 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…
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 consu…
Elite schools want people from the power class. A lot of this is explicitly baked into admissions. Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.). This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's…
But I think that children of faculty and legacies are not as clear-cut a case. For example, it takes a lot of skill and hard work (and luck) to become a faculty member at Harvard. If you are still there when your kids are college-aged, you are very likely tenured. It would not at all be surprising if your children were significantly above-average in terms of academic achievement. This would be the result of your intelligence, drive, mate selection, and parenting. The fact that your kids are much more likely to get into Harvard (probably around 40%, versus 4%) is due in large part to these facts. The admissions office may put a thumb on the scale, but it's undoubtedly the case that the average faculty child applicant has higher qualifications than the average Harvard applicant.
These same arguments apply to legacy admits, but to a much lesser degree. Harvard did not used to be much of an academic/intellectual filter, but since the 90s or so it was very difficult to get in. If you are applying now and your parents went there, there's a good chance that the hard work and skill that got them in was passed down to you, by nature or nurture.
I don't disagree with you entirely, but I do disagree with the last sentence that frames 'meritocratic' admissions as distinct from children of legacy and faculty who are admitted at higher rates than the average applicant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been affiliated with MIT in one way or another for more than a quarter-century. What's been astounding is the change in faculty. Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems. New MIT faculty are slick politicians with an increasing sleazy Enron-style vibe. That's true of MIT leadership as well.
Do you know of some place where there are still nerds into neat tech problems?