Who cares about the Ivy League? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#111

Post by deltarholamda » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

SilverBirch wrote: post #65

One of the things that is fascinating about America is that their obsession with race draws attention away from Class. The value of getting into Harvard- sure, you'll get a good education. You might even get a great education! But what you're also going to get is membership of a club that is going to offer you opportunities for the rest of your life. Once you view it that way then changing the composition of the elit…

>Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you

This is the key to the Ivies' brand.

And it's not really covered in the article, but the reason we care about the Ivies is because whatever fad catches on in the Ivies goes on to become government policy. And why not? They are the best and the brightest, the great and good, destined to guide the benighted masses into the future.

Bill Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard. Interestingly, this somewhat reflects the idea behind Free Software, where many eyes make bugs shallow. If you were trained in an Ivy, everybody you work with came from an Ivy, all of the potential eyes work the same way, so the bugs remain deep.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#112

Post by jmchuster » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

ericmay wrote: post #38

alephnerd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't necessarily work like that anymore. I have 4 close friends of mine who did EECS@MIT who didn't get recruited at Google.

Overall it does work like that though. Google (or other tech companies/elite institutions) attends MIT engineering career fairs, it doesn't attend others. Corporations are not good at identifying promising talent outside of their traditional (Ivy League, etc.) recruiting grounds so they stick with their traditional recruiting grounds and then they'll favor "diverse" students from their traditional recruiting grounds.…

New grad talent is a huge pipeline for Google or any other FAANG, and they'll recruit at every well-rated and large engineering program they can find, the large majority of which aren't just MIT. And tons of engineering programs that aren't those, though they may just do all their recruiting through the colleges' online resources, since they have a limited number of humans to physically travel.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#113

Post by nearbuy » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:40 PM UTC

dralley wrote: post #94

uneekname wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I think you're missing the point too. You are right that many folks who get access to these top resources don't then go on to become so successful, however you might define success. But a larger proportion of them do compared to other groups. I'm not saying that an individual is guaranteed success if they're born into a wealthy family. But I am saying that a wealthy neighborhood of kids who have access…

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteins brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould.

Srinivasa Ramanujan would be a counterexample. He grew up poor with no formal training in mathematics but was nonetheless one of the world's greatest math geniuses.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#114

Post by alexpotato » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #56

Aromasin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I now work in a team with a bunch of Ivy League UK equivalents (Oxford/Cambridge), but I'm about 5 years older working at a similar grade/comp ratio. I had to hop around 4 different teams at 2 companies, and build a pretty extensive portfolio of work, before I got a foot in the door they did straight out of university.

After graduating from a bog standard state school, it took me 20 years of job hopping from one non-name-brand company to another before I finally got into a FAANG company. And once you're inside, you can see why this is: You're surrounded by a monoculture of Stanford and MIT and Berkeley graduates, because those (and a few others) are where they do all their university recruitment. Not to pick on graduates of those g…

I have a similar story but replace "FAANG" with "hedge funds".

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#115

Post by user_named » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

The author doesn't get the first thing about the education system, and complains that the elite schools are too small. That's exactly the point. They are small in order to keep them elite. If everyone got into Harvard, many would decline. They'd go to a new, more selective school instead.

Because universities are not in the business of education but the business of credentialing. It's about being different, more elite. That's what they sell.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#116

Post by light_hue_1 » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

Auracle wrote: post #51

uneekname wrote: post #30

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented…

[flagged]

IQ is not "intelligence". Low IQ closes many doors. Normal and above IQ aren't correlated with anything. For example in "Zagorsky JL. Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress. Intelligence. 2007 Sep 1;35(5):489-501." https://gwern.net/doc/iq/ses/2007-zagorsky.pdf There is no relationship between IQ and wealth. And income after an IQ of around 100 barely goes up.

About heritability, that doesn't say that if your parents had an IQ of X you will have an IQ of ~X. It says, two people with "identical" DNA will have IQs that are very similar! There's also the big caveat that many scientists think these studies have confounds that overstate the results. But even if they are real, they don't mean what you think they do.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#117

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #9

I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most i…

No, I don't think this is true.

Because Google is similarly valuable to MIT in your scenario.

But if you worked at a random startup after college, or three in a row, it's very likely that MIT on your resume will still be the thing that gets you in the door for an interview for your next job.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#118

Post by hotpotamus » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:45 PM UTC

daniel_reetz wrote: post #74

wpietri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. I would like this to be true, but I think it varies a lot. I have seen execs be very excited by name-brand degrees well past that point. And then do the same thing with name-brand companies, without inquiring much as to what a given developer did at, say, one of the FAANGs. When I've ask…

It also strongly selects for people who excel at jumping hoops/working within institutions. We make it all about smarts, but smarts aren't everything in the corporate grind.

It makes sense that the best teacher-pleasers would go on to be the best executive-pleasers.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#119

Post by majesticglue » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

jbullock35 wrote: post #52

uneekname wrote: post #30

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented…

> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed. That must be part of the answer, but it can’t be the whole answer, or close to the whole. There’s huge variation in educational outcomes among those who get the access that you describe. What explains why some people in this group have such good outcomes, while most have relatively lacklus…

A lot of the comments here come from a place of ignorance...

I've had the unique experience of private tutoring many "elite" students in high school for math and physics for nearly a decade in Los Angeles a while back. Basically both rich kids and less fortunate kids who can only afford my tutoring rate every once in a while vs rich kids who can if they wanted to afford my help every day.

It's not simply "better textbooks" or "better schooling", the difference in education is VERY DRASTIC and being in LA I was able to see kids from drastically different backgrounds. Rich kids with having tutors for every class, maids for every other side chore so parents can actually pay attention to their kids, private high schools and middle schools that cost nearly $30-50k per year can buy you so many advantages most people can't even comprehend.

The biggest advantages I saw was better resources, better textbooks, curriculums that are ACTUALLY made with care and time, and most importantly teachers who were paid very very comfortable (ie, 6 figure salaries) who have the luxury to not be overworked, and can actually attend to their students as needed. Imagine every one of your teachers in middle school and high school, putting top notch effort into providing a great learning experience for you? Most people probably only had one teacher like that in their entire lifetime. And not to mention if the school was lacking in any area, many of the rich parents would hire their own private ex-olympian or ex-superstar specialist of whatever they desire.

People here are DRASTICALLY underestimating what extra educational resources can buy.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#120

Post by rcme » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

uneekname wrote: post #104

rcme wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Results: Parents who read 1 picture book with their children every day provide their children with exposure to an estimated 78,000 words each a year. Cumulatively, over the 5 years before kindergarten entry, we estimate that children from literacy-rich homes hear a cumulative 1.4 million more words during storybook reading than children who are never read to. This study just says that kids who are read to are expos…

> But does it matter? Yes, it does. It matters a lot. "The Word Gap ... has important consequences for children’s later vocabulary, literacy and school performance" [0] Even if this whole line of research gets debunked, reading to your kids won't hurt! > eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs I haven't read much about this research, maybe it holds more water than I think. But does it matter…

I think there are two types of properties: intrinsic and extrinsic. Your intelligence is intrinsic. It’s internal to you and is highly correlated with your genetics. Your success in life is extrinsic. It’s based on factors outside of you, like the circumstances of your family, etc.

So, no, I’m not saying success is purely genetic. But, I also think there is a strong genetic component to one’s intrinsic ability and so not everyone can reach the top even if they work really hard.