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Who cares about the Ivy League?

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Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#151

Post by gen220 »

alephnerd wrote: post #95
gen220 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly a lagging indicator for 1/N of the people at those schools. For the other 1-(1/N), it's more like the "last" of the leading indicators – i.e. their last shot at a significant step change in career outcomes before beginning a career. The ability to get a great technical education is more a function of who your parents are and how involved they want to be in your education than anything else, me thinks.…

By lagging indicator I mean traditionally less selective public schools have become extremely selective now. When I was in elementary school, I assumed I'd get into Cal because everyone did in the 90s and 2000s. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, it's selectivity dropped to the 10-20% range and is dropping further. This is the same at other flagships as well (eg. UCLA, UVA, Mich, etc). With this drop in acceptance ra…

I see and agree that education and support at the earliest levels of education are heavily correlated with inequality in elite outcomes. However, I think this has always been the case in American history, no?

There were brief periods where this wasn't true for the richest people in the US, but the majority of the top 1% has always been bred for the top 1%. If you accept that it's more or less constant and think that the magnitude of inequality is the bigger issue, this isn't necessarily a bad thing: as long as the top 1% continue to allocate capital effectively, and don't get too greedy (i.e. leave enough wealth for the rest of society to lead fulfilling lives / don't exacerbate the inequality gap).

For what it's worth, I think the primary issue today is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to live a "dignified life" (i.e. free from debt or peonage), unless you fall on the right side of the inequality distribution. That quality-of-life-burden is less severe of an issue in the other countries you mention. Unfortunately, expanding higher-quality education does not solve this problem.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#152

Post by ldehaan »

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…

[dead]

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#153

Post by ericmay »

alephnerd wrote: post #148
ericmay wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berkely, UCLA, Michigan, Washington, are some of the best universities in the country. They exceed Ivy League schools in some fields and compete across the board. These aren't great examples in this context. UIUC, Wisconsin (CMU as well for example) have really strong engineering programs and "fit the mold". UCSB (UCI too for example) and Oregon State are based on the west coast. You can get the kids who didn't get i…

It's a non-exhaustive list. Iowa State has a strong STEM program because of Ames National Lab. They also have on campus recruiting at UTD, UMinn, Purdue, BYU, ASU, and Stony Brook. And when did you attend college? And, to be fair, if it wasn't Ohio State I doubt they would have been there. > (just to be clear, I'm not picking on Google specifically and these comments can be applied generally to all the top hedge fund…

> It's a non-exhaustive list.

It's going to be very hard to convince me that Google puts the same amount of recruiting resources into Iowa State or similar as it does Harvard, MIT, Michigan, etc. It's not a matter of "they went to campus at least once, therefore it's the same thing" which is what you're implying here.

> And when did you attend college?

I went to Ohio University (close to the same enrollment numbers as Iowa State actually) 2012-2015, and then went to Ohio State 2018-2020. I did a fair amount of campus recruiting on behalf of my employer, helped Ohio University some with getting companies on campus, and created a hackathon with a career fair element to it as well.

> Indiana Tech or Wright State aren't one of those and probably won't be.

Yes... which further strengthens my original point.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#154

Post by trgn »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #131
trgn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is true for every country on the planet No, it's a cultural thing. There's really two points in that article: - (1) people are overestimating the actual lifetime effects of attending an elite school. - (2) people are obsessing over attending (or their children attending) elite schools. That second one is a spiritual failure, not just one of ignorance. That upper middle-class obsession with the brand of educati…

>No, it's a cultural thing. IIT's, Peking/Tsinghua, SNU(Korea), University of Tokyo, Oxbridge, etc. etc. Cultural thing that happens across the entire world?

i guess we're just going around in circles. It happens nowhere near US levels in e.g. western europe.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#155

Post by adamsmith143 »

nineplay wrote: post #149
adamsmith143 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that say MIT and Caltech students don't have higher than average IQ? It's almost a certainty that they do and I'm sure it extends to the Ivy league and other elite schools.

I'll bet that most students with good grades who are applying to elite colleges have higher than average IQs. MIT and Caltech are not Ivy League but even then I'm sure they have a lot of students who benefit from private schools, private tutors, and pricy college prep programs. What differentiates the ones who get accepted from the ones who don't?

> I'll bet that most students with good grades who are applying to elite colleges have higher than average IQs.

That wasn't your claim:

> You're assuming that people who are admitted to Ivy League schools a) have higher IQs than average and b) have parents with higher IQs than average.

>What differentiates the ones who get accepted from the ones who don't? At Caltech and MIT?

Possibly the most meritocratic schools in the US?

Idk, .001 on your GPA or a single point on your SAT and AP scores? Or the fact that you didn't win an IOM medal or Intel Talent Search?

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#156

Post by dangus »

mrangle wrote: post #55
dangus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League? I suspect it's much more of the former than the latter. It's not that you have to go to an Ivy League school to run the country. Instead, the people born into the families that run the country have no reason not to go to Ivy League schools.…

Lots of elites never go to college. Lots go to non-Ivies. The top liberal arts schools have Ivy level tuition for that reason. Lots of elites go to Ivies, but the Ivy league's primary value will always be the possibility of an upward class mobility gateway. In the social sense, which is impossible to achieve otherwise generally speaking. In other words, your trailer park upbringing suddenly becomes much less relevant…

Elites not needing to go to college is beside the point. The point is that when they go, they don't go to second-rate schools.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#157

Post by j_crick »

majesticglue wrote: post #119
jbullock35 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 text…

I don’t know why this was flagged, because to me it rings very true. I’m from a different country but I have been on the receiving end of poverty and teachers who at least tried to give a damn about their pupils, and some tutors too. At some point I was very surprised to learn that being not fucked up by life and having a teacher who gives a shit can work wonders on you, if circumstances allow.

It’s all about incentives and availability of resources, time and attention. When life gives too many shit lemons to both students and teachers, there’s no breathing room left for any of them to care a little bit more about any taught subject. When teachers are overburdened and children not supported by their environments, they just want to get rid of each other ASAP, and then it’s on parents to berate their kids for not wanting to study because whatever reason.

But if you can unburden both a teacher and a student from hardships of life even just a little bit, somehow a lot of attention and time free up to care about any subject, and explore it in different directions, not necessarily by what’s included in curriculum. Suddenly learning about something and practicing it can be actually fun.

Fun and joy of exploring stuff is so important yet so missing. Having some not even too fat stacks of cash can help with that drastically.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#158

Post by AnimalMuppet »

randomdata wrote: post #144
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually a dunce cap"? Let's see. Bill Gates dropped out. So did Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs went to Reed College (where?) and didn't graduate. Maybe Peter Thiel's perspective is a bit distorted? > Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities... Maybe Peter Thiel isn't the only one with a bit of a distorted perspective?

Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs all recognized that the value proposition was not there and moved on. They did not stick it out to receive the graduate/dunce cap just to sooth their sunk cost pangs. Indeed, had they continued with it just because they started, that would be dunce-worthy. Thiel suggests that the "colleges that matter" offer more, e.g. research labs, that bring more to the table. That may justify greater i…

OK on Steve Jobs, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at Harvard. And they decided the value still wasn't there - even with Harvard's "ground breaking things" and "college that matters".

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#159

Post by sheepybloke »

user_named wrote: post #122
alephnerd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not denying that, but you are ignoring the fact that Google would open that booth at a LOT of public schools as well. Just off the top of my head - UC Berkeley, UCLA, Mich, Iowa State, UIUC, UW, UW Madison, UCSB, Oregon State, UMass Amherst, etc. And honestly, I really don't think you understand how hiring whas changed at a traditional corporation. For management track roles, these companies (eg. Danaher, Abbvie,…

I don't think it's true that companies disregard the ivies and instead look for leadership recruits at no name schools. Source?

I was a part of GE Aviation's Leadership Program and they definitely started looking towards especially more local schools towards the end of my program. They found that people who were from more local schools were more likely to stay longer term after the program finished. Most of the people they hired from the larger schools would leave pretty quickly after finishing the program.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#160

Post by randomdata »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #158
randomdata wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs all recognized that the value proposition was not there and moved on. They did not stick it out to receive the graduate/dunce cap just to sooth their sunk cost pangs. Indeed, had they continued with it just because they started, that would be dunce-worthy. Thiel suggests that the "colleges that matter" offer more, e.g. research labs, that bring more to the table. That may justify greater i…

OK on Steve Jobs, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at Harvard. And they decided the value still wasn't there - even with Harvard's "ground breaking things" and "college that matters".

The idea isn't that Harvard magically gives you value just by showing up, but that there is opportunity to extract value there. An early investment in Harvard may lead you to joining the ranks as a researcher, for example. Gates and Zuckerberg realized that wasn't their future, so they aborted and got on the right track for themselves. But Thiel suggests that there is a possible future for those who wish to strive to join a Harvard "Old Boys Club".

In contrast, he suggests that a Reed College has no such opportunity. Let's say Jobs did graduate from its hallowed halls. Then what? Maybe he'd become a professor there? What can one really get out of Reed College? More likely he would have just ended up back in industry, at which point it was a waste of resources to invest in academia. Thiel would see such waste as being a boneheaded move. Sure, if you are in college for personal enjoyment, or what have you, rather than some kind of financial investment then such waste is less of a concern, but then you are also not Thiel's intended audience.

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