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Academia's 1%

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Re: Academia's 1%

#121

Post by cozzyd »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #37
williamstein wrote: post #5

[Disclaimer: I'm part of that 1% she is talking about, since I'm tenured faculty in Mathematics at University of Washington, with "Harvard" on my resume due to my first job being there. http://wstein.org ] The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even w…

Excuse me, but I think you're letting defensiveness get in the way of clear mathematics ;-). >Such entitlement. I got into UC Berkeley (1995-2000) where I received $13K/year to live on from them (for TA'ing), and I made it work by having a roommate, being frugal, and getting some student loans (the minimum I needed), which I paid off within 2 years of graduation. It sucked, but I had to just be lean and deal with it,…

MIT graduate stipend is currently around 2800 / month, at least for physics. Also, grad students don't pay payroll taxes and it's relatively easy to make extra money by signing up to grade things or to help at conferences.

Re: Academia's 1%

#122

Post by jroesch »

ibrahima wrote: post #113
egocodedinsol wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but I'd bet that the best institutions actually don't care where their applicants come from. They can afford to just choose the best. It's the so-so places that have to signal their quality by 'hiring the best'. I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one.

> I've seen this in graduate school applications - students with poor marks often stand a better chance of admittance in a top program than a so-so one. Well, that's probably deceptive, as those guys are probably exceptional in other ways (publications as an undergrad, other research, etc) which takes away from their grades, or they only cared about certain classes which were important to their field.

As a current graduate school applicant with a couple of admits to top 10 programs I can confirm this.

My GPA looks "low" around a 3.3 cumulative (I have lots of C's in things I deemed unimportant) but I have a relatively high CS GPA (3.8-3.9), took many graduate classes during undergrad, worked at startups, consulted, did multiple years of research resulting in two publications with 2-3 more in the pipeline, worked on open source, gave talks at workshops and software engineering conferences, TAed, constructed two student led courses, etc.

It seems the most important thing is to demonstrate your ability to work as a researcher (your primary role as a CS graduate student) trumps all in graduate admissions, but that is just my 2 cents.

Re: Academia's 1%

#123

Post by analog31 »

hga wrote: post #55
Dewie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't everyone who joins the military attain the rank of colonel or higher eventually?

On the other hand, when you become an officer you'd have to be grossly ignorant not to know about the (US) military "up or out" policy. One complaint here that seems to be legit is that students are not told how poor their job prospects are in raw numbers. Now, some of that is no doubt to avoid discouragement, you don't know if X student will later shine, or burn out, but....

I got my degree in the early 90s. At that time, it was already common knowledge among grad students that we couldn't all be hired into academic jobs. How could we not have known? My dad, who got his PhD in the 50s told me it was well known even then.

Re: Academia's 1%

#124

Post by DiversityWorks »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #115
michaelochurch wrote: post #86

Here's how to understand academia. When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course…

Why do you always get downvoted to hell? I thoroughly enjoy your posts. HN, what is wrong with being provocative? This place has too much buttoned-down, fear of the downvote (FOD, kinda like FUD but for geeks). Ironically, the HN crowd would make perfect academics. Such reason, much facts! note: i'm an academic deciding on whether to take or bail on a tenure-track academic job.

HN is getting less and less tolerant of anything that isn't boiler plate valley tripe.

Re: Academia's 1%

#125

Post by TimPC »

lkrubner wrote: post #95

Does anyone else find it ironic that academia is, in some sense, more anti-intellectual than general manager Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team? I'm sure on Hacker News most of your know about MoneyBall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball Consider this paragraph, and ask yourself why the nation's major universities can not raise themselves to the same level of statistical rigor: "The central premi…

Research isn't a competitive game with clear wins and losses. Moneyball and finding the under valued players works best in environments where you can actually prove/demonstrate they wre clearly undervalued. It's very difficult to show someone who's undervalued is clearly undervalued short of them solving a major open problem. When there is far less direct competition everything is more subjective and the prestige factor of top tier applicants shines.

Re: Academia's 1%

#126

Post by swatow »

superdude264 wrote: post #33
dpweb wrote: post #10

This was the best article, not just regarding academia, but describing the issue of privilege and its destructive effect on the "american dream" - that I think I have seen since the 2009 crash. We have a controversy about wealth inequality and it seems that would be a natural result of a cycle of power simply being passed down generation by generation. I think the opposite of that, a meritocracy, is what we want - bu…

Who gets do define merit? Too many Jewish students were getting into Harvard in the early part of the 20th century, so the application process was changed.

and exactly the same thing now happens with Asians.

Re: Academia's 1%

#127

Post by Dewie »

untilHellbanned wrote: post #115
michaelochurch wrote: post #86

Here's how to understand academia. When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course…

Why do you always get downvoted to hell? I thoroughly enjoy your posts. HN, what is wrong with being provocative? This place has too much buttoned-down, fear of the downvote (FOD, kinda like FUD but for geeks). Ironically, the HN crowd would make perfect academics. Such reason, much facts! note: i'm an academic deciding on whether to take or bail on a tenure-track academic job.

I don't know about provocative. Everyone knows what O'Church's opinions are at this point. Can the same tune really be provocative?

Re: Academia's 1%

#128

Post by millermp12 »

cle wrote: post #26
nycticorax wrote: post #8

The author seems to view the hiring statistics she cites as evidence of "bias", but I didn't see any attempt to control for the actual quality of the applicants. I.e. You could read all of this as just more evidence that the "system" works: the good schools tend to be enriched for good graduate students, who then tend to get a lot of the tenure-track jobs.

I was thinking the same thing, and then I read: "With institutional bias in hiring now proven by multiple social scientists..." Is anyone familiar with these studies? This is a crucial piece of information for the article.

When referring to social "scientists" the quotes should be obligatory

Re: Academia's 1%

#129

Post by millermp12 »

analog31 wrote: post #88
Dewie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will wax poetically about meritocracy and fairness. Then they will get children of their own and think to themselves that giving them all the advantages that they can get is their newest and most moral goal.

Guilty as charged. But realistically, I know of no society where parents don't favor the interests of their own children, resulting in a trend towards increasing disparity. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to remember that perfect meritocracy is utopian, and can't be reconciled with fairness, so long as individuals can choose to whom they share their advantages -- indeed when we can't even all agree on what those…

From casual observation, it would seem a lot of black communities are not afflicted with this moral dillemma.

What's more the latest US Census post points quite clearly to a powerful assortat I've mating effect.

Re: Academia's 1%

#130

Post by lsc »

michaelochurch wrote: post #86

Here's how to understand academia. When you're 22, almost everything you've done has been measured in relative terms to your peers (in part, because almost no one at that age has real accomplishments by adult standards, except in athletics; so it's a favorable curve). You think that the world is more competitive than it actually is, because you've been rewarded (or punished) based on individual performance. Of course…

>Then there are the tribal effects. Why do bankers and traders earn 3x what programmers do, and why do we as programmers earn 3x what academics do, at each level? Because the worst place you want to be in a market is side-by-side with someone who's similarly competent in the rendered service but has no organizational or social skill, nor sense of self-worth; he'll sell himself very short, and drag you down with him by lowering your market value as well.

I am failing to understand how the question and answer are related here.

Are you saying that bankers make more than programmers, and programmers make more than academics because of the difference in overall or uniformity of social skills?

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