Who cares about the Ivy League?
noahpinion.blog
Who cares about the Ivy League?
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Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#2Parents and their friends.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#3[flagged]
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#4I've heard that most human beings are fairly obsessed with social status.
Similar in most other primate species, and many mammals, and ...
Not sure about plants.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#5He suggests we should increase the number of spots at top schools. Perhaps. But I’m reading “End Times” by Turchin and this suggests “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability. Maybe that’s wrong, but if so it would add an important reason to instead focus on the well being of “the productive class”, perhaps through expanding trade schools etc.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#6[dead]
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#7The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of the top 7 are Ivies[0]. I bet you'd see the same with CEOs.
You could argue that it is a reflection on the already rich getting in (although you would overlook those like Thomas, who grew up very poor), but that is also part of the problem. Many times these schools are finishing schools, which prepare their students to take their places as Masters of the Universe.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/30/wh...
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#8He suggests we should increase the number of spots at top schools. Perhaps. But I’m reading “End Times” by Turchin and this suggests “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability. Maybe that’s wrong, but if so it would add an important reason to instead focus on the well being of “the productive class”, perhaps through expanding trade schools etc.
> “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability
I'm ambivalent about Turchin's work, but there are corroborating theories on this; see the idea of "change merchants"[0], which posit that as more people (and especially more people with higher social rank and influence) deal in the virtual as opposed to the physical, there is an increasing amount of personal incentive on those involved to make sure that things change rapidly.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#9I 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 important as it's crucial to your "personal brand" (A "Harvard trained" lawyer). With doctors it seems less important and with most other professions it seems almost irrelevant.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#10The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of t…
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.
You have unlimited tuition money, and you're guaranteed to be accepted into Harvard since you have passably average grades and your legacy family donates to the school. Would you not go to Harvard?
Some prestigious companies hire mostly/only from Ivy Leagues, but ultimately those are mostly just upper-middle-class salary jobs (e.g., MBB consulting companies).