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It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

chronicle.com

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Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#101

Post by Der_Einzige »

bradleyjg wrote: post #20
Causality1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the deal is with such a large percentage of submissions being paywalled sites. Do the submitters have subscriptions to everything and just don't realize? Does everybody reading HN have anti-paywall extensions installed? Sure there's always the archive.is link but someone has to see the article in the first place.

Maybe content that has a reasonable revenue stream supporting it is just better.

Maybe students attending universities who have "reasonable revenue streams" supporting them are just better.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#102

Post by [deleted] »

tedunangst wrote: post #82
graeme wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because for cultural reasons US people ascribe elite status to precisely those ten colleges. Or T14 in some cases. If the US ascribed sainted elite status to the top 100 colleges to the top 100 colleges, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. By contrast in Canada if you went to UBC, McGill or UBC people assume you are smart.

Tough break for the Berkeley grads widely assumed to be dumb idiots.

[deleted]

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#103

Post by rdiddly »

I'm sure they're quaking in their boots upon reading this sternly-worded letter! To change things would take this, plus the slightest hint of conviction on the part of those currently living fat lives working in and leading those same institutions - not just academia but others that were supposed to safeguard society against such excesses, such as the press, the media, organized labor (sorry who?), and the vibrant American communist/socialist movement (LOL JK). They've all been neutralized and their brightest individuals bought off in subtle ways e.g. they just happen to make more money and get invited to more parties by agreeing with the elite party line. Or disagreeing with it in principle but crucially misattributing the blame to protect those actually at fault and/or cui bono-ing from it, that's a popular tactic. Ironically if you've got tenure (as increasingly few do) you ought to be able to speak out all the more loudly, and you can, and still make money, but you won't get invited to the parties anymore.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#104

Post by vmception »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #68

It’s time to break up the education system from all the extracurricular fluff. The universities are fostering identities around themselves: students join debate teams, sports teams, religious groups , orchestra, etc under the aegis of their universities and attach their personal identities to these things. To me personally it seems kind of ridiculous. What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you…

As long as its a privately run social credit system dictating the available choices in your life its fine

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#105

Post by hecubus »

wolverine876 wrote: post #55

What is the author's thesis? I skimmed and read and re-read, but didn't figure it out. It's well known that elite universities are elitist in their admissions and have over-large endowments. And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different. And it's well known that the rest of the U.S. educational system is underfunded. > Sen. Tom Cotton, of all political leaders, suggeste…

In case it helps, I found out about the article from this interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Aji9tl2D8. I hadn't heard of Sam Haselby before, but Matt Stoller is an interesting antitrust-oriented critic of big tech.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#106

Post by xmprt »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #68

It’s time to break up the education system from all the extracurricular fluff. The universities are fostering identities around themselves: students join debate teams, sports teams, religious groups , orchestra, etc under the aegis of their universities and attach their personal identities to these things. To me personally it seems kind of ridiculous. What if you are a young adult who is interested in trades, but you…

Maybe it's different in public universities (or just the universities that I've seen), but I went to one and the on campus activities are pretty available to the general public who don't attend the university. There are few things that are locked down to students only and I know cases where non-students talk to the club organizers to get exceptions.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#107

Post by noizejoy »

retrac wrote: post #24
jedberg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the NYT: Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7…

I was just going to look for data on plumbers and carpenters. One common theme to all these jobs is that they tend to be quite stable, and require a life-long set of skills. My father did metalwork before moving to an office job in the civil service. He was the son of a die pressman. Who was the son of a blacksmith. Dad taught me how to weld and cut and so on before my teens. My intellectual interests went to math an…

I'd say it's a script filled with probabilities rather than absolutes. And isn't that all of life, the universe and everything?

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#108

Post by m00x »

an_opabinia wrote: post #70
zamfi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, what is this “has become” language for? It implies that the this elite group is more self-reinforcing than it used to be, but there’s no evidence for that. Harvard’s 1940s admission rate of 85% was certainly not a more meritocratic time. The ratio you ask for is almost certainly decreasing over time, not increasing, right?

Admissions rates mean a lot less than people think they do. Meritocracy - what you’re really saying is, the most qualified people get to do the thing with the scarce stuff - has risen. Anyway, historically, if you felt wronged by an educational institution, you made your own schools.

> Anyway, historically, if you felt wronged by an educational institution, you made your own schools.

Source on this? I doubt that spinning up a whole new school was ever this simple and accessible.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#109

Post by rebelos »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #62
scarmig wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.

I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?

You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets.

The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ.... This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total police encounters. While it's tragic that the count is nonzero, any rational person should be amazed that the incidence is so vanishingly low, given the uncertainty inherent to policing. It's truly remarkable that it isn't much much higher. I couldn't find statistics about police killings of unarmed White people, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is higher than 31 since 2014.

The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people is because the media has worked very hard to maximally exploit cherrypicked cases to get you to believe that.

Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence:

> A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 [2020] surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area.

The reason for this is obvious. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has had the same devastating impact within Black communities as it has had everywhere else in the world: increased criminality.

Re: It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

#110

Post by zarkov99 »

sokoloff wrote: post #11

> Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families. What’s the ratio in other fields of top achievement for kids to follow in their parents’ footsteps? It’s entirely unsurprising that a…

Most of all your kids are likely to have IQ's close to the median of you and your wife. This is likely the most important factor of all as heart-breaking and unfair as this is.
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