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People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

washingtonpost.com

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Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#101

Post by novok »

grapeskin wrote: post #87
slt2021 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it says more about your skill that someone from 3rd world country, whose parents earn $10/mo is more skilled and smart to pass interview. Keep in mind it is more expensive for company to hire foreigners as there are 12 hoops to bring foreigner in board, they just desperate for any talent that can do the job (at high bar though)

Nah. H1B sponsor mills are a well documented issue that the US government has been trying to handle for a while now. These organizations go as far as filing multiple applications so they can more easily push one through. [1] It's nothing to do with "skill level" but everything to do with employers pushing down wages and wanting employees that are easily churned when necessary and kept obedient with the threat of thei…

WiPro H1B contractor mill staff are very very bad. The other person is probably talking from their non-wipro hiring experience.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#102

Post by oofnik »

Why is this at all surprising?

In any status-conscious society (read: any human society), given enough time, the people who make it to the top will invariably maximize opportunity afforded to their affinity group (i.e. offspring) at the expense of everyone else. This process manifests itself regardless of the role merit plays in the sorting algorithm. If the rules are relatively meritocratic (and relatively stable), and merit broadly defined is largely a heritable trait either via genetics or culture, it follows that given enough iterations, a structure will eventually emerge that exhibits strong nepotistic tendencies. The growing call for greater diversity and equity among high-status occupations is a reaction to this phenomenon.

Alternatively, many long-lasting power structures throughout history attempted to mitigate the phenomenon of hereditary nepotism via the policy of enforced celibacy among the elite class: eunuch advisors in many classical near-Eastern empires, Catholic clergymen, etc.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#103

Post by moonchrome »

thrown_22 wrote: post #86
brutusborn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly like that, but close. As % of people with college degrees approaches 100%, all students will have parents with a college degree, so it will approach 5/5. The logic in the parent comment still stands.

What you care about is how much more likely a person with parents who had degrees is to have a degree over one who doesn't. In 1970 4% of people had degrees and 20% of degree holders had parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 5 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders. In 2020 14% of people have degrees and 66% of degree holders have parents with degrees. That means that c…

% of degree holders as a population vs % parents of people with degrees is misleading - trend for getting degrees as a % of population is increasing and parents with degrees is lagging by around 10-20 years (ie. it will be 10-20 years before all the people that have degrees now can have children old enough to attain a degree).

So even if this probability reduces to 4 times more as likely, the % of population with degrees keeps increasing you'll see the pattern article is describing.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#104

Post by winReInstall »

The bad of caste appearing is a symptom of technology strangulation & stagnation. Meaning: new technology empowers the new comer, allowing them to excell in moments of meritocracy - if the economic circumstances give them the chance. But they do no longer, creating the families of old, who own all the things and prevent a change of all the things.

The ugly truth is, the more oligarch a country is, the more the number of disruptions reduces. All that remains is "allowed" disruption, which are basically take over of internal guilds by the oligarchs consolidating power. Think of Rockefeller taking over the stage coach guild with ueber.

The good thing is though, this consensus of oligarchs is not global. In chaotic countries, were the hold of the oligarchs is not total, the new might still bloom and overthrow them. There lies hope, supressed by the tendrils of the oligarchs to the extern in a empire that sanctions experiments.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#105

Post by brutusborn »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #45
metadat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad... Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point. My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition. Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling t…

If Harvard went away, I would be VERY happy. Schools like Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 are much more meritocratic. Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible, and given the history of the early US, it's not surprising that this insular Victorian / London culture of poshness also permeated into 17th / 18th century Ivy League schools in the Puritanical US. I'm amazed at what abject conditions Easte…

What does the entrance process for Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 look like? I'm just wondering how they are more meritocratic, do they just have less side-door admissions?

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#106

Post by brutusborn »

lordnacho wrote: post #99
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Harvard went away, I would be VERY happy. Schools like Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 are much more meritocratic. Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible, and given the history of the early US, it's not surprising that this insular Victorian / London culture of poshness also permeated into 17th / 18th century Ivy League schools in the Puritanical US. I'm amazed at what abject conditions Easte…

> Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who wou…

Your first point seems paradoxical but I might be misunderstanding. When you said 'dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in', are you inferring that although the right to decide is owned by the dons, they are 'ordinary' so there is less selection pressure for people from powerful backgrounds?

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#107

Post by thrown_22 »

moonchrome wrote: post #103
thrown_22 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you care about is how much more likely a person with parents who had degrees is to have a degree over one who doesn't. In 1970 4% of people had degrees and 20% of degree holders had parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 5 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders. In 2020 14% of people have degrees and 66% of degree holders have parents with degrees. That means that c…

% of degree holders as a population vs % parents of people with degrees is misleading - trend for getting degrees as a % of population is increasing and parents with degrees is lagging by around 10-20 years (ie. it will be 10-20 years before all the people that have degrees now can have children old enough to attain a degree). So even if this probability reduces to 4 times more as likely, the % of population with deg…

Yes and?

The point is that if anything degrees now provide less generational predictability than they used to 50 years ago.

The article is trying to argue the exact opposite.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#108

Post by pmyteh »

AinderS wrote: post #26
muglug wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could go further and observe that all of the article's pictured students are graduating from Oxford, whereas the article discusses students at US universities. But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.

A search for "uk phd graduate" or "uk university students" likewise yields exceedingly diverse results.

This is especially true of PhD/DPhil programmes at places like Oxford: their intake is massively international, unlike their undergraduate provision which hews to (a small slice of) England.

Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

#110

Post by lordnacho »

brutusborn wrote: post #106
lordnacho wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who wou…

Your first point seems paradoxical but I might be misunderstanding. When you said 'dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in', are you inferring that although the right to decide is owned by the dons, they are 'ordinary' so there is less selection pressure for people from powerful backgrounds?

Basically I got the impression that the Dons/profs would not like if the college master tapped them on the shoulder and said "Little Johnny's dad gave us some money, please let him into your tutorial group".

If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions.

There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.

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