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What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

washingtonpost.com

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Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#161

Post by eighthnate »

leggomylibro wrote: post #159
eighthnate wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. There are tons of old universities in europe. University of Bologna is older than oxford, but I doubt anyone would say it is more prestigious. Prestige is determined by money and power. Oxford doesn't really measure up to harvard or yale in this regard. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/05/harvard-mit-ran... The most important and wealthiest universities in the most important country is going to b…

Sorry, I was sort of making a facetious joke. Sometimes it's surprising how fervently people revere tradition, and you do see it a bit more often in the UK, imo. Not that I'd be a great judge, having spent less than a month or so there in total.

> Sorry, I was sort of making a facetious joke.

Oh. I see. The joke went completely over my head.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#162

Post by rdlecler1 »

tehwebguy wrote: post #67
rdlecler1 wrote: post #16

I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to…

What a scam it all is. How tragic that you TAs are apparently complicit. Edit: Thanks for the downvote but giving higher grades because it's more convenient than doing the right thing is... the wrong thing. Painful that at some point it felt like your (and many others') best choice but it was still wrong flat out. Hey maybe now you can "change the system from the inside!"

As you feel so strongly about this issue, I assume that you will not sit around and be complicit now that you are aware of the realities but instead will put in the hard work to marshall a campaign of change.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#163

Post by milkywayz »

Animats wrote: post #25

Harvard's graduation rate is 97.5%. Yale 97%. Princeton 96.9%. It's hard to flunk out of the Ivy League. Non Ivy League highly selective schools: Caltech 92.3%. Stanford 93%. MIT 92.2%. UC Berkeley: 90.9%. Low 90% success rate is normal there.

RIT 63.2%.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#164

Post by derekja »

bllguo wrote: post #125
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when it comes to writing programs, the homework is the only thing that even remotely demonstrates your utility to an employer. I would go as far as to say that exams should not count, only homework should.

What? What employer has ever looked at a potential hire's homework? If you don't grade exams but grade homework, then homework just becomes a take-home exam...

I'm teaching an intro Web Development course at the University level right now. No exams, only projects and homework. All submissions in github, so it's likely some will be looked at!

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#165

Post by rconti »

positivity89 wrote: post #7

Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

It really is frustrating. I know it doesn't help the WaPo, but I subscribe to the NYTimes and the Economist and my wife's got a couple of other subs in there somewhere, but instead every site wants their $10-$20. Micropayments now!

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#166

Post by [deleted] »

eighthnate wrote: post #147
irrational wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

As an american, yes. I'd say Harvard and Yale are much more prestigious than oxford or cambridge. Most americans don't even know what oxford or cambridge is. It's also been my experience that most chinese/asians prefer harvard/yale/ivy league and of course our top engineering schools ( MIT/Cal Tech/etc ). Stanford and Carnegie Mellon also seem to be very desired by chinese/asian students as well due to prominence of…

[deleted]

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#167

Post by blibble »

irrational wrote: post #14
NumberSix wrote: post #9

The article ends with: It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show. Emphasis on now added. Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep s…

Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.

for one there's no legacy admissions at Oxford or Cambridge...

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#168

Post by rdlecler1 »

sabas123 wrote: post #17
rdlecler1 wrote: post #16

I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to…

Did you get any different instructions for your grading at Yale? And doesn't such thing lead to large varying amounts of average grads per class?

No, but students will go around you to the prof and they get away with things that wouldn’t have worked at UofC. Mostly you end up asking yourself how much you’re willing to go to battle. No upside, lots of downside. Grades become more binary for anything subjective. Obviously multiple choice is much easier to deal with, but even then students will get exam re-writes from the profs.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#169

Post by blacksmythe »

WalterBright wrote: post #128
Animats wrote: post #25

Harvard's graduation rate is 97.5%. Yale 97%. Princeton 96.9%. It's hard to flunk out of the Ivy League. Non Ivy League highly selective schools: Caltech 92.3%. Stanford 93%. MIT 92.2%. UC Berkeley: 90.9%. Low 90% success rate is normal there.

I wonder how they're measuring it. I attended Caltech in the 70s, and the percent who entered as freshman and graduated as seniors was much lower. You could see it just in the number of students at each level, it declined every year.

The Caltech graduation rate back then said to be on the order of 66%.

The saying at Frosh camp was 'Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you is not going to graduate'.

Re: What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

#170

Post by nnfy »

kafkaesq wrote: post #140
nnfy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also be at least partly related to higher selectivity and more financial aid, and/or rich parents, that make school easier. But I dont actually know what goes on in ivy and off ivy league elite schools. Also consider that these may just be better run schools which also provide more and more useful assistance to students. Edit: I would like to add I think this article title is extremely clickbaity, and plays…

There's no merit to this biased pile of shit. You may no particularly like the author's point of view -- but you looked carefully, you might have noticed it was placed in he "Perspective" section, which as the name implies, is dedicated to expressing what are commonly known as "points of view" -- otherwise known as "biases". Which, forming the very core of our cognitive processes as they do, are very far from flaws -…

The fact that journalists are inherently biased as humans does not imply that we should not strive toward the opposite.

I dont care either way for the author's point of view. I am bothered by the fact that a news source publishes so much in opinion, and that people end up more polarized after the article, not because of its factual content, but because of its vitriol.

I believe it irresponsible to create and publish content like this, because it amounts to propaganda - I dont care side of our false dichotomy you are on, huff post is up there with breibart.

Opinion pieces should not affect our beliefs as much as they do, but let's be real, communities feed off of opinion pieces. We all do, and I come to HN specifically to minimize my exposure to feel good emotional reinforcement that leads to irrational thinking.

Sorry for the rant.

Edit: your choice of quote may be more effective than you realize, I am a big fan of Thompson's persona. Ironic, I know.

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