Higher education is the most socially acceptable form of capitalism. You invest in large upfront costs with the hopes that the multipliers of your capital will make it all worth it. Here, capital includes skills, knowledge, relationships, and human networks.
People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
21–30 of 334 posts
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#22Isn't this to be expected with any similarly weighted network? Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco. Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perce…
Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most of middle and upper management (VP / SVP) also has degrees from no-name schools. If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees (except for Cornell, which is basically a public school). Upw…
> 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 that is hard to break through.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#23How to determine if this is attributable to economic inequality and not just overproduction of degrees ?
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#24Criteria for becoming an academic:
- Above-average IQ
- Intellectual upbringing
- PhD, i.e. spending five years of your life in your mid to late 20s getting your union card
- During those five years, at least one of: no other mouths to feed, a working spouse, independent wealth, or well-off parents willing to support you
- Willingness to get a PhD for a less than - Left-wing cosmopolitan social and political views
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#25For a person that isn’t from a wealthy background already, it’s hard to justify the path of academia when a more lucrative path has much more potential to be life changing for them and their family.
My working class zip code public schooling presented a narrative that academics make low wages. Later I realize the wages of STEM PhDs in industry. I known this does not generalize among discipline but I regret not taking an academic path.
STEM PhDs in industry are not really in 'academia', as their research is typically not arbitrary.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#26Interesting. Although US graduate students are only 53% white [1] (while the US is 57.8% white [2]) and women account for 53% of doctoral degrees [3], all 5 of the people in the generic stock photos in the article are white males, despite making up only an estimated 25% of graduates. A striking deviation from the photographic trend if one e.g. google image searches for "phd graduate". [1] https://www.equityinhighered…
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.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#27Isn't this to be expected with any similarly weighted network? Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco. Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perce…
Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most of middle and upper management (VP / SVP) also has degrees from no-name schools. If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees (except for Cornell, which is basically a public school). Upw…
come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course.
they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a handful have the personality traits for C-suite or founding a company anyway. they're mostly just nerds who went to a top private HS and got perfect SAT scores.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
And prior to that, education used to be a lot more expensive, and was only for the rich. Your claim is not just cause-and-effect, it's historical fact too.
Not in the US it wasn't? Costs for higher education have tripled in the past couple decades, to say NOTHING of costs in the 80s or 90s. Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are: https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-ongoi... In case y…
"Prior" was before 1920 or 1945 or so. Costs for higher education placed it well into the realm of the super-elite.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
My working class zip code public schooling presented a narrative that academics make low wages. Later I realize the wages of STEM PhDs in industry. I known this does not generalize among discipline but I regret not taking an academic path.
STEM PhDs in industry are not really in 'academia', as their research is typically not arbitrary.
Can you elaborate slightly? I don't want to misinterpret you.
Re: People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
My working class zip code public schooling presented a narrative that academics make low wages. Later I realize the wages of STEM PhDs in industry. I known this does not generalize among discipline but I regret not taking an academic path.
STEM PhDs in industry are not really in 'academia', as their research is typically not arbitrary.
i think what he meant was, pursuing a PhD opens the possibility of entering academia, and if not, the time and attainment is not wasted financially.
also, he might include that STEM professors earn higher than other academics and have many opportunities to earn high rates of consulting pay, and or spin off to found companies, etc.