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It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

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

#271

Post by devnonymous »

plank_time wrote: post #252
devnonymous wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lawyer's kid could go do technology and my kid could grow up to be a lawyer-- it's just a somewhat less likely outcome. And what would be the likelyhood of the child of a single mom working 2 unskilled jobs to be either of those? Like I mentioned in a different comment, Systematic barriers exist without being consciously built and are then perpetuated as just the natural way of things.

Someone I know is an illegal immigrant from Central America. She cleans houses for a living. Her husband is also illegal immigrant and he paints houses. Her daughter is going to one of the top private schools in SF, on a full scholarship. She dreams of Yale, and I would bet that she gets it easily. If you are dedicated to education, there is plenty of opportunity to succeed. It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make i…

> It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make it out of poverty easily, but that’s just how the world works.

Right, right, my mistake, this is nothing like the Varana system.

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

#272

Post by naturalauction »

graphtradr wrote: post #262
namesafe77 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats Indian Varna system right there.

Kind of a goofy comment IMO. My parents are not intellectual in the least. The career advice I received from them growing up was all bad. Lucky for me I ignored them. Now take one kid getting bad career advice and another kid getting good career advice from mom and dad. After thousands of iterations the asymmetry is going to be huge. Sorry that doesn't line up with the institutional victim mentality.

Not sure what you mean by “institutional victim mentality” but I would say that your example is a great example of institutional failure. Ideally kids would get good career advice from many other places (schools etc) which would rectify a lot of the negative damage caused by the bad advice from their parents.

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

#273

Post by haihaibye »

scbrg wrote: post #259
haihaibye wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He used median instead of mean, and forgot regression to the population average. IQ is only ~80% genetic

> He used median instead of mean What's the difference when you only have two values in the set?

Same result but unnecessary complexity

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

#274

Post by bruce343434 »

obstacle1 wrote: post #87
neom wrote: post #52

Used to have this argument regularly with executives of startups I've worked for who had worked in more "traditional" industries. The number of times I've had to interject around "pedigree" being "useful" is.. sad. (Most)Everyone I've hired from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, etc have been the worst performing, and the most far behind in relevant skills. RIT, Rutgers, etc, waaaay far ahead. It got to the point where I…

Maybe the problem is you're hiring CS/engineering students to "show KPIs" or "set up mixpanel" or "not program"? I can't imagine any competent student from those disciplines, never mind a student from a top tier school, being happy at any kind of job like that. Especially if they were sold a job that would use their full abilities. Sounds like a recipe for otherwise talented people half-assing your job while looking…

./.. never said anything about CS/engineering

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

#275

Post by bluenose69 »

I'd be more interested in reading a complaint about richly-endowed universities if I were not faced with the necessity to pay to continue reading past the first screenful.

I'm disinclined to pay, because history indicates that the HN comments are likely to be more useful than the linked item.

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

#276

Post by thaumasiotes »

jedberg wrote: post #264
rajin444 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science needs to advance more so that we can determine nature vs. nurture. It's all genetic (nature) in the end - but I think being able to say "x lacks the genetic makeup to dunk a basketball" vs "x was malnourished as a child so they wont grow enough to be able to dunk a basketball" is useful. I think articles looking at outcomes of the children of successful people are unhealthy and will focus too much on environm…

I think it's been fairly well established that genetics determines the max values -- max IQ, max height, max athleticism, etc. and then nurture determines if you reach the max.

There's plenty left to be directly determined by nature after setting maximum values.

You've got far more food than you need. You can't get any taller -- what do you do with it? Should you eat it at all?

How resilient should you be to less-than-ideal input? Say it's unseasonably cold for a few months. Should you get shorter, or is it better to just give up and die?

You don't have enough food. You're not in any danger of starving, but you're not going to reach maximum height, IQ, _and_ athleticism. Which trait(s) should be lowered? By how much?

Genetics doesn't just specify the maximum outcome. It specifies the entire set of possibilities, and how those possibilities are reached.

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

#277

Post by Broken_Hippo »

jedberg wrote: post #19
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…

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…

The thing many of these have in common is that connections help you. In other words, if your parent is in x career, it means that you get a starting bonus if you do the same. On top of this, most children have some knowledge of the job conditions: Familiarity seems to lessen risk (even if it doesn't - it is the reason showers seem safe but airplanes might not).

Legislators seem to get more done if they are well-connected, for example, and a parent introducing you to their connections makes you a better legislator, probably at a younger age than your parent. Yes, you can do some job shadowing at this other dentist's office: I can put in a good word for you at the electrician's union so you can get into the schooling they offer. Yes, you can work at my plumbing company and learn - it isn't like this state requires licenses, so you'll be just fine.

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

#278

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

jedberg wrote: post #263
exporectomy wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are Ivy League universities really that much better at training people or is their success mostly due to skimming from the top of the applicant pool? If the latter, then it seems like those students would do just as well if they didn't exist and nothing's really lost or gained either way by their exclusivity. If they have a magic recipe for creating success, why can't other universities copy it? Does it depend on…

Their magic recipe is putting a bunch of smart, mostly rich, people in one place and then telling them they are part of an exclusive community. Then they give them access to the older successful members of the community and constantly remind them that once they are the older successful members they need to help out the recent grads.

Sounds a lot like Freemasonry, but unlike Feemasonry, it seems to be actually working as intended.

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

#279

Post by unishark »

barry-cotter wrote: post #139
wolverine876 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> And the elite universities have acted on it, and many of their new classes are very different. > No less elitist though. The idea of a selective college is elitist. What does that mean? By that definition, everything selective is 'elitist', including my high school wrestling team. By non-elitist, we generally mean it's not biased in favor of the people who are already in society's elite. Some top colleges now admi…

> Some top colleges now admit much more economically and ethnically diverse students. Yes, there are lots more black and Hispanic students than before, and since the universities refuse to share the data we can’t be sure that this increase in diversity mostly means more children of Nigerian doctors and Colombian lawyers, mostly paying full international student fees but that’s the way to bet. Regarding economic diver…

> Less selective colleges with smaller endowments that need the money from fees more are not going to be more economically diverse if they can possibly avoid it.

Why does it matter? They are less selective so anyone has a better chance of getting in.

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