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Who cares about the Ivy League?

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Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#41

Post by tyre »

_fat_santa wrote: post #9

I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most i…

> the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.

but it does matter for a first job, which then has trickle down effects. If you have a better shot at a high-paying company with a good brand name and/or a better shot at "prestige" teams on those companies, that influences the next few years.

Nothing is guaranteed, but these marginal gains snowball.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#42

Post by fullshark »

People who understand that higher education quality is basically at parity and what matters is your peers/connections fostered in college + the doors that open for you based on what school you went to. The perceived elite schools give you a leg up in life, this is true for every country on the planet, and a lot of parents/kids work extremely hard to try and get into them for a reason.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#43

Post by mrangle »

alephnerd wrote: post #19
dustincoates wrote: post #7

The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of t…

University affiliation is a lagging indicator. At least in my friend group (mostly White, Asian, and Latiné who attended the Top 50 ranked US News schools), most of us already knew each other via competitive high school extracurriculars (eg. Debate, Sports, DECA, MUN, Science Olympiads, Quiz Bowl, SAT Bootcamp, Intel Science Fair, Cyberpatriot, etc) and because we all attended the same 200-300 high schools nationally…

You already knew your friend group because you attended the same "2-300" high schools?

Flagship Public Schools have long been limited elite. Hence the concept of the "Public Ivies".

Ivy does STEM, but STEM isn't the point of going Ivy. Public Schools will continue to be fine institutions for technical workers, who were and will never considered to be elite in the class sense. Real elites tend toward history and art majors, if any college at all. Even medicine is middle class.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#44

Post by skizm »

uneekname wrote: post #30

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented…

FWIW, most Ivy League and other top schools (MIT, Stanford) offer extreme discounts on tuition for students with household income under around $150K. Often times they'll pay somewhere between 0-10% of the actual tuition. If your family makes less than $75k, I think you can go to most or all of these schools for free (in tuition at least, not sure about room/board/food).

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#45

Post by _yb2s »

thathndude wrote: post #23
hackyhacky wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia itself is probably the field that is most particular about these things.

Yeah. For many of the same reasons. Schools want to be able to market “all of our professors are ivy-league grads”

“we would never hire someone that went to a shitty school like this one”

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#46

Post by Cthulhu_ »

uneekname wrote: post #30

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented…

The long and short of it is that when it comes to education, the US needs equal opportunities. This means paid-for education and an equalization of education knowledge / lessons, and less emphasis (in hiring) on what schools you went to. A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at.

Personally, I've benefited from the Netherlands' older equal opportunity system; my parents weren't rich (working class, single income, house bought at inopportune times) so they wouldn't have been able to put me through college, but thanks to a government funding - only a few hundred per month - plus affordable colleges - iirc it was €1500 per year + a few hundred tops in books but the books felt optional since piracy was a thing - meant that I could get a college degree and a subsequent job in a highly desired field (software development) and comfortably move up to middle class.

Of course, thanks to inflation and whatnot, I'm not significantly better off than my parents were - I bought a house ten years later in life than they did, half the size and twice the price, and I got lucky - but I'm still fortunate that we had this opportunity.

Some years ago, the government sliced into this equal opportunity program though, turning the 'free' government student funding into a loan so there's a generation now starting out with a college degree and 15-25K in debt and a completely inaccessible housing market even if they were to combine incomes with a significant other.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#47

Post by sublinear »

fullshark wrote: post #42

People who understand that higher education quality is basically at parity and what matters is your peers/connections fostered in college + the doors that open for you based on what school you went to. The perceived elite schools give you a leg up in life, this is true for every country on the planet, and a lot of parents/kids work extremely hard to try and get into them for a reason.

This is exactly it and why admitting more people to ivy league schools will entirely dilute what value was there.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#48

Post by armitron »

uneekname wrote: post #30

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented…

> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart.

This seems like a wild assertion to make, and here's something by Scott Alexander that points in the other direction:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-f...

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#49

Post by Eumenes »

If you're involved in hiring in the tech industry, the particular school doesn't matter as much as it used to, unless you're super focused in research or something arcane like quantum computing. Post graduate vs undergrad is a different ball game. But from my experience, MIT is special, but other Ivy's, not as much. I'm a big fan of schools like RPI, Drexel, Waterloo, Virginia Tech, etc. The co-op program produces very strong engineers. Ivy's may produce better product managers though.

Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?

#50

Post by ascar »

uneekname wrote: post #30

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented…

> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.

The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional. The schools filter so harshly that just getting admitted already means you are exceptional. And they can do that because of their good reputation, which is mostly based on tradition and perception.

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