Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 334 posts

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

#61

Post by sudosysgen »

frognumber wrote: post #55
usednet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of this contributes to extremely low intellectual diversity at Ivy Leagues. I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Harvard students and it is consistently true that they are always unremarkable individuals. These schools simply breed a managerial class that is capable of grinding hard and following orders.

I've been affiliated with MIT in one way or another for more than a quarter-century. What's been astounding is the change in faculty. Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems. New MIT faculty are slick politicians with an increasing sleazy Enron-style vibe. That's true of MIT leadership as well.

Do you know of some place where there are still nerds into neat tech problems?

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

#62

Post by redox99 »

AinderS wrote: post #51
cypress66 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You usually see men hanging with other men, and women with other women. There are 2 pictures shown. If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random, it would be completely common for both pictures to end up like the ones in the article.

> If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random Yes. But if a Washington Post photographer went (or chose the pictures), it's vanishingly uncommon. A duckduckgo image search, limited to washingtonpost.com, of "phd graduation", "phd students", "phd graduate", "graduation", or "university students", yields almost no such pictures. Almost all are either very diverse, or entirely black. They on…

Yes, it's true that stock photos usually have this "checkbox diversity" where the photo must contain one of each (one white, one black, one man, one woman, etc)

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

#63

Post by zamfi »

AlexandrB wrote: post #37
eek2121 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whenever this comes up, I'm always puzzled about where the extra money is going. Is it just pure profit for the University?

Rarely profit. But it goes towards higher salaries, larger administrations, financial aid, and various amenities that today's college-bound kids' parents demand, like comfortable dorms, gyms, etc. College in the 80s didn't look much like college today.

For many schools, the actual cost the average student pays has not changed as much as the sticker price. One reason is that some colleges discovered they could price discriminate: by charging $XXk/yr as the sticker price, they could let in some fraction of students who can afford to pay full fare, and use that money to offer financial aid to the students they want to attract but who can't pay full fare. Another reason is that basically no college competes on being less expensive, because that might imply that they're not "worth it".

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

#64

Post by forum_ghost »

frognumber wrote: post #55
usednet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of this contributes to extremely low intellectual diversity at Ivy Leagues. I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Harvard students and it is consistently true that they are always unremarkable individuals. These schools simply breed a managerial class that is capable of grinding hard and following orders.

I've been affiliated with MIT in one way or another for more than a quarter-century. What's been astounding is the change in faculty. Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems. New MIT faculty are slick politicians with an increasing sleazy Enron-style vibe. That's true of MIT leadership as well.

has been reflected in the student body as well in some ways? tia

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

#65

Post by maegul »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #16

From my own experience in academia I was surprised by how many of my peers went into academia because they were expected to do so by their parents, who were also academics. It's a smallish sample, but ~90% of the people I talked to never considered other careers paths. Their parents were academics, so it's just natural that they become one too. They already knew this ever since high school. As someone who got into ac…

Not unheard for me too: it seemed for some that having both parents with PhDs, and a partner too, basically made them feel like they needed one.

Plenty going on in such a phenomenon I feel. There’s the relative directionless-ness that can plague smart people coming out of unchallenging high school environments; the often accompanying “prestige for the sake of prestige” logic that you can get in middle-upper class culture, and, IMO, the inflated value and prestige of actually having a PhD in the modern (ie production-line) education system. A healthy dose of cynicism about the corporate world is often involved too I’d say.

I personally find it unfortunate how classist and stupid Grad school would feel at times.

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

#66

Post by forum_ghost »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #16

From my own experience in academia I was surprised by how many of my peers went into academia because they were expected to do so by their parents, who were also academics. It's a smallish sample, but ~90% of the people I talked to never considered other careers paths. Their parents were academics, so it's just natural that they become one too. They already knew this ever since high school. As someone who got into ac…

not at all uncommon with other highly specialized professions either.

MD's kids are 24x more likely to become MDs as well.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

kepler1 wrote: post #43

Let's play it forward where in some alternate reality we were able to reset the current "inequity" and give lots more people from non-elite backgrounds a good shot at proving their capabilities. Or even have that as an ongoing policy in a very fair way. ("Fair" being the problematic word which will constantly be debated.) Do you imagine that a new elite of some new type of class would not emerge? Would that new elite…

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by truly »

I would like to draw the attention to the precise wording around the statistics:

""" In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, [...] """

These numbers (1/5, 2/3) refer to US-born PhD graduates (in economics).

But the number of US-born PhD students is very small. The vast majority of PhD students are immigrants.

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

#69

Post by forum_ghost »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #20
metadat wrote: post #3

Isn'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…

>Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering.

I have witnessed numerous times hiring managers that would request that HR only sends them resumes from 1-2 target schools, specified by name.

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

#70

Post by wyre »

cm2187 wrote: post #32

> In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. > This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degr…

This article’s point is that economist graduates now are more likely to have come from a parent who is also an economics grad than compared to other points in time and against other graduate programs.
Post reply on HN