Who cares about the Ivy League?

> More than half of Stony Brook students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution make it to the top 20%! That’s amazing!

That is really impressive! And look, more schools should focus on this metric.

As an Ivy League grad, you can get the "education" anywhere. Ivies, State Schools (ha, ome Ivies are State Schools!), Community Colleges, Udemy, Khan Academy, YouTube... once you learn how to learn, the sky is the limit. And learning how to learn on your own, and in a way where your failures as you learn aren't life threatening... I'd say that's the real key to life-long success.

But there's nothing going to an Ivy taught me that was unique to that school. For the most part, I found the "famous" professors to be miserable during my undergrad. Like they may know the material inside and out, and their books may be used by other schools, but that doesn't make them good lecturers. In fact, most of them kind of sucked at it, and you could tell it wasn't how they'd spend their time if the university didn't say, "Oh, thanks for the book, keep 'em coming, but you also have to teach an undergrad class too..."

Outside of education though, that's the real benefit. The network there... the opportunities some of my peers had, and I had, because of their connections... And it's a mind shift. Higher expectations, to be sure -- for myself, and others around me. (And, over time, that leads to the ability to teach others ways to improve their game.)

And look, as a kid starting out, getting a few wins in early on makes the world seem a lot less uphill. Even small things, like being able to make a good first impression when I looked for jobs as a new grad (or even 20 years on), people giving me the benefit of the doubt because of the school I went to -- small things turned out to be huge. That initial first impression "I bet this kid is good..." is so valuable. Creates a nice confidence feedback loop too.

All things being equal, I sure am glad I went to an Ivy. I didn't learn anything at school that I couldn't have learned other places. Its was just nice to have that networking opportunity. I look through my friends and I have a huge range of highly successful people in my network. And not all of them went to Ivys, but I will say that having that "starter network" allowed me to connect with other successful people, offer them opportunities, build relationships... like attracts like. And having high expectations seems to attract others with high expectations.

(I fully understand now that my going to an Ivy League school, even as a financial aid recipient, really had more to do with my parents than me. As an 18 year-old kid... what do you know? You're just along for the ride, and taking the ramp my parents set up for me -- I took the opportunities I could, but I didn't realize it until much later how my perceived choices were really because they busted their asses to make sure the I had good options in front of me.)

Anyway, for a kid who grew up on a cattle ranch... going to an Ivy was huge for me. Huge. Like opened all kinds of doors that never would have been accessible to me.

And let's not even pretend race doesn't factor into this. The reason so many Asian students excel is that they're the children of (reasonably) high status immigrants. Even if the wealth in the country of origin doesn't directly translate, the social status still carries over. Likewise the reason so many Black students underperform or only gain access via Affirmative Action is that they largely originate in families of lower social status with little access to education, carried over ultimately from slavery but more directly a familial legacy pruned by centuries of racism.

Social mobility is not universally seen as a good thing by everyone in society. Specifically to those at the top of the social hierarchy it can be a threat because a wide gap and inequality helps maintain a position of power: if everyone has equal power, noone does.

So it's silly to expect elite universities to follow a broader economic incentive when it comes to who gets in, who graduates and who receives preferrential treatment. There are certainly economic factors at play but ultimately the entire system is heavily built around nepotism (which in this case is hardly a modern invention given that universities used to be very much run by and for the hiearchial elites of society). Sure, the more direct incentives may be financial (e.g. donations) but ultimately power and hierarchies are a better lens than the economist one of the article if you want to make sense of this.

One of the things that is fascinating about America is that their obsession with race draws attention away from Class. The value of getting into Harvard- sure, you'll get a good education. You might even get a great education! But what you're also going to get is membership of a club that is going to offer you opportunities for the rest of your life.

Once you view it that way then changing the composition of the elite universities takes on a completely different perspective. Because if you break that old boys club, suddenly access to great job opportunities and high political office become 1000x more meritocratic.

Do we really think that Harvard and Yale have such a fantastic admissions process that they managed to spot and select every single future Supreme Court Justice at the age of 20? No don't be silly. Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you. And the role of Harvard is to zealously nurture this in-group, because that's what creates their value, and the core of that is legacy admissions.

This is path dependency though. They got into Google because they went to MIT and they'll get their next job because they were at Google and so on. Sure, you could have gone to some terrible college and then ended up at Google, but that's a much more difficult path to break into.

You're assuming that people who are admitted to Ivy League schools a) have higher IQs than average and b) have parents with higher IQs than average.

Neither of these need to be true. It's a incestuous system where it's easy to believe that people of average IQ have been born into privilege for generations and succeeded only because of their family wealth and connections.