[HN Gopher] It's Time to Break Up the Ivy League Cartel ___________________________________________________________________ It's Time to Break Up the Ivy League Cartel Author : hecubus Score : 100 points Date : 2021-06-11 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.chronicle.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.chronicle.com) | eternalban wrote: | > One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of | the Ivy League. It is a bastion of privilege and power, and yet | full of left-leaning professors who one might imagine would favor | the redistribution of wealth. | | Re-imagining social norms -- not a conservative predisposition -- | has nothing to do with redistributing wealth. It is precisely the | requirement for a shared mindset, or a demonstration of | willingness to adhere to ideological dogma, that requires | generational and selective admission. As the re-imaginings take | to greater heights of fancy, the distance from the non- | indoctrinated society at large (which generally feels and thinks | via principles and not ideology) increases and this requires and | motivates a greater degree of insularity by an establishment. | | It is certainly true that some children of the ideologically | and/or culturally "unwashed" masses will arrive at the | 'acceptable' socio-economic conclusion (due to their superior | intellect) -- whether they acknowledge this consciously is not | germinal -- but the risk to an establishment (regardless of their | leaning on the fabled 1 dimensional L/R spectrum) to an 'open | admissions and integration' policy are simply too great. | mlac wrote: | "In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was 85 percent." | | I didn't realize that was the acceptance rate, but JFK's | application to Harvard is interesting and that acceptance rate | adds context: | https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/jfks-v... | | And maybe it's not people pulling the ladder up behind them - | it's that the ladder has become more visible and desirable | without expanding or changing. | | I do have some hope with Coursera and EdX. There are now blended | programs starting online that allow students to start remote and | show they can do the coursework, before completing the rest on | campus: https://scm.mit.edu/program/blended-masters-degree- | supply-ch... | | I'd argue the knowledge is becoming more open and freely | available, but the network is not. Maybe the value of the network | would drop if it was less personal and more people were there. | There is some optimal program size and it's possible some | programs could hold more. At the same time, do we really need | more Cal tech grads? Not a slam at Cal tech (I chose the | smallest), but how many people with those skill sets do we need | vs. graduates from other less specialized schools. | | There is something special about Cal Tech's community, and I | don't know I would want to dilute it just because other people | should have the ability to go there to meet some arbitrary | "fairness metric". | | The value these institutions have brought, and bring, to the | country by making us the top in the world in a number of fields | comes from how selective they are and their massive resources | they can put toward problems. This makes them attractive to the | world's top talent and gives them the freedom to work on some | things without economic constraints, and that's a societal | benefit. Pulling money away because they've managed it well could | hurt us long term. And it's not like the Harvard endowment of | $40B is just sitting there - it is invested into the economy like | other funds until it is needed for investment in the community. | | Lastly - just because you didn't go to one of those institutions | doesn't mean you can't be successful or attend one for grad | school. And I've found grad school admissions to be meritocratic. | analog31 wrote: | Acceptance rates are meaningless. There is no limit on the | denominator. | thrower123 wrote: | There's only four times as many people in the USA now as there | were in the early 20th century, and still only about a thousand | slots for Harvard freshmen. | q-big wrote: | But I bet the number of universities has increased by a lot. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Why do you think that's relevant? The post you replied to | was talking about Harvard, and the article was talking | about the Ivy League. Has the number of Harvards increased? | Has the Ivy League expanded very much? | SkyMarshal wrote: | paywalled | fighterpilot wrote: | https://archive.is/kk0CY | tedunangst wrote: | What would happen if Harvard were required to accept 40 percent | of all applicants as before? | | I think it would be pretty amusing if they got 50000 applicants, | admitted 20000, and then said "guess what Cambridge, we're | building 200 new dormitories, here, there, and everywhere." | graeme wrote: | Either it would have to expand its undergrad programs, or | student quality (as Harvard measures it) would decline. | | Joseph Heath has a very interesting article comparing US elite | schools (tiny undergrad program) and Canadian elite schools | (massive undergrad programs, bigger than Ivy League) | | http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education... | tedunangst wrote: | I've seen this before, and I think it's ridiculous to assume | that there's some arbitrary cutoff about top 10 colleges. Why | is not percentile based? | | For reference, there's 12 Houses at Harvard. With a bit of | paperwork, they could each be a separate college, pushing | Dartmouth all the way down completely out of the top 20. But | would the education at Dartmouth have gotten worse in any | way? | | Rephrased, what if we instead classify the Ivy League as a | single college with eight campuses? What's the difference? | sokoloff wrote: | That's in the same article where they compare the value of | an endowment (measured in dollars) against the GDP of three | random countries (measured in a different unit: dollars per | year [per country]). Analytic rigor is not high. | gowld wrote: | It's interesting to note that Harvard could fund an | entire country for a year. | fighterpilot wrote: | It could easily do that, but its status and signaling value | would be negatively impacted. | poopypoopington wrote: | Or why do they have to be in Cambridge? Why not expand in Las | Vegas or Houston or something? | jlund-molfese wrote: | https://outline.com/YAPKuj | | Non-paywalled link | Causality1 wrote: | I wonder what the deal is with such a large percentage of | submissions being paywalled sites. Do the submitters have | subscriptions to everything and just don't realize? Does | everybody reading HN have anti-paywall extensions installed? | Sure there's always the archive.is link but someone has to see | the article in the first place. | bradleyjg wrote: | Maybe content that has a reasonable revenue stream supporting | it is just better. | chirau wrote: | Full no paywall article here | | https://outline.com/YAPKuj | [deleted] | torstenvl wrote: | I strongly disagree. Having elite schools is far far better for | upward mobility. | | Being a poor kid and going to Harvard is a far more effective | ticket to the upper middle class than any alternative the author | proposes. | | Sure, you could theoretically dilute academic signaling strength, | by force, to the point of homeopathic levels - but who does that | help? Whose life completely changes for the better by attending | such an institution? | paulpauper wrote: | >The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the | country's elite colleges and universities, including five in the | Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1 | percent of income earners than from the bottom 60 percent. The | computer scientist Allison Morgan recently released a study | examining 7,218 professors in Ph.D.-granting departments in the | United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the | faculty come from families almost 34-percent richer than average | and are 25 times more likely than average to have a parent with a | Ph.D. 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. | | This is like the 'branch cut' equivalent of the social sciences, | but rather than making the integral easier to compute, makes the | argument sound more convincing than it actually is or supported | by the evidence. | | If one looks aat the actual data, admitees of elite colleges are | hardly among the elite, but just somewhat wealthier than average. | | http://yaledailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/admissio... | | We're not taking Rockefeller-level of wealth here. | | But this holds even for non-elite colleges. It not that top | colleges are biased against the lower classes, but that lower | classes may just be less inclined to apply or score lower on | standardized tests. | jhayward wrote: | > _It not that top colleges are biased against the lower | classes, but that lower classes may just be less inclined to | apply or score lower on standardized tests_ | | Oh, my. This is such a straight-textbook example of not seeing | systemic bias. | paulpauper wrote: | Generations ago, elite colleges had quotas preventing or | discouraging certain groups from applying. Those barriers | have been removed. As it turns out, selecting for | intelligence yields more for endowments and other benefits | than selecting for prestige or lineage. This may not be | completely fair, but is more fair than the old way.Tons of | people apply to these schools. The SAT is still a useful | despite being an imperfect filter. | grecy wrote: | > _... more students from families in the top 1 percent of | income earners than from the bottom 60 percent_ | | These institutions exist for the purpose of making money. Why | would anyone be surprised they have rich customers to extract | money from? | | I'm sure if you look at the top hospitals in the USA the vast | majority of their customers are insanely rich. | | That's not a coincidence, it's by design. These things exist to | make as much money as possible. | | Ivy League Cartels are not the problem. For profit institutions | that should not be are the problem. | sokoloff wrote: | > 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 academics raise academics, doctors doctors, Olympians | Olympians, teachers teachers, etc. | | It's equally unsurprising that the ambitious children of highly | educated and prosperous families themselves pursue such a similar | path and achieve similar outcomes. I'm an engineer and my spouse | a scientist. Our kids have commensurately higher chance to pursue | one of those or a closely related field due to exposure and | biases. | MattGaiser wrote: | Yeah, so many of these arguments about who comes from what | category seem to assume that talent and inclination is randomly | distributed among 18 year olds and that university where you | find yourself. | jvanderbot wrote: | This seems obvious and unharmful. | | Its funny, my co worker insisted that his children shall go to | MIT so they can have all the opportunities he did. He didn't | see any irony is saying this to me, his peer, a first gen | engineer from University of Midwest Farm Community. | | And I agree, its not surprising kids learn by example and | inherit so much from their parents. | zamfi wrote: | Also, what is this "has become" language for? It implies that | the this elite group is _more_ self-reinforcing than it used to | be, but there's no evidence for that. Harvard's 1940s admission | rate of 85% was certainly not a more meritocratic time. | | The ratio you ask for is almost certainly decreasing over time, | not increasing, right? | ttul wrote: | You likely don't realize that your kids will also have an | easier chance at succeeding because of other privileges they | enjoy, aside from the merits of having intelligent and educated | parents. | | Take a similarly educated family who happen to live in Gaza, | for instance, and it's obvious that the children will have a | different set of opportunities available to them. | sokoloff wrote: | Is there any basis for your assumption that I don't realize | that? | jedberg wrote: | 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 times as likely to have the | same job as their fathers. [0] | | From the General Social Survey[1]: | | If your father was a legislator, you are 354 times more likely | to be drawn to that career, too. Kids whose father was a doctor | are 23 times more likely to follow in his footsteps. If your | father was a lawyer, you're 17 times more likely to become one, | as well. | | Jobs in the trades figure into these statistics, as well. | | - The sons and daughters of plumbers are 14 times more likely | to pursue a job in this field. | | - The sons and daughters of electricians are nine times more | likely to pursue a job in this field. | | - The sons and daughters of carpenters are five times more | likely to pursue a job in this field. | | And, maybe it's all that brushing and flossing - but the sons | and daughters of dentists are 13 times more likely to become | one, too. | | [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/learning/will-you- | follow-... | | [1] http://gss.norc.org/About-The-GSS | retrac wrote: | I was just going to look for data on plumbers and carpenters. | One common theme to all these jobs is that they tend to be | quite stable, and require a life-long set of skills. | | My father did metalwork before moving to an office job in the | civil service. He was the son of a die pressman. Who was the | son of a blacksmith. Dad taught me how to weld and cut and so | on before my teens. My intellectual interests went to math | and computers early on, and he did encourage me to go | wherever that might lead. Yet after university and exploring | the world I end up in a job where I make circuit boards. It's | nearly all automated now but I still do far more welding in | my job than most people with a degree. | | Sometimes it feels like our life scripts are often sketched | out by circumstance and trends long before we're even born. | marcosdumay wrote: | So, looks like contacts and internal knowledge are much more | important for a PHD than it is for most professions, but the | situation is still much better than for politicians. | | I'd say that means the PHD job market has a large problem. | When politicians are the ones you can compare yourself to | look good, it's because things are not good at all. | namesafe77 wrote: | Thats Indian Varna system right there. | bradleyjg wrote: | _There is a large supply of scholars and teachers ready, willing, | and able to work. Public universities, colleges, community | colleges, and HBCUs have for decades been starved. The Biden | family understands public education, and Jill Biden is an | educator. With something like a Works Project Administration | program to bring arts and sciences education to Americans, the | administration could restore democratic education in the U.S._ | | This makes the mistake of accepting that college is about | education. It isn't. If it were those that barely graduate | college and those that barely flunk out would have about the same | outcomes, having learned about the same amount. They have very | different outcomes because college is about the endless treadmill | of credentialism. | hpcjoe wrote: | I had a similar discussion with a young colleague considering | grad school recently. My two cents is now, with nearly 25 years | post Ph.D. under my belt, that it is a union card for some | jobs, and irrelevant for others. The degrees don't make the | person. The content of the character and drive do. | | I got a Ph.D. as I had the goal of being a physics prof | someday. I knew that was an essential milestone on the path to | this. Now, my goal is to save for retirement, and do what I | enjoy doing while doing this, and maybe after retirement | teaching physics/math/etc. at a local uni/college. | | The treadmill of credentialism is an apt phrase though. I don't | need a Ph.D. in my current job. Or most of my previous ones. | b9a2cab5 wrote: | > recirculating resources among the most exclusive and wealthy | while chanting social-justice keywords | | Indeed, Harvard aggressively defends its admissions program as | "holistic" while rating Asians as having lower personal ratings | that they define as measuring "likeability", "courage", and | "kindness" [1]. You might ask yourself how an institution which | claims to be anti-racist exhibits behavior of the opposite kind. | | [1]: https://nypost.com/2018/10/19/harvards-own-study-reveals- | uni... | fighterpilot wrote: | What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is | between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always | like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the | same number now. It appears to be collusion either of the sort | discussed in the article or the informal sort where each | college copies their competitors' quotas. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-11 23:00 UTC)