This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation and not a single person is required to go there or hire someone from there.
Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".
> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument.
I think you missed the point of the article, which was "Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic, and it does that while subsidized by everyone else."
> Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies.
The author discusses this: "The hardest part of Harvard is getting in." "High-stakes college admissions means that much of the value of a college degree is determined before students even start college. If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?"
On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money. This was decades ago, so perhaps things have changed recently, but my higher education was gated on my family's wealth, i.e., lack thereof. Was it a "meritocracy"? No fucking way.
> “On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money.”
This does fit my hypothesis that the outliers at state schools are likely undervalued in the market by recruiters. The averages at selective schools are a lot higher (work a few career fairs where you ask basic technical questions and this is obvious), but everyone is competing over them and the outliers at state schools are people like you with extenuating circumstances. Since the actual education product isn’t that different (though there is some difference), there’s probably opportunity in trying to recruit the best students from state schools companies tend to ignore.
> The averages at selective schools are a lot higher
This is what I expected when I went from undergrad at a solid but not elite shool (top 100, ~50% admission rate) to grad school (top 10, single digit admission rate).
It's not what I experienced. The undergrad students I taught and TA for at the elite school were no better, on average, than my peers at my undergrad school. They were more ambitious and entitled. They were not smarter or harder working or more engaged or motivated.
My observation from doing hundreds of interviews at career fairs was the fancy schools (Stanford) had students that were way better at basic questions. This isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s signal.
If your peers in undergrad were your friends, you were probably selecting a non-representative group (smart people you liked) and your job as a TA shows you a more random sample (or even skewed negative, poor students grubbing for grades).
At least that’s my guess (selection bias).
Of course if I’m wrong there’s an even bigger opportunity in undervalued students, but I’ve done enough interviews to believe that’s not true.
I agree and have noticed this too. Even the median kid from Stanford, Harvard, etc., has a level of elevator pitching skills that are unmatched by anyone below the 90th to 95th percentile at 'lower ranked' schools.
In terms of raw smarts I wouldn't make so bold a claim, but in terms of what folks can realistically assess in a single minute of interaction...
Your reaction to the parent was wondering at selection bias in schools, which was a nice context to me wondering at the selection bias you have in interviews. Thanks.
Yeah there's definitely a selection bias in an interview setting too, but since I was doing the same thing in both locations (career fair interviews as a company employee) there was more in common between the groups and me (imo) as opposed to undergrad peers/friends when you're an undergrad and students you TA when you're a grad student.
This word choice surprised me as well. The average Big 10 tuition for nonresidents is approaching $40,000. It is better for in-state tuition, but locking students into wherever they happened to grow up also seems unfair.
I just meant things like couldn’t afford tuition, don’t know how or can’t get loans, or couldn’t move from family, or w/e - someone who was accepted but didn’t go due to stuff unrelated to getting in (my dad was also in this category). Some large percentage of people think they’re middle class so it’s hard to know what that means without specifics.
A lot of elite schools do cover tuition now if your parents are below a certain income, but it’s imperfect and doesn’t scale with number of siblings etc.
Recruiters and HR people are usually not subject matter experts, so they don't have the expertise to select great people from among outlier groups or from the larger population. They end up relying on indicators like top schools or top prior employers.
I've hired outstanding people for dev roles with all kinds of backgrounds including self-taught, low-mid tier state schools, unfinished college, etc., but that's because I am a developer and I can tell who knows things and who doesn't. I couldn't do the same for, say, a mechanical engineering position since I am not an expert in that field.
Yeah, this is one reason why I think the outliers at state schools are undervalued. These heuristics are indirect and lead to inefficient selection, competition over the same scarce resources.
If you’re a startup there’s a strategic advantage in trying to look for talent where others aren’t and leveraging your own subject matter expertise to do so.
In moneyball the scouts selected on stupid stuff rather than on base percentage - if you know what to actually look for you can find stuff mispriced.
> If you’re a startup there’s a strategic advantage in trying to look for talent where others aren’t and leveraging your own subject matter expertise to do so.
That's the huge take-away, and why startups and other small to medium sized businesses are so critical for class mobility.
>Yeah, this is one reason why I think the outliers at state schools are undervalued.
What I've always heard about the big state schools is that you can get in (probably relatively easily) and then you can either spend your days doing a lot of doing sports and partying (not that there's anything wrong with that in moderation) or you can get a pretty world-class STEM degree.
The best way to get the elite school benefits as a state school undergraduate is to attend a graduate program at an elite school. The financial ROI on a Yale JD or Harvard MBA will be really strong, and if you want a paid-for program you can do a PhD.
The “Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic” idea is repeated a couple of times, and the article doesn’t seem to make any argument at all that it’s correct.
An alternative hypothesis, entirely consistent with the author’s arguments, is that Harvard exists to educate its students (and to do research and have fancy sports and pretty buildings and cultural events, etc), that it’s quite good at this but not necessarily substantially better than its lower class competition, and that its gating function developed over time and is unfortunate.
> its gating function developed over time and is unfortunate.
It seems like you're mistaking the article for some kind of historical origin hypothesis?
Harvard as it currently exists has the function of making society less meritocratic, while society continues to subsidize Harvard in various ways. How Harvard came into existence originally and its function in the 17th century are not particularly relevant to the argument.
No, I’m reading the text of the article as written. It says:
“Harvard would still be an organization designed to reduce meritocracy…”
“Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic”
These are statements about Harvard’s purpose or intent, not about its effect. And I think it’s more likely that the original intent, as well and the present intent of those involved, is to foster meritocracy: admit the best students (for some, fairly clearly extremely flawed, concept of “best”), give the best ones the best grades (again, there are flaws here), and hopefully let the best ones succeed.
The article argues that it fails at this, and perhaps even that it can’t succeed, but the article states, without justification, that it was not intended to succeed.
> These are statements about Harvard’s purpose or intent, not about its effect.
Yes, the current purpose or intent. Harvard was established 387 years ago; what was its original purpose or intent? I don't know. In fact, I don't care. It's not relevant to the current argument. Institutions change over time, and we're talking about hundreds of years at Harvard.
… is to make society less meritocratic? Where’s the evidence that this is what the institution is currently driving at as its mission? Versus this being an emergent effect, subjectively?
OK. But the problem here is that people disagree on what Harvard does. That has to be established before we can even work backwards to a purpose, assuming this framework you suggest is even valid, which I separately doubt.
My a priori assumption of the purpose of a car is to transport people. Cars kill thousands of people each year. Is the purpose of a car then to kill people?
The 6 comments before accepted for discussion's sake at least a view on what Harvard does. Why stop now?
The dominant purpose of a car is to use a system of car centered infrastructure. Why did some places replace car centered infrastructure with other systems and some not?
This is always such an interesting argument people make when nearly every 'next step' after undergrad is more selective than Ivy League schools.
Tier-1 Tech/Banking/Consulting/Law School/Med School all reject plenty of people from Harvard because they didn't do a good enough job there. Plenty of Harvard grads languish.
It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in, but doing something with it still has capability-based gates.
If they only accept the very best academically there is probably a bias: it may not be that 'simple' to get a degree once you're in but since those who are in are very good they have a high graduation rate.
>It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in
Historically, that was at least somewhat true of undergrads in general. But wasn't necessarily the case for the top law schools and Big Law still, as far as I know, has something up an up or out career ladder.
The Ivy League schools have extensive financial aid now. Stanford for instance will have zero cost for people from families making $150k or less, no need for student loans.
Looking back, that's not a bad life lesson to get into your system early. I think it's also important for those to not place too much of their worth in college and realize that there are many "Stanford qualified" students who don't get into Stanford for one reason or another.
Exactly, I had to go to a junior college and transfer later on due to funds. Plus driving to and from out of state is expensive so I was stuck being a commuter at local institutions. Not to mention some kids that are good at sports can’t afford to play either and possibly get a scholarship.
That’s life though, but most of the upper class and higher don’t realize it.
As the parent of two exceptionally-achieving children who were rejected from the "elite" colleges - I've become a lot more sympathetic to the mindset behind this line of thinking. My kids literally couldn't have done more or tried harder - since kindergarten - than they did. They both graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, scored in the top 99% of the SAT, did sports, did clubs, volunteered, worked, studied... and when they applied to the ivy's, they didn't even get waitlisted. When I see that somebody like, say, Jared Kushner graduated from Harvard... yeah, it makes me mad. I'm mad on behalf of my two kids who tried so hard for so long.
But - I don't really see a "solution" besides some sort of "populist revolt" _against_ these "elite" institutions. The solution is - just stop assigning so much importance to colleges like Harvard. This isn't Harvard's problem, it's all of us that are doing it.
It’s a similar problem to the scientific journals that extort scientists.
The elite universities are not primarily selling education they’re selling prestige. In academia it’s worse because prestige is the metric for getting grants and status since the pay is bad.
It’s also not great in private companies since institutional prestige is used to filter inbound interest, but it’s better because at least there are other ways to prove ability - it’s just harder to get the opportunity.
The prestige is also available for direct sale - I think you could pay $5M for a building or something and your kid could go to Stanford (I was told this off the record by a student that worked in admissions) That was the irony with the whole “famous people cheating their way in” news cycle, the schools were angry they were getting a discount on the fee (and probably that this hurt their prestige).
Schools like Harvard also hold spots that help their own prestige, in Lisa Brennan-Jobs (great) book Small Fry she talks about her Harvard interview and the woman was basically an ass ignoring her until she mentioned her dad founded a computer company. When the interviewer realized her dad was Steve Jobs she literally got up and left for a moment, then came back with an entirely different demeanor. Lisa expected it to help (she was counting on it), but even she was surprised by the obviousness of it. She was accepted.
If you read the admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case you can see how messed up it is. [0] This kind of high status selective scarcity creates perverse incentives.
If the goal was actually educating smart people, the behavior of the institutions would be different (probably more ISAs and such), but that’s not the primary goal and the behavior reveals it.
Yes very much like showing up for a meeting and your defense attorney worked with the prosecutor and gets a case dropped after a conversation about golfing.
do you have a link to the "admissions content that came out in the affirmative action SCOTUS case"? That sounds very interesting. I found a report on the entire case but its near 300 pages long
Holy shit I hadn’t read the cert petition and hasn’t seen the quotes. I never believed the assertion that “all white people are racist” because I honestly thought the white people around me didn’t “see race.” This has been extremely eye-opening.
I'm referring to that statement because it's something people say, hence the quotes. I'm not saying I agree with its full scope now. But I get where it's coming from more than I did before.
While university admissions people aren't representative of white people, they're in the class of people I had always assumed didn't see people in terms of race. I knew affirmative action was a thing, but I kind of assumed it was a mathematical, maybe computerized process. I didn't realize they were sifting through applications saying "oh, here's a hispanic, and that one's a black kid, shoot this one's an asian."
I think it's a big (and likely incorrect) assumption that all of (or even a plurality of) the people making these comments working in admissions are themselves white.
It's not just that they're not representative of an entire group of people, many aren't members of that group at all.
It's also not necessarily entirely on the admissions people - the argument made in that substack (and ultimately the conclusion of SCOTUS) is that affirmative action is a euphemism for racial discrimination.
Ultimately you have to be doing something like this somewhere if that's the policy since that's explicitly what it means, the internal comms just show the reality of the policy that's often not said in public communication (because imo it seems obviously bad to most people).
My kid is only in middle school and I recently been readjusting my opinion towards 'elite' colleges. Being from the Bay Area we have friends and family who graduated from Stanford and Cal and up until recently I thought those were good schools for my kid to set their sights on.
What I've seen in the last year or so is making me reconsider. I see the profiles of the top graduating seniors in our newsletters and they read like parodies. 4.9 GPA - check. Sports teams - check. Competitive academic club - check. Social clubs - check. Musical instrument competitions - check. Leadership roles - check. Volunteer roles- check. It's just so cynical after a while. You know some consultant has been hired with a todo list and they've dutifully filled in every box.
Then the kids I know who've gotten in and gone to these elite schools are really struggling. Struggling in ways that I didn't see when my peers and I were going to these schools. There's been a sea change in expectations and requirements.
In the meantime it's the kids I know who got into the "second-tier" schools who are doing well. They aren't under such high expectations, they aren't surrounded by classmates under such high expectations. If some day they don't get hired by a FAANG or a some Wall Street firm than maybe that's for the best too.
I was talking to a couple of high school seniors from Germany recently and it all sounded so sane. All the state colleges are free and all are good. You fill out one application, rank the ones you want to get into, and wait for your letter.
I can make guesses as to how it all got so insane in the US but it doesn't matter much. I don't want to play. I don't want my kid to play.
I totally agree that the legacy and nepotism needs to be dropped. But there's some caveats to consider:
* It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
* Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.
* It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.
And I agree with you, there's schools just as good, if not better, than the Ivies. You just have to shop around looking for the field you're interested in. For instance, UIUC is a top choice for computer science and engineering, and it's a state-funded school.
> * It's partly about where your kids graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, etc. I was considered "gifted" in my district, but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
One of the biggest factors for success is zip code; that needs changing too. And in any case, if you can graduate valedictorian in a shitty school in a shitty neighborhood, that's a big achievement nonetheless. Ivy League schools would be well served taking those students in, and not just for reasons of basic fairness.
> Top 99% of SAT is nothing. I read somewhere that 60% of Ivy applicants have perfect scores.
The difference between 99% and perfect has little to do with ability, and everything to do with the ability to spend time/money hacking a metric beyond reason.
> * It depends on the major they intend to pursue. If it's a popular one, there would be many fewer open slots.
That doesn't actually follow. If it's a popular major, then there ought to be more slots made available for students. It's not like Harvard doesn't have the money to make that happen.
... We may disagree on these, but I also agree that legacy and nepotism is a major problem, and that there are better schools, from an academic / learning standpoint.
> but I would be below average in the greater scheme of things.
Which scheme of things is this?
> Top 99% of SAT is nothing.
I got 99pct on my SAT too (1500/1600). I didnt have a chance at a top school. What do you suggest people like me do now? I went to an undergrad with a 50% acceptance rate, not exactly UIUC CS. I can't sleep most days because I don't feel like I have anything to hope for.
Sounds like you need a serious adjustment on your world view if you currently believe you don't have anything to hope for simply because you and your 1500 SAT score didn't get into an elite school.
This isn't what the rest of these comments would indicate (which say that people that get into top schools are fundamentally more qualified and intelligent than people that do not)
Your comment is the only one in this thread that uses the word "fundamentally." The other comments I've read suggested that school can be an indicator of talent/diligence/etc. especially in the absence of a lot of other signal. It's also true that Big Law and Big Management Consulting are pretty educational pedigree focused especially for new grads but that's not everyone.
OK, but it's a pretty big indicator, and apparently justified in being so because the people at top schools are just that much better than people like me.
I don't think so? I think I'm just surfacing the implication. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it appears like the pretty clear implication of defending Harvard and elite schools is to believe that the rest of us should remain in a lower social caste, forever, and that we deserve it because of meritocracy.
I have very little direct experience with Harvard but do have a lot of experience with grads from other East Coast Ivies and related schools--other liberal arts colleges, seven sisters--and have rarely encountered that type of school-centric snobbery except maybe in jest or football rivalry.
Telling people who are experiencing dread at the classist social prospects available to them to just "adjust your world view" isn't exactly a refutation of their cause for that dread.
To a Northern European, this is all very weird. Especially once you bundle in the sports business..
What I grew up with:
- Universities are tax funded
- there's no tuition (there's an option to pay something like $500/year for being a member of the student organization, which gets you meal discounts, social events, etc; strictly not related to your studies)
- approval process is a direct function of high school grades and entrance exam, top N pass (exchange students were separate, and closer to scholarships, but still the criteria was scoring well in some test)
To someone who grew up in a different setting, many American systems can be summarized as institutionalized corruption.
For this reason there's a pretty good argument to be made that legacy and donation status shouldn't be taken into account when determining admissions. Ditching standardized testing, however, is going in the wrong direction.
Why does it matter if your kids go to "elite" colleges or not? They're probably going to be successful in their own way anyway with those stats. shouldn't your concern be the objective success they achieve, not their attendance of an "elite" institution?
I know people who want to say University of Virginia who have had better outcomes than some folks I know who went to Harvard College - just to cherry pick a single set.
Maybe it does help if your goal is to attend a top 3 medical or law school, and then go on to equally impressive practices after, or if you want to go into very very high level investment banking or something. It's shouldn't be a terribly controversial statement to say that if you want to be one of the top in the world in a given field you probably need to go to one of the top universities. Even then you'll find plenty of people from University of Whatever in those classes.
I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a boring suburban part of a boring state for a company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone from Harvard is killing it.
I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from
Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a
boring suburban part of a boring state for a
company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone
from Harvard is killing it.
I... don't think that anybody is claiming that literally every single individual who went to Harvard is successful. Surely you see that this discussion is about trends and aggregates?
look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with.
Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges".
In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition.
I worked at Stanford admissions many years ago. Over 15% of every incoming class are students admitted due to nepotism.
At Harvard, that nepotism number is closer to 50%, according to my colleagues at the time.
The remainder are chosen from those with strong academics, nearly at random, with a very strong bias against students who don't visual demonstrate diversity on campus.
Basically, if your family name isn't in that list, you have a massive reduction in your probability of being accepted, regardless of merit. If your name is in that list, then you likely will be accepted regardless of merit.
People don’t talk about it because they don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. We act like the descendants of English/Dutch north-easterners, who profiteered from slavery (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/04/slavery-probe...) are in the same group as German immigrants who came to the Midwest as indentured servants or Italian immigrants who came here in the 20th century. The false concept of “white people” totally obscures the fact that there are different groups, with different histories, origins, and cultures, who are very differently situated.
These are very likely not true especially the second part but since specific ethnicity is not tracked it's much harder to disprove. But I would wager this is is not true at all.
This is utter shite nonsense dude. I know literally hundreds of ivy alums. Pretty sure none of them are in the register.
Social register is barely relevant for many years and of no consequence to Ivy league admissions.
I'd be very skeptical. I know a ton of people who went to East Coast Ivies. Many are not from the East Coast. Many are not literally WASPy and I can't imagine most of them being in a Social Register--and it's not like I especially have known an out of the mainstream crowd.
This is why I wrote in another comment that making it about Harvard somewhat muddies the discussion because Harvard probably is more likely to admit at least a slice of students that are far more about pedigree than anything else.
But as you say, you need to not only have the credentials, something else that sets you apart, and even then the Teela Brown luck gene. When you're being that selective, there's no way that you're realistically finding strong signals in all but the most exceptional circumstances to admit specific individuals.
(And things have only gotten more competitive. I would be shocked if I would get into my undergrad school today.)
There's a great Veritasium video about this. The idea is that if there are far more applicants than positions, then even if luck plays a small role - say, 5% of the outcome - successful applicants are overwhelmingly likely to be extremely lucky as well as highly qualified. Since so many people are close to that 95% competence factor, only the luckiest - by whatever metric of "luck" you like - can succeed.
Because higher education is objectively not a meritocracy. The mere existence of legacy admissions proves this.
Of course those with degrees from Ivys and other selective schools don't want to acknowledge this - it devalues their degree. Same for those who aspire to attend these schools - whether they have an 'unfair' advantage or not.
That's simple: Ivy schools are mostly for $$$ to schmooze with other $$$, with a thin veneer of actually talented kids that had to pass insurmountable odds to get in. The talented kids are there to make the $$$ think they're also talented and had to pass the same rigorous criteria. Smoke and mirrors all of it.
People parrot this point a lot but it doesn't make any sense. The average SAT/ACT at the Ivy's are near perfect, the number of mediocre rich kids paying their way in is a small fraction of the student body.
And yes test scores aren't the best metric for "talent" but it is one of the better signals you get in a college application.
Yeah, but the money paid by that small fraction of the student body is colossal.
They're not numerous enough to change any GPA/SAT averages, but they likely pay many times more in tuition & donations than the rest of their class put together. That's why they're the main focus of these places, even if their numbers are small.
All the schools lie about their average test scores to boost their rankings(source, president of northwestern when I took his econ class). We have no idea what the ivies averages are.
Second, maybe we overproduce good students. Either the curriculum is too easy (imagine compared to Chinese high schools). Either everyone wants to be in the tertiary sector and society doesn’t need so many, and rejects people who are perfectly fit, randomly without fairness.
Although it looks like you were downvoted for suggesting such a thing exists, I actually do believe that it happens - but in their case no, they're actually hispanic.
I've seen research suggesting that the schools aren't necessarily great, the students are. They were already great which is how they passed the admissions criteria, and their career success can be attributed to the qualities that they arrived at e.g. Harvard with. They would have been as successful regardless of where they attended. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Given the argument that the wait-list students that didn't get to actually attend did worse in life than wait-list students that did get to attend, how does your implication that the "students were already good and that's why they did well in life" hold up?
Is that what the data shows, though? I've read summaries of papers describing the exact opposite and linked them here before.
Here's one such example, with a followup comment describing a study that contradicts the argument you lead with. (I'm merely saying it contradicts it; I'm not vouching that the contradiction is correct.)
> For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
The link to the article and the followup is in the only 2-deep chain linked above.
> Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation
It used to.
Now when I see someone went to Harvard, I imagine they had rich parents or were part of Affirmative Action. Not to mention their cheating scandals and forged data.
Heck, I talked to a Harvard law grad last week and asked them for specific points on their speech and they had no follow up, they regurgitated. This was no AAA student, this was someone that benefited from Affirmative Action + had 2 physician parents.
> Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies.
They are very decent proxies to evade anti-discrimination laws, as well. Just look how many jobs these days require higher education credentials for paper pusher jobs. Sounds innocent on paper - but the reality is that wide swaths of society can now be perfectly legally discriminated against.
Poor people or people of color? No way. People with disabilities of all kind? No way. People who have to raise children they got at a young age? No way.
All of these people simply (virtually) filtered out from a lot of employment opportunities, simply because their classes are highly likely to never reach higher education.
> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument.
It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class.
Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power.
Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power.
And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.
> Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible.
Jamie Dimon went to Tufts — Harvard-adjacent? — with an MBA from Harvard.
"Inequality tends to be greater in developing countries than wealthier ones. The United States is an exception."
"In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065 – less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively."
> 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite?
How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.
> This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed
I didn't bring up the figure - I was just remarking on how I had a different reaction to it. And the remainder is also distributed in a non-diffuse manner.
> If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are
Do the majority of people have "a high quality of life"? I'm not sure that's true, but assuming it is true, then one issue is the massive power imbalance in terms of control over society: small numbers of people having huge influence over politics, the media, social tech companies etc.
> Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold
Which I was not doing. I'm not sure what would be the best distribution - but if I can't look at it quantitively, I think we can consider it qualitatively. Would we be in a better place if we moved towards more wealth inequality or less?
Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it. In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%. And even in the top 1%, a lot of the owners are like retired dentists or early employees at Microsoft. They don’t exercise meaningful power over these companies by virtue of ownership.
That diffusion of ownership means that capital usually has much less power than the managerial class in terms of actually running the company. Jamie Dimon owns something like 0.1% of JP Morgan. In a traditional Marxist analysis, he’s actually an employee. He makes money from his labor. Even after 20 years the dividends from his JPM stock are less than his compensation as an employee.
You have this class of people now whose wealth and power doesn’t derive from owning the means of production, but by having credentials that persuade a diffuse group of shareholders to appoint them as managers of these corporations. And Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
> Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it.
It's unclear why you even mentioned the US specifically. The so-called "modern corporation" and "the traditional Marxist scenario" are both US. Although Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, he emigrated to the US at age 12, and Carnegie Steel was a US company.
> In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%.
This definitely makes a lot more sense than "Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth."
Of course, I'm just quibbling here. I don't disagree with your main point:
> Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
Harvard's not purely private: it receives massive structural tax advantages, & lots of government funding via many kinds of tuition & research subsidies.
Harvard's supposed "excellent reputation" is significantly maintained by the cartel of graduates from it, & its close peers, preferentially touting, publishing, hiring, and funding class-similar people – even when they are no better on objective measures than non-graduates.
Your hiring observation is nearly fully driven not by Harvard providing any "educational lift", specific to its educational product, that would justify its state-granted advantages, but simply by Harvard getting "early pick" (pre-career) to place its brand on people who are already talented, ambitious, or highly-prepared before they arrive at Harvard.
Honestly, leading with Harvard is probably a distraction. There are quite a few good schools that don't have the same level of baggage but are pretty competitive with respect to admissions standards. (Of course, the details likely matter depending on the field in question to at least some degree.)
Certainly undergrad school is far from a perfect filter but I agree that if that were really all you had to go on, there is signal there whether one likes that fact or not. (And how could there not be? A lot of people who get into top schools could, shall we say, not super-concentrate on academics as undergrads and many will still do pretty well--although others will flame out.)
right well, the problem is people are not iphones, they're human beings. we can throw away our cheap android phones and get iphones, but as a society, we might decide that we should not be throwing away humans who don't come from the right "brand"
> I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
This is my exact opposite experience. Degrees are meaningless unless you've literally just left college. Even then, it tells you their scores in particular subjects, it does not tell you their attitude, work ethic, general problem solving ability, etc.
I ignore qualifications unless you've just completed it. Experience is a better guide and, I know this is controversial, just talking to the candidate - it's amazing what people will expose once they feel comfortable that they're having a friendly chat.
Not all jobs require attitude, work ethic and problem solving ability. Some require skills like dress sense, eloquence, table manners, and a refined taste in fine wine and art.
> Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
What do you recommend those of us who didn't get into any top schools do then? If clearly we're destined to be inferior for life?
I don't think so, but life will be harder. Life is harder if you are born poor. I graduated from an unknown university (in the US) overseas, so I started in lower places and climbed my way up through hard work, study, luck and skill development (which include social skills). You are not destined to be inferior, but if the cards are not stacked in your favor, you will just have to make up for it somehow.
It's not sarcasm. I'm told that I'm lesser because I didn't get into any top schools or "deserve" the respect they get - clearly I'm doing worse than Ivy+ folks.
I think yours is less a problem of how to keep up with the joneses and more a problem of realistically evaluating your circumstances and expectations.
Whoever is telling you that you aren’t good enough is trying to pull something over on you at this point. It works well on people that can never be satisfied.
I think the people that told me that aren't good enough are the admissions committees of the 2 elite schools I applied to that rejected me (I only applied to 4 schools in total). They've already decided that I have no "merit".
To put it in another way, if you genuinely expect to be one of the world's major decision makers, wealthiest, etc., then yes there's close to zero prospects, given the stated background and age.
But if your expectation is to have a happy life, a nice house in a decent neighbourhood, etc., then there's no reason to listen to them and self-flagellate.
Yeah, but it’s still within the realm of possibility for anyone that got into Penn or Brown or Columbia or Princeton or MIT because they are just inherently better.
For the record I doubt I can have a happy life or a house in a decent neighborhood too.
> Yeah, but it’s still within the realm of possibility for anyone that got into Penn or Brown or Columbia or Princeton or MIT because they are just inherently better.
Not really, even the 50th percentile Harvard Law graduate, let alone Ivy league undergrads, has minimal chance of being a big shot in the world.
Sure, it's many times more then someone from Iowa State, statistically, but that's idle fantasizing either way.
They're a lot closer to any random office worker then supermen destined for the royal road.
If, after some reflection, your still worked up about not enjoying a few tenths of a percentage chance instead of a few hundredths or thousandths, then you can always seek solace in religion/meditation/etc.
Hardly a solid basis for self-worth. Revenge is living well, you need to get some perspective to realize you already are. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen or habitat for humanity, and don’t forget to actually talk to the people who work those jobs full time and the people they are serving.
I have no idea who is telling you that unless it's yourself. Contrary to the impression that some people here may give you, making millions a few (or even many) years out of school is not the norm wherever you went to school. And while connections do matter to some degree among Ivy and related grads I know (and those are mostly for what many here would consider low-paid jobs in the literary industry), connections from people I've worked with at jobs have always mattered to me more or even exclusively.
As I wrote, there is pedigree in some professions/positions but I'm assuming you're not looking at clerking on the Supreme Court, working for a white shoe law firm, and maybe getting a Federal Court of Appeals seat. Nor working for McKinsey.
There's lots of pedigree in working in software, even if it's not as obvious as law. Amazon does not have pedigree, but Google does, Stripe does etc. It's also not surprising that the people that graduate from MIT CS and Harvard CS go to Google and Stripe and Facebook as their "backups" and not Amazon or Capital One or Northrop Grumman.
Honestly, you're way too obsessed with pedigree in terms of companies. I've probably never worked for (or even applied for what people here would consider) a "high pedigree" (though not necessarily unknown) company over a long (and I think pretty successful by my standards) career.
I somewhat surprisingly got into a really good school undergrad and good ones grad. But got rejected by plenty too.
You win some. You lose some. You seem to be taking every long odds dice roll you lose as a personal affront.
I mean it feels like an affront - these people go to top schools because they want people like me out of eyesight because I don’t have “merit”. It does frankly feel personal.
I would have never gotten into a good school for undergrad and have no chance at a top grad school. It just feels like it’s all over for me.
Trust me. I have educational credentials that would be considered immaculate. I've done fine. But then I've never had an obsession with earning millions a year because some people are. You probably make more at 27 than I have much later. Which is fine. You'd be much happier if you stopped obsessing about how someone else may be making more money than you.
Sure, but not enough for Jane Street or Citadel Securities (not the hedge fund which did give me an offer) or DE Shaw or HRT. Aka, the firms actually offering $350k+ to new grads while I make far less.
I see. I have no consolation to offer you. No amount of money or prestige will satisfy you. Someone will be wealthier than you no matter how much you acquire. And old money families look down at new money.
How is your social life? Do you consider most people around you beneath you?
> Do you consider most people around you beneath you?
Several of my friends are crypto millionaires who also have higher total compensation than me and they certainly think I'm beneath them. I know a lot of people that got into top schools or have higher SATs/more "merit" than me. I'm probably the person with the least merit in my social circle.
> Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple.
So I disagree with the analogy, when we're talking about people who went to big-name schools vs. everyone else.
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't
as good of quality as Apple.
I don't want to get too deep in the weeds w.r.t. this analogy, but generic stuff is very often as good as Apple.
It's just that with Apple (substitute another high-prestige name brand, if you prefer) you are typically getting a certain guaranteed level of quality.
I've had Apple-branded phone cases. They are always top-tier. I've had generic ones that were just as good or maybe better. Also had some godawful ones. I can afford to experiment with phone cases because I can tolerate a $15 failure that takes a small amount of my time. But this isn't as true for potential hires so companies gravitate toward those "big-name" schools.
When you are in a hiring role, it's often impossible to avoid this kind of bias. If you hire a Harvard grad and they don't work out, at least you made the safe choice in your manager's eyes. Much easier to defend than taking a chance on some rando wildcard person.
> Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees
You missed the central point of the article about causality.
Of course this will be the case on average, because Harvard gets smarter people on average!
Harvard serves no additional value here other than to be a gatekeeper.
> selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
That's... a bullshit argument, and should get called out as bullshit? It's an easy approach, and beats other approaches for HR but says absolutely nothing about whether the person is a good person (both in the "are they a sociopath?" and "are they a good fit for the role we're filling" sense). In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. They're on a fast track career path, no matter what job you're offering them, you're going to have to rehire for it 2 or even 1 year down the road.
That's an atrocious cost-benefit ratio: that's not an investment, that's intentionally hiring for the short term and intentionally preventing institutional knowledge from ever building up. If you're a startup, good for you, your goal is to get valuable fast and then cash out. But if you're a real business, and your plan is to own yourself and the market you operate in, it's downright idiotic.
I'm okay with using anecdotal data to refute anecdotes. So, source: me, I've seen loads of high achievers come in, get promoted, stick around for half a year, then job hop to the next company in order to "start without baggage" but at a higher rung.
(And of course, while it should go without saying, it very much needs saying because people are very bad at logic: that doesn't mean I claimed that no high achievers stick around, and it also doesn't mean I claimed that people who do stick around are low achievers. Reading the latter would require making not just one but _two_ mistakes)
I’ve hired 100+ people with around a 97% hit rate on hiring great employees and great engineers. I don’t look at whether they have a degree or not, I don’t care what school they went to. In my experience it provides no indication of whether they’re good or not.
The question is, could you do a similar filter by asking each applicant about their parents wealth? Perhaps ultra-wealthy parents is the decent proxy for productivity?
Conformity is not scientific, using a university to stealth filter for obedience to (data) authority is both lazy and a fancy dressed deceitful gang mentality on display.
There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing. What I really don’t get is the conclusion which suggests tearing it all down. Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? Yeah, it’s a tall order, but much more practical (not to mention positive) than getting rid of top schools.
> There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing
Because it argues for meritocratic rewards in society? Because it pointed out that capital is a gatekeeper? What makes it seem "Marxist" to you?
> Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table?
I think the argument against subsidizing anti-meritocratic institutions such as Harvard is exactly this. The money is better spent on lifting up people regardless of their ability to get into Harvard.
I find the ending ambiguous, less "Harvard should be burned to the ground" and more "Harvard shouldn't get subsidies."
I think Harvard would survive just fine without subsidies. It's Harvard.
It’s the same folk-interpretation of Marxism that always goes around. Now that Marxism is dead and can’t defend itself, it’s whatever anyone wants it to be.
States that were far closer to Marxism, like the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decimated their universities and dispersed their faculties over the countryside, or to labor camps.
This article is not on the same planet as that madness.
Now I'm seriously confused - a major criticism, by communists, of the Cultural Revolution was the blow back against all intellectuals and the destruction of the education system in the PRC. In what was was that Marxist? I mean, I know the arguments the red guard made, but there were other Marxists that disagreed. Are you just saying the red guard interpretation was the correct one?
I’m saying that on the continuum of Marxism, the PRC circa 1965 is somewhere to the middle-far-left and the article above (that OP claimed was Marxist) is all the way on the far right.
I’m not super interested in whether or not their Marxism was “authentic”, and neither is anyone who goes around, as OP did, randomly labeling things they don’t like as Marxist.
A Marxist tone would be more focused on getting rid of the elite class doing the owning things part. (which has proved difficult...)
Meritocracy is actually nearly as awful as aristocracy in practice. A better society would just be more equal across the whole population regardless of birth, merit or whatever.
i.e. CEO pay is now 300 times average employee pay, something more like 5 times would be a very different society and still have room for some merit element
And having wealth above a reasonable level shrink exponentially rather than grow exponentially through some kind of share ownership tax
I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit.
But if we're serious about a liberal/conservative "equality of opportunity" vs a progressive/socialist "equality of outcome" reality, then we should consider that children have very little consent over the kind of education and familial upbringing they get, yet that childhood education and familial upbringing has profound implications as to whether they can get admitted to a school like Harvard or not.
If we're serious about equality of opportunity society, then we should take a lottery admissions policy for young adults seriously. But it's fine if you don't care about equality at all, at least be explicit about it.
> I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit.
From the article:
"Some people say Harvard is a private institution and it can do what it wants. These people are wrong."
"private universities are non-profits."
"When John Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard, that was tax-deductible. If we assume his marginal tax rate was 25%, that’s equivalent to him donating $300 million of after-tax money, and then having the government kick in an extra $100 million. Ivy-league universities also earn insane profits on endowments tax-free and are exempt from local property taxes."
That's true. But dysfunctional families come at all income levels, and making sure kids have enough to eat and somewhere safe to do homework is 100% possible without fixing all of society's problems.
I would like what you envision to exist but to be remotely effective the game has to be played before college.
Otherwise the results will be similar to if any 18 year-old could “win” a place in the NFL. Either they have a rough time and get spit out or the system is forced to change to accommodate them.
>>I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit.
I would agree to this under 3 conditions
1. The university can not accept any federally backed student loans, grants, etc
2. The university must self finance any financial aid given using their massive endowments
3. Those loans must be discharged in bankruptcy
I dont even care about their non-profit status as others do. I care they are getting billions in federally (tax payer) backed loan, with no accountability for the money, and no skin in the game at all
If we truly consider children's consent, then we would need to actually ask them what they want before bothering with any adult-born ideas. Otherwise, they're still trapped in a system they never designed, only being given the options chosen for them.
In doing that you're also buying into an exclusionary system that benefits the extravagantly wealthy.
These institutions hit a critical mass, then they get powerful alumni and have dynasty that self perpetuates. Everyone knows you don't go to college to get an education... at least not if you're trying to win the US capitalist game (which most educated people realize is their best bet), you go to college to network, and sometimes for hands on experience, which can be gained anywhere. The academic material itself is usually useless.
So what you end up with amounts to a privilege factory. Sure you also might have extra opportunities to gain wisdom from exceptional people that don't exist elsewhere, but this is quite rare, and a substantial percentage of students never see it (ie. nuggets of wisdom they couldn't get by grabbing a random engineer with knowledge of the subject).
Mostly you're just getting a chance to rub elbows with the elite. See how they function and hopefully gain some allies with power. I think it may often be true that employees from elite schools can do better. You're hiring based on pedigree, which works in many cases, but it's questionable how it impacts society.
BTW, I've also heard the opposite about ivy league employees. They tend to be entitled, unwilling to get in the trenches, and always seem to think they could be doing better. Also, I've heard lots of complaints that the personality issues tend to be worse.
P.S. I wanted to explain why I think most intelligent people eventually decide to "play the game" and go for money / power. No matter how meaningful your career, you will probably just end up doing the same thing: making the world worse, by helping your corporate overlords, only with far less money.
This is very true for almost any calling / "just cause" professions.
* Police - spend most of your time ruining poor peoples lives for an injustice system
* Doctors - again ruining poor peoples lives, otherwise abusing patients, and trying to prevent them from getting health care
* Nurses - Pretty much the above, with less evil decisions, more thankless work, less money
* Mental health / psych - Watch people slowly be bled to death by a system that cannot help you. A substantial percentage of your patients will see you as like a horrible witch poisoning them (not just the psychotic ones!). You will "help" by stripping them of rights.
* Social worker - you will have all of societies problems dumped on you, overworked and make no money. You also get to play the role of cop and ruin peoples lives (people with horrific upbringings), who will now hate you. It's your job to get the drug addicted SA survivor into jail, sometimes through shady means.
* Nonprofit - worse corporate politics and guilt when you realize how much money goes to perpetuating the organization instead of helping.
* Engineer - no matter how brilliant you are, you will be implementing someone else's idea. You will be expendable. You will be undermined and blamed. You don't get to own anything and it's mostly thankless busywork.
Anyway THIS is why most people eventually decide that they should just maximize money/power. It would arguably be hard to decide if the work lived up to reality. When it's just as hollow and empty, yeah just go for $$$.
>Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees.
There is a better method for selecting candidates: IQ testing. For better or worse, that's illegal. In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data.
Problematic/controversial but not necessarily illegal. They can probably ask for SAT/ACT scores which are probably a pretty good proxy as well.
>In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data
Disagree to a fair degree. The college degree (and grades/other experiences) tell more than how well you do on a multiple choice test. One can of course argue how much more.
Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution.
Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them.
Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".