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Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60

188 points by thisisit 10y ago

xorfish 10y ago
Education should be cheap for everyone, otherwise this will only get worse. Additionally everyone that has finished High School should be accepted into any state-funded university. You can seed out the unqualified students during the first two semesters.
- jMyles 10y ago
  Some state universities are under such incredible demand; your plan will require building many new ones. Which, in relative terms, is not that hard: simply re-purpose state prisons.
  - nashashmi 10y ago
    It will be less labor intensive and more fruitful to build new schools. Maybe prisons can serve as dorms.
    - emehrkay 10y ago
      Could you imagine spending any time in a building that was originally designed to be a prison? Aren't those things made to break spirits and punish people simply by being in it? Have you ever entered a space and felt uncomfortable simply because it doesn't have windows or the walls are barren or it is just "cold"? We'd probably see a lot more drop outs if prisons were repurposed as dorms. Shit, some new schools are designed with the same brush as these prisons and we can probably easily predict the success/failure rates of students coming from them.
      - nordify 10y ago
        Both Sweden and Finland have hotels in the capital city center which are former prisons. According to reviews they are well regarded.
      - lovich 10y ago
        Many of the colleges I had visited and the one I went to had prison like dorms. It seems to be the default type of building to construct whenever there is an unexpected increase in students and they have to put as many people into a small place as possible. I know the room I shared with another student in college was smaller than some prison cells.
  - xorfish 10y ago
    Make the courses harder to pass. If you filter out a lot of students early on, you don't need to build new ones.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      I'd argue that the goal should be to get more people into colleges, rather than filtering more people out
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        Why? People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce. Guess which of those I believe drives college admissions right now. Of course many careers will benefit from a college education, but here in the US we have long since surpassed that number of people attending college.
        CaptSpify 10y ago
        > Why? Because education is important, and our society is helped by everyone having access to improve their lives. I don't want to get into an automation discussion, but I personally believe that it will be even more important in the next few decades. > People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce I completely agree! But I think that is a separate problem. I'd love to go to school for things completely unrelated to my career. I don't think college should necessarily be easy, but getting into it should be. I personally believe that encouraging people to further educate themselves, especially "non-intellectuals"* , is a great way for everyone to benefit. IME, most people who skip college aren't skipping it because they are dumb, but because they don't have the resources to attend easily. In my own experience: High-school wasn't reflective of my current educational desires. I want to attend more college classes, but don't have the resources to do so. I live a pretty simple lifestyle, and if college isn't easily accessible to me, I can't see how it's accessible to people with kids, two jobs, etc * : I don't know how else to phrase that without sounding condescending. If someone has a better wording, let me know.
- ivl 10y ago
  I'm not sure high school completion would reflect well on that. We already have a significant number of people not finishing college and university. Wasting resources on more profs doing remedial teaching wouldn't do any good. High schools need higher standards, and colleges should probably accept fewer students.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yeah, the first 2 semesters mentioned by the grandparent should be readily available to high school juniors + seniors.
  - xorfish 10y ago
    The ETH Zurich works that way. After you finished high school you can go there. (I'm not sure, but there might be some exception where you need to pass an exam) Depending on the course, 2/3 of the students will be gone after two semesters.
    - ivl 10y ago
      I just don't see how that's a good model. Make high school a little harder and let the degree have some worth, and have it so it's only 1/3rd or less that don't continue after the first couple semesters. In the context of the US post-secondary education is just too expensive to have such low standards. It probably works better in countries with low individual costs on education, but even then I'd want standards in place that are high enough not to need so many resources used to remove people who definitely don't belong there.
      - phlo 10y ago
        It seems more meritocratic, to me. The bar to enter is low, and the criteria for continuing their studies is proficiency in the subject at hand, not standardized test scores, extracurricular activities in high school or the best-written application essay. On a side note, ETHZ (and other Universities in Switzerland) charge some $500-1000 per semester, and taking on student debt is rare. This way, by dropping out, students mostly only lose the invested time and don't face potential bankrupcy.
- Retric 10y ago
  Education is a prestige game which you can't win. Banning school names from resumes would be far cheaper and more useful if you want to level the playing field. Companies already avoid asking about marital status or children etc, this could easily be added to that list.
  - acomar 10y ago
    There's a difference. You aren't forbidden from listing your marital or child-care status on your resume, companies are forbidden from asking you about it. Banning applicants from disclosing their school would be a rather different step.
  - sulam 10y ago
    Amusingly people from 'elite' schools often will not say where they went to school by name in casual conversation. This seems to be especially true for east coast schools that are particularly elitist (a subset of the Ivies). This gets especially absurd when they say something like "oh, I went to school in New Haven" (Yale people do this semi-reliably). In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?" Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor. Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
    - foobarian 10y ago
      My experience is it's out of not wanting to appear elitist or boastful when talking with people who went to other schools. As soon as the name comes out there is an almost hostile change in attitude e.g. "ah look we got a 1-percenter here to take our jobs".
- pitt1980 10y ago
  is it actually the education that's not cheap these days, or merely the credentialing? seems like cheapening the credentialing might be a better way to attack this problem
  - rbcgerard 10y ago
    the classroom costs are not that bad, but all of the school administration, facilities (gyms, concert halls, etc), etc. that are out of control. This is a great study if you want to learn more: http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustainable_university.pdf http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustai...
- cmurf 10y ago
  This includes trade schools. The U.S. doesn't have a very good formality for matching high school students with particular trades, there are few public trade schools, and essentially no public funding.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    If you want to go to a trade school, a lot of tribal community colleges are certified by the state[1] they are in as vocational schools and are always looking for students. Tribal community colleges tend to be dual role institutions. 1) I am not going to discuss "sovereignty" as applied to the tribe and just say schools like getting state certification because it makes everything (including grants) easier
- 234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
  Oh so 12 years in the public education system wasn't enough to figure out of someone is prepared and is a good fit for college? Let's spend more money throwing another year (at a much higher cost) to see? Where is this money going to come from? I don't want to pay for this. Look, if you turn college into another highschool, it will become just as worthless. College is already worthless for a large number of people who graduate with worthless degrees. Letting everyone to go to college? Why not just stay in highschool for another year. It will be cheaper and accomplish the exact same thing.
- wang_li 10y ago
  It would be silly to put a bunch of resources into expanding college and university accessibility. In the US, highschool is free and mandatory, but still 20% of students are not graduating. Then there's the portion of those who graduate who have GPAs lower than 3.0. A disappointingly large portion of students do not take education seriously and there is no real societal value in providing those students with four more years of tax-payer supported casual living.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    Just to provide an example how other countries do it - in Poland, all higher education is 100% free for the student. It doesn't matter what and where they want to study - there is nothing to pay. Of course, the problem you mentioned still exists - a lot, if not most of people are not cut out for higher education, and since there is no financial barrier to entry, why aren't people spending 3+ years on taxpayer's dime doing nothing? Well, I believe there are two mechanisms at work here - it's stupidly hard to get into any university, even a relatively poor one. You need fantastically good results on the high school diploma or you are not even considered. Second mechanism - first year is the sieve to rule out who is not cut out for higher education. It has a reputation for being harshly difficult, and it's not unheard of university courses failing or just losing 90% of all students that have enrolled in their first year. If you come to university with an attitude that you are going to party and play games, you will be out by the end of the first semester. Then, if you do reach the end, there's no "grades" on your diploma. You can't graduate with a low score so to speak - you need to have absolutely pristine record to actually graduate. People have finished their 3-4 years and have been re-taking final exams for years just because you need to get something stupid like 90%+ score to actually pass. In comparison, I was shocked by education in country like the UK - in here, first year of uni is almost treated like kindergarten. It's not meant to be difficult. You are not meant to be treating it seriously. It's the year when you are supposed to get the partying out of your system and enjoy yourself. The grades from 1st year don't even count towards your final degree. The only way to fail in 1st year would be to assault a lecturer or something. Then anything above 40% is a pass. "First" is just a paltry 70% of higher. So you can cruise through higher education and graduate, even if your scores were below 50% average.
- jaredklewis 10y ago
  Seems like a huge burden on students. They have invested one year of their life and possibly moved to attend, only to find out they don't cut it. One year of college is worth very little if you don't graduate, but supporting one's self (at a young age with no work experience) can be very hard even if tuition is free. Most states have a variety of institutions that cater to students of different fields and levels. What is the advantage of them all accepting everyone?
  - noobermin 10y ago
    And this is worse than artificially putting in a cost barrier and then cutting out a bulk of those who do get in anyway?
- cafard 10y ago
  Tell me that somebody has finished high school, and I don't know much about how ready he is for college. Tell me which high school, and if I know the area, I might be able to guess. It has been this way for many years. Reforming the primary and secondary education systems in this country would make a great difference. But that is easier said than done.
- p10_user 10y ago
  I don't think this is a good idea. There are many high school graduates that are woefully unprepared for college. It will be a huge waste of time and resources. No point of throwing students in the deep end and let them sink or swim. At a local community college I worked at previously, the most popular math course was college algebra. Many kids right out of high school were in this course with very weak math skills. Now this is only one subject, but I think education needs to be addressed earlier. And just to add, local community colleges are a fairly cheap avenue for just about anyone to take college course (and remedial high school courses like algebra). It shouldn't be the job of a four year college to devote extensive resources to re-teaching material that should have been learned in high school. Let's focus on making education better before college so more people are ready and qualified to enroll after high school.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  > Education should be cheap for everyone This and the "healthcare should be cheap for everyone" positions are so intellectually lazy. "Education" and "healthcare" aren't some intangible pie-in-the-sky assets that are being magically bestowed upon certain individuals. They are services provided by institutions that must pay for high tech facilities and competitive wages in order to retain the best staff, accreditations, and reputation. Those costs have to be paid by someone. A half-baked solution that is subsidized or mandated only reduces competition and drives prices higher.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    It's almost as if we didn't give historically large tax breaks to billionaires and funded two wars in the middle east, bail out banks playing the poorest and most vulnerable using subprime loans, all that stuff was "necessary" and "needed" and no one ever asks who had to pay for those. But, education for all is "expensive," even though it would cost fraction per year for what we spent in Iraq per year.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Nice diatribe... yet you provide no solution to the problem other than hand waving. How else besides a strong commitment to public funding (possibly even free college like exists in some countries) do you propose to resolve this?
  - xorfish 10y ago
    How can it be that Switzerland has free education, a mandatory health care system and still have a much lower government spending/GDP than the USA?
    - mi100hael 10y ago
      A population less than 3% the size of the US, a GDP per capita 50% higher than the US, and a physical size of about 0.5% of the US. Switzerland has about the same physical area and population as the state of Virginia, only it's about 50% richer by raw GDP. Not exactly a good analog for the entire US.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  University education is a red herring. Vocational education is just as important, if not moreso. There are plenty of people who would benefit more from a major in carpentry or engine maintenance than in communications, psychology, or history
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  In my state, they take you if you're in the top 50% of your class. A compromise?
tabeth 10y ago
As someone who was born into a bottom 20% family and went to a supposed "Ivy Plus/Elite College" this is not shocking to me at all. The culture shock for me personally was amazing. In particular, I'll never forget when some students wanted to go to Asia of all places for a 4 day weekend. Though I've personally benefited from diversity recruiting for low income, first in family to go to college, etc. I still believe the solution is to fix K-12. In particular, Boston is an example of there being great higher education, but terrible public schools. ----------------- Short of that, I would recommend for the following actions: 1. Anonymous interviewing for all companies, mandatory. Let's be honest, those attending elite schools are the biggest beneficiaries of "discriminatory recruiting." Oh, except, not if you're the stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action [1] (ironic because really white women are those who benefit the most [2]). The idea here is to level the playing field. I imagine most resistance to this will come from people who went to schools similar to mine. 2. Banning of private schools. This probably won't happen, but private schools simply perpetuate the problems with access. How is it that rich cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have terrible school systems? Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE solution, there's still the rich suburb effect [3]. Practically, this probably wouldn't work. Those in control generally either live in rich suburbs or send their kid to private school. It would take one heck of a politician to pull this off. 3. Affirmative action should now be implemented at the beginning, not at the end. Helping people who already succeeded is unnecessary for real change, and expensive. Not to mention it's cheaper and more effective [4]. The tin-foil hat in me says that people wouldn't want this to happen, simply because it'd produce better competition. Affirmative action at the end is more tame. 4. More advocacy of college alternatives. Personally, I went to a two-year college and transferred to an "Ivy Plus/Elite College" in order to not pay loans. Ironically, that was not necessary since they paid for everything anyway, but hey, I didn't know that. For many, college loans are just entrapment [5]. Two year college is a factor to help mitigate the pain, in the short term [6]. 5. Complete banning of for-profit school. There's already been movement in this direction, with the prevention of enrollment of students with federal aid to ITT. [7] I have many more ideas about this, but unfortunately things are very complicated. The intersection between the economy, parenting, culture, the government as well as racism, discrimination and access make it very difficult to propose a general solution. I disagree with my own advice above depending on the city, and the circumstances. Ultimately, this is too tough a problem to solve merely with broad strokes, but I do believe the sentiment "fix K-12" summarizes my view. [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college-degrees-give-black-graduates-little-advantage-job-market https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college... [2] http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-helped-white-women-more-than-anyone/ http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-help... [3] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-private-schools-didnt-exist-there-would-still-be-rich-suburbs/279295/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-... [4] http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/24/we-wouldnt-need-affirmative-action-if-k-12-schools-actually-worked/ http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/24/we-wouldnt-need-affirmat... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/upshot/student-debt-is-worse-than-you-think.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/upshot/student-debt-is-wo... [6] http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/make-first-two-years-college-free-cost-effective-way-expand-access-higher-education-america http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/make-first-two-... [7] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0828/For-profit-college-banned-from-accepting-students-with-federal-aid http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0828/For-profit-...
thenewregiment1 10y ago
Everything in this world is a commodity. Supply vs demand. Education is like that too.
TempleOS 10y ago
High IQ before, High IQ after. Zuckerberg and Gates.
popobobo 10y ago
This is a capitalism country. We reward individuals who are rich. What is wrong with rich kids getting into college? This is the bonus they got from creating more economy growth for the society. And to be honest, the 1% income limit is misleading. The real rich people will laugh at the 1% income threshold. With 1% income in nyc, you can't even raise a family in decent life style.
- Qworg 10y ago
  Being richer doesn't correspond to having more potential. For every rich person in college (top 1% of pop), there's a cohort of roughly 30x that would do as well or better.
- akjainaj 10y ago
  >With 1% income in nyc, you can't even raise a family in decent life style. I don't know much of NYC but isn't it... huge? I'm sure that there are parts of it far away from Manhattan that aren't shitholes and where you can live with a "normal" wage.
  - popobobo 10y ago
    I've known some 1% commuting 3hrs round way. Just because the "aren't shitholes" area could be really far away. Plus after tax 600k will turn into 350k.
    - akjainaj 10y ago
      So you literally have to be a millionaire to live in Manhattan?
      - jandrese 10y ago
        The 1% cutoff is about $400k/year. If you want to live in lower Manhattan that sounds about right. Upper Manhattan has a bit more opportunity, but even then you're looking at old and tiny apartments for your family.
      - 10y ago
krat0sprakhar 10y ago
If anyone's interested in learning more about this topic I can't recommend Revisionist History's episode 4, 5 & 6 enough. Malcolm Gladwell uses a very compelling and thought-provoking narrative to dissect educational philanthropy and how hard the elite universities trying to be more inclusive (or are they?) [0] - http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes
- heymijo 10y ago
  Let me second that. Gladwell raises my skeptic alarm often, but these three highlighted episodes are good. For the past 7 years I've been involved in education from pre-k to university and my BS detector didn't budge during these episodes.
  - Sone7 10y ago
    I'll second your Gladwell doubt: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161228/23550336364/malcolm-gladwells-ridiculous-attack-ed-snowden-based-weird-prejudice-about-how-whistleblower-should-look.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161228/23550336364/malco... But the guy can be good, I'll check these out.
    - nickbauman 10y ago
      Very skeptical of Gladwell, especially since David and Goliath http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.ph...
- deeteecee 10y ago
  did not know malcolm gladwell had a podcast. can't wait to start listening!
xyzzy4 10y ago
Some sports cars have more owners from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60. What's the big deal? Besides, farming is the backbone of civilization. You don't need much education for that. Everything we have nowadays is extra.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Farming is less than 1% of human activity currently.
  - xyzzy4 10y ago
    In India it's half of the workforce. So I don't think your 1% is accurate. Also most jobs are nonessential for human survival, unlike agriculture.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      In first world nations it is. The US has 3.2 million farmers and a population of 325 million or so. I don't know if your figure is inaccurate, misleading or farmers in India are extremely inefficient.
      - xyzzy4 10y ago
        "Today, India ranks second worldwide in farm output. Agriculture and allied sectors like forestry and fisheries accounted for 13.7% of the GDP (gross domestic product) in 2013,[2] about 50% of the workforce.[3][4]" - Wikipedia
        cmdrfred 10y ago
        Wow, the output of a single American farmer must be an order of maginatude higher than an Indian one. Not really something I'd strive for.
        vonmoltke 10y ago
        50% of the population is in agriculture, not farming. Total agriculture represents about 10% of US jobs, but only 10% of agriculture jobs are farming jobs.
dpflan 10y ago
To the extent that society is self-similar, does this represent society as a whole - like some sort of power laws of societal existence/expression?
EduardoBautista 10y ago
The poorer 20% are also much more likely to go to for profit "colleges". I don't think this is as simple as saying they can't afford to go to the best colleges.
- plandis 10y ago
  > But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. “Free tuition only helps if you can get in," This is, I think, the bigger problem. Educational opportunities are highly differentiated by wealth at a young age. Better public schools require living in more expensive neighborhoods. Private schools are expensive and even on financial aid difficult for some people to get to. Poor people can't afford to send their kids on summer trips (i.e. summer camp) and effectively the poor are more likely to have learning stop in the summer. To top if off, the guidance people in poor school districts get in/around their senior year is rarely helpful and sometimes just terrible (I.e. councilors telling students to not even bother applying to Harvard, etc...) So yes, I'd say it's more complicated. When you're poor you're playing against students with a stacked deck. That's not to say there is no personable accountability, but it's not the only determining factor.
  - pkaye 10y ago
    I don't know if we can account for the wealth difference and "stacked desk" at the school level. My city school district has five high schools in difference part of the city. The best ones is near the top of the state academic ranking while the others are average. They all get the same level of funding from the city and the schools look all equally run down. The difference is the demographics of those attending these schools. When they started statewide ranking of schools, families started gravitating to the slightly better schools and driving up the prices on neighboring houses. So this school is full of wealthy and high achieving families despite equal levels of funding.
    - EduardoBautista 10y ago
      Yup. I believe that the success of a person has much more to do with their family than what school they go to. But that would place the responsibility on parents instead of the government so this is not a popular opinion.
wehadfun 10y ago
In their top 10 list the only school I have heard of is Tuf. Are these considered Elite colleges? Havard, Yale, Penn, MIT, Columbia, were not there.
- FT_intern 10y ago
  The fact that these colleges aren't elite actually hurts the article's argument. Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.
  - phlo 10y ago
    The mentioned schools are grouped into the 'Ivy plus' label and ranked as even more selective than the 'elite' group.
    - URSpider94 10y ago
      Right, they're so elite that the mainstream hasn't really heard of them. But, if you were to wander onto the executive floor at Goldman Sachs or a top law firm, I guarantee you'd see their banners hanging in the offices. These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
      - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
        For some corroboration, I grew up as a 1%-er and I went to one of those schools with a student body of ~2k. I studied in London for a semester. My first week off the plane, there was a meet and greet with alums that were living there at the time. Before finishing my first drink I had an internship lined up at Credit Suisse for the summer. The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore). Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.
flareback 10y ago
In other news, more people from the top 1% drive Ferraris than people from the bottom 50%.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tedmiston 10y ago
> Where today’s 25-year-olds went to college, grouped by their parents’ income Their parents' income relative to what... The city their parent works or lives in? The state? Country-wide? Seems like an important thing to clarify. You can be in the top 5–10% in a small blue-collar town and still middle of the road across the country.
- dmoy 10y ago
  In any context I've ever seen, income percentiles are always nation-wide. Re-read OP, didn't see them explicitly call it out, but they did implicitly mention "[percent] of American families" in places, so likely it's nation here too.
- jsin05 10y ago
  Article has a bad way of representing how they use their data points but the data is nationwide income percentiles. The top 1% household income is > $630k
lngnmn 10y ago
Ivy League degree is not about education, but a social status certificate. That is why 1% are paying for it in the first place. No wonder that most of the Ivy Leagues colleges are of liberal arts. There is MIT for education.
- bjacobel 10y ago
  Your disdain for the liberal arts is misplaced. I'd think that, on Hacker News of all places, people would value an education that values algorithms and data structures on as equal a footing as economics, sociology, political science, communication... all components of finding a market, building a business and disrupting an industry.
- Kephael 10y ago
  MIT practices the same undergraduate admissions shenanigans as Ivy League universities. At a certain point, the course material is largely identical. I really doubt 6.006 is going to significantly differ from CS 31 in terms of student outcomes [1]. Liberal arts are great to study at top schools if you'd like to work in investment banking or consulting. [1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs31/journal.html http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs31/journal.html
wyldfire 10y ago
> Add your favorite colleges to the tables in this article: What a great idea! NYT really capitalizes on this medium and doesn't simply deliver print articles via web.
- jedberg 10y ago
  They have a very strong web team. In fact, they are contributors to things like D3 and other big JS libraries.
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    True. But I think it takes a distinct editorial mind shift to publish articles that have interactivity features, though. It's not enough to have "a very strong web team" if they're only focused on dimensions like uptime and page load times.
  - __derek__ 10y ago
    Mike Bostock, the creator of D3, actually worked at NYT until last year.
syphilis2 10y ago
It's disappointing that the article leads into this as a discussion about income inequality at certain universities, when the study is branded as a tool for low income students to determine which colleges provide the best opportunity for upward mobility. http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/ http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/
- rmxt 10y ago
  Why is starting such a discussion "disappointing"? It seems like a fair extrapolation to make, and a conversation worth exploring. Is income inequality at particular universities not an interesting issue to explore? The article links to the page you've linked to, and includes links to data and source information. I haven't personally vetted what NYT has done here, but it seems fair to take original research and run with it in new directions.
  - syphilis2 10y ago
    Well yes, income inequality at a particular university is not interesting because the paper concludes that upward mobility is a better metric to identify schools that should be expanded. I see comments below about capitalism, supply/demand, luxury cars, tuition, affirmative action, banning private/for-profit schools, and social status. Some of those are totally irrelevant, and the relevant ones ought to be in the context of how they relate to access to high mobility schools. There are accompanying NYT articles, and I agree that it's fair to jump off from the research. I believe the discussion needs to incorporate the conclusions from the paper into that new direction.
lend000 10y ago
This is partially a side effect of admissions that are skewed by racial affirmative action, as opposed to taking into account overall socioeconomic status. Race is still a factor for two families of similar income, but Obama's children received a enjoyed significantly more educational opportunities than the children of an average working-class West Virginia white family -- yet admissions only sees race.
randyrand 10y ago
this is because some schools are very expensive.
aidenn0 10y ago
I went to Purdue, which I considered fairly blue-collar as far as 4-year universities go. Stats: 3.1% from the 1% and 21.1% from the bottom 60%. Even more sobering is that there are more people from the bottom 40% at MIT than at Purdue. I then thought of what would be the most blue-collar state university in Indiana, and checked ISU: <1% from the 1% and 46.5% from the bottom 60%.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  I don't find this surprising at all. I spent a summer program at ISU once and had plenty of friends that wound up going there. In the mid-90's, it was cheaper than both Indiana University and Purdue, with smaller class sizes - and they have a completely different focus it seemed. If I remember correctly, ISU seemed to cater towards lower income much more than Purdue ever did.
rbcgerard 10y ago
two thoughts 1. I think its interesting/notable that the colleges that are most successful at helping poorer kids, are not elite schools, but rather are training people for well paying "middle class" jobs like teaching them how to be an air traffic controller 2. nowhere does it talk about the cost of providing an education...if it costs College X $75,000/year/student and College Y costs $15,000/year/student then making Y "affordable" is eminently easier than X...the point being some schools may want to have a more economically diverse student body, but in order to achieve that end, they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious), raise more money/get more grants, or charge the students that are already paying full tuition even more...none of which appealing/easy...
- rflrob 10y ago
  On the first point, there's an interesting discussion to be had about what we mean by successful---for any given student, they're just as well off on average at Vaughn Aeronautic College as U Chicago (and better off at Stanford, Princeton, or MIT). However, Vaughn takes so many more low income students that their marginally lower success rate helps so many more. As a graduate of an elite college coming in from a highly privileged background (and thus as someone trying to minimize cognitive dissonance), I do think we would lose something if we as a society only put our resources into colleges that focused on lower income students. That said, I wouldn't be too bummed if more of my tax dollars ended up in places where it was actually helping people who benefited from that help.
- dikdik 10y ago
  >they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious) Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates. But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.
  - rbcgerard 10y ago
basseq 10y ago
But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. The article talks about access multiple times, but never defines what that might mean. If financial commitment is removed from the table, either qualified low-income applicants aren't being accepted at the same rates (unsubstantiated here) or qualified low-income applicants simply aren't applying (supported by linked research[1]). Or colleges accept students based on qualification alone and are "blind" to economic circumstances—which may be good or bad depending on your POV. If the second, the question then becomes how to encourage those applicants. Is that "access"? Or do we need to re-think "qualification" to be more democratic (if it includes, say, international exposure that can be bought)? Are institutions obligated to change their qualification criteria to this end? Should they all? The selectivity-vs-income ("rainbow") chart is interesting and fairly linear. I wonder what a similar "qualification-vs-income" chart would look like: e.g., are top 0.1%-ers "more qualified" (e.g., more likely to get into a selective university by performance alone) than other bands? Then we're either into really dangerous territory (e.g., wealth correlated with intelligence), we're back to (re-)defining qualification criteria, or we shift the "blame" from university admissions to childhood education. [1]http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586 http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586
- SilasX 10y ago
  I assume, from that sentence, "expanding access" means "teaching more students" and thus accepting a larger class/more applicants.
  - basseq 10y ago
    Sure, but that's a pretty blind metric. "If Harvard (6k undergrads) accepted as many students as Texas A&M (50k undergrads), it would be more diverse!" But then it wouldn't be selective; it wouldn't be Harvard. Presuming Harvard is interested in increasing enrollment at all, that alone doesn't help increase these percentages. If Harvard accepts 1 low-income student for every 10 people, and accepts 100 more people in total, the mix is still 10%. I don't think that's "increased access".
redbluetriangle 10y ago
Elite schools may provide generous financial aid, but what this ignores is that typically students from lower income families go to secondary schools that are weaker than traditional schools upper middle class students attend. Some provide few AP courses, one where no one may explains/prep students for the SAT and only schools students are recommended to attend are local community college/nearby schools. Take a top student from this school and she may have 0 AP courses, 3.8 unweighted GPA, 0 ECs, average SAT score (after taking it blind) and from a low income family. Elite universities will not lower their admission requirements to accept her, nor would top public universities. Due to her background, she is forced to attend a lower ranked school. She failed at a game she never had a chance to win to begin with. Harvard and the like may offer great financial aid to those students, but those students are the very ones that aren't going to be accepted Harvard.
BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago
I find it very interesting that many so-called "Ivy Misser" schools such as WUSTL and Tufts have more 1%ers and fewer 60%ers than extremely elite schools such as Princeton and Harvard. Even Yale has a lower ranking on the list. Perhaps the elite of the elite are more concerned with giving their progeny a broad exposure to different classes of people, while more middling members of the upper class concern themselves with status signalling.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
Maybe we should replace affirmative action w/ one based on income... Average incomes of student families must = average american salary -- or absolutely 0 tax savings, grants, etc.... from the government.
mohanmcgeek 10y ago
What happened to the 39% in between? Aren't they the majority?
rednerrus 10y ago
You would think it makes sense to grab the smartest poor people and start indoctrinating them as soon as possible.

188 points by thisisit 10y ago

Education should be cheap for everyone, otherwise this will only get worse. Additionally everyone that has finished High School should be accepted into any state-funded university. You can seed out the unqualified students during the first two semesters.

jMyles 10y ago
Some state universities are under such incredible demand; your plan will require building many new ones. Which, in relative terms, is not that hard: simply re-purpose state prisons.
- nashashmi 10y ago
  It will be less labor intensive and more fruitful to build new schools. Maybe prisons can serve as dorms.
  - emehrkay 10y ago
    Could you imagine spending any time in a building that was originally designed to be a prison? Aren't those things made to break spirits and punish people simply by being in it? Have you ever entered a space and felt uncomfortable simply because it doesn't have windows or the walls are barren or it is just "cold"? We'd probably see a lot more drop outs if prisons were repurposed as dorms. Shit, some new schools are designed with the same brush as these prisons and we can probably easily predict the success/failure rates of students coming from them.
    - nordify 10y ago
      Both Sweden and Finland have hotels in the capital city center which are former prisons. According to reviews they are well regarded.
    - lovich 10y ago
      Many of the colleges I had visited and the one I went to had prison like dorms. It seems to be the default type of building to construct whenever there is an unexpected increase in students and they have to put as many people into a small place as possible. I know the room I shared with another student in college was smaller than some prison cells.
- xorfish 10y ago
  Make the courses harder to pass. If you filter out a lot of students early on, you don't need to build new ones.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    I'd argue that the goal should be to get more people into colleges, rather than filtering more people out
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Why? People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce. Guess which of those I believe drives college admissions right now. Of course many careers will benefit from a college education, but here in the US we have long since surpassed that number of people attending college.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        > Why? Because education is important, and our society is helped by everyone having access to improve their lives. I don't want to get into an automation discussion, but I personally believe that it will be even more important in the next few decades. > People going to college should consider it a valuable use of their time, not a necessary credential for entering the workforce I completely agree! But I think that is a separate problem. I'd love to go to school for things completely unrelated to my career. I don't think college should necessarily be easy, but getting into it should be. I personally believe that encouraging people to further educate themselves, especially "non-intellectuals"* , is a great way for everyone to benefit. IME, most people who skip college aren't skipping it because they are dumb, but because they don't have the resources to attend easily. In my own experience: High-school wasn't reflective of my current educational desires. I want to attend more college classes, but don't have the resources to do so. I live a pretty simple lifestyle, and if college isn't easily accessible to me, I can't see how it's accessible to people with kids, two jobs, etc * : I don't know how else to phrase that without sounding condescending. If someone has a better wording, let me know.
ivl 10y ago
I'm not sure high school completion would reflect well on that. We already have a significant number of people not finishing college and university. Wasting resources on more profs doing remedial teaching wouldn't do any good. High schools need higher standards, and colleges should probably accept fewer students.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yeah, the first 2 semesters mentioned by the grandparent should be readily available to high school juniors + seniors.
- xorfish 10y ago
  The ETH Zurich works that way. After you finished high school you can go there. (I'm not sure, but there might be some exception where you need to pass an exam) Depending on the course, 2/3 of the students will be gone after two semesters.
  - ivl 10y ago
    I just don't see how that's a good model. Make high school a little harder and let the degree have some worth, and have it so it's only 1/3rd or less that don't continue after the first couple semesters. In the context of the US post-secondary education is just too expensive to have such low standards. It probably works better in countries with low individual costs on education, but even then I'd want standards in place that are high enough not to need so many resources used to remove people who definitely don't belong there.
    - phlo 10y ago
      It seems more meritocratic, to me. The bar to enter is low, and the criteria for continuing their studies is proficiency in the subject at hand, not standardized test scores, extracurricular activities in high school or the best-written application essay. On a side note, ETHZ (and other Universities in Switzerland) charge some $500-1000 per semester, and taking on student debt is rare. This way, by dropping out, students mostly only lose the invested time and don't face potential bankrupcy.
Retric 10y ago
Education is a prestige game which you can't win. Banning school names from resumes would be far cheaper and more useful if you want to level the playing field. Companies already avoid asking about marital status or children etc, this could easily be added to that list.
- acomar 10y ago
  There's a difference. You aren't forbidden from listing your marital or child-care status on your resume, companies are forbidden from asking you about it. Banning applicants from disclosing their school would be a rather different step.
- sulam 10y ago
  Amusingly people from 'elite' schools often will not say where they went to school by name in casual conversation. This seems to be especially true for east coast schools that are particularly elitist (a subset of the Ivies). This gets especially absurd when they say something like "oh, I went to school in New Haven" (Yale people do this semi-reliably). In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?" Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor. Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
  - foobarian 10y ago
    My experience is it's out of not wanting to appear elitist or boastful when talking with people who went to other schools. As soon as the name comes out there is an almost hostile change in attitude e.g. "ah look we got a 1-percenter here to take our jobs".
pitt1980 10y ago
is it actually the education that's not cheap these days, or merely the credentialing? seems like cheapening the credentialing might be a better way to attack this problem
- rbcgerard 10y ago
  the classroom costs are not that bad, but all of the school administration, facilities (gyms, concert halls, etc), etc. that are out of control. This is a great study if you want to learn more: http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustainable_university.pdf http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_The_financially_sustai...
cmurf 10y ago
This includes trade schools. The U.S. doesn't have a very good formality for matching high school students with particular trades, there are few public trade schools, and essentially no public funding.
- protomyth 10y ago
  If you want to go to a trade school, a lot of tribal community colleges are certified by the state[1] they are in as vocational schools and are always looking for students. Tribal community colleges tend to be dual role institutions. 1) I am not going to discuss "sovereignty" as applied to the tribe and just say schools like getting state certification because it makes everything (including grants) easier
234dd57d2c8db 10y ago
Oh so 12 years in the public education system wasn't enough to figure out of someone is prepared and is a good fit for college? Let's spend more money throwing another year (at a much higher cost) to see? Where is this money going to come from? I don't want to pay for this. Look, if you turn college into another highschool, it will become just as worthless. College is already worthless for a large number of people who graduate with worthless degrees. Letting everyone to go to college? Why not just stay in highschool for another year. It will be cheaper and accomplish the exact same thing.
wang_li 10y ago
It would be silly to put a bunch of resources into expanding college and university accessibility. In the US, highschool is free and mandatory, but still 20% of students are not graduating. Then there's the portion of those who graduate who have GPAs lower than 3.0. A disappointingly large portion of students do not take education seriously and there is no real societal value in providing those students with four more years of tax-payer supported casual living.
- gambiting 10y ago
  Just to provide an example how other countries do it - in Poland, all higher education is 100% free for the student. It doesn't matter what and where they want to study - there is nothing to pay. Of course, the problem you mentioned still exists - a lot, if not most of people are not cut out for higher education, and since there is no financial barrier to entry, why aren't people spending 3+ years on taxpayer's dime doing nothing? Well, I believe there are two mechanisms at work here - it's stupidly hard to get into any university, even a relatively poor one. You need fantastically good results on the high school diploma or you are not even considered. Second mechanism - first year is the sieve to rule out who is not cut out for higher education. It has a reputation for being harshly difficult, and it's not unheard of university courses failing or just losing 90% of all students that have enrolled in their first year. If you come to university with an attitude that you are going to party and play games, you will be out by the end of the first semester. Then, if you do reach the end, there's no "grades" on your diploma. You can't graduate with a low score so to speak - you need to have absolutely pristine record to actually graduate. People have finished their 3-4 years and have been re-taking final exams for years just because you need to get something stupid like 90%+ score to actually pass. In comparison, I was shocked by education in country like the UK - in here, first year of uni is almost treated like kindergarten. It's not meant to be difficult. You are not meant to be treating it seriously. It's the year when you are supposed to get the partying out of your system and enjoy yourself. The grades from 1st year don't even count towards your final degree. The only way to fail in 1st year would be to assault a lecturer or something. Then anything above 40% is a pass. "First" is just a paltry 70% of higher. So you can cruise through higher education and graduate, even if your scores were below 50% average.
jaredklewis 10y ago
Seems like a huge burden on students. They have invested one year of their life and possibly moved to attend, only to find out they don't cut it. One year of college is worth very little if you don't graduate, but supporting one's self (at a young age with no work experience) can be very hard even if tuition is free. Most states have a variety of institutions that cater to students of different fields and levels. What is the advantage of them all accepting everyone?
- noobermin 10y ago
  And this is worse than artificially putting in a cost barrier and then cutting out a bulk of those who do get in anyway?
cafard 10y ago
Tell me that somebody has finished high school, and I don't know much about how ready he is for college. Tell me which high school, and if I know the area, I might be able to guess. It has been this way for many years. Reforming the primary and secondary education systems in this country would make a great difference. But that is easier said than done.
p10_user 10y ago
I don't think this is a good idea. There are many high school graduates that are woefully unprepared for college. It will be a huge waste of time and resources. No point of throwing students in the deep end and let them sink or swim. At a local community college I worked at previously, the most popular math course was college algebra. Many kids right out of high school were in this course with very weak math skills. Now this is only one subject, but I think education needs to be addressed earlier. And just to add, local community colleges are a fairly cheap avenue for just about anyone to take college course (and remedial high school courses like algebra). It shouldn't be the job of a four year college to devote extensive resources to re-teaching material that should have been learned in high school. Let's focus on making education better before college so more people are ready and qualified to enroll after high school.
mi100hael 10y ago
> Education should be cheap for everyone This and the "healthcare should be cheap for everyone" positions are so intellectually lazy. "Education" and "healthcare" aren't some intangible pie-in-the-sky assets that are being magically bestowed upon certain individuals. They are services provided by institutions that must pay for high tech facilities and competitive wages in order to retain the best staff, accreditations, and reputation. Those costs have to be paid by someone. A half-baked solution that is subsidized or mandated only reduces competition and drives prices higher.
- noobermin 10y ago
  It's almost as if we didn't give historically large tax breaks to billionaires and funded two wars in the middle east, bail out banks playing the poorest and most vulnerable using subprime loans, all that stuff was "necessary" and "needed" and no one ever asks who had to pay for those. But, education for all is "expensive," even though it would cost fraction per year for what we spent in Iraq per year.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Nice diatribe... yet you provide no solution to the problem other than hand waving. How else besides a strong commitment to public funding (possibly even free college like exists in some countries) do you propose to resolve this?
- xorfish 10y ago
  How can it be that Switzerland has free education, a mandatory health care system and still have a much lower government spending/GDP than the USA?
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    A population less than 3% the size of the US, a GDP per capita 50% higher than the US, and a physical size of about 0.5% of the US. Switzerland has about the same physical area and population as the state of Virginia, only it's about 50% richer by raw GDP. Not exactly a good analog for the entire US.
nerdponx 10y ago
University education is a red herring. Vocational education is just as important, if not moreso. There are plenty of people who would benefit more from a major in carpentry or engine maintenance than in communications, psychology, or history
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
In my state, they take you if you're in the top 50% of your class. A compromise?

tabeth 10y ago

As someone who was born into a bottom 20% family and went to a supposed "Ivy Plus/Elite College" this is not shocking to me at all. The culture shock for me personally was amazing. In particular, I'll never forget when some students wanted to go to Asia of all places for a 4 day weekend. Though I've personally benefited from diversity recruiting for low income, first in family to go to college, etc. I still believe the solution is to fix K-12. In particular, Boston is an example of there being great higher education, but terrible public schools. ----------------- Short of that, I would recommend for the following actions: 1. Anonymous interviewing for all companies, mandatory. Let's be honest, those attending elite schools are the biggest beneficiaries of "discriminatory recruiting." Oh, except, not if you're the stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action [1] (ironic because really white women are those who benefit the most [2]). The idea here is to level the playing field. I imagine most resistance to this will come from people who went to schools similar to mine. 2. Banning of private schools. This probably won't happen, but private schools simply perpetuate the problems with access. How is it that rich cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have terrible school systems? Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE solution, there's still the rich suburb effect [3]. Practically, this probably wouldn't work. Those in control generally either live in rich suburbs or send their kid to private school. It would take one heck of a politician to pull this off. 3. Affirmative action should now be implemented at the beginning, not at the end. Helping people who already succeeded is unnecessary for real change, and expensive. Not to mention it's cheaper and more effective [4]. The tin-foil hat in me says that people wouldn't want this to happen, simply because it'd produce better competition. Affirmative action at the end is more tame. 4. More advocacy of college alternatives. Personally, I went to a two-year college and transferred to an "Ivy Plus/Elite College" in order to not pay loans. Ironically, that was not necessary since they paid for everything anyway, but hey, I didn't know that. For many, college loans are just entrapment [5]. Two year college is a factor to help mitigate the pain, in the short term [6]. 5. Complete banning of for-profit school. There's already been movement in this direction, with the prevention of enrollment of students with federal aid to ITT. [7] I have many more ideas about this, but unfortunately things are very complicated. The intersection between the economy, parenting, culture, the government as well as racism, discrimination and access make it very difficult to propose a general solution. I disagree with my own advice above depending on the city, and the circumstances. Ultimately, this is too tough a problem to solve merely with broad strokes, but I do believe the sentiment "fix K-12" summarizes my view. [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college-degrees-give-black-graduates-little-advantage-job-market https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college... [2] http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-helped-white-women-more-than-anyone/ http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-help... [3] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-private-schools-didnt-exist-there-would-still-be-rich-suburbs/279295/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-... [4] http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/24/we-wouldnt-need-affirmative-action-if-k-12-schools-actually-worked/ http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/24/we-wouldnt-need-affirmat... [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/upshot/student-debt-is-worse-than-you-think.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/upshot/student-debt-is-wo... [6] http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/make-first-two-years-college-free-cost-effective-way-expand-access-higher-education-america http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/make-first-two-... [7] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0828/For-profit-college-banned-from-accepting-students-with-federal-aid http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0828/For-profit-...

thenewregiment1 10y ago

Everything in this world is a commodity. Supply vs demand. Education is like that too.

TempleOS 10y ago

High IQ before, High IQ after. Zuckerberg and Gates.

popobobo 10y ago

This is a capitalism country. We reward individuals who are rich. What is wrong with rich kids getting into college? This is the bonus they got from creating more economy growth for the society. And to be honest, the 1% income limit is misleading. The real rich people will laugh at the 1% income threshold. With 1% income in nyc, you can't even raise a family in decent life style.

Qworg 10y ago
Being richer doesn't correspond to having more potential. For every rich person in college (top 1% of pop), there's a cohort of roughly 30x that would do as well or better.
akjainaj 10y ago
>With 1% income in nyc, you can't even raise a family in decent life style. I don't know much of NYC but isn't it... huge? I'm sure that there are parts of it far away from Manhattan that aren't shitholes and where you can live with a "normal" wage.
- popobobo 10y ago
  I've known some 1% commuting 3hrs round way. Just because the "aren't shitholes" area could be really far away. Plus after tax 600k will turn into 350k.
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    So you literally have to be a millionaire to live in Manhattan?
    - jandrese 10y ago
      The 1% cutoff is about $400k/year. If you want to live in lower Manhattan that sounds about right. Upper Manhattan has a bit more opportunity, but even then you're looking at old and tiny apartments for your family.
    - 10y ago

krat0sprakhar 10y ago

If anyone's interested in learning more about this topic I can't recommend Revisionist History's episode 4, 5 & 6 enough. Malcolm Gladwell uses a very compelling and thought-provoking narrative to dissect educational philanthropy and how hard the elite universities trying to be more inclusive (or are they?) [0] - http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes

heymijo 10y ago
Let me second that. Gladwell raises my skeptic alarm often, but these three highlighted episodes are good. For the past 7 years I've been involved in education from pre-k to university and my BS detector didn't budge during these episodes.
- Sone7 10y ago
  I'll second your Gladwell doubt: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161228/23550336364/malcolm-gladwells-ridiculous-attack-ed-snowden-based-weird-prejudice-about-how-whistleblower-should-look.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161228/23550336364/malco... But the guy can be good, I'll check these out.
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    Very skeptical of Gladwell, especially since David and Goliath http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.ph...
deeteecee 10y ago
did not know malcolm gladwell had a podcast. can't wait to start listening!

xyzzy4 10y ago

Some sports cars have more owners from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60. What's the big deal? Besides, farming is the backbone of civilization. You don't need much education for that. Everything we have nowadays is extra.

cmdrfred 10y ago
Farming is less than 1% of human activity currently.
- xyzzy4 10y ago
  In India it's half of the workforce. So I don't think your 1% is accurate. Also most jobs are nonessential for human survival, unlike agriculture.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    In first world nations it is. The US has 3.2 million farmers and a population of 325 million or so. I don't know if your figure is inaccurate, misleading or farmers in India are extremely inefficient.
    - xyzzy4 10y ago
      "Today, India ranks second worldwide in farm output. Agriculture and allied sectors like forestry and fisheries accounted for 13.7% of the GDP (gross domestic product) in 2013,[2] about 50% of the workforce.[3][4]" - Wikipedia
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        Wow, the output of a single American farmer must be an order of maginatude higher than an Indian one. Not really something I'd strive for.
      - vonmoltke 10y ago
        50% of the population is in agriculture, not farming. Total agriculture represents about 10% of US jobs, but only 10% of agriculture jobs are farming jobs.

dpflan 10y ago

To the extent that society is self-similar, does this represent society as a whole - like some sort of power laws of societal existence/expression?

EduardoBautista 10y ago

The poorer 20% are also much more likely to go to for profit "colleges". I don't think this is as simple as saying they can't afford to go to the best colleges.

plandis 10y ago
> But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. “Free tuition only helps if you can get in," This is, I think, the bigger problem. Educational opportunities are highly differentiated by wealth at a young age. Better public schools require living in more expensive neighborhoods. Private schools are expensive and even on financial aid difficult for some people to get to. Poor people can't afford to send their kids on summer trips (i.e. summer camp) and effectively the poor are more likely to have learning stop in the summer. To top if off, the guidance people in poor school districts get in/around their senior year is rarely helpful and sometimes just terrible (I.e. councilors telling students to not even bother applying to Harvard, etc...) So yes, I'd say it's more complicated. When you're poor you're playing against students with a stacked deck. That's not to say there is no personable accountability, but it's not the only determining factor.
- pkaye 10y ago
  I don't know if we can account for the wealth difference and "stacked desk" at the school level. My city school district has five high schools in difference part of the city. The best ones is near the top of the state academic ranking while the others are average. They all get the same level of funding from the city and the schools look all equally run down. The difference is the demographics of those attending these schools. When they started statewide ranking of schools, families started gravitating to the slightly better schools and driving up the prices on neighboring houses. So this school is full of wealthy and high achieving families despite equal levels of funding.
  - EduardoBautista 10y ago
    Yup. I believe that the success of a person has much more to do with their family than what school they go to. But that would place the responsibility on parents instead of the government so this is not a popular opinion.

wehadfun 10y ago

In their top 10 list the only school I have heard of is Tuf. Are these considered Elite colleges? Havard, Yale, Penn, MIT, Columbia, were not there.

FT_intern 10y ago
The fact that these colleges aren't elite actually hurts the article's argument. Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.
- phlo 10y ago
  The mentioned schools are grouped into the 'Ivy plus' label and ranked as even more selective than the 'elite' group.
  - URSpider94 10y ago
    Right, they're so elite that the mainstream hasn't really heard of them. But, if you were to wander onto the executive floor at Goldman Sachs or a top law firm, I guarantee you'd see their banners hanging in the offices. These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
    - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
      For some corroboration, I grew up as a 1%-er and I went to one of those schools with a student body of ~2k. I studied in London for a semester. My first week off the plane, there was a meet and greet with alums that were living there at the time. Before finishing my first drink I had an internship lined up at Credit Suisse for the summer. The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore). Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.

flareback 10y ago

In other news, more people from the top 1% drive Ferraris than people from the bottom 50%.

deleted 10y ago

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tedmiston 10y ago

> Where today’s 25-year-olds went to college, grouped by their parents’ income Their parents' income relative to what... The city their parent works or lives in? The state? Country-wide? Seems like an important thing to clarify. You can be in the top 5–10% in a small blue-collar town and still middle of the road across the country.

dmoy 10y ago
In any context I've ever seen, income percentiles are always nation-wide. Re-read OP, didn't see them explicitly call it out, but they did implicitly mention "[percent] of American families" in places, so likely it's nation here too.
jsin05 10y ago
Article has a bad way of representing how they use their data points but the data is nationwide income percentiles. The top 1% household income is > $630k

lngnmn 10y ago

Ivy League degree is not about education, but a social status certificate. That is why 1% are paying for it in the first place. No wonder that most of the Ivy Leagues colleges are of liberal arts. There is MIT for education.

bjacobel 10y ago
Your disdain for the liberal arts is misplaced. I'd think that, on Hacker News of all places, people would value an education that values algorithms and data structures on as equal a footing as economics, sociology, political science, communication... all components of finding a market, building a business and disrupting an industry.
Kephael 10y ago
MIT practices the same undergraduate admissions shenanigans as Ivy League universities. At a certain point, the course material is largely identical. I really doubt 6.006 is going to significantly differ from CS 31 in terms of student outcomes [1]. Liberal arts are great to study at top schools if you'd like to work in investment banking or consulting. [1] http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs31/journal.html http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~cs31/journal.html

wyldfire 10y ago

> Add your favorite colleges to the tables in this article: What a great idea! NYT really capitalizes on this medium and doesn't simply deliver print articles via web.

jedberg 10y ago
They have a very strong web team. In fact, they are contributors to things like D3 and other big JS libraries.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  True. But I think it takes a distinct editorial mind shift to publish articles that have interactivity features, though. It's not enough to have "a very strong web team" if they're only focused on dimensions like uptime and page load times.
- __derek__ 10y ago
  Mike Bostock, the creator of D3, actually worked at NYT until last year.

syphilis2 10y ago

It's disappointing that the article leads into this as a discussion about income inequality at certain universities, when the study is branded as a tool for low income students to determine which colleges provide the best opportunity for upward mobility. http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/ http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/

rmxt 10y ago
Why is starting such a discussion "disappointing"? It seems like a fair extrapolation to make, and a conversation worth exploring. Is income inequality at particular universities not an interesting issue to explore? The article links to the page you've linked to, and includes links to data and source information. I haven't personally vetted what NYT has done here, but it seems fair to take original research and run with it in new directions.
- syphilis2 10y ago
  Well yes, income inequality at a particular university is not interesting because the paper concludes that upward mobility is a better metric to identify schools that should be expanded. I see comments below about capitalism, supply/demand, luxury cars, tuition, affirmative action, banning private/for-profit schools, and social status. Some of those are totally irrelevant, and the relevant ones ought to be in the context of how they relate to access to high mobility schools. There are accompanying NYT articles, and I agree that it's fair to jump off from the research. I believe the discussion needs to incorporate the conclusions from the paper into that new direction.

lend000 10y ago

This is partially a side effect of admissions that are skewed by racial affirmative action, as opposed to taking into account overall socioeconomic status. Race is still a factor for two families of similar income, but Obama's children received a enjoyed significantly more educational opportunities than the children of an average working-class West Virginia white family -- yet admissions only sees race.

randyrand 10y ago

this is because some schools are very expensive.

aidenn0 10y ago

I went to Purdue, which I considered fairly blue-collar as far as 4-year universities go. Stats: 3.1% from the 1% and 21.1% from the bottom 60%. Even more sobering is that there are more people from the bottom 40% at MIT than at Purdue. I then thought of what would be the most blue-collar state university in Indiana, and checked ISU: <1% from the 1% and 46.5% from the bottom 60%.

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
I don't find this surprising at all. I spent a summer program at ISU once and had plenty of friends that wound up going there. In the mid-90's, it was cheaper than both Indiana University and Purdue, with smaller class sizes - and they have a completely different focus it seemed. If I remember correctly, ISU seemed to cater towards lower income much more than Purdue ever did.

rbcgerard 10y ago

two thoughts 1. I think its interesting/notable that the colleges that are most successful at helping poorer kids, are not elite schools, but rather are training people for well paying "middle class" jobs like teaching them how to be an air traffic controller 2. nowhere does it talk about the cost of providing an education...if it costs College X $75,000/year/student and College Y costs $15,000/year/student then making Y "affordable" is eminently easier than X...the point being some schools may want to have a more economically diverse student body, but in order to achieve that end, they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious), raise more money/get more grants, or charge the students that are already paying full tuition even more...none of which appealing/easy...

rflrob 10y ago
On the first point, there's an interesting discussion to be had about what we mean by successful---for any given student, they're just as well off on average at Vaughn Aeronautic College as U Chicago (and better off at Stanford, Princeton, or MIT). However, Vaughn takes so many more low income students that their marginally lower success rate helps so many more. As a graduate of an elite college coming in from a highly privileged background (and thus as someone trying to minimize cognitive dissonance), I do think we would lose something if we as a society only put our resources into colleges that focused on lower income students. That said, I wouldn't be too bummed if more of my tax dollars ended up in places where it was actually helping people who benefited from that help.
dikdik 10y ago
>they would need to either spend less on education (and consequently become less prestigious) Given many studies (notably Google's) showing that school performance is not a good indicator of future performance. Is losing prestige such a bad thing? It would be if the prestige was correlated with significantly smarter and better performing graduates. But if the prestige only comes from being associated with higher class individuals, all you are losing is a false-positive signal.
- rbcgerard 10y ago

basseq 10y ago

But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. The article talks about access multiple times, but never defines what that might mean. If financial commitment is removed from the table, either qualified low-income applicants aren't being accepted at the same rates (unsubstantiated here) or qualified low-income applicants simply aren't applying (supported by linked research[1]). Or colleges accept students based on qualification alone and are "blind" to economic circumstances—which may be good or bad depending on your POV. If the second, the question then becomes how to encourage those applicants. Is that "access"? Or do we need to re-think "qualification" to be more democratic (if it includes, say, international exposure that can be bought)? Are institutions obligated to change their qualification criteria to this end? Should they all? The selectivity-vs-income ("rainbow") chart is interesting and fairly linear. I wonder what a similar "qualification-vs-income" chart would look like: e.g., are top 0.1%-ers "more qualified" (e.g., more likely to get into a selective university by performance alone) than other bands? Then we're either into really dangerous territory (e.g., wealth correlated with intelligence), we're back to (re-)defining qualification criteria, or we shift the "blame" from university admissions to childhood education. [1]http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586 http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586

SilasX 10y ago
I assume, from that sentence, "expanding access" means "teaching more students" and thus accepting a larger class/more applicants.
- basseq 10y ago
  Sure, but that's a pretty blind metric. "If Harvard (6k undergrads) accepted as many students as Texas A&M (50k undergrads), it would be more diverse!" But then it wouldn't be selective; it wouldn't be Harvard. Presuming Harvard is interested in increasing enrollment at all, that alone doesn't help increase these percentages. If Harvard accepts 1 low-income student for every 10 people, and accepts 100 more people in total, the mix is still 10%. I don't think that's "increased access".

redbluetriangle 10y ago

Elite schools may provide generous financial aid, but what this ignores is that typically students from lower income families go to secondary schools that are weaker than traditional schools upper middle class students attend. Some provide few AP courses, one where no one may explains/prep students for the SAT and only schools students are recommended to attend are local community college/nearby schools. Take a top student from this school and she may have 0 AP courses, 3.8 unweighted GPA, 0 ECs, average SAT score (after taking it blind) and from a low income family. Elite universities will not lower their admission requirements to accept her, nor would top public universities. Due to her background, she is forced to attend a lower ranked school. She failed at a game she never had a chance to win to begin with. Harvard and the like may offer great financial aid to those students, but those students are the very ones that aren't going to be accepted Harvard.

BigJeffeRonaldo 10y ago

I find it very interesting that many so-called "Ivy Misser" schools such as WUSTL and Tufts have more 1%ers and fewer 60%ers than extremely elite schools such as Princeton and Harvard. Even Yale has a lower ranking on the list. Perhaps the elite of the elite are more concerned with giving their progeny a broad exposure to different classes of people, while more middling members of the upper class concern themselves with status signalling.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

Maybe we should replace affirmative action w/ one based on income... Average incomes of student families must = average american salary -- or absolutely 0 tax savings, grants, etc.... from the government.

mohanmcgeek 10y ago

What happened to the 39% in between? Aren't they the majority?

rednerrus 10y ago

You would think it makes sense to grab the smartest poor people and start indoctrinating them as soon as possible.