19 ms·

What the elite expect and receive from an Ivy League education

211 points by qiqing 9y ago

jforman 9y ago
This article has very little basis in reality based on my experience at Harvard as an undergrad and at Princeton as a grad student and TA. Yes, students are arrogant and push for grades quite a bit. But I saw zero evidence of systemic catering to them as a whole or to any specific sub-population. I imagine the Development Office (the folks who would cater to the ultra powerful) may get involved in extreme cases? But it would be a huge to-do among the faculty (tenured faculty at Harvard and most elite institutions are incredibly powerful) and I never heard of it happening. As an undergrad, I pressed for grade changes twice and was denied, reasonably, both times. As a TA at Princeton I was often pressed for grade changes and all were denied. What almost certainly happened in this person's case is that the Professors either a) weren't tenured and couldn't bother with student push-back given a sea of work and anxiety (or mistakenly thought student perceptions matter), or b) were tenured and didn't care to deal with student push-back.
- tptacek 9y ago
  When you say "very little basis in reality", you mean "disagrees with my own experience". The difference between those two phrases isn't subtle. The author is relating their own actual experience teaching at Harvard, and the directly related experiences of other teachers.
  - devopsproject 9y ago
    don't be so hard on the lad. They tried to teach him this at Harvard and Princeton but they apparently curved his grade and pushed him through instead of actually teaching him :)
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    The parent is relating their own actual experience to you. Which you chose to believe is more a product of confirmation bias than reality. The author of the article, so I'll be generous and suggest she liberally is using poetic license with the truth to make a point. Do you really believe this is how the supposed incident happened? "Then, in front of the student, he pressed me to explain the reason for my poor teaching."
    - taysic 9y ago
      If the student was well-connected, and the professor was worried about their position (nontenured) and did not find arguing worth the hassle - then yes, why not? Doesn't sound that surprising.
  - jforman 9y ago
    Agreed — hence the privileged place of the second half of that sentence
- taysic 9y ago
  The nature of the grading system is that it doesn't have a ton of transparency. It doesn't sound too surprising that the wealthy and well-connected might use any lever possible to increase their standing. This is actually one of the many things that drew me to tech as a profession - more meritocratic and you can feel it. At the end of the day, without more data it's impossible to know.
- L_Rahman 9y ago
  The mistake is in thinking of this as an overt control instead of a system of subtle nudges. A professor known for harsh grading gets a question from his department head and next year the curve shifts a little. And that is how your undergrad program has a proportion of grade inflation that verges on embarrassing.
  - jforman 9y ago
    "A professor known for harsh grading gets a question from his department head and next year the curve shifts a little." Professors just don't care about undergrads and teaching to near the degree that you think they do. 95% of their focus is on their research. The only intervention I saw from administration in regards to grading while at Princeton was to nudge grades down.
- jonstokes 9y ago
  I was a graduate student at Harvard for five years (two Masters degrees), and the article is spot-on. Grade inflation was a big topic while I was there (some prof had written an editorial blaming it on affirmative action), and everything she said resonated with me. In fact, your comment is so clueless and un-self-aware, I'm kinda shocked that someone with your apparent bio could have written it. That you did pretty powerfully proves her point.
  - jforman 9y ago
    These schools are big places, so it's not all that surprising different people have different experiences. What department, out of curiosity? I had experience in molecular biology and computer science at Harvard and mol bio at Princeton. (But yes, I saw zero of this in any of those places)
    - jonstokes 9y ago
      Lol, I'm so sorry, this is unkind and very possibly inaccurate, but I read your "what department" question like this: "Where were you on the internal Harvard hierarchy that we both know is incredibly important to Harvard folks, but that the outside world generally knows nothing about. I need to know where you were on the status ladder so I can decide how much of your comment, like the article author's (she's on the lower side of the middle of the ladder) is sour grapes from someone who hit a velvet rope inside the club and is bitter about it." Like I said, this is probably deeply unfair, and if it is then my apologies, but after spending five years there I can't help but parse it this way. FWIW I was at the Div school, which is near the bottom, so we're all keenly aware of these issues because the lower you are on any hierarchy the more that hierarchy and your place in it defines your experience of the whole. It's only the folks on top who can afford to be ignorant of the kinds of issues that everyone below them has to carefully navigate.
      - jforman 9y ago
        I was a common undergrad in the computer science department, and my freshman Tutor was an awesome guy from the div school. I had no part in politics (although I was aware FAS sat higher than DIV on somebody's totem pole); I just saw no evidence of the behavior described in the article and was curious if other departments behaved differently from CS.
wand3r 9y ago
Page not found.
adamvalve 9y ago
Link had a bad char at the end: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...
grzm 9y ago
Likely the intended URL is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... Also important to note is that it's apparently an opinion piece.
alttab 9y ago
Here's a working link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... The article is short, and only uses an anecdote to support its claim. While I can generally agree that places like Harvard work more in connections, networks, and money than intellectual rigor, the article is too short and missing enough detail to fall flat.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  Yeah it seems like a well timed attack piece considering all the recent Harvard headlines. Not that I disagree - Harvard is more likely concerned with reputation and possible future donors than intellectual integrity - but it doesn't make a good foundation for an article.
- tlb 9y ago
  Link fixed, thanks.
- tomtheelder 9y ago
  As a former undergrad, the points about grade inflation are 100% correct, and everything else is garbage. > Many of the better-off young people at Harvard appeared to require intense favoritism to reassure them, perhaps because of the less-moneyed achievement and potential that loomed all around. Though some of the anointed developed their capabilities to the full, the institutional imperative to establish a hierarchy between them and us took precedence. This is just utter nonsense. There are a lot of very legitimate ways that the school favors its privileged students (self selecting social clubs with dues, the disaster that is on campus dining, not subsidizing a whole lot of expenses that they ought to, forcing students on financial aid to work for the school, etc.) but the insinuation that the professors and other teachers at the school systematically favor privileged students in some sort of effort to reaffirm social hierarchy is totally unsubstantiated, and, quite frankly, a disgusting and slanderous accusation. I didn't like all (or even necessarily most) my professors/advisers/TAs that much, but I am honestly outraged on their behalf after reading this.
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
positivity89 9y ago
Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?
- bgentry 9y ago
  I have one. You get like 6mo free if you sign up with a Prime account and only $4/mo after that. I read more than a handful of great articles from them each month and that price seems fair.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  No subscription is needed to read the article. (However, the link is broken and leads to a page with no actual article; several people have commented with corrected URLs.)
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Washington Post is some of the best investigative journalism going on right now at a mainstream media level. NYT is just a rag in comparison.
  - Allower 9y ago
    While I agree that the NYT is garbage by and large. WaPo ain't much better; if they have some of the best investigative journalism around, that's a very, very sad state of affairs. Not to mention their conspicuous lack of criticism when reporting on Amazon..
- raldi 9y ago
  Yes. It's well worth it, both to receive the content hassle-free and to support their mission.
- paulgb 9y ago
  I canceled mine because they use outbrain but it hasn't expired yet.
  - 9y ago
NumberSix 9y ago
The article ends with: It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show. Emphasis on now added. Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep schools haven't been running the whole show since before the American Revolution? See for example: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-list-of-seven-presidents-with-harvard-degrees/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-l...
- irrational 9y ago
  Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    Quantifying prestige and definitively ranking the three is beyond me, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Harvard was considered more prestigious, in large part because it balances (reputationally speaking) "new-world dynamism" and "old-world prestige" better than Oxbridge does. The latter without the former has connotations of sclerotic inefficiency.
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
      I think this "new-world dynamism" but might actually count against US schools if it makes them seem non-rigorous. Oxbridge teachers I've met are rigorous (in terms of their expections of students, not their own methods). Regarding the US, I can only offer how I came by my own priors in family that in traditional subcontinental style is always on the lookout for prestegious schools. I learned at my father's knee that US postgrad schools were the best in the world, but that undergrad education was soft and "mickey mouse". I'd need data rather than annecdotes to say if this is really the international preception of US education, rather than just my family's the lore. But so much that I see out of America confirms that lore, that I guess other people have come to the same conclusion.
killjoywashere 9y ago
Cultivating this attitude in future leaders does in fact seem to help them gain power. I think it ties in with the need for A) impeccable credentials and B) the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf. In some people we call it charisma, in others we call it entitlement. I'm starting to wonder if it's not only the person we describe, but also our own position and personal knowledge of them that influence the decision on which one to call it.
- Animats 9y ago
  the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf. "There is no door in this entire country that cannot be opened by a Choate graduate." - Choate fund-raising director.[1] [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=Fw4nkhf_6lMC&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109 https://books.google.com/books?id=Fw4nkhf_6lMC&pg=PA109&lpg=...
rdlecler1 9y ago
I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to spend hours explaining why they didn’t deserve a higher grade. At the end of the day you’re worn down and there’s very little incentive to grade honestly as you get pain nearly nothing and you’re really there to finish your PhD.
- sabas123 9y ago
  Did you get any different instructions for your grading at Yale? And doesn't such thing lead to large varying amounts of average grads per class?
  - rdlecler1 9y ago
    No, but students will go around you to the prof and they get away with things that wouldn’t have worked at UofC. Mostly you end up asking yourself how much you’re willing to go to battle. No upside, lots of downside. Grades become more binary for anything subjective. Obviously multiple choice is much easier to deal with, but even then students will get exam re-writes from the profs.
- jseliger 9y ago
  I've actually seen similar things happen at public schools; I think students may also intuit that very little incentivizes profs to grade honestly: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
  - geebee 9y ago
    I believe average GPAs are much lower at Berkeley and UCLA than they are at ivies though, is that correct?
Bretts89 9y ago
I'm working on an edtech startup and with it I've been spending a lot of time at Princeton University. From my experience with Princeton, Ivy League school are VERY overt about promoting elitism within their communities. I understand the thought behind it but a lot of these students are in for a rude awakening when they go work for an investment bank and find out that their Ivy League elitism means nothing if they can't produce in the workplace.
- ebola1717 9y ago
  Eh, investment banking is arduous cause of the hours, and does require you to be pretty smart, but its not as meritocratic as your claiming. It's stacked with Ivy League kids exactly because elitism at big banks works in their favor during the hiring process.
- wfo 9y ago
  Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very smart at a decent school will get them anything close to what C students from ivies waltz into without trying once they hit the working world. Remember, the C business students are the boss, A engineering students are the employees is the general rule of thumb.
  - taysic 9y ago
    I agree with you to an extent. It's my experience in engineering that you can start a company alone based on your specialized skills. I'm not sure you can do that on business skills alone. I suppose it depends on what path you want to take.
    - wfo 9y ago
      Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.
Animats 9y ago
Harvard's graduation rate is 97.5%. Yale 97%. Princeton 96.9%. It's hard to flunk out of the Ivy League. Non Ivy League highly selective schools: Caltech 92.3%. Stanford 93%. MIT 92.2%. UC Berkeley: 90.9%. Low 90% success rate is normal there.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Can it have something to do with higher tuition fees too?
  - plussed_reader 9y ago
    Why would it?
    - ssanders82 9y ago
      Sunk cost
    - cm2187 9y ago
      If they pay higher tuition fees, it should put more pressure on the kids (through their parents or their creditor) to graduate.
      - jeremiep 9y ago
        For a lot of students its their parents paying, they'll only realize the value of it all decades later.
      - collegestoo 9y ago
        This is also true of colleges to return a good return on investment. Also, their financial aid is already comparable (thinking of Standord specifically); I don't think it makes sense to speculate in the direction you're speculating any more than other directions.
      - jmgrosen 9y ago
        Those all have ~roughly equal tuition (except Berkeley, which is far less for in-state students).
atriches 9y ago
First world problems...
YouEatThatSoup 9y ago
Wow.
bllguo 9y ago
I had a different experience at an Ivy, but I'm not rich. Wouldn't say arrogant either, although I should probably leave that up to others to judge. My point is that "rich" and "arrogant" are key words here. Such people tend to get preferential treatment in our society, at Harvard and elsewhere. It's hardly specific to Harvard.
ryandrake 9y ago
The silliness, of course, is that if you are among the "elite" and "privileged" going to an Ivy League school, nobody is going to give a shit about your grades anyway. Your career and success is already pre-ordained. Why on earth would you bother arguing with your professor that your "A-" should be an "A"? You're going to go to work at your daddy's investment bank after you graduate either way! You think big name banks and consulting firms are going to say "Gee.. he's a Kennedy, but his grades are so bad! We can't bring him in." Just party and get C's and D's--you're already set for life.
- devopsproject 9y ago
  > Why on earth would you bother arguing with your professor that your "A-" should be an "A"? because someone is paying good money for that "A"
- buchanaf 9y ago
  While I didn't go to an Ivy, that's clearly not true. Do you honestly think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman, law schools, medical schools, etc., are going to accept you if you have poor grades? Not everyone can count on "daddy".
  - wolco 9y ago
    If you are paying full price someone has an extra 300000.
  - orian 9y ago
    It doesn't matter if all companies does this, it matter how many do.
  - lawnchair_larry 9y ago
    Yes, at least for the tech companies. Grades are irrelevant at FB/MS/Google.
    - buchanaf 9y ago
      Again, I have no anecdotal experience, but I have a hard time believing that the new hires for those 3 companies are anything but students from top-tier colleges with near perfect grades. To be fair, I'm sure a couple of years of work experience and they probably don't care as much.
jtraffic 9y ago
It's an interesting anecdote, but makes conclusions about the aggregate. Give me almost any university, and with time I could probably find at least one story like this. I'm not saying it isn't true, just that this evidence is weak.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
There is a recurring theme of incentives becoming out of alignment with purpose. This happens in business, medicine, government... It's become a real focus for me, and CEOs should consider this very carefully. What are the company's goals, really, and are the incentives offered, all the way from the janitors up to their own compensation, in alignment with those goals? The professor stated blatantly: The students are paying too much for us to fail them. Said another way: The students bought their grades. Does anyone have knowledge of incentive structures at universities that they'd defend as being in strong alignment with the goal of turning out the best educated students? What was that incentive structure?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
csa 9y ago
That was an... interesting read. Some comments: 1. I imagine the author just became a PNG in terms of faculty hiring at any elite university. There's no way I would hire her due to what I consider her tone deaf response to her experiences. 2. The only potentially misleading part was the professor talking about grade inflation. Most people know that declarations like this are largely a formality -- grading hard creates nothing but trouble for no benefit but plenty of potential loss. Lost time dealing with complaints, fewer enrolled students/majors, lower ratings, etc. 3. Most of the real insiders know that a "Harvard A" means nothing. Back it up with a good recommendation, and it starts to mean something. Note that there is a code in recommendation letters so that professors never need to be negative and expose themselves to lawsuits and/or criticism. "[student] took my class [class name] and got an A. All work was completed on time and met the high standards for an A that are set in my classes." translates to "OMG, stay away." On the other hand, the above with added specific examples about how the student exceled or showed exceptional promise are the premium recommendations. 4. IMHO, fighting grade inflation is something best done in required courses or lower level courses. Grades for third year classes should err on the high side. I have seen this system work a lot. I have seen systems that did not do this founder frequently. 5. This has nothing to do with privileged students -- they don't need great grades for jobs or grad school. Seriously. This probably does have more to do with arrogant students. My thought? So what? Educating arrogant students is collateral damage for (usually) having great peers and having access to great resources. 6. There actually are students at Harvard who are smart, humble, and work hard. In fact, there are quite a few of them. I personally would not let a few bad apples rain on my party. 7. As far as passing someone who scored "in the teens" on a final, the so-called gentlemen's C is a real thing (especially in weeder courses). The best part of said C is that it usually keeps the student out of other courses (e.g., pre-med), so the pain of their presence usually stops there. 8 Lastly, not all students at elite schools are comparable to Guggenheim Fellows like the author. In fact, I usually say that only 20-30% of most students at elite schools would be widely considered impressive, "really smart", or "interesting" (my subjective view, but it is shared by many of my peers). Students at elite schools are not gods. A random individual from an elite school is not likely to be the smartest person you know -- not even close. I strongly suggest that people not kiss the asses of elite school students, and do due diligence just like they do with everyone else. That elite school degree may mean that there is a higher chance that the holder is exceptional, but it is nowhere near a guarantee. Just my 2 cents....
kafkaesq 9y ago
The original title was way better. It may have sounded a bit splashy - it wasn't out of line with the overall narrative of the article. And there's certainly no need to soft-peddle Harvard's moral and intellectual cowardice, as revealed in this episode.
boredom_boredom 9y ago
Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job. I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago. I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors. So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere. So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students
boredom_boredom 9y ago
Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job. I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago. I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors. So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere. So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students.
- wolf550e 9y ago
  dupe
arx1422 9y ago
I didn't go to Harvard and I'll freely admit that when I come across Harvard people, they are as a general pool, stunningly impressive in whatever discipline they are in.
- chrismealy 9y ago
  A Harvard MBA once told me that going from zero to ten is a 1000% increase. I was not impressed. Also, George W Bush.
pcurve 9y ago
Cornell wasn't like this... (at least in the 90s). 3.2 would get you on dean's list. There were freshman weed-out courses to winnow out dumb and lazies. I remember getting D+ on a paper that nearly gave me a stroke, and professor stood by it. Asked TA to re-grade it and gave me the same grade. Some guy in my dorm got a letter from school with threat of expulsion if he didn't improve his 1.7 GPA, after just 1 tough semester. I once made the mistake of taking a comp sci course as an elective where most of the students were comp sci majors and already new the materials. Never went to so many TA office hours in my life, just to get B+.
cpr 9y ago
This calls to mind the amusing Harvey Mansfield, who used to be the only "conservative" (arguable) professor in the government dept. (I missed him in my time there epochs ago.) He gave two grades, the official, inflated, career-preserving grade, and the real (his true assessment) grade. You could come ask him for the real grade if you wanted to know the awful truth. ;-)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

211 points by qiqing 9y ago

This article has very little basis in reality based on my experience at Harvard as an undergrad and at Princeton as a grad student and TA. Yes, students are arrogant and push for grades quite a bit. But I saw zero evidence of systemic catering to them as a whole or to any specific sub-population. I imagine the Development Office (the folks who would cater to the ultra powerful) may get involved in extreme cases? But it would be a huge to-do among the faculty (tenured faculty at Harvard and most elite institutions are incredibly powerful) and I never heard of it happening. As an undergrad, I pressed for grade changes twice and was denied, reasonably, both times. As a TA at Princeton I was often pressed for grade changes and all were denied. What almost certainly happened in this person's case is that the Professors either a) weren't tenured and couldn't bother with student push-back given a sea of work and anxiety (or mistakenly thought student perceptions matter), or b) were tenured and didn't care to deal with student push-back.

tptacek 9y ago
When you say "very little basis in reality", you mean "disagrees with my own experience". The difference between those two phrases isn't subtle. The author is relating their own actual experience teaching at Harvard, and the directly related experiences of other teachers.
- devopsproject 9y ago
  don't be so hard on the lad. They tried to teach him this at Harvard and Princeton but they apparently curved his grade and pushed him through instead of actually teaching him :)
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  The parent is relating their own actual experience to you. Which you chose to believe is more a product of confirmation bias than reality. The author of the article, so I'll be generous and suggest she liberally is using poetic license with the truth to make a point. Do you really believe this is how the supposed incident happened? "Then, in front of the student, he pressed me to explain the reason for my poor teaching."
  - taysic 9y ago
    If the student was well-connected, and the professor was worried about their position (nontenured) and did not find arguing worth the hassle - then yes, why not? Doesn't sound that surprising.
- jforman 9y ago
  Agreed — hence the privileged place of the second half of that sentence
taysic 9y ago
The nature of the grading system is that it doesn't have a ton of transparency. It doesn't sound too surprising that the wealthy and well-connected might use any lever possible to increase their standing. This is actually one of the many things that drew me to tech as a profession - more meritocratic and you can feel it. At the end of the day, without more data it's impossible to know.
L_Rahman 9y ago
The mistake is in thinking of this as an overt control instead of a system of subtle nudges. A professor known for harsh grading gets a question from his department head and next year the curve shifts a little. And that is how your undergrad program has a proportion of grade inflation that verges on embarrassing.
- jforman 9y ago
  "A professor known for harsh grading gets a question from his department head and next year the curve shifts a little." Professors just don't care about undergrads and teaching to near the degree that you think they do. 95% of their focus is on their research. The only intervention I saw from administration in regards to grading while at Princeton was to nudge grades down.
jonstokes 9y ago
I was a graduate student at Harvard for five years (two Masters degrees), and the article is spot-on. Grade inflation was a big topic while I was there (some prof had written an editorial blaming it on affirmative action), and everything she said resonated with me. In fact, your comment is so clueless and un-self-aware, I'm kinda shocked that someone with your apparent bio could have written it. That you did pretty powerfully proves her point.
- jforman 9y ago
  These schools are big places, so it's not all that surprising different people have different experiences. What department, out of curiosity? I had experience in molecular biology and computer science at Harvard and mol bio at Princeton. (But yes, I saw zero of this in any of those places)
  - jonstokes 9y ago
    Lol, I'm so sorry, this is unkind and very possibly inaccurate, but I read your "what department" question like this: "Where were you on the internal Harvard hierarchy that we both know is incredibly important to Harvard folks, but that the outside world generally knows nothing about. I need to know where you were on the status ladder so I can decide how much of your comment, like the article author's (she's on the lower side of the middle of the ladder) is sour grapes from someone who hit a velvet rope inside the club and is bitter about it." Like I said, this is probably deeply unfair, and if it is then my apologies, but after spending five years there I can't help but parse it this way. FWIW I was at the Div school, which is near the bottom, so we're all keenly aware of these issues because the lower you are on any hierarchy the more that hierarchy and your place in it defines your experience of the whole. It's only the folks on top who can afford to be ignorant of the kinds of issues that everyone below them has to carefully navigate.
    - jforman 9y ago
      I was a common undergrad in the computer science department, and my freshman Tutor was an awesome guy from the div school. I had no part in politics (although I was aware FAS sat higher than DIV on somebody's totem pole); I just saw no evidence of the behavior described in the article and was curious if other departments behaved differently from CS.

wand3r 9y ago

Page not found.

adamvalve 9y ago

Link had a bad char at the end: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0...

grzm 9y ago

Likely the intended URL is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... Also important to note is that it's apparently an opinion piece.

alttab 9y ago

Here's a working link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/how-harvard-helps-its-richest-and-most-arrogant-students-get-ahead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/0... The article is short, and only uses an anecdote to support its claim. While I can generally agree that places like Harvard work more in connections, networks, and money than intellectual rigor, the article is too short and missing enough detail to fall flat.

nxsynonym 9y ago
Yeah it seems like a well timed attack piece considering all the recent Harvard headlines. Not that I disagree - Harvard is more likely concerned with reputation and possible future donors than intellectual integrity - but it doesn't make a good foundation for an article.
tlb 9y ago
Link fixed, thanks.
tomtheelder 9y ago
As a former undergrad, the points about grade inflation are 100% correct, and everything else is garbage. > Many of the better-off young people at Harvard appeared to require intense favoritism to reassure them, perhaps because of the less-moneyed achievement and potential that loomed all around. Though some of the anointed developed their capabilities to the full, the institutional imperative to establish a hierarchy between them and us took precedence. This is just utter nonsense. There are a lot of very legitimate ways that the school favors its privileged students (self selecting social clubs with dues, the disaster that is on campus dining, not subsidizing a whole lot of expenses that they ought to, forcing students on financial aid to work for the school, etc.) but the insinuation that the professors and other teachers at the school systematically favor privileged students in some sort of effort to reaffirm social hierarchy is totally unsubstantiated, and, quite frankly, a disgusting and slanderous accusation. I didn't like all (or even necessarily most) my professors/advisers/TAs that much, but I am honestly outraged on their behalf after reading this.
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

positivity89 9y ago

Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?

bgentry 9y ago
I have one. You get like 6mo free if you sign up with a Prime account and only $4/mo after that. I read more than a handful of great articles from them each month and that price seems fair.
wolfgang42 9y ago
No subscription is needed to read the article. (However, the link is broken and leads to a page with no actual article; several people have commented with corrected URLs.)
wavefunction 9y ago
Washington Post is some of the best investigative journalism going on right now at a mainstream media level. NYT is just a rag in comparison.
- Allower 9y ago
  While I agree that the NYT is garbage by and large. WaPo ain't much better; if they have some of the best investigative journalism around, that's a very, very sad state of affairs. Not to mention their conspicuous lack of criticism when reporting on Amazon..
raldi 9y ago
Yes. It's well worth it, both to receive the content hassle-free and to support their mission.
paulgb 9y ago
I canceled mine because they use outbrain but it hasn't expired yet.
- 9y ago

NumberSix 9y ago

The article ends with: It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show. Emphasis on now added. Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep schools haven't been running the whole show since before the American Revolution? See for example: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-list-of-seven-presidents-with-harvard-degrees/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/11/obama-joins-l...

irrational 9y ago
Is Harvard really considered more prestigious than Oxford or Cambridge? That doesn't follow my perception.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Quantifying prestige and definitively ranking the three is beyond me, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Harvard was considered more prestigious, in large part because it balances (reputationally speaking) "new-world dynamism" and "old-world prestige" better than Oxbridge does. The latter without the former has connotations of sclerotic inefficiency.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    I think this "new-world dynamism" but might actually count against US schools if it makes them seem non-rigorous. Oxbridge teachers I've met are rigorous (in terms of their expections of students, not their own methods). Regarding the US, I can only offer how I came by my own priors in family that in traditional subcontinental style is always on the lookout for prestegious schools. I learned at my father's knee that US postgrad schools were the best in the world, but that undergrad education was soft and "mickey mouse". I'd need data rather than annecdotes to say if this is really the international preception of US education, rather than just my family's the lore. But so much that I see out of America confirms that lore, that I guess other people have come to the same conclusion.

killjoywashere 9y ago

Cultivating this attitude in future leaders does in fact seem to help them gain power. I think it ties in with the need for A) impeccable credentials and B) the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf. In some people we call it charisma, in others we call it entitlement. I'm starting to wonder if it's not only the person we describe, but also our own position and personal knowledge of them that influence the decision on which one to call it.

Animats 9y ago
the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf. "There is no door in this entire country that cannot be opened by a Choate graduate." - Choate fund-raising director.[1] [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=Fw4nkhf_6lMC&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109 https://books.google.com/books?id=Fw4nkhf_6lMC&pg=PA109&lpg=...

rdlecler1 9y ago

I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to spend hours explaining why they didn’t deserve a higher grade. At the end of the day you’re worn down and there’s very little incentive to grade honestly as you get pain nearly nothing and you’re really there to finish your PhD.

sabas123 9y ago
Did you get any different instructions for your grading at Yale? And doesn't such thing lead to large varying amounts of average grads per class?
- rdlecler1 9y ago
  No, but students will go around you to the prof and they get away with things that wouldn’t have worked at UofC. Mostly you end up asking yourself how much you’re willing to go to battle. No upside, lots of downside. Grades become more binary for anything subjective. Obviously multiple choice is much easier to deal with, but even then students will get exam re-writes from the profs.
jseliger 9y ago
I've actually seen similar things happen at public schools; I think students may also intuit that very little incentivizes profs to grade honestly: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
- geebee 9y ago
  I believe average GPAs are much lower at Berkeley and UCLA than they are at ivies though, is that correct?

Bretts89 9y ago

I'm working on an edtech startup and with it I've been spending a lot of time at Princeton University. From my experience with Princeton, Ivy League school are VERY overt about promoting elitism within their communities. I understand the thought behind it but a lot of these students are in for a rude awakening when they go work for an investment bank and find out that their Ivy League elitism means nothing if they can't produce in the workplace.

ebola1717 9y ago
Eh, investment banking is arduous cause of the hours, and does require you to be pretty smart, but its not as meritocratic as your claiming. It's stacked with Ivy League kids exactly because elitism at big banks works in their favor during the hiring process.
wfo 9y ago
Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very smart at a decent school will get them anything close to what C students from ivies waltz into without trying once they hit the working world. Remember, the C business students are the boss, A engineering students are the employees is the general rule of thumb.
- taysic 9y ago
  I agree with you to an extent. It's my experience in engineering that you can start a company alone based on your specialized skills. I'm not sure you can do that on business skills alone. I suppose it depends on what path you want to take.
  - wfo 9y ago
    Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.

Animats 9y ago

Harvard's graduation rate is 97.5%. Yale 97%. Princeton 96.9%. It's hard to flunk out of the Ivy League. Non Ivy League highly selective schools: Caltech 92.3%. Stanford 93%. MIT 92.2%. UC Berkeley: 90.9%. Low 90% success rate is normal there.

cm2187 9y ago
Can it have something to do with higher tuition fees too?
- plussed_reader 9y ago
  Why would it?
  - ssanders82 9y ago
    Sunk cost
  - cm2187 9y ago
    If they pay higher tuition fees, it should put more pressure on the kids (through their parents or their creditor) to graduate.
    - jeremiep 9y ago
      For a lot of students its their parents paying, they'll only realize the value of it all decades later.
    - collegestoo 9y ago
      This is also true of colleges to return a good return on investment. Also, their financial aid is already comparable (thinking of Standord specifically); I don't think it makes sense to speculate in the direction you're speculating any more than other directions.
    - jmgrosen 9y ago
      Those all have ~roughly equal tuition (except Berkeley, which is far less for in-state students).

atriches 9y ago

First world problems...

YouEatThatSoup 9y ago

Wow.

bllguo 9y ago

I had a different experience at an Ivy, but I'm not rich. Wouldn't say arrogant either, although I should probably leave that up to others to judge. My point is that "rich" and "arrogant" are key words here. Such people tend to get preferential treatment in our society, at Harvard and elsewhere. It's hardly specific to Harvard.

ryandrake 9y ago

The silliness, of course, is that if you are among the "elite" and "privileged" going to an Ivy League school, nobody is going to give a shit about your grades anyway. Your career and success is already pre-ordained. Why on earth would you bother arguing with your professor that your "A-" should be an "A"? You're going to go to work at your daddy's investment bank after you graduate either way! You think big name banks and consulting firms are going to say "Gee.. he's a Kennedy, but his grades are so bad! We can't bring him in." Just party and get C's and D's--you're already set for life.

devopsproject 9y ago
> Why on earth would you bother arguing with your professor that your "A-" should be an "A"? because someone is paying good money for that "A"
buchanaf 9y ago
While I didn't go to an Ivy, that's clearly not true. Do you honestly think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman, law schools, medical schools, etc., are going to accept you if you have poor grades? Not everyone can count on "daddy".
- wolco 9y ago
  If you are paying full price someone has an extra 300000.
- orian 9y ago
  It doesn't matter if all companies does this, it matter how many do.
- lawnchair_larry 9y ago
  Yes, at least for the tech companies. Grades are irrelevant at FB/MS/Google.
  - buchanaf 9y ago
    Again, I have no anecdotal experience, but I have a hard time believing that the new hires for those 3 companies are anything but students from top-tier colleges with near perfect grades. To be fair, I'm sure a couple of years of work experience and they probably don't care as much.

jtraffic 9y ago

It's an interesting anecdote, but makes conclusions about the aggregate. Give me almost any university, and with time I could probably find at least one story like this. I'm not saying it isn't true, just that this evidence is weak.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

There is a recurring theme of incentives becoming out of alignment with purpose. This happens in business, medicine, government... It's become a real focus for me, and CEOs should consider this very carefully. What are the company's goals, really, and are the incentives offered, all the way from the janitors up to their own compensation, in alignment with those goals? The professor stated blatantly: The students are paying too much for us to fail them. Said another way: The students bought their grades. Does anyone have knowledge of incentive structures at universities that they'd defend as being in strong alignment with the goal of turning out the best educated students? What was that incentive structure?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

csa 9y ago

That was an... interesting read. Some comments: 1. I imagine the author just became a PNG in terms of faculty hiring at any elite university. There's no way I would hire her due to what I consider her tone deaf response to her experiences. 2. The only potentially misleading part was the professor talking about grade inflation. Most people know that declarations like this are largely a formality -- grading hard creates nothing but trouble for no benefit but plenty of potential loss. Lost time dealing with complaints, fewer enrolled students/majors, lower ratings, etc. 3. Most of the real insiders know that a "Harvard A" means nothing. Back it up with a good recommendation, and it starts to mean something. Note that there is a code in recommendation letters so that professors never need to be negative and expose themselves to lawsuits and/or criticism. "[student] took my class [class name] and got an A. All work was completed on time and met the high standards for an A that are set in my classes." translates to "OMG, stay away." On the other hand, the above with added specific examples about how the student exceled or showed exceptional promise are the premium recommendations. 4. IMHO, fighting grade inflation is something best done in required courses or lower level courses. Grades for third year classes should err on the high side. I have seen this system work a lot. I have seen systems that did not do this founder frequently. 5. This has nothing to do with privileged students -- they don't need great grades for jobs or grad school. Seriously. This probably does have more to do with arrogant students. My thought? So what? Educating arrogant students is collateral damage for (usually) having great peers and having access to great resources. 6. There actually are students at Harvard who are smart, humble, and work hard. In fact, there are quite a few of them. I personally would not let a few bad apples rain on my party. 7. As far as passing someone who scored "in the teens" on a final, the so-called gentlemen's C is a real thing (especially in weeder courses). The best part of said C is that it usually keeps the student out of other courses (e.g., pre-med), so the pain of their presence usually stops there. 8 Lastly, not all students at elite schools are comparable to Guggenheim Fellows like the author. In fact, I usually say that only 20-30% of most students at elite schools would be widely considered impressive, "really smart", or "interesting" (my subjective view, but it is shared by many of my peers). Students at elite schools are not gods. A random individual from an elite school is not likely to be the smartest person you know -- not even close. I strongly suggest that people not kiss the asses of elite school students, and do due diligence just like they do with everyone else. That elite school degree may mean that there is a higher chance that the holder is exceptional, but it is nowhere near a guarantee. Just my 2 cents....

kafkaesq 9y ago

The original title was way better. It may have sounded a bit splashy - it wasn't out of line with the overall narrative of the article. And there's certainly no need to soft-peddle Harvard's moral and intellectual cowardice, as revealed in this episode.

boredom_boredom 9y ago

Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job. I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago. I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors. So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere. So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students

boredom_boredom 9y ago

wolf550e 9y ago
dupe

arx1422 9y ago

I didn't go to Harvard and I'll freely admit that when I come across Harvard people, they are as a general pool, stunningly impressive in whatever discipline they are in.

chrismealy 9y ago
A Harvard MBA once told me that going from zero to ten is a 1000% increase. I was not impressed. Also, George W Bush.

pcurve 9y ago

Cornell wasn't like this... (at least in the 90s). 3.2 would get you on dean's list. There were freshman weed-out courses to winnow out dumb and lazies. I remember getting D+ on a paper that nearly gave me a stroke, and professor stood by it. Asked TA to re-grade it and gave me the same grade. Some guy in my dorm got a letter from school with threat of expulsion if he didn't improve his 1.7 GPA, after just 1 tough semester. I once made the mistake of taking a comp sci course as an elective where most of the students were comp sci majors and already new the materials. Never went to so many TA office hours in my life, just to get B+.

cpr 9y ago

This calls to mind the amusing Harvey Mansfield, who used to be the only "conservative" (arguable) professor in the government dept. (I missed him in my time there epochs ago.) He gave two grades, the official, inflated, career-preserving grade, and the real (his true assessment) grade. You could come ask him for the real grade if you wanted to know the awful truth. ;-)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]