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“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrat

by arbuge 7y ago

“Having a college degree is most beneficial to the kids who aren’t that smart,” Reeves said. Intelligent kids will have thousands of opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Less-talented kids, on the other hand, have to rely on credentials that make them seem intelligent — high SAT scores, top-tier diplomas and corporate internships." This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend the best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
api 7y ago
> This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend the best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between. I'm a self-taught autodidact who grew up relatively poor (by first world standards) and attended a mid-tier Midwestern school-- so I do have a BS degree but not one of the top-brand ones that really open doors. I've worked my way up to doing a lot of the things that top-tier college grads do: working with other top people, working on advanced leading-edge things, and raising angel and venture capital. There's a catch though: I feel like I've had to work at least twice as hard to do these things vs. someone who graduated with a name brand degree from a top school. I'm also white and male, so if I were female or non-white I'd probably have to work 4-8X as hard. So yeah, you can battering ram yourself past things like name brand university bias, classism, racism, etc., but it's nice if you don't have to. So my advice to today's young people would be to go to a top tier university if you can do so on reasonable terms. I'd also say it probably matters more if you have other things going against you like race, gender, or a stronger class divide. Having that name brand university will compensate a bit. It's somewhat disturbingly like leveling your character in some kind of MMO.
- indemnity 7y ago
  I’m in a similar boat. I don’t even have the degree, but in my favour is that I was white, male and had a lot in common with other programmers who started their career in the late 90s. In most jobs so far I’ve been able to work my way up but always felt I had to prove myself a lot more to get the same outcomes as other more credentialed colleagues. Got into a reasonably secure position (I’m now 39), but I still have a lot of impostor syndrome moments, and I’m sure I’ll start encountering ageism soon. Hopefully after I’ve paid the house off.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FussyZeus 7y ago
> This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend the best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between. You're talking about two different metrics there, intelligence and achievement. Ideally the former would lead to the latter, but in practice, I've seen myself and read in numerous places how the most clever people rarely ascend into management, because management doesn't want them in management, they want them doing the work. They do it best. There's a reason "failing upward" is a concept.
- steve_gh 7y ago
  Yeah - I have come across this on a number of occasions. The CTO of am company I was contracting for once described it to me as "The Technical Ghetto" - he had been pulled in of CTO of the division from CEO of another division. Basically, tech skills are in high enough demand that good tech people are too valuable to be allowed into management
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    A very cynical but funny take on this premise can be had in Venkatesh Rao's series of essays ["The Gervais Principle"][0]. He posits three groups: Sociopaths, Losers, and The Clueless. Here the Sociopaths are the intelligent but ruthless C-levels who build and oversee organizations. The Losers are the ones who actually get the day-to-day work done, at the expense of their own progress in life. And the Clueless are moved "up" from the ranks of the Losers by Sociopaths into middle management, where they insulate the two productive groups from each other. [0]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
- poilcn 7y ago
  For me the problem is that it's considered an established truth that one could somehow manage to spot intelligence by reducing its dimensionality to some calculable metrics. If one is good in some tests, he or she is good in these tests, nothing more.
turk73 7y ago
Fascinating. Having been a "talented poor" person I can tell you that I have never had even close to the kinds of opportunities my less intelligent but better funded colleagues have had. It's unpopular as a sentiment, but it is true--the elite protect the elite and certain factions of the elite hold all the real power and control in the US. The only hope an outsider has it to either be incredibly lucky or marry well. That's it. Exceedingly few people can "work their way to the top" as the system is designed purposefully to prevent that sort of rise. Also, it wasn't me who put all those idiotic barriers in place such as SAT tests and other such nonsense. I have always thought it was pure nonsense, make work, give smart people hurdles to have to jump over so that they never actually get anywhere at all. The pursuit of credentials in place of actual achievement. I have fallen victim to it myself. It would be nice to say that I have gotten somewhere in life but while I have achieved some material wealth, the real wealth has always been kept safely out of reach. What Middle Class Americans have is an illusion of wealth where the goal posts are continuously moved just out of reach. Inflation, health insurance costs, cost of education, environmental guilt, all used to control us and send us down useless rat holes from which there is no escape. One doesn't have to be a socialist to remark that the wealthy 1% (or .01%, if you prefer) are pushing their limits with the rest of us. Because when some 40% of Americans earn something in the range of $12-$15/hr, what sense does anything make in a nation where government spending dollar figures are rounded to the nearest $100Million? I'm no collectivist, I abhor collectivism, and the poor are sold on Marxist ideas the implications of which they cannot even fathom. I, however, and not swayed. What I would like to see is actual Capitalism, where "too big to fail" ceases to exist. Then we will not see such massive aberrations and wealth disparities. You only get there by de-constructing big government so that it can't be weaponized by wealth concentrators. When we do that, there could be other, less desirable effects. I'm comfortable in the belief that big government could at least be rolled back to the size it was in the 1980s or 1970s and we would not suffer for it.

by arbuge 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

api 7y ago

> This would seem to contradict the premise of the article. The talented poor kids would by that argument have no problem breaking into the top echelons of society, irrespective of the resources available to rich kids to attend the best colleges. Reality is somewhere in between. I'm a self-taught autodidact who grew up relatively poor (by first world standards) and attended a mid-tier Midwestern school-- so I do have a BS degree but not one of the top-brand ones that really open doors. I've worked my way up to doing a lot of the things that top-tier college grads do: working with other top people, working on advanced leading-edge things, and raising angel and venture capital. There's a catch though: I feel like I've had to work at least twice as hard to do these things vs. someone who graduated with a name brand degree from a top school. I'm also white and male, so if I were female or non-white I'd probably have to work 4-8X as hard. So yeah, you can battering ram yourself past things like name brand university bias, classism, racism, etc., but it's nice if you don't have to. So my advice to today's young people would be to go to a top tier university if you can do so on reasonable terms. I'd also say it probably matters more if you have other things going against you like race, gender, or a stronger class divide. Having that name brand university will compensate a bit. It's somewhat disturbingly like leveling your character in some kind of MMO.

indemnity 7y ago
I’m in a similar boat. I don’t even have the degree, but in my favour is that I was white, male and had a lot in common with other programmers who started their career in the late 90s. In most jobs so far I’ve been able to work my way up but always felt I had to prove myself a lot more to get the same outcomes as other more credentialed colleagues. Got into a reasonably secure position (I’m now 39), but I still have a lot of impostor syndrome moments, and I’m sure I’ll start encountering ageism soon. Hopefully after I’ve paid the house off.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

FussyZeus 7y ago

steve_gh 7y ago
Yeah - I have come across this on a number of occasions. The CTO of am company I was contracting for once described it to me as "The Technical Ghetto" - he had been pulled in of CTO of the division from CEO of another division. Basically, tech skills are in high enough demand that good tech people are too valuable to be allowed into management
- wool_gather 7y ago
  A very cynical but funny take on this premise can be had in Venkatesh Rao's series of essays ["The Gervais Principle"][0]. He posits three groups: Sociopaths, Losers, and The Clueless. Here the Sociopaths are the intelligent but ruthless C-levels who build and oversee organizations. The Losers are the ones who actually get the day-to-day work done, at the expense of their own progress in life. And the Clueless are moved "up" from the ranks of the Losers by Sociopaths into middle management, where they insulate the two productive groups from each other. [0]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
poilcn 7y ago
For me the problem is that it's considered an established truth that one could somehow manage to spot intelligence by reducing its dimensionality to some calculable metrics. If one is good in some tests, he or she is good in these tests, nothing more.

turk73 7y ago

Fascinating. Having been a "talented poor" person I can tell you that I have never had even close to the kinds of opportunities my less intelligent but better funded colleagues have had. It's unpopular as a sentiment, but it is true--the elite protect the elite and certain factions of the elite hold all the real power and control in the US. The only hope an outsider has it to either be incredibly lucky or marry well. That's it. Exceedingly few people can "work their way to the top" as the system is designed purposefully to prevent that sort of rise. Also, it wasn't me who put all those idiotic barriers in place such as SAT tests and other such nonsense. I have always thought it was pure nonsense, make work, give smart people hurdles to have to jump over so that they never actually get anywhere at all. The pursuit of credentials in place of actual achievement. I have fallen victim to it myself. It would be nice to say that I have gotten somewhere in life but while I have achieved some material wealth, the real wealth has always been kept safely out of reach. What Middle Class Americans have is an illusion of wealth where the goal posts are continuously moved just out of reach. Inflation, health insurance costs, cost of education, environmental guilt, all used to control us and send us down useless rat holes from which there is no escape. One doesn't have to be a socialist to remark that the wealthy 1% (or .01%, if you prefer) are pushing their limits with the rest of us. Because when some 40% of Americans earn something in the range of $12-$15/hr, what sense does anything make in a nation where government spending dollar figures are rounded to the nearest $100Million? I'm no collectivist, I abhor collectivism, and the poor are sold on Marxist ideas the implications of which they cannot even fathom. I, however, and not swayed. What I would like to see is actual Capitalism, where "too big to fail" ceases to exist. Then we will not see such massive aberrations and wealth disparities. You only get there by de-constructing big government so that it can't be weaponized by wealth concentrators. When we do that, there could be other, less desirable effects. I'm comfortable in the belief that big government could at least be rolled back to the size it was in the 1980s or 1970s and we would not suffer for it.