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I figure maybe I can offer some perspective on the ivy league comments, as I just went through the admissions process. No ivy I've seen claims to evaluate on o

I figure maybe I can offer some perspective on the ivy league comments, as I just went through the admissions process. No ivy I've seen claims to evaluate on objective criteria. Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". This is what allows them to frame their classes to fit what they want on a brochure. I had a asian friend who took seven AP classes in one year and was a valedictorian who was rejected from Harvard. When I toured, the guide was a farm girl from rural Oregon with precisely zero credentials (according to her) who said she applied on a lark to frame the rejection letter. Ivies are a terrible example because they don't even pretend to be objective any more. The reality is there's a lot outside the bubbles of ivy league institutions and silicon valley, and this author clearly writes from inside them. I've seen meritocracy almost everywhere I go, even though I'm not from the sort of background the author described. I got hired at my current job because I was the best person for it, though it was un-conventional. I earned scholarships through merit, not because of a particular background. The list goes on. There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs.

exolymph 6y ago
Ivies manage the demographics of the study body for political reasons, but you can rest assured that this is an added priority to securing the best and brightest. Prestige is rarely completely without substance. > There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs. I don't think you're wrong, per se, but that "mostly good people" do not rule the world, and this is no coincidence. They're not ruthless and driven enough to end up on top. See Nils Gilman's "Twin Insurgency": https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-in...
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses". Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses". This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process. It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for. The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it. > The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system. The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire. You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine. Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.) How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority. As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we also want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  This is why I think of the Ivy League people as the ruling class of this country. This is also one reason I find the woke Ivy League left so ridiculous. They see themselves as fighting the power. If you think they are the power, they look very different.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    If you think that they know that they are the power, things look still different. Then the "woke-ness" is just a technique of manipulation and maintaining their power. I suspect that some know, and some don't. But I'm not of that class, and I have no concrete information on how they think.
- wincy 6y ago
  I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    > George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court She went to Southern Methodist University, not an Ivy but also far from a community college. Also, in the South SMU Law holds as much weight as Ivy Law as far as credentials go.
wpietri 6y ago
> don't even pretend to be objective any more Could you say more about why you think they ever were objective? From the get-go, the Ivies were explicitly for the white male children of well-off white men. I know the Industrial Revolution changed American higher education some, as there was a sudden need for a lot of agricultural and technical education, making it less of a class marker. But My impression is that the Ivies stayed pretty aloof from that.
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  But out of that limited pool, they could have some half-hearted attempt at objectivity and not worry about the wrong type of person getting in, since they'd do the real screening at step 1 in the process.
0d9eooo 6y ago
The problem is that the objective criteria aren't much better. What do we mean? GPA? Test score? Those correlate maybe .4 with first year GPA in school, and even less with later criteria. So, putting aside variability from one day to the next in when you take the test, inequities in students' preparedness on the day of the exam, etc and so forth, you're left empirically with a fairly weak correlation with one very immediate criterion, that gets even weaker with time. I don't disagree with your concerns at some level, but think the alternative has its problems too. We discuss "merit" as if people can't change, can't improve, and that, more importantly, all the proxies we assess are equal to what we're really looking for. And then we use it as some statement about individual ability as an inherent, perfectly assessed metric. Imagine if we measured people's weights at age 18 with a scale that correlated only .40 with true weight, and then used that as an index of physical fitness that then determined important trajectories in their lives. It sounds absurd because it is. Meritocracy is broken because we've become used to treating proxy metrics as equal to the real attribute of interest, and assuming that attribute can't change and is fixed with time. I think a lot of the problems we have in the US all come back to this, whether it be inequality, resentment, distrust, or dysfunction: there's very much a class divide built on sand, and a sort of daily cognitive dissonance we're asked to just accept. I'm not saying these purely holistic strategies are better or worse; I have no problems with "objective" criteria, if used appropriately, but now they're not used appropriately.

exolymph 6y ago

Ivies manage the demographics of the study body for political reasons, but you can rest assured that this is an added priority to securing the best and brightest. Prestige is rarely completely without substance. > There's a whole world outside of this author's, full of mostly good people who just want good people to do good jobs. I don't think you're wrong, per se, but that "mostly good people" do not rule the world, and this is no coincidence. They're not ruthless and driven enough to end up on top. See Nils Gilman's "Twin Insurgency": https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/ https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-in...

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process". They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses". Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses". This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process. It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for. The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it. > The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system. The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire. You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

I think you're missing part of the point of the article. Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, how many went to an Ivy League school? All nine. Out of the last 10 presidents, how many went to an Ivy League school? Seven. (The exceptions are Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. If I had asked how many of the most recent 5 presidents, the answer would be five.) How many of the current US Senators and Representatives went to Ivy League schools? I'm not going to do the research to answer that, but I bet it's at least the majority, and probably the overwhelming majority. As the article said, it's the "ocracy" part. We want merit in those who run things. But in those who rule, we also want that they understand where the rest of us are coming from.

BurningFrog 6y ago
This is why I think of the Ivy League people as the ruling class of this country. This is also one reason I find the woke Ivy League left so ridiculous. They see themselves as fighting the power. If you think they are the power, they look very different.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  If you think that they know that they are the power, things look still different. Then the "woke-ness" is just a technique of manipulation and maintaining their power. I suspect that some know, and some don't. But I'm not of that class, and I have no concrete information on how they think.
wincy 6y ago
I recall George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court and she didn't get appointed. Right, it was Harriet Miers. So instead Samuel Alito was appointed.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  > George W Bush tried to appoint a woman who had gone to community college to the supreme court She went to Southern Methodist University, not an Ivy but also far from a community college. Also, in the South SMU Law holds as much weight as Ivy Law as far as credentials go.

wpietri 6y ago

> don't even pretend to be objective any more Could you say more about why you think they ever were objective? From the get-go, the Ivies were explicitly for the white male children of well-off white men. I know the Industrial Revolution changed American higher education some, as there was a sudden need for a lot of agricultural and technical education, making it less of a class marker. But My impression is that the Ivies stayed pretty aloof from that.

ZeroGravitas 6y ago
But out of that limited pool, they could have some half-hearted attempt at objectivity and not worry about the wrong type of person getting in, since they'd do the real screening at step 1 in the process.

0d9eooo 6y ago

The problem is that the objective criteria aren't much better. What do we mean? GPA? Test score? Those correlate maybe .4 with first year GPA in school, and even less with later criteria. So, putting aside variability from one day to the next in when you take the test, inequities in students' preparedness on the day of the exam, etc and so forth, you're left empirically with a fairly weak correlation with one very immediate criterion, that gets even weaker with time. I don't disagree with your concerns at some level, but think the alternative has its problems too. We discuss "merit" as if people can't change, can't improve, and that, more importantly, all the proxies we assess are equal to what we're really looking for. And then we use it as some statement about individual ability as an inherent, perfectly assessed metric. Imagine if we measured people's weights at age 18 with a scale that correlated only .40 with true weight, and then used that as an index of physical fitness that then determined important trajectories in their lives. It sounds absurd because it is. Meritocracy is broken because we've become used to treating proxy metrics as equal to the real attribute of interest, and assuming that attribute can't change and is fixed with time. I think a lot of the problems we have in the US all come back to this, whether it be inequality, resentment, distrust, or dysfunction: there's very much a class divide built on sand, and a sort of daily cognitive dissonance we're asked to just accept. I'm not saying these purely holistic strategies are better or worse; I have no problems with "objective" criteria, if used appropriately, but now they're not used appropriately.