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In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Ca

In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sharp social stratifications and popular resentment among working people that "elites" (defined overwhelmingly as people with significant economic capital, political influence, and elite pedigrees) are detached from the reality on the ground. Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites. Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. This is only going to get worse. The ruthless competition to get into elite colleges is both a cause, and a product of, economic inequality. The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, and that investment banks recruit mostly from a handful of targets. If prospective law students were confident they could earn 90% as much, or 100% as much, as graduates from T-10 law schools, if they attended lower ranked schools, there wouldn't be so much competition to get into the same handful of elite schools. This winner take all economy is stupid, and it's making us sick in pursuit of success. People should act in their best personal interests, and this competition is the result. We can't blame parents for wanting the best outcomes for their children. But everyone deserves a bit of blame, some more than others, for helping make American society so unequal.

nradov 5y ago
In complex legal issues involving lots of money, clients have a strong incentive to hire the very best lawyers. Even if a lawyer charges >$1000 per hour that's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall stakes. Thus top law firms play it safe and recruit from only top schools instead of taking a risk on lower tier candidates. So a winner-take-all outcome is completely rational and expected.
- obviouslynotme 5y ago
  It's not the best lawyers you want. It's the most connected. You want to hire the firm your likely judge was in before he got on the bench.
ggm 5y ago
I am not an Oxbridge or ENS graduate but I felt compelled to point out both had a competitive entry exam. I am unsure Oxbridge still does. The ecole normale system presupposes a national baccalaureate with ranking. The French took this seriously for decades. It was wafer thin egalitarianism because poor smart kids had a path in. I have little doubt nepotism also plays its part, but the fundamental underpinning is ranked - elitism that was tested. I've worked with many Oxbridge graduates and met, presented to ENS students and they were super smart.
- gryn 5y ago
  for ENS and polytechnique, I remember reading that a very large number of the accepted candidates for such schools came from a handful of rich kids high schools and can be traced back to a handful of rich kids Kindergartens. (I can't find the article)
  - hikingsimulator 5y ago
    Wealth helps tremendously indeed. Usually, before accessing those schools, you have to study for 2 years in a preparatory program called a Classe Préparatoire. Point is, the best can be quite expensive. The most egregious thing though is that during school holidays in France, some private organisms (in Paris) offer 1 or 2-week cramming programs for €10-15k a pop where you get tutored by the very people that write the entrance exams to the most prestigious schools. Wealth is a key.
    - pmezard 5y ago
      TL;DR: wealth helps a lot, but not in the "parents paid the diploma" direct way. More because good social status helps putting people in the right track. Hard work is still required IMHO (at least for the engineering track, I do not know about the business schools variant). Wealth definitely helps in the sense it gives you a better environment to support you during your studies. About it helping you being tutored by fancy private organisms, this is true but I think it applies more to the "lower" part of the Grandes Écoles & co pyramid. You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent. About the set of high schools/classes préparatoires funneling a large part of candidates to top schools, that is definitely true. But again it requires a lot of work, you are not going to move through Henri IV or whatever to ENS only because your parents have money. But receiving a good education from birth and having family and friends who knows how the system work, because they moved through it themselves, helps a lot. But wealth helps because these places are usually in large cities (and mostly in Paris), which are expensive to live in. And to get there you have to come from good/prestigious high schools and have good grades, which again living in a wealthy family helps a lot.
light_hue_1 5y ago
> Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites It's very deniable. This simply cannot be the explanation. Trump is an elite. He inherited vast amounts of money and vastly underperformed with them. He went to an Ivy, Wharton at UPenn. Sure, he sounds like an idiot, but it's undeniable that he is part of the political, educational, and business elite. The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd. Yet if you cast your gaze upon history, you'll find that many social movements are indeed led against members of a political class by members of that very same political class. Many leaders of communist revolutions, for example, come from wealthy families and not the oppressed proletariat that they claim to represent. Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
  - light_hue_1 5y ago
    Trump supporters idolize elites almost exclusively. From Trump, to CEOs, to Giuliani, to Tucker Carlson, to Bill Barr, to Bill O'Reilly, to Ted Cruz, to Josh Hawley. This is not a movement that happens to have a single elite as the head, it is a movement by elites. > Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites. That's just untrue. Trump loves to play up how he is a business person. He loves to play up his successes. He loves to point out how much money he has. He loves to point at all of his houses. He loves to point out how many rich people he knows. He loves to point out how below him other people are. He loves to point out how he moves in those elite circles! Have you watched a Trump rally? It's in large part about how awesome and elite he is. As long as people follow this simple story of the Trump movement being anti-elite, they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do. The movement is not anti-elite, literally, no one gives a damn that Cruz or Hawley have fancy degrees. It's anti-fact. Trump supporters don't like reality as it is and Trump came out directly to sell them a totally different version of reality that they like a lot more (slavery wasn't all that bad, white people are being oppressed, global warming isn't happening, you never need to switch jobs, etc.). It has nothing to do with elites, it's a basic denial of reality, just as fundamental as flat earth.
bawolff 5y ago
As a canadian, are we really that much more equal than the USA? Sure, maybe we have less of the extremes on both sides (Less billionairs, and i suspect less hopelessly poor, although i don't know the number on that), but we still have rich people and poor people, a good uni still gives you a major step up.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  By college exclusivity yes, you are substantially more equal. Your good universities expand, theirs stay about the same size and become even more exclusive. No one goes Ooooh! if they hear someone went to McGill or Waterloo, excellent as they are. They’re just universities.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    True, but i suspect the canadian elite go to harvard just like the american elite.
ollifi 5y ago
> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. Maybe besides the point, but nordic countries do have significant populist movements. In Finland (which I know best) populist Finns Party[1] is the largest party according to polls at the moment. We had our trump/brexit moment in 2011 when they took landslide victory against what the experts and ”elites” expected. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns_Party
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  "Landslide" meaning 19%, and not able to form a government. A far cry for the 40%+ for hard-right Brexiteers or 48% for Trump.
  - ollifi 5y ago
    True. Landslide is a wrong word here. I meant It had similar Nobody saw it coming -narrative attached to it. Also hard to compare vote result percentages between multiparty and two options votes.
paganel 5y ago
> The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, In the end that's what's causing revolutions, i.e. members of the educated middle-class being left out and not getting on the financial bandwagon. Imo it all started with the French Revolution, some people say that it was a bourgeois vs nobles thing but many bourgeois were doing quite all right (think the banker Necker [1]), it was the small bourgeois (and lawyer) from out-of-Paris like Robespierre that was feeling left out. The same thing happened between the two world wars in Europe. In my parts of the continent (Eastern Europe) there were too many college graduates chasing too few State jobs (the only ones available to college graduates at the time), plus Jewish students crowding them out in domains that were lucrative even if not working for the State (think Law and Medicine). The solution some of those people thought of? Joining the right-wing movement that was advocating for "cleansing the State" and doing very bad things to those Jewish students that were competing for the same jobs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Necker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Necker
barry-cotter 5y ago
> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. University elitism and general egalitarianism are easily separable. Germany quite deliberately got rid of its elite universities after 1968, leveling former pinnacles of research excellence like Göttingen, Heidelberg and Tübingen so that which university you go to now has basically no social cachet. Every US Supreme Court justice went to Harvard or Yale. The website for the German Supreme Court mostly doesn’t list where they got their degrees, so little do people care. Germany is not an egalitarian society. It is class and title obsessed. Sweden may have an egalitarian affect but it likewise has large and enduring fortunes. The wealth inequality is there even if income inequality is more modest.
StandardFuture 5y ago
> the educational pyramid is even more skewed TBF, this might be a more accurate representation of what the education pyramid was always supposed to be. The biggest problem that I see in the west was the rise of the belief that anyone can simply go through a curriculum and now be upper middle class too. It's ruining potential, drive, competition, etc. It's super quasi-Marxist as well. Anytime someone proposes a simple solution that will somehow magically guarantee your life to be better is selling snake oil. > Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements Perhaps not as strong, but I am not sure this is actually true. There are growing populist movements in France and Spain for sure. And you could be correct in establishing a pattern between slower economies, higher-inequality and unrest. > This winner take all economy is stupid Yes i.e. crony capitalism. > this competition is the result Of course, everyone doing the exact same thing and expecting to be the exception to the rule is not actually competition. Why are you not asking the more critical questions like: why is there yet no competition to Universities themselves?

nradov 5y ago

In complex legal issues involving lots of money, clients have a strong incentive to hire the very best lawyers. Even if a lawyer charges >$1000 per hour that's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall stakes. Thus top law firms play it safe and recruit from only top schools instead of taking a risk on lower tier candidates. So a winner-take-all outcome is completely rational and expected.

obviouslynotme 5y ago
It's not the best lawyers you want. It's the most connected. You want to hire the firm your likely judge was in before he got on the bench.

ggm 5y ago

I am not an Oxbridge or ENS graduate but I felt compelled to point out both had a competitive entry exam. I am unsure Oxbridge still does. The ecole normale system presupposes a national baccalaureate with ranking. The French took this seriously for decades. It was wafer thin egalitarianism because poor smart kids had a path in. I have little doubt nepotism also plays its part, but the fundamental underpinning is ranked - elitism that was tested. I've worked with many Oxbridge graduates and met, presented to ENS students and they were super smart.

gryn 5y ago
for ENS and polytechnique, I remember reading that a very large number of the accepted candidates for such schools came from a handful of rich kids high schools and can be traced back to a handful of rich kids Kindergartens. (I can't find the article)
- hikingsimulator 5y ago
  Wealth helps tremendously indeed. Usually, before accessing those schools, you have to study for 2 years in a preparatory program called a Classe Préparatoire. Point is, the best can be quite expensive. The most egregious thing though is that during school holidays in France, some private organisms (in Paris) offer 1 or 2-week cramming programs for €10-15k a pop where you get tutored by the very people that write the entrance exams to the most prestigious schools. Wealth is a key.
  - pmezard 5y ago
    TL;DR: wealth helps a lot, but not in the "parents paid the diploma" direct way. More because good social status helps putting people in the right track. Hard work is still required IMHO (at least for the engineering track, I do not know about the business schools variant). Wealth definitely helps in the sense it gives you a better environment to support you during your studies. About it helping you being tutored by fancy private organisms, this is true but I think it applies more to the "lower" part of the Grandes Écoles & co pyramid. You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent. About the set of high schools/classes préparatoires funneling a large part of candidates to top schools, that is definitely true. But again it requires a lot of work, you are not going to move through Henri IV or whatever to ENS only because your parents have money. But receiving a good education from birth and having family and friends who knows how the system work, because they moved through it themselves, helps a lot. But wealth helps because these places are usually in large cities (and mostly in Paris), which are expensive to live in. And to get there you have to come from good/prestigious high schools and have good grades, which again living in a wealthy family helps a lot.

light_hue_1 5y ago

> Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites It's very deniable. This simply cannot be the explanation. Trump is an elite. He inherited vast amounts of money and vastly underperformed with them. He went to an Ivy, Wharton at UPenn. Sure, he sounds like an idiot, but it's undeniable that he is part of the political, educational, and business elite. The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd.

jcranmer 5y ago
> The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd. Yet if you cast your gaze upon history, you'll find that many social movements are indeed led against members of a political class by members of that very same political class. Many leaders of communist revolutions, for example, come from wealthy families and not the oppressed proletariat that they claim to represent. Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
- light_hue_1 5y ago
  Trump supporters idolize elites almost exclusively. From Trump, to CEOs, to Giuliani, to Tucker Carlson, to Bill Barr, to Bill O'Reilly, to Ted Cruz, to Josh Hawley. This is not a movement that happens to have a single elite as the head, it is a movement by elites. > Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites. That's just untrue. Trump loves to play up how he is a business person. He loves to play up his successes. He loves to point out how much money he has. He loves to point at all of his houses. He loves to point out how many rich people he knows. He loves to point out how below him other people are. He loves to point out how he moves in those elite circles! Have you watched a Trump rally? It's in large part about how awesome and elite he is. As long as people follow this simple story of the Trump movement being anti-elite, they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do. The movement is not anti-elite, literally, no one gives a damn that Cruz or Hawley have fancy degrees. It's anti-fact. Trump supporters don't like reality as it is and Trump came out directly to sell them a totally different version of reality that they like a lot more (slavery wasn't all that bad, white people are being oppressed, global warming isn't happening, you never need to switch jobs, etc.). It has nothing to do with elites, it's a basic denial of reality, just as fundamental as flat earth.

bawolff 5y ago

As a canadian, are we really that much more equal than the USA? Sure, maybe we have less of the extremes on both sides (Less billionairs, and i suspect less hopelessly poor, although i don't know the number on that), but we still have rich people and poor people, a good uni still gives you a major step up.

barry-cotter 5y ago
By college exclusivity yes, you are substantially more equal. Your good universities expand, theirs stay about the same size and become even more exclusive. No one goes Ooooh! if they hear someone went to McGill or Waterloo, excellent as they are. They’re just universities.
- bawolff 5y ago
  True, but i suspect the canadian elite go to harvard just like the american elite.

ollifi 5y ago

> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. Maybe besides the point, but nordic countries do have significant populist movements. In Finland (which I know best) populist Finns Party[1] is the largest party according to polls at the moment. We had our trump/brexit moment in 2011 when they took landslide victory against what the experts and ”elites” expected. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finns_Party

MagnumOpus 5y ago
"Landslide" meaning 19%, and not able to form a government. A far cry for the 40%+ for hard-right Brexiteers or 48% for Trump.
- ollifi 5y ago
  True. Landslide is a wrong word here. I meant It had similar Nobody saw it coming -narrative attached to it. Also hard to compare vote result percentages between multiparty and two options votes.

paganel 5y ago

> The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, In the end that's what's causing revolutions, i.e. members of the educated middle-class being left out and not getting on the financial bandwagon. Imo it all started with the French Revolution, some people say that it was a bourgeois vs nobles thing but many bourgeois were doing quite all right (think the banker Necker [1]), it was the small bourgeois (and lawyer) from out-of-Paris like Robespierre that was feeling left out. The same thing happened between the two world wars in Europe. In my parts of the continent (Eastern Europe) there were too many college graduates chasing too few State jobs (the only ones available to college graduates at the time), plus Jewish students crowding them out in domains that were lucrative even if not working for the State (think Law and Medicine). The solution some of those people thought of? Joining the right-wing movement that was advocating for "cleansing the State" and doing very bad things to those Jewish students that were competing for the same jobs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Necker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Necker

barry-cotter 5y ago

> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. University elitism and general egalitarianism are easily separable. Germany quite deliberately got rid of its elite universities after 1968, leveling former pinnacles of research excellence like Göttingen, Heidelberg and Tübingen so that which university you go to now has basically no social cachet. Every US Supreme Court justice went to Harvard or Yale. The website for the German Supreme Court mostly doesn’t list where they got their degrees, so little do people care. Germany is not an egalitarian society. It is class and title obsessed. Sweden may have an egalitarian affect but it likewise has large and enduring fortunes. The wealth inequality is there even if income inequality is more modest.

StandardFuture 5y ago

> the educational pyramid is even more skewed TBF, this might be a more accurate representation of what the education pyramid was always supposed to be. The biggest problem that I see in the west was the rise of the belief that anyone can simply go through a curriculum and now be upper middle class too. It's ruining potential, drive, competition, etc. It's super quasi-Marxist as well. Anytime someone proposes a simple solution that will somehow magically guarantee your life to be better is selling snake oil. > Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements Perhaps not as strong, but I am not sure this is actually true. There are growing populist movements in France and Spain for sure. And you could be correct in establishing a pattern between slower economies, higher-inequality and unrest. > This winner take all economy is stupid Yes i.e. crony capitalism. > this competition is the result Of course, everyone doing the exact same thing and expecting to be the exception to the rule is not actually competition. Why are you not asking the more critical questions like: why is there yet no competition to Universities themselves?