4 ms·
>So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companie
by _dain_ 5y ago
>So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.
the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes. if they are smarter it is bc of direct filtering by SAT at the admissions stage and indirect genetic confounds, not because elite institutions actually teach useful things better.
- Hermitian909 5y ago> the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes As someone who taught kids like this I can't agree. I taught hundreds of kids real math, writing, and programming skills that I now use in my professional life as a highly paid software engineer. Some of those kids have reconnected with me as adults to tell me I made a difference in their lives and credit my teaching (which their parents paid thousands for) as a very meaningful part of their success.
- urthor 5y agoThe problem is that the UMC status signalling game is heavily correlated with success in the real world. Especially in law, where the status signalling game is a prerequisite in a very serious sense for doing the job, attracting wealthy clients. If you hire someone from a working class background you basically need to teach them that on the job. Even in engineering it happens.
- _dain_ 5y agostatus signalling games are correlated with success in the real world almost by definition, but that does not mean they are useful to society or that we should tolerate ever greater shares of resources ploughed into them. it is a zero sum game!
- ikr678 5y agoWhat are the KPI's of the people doing the recruiting strategy for these organizations? They're incentivized to hire people who will fit in, and perform well. After a certain level of competency, from any school, this is no longer a distinguishing feature. So they double down on the culture fit, and the easiest way to eliminate risk is to hire from a pool of people who have already demonstrated that culture. I has a very illuminating chat once with a hiring consultant developing the onboarding/induction process and activity package for graduate engineers starting at a global oil&gas company (different industry, but the same level of gatekeeping). When taking the grads through these activities, she was struck by the fact they all looked and sounded nearly identical(even with obligatory racial diversity). She later found out that the two managers in charge of graduate program were hiring exclusively from the two engineering schools they themselves had attended, and that they were running into a terrible time retaining graduates after the program had finished, as they usually stepped off into more boutique consultancies or went to work on passion projects as money was never the motivator. The recommendation from her consultancy was to broaden their hiring practices, and that drawing exclusively upper crust engineers who just saw the role as a stepping stone was going to hurt them in the long run, whereas they'd get much better loyalty from middle class graduates.