6 ms·

35% of the wealthiest people in the US attended one of just 8 elite universities

25 points by frontman1988 4y ago

FrontierPsych 4y ago
Eye reed all the tyme about how those skools are eleetist and racist and all that, butt what is never said is that those skools are "smart-ist." Eye'm not vary smart, butts why knot me admitted to Harvard? Eye only gots a C- avrage in hi skool, butts if we going to bee equal, then us knot smart peeple must bee admitted at them universities, two. Eye hate the discrimination against us. Maybee they need to take the same ratio of GPAs - only 5% A students, 25% B students and 60% C students and 10% hi skool dropouts so that Harvard and all of thems eleet skools "look like America."
cafard 4y ago
How exactly does yahoo.com let its certificates lapse?
mska 4y ago
There is JS code at the end of the article for some reason: !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e) {if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r
- sacnoradhq 4y ago
  That's always how our ChatGPT bots message on dating sites to give fair warning that we're a 2-headed morbidly-obese octogenarian with green chicken skin. And the screen cap profile pic from a lesser-known 80's TV show.
perfecthjrjth 4y ago
It is good for the US to distribute power centers across at least 50 universities, not just tier-1 Ivies and Stanford.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  unfortunately the hyper capitalist us system will always end up in a small quantity of X having a majority quantity of Y, just due to compound interest.
theRealMe 4y ago
So? Is this supposed to make me angry or something? That the top 8 universities ordered by wealth creation produced 35% of the wealthiest individuals? Aka, on average each of those universities produced <5% of the wealthiest 9600 people? Tbh that’s actually lower than I would have expected when trying to cherry pick anger-fuel numbers for wealth inequality.
- randomdata 4y ago
  > That the top 8 universities ordered by wealth creation produced 35% of the wealthiest individuals? Produced doesn't sound right. If anything, wealth attainment has declined with the rise of post-secondary schooling. Incomes have held stagnant. There is no sign of economic production. "Those who come from wealthy families likely to choose amongst eight universities when selecting a university to attend" might be the most realistic way to frame this.
  - theRealMe 4y ago
    “Produced” is a pretty standard way to describe people coming from a university. But I do understand that these universities aren’t just taking in the basic elements that compose a human being and churning out titans of industry… And about wealth attainment declining, we’re literally talking about the specific people that attained incredible amounts of wealth here… centimillionaires. Those are specifically what we’re counting. Your points about wealth attainment may hold true as an average of our whole population, but it’s specifically not the case for centimillionaires. And both the way that I apparently unintentionally “framed” it and the way that you framed it are accurate. The people that attend these elite universities usually(not always) did come from backgrounds with a lot of “help” AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). It doesn’t have to be an either/or.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      > AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). Doubtful. The data just doesn't support it. Having connections and the capability to excel in that environment saw them more likely to be accepted into these schools, maybe. > It doesn’t have to be an either/or. It (university) also doesn't have to have any impact. It can just be a thing off to the side that someone does as a hobby. Just because it costs money doesn't mean it produces economic value. 35% of these people likely also own some kind of exotic sports car, but is the car the reason for their position? Not likely.
lapcat 4y ago
I was accepted to one of those elite universities as an undergrad, but my family couldn't afford to send me there. You need money to make money.
- testTED 4y ago
  They didn't have a house or four to sell to pay for those irreplaceable connections?
- CincinnatiMan 4y ago
  Were student loans not an option? Or maybe they were, but the cost of tuition was too high and deemed not worth it?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    I don't remember. But this was before the big changes in financial aid laws during the 1990s. I'm not sure whether I was personally eligible for loans. I have no recollection of that option ever being discussed. I do know that the financial aid application required information from my parents.
- noahtallen 4y ago
  Maybe things have changed since then; the big elite schools like Harvard have grants which cover basically everything you can’t afford. (At the time I was looking in 2015, my total cost would have been around $4k/semester.) According to them, 20% of students don’t pay anything at all
paxys 4y ago
Not really unexpected or surprising. What I'd really like to see though is a similar list that differentiates between universities that help people create wealth vs those that just admit wealthy people to begin with. The conclusion the article seems to be drawing is – regular people can't become centimillionaires because they can't get into Harvard. But is that really what this data shows? If someone pulled up the demographic of top country clubs, for example, they could similarly conclude that everyone who is a member of these clubs is rich, so if we just forced them to let in poor people we'd solve poverty. The boring answer instead is – forget about Harvard and MIT and the rest of the top 10-20 "elite" schools and instead fund the state university system (funding still hasn't been restored since it went away nation-wide during the 2008 financial crisis), community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeship programs. All of these are a way more effective solution to getting a large number of people educated than constantly crying about Harvard's admission policies, but the latter is what drives online outrage and gets clicks.
- lapcat 4y ago
  If college is not a path to upward mobility, then why go at all? Kids don't take out loans to join country clubs. I'm not sure why you're talking about poverty, which is not the subject of the linked article.
  - cafard 4y ago
    > Why go at all? " The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect. Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the College a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped." The Education of Henry Adams*, Chapter IV, "Harvard College". (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044.txt
up2isomorphism 4y ago
It might just mean these universities are willing to take wealthy kids.
polski-g 4y ago
A shame that they didn't even think of the genetic confounding! The universities only let in elite people. They don't make them elite.

25 points by frontman1988 4y ago

Eye reed all the tyme about how those skools are eleetist and racist and all that, butt what is never said is that those skools are "smart-ist." Eye'm not vary smart, butts why knot me admitted to Harvard? Eye only gots a C- avrage in hi skool, butts if we going to bee equal, then us knot smart peeple must bee admitted at them universities, two. Eye hate the discrimination against us. Maybee they need to take the same ratio of GPAs - only 5% A students, 25% B students and 60% C students and 10% hi skool dropouts so that Harvard and all of thems eleet skools "look like America."

cafard 4y ago

How exactly does yahoo.com let its certificates lapse?

mska 4y ago

There is JS code at the end of the article for some reason: !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e) {if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

sacnoradhq 4y ago
That's always how our ChatGPT bots message on dating sites to give fair warning that we're a 2-headed morbidly-obese octogenarian with green chicken skin. And the screen cap profile pic from a lesser-known 80's TV show.

perfecthjrjth 4y ago

It is good for the US to distribute power centers across at least 50 universities, not just tier-1 Ivies and Stanford.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
unfortunately the hyper capitalist us system will always end up in a small quantity of X having a majority quantity of Y, just due to compound interest.

theRealMe 4y ago

So? Is this supposed to make me angry or something? That the top 8 universities ordered by wealth creation produced 35% of the wealthiest individuals? Aka, on average each of those universities produced <5% of the wealthiest 9600 people? Tbh that’s actually lower than I would have expected when trying to cherry pick anger-fuel numbers for wealth inequality.

randomdata 4y ago
> That the top 8 universities ordered by wealth creation produced 35% of the wealthiest individuals? Produced doesn't sound right. If anything, wealth attainment has declined with the rise of post-secondary schooling. Incomes have held stagnant. There is no sign of economic production. "Those who come from wealthy families likely to choose amongst eight universities when selecting a university to attend" might be the most realistic way to frame this.
- theRealMe 4y ago
  “Produced” is a pretty standard way to describe people coming from a university. But I do understand that these universities aren’t just taking in the basic elements that compose a human being and churning out titans of industry… And about wealth attainment declining, we’re literally talking about the specific people that attained incredible amounts of wealth here… centimillionaires. Those are specifically what we’re counting. Your points about wealth attainment may hold true as an average of our whole population, but it’s specifically not the case for centimillionaires. And both the way that I apparently unintentionally “framed” it and the way that you framed it are accurate. The people that attend these elite universities usually(not always) did come from backgrounds with a lot of “help” AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). It doesn’t have to be an either/or.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). Doubtful. The data just doesn't support it. Having connections and the capability to excel in that environment saw them more likely to be accepted into these schools, maybe. > It doesn’t have to be an either/or. It (university) also doesn't have to have any impact. It can just be a thing off to the side that someone does as a hobby. Just because it costs money doesn't mean it produces economic value. 35% of these people likely also own some kind of exotic sports car, but is the car the reason for their position? Not likely.

lapcat 4y ago

I was accepted to one of those elite universities as an undergrad, but my family couldn't afford to send me there. You need money to make money.

testTED 4y ago
They didn't have a house or four to sell to pay for those irreplaceable connections?
CincinnatiMan 4y ago
Were student loans not an option? Or maybe they were, but the cost of tuition was too high and deemed not worth it?
- lapcat 4y ago
  I don't remember. But this was before the big changes in financial aid laws during the 1990s. I'm not sure whether I was personally eligible for loans. I have no recollection of that option ever being discussed. I do know that the financial aid application required information from my parents.
noahtallen 4y ago
Maybe things have changed since then; the big elite schools like Harvard have grants which cover basically everything you can’t afford. (At the time I was looking in 2015, my total cost would have been around $4k/semester.) According to them, 20% of students don’t pay anything at all

paxys 4y ago

Not really unexpected or surprising. What I'd really like to see though is a similar list that differentiates between universities that help people create wealth vs those that just admit wealthy people to begin with. The conclusion the article seems to be drawing is – regular people can't become centimillionaires because they can't get into Harvard. But is that really what this data shows? If someone pulled up the demographic of top country clubs, for example, they could similarly conclude that everyone who is a member of these clubs is rich, so if we just forced them to let in poor people we'd solve poverty. The boring answer instead is – forget about Harvard and MIT and the rest of the top 10-20 "elite" schools and instead fund the state university system (funding still hasn't been restored since it went away nation-wide during the 2008 financial crisis), community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeship programs. All of these are a way more effective solution to getting a large number of people educated than constantly crying about Harvard's admission policies, but the latter is what drives online outrage and gets clicks.

lapcat 4y ago
If college is not a path to upward mobility, then why go at all? Kids don't take out loans to join country clubs. I'm not sure why you're talking about poverty, which is not the subject of the linked article.
- cafard 4y ago
  > Why go at all? " The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect. Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the College a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped." The Education of Henry Adams*, Chapter IV, "Harvard College". (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044.txt

up2isomorphism 4y ago

It might just mean these universities are willing to take wealthy kids.

polski-g 4y ago

A shame that they didn't even think of the genetic confounding! The universities only let in elite people. They don't make them elite.