11 ms·

Who cares about the Ivy League?

67 points by jseliger 3y ago

costanzaDynasty 3y ago
Parents and their friends.
pauldenton 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  This comment broke the HN guidelines, which ask: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also - it looks like your account has been using HN primarily (exclusively?) for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against*. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so I need to ask you to stop doing this. It's fine to occasionally post on divisive topics as part of a general mix, but we ban accounts when they are primarily used for that, and single-purpose accounts are definitely not ok here. We want curious conversation, which is quite the opposite. * i.e. it's not about your views - it's about not using HN as intended
bell-cot 3y ago
I've heard that most human beings are fairly obsessed with social status. Similar in most other primate species, and many mammals, and ... Not sure about plants.
onos 3y ago
He suggests we should increase the number of spots at top schools. Perhaps. But I’m reading “End Times” by Turchin and this suggests “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability. Maybe that’s wrong, but if so it would add an important reason to instead focus on the well being of “the productive class”, perhaps through expanding trade schools etc.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability I'm ambivalent about Turchin's work, but there are corroborating theories on this; see the idea of "change merchants"[0], which posit that as more people (and especially more people with higher social rank and influence) deal in the virtual as opposed to the physical, there is an increasing amount of personal incentive on those involved to make sure that things change rapidly. [0]: https://www.city-journal.org/article/change-merchants https://www.city-journal.org/article/change-merchants
- soco 3y ago
  I guess if learning a trade could guarantee the kids a future (or at least make it look like guaranteed) I bet many people would go that way without any need for extra nudges. Picking up the trade of your parents was earlier a pretty fine plan in life. But today we are where we are and political influence seems like the only safe bet... "bet" because learning to gamble it is.
  - mschild 3y ago
    This is from a German perspective but learning a trade in Germany can be a ticket to good income and good life. There's unfortunately the perception that trades are worth less than academics in Germany from a societal standpoint. I suspect it's somewhat similar in the US. That's part of the reason why we have a massive shortage of any skilled tradesperson in Germany. If you're an electrician or plumber you can basically pick your work. The other part of course being that the apprenticeship salary and treatment is utter shit. My brother completed an industrial electrician apprenticeship recently. Right out of the gate he received offers for 50-60k salaries. In Germany that's a really good salary.
    - soco 3y ago
      Wow okay then the government (I know, the horror) would only need to work on the image issues and smoothing out the first steps. Or the trade schools need, or whoever cares about people getting a safe and very useful job - we all, I guess. (insert rant about traditional parties getting out of touch with such basic needs thus leaving room for extremists to grow)
ouid 3y ago
[dead]
dustincoates 3y ago
The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of the top 7 are Ivies[0]. I bet you'd see the same with CEOs. You could argue that it is a reflection on the already rich getting in (although you would overlook those like Thomas, who grew up very poor), but that is also part of the problem. Many times these schools are finishing schools, which prepare their students to take their places as Masters of the Universe. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/30/where-the-senate-went-to-college-in-one-map/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/30/wh...
- dangus 3y ago
  I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League? I suspect it's much more of the former than the latter. It's not that you have to go to an Ivy League school to run the country. Instead, the people born into the families that run the country have no reason not to go to Ivy League schools. You have unlimited tuition money, and you're guaranteed to be accepted into Harvard since you have passably average grades and your legacy family donates to the school. Would you not go to Harvard? Some prestigious companies hire mostly/only from Ivy Leagues, but ultimately those are mostly just upper-middle-class salary jobs (e.g., MBB consulting companies).
  - chrischen 3y ago
    Ivey leagues do a lot to enable the propagation of generational wealth. Considering that many equally smart and talented individuals don’t get into Ivies because there simply isn’t enough space, one can view Ivies as primarily a tool to enable generational wealth by providing an environment where a hand curated selection of exceptional people (and curated diversity) is admitted to the environment to give your elite kids a well rounded education. I guess it boils down to do the Ivies really move the needle on upward mobility or is it really just doing it just enough to create the ideal student body for wealthy participants? Is it easier to guarantee entry by merit or through money?
_fat_santa 3y ago
I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most important as it's crucial to your "personal brand" (A "Harvard trained" lawyer). With doctors it seems less important and with most other professions it seems almost irrelevant.
- heliodor 3y ago
  You forgot politics!
- tneely 3y ago
  While I agree it doesn’t matter much 1-2 jobs into your career, Ivies are really good at getting you through that first door. I wouldn’t be surprised if that MIT degree got someone to their first technical screen at Google, or gave them the right resources they needed to pass the interview.
- thathndude 3y ago
  Am a lawyer. Completely agree. For a person who strongly believes in meritocracy, I really picked a stupid career.
  - te_chris 3y ago
    I wouldn't worry too much. Meritocracy was a satirical idea from conception.
- hackyhacky 3y ago
  Academia itself is probably the field that is most particular about these things.
  - thathndude 3y ago
    Yeah. For many of the same reasons. Schools want to be able to market “all of our professors are ivy-league grads”
throwaway22032 3y ago
The article has the directionality backwards. People in similar socioeconomic circumstances band together. If you stopped the successful doing it at Harvard they'd just find another way, whether it be geographic location, specific jobs, parties, the country club, whatever.
ke88y 3y ago
> It’s as if the inequality of income and wealth is mirrored in a general inequality of status, where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch the glitterati from the cheap seats. The author almost gets the point -- and even mentions the substantive reason people care in this sentence -- but then veers off a cliff in the last half of the sentence. Huge portions of our economy are winner-take-all, with a very small number of winners. And the organizations that win are also increasingly winner-take-all. The obsession with access to elite institutions makes more sense if you re-write these two sentences: > We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs. Our economy is dominated by superstar companies. like this: > We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs BECAUSE our economy is dominated by superstar companies. Is is that people are obsessed with status? Or is that people feel their basic needs -- housing, food, a sense of worth -- are at risk as long as they're not on top? And if they feel that way, are they wrong? If you want to know why people are obsessed with becoming an Elon Musk, then look at how the man talks about his employees at Twitter. If the world is full of leaders who will stomp on you and lemmings who get stomped out, then you better try to claw your way as high as you can.
Ialdaboth 3y ago
We are on the brink of an AI revolution, which mean Intelligence will become a commodity. In comparison, credentials will have even more value than ever. Supply vs demand.
- thathndude 3y ago
  But what credentials? 300 years ago that must-have credential was some stamp from a master tradesman or guild confirming experience and expertise in a trade.
- boringg 3y ago
  No we aren’t. Intelligence will never be commoditized. You'll just have higher degrees of competition and disinformation. Hard disagree with you.
malta_kano 3y ago
[flagged]
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Hollywood cares, for one. I think almost every movie (or book) I read that involves a smart person with good credentials involves Harvard or mit or sometimes Stanford. It’s getting old. Be more creative, people
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anders_p 3y ago
  That's mostly because movies are a condensed media that has to use shorthand for everything. (and writers are often lazy). You don't have time in a movie to explain everything, so they fall back on tropes we all know. Like "MIT super hacker" or "Harvard miracle lawyer". Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories that explain character details and quirks in more creative ways.
  - chongli 3y ago
    That's mostly because movies are a condensed media ... Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories Which is why all of the creative energy has moved into serialized TV shows. Movies are almost completely creatively bankrupt these days, having become a never-ending stream of CG-spectacles and superhero plots.
prvc 3y ago
>a rough estimate of about 100,000 undergraduates at top private schools in the U.S. That might sound like a lot, but it’s compared to 22 million total undergraduates in the country. In other words, top private schools are educating less than half a percent of Americans. The entire Harvard undergrad student body could fit into the University of Michigan football stadium more than 15 times over. Those figures are completely irrelevant. The proportion of those 22M undergraduates who will need to make use of any specialized knowledge or skills acquired during their student-hood is also miniscule. They are simply following a social convention by going to these schools. There is no equivalence between these populations, except by sloppy word-based reasoning.
uneekname 3y ago
I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school. If the same money was put toward social mobility, the most successful people in our country could be folks who grew up in poverty. Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed. > toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades ... where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch... That's been happening for much longer than four decades, lol
- skizm 3y ago
  FWIW, most Ivy League and other top schools (MIT, Stanford) offer extreme discounts on tuition for students with household income under around $150K. Often times they'll pay somewhere between 0-10% of the actual tuition. If your family makes less than $75k, I think you can go to most or all of these schools for free (in tuition at least, not sure about room/board/food).
  - uneekname 3y ago
    I'm glad they do that. But those kids still have to get in. Which is much more difficult for a kid graduating from an under-resourced high school. I went to a very privileged high school. There were so many eyeballs on my class' test scores, recommendations, personal essays...of course we were going to succeed. Most of us got into our top choice schools. You often need a lot more than money to get into these schools.
    - cudgy 3y ago
      Money is at the root of everything you just mentioned.
  - 3y ago
iwillmemberthis 3y ago
Formal education is a great tool, however the organisation that delivers it is irrelevant. Brilliant people are brilliant. They're the people you want to hire. And those people will be learning from everything, not just their Ivy League school. IMO large amounts of students topping IT classes at these schools are doing majority of the learning on their own at a faster pace.
fullshark 3y ago
People who understand that higher education quality is basically at parity and what matters is your peers/connections fostered in college + the doors that open for you based on what school you went to. The perceived elite schools give you a leg up in life, this is true for every country on the planet, and a lot of parents/kids work extremely hard to try and get into them for a reason.
- sublinear 3y ago
  This is exactly it and why admitting more people to ivy league schools will entirely dilute what value was there.
- trgn 3y ago
  > this is true for every country on the planet No, it's a cultural thing. There's really two points in that article: - (1) people are overestimating the actual lifetime effects of attending an elite school. - (2) people are obsessing over attending (or their children attending) elite schools. That second one is a spiritual failure, not just one of ignorance. That upper middle-class obsession with the brand of education may not be uniquely american (i read similar horror stories about china for example), but it is certainly very pronounced here. It is in no way similar to how kids and families choose universities in say western europe imho.
  - adamsmith143 3y ago
    >No, it's a cultural thing. IIT's, Peking/Tsinghua, SNU(Korea), University of Tokyo, Oxbridge, etc. etc. Cultural thing that happens across the entire world?
    - trgn 3y ago
      i guess we're just going around in circles. It happens nowhere near US levels in e.g. western europe.
      - TMWNN 3y ago
Eumenes 3y ago
If you're involved in hiring in the tech industry, the particular school doesn't matter as much as it used to, unless you're super focused in research or something arcane like quantum computing. Post graduate vs undergrad is a different ball game. But from my experience, MIT is special, but other Ivy's, not as much. I'm a big fan of schools like RPI, Drexel, Waterloo, Virginia Tech, etc. The co-op program produces very strong engineers. Ivy's may produce better product managers though.
netbioserror 3y ago
The issue with the Ivy League and its elitist gatekeeping is its rising pattern of rubber-stamping deeply unimpressive people. These schools are supposed to actively seek out the best and forge them into the most capable people who have ever existed. Instead, they're lifelong credentials and status for heirs who are missing the talent and discipline of their forefathers. And then, as others have mentioned, they have spread a false culture of using those credentials as a lifelong door-pass into anything someone might want to do, when this is deeply untrue for anyone who hasn't gone to the Ivy League. For most people, a bachelor's gets them past a resume filter for their first job; from there, future employers only care about the value they created at the last job.
- gochi 3y ago
  A great summary, there is a dramatic mismatch in what the ivies suggest they do, and what they actually do and this has horrible consequences for society.
dbg31415 3y ago
> More than half of Stony Brook students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution make it to the top 20%! That’s amazing! That is really impressive! And look, more schools should focus on this metric. As an Ivy League grad, you can get the "education" anywhere. Ivies, State Schools (ha, ome Ivies are State Schools!), Community Colleges, Udemy, Khan Academy, YouTube... once you learn how to learn, the sky is the limit. And learning how to learn on your own, and in a way where your failures as you learn aren't life threatening... I'd say that's the real key to life-long success. But there's nothing going to an Ivy taught me that was unique to that school. For the most part, I found the "famous" professors to be miserable during my undergrad. Like they may know the material inside and out, and their books may be used by other schools, but that doesn't make them good lecturers. In fact, most of them kind of sucked at it, and you could tell it wasn't how they'd spend their time if the university didn't say, "Oh, thanks for the book, keep 'em coming, but you also have to teach an undergrad class too..." Outside of education though, that's the real benefit. The network there... the opportunities some of my peers had, and I had, because of their connections... And it's a mind shift. Higher expectations, to be sure -- for myself, and others around me. (And, over time, that leads to the ability to teach others ways to improve their game.) And look, as a kid starting out, getting a few wins in early on makes the world seem a lot less uphill. Even small things, like being able to make a good first impression when I looked for jobs as a new grad (or even 20 years on), people giving me the benefit of the doubt because of the school I went to -- small things turned out to be huge. That initial first impression "I bet this kid is good..." is so valuable. Creates a nice confidence feedback loop too. All things being equal, I sure am glad I went to an Ivy. I didn't learn anything at school that I couldn't have learned other places. Its was just nice to have that networking opportunity. I look through my friends and I have a huge range of highly successful people in my network. And not all of them went to Ivys, but I will say that having that "starter network" allowed me to connect with other successful people, offer them opportunities, build relationships... like attracts like. And having high expectations seems to attract others with high expectations. (I fully understand now that my going to an Ivy League school, even as a financial aid recipient, really had more to do with my parents than me. As an 18 year-old kid... what do you know? You're just along for the ride, and taking the ramp my parents set up for me -- I took the opportunities I could, but I didn't realize it until much later how my perceived choices were really because they busted their asses to make sure the I had good options in front of me.) Anyway, for a kid who grew up on a cattle ranch... going to an Ivy was huge for me. Huge. Like opened all kinds of doors that never would have been accessible to me.
SilverBirch 3y ago
One of the things that is fascinating about America is that their obsession with race draws attention away from Class. The value of getting into Harvard- sure, you'll get a good education. You might even get a great education! But what you're also going to get is membership of a club that is going to offer you opportunities for the rest of your life. Once you view it that way then changing the composition of the elite universities takes on a completely different perspective. Because if you break that old boys club, suddenly access to great job opportunities and high political office become 1000x more meritocratic. Do we really think that Harvard and Yale have such a fantastic admissions process that they managed to spot and select every single future Supreme Court Justice at the age of 20? No don't be silly. Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you. And the role of Harvard is to zealously nurture this in-group, because that's what creates their value, and the core of that is legacy admissions.
- deltarholamda 3y ago
  >Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you This is the key to the Ivies' brand. And it's not really covered in the article, but the reason we care about the Ivies is because whatever fad catches on in the Ivies goes on to become government policy. And why not? They are the best and the brightest, the great and good, destined to guide the benighted masses into the future. Bill Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard. Interestingly, this somewhat reflects the idea behind Free Software, where many eyes make bugs shallow. If you were trained in an Ivy, everybody you work with came from an Ivy, all of the potential eyes work the same way, so the bugs remain deep.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
(2021) Conversation from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240354
parpfish 3y ago
i think these analyses tend to focus on the impact of education on earnings because earnings are easy to measure. i would wager that it's more common for high achievers to chase after prestigious schools because they are high achievers and they are driven by being 'the best' rather than chasing some expected lifetime value/return on investment. that, or that they think it'll look good on their tinder bio (college applicants are teens after all).
flashback2199 3y ago
America does not have low economic mobility. Last I looked at the statistics, it's not top of the pack, but it's not low, either. Another thing: The primary driver of low economic mobility, at least in the US, is lack of that ticket to ride - a degree from a good university - and the poor kids who do go to an Ivy league university end up having high economic mobility, again, due to receiving a degree from a top university. This is really just a nitpick of the part of the article where they said that low economic mobility is a reason why Ivy league universities don't want to admit poor kids. Low economic mobility is not a factor. What they meant to say, probably, is that starting with family money will mean that a rich kid will end up with even more money than the poor kid, on average, and that would be correct AFAIK.
nostrademons 3y ago
The reason elite roles are elite is because they're focused on directing the activities of other people. Management consultants, executives, finance, entrepreneurs, politicians, to some extent tech - what these all have in common is that they make decisions influencing what problems all the other people in society will solve. By definition, there can only be a limited number of these roles in any complex society, because the roles are structured as the top of a pyramid. If you don't have a large number of people following you, you're not really an elite. The true purpose of the Ivy League isn't necessarily to train elites to do better at these roles. Everybody sucks at these roles, regardless of how much training you've had. Executives make boneheaded company-destroying and job-destroying decisions all the time, finance people make bad investments, politicians make bad laws. This is because the complexity of understanding and directing thousands to millions of people is more than any one person could conceivably do, regardless of how much training they've had. In fact, one of the reasons liberal democracies have generally done better than communism or fascism or feudalism is because they try to devolve as many of these decisions as possible to non-human systems like markets, elections, and algorithms. But having some selection filter for the people who will occupy these roles, whether it's the Ivy League or imperial China's civil service exam, seems to result in less braindead decisions than having absolutely no filter. More importantly, the Ivy League also functions as a way to take potential counter-elites and assimilate them into the existing system so that they can take roles that preserve it rather than destroy it. The most dangerous thing for a socioeconomic system is a leader who can convince a majority of people that the existing system needs to be cast down and replaced with a competing one. Ivy League universities work like an escape valve, trying to identify people that may be poor but smart and give them the connections and education (indoctrination?) to believe that they can make themselves less poor within the existing system without having to destroy it.
user_named 3y ago
The author doesn't get the first thing about the education system, and complains that the elite schools are too small. That's exactly the point. They are small in order to keep them elite. If everyone got into Harvard, many would decline. They'd go to a new, more selective school instead. Because universities are not in the business of education but the business of credentialing. It's about being different, more elite. That's what they sell.
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  The top students across a population are hurt more from interacting with below average students than the below average is helped by interacting with them.
  - nostromo95 3y ago
    Would you mind quoting a source?
    - piuantiderp 3y ago
      What do you think MIT and Stanford are about? Removing the noise....
photochemsyn 3y ago
Ivy League schools may not have the best research facilities or opportunities in terms of being on the cusp of the latest cutting-edge technological and scientific developments. Their facilities are often a bit old and funky, with some notable exceptions. In terms of cost to value ratio, ($80K - $90K per year seems to be the media-reported range) there are likely equivalent learning opportunities elsewhere for much less. However, I think most people know undergrads go to Ivy League schools simply to make connections with wealthy people that will lead to lucrative post-college appointments, that's why legacy admissions are not going away. It's become like the British public school system of 100 years ago in that respect - a social club for aristocrats.

67 points by jseliger 3y ago

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

Parents and their friends.

pauldenton 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
This comment broke the HN guidelines, which ask: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also - it looks like your account has been using HN primarily (exclusively?) for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against*. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so I need to ask you to stop doing this. It's fine to occasionally post on divisive topics as part of a general mix, but we ban accounts when they are primarily used for that, and single-purpose accounts are definitely not ok here. We want curious conversation, which is quite the opposite. * i.e. it's not about your views - it's about not using HN as intended

bell-cot 3y ago

I've heard that most human beings are fairly obsessed with social status. Similar in most other primate species, and many mammals, and ... Not sure about plants.

onos 3y ago

He suggests we should increase the number of spots at top schools. Perhaps. But I’m reading “End Times” by Turchin and this suggests “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability. Maybe that’s wrong, but if so it would add an important reason to instead focus on the well being of “the productive class”, perhaps through expanding trade schools etc.

gottorf 3y ago
> “elite overproduction” is a major source of cultural instability I'm ambivalent about Turchin's work, but there are corroborating theories on this; see the idea of "change merchants"[0], which posit that as more people (and especially more people with higher social rank and influence) deal in the virtual as opposed to the physical, there is an increasing amount of personal incentive on those involved to make sure that things change rapidly. [0]: https://www.city-journal.org/article/change-merchants https://www.city-journal.org/article/change-merchants
soco 3y ago
I guess if learning a trade could guarantee the kids a future (or at least make it look like guaranteed) I bet many people would go that way without any need for extra nudges. Picking up the trade of your parents was earlier a pretty fine plan in life. But today we are where we are and political influence seems like the only safe bet... "bet" because learning to gamble it is.
- mschild 3y ago
  This is from a German perspective but learning a trade in Germany can be a ticket to good income and good life. There's unfortunately the perception that trades are worth less than academics in Germany from a societal standpoint. I suspect it's somewhat similar in the US. That's part of the reason why we have a massive shortage of any skilled tradesperson in Germany. If you're an electrician or plumber you can basically pick your work. The other part of course being that the apprenticeship salary and treatment is utter shit. My brother completed an industrial electrician apprenticeship recently. Right out of the gate he received offers for 50-60k salaries. In Germany that's a really good salary.
  - soco 3y ago
    Wow okay then the government (I know, the horror) would only need to work on the image issues and smoothing out the first steps. Or the trade schools need, or whoever cares about people getting a safe and very useful job - we all, I guess. (insert rant about traditional parties getting out of touch with such basic needs thus leaving room for extremists to grow)

ouid 3y ago

[dead]

dustincoates 3y ago

The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of the top 7 are Ivies[0]. I bet you'd see the same with CEOs. You could argue that it is a reflection on the already rich getting in (although you would overlook those like Thomas, who grew up very poor), but that is also part of the problem. Many times these schools are finishing schools, which prepare their students to take their places as Masters of the Universe. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/30/where-the-senate-went-to-college-in-one-map/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/30/wh...

dangus 3y ago
I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League? I suspect it's much more of the former than the latter. It's not that you have to go to an Ivy League school to run the country. Instead, the people born into the families that run the country have no reason not to go to Ivy League schools. You have unlimited tuition money, and you're guaranteed to be accepted into Harvard since you have passably average grades and your legacy family donates to the school. Would you not go to Harvard? Some prestigious companies hire mostly/only from Ivy Leagues, but ultimately those are mostly just upper-middle-class salary jobs (e.g., MBB consulting companies).
- chrischen 3y ago
  Ivey leagues do a lot to enable the propagation of generational wealth. Considering that many equally smart and talented individuals don’t get into Ivies because there simply isn’t enough space, one can view Ivies as primarily a tool to enable generational wealth by providing an environment where a hand curated selection of exceptional people (and curated diversity) is admitted to the environment to give your elite kids a well rounded education. I guess it boils down to do the Ivies really move the needle on upward mobility or is it really just doing it just enough to create the ideal student body for wealthy participants? Is it easier to guarantee entry by merit or through money?

_fat_santa 3y ago

I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most important as it's crucial to your "personal brand" (A "Harvard trained" lawyer). With doctors it seems less important and with most other professions it seems almost irrelevant.

heliodor 3y ago
You forgot politics!
tneely 3y ago
While I agree it doesn’t matter much 1-2 jobs into your career, Ivies are really good at getting you through that first door. I wouldn’t be surprised if that MIT degree got someone to their first technical screen at Google, or gave them the right resources they needed to pass the interview.
thathndude 3y ago
Am a lawyer. Completely agree. For a person who strongly believes in meritocracy, I really picked a stupid career.
- te_chris 3y ago
  I wouldn't worry too much. Meritocracy was a satirical idea from conception.
hackyhacky 3y ago
Academia itself is probably the field that is most particular about these things.
- thathndude 3y ago
  Yeah. For many of the same reasons. Schools want to be able to market “all of our professors are ivy-league grads”

throwaway22032 3y ago

The article has the directionality backwards. People in similar socioeconomic circumstances band together. If you stopped the successful doing it at Harvard they'd just find another way, whether it be geographic location, specific jobs, parties, the country club, whatever.

ke88y 3y ago

> It’s as if the inequality of income and wealth is mirrored in a general inequality of status, where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch the glitterati from the cheap seats. The author almost gets the point -- and even mentions the substantive reason people care in this sentence -- but then veers off a cliff in the last half of the sentence. Huge portions of our economy are winner-take-all, with a very small number of winners. And the organizations that win are also increasingly winner-take-all. The obsession with access to elite institutions makes more sense if you re-write these two sentences: > We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs. Our economy is dominated by superstar companies. like this: > We’re obsessed with high-status winner-take-all jobs BECAUSE our economy is dominated by superstar companies. Is is that people are obsessed with status? Or is that people feel their basic needs -- housing, food, a sense of worth -- are at risk as long as they're not on top? And if they feel that way, are they wrong? If you want to know why people are obsessed with becoming an Elon Musk, then look at how the man talks about his employees at Twitter. If the world is full of leaders who will stomp on you and lemmings who get stomped out, then you better try to claw your way as high as you can.

Ialdaboth 3y ago

We are on the brink of an AI revolution, which mean Intelligence will become a commodity. In comparison, credentials will have even more value than ever. Supply vs demand.

thathndude 3y ago
But what credentials? 300 years ago that must-have credential was some stamp from a master tradesman or guild confirming experience and expertise in a trade.
boringg 3y ago
No we aren’t. Intelligence will never be commoditized. You'll just have higher degrees of competition and disinformation. Hard disagree with you.

malta_kano 3y ago

[flagged]

barbariangrunge 3y ago

Hollywood cares, for one. I think almost every movie (or book) I read that involves a smart person with good credentials involves Harvard or mit or sometimes Stanford. It’s getting old. Be more creative, people

deleted 3y ago
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anders_p 3y ago
That's mostly because movies are a condensed media that has to use shorthand for everything. (and writers are often lazy). You don't have time in a movie to explain everything, so they fall back on tropes we all know. Like "MIT super hacker" or "Harvard miracle lawyer". Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories that explain character details and quirks in more creative ways.
- chongli 3y ago
  That's mostly because movies are a condensed media ... Books have all the time in the world to make up convoluted background stories Which is why all of the creative energy has moved into serialized TV shows. Movies are almost completely creatively bankrupt these days, having become a never-ending stream of CG-spectacles and superhero plots.

prvc 3y ago

>a rough estimate of about 100,000 undergraduates at top private schools in the U.S. That might sound like a lot, but it’s compared to 22 million total undergraduates in the country. In other words, top private schools are educating less than half a percent of Americans. The entire Harvard undergrad student body could fit into the University of Michigan football stadium more than 15 times over. Those figures are completely irrelevant. The proportion of those 22M undergraduates who will need to make use of any specialized knowledge or skills acquired during their student-hood is also miniscule. They are simply following a social convention by going to these schools. There is no equivalence between these populations, except by sloppy word-based reasoning.

uneekname 3y ago

I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit: > what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school. If the same money was put toward social mobility, the most successful people in our country could be folks who grew up in poverty. Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed. > toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades ... where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch... That's been happening for much longer than four decades, lol

skizm 3y ago
FWIW, most Ivy League and other top schools (MIT, Stanford) offer extreme discounts on tuition for students with household income under around $150K. Often times they'll pay somewhere between 0-10% of the actual tuition. If your family makes less than $75k, I think you can go to most or all of these schools for free (in tuition at least, not sure about room/board/food).
- uneekname 3y ago
  I'm glad they do that. But those kids still have to get in. Which is much more difficult for a kid graduating from an under-resourced high school. I went to a very privileged high school. There were so many eyeballs on my class' test scores, recommendations, personal essays...of course we were going to succeed. Most of us got into our top choice schools. You often need a lot more than money to get into these schools.
  - cudgy 3y ago
    Money is at the root of everything you just mentioned.
- 3y ago

iwillmemberthis 3y ago

Formal education is a great tool, however the organisation that delivers it is irrelevant. Brilliant people are brilliant. They're the people you want to hire. And those people will be learning from everything, not just their Ivy League school. IMO large amounts of students topping IT classes at these schools are doing majority of the learning on their own at a faster pace.

fullshark 3y ago

People who understand that higher education quality is basically at parity and what matters is your peers/connections fostered in college + the doors that open for you based on what school you went to. The perceived elite schools give you a leg up in life, this is true for every country on the planet, and a lot of parents/kids work extremely hard to try and get into them for a reason.

sublinear 3y ago
This is exactly it and why admitting more people to ivy league schools will entirely dilute what value was there.
trgn 3y ago
> this is true for every country on the planet No, it's a cultural thing. There's really two points in that article: - (1) people are overestimating the actual lifetime effects of attending an elite school. - (2) people are obsessing over attending (or their children attending) elite schools. That second one is a spiritual failure, not just one of ignorance. That upper middle-class obsession with the brand of education may not be uniquely american (i read similar horror stories about china for example), but it is certainly very pronounced here. It is in no way similar to how kids and families choose universities in say western europe imho.
- adamsmith143 3y ago
  >No, it's a cultural thing. IIT's, Peking/Tsinghua, SNU(Korea), University of Tokyo, Oxbridge, etc. etc. Cultural thing that happens across the entire world?
  - trgn 3y ago
    i guess we're just going around in circles. It happens nowhere near US levels in e.g. western europe.
    - TMWNN 3y ago

Eumenes 3y ago

If you're involved in hiring in the tech industry, the particular school doesn't matter as much as it used to, unless you're super focused in research or something arcane like quantum computing. Post graduate vs undergrad is a different ball game. But from my experience, MIT is special, but other Ivy's, not as much. I'm a big fan of schools like RPI, Drexel, Waterloo, Virginia Tech, etc. The co-op program produces very strong engineers. Ivy's may produce better product managers though.

netbioserror 3y ago

The issue with the Ivy League and its elitist gatekeeping is its rising pattern of rubber-stamping deeply unimpressive people. These schools are supposed to actively seek out the best and forge them into the most capable people who have ever existed. Instead, they're lifelong credentials and status for heirs who are missing the talent and discipline of their forefathers. And then, as others have mentioned, they have spread a false culture of using those credentials as a lifelong door-pass into anything someone might want to do, when this is deeply untrue for anyone who hasn't gone to the Ivy League. For most people, a bachelor's gets them past a resume filter for their first job; from there, future employers only care about the value they created at the last job.

gochi 3y ago
A great summary, there is a dramatic mismatch in what the ivies suggest they do, and what they actually do and this has horrible consequences for society.

dbg31415 3y ago

> More than half of Stony Brook students from the bottom 20% of the income distribution make it to the top 20%! That’s amazing! That is really impressive! And look, more schools should focus on this metric. As an Ivy League grad, you can get the "education" anywhere. Ivies, State Schools (ha, ome Ivies are State Schools!), Community Colleges, Udemy, Khan Academy, YouTube... once you learn how to learn, the sky is the limit. And learning how to learn on your own, and in a way where your failures as you learn aren't life threatening... I'd say that's the real key to life-long success. But there's nothing going to an Ivy taught me that was unique to that school. For the most part, I found the "famous" professors to be miserable during my undergrad. Like they may know the material inside and out, and their books may be used by other schools, but that doesn't make them good lecturers. In fact, most of them kind of sucked at it, and you could tell it wasn't how they'd spend their time if the university didn't say, "Oh, thanks for the book, keep 'em coming, but you also have to teach an undergrad class too..." Outside of education though, that's the real benefit. The network there... the opportunities some of my peers had, and I had, because of their connections... And it's a mind shift. Higher expectations, to be sure -- for myself, and others around me. (And, over time, that leads to the ability to teach others ways to improve their game.) And look, as a kid starting out, getting a few wins in early on makes the world seem a lot less uphill. Even small things, like being able to make a good first impression when I looked for jobs as a new grad (or even 20 years on), people giving me the benefit of the doubt because of the school I went to -- small things turned out to be huge. That initial first impression "I bet this kid is good..." is so valuable. Creates a nice confidence feedback loop too. All things being equal, I sure am glad I went to an Ivy. I didn't learn anything at school that I couldn't have learned other places. Its was just nice to have that networking opportunity. I look through my friends and I have a huge range of highly successful people in my network. And not all of them went to Ivys, but I will say that having that "starter network" allowed me to connect with other successful people, offer them opportunities, build relationships... like attracts like. And having high expectations seems to attract others with high expectations. (I fully understand now that my going to an Ivy League school, even as a financial aid recipient, really had more to do with my parents than me. As an 18 year-old kid... what do you know? You're just along for the ride, and taking the ramp my parents set up for me -- I took the opportunities I could, but I didn't realize it until much later how my perceived choices were really because they busted their asses to make sure the I had good options in front of me.) Anyway, for a kid who grew up on a cattle ranch... going to an Ivy was huge for me. Huge. Like opened all kinds of doors that never would have been accessible to me.

SilverBirch 3y ago

One of the things that is fascinating about America is that their obsession with race draws attention away from Class. The value of getting into Harvard- sure, you'll get a good education. You might even get a great education! But what you're also going to get is membership of a club that is going to offer you opportunities for the rest of your life. Once you view it that way then changing the composition of the elite universities takes on a completely different perspective. Because if you break that old boys club, suddenly access to great job opportunities and high political office become 1000x more meritocratic. Do we really think that Harvard and Yale have such a fantastic admissions process that they managed to spot and select every single future Supreme Court Justice at the age of 20? No don't be silly. Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you. And the role of Harvard is to zealously nurture this in-group, because that's what creates their value, and the core of that is legacy admissions.

deltarholamda 3y ago
>Instead Harvard and Yale have created an environment where every single step through your career as a Harvard grad there's a helping hand for you This is the key to the Ivies' brand. And it's not really covered in the article, but the reason we care about the Ivies is because whatever fad catches on in the Ivies goes on to become government policy. And why not? They are the best and the brightest, the great and good, destined to guide the benighted masses into the future. Bill Buckley famously said he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard. Interestingly, this somewhat reflects the idea behind Free Software, where many eyes make bugs shallow. If you were trained in an Ivy, everybody you work with came from an Ivy, all of the potential eyes work the same way, so the bugs remain deep.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

(2021) Conversation from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240354

parpfish 3y ago

i think these analyses tend to focus on the impact of education on earnings because earnings are easy to measure. i would wager that it's more common for high achievers to chase after prestigious schools because they are high achievers and they are driven by being 'the best' rather than chasing some expected lifetime value/return on investment. that, or that they think it'll look good on their tinder bio (college applicants are teens after all).

flashback2199 3y ago

America does not have low economic mobility. Last I looked at the statistics, it's not top of the pack, but it's not low, either. Another thing: The primary driver of low economic mobility, at least in the US, is lack of that ticket to ride - a degree from a good university - and the poor kids who do go to an Ivy league university end up having high economic mobility, again, due to receiving a degree from a top university. This is really just a nitpick of the part of the article where they said that low economic mobility is a reason why Ivy league universities don't want to admit poor kids. Low economic mobility is not a factor. What they meant to say, probably, is that starting with family money will mean that a rich kid will end up with even more money than the poor kid, on average, and that would be correct AFAIK.

nostrademons 3y ago

The reason elite roles are elite is because they're focused on directing the activities of other people. Management consultants, executives, finance, entrepreneurs, politicians, to some extent tech - what these all have in common is that they make decisions influencing what problems all the other people in society will solve. By definition, there can only be a limited number of these roles in any complex society, because the roles are structured as the top of a pyramid. If you don't have a large number of people following you, you're not really an elite. The true purpose of the Ivy League isn't necessarily to train elites to do better at these roles. Everybody sucks at these roles, regardless of how much training you've had. Executives make boneheaded company-destroying and job-destroying decisions all the time, finance people make bad investments, politicians make bad laws. This is because the complexity of understanding and directing thousands to millions of people is more than any one person could conceivably do, regardless of how much training they've had. In fact, one of the reasons liberal democracies have generally done better than communism or fascism or feudalism is because they try to devolve as many of these decisions as possible to non-human systems like markets, elections, and algorithms. But having some selection filter for the people who will occupy these roles, whether it's the Ivy League or imperial China's civil service exam, seems to result in less braindead decisions than having absolutely no filter. More importantly, the Ivy League also functions as a way to take potential counter-elites and assimilate them into the existing system so that they can take roles that preserve it rather than destroy it. The most dangerous thing for a socioeconomic system is a leader who can convince a majority of people that the existing system needs to be cast down and replaced with a competing one. Ivy League universities work like an escape valve, trying to identify people that may be poor but smart and give them the connections and education (indoctrination?) to believe that they can make themselves less poor within the existing system without having to destroy it.

user_named 3y ago

The author doesn't get the first thing about the education system, and complains that the elite schools are too small. That's exactly the point. They are small in order to keep them elite. If everyone got into Harvard, many would decline. They'd go to a new, more selective school instead. Because universities are not in the business of education but the business of credentialing. It's about being different, more elite. That's what they sell.

piuantiderp 3y ago
The top students across a population are hurt more from interacting with below average students than the below average is helped by interacting with them.
- nostromo95 3y ago
  Would you mind quoting a source?
  - piuantiderp 3y ago
    What do you think MIT and Stanford are about? Removing the noise....

photochemsyn 3y ago

Ivy League schools may not have the best research facilities or opportunities in terms of being on the cusp of the latest cutting-edge technological and scientific developments. Their facilities are often a bit old and funky, with some notable exceptions. In terms of cost to value ratio, ($80K - $90K per year seems to be the media-reported range) there are likely equivalent learning opportunities elsewhere for much less. However, I think most people know undergrads go to Ivy League schools simply to make connections with wealthy people that will lead to lucrative post-college appointments, that's why legacy admissions are not going away. It's become like the British public school system of 100 years ago in that respect - a social club for aristocrats.