20 ms·

Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

tbarbugli 3y ago
Problems, problems, problems. What about constructive ideas?
marcinzm 3y ago
This article misses the simple fact that the type of fellow students you have will impact how well you do as a student. Humans are social creatures and will influence each other's behavior. That's not even getting into negative pressure from things like bullying. edit: Also their point on the curriculum being similar misses the fact that the standard for doing well differs. Barely learning some material is different from understanding it well. I've had the experience of taking various college math classes from a variety of institutions. There is a very large difference in the effort I had to put in to do well at a top school versus a middling school. This is of course related to my first point on the quality of students mattering as you simply cannot have the same bar given such different student populations.
- joelfried 3y ago
  Doesn't that enhance the effect of the gate rather than detract from it? If, ceteris paribus, being around the shiniest of gold stars helps you shimmer a little brighter, that seems likely to make the gating-function effect more pronounced, not less. My criticism of the article is that there's no alternative solution given. You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function . . .
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    One of the points of the article seemed to be to do gating latter rather than earlier. I'm saying that this is detrimental as being around the dullest stars will make you a dull star more often than not.
    - joelfried 3y ago
      Perhaps I missed it but I didn't see the author put forward a mechanism for how the "gate later" approach was supposed to work. Did I miss it? To your point though, absent an implementation of "gate later", it's not clear to me that what the author would want would put you near the "dullest stars". There's no way Harvard (or any other Ivy+) would accept a "gate later" implementation that would give them the dullest of stars. The differentiators between folks with any non-zero chance of acceptance are already pretty small, and I don't think "allow everyone in" would be feasible as they would not have room to put all of the people who want to be there.
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    > You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead. What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Stratification is inevitable but efforts to disintermediate lifetime quality of life from status (Ivy) is warranted (depending upon your viewpoint on merit).
- thorel 3y ago
  Isn't this what is suggested below the second picture? > Really, it’s harder than this picture suggests, because many experiences are based on other students. If I want you as my project partner but you want to forget I exist, then something has to give.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    I'm saying that the effect is much much more impactful than they make it seem with their one line throwaway comment in a long article.
HPsquared 3y ago
There is always a ruling class. It's an emergent phenomenon which always reasserts itself after any upset. Basically a law of nature.
- BoxOfRain 3y ago
  Isn't pre-agricultural society supposed to have been fairly egalitarian in comparison?
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    There were plenty of agricultural societies that were also fairly egalitarian. One interesting bias we tend have is that we identify "advanced" societies by how much they look like our own. This leads to a general bias towards deeply hierarchial, stratified societies being described/perceived favorably in media against their less familiar neighbors.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Which ones were fairly egalitarian compared to others?
      - AlotOfReading 3y ago
        The ones I was specifically thinking about were the Puebloans of the American Southwest. There's a famous old paper whose title summarizes the situation pretty well: "Although they have petty captains, they obey them badly"
      - trgn 3y ago
        I mean, it doesn't need to be extreme comparisons. We have gini-coefficient already, which captures similar. The rankings correspond reasonably to my intuition too, when I think of which have "elite" universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality#Gini_coefficient,_before_taxes_and_transfers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
sugarpile 3y ago
It has fallen out of favor but I am a massive proponent for graduated drivers licenses. Free toll roads would be silly but higher/removed speed limits seem 100% ok to me as long as it's coupled with an actual assessment of driving ability, semi-frequent required reassessment, and stiffer penalties for things such as DUI when driving in the graduated speed limit range.
- Xeoncross 3y ago
  On a related note, I consider paying for toll roads to be a form of health insurance. I know the newest teen drivers out cruising with their friends aren't paying $6 to race each other down the toll road and likely crash with me. I've seen some crazy stuff on the freeways and much safer driving on toll roads.
  - dublinben 3y ago
    Now imagine how much even more safe you’d all be if you were riding on a train, and those youths were harmlessly racing each other on bikes on a nearby separated bike path.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Now imagine how much safer you’d all be if you stayed home and never went anywhere. This is a ridiculously regressive argument.
      - Xeoncross 3y ago
        I'm all for both of these actually. However, until utopia happens and we don't have to use cars or commute I'm thankful for the little improvements.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Interesting idea, not sure how enforcement would work. That being said, this pretty much already happens in practice. Many people go their whole lives driving (safely) over the speed limit without ever getting a ticket, because they aren't being reckless about it. Generally police officers will ignore you if you're just going with the flow or slightly faster. It's when you start going a lot faster or weaving or being otherwise reckless that they start to care.
viburnum 3y ago
Every tech company I’ve worked at has been run by Ivy people but all the actual code is written by Cal State graduates and high school dropouts.
- waynesonfire 3y ago
  Yes. I see people promoted to elevated managerial positions not on merit but were they went to school. We deal with this by "managing up", it's exhausting.
  - viburnum 3y ago
    It can be very draining.
- flkenosad 3y ago
  Ivy has the money, we have the brains.
- vkazanov 3y ago
  Does that include CTOs? I've been around quite a few companies, and this ivy/oxbridge thingie mostly involves working in areas with a strong prestige element to them. I.e. there get-shit-done areas, and there are showing-off areas, with very different ruling classes in them, different problems too.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  This is not true of any FAANG and I've worked for all of them. Go to any of them and you will see that most of the SWEs are some combination of MIT, Cal, Stanford, and tier-1 public schools and top 20 (by US News Report) private schools.
  - codekansas 3y ago
    From my experience the best people are usually state school undergrad (e.g., Berkeley / UIUC / UNC / UW / GTech) plus selective grad school (Harvard / Stanford / MIT / CMU). At the graduate level those schools are much more meritocratic and it's usually a better indicator of ability. Plus doing well at one of those undergrads is actually really hard.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I find the Harvard angst interesting. I’ve never once felt someone else going to Harvard impacted my life in any way whatsoever. I’ve advanced further than everyone I know that went to Harvard in my career and not once did someone wink at the Harvard guy and pass me over. I’m sure it happens, and I’m sure there are secret clubs I don’t get invited to (well the Harvard club is pretty nice and I was invited there by a great uncle who went to Harvard - they have these really great puffy dinner rolls). But it’s never caused me a moment of anxiety, suffering, doubt, or jealousy. The fascination has never made sense to me.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  their dropouts impact your life tho.
- merth 3y ago
  probably nobody felt Salomon Brothers impacted their life but he changed your life more than Michael Jordan, the iPod and YouTube put together. -Big Short
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Given I’ve spent a long time on Wall Street that quote doesn’t quite jibe with me ;-) I’d also say it’s false for almost anyway - YouTube directly impacts most people considerably more than Wall Street shenanigans, and that I lived the plot of the big short and know what actually happened for a first hand fact, I can assure you the big short is extraordinarily short of accuracy.
    - kevinventullo 3y ago
      Maybe this is veering off-topic, but as someone outside of that industry who understands the basic ideas around repackaging loans, etc., I’m very curious to hear which aspects you think are inaccurate!
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
542458 3y ago
> But we agree on the ideal, right? In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist. Aren’t “path” and “track” essentially synonyms? And why wouldn’t there be advanced classes? Somebody who wants to become a tradesperson needs to know math, but doesn’t need the same level of advanced math that somebody who is interested in particle physics would need.
- singron 3y ago
  "track" probably refers to "tracking", which is education jargon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) > Tracking is separating students by academic ability into groups...
  - Ntrails 3y ago
    Right. And what do you think a path is if not separating students by academic interest into groups? Now, I'll concede there's a difference between interest and ability, but it will probably come out in the wash, as failure to keep up will typically result in a loss of interest
kneebonian 3y ago
No the problem goes thusly. The university was a place of learning, education, and becoming a better person. It was focused on the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Then it became noticed that smart educated people went to college, and so the idea then became if you went to college you to must be smart and educated. Then because that was accepted as true many people saw college as the path to a better life. Then after WW2 because college was seen as the path to a better life the US Govt. decided that everyone should get the chance to go to college with the GI Bill. Then college morphed from a place you went to learn to study and to understand to a place you go so you could get a job. Then because that is why people were going colleges started optimizing as places to get a job. Harvard became optimized for getting certain types of jobs, namely CEO, politician, etc, essentially seen as the jobs of "the elite". But remember for every person who went to Harvard and is now an overqualified CEO there are also 10 Andy Bernards out there. So the whole purpose of the university and higher education has been gutted, as thanks to the introduction of the Business and Communications degrees you can actually be college educated while learning nothing of real value, or of beauty or science or anything that the traditional colleges existed to teach us. As a final though I leave this article against Tulip Subsidies. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...
- fallingknife 3y ago
  Very true. After basic needs are met, the majority of people will spend the majority of their efforts pursuing status. So anything that confers status will become focused on that alone to the exclusion of other goals.
- programmarchy 3y ago
  Seems like you've got your rose tinted glasses on. The first universities were established by religious leaders to organize/control priestly power. Basically the same as today.
  - kneebonian 3y ago
    Seems like your off. The first universities were the Acadamy of Plato and the rehtorical schools of the ancient Greeks. During the middle ages the universities were associated with the monastaries because those were the few places where literate people congregated. Plus there were only 5 areas of study in the early university. - Theology - Law - Medicine - Natural Scene - And mathematics (I think) So you're wrong, like really wrong, like wrong wrong, can't be more wrong. But hey I'm sure if you go back to /r/athiesm you'll get some more good talking points.
a2xd94 3y ago
The thing that gets me is that nearly every single podcast or article that talks about admissions and how fair/unfair they are focuses almost solely on Ivy League schools and leaves out the state and local colleges/universities that actually churn out 99% of college graduates in the US. Maybe we tax payers need to do better about steering the conversation towards those institutions that we fund as opposed to those that function almost solely in a closed legacy-admissions environment (regardless of what pretty/diverse narratives those schools would like to have us 'normies' believe).
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  That's an 80/20 or I guess 99/1 though. The actual quality of most local colleges is poor and is basically just a loan servicer subsidization program. If you want to be the lead engineer of a Fortune 500....you went to the 1%...not the 99. I think your argument is super solid and highlights what I'm saying here..but also the Ivy League club is basically just a billionaire boys club to keep the others out.
- PAPPPmAc 3y ago
  Many (most?) state schools don't do significantly competitive admissions, and many have state mandates in the vein of "Anyone who graduated in the top half of their in-state high school gets admitted with the following terms." For most students and employers, they are largely interchangeable except for in-state tuition being cheaper (and to be clear, I think that is a good thing). It's actually a bit of a problem in other ways though. The school I teach at gets an alarming number of students coming in as pre-engineering who have dramatic math or literacy deficits and would be better served with a year or two at a cheaper-for-everyone community college (or a not-broken highschool, but that's way harder to fix) instead of slamming into their first couple technical classes and failing because they don't understand variables and/or don't have the reading comprehension for the course materials unless/until they finish a pile of remediation. Universities have a profit motive to encourage this, since having a student take two years of high-margin large service classes while paying for room and board, then never consume any lower-margin resources, is a financial win for the university.
  - 3y ago
fallingknife 3y ago
I have no issue with Harvard existing. However, it should be taxed on its endowment and it should not receive taxpayer support like student loans unless it commits to being a purely meritocratic institution.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  That fails to address the main thrust of TFA: even if Harvard were to be purely objective in its admissions, it would be anti-meritocratic because of the boost of the credentials and the imperfections in any gating function.
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    I disagree that imperfect gatekeeping is worse than no gatekeeping. I also disagree with his point that gatekeeping should come as late as possible. That's how you get graduate students loaded down with debt who can't get a job in the field. Gatekeeping should come as soon as possible to allow the people who don't pass the gate the best opportunity to find some other path to succeed in.
mapgrep 3y ago
Post made some good points but in the end it's pretty nihilistic to say that elite spaces shouldn't exist merely because they tend to cultivate elites and other elite spaces. Also very reductive to say that Harvard exists just to perpetuate elitism (no, it has a genuine educational and research mission, whatever its various flaws, that's patently clear). The world is flawed and imperfect and perfect things don't really emerge from it. Harvard is glorious. Our best and oldest (in the US) university is bad because it's not sufficiently egalitarian, and let's destroy it? It's an engine for our society and other universities have followed in its footsteps. Stanford, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, the Claremont schools, etc etc - none of these were in the original ivy league, all are imperfect to some extent in their admissions and embrace and fulfillment of egalitarian ideals. They are also glorious though. They make our country a dynamic, innovative, intellectually vibrant place and attract students from around the world. They absolutely are key to our (staggering) economic and cultural success (in the US). Elite clubbiness is an unfortunate side effect of success, but it doesn't mean we should then intentionally obliterate the engine of that success out of distaste for the cose of it.
nsenifty 3y ago
Gating as late as possible was precisely the philosophy of the OMSCS program of Georgia Tech. They reduced the bar for admission and admitted as many as they could (given they didn't need to fit everyone in physical classrooms) but kept the same academic rigor. I benefited greatly getting this program, but would have never bothered to apply by taking GRE first (in my 30s, if I may add) otherwise.
aidenn0 3y ago
> [We should maximize individual potential even if this causes more variance than we have now]... But we agree on the ideal, right? Some people absolutely disagree with this ideal. One argument against gifted classes is roughly "Those kids will do alright regardless of the classroom, so we should ignore them and focus resources on less gifted kids"
Chabsff 3y ago
> There’s a reasonable argument for putting the top professors together in one school, sure, and maybe even PhD students. Who's "putting" the professors there? The entire thing seemingly hinges on the idea that Harvard's role in society is somehow intentional and planned, as opposed to emergent and organic. I just don't buy it. The institution's stated objective may be the creation "citizen-leaders", but the influence Harvard has, and the harm this causes, is entirely predicated on our willingness to buy that narrative. Make an argument that Harvard's importance and credibility is vastly overrated, go ahead. I'm fully on board with that. But don't go blaming the institution itself for it. There's a ton of organizations with similarly lofty goals and aspirations, but we don't consider them harmful. That's because the harm is coming from without, not within. Harvard doesn't need to not exist for us to be able to ignore it.
- r00fus 3y ago
  > The entire thing seemingly hinges on the idea that Harvard's role in society is somehow intentional and planned At some point it doesn’t matter. It’s a self-reinforcing systemic effect now. almost all of the political class having gone to these Ivys means Ivys have vastly more representation than anyone else.
- creer 3y ago
  These ideas have a lot of following - that things are planned, intentional, designed to be that way. We might hear "why is that job worth so much money and that one isn't?" or here "why Harvard, at all?". And this is worth countering. Society as a whole rarely plans "one more Harvard" - and when it tries, it rarely succeeds. Many people did work hard to make Harvard (or anything that exists now) into what it is now - while from society's point of view, it just happened. At some stage these are the fruit of a market economy: some people put in their effort and now Harvard is what it is. In that case ironically, "putting the top professors together in one school" is pretty universal. High prestige institutions are attractive - for their colleagues, pay, facilities, projects, etc. The good news for the US is that there are many such "top institutions".
glimshe 3y ago
This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation and not a single person is required to go there or hire someone from there. Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution. Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them. Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  It used to have excellent reputation.
- beebmam 3y ago
  I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit. But if we're serious about a liberal/conservative "equality of opportunity" vs a progressive/socialist "equality of outcome" reality, then we should consider that children have very little consent over the kind of education and familial upbringing they get, yet that childhood education and familial upbringing has profound implications as to whether they can get admitted to a school like Harvard or not. If we're serious about equality of opportunity society, then we should take a lottery admissions policy for young adults seriously. But it's fine if you don't care about equality at all, at least be explicit about it.
  - whymauri 3y ago
    Why not tackle inequality earlier in the funnel than college admissions? Better primary schooling and family resources? A college admission lottery doesn't seem to be a serious solution.
curiousllama 3y ago
> But we agree on the ideal, right? In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist. If I grew up in this ideal, I'd be a bum. I was a lazy and arrogant teenager; my ideal path was to go "oh, sh*t, I need to work hard or I won't get into a good school" I'm not saying our system is perfect (or even good). But it's easy to critique a system when you acknowledge exactly 0 of its benefits.
Kyragem 3y ago
The existence of these institutions hinges solely on the reputation we assign to them. If we collectively recognize them for their role in perpetuating economic inequality, catering primarily to privileged white adults whose parents bought them a ticket to attend, their worth will diminish rapidly over time.
chinchilla2020 3y ago
The author is pontificating on some very fundamental things without considering reality. 8 Billion human beings cannot be jammed into the same exact university. It's as simple as that. Sorry for being reductive but that's the reality. Naturally, you have to have more universities. Naturally, some will be better than others. The author tries pushing some marxist ideas about how everything can be exactly equal but even in a marxist utopia you are going to have some neighborhoods/schools/universities/hospitals that are better than others.
xwowsersx 3y ago
Related: Glenn Loury in conversation with Jay Kaspian King. "Elite Schools Only Care About Rich Kids" https://youtu.be/lC-rviti8dU https://youtu.be/lC-rviti8dU
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
There have been several studies finding no benefit from going to “top” schools when controlling for student quality. So the entire premise is false.
seydor 3y ago
Bees select their next queens at random. They treat them literally royally and it grows to be a big wise queen and they are loyal to her. Maybe humans are more like other eusocial animals, and things like merit and equality are a comforting charade.
pxx 3y ago
> You can't start a tax-exempt country club. Uh... Sure you can? This is literally section 501(c)7; private clubs in general are exempt from federal income taxation.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  Country clubs have a specific business model and are definitely not exempt from federal income taxes. The Freemasons are exempt from income taxes as an organization though.
  - pxx 3y ago
    Some specific country clubs may not be 501(c)7s but country clubs in general often are. See, e.g.: https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2015/01/22/most-local-country-clubs-operate-as-nonprofits-enjoy-some-tax-breaks/ https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2015/01/22/most-loca... https://www.pugetsound.edu/sites/default/files/file/1359_FahningCountryClubsandTaxationACostBenefitAnalysisoftheNonProfitStatusofCountryClubs_0.pdf https://www.pugetsound.edu/sites/default/files/file/1359_Fah... and straight from the horse's mouth, the IRS: > Typical organizations that may qualify for exemption under IRC section 501(c)7) are: ... Country clubs, ..., Yacht clubs https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/atg_social_rec_clubs.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/atg_social_rec_clubs.pdf
sevenseventen 3y ago
A lot of these responses seem to think that Harvard is better to go to because the education is better there, which is explicitly if lightly addressed in the article. The article's thesis is that the benefit of going to Harvard is mostly derived from just from having gone to Harvard irrespective of the education itself. That could accrue just from the credential, or from the enormous and powerful social and support networks that graduates benefit from.
kweingar 3y ago
The most galling part about these institutions is that they have the capacity to teach many, many more students, and they don’t. They can’t expect me to keep a straight face when they prattle on about their "genuine educational mission", while their class sizes are artificially tiny so they can preserve The Brand and make sure The Club doesn’t get so big as to be unwieldy.
jononomo 3y ago
I think once a schools endowment goes over a certain amount they should simply be required to educate more students -- I think Harvard should just admit 10x the number of students that they currently admit.
photochemsyn 3y ago
The issue is that American academic institutions have adopted the inherited-wealth / social-class-based model that was so prevalent in Britain in the early 20th century. Elite schools are not centers of education so much as they are centers of networking for feeding the anoited few into positions in government and business, regardless of what actual skills and talents and abilities they possess. Eliminating legacy admissions and ensuring that K-12 schools across the country are of uniform high quality (in particular in the STEAM fields, yes that includes Art) would do much to reverse this trend, along with reducing college tuition costs. It's like wild salmon vs. farmed salmon - pampered students who never have to swim upstream don't develop the best qualities.
sokoloff 3y ago
> What would happen in schools if we lived in a magical dreamworld? I think the answer is: Each kid gets whatever experiences maximize their potential. That answer sure does sound like the stuff of magical dreamworlds. Whatever experiences maximize their potential is the province of families, not the stuff of society-paid education. It's not that it couldn't be provided by the latter, but the daunting expense means that it will never be funded to a level that maximizes on an individualized basis. What would that require? One teacher for every 4 kids, maybe you could stretch it to 6 or 8. On top of that, a multitude of specialists to ensure that any special needs are addressed in an individually customized fashion to maximize the potential of every kid. In many districts, we can't get agreement that we should feed every kid, let alone agreement that there should be roughly one professional adult in total for every 2-3 kids. > In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist. Those concepts would absolutely exist, just under a different label (and maybe not even that), because kids at the very top of the range would be taking something that would be readily recognizable as the close equivalent of today's advanced classes.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  One can argue that this argument is actually what the Soviet Union actually did always. It worked, at least at first. They beat the US to orbit on the back of that despite the US technically having better people. Eventually the US got the game plan in order and got to the moon first but since then the exact argument that the article makes happened. The people in the classroom became the people with the best connections rather than the best abilities.
deleted 3y ago
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endisneigh 3y ago
this article had so many terrible takes I don't know where to begin. the simplest refutation of the entire thing is the extensive evidence that people who are accepted to top schools, but do not attend have similar achieves as those who go. this lends credence to the idea that the top schools are simplest triaging the successful and do not create them, in general. Of course there are specific exceptions to this, such as Supreme Court Justices, but in general it seems to be true. The paper (https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...) is ultimately flawed because it doesn't (and cannot) evaluate the simplest thing: look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with. Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges". In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition. the stratification of society is an emergent phenomenon.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  > the simplest refutation of the entire thing is the extensive evidence that people who are accepted to top schools, but do not attend have similar achieves as those who go. This completely misses the point because 95% of the people that apply do not get in. Please think of the rest of us!
drdrek 3y ago
Equality is one value out of many important values of a society. Looking for ways to over-optimize society for this one thing leads to many silly conclusions.
montyboy_us 3y ago
“If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?" Because success, outside entertainment, is oft detectable through cultural mores; well ingrained and detectable by 18 years of age.
TrackerFF 3y ago
It is much easier these days to interview for top jobs that would have excluded you 20 years ago, because you went to the wrong schools. If you're a smart and ambitious student, don't let your alma mater be the deciding factor in your life. It is true, you may have to work much harder than those that can coast on their HYPS-pedigree, but as the saying goes: You can't keep a good man down. The anxiety of not getting accepted into a top school is mostly a juvenile phenomena.
pphysch 3y ago
If Harvard revolutionized its admissions tomorrow, elite debutants would find a different way to signal.
- mbauman 3y ago
  That was my favorite part of the article: > We should have a Marxist version of Goodhart’s law, something like: >> When a measure becomes a target, the privileged always find a way to win.
less_less 3y ago
I agree that there are many aspects of how elite universities work that are not what's best for society. I don't think this is the best thinkpiece on it though. One small thing that jumped out at me is the bit about "we don't have to sort kids at 18, because most colleges teach the same stuff". To support this point, the author compared Harvard Math 1a to SIUE Math 150. This is a bad comparison, because these are introductory math classes for first-year students who aren't math majors, used to satisfy distribution requirements or give math background for non-math-intensive courses. There's a placement system to decide what math class to take, probably at both universities, but here is Harvard's (2020-2021): https://www.math.harvard.edu/media/Math-for-first-year-students-2020-2021.pdf https://www.math.harvard.edu/media/Math-for-first-year-stude... As you can see, first-year Harvard math or physics majors sometimes take Math 21, but more likely Math 23, 25, or 55. (Math 55 is weirdly fetishized, but that's another story.) These classes are significantly more rigorous than Math 1. Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  > Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars. OK, and? How does this change anything? You have to be a PhD to be a mathematician anyway. I've become negatively polarized against this rigor fetishization, which serves exclusively to otherize normal folks in increasingly esoteric ways
  - less_less 3y ago
Bostonian 3y ago
Letting employers filter employees by SAT/ACT scores without fear of disparate impact lawsuits would reduce the Ivy League premium.
thatcherthorn 3y ago
The depth of the subject is much too great for an article. But, there's certainly some interesting discussion to be had around the relationship between people's general work outcomes and a strong gating mechanism evaluated earlier in life. I really hope we soon see innovation around education. When the entire corpus of human knowledge became available freely - surely we would've seen changes in higher education by now (if they were/are ever going to happen).
dekhn 3y ago
Harvard exists for strategic reasons. It helps maintain the establishment (that ambiguously defined collection of people and processes that keep the US running and a major world power). Getting rid of it would likely have a very negative effect in the medium-term.
deleted 3y ago
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earthboundkid 3y ago
Working at NYT isn't as gated as the article suggests. I know two people who work there. AFAIK, neither went to an Ivy. (Old joke: How do you know if someone went to an Ivy? They tell you.) You do need a college degree, but you can work at a smaller paper first and get recruited from there.
JoshTko 3y ago
Harvard is obviously a problem. Does any institution work against the interests of the people that fund it? Rich people fund Harvard. Harvard will work in the interests of rich people. Meritocracy is not in the in the interests of rich people. Harvard is just a pay to play gated community.
waffletower 3y ago
Endowments are not meritocratic. While I can't quote data, I imagine that wealthy students provide much more growth for endowments, which in turn contribute not only to reputation, but also research, and ratio boosting hiring capacity. While Princeton and other Ivies, do have aggressive financial aid programs, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/09/08/princeton-will-enhance-its-groundbreaking-financial-aid-program https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/09/08/princeton-will-enh..., it is important for the elite schools to admit the wealthy, particularly students whose families will donate generously initially upon admission, and also throughout the student's life. Less wealthy students are less attractive fiscally, but reputation is influenced by a schools willingness to admit lower income students.
tlb 3y ago
You could base a society on randomly selecting people at a young age to be elite. It would still have advantages over a society with no elites at all. The goal of having an elite class is to make better collective decisions about how society should organize itself. Decisions are best made by people with the best information, and elites (regardless of any intrinsic merit) have better information. By virtue of being elite, they get better educations and more inside access to new information. The classical way of doing this was through inherited privilege. Whatever intrinsic merit first-generation aristocrats may have had to win their position is mostly gone after a few generations, so for example 19th century English aristocrats had little genetic advantage over the average population. But they were selected at birth to receive the best educations and inside access to each other, so they made better decisions than if you chose random citizens in adulthood to put in charge. Part of what Harvard does is to say "You are now an elite. You will shape the future of society." Most students take that seriously and try to become worthy of the challenge. No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge. The closest natural experiment is societies that select leaders based on physical strength and courage. They seem to make fairly bad decisions.
- adifgoi0nio 3y ago
  >No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge. This is a practice called 'sordition'. As evidenced by the fact it has a name and a Wikipedia article, it is not something you just invented. It was famously used in Athens and is how American juries are selected today, I think I would support a revival of sordition. Perhaps we could start small, perhaps by selecting one representative for each state at random.
  - tlb 3y ago
    Sortition happened in adulthood, though. The interesting (and untried) experiment is to designate people early in life, so they can grow up being educated and prepared for their future responsibility.
steve76 3y ago
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thrawa8387336 3y ago
"Old man yelling at cloud" Guys can we move on?
gwbas1c 3y ago
A few years ago I read a book called "Listen Liberal." It was a book written by liberals, for liberals. One of the criticisms it made of the Obama Administration's cabinet was that it was far too heavy in choosing Ivy-League graduates. The book pointed out that the cabinet was racially / ethnically diverse, but because the vast majority of the cabinet was Ivy-League educated, it had all of the biases that come with an Ivy-League education. I don't think Harvard is the problem: They are an organization that exists, and the selection criteria they use is to choose people who they believe will graduate. Granted, someone could argue that they should take more risks on applicants, but that's not my argument to make. In part, the value of these institutions is that they are exclusive. Many people argue that the advantage of an Ivy League education, compared to an equivalent, less exclusive school, is the people you meet while on campus. This difference can only be maintained if the schools maintain their selection criteria. I think the bigger problem is that far too many people / organizations put too much weight on an Ivy League education. It's generally unobtainable, even if you "check the boxes," because these schools get far more applicants than they can ever accept. Which is why I don't want to argue that they should change their selection criteria: Who is to say what is the best selection criteria? Everyone will try to argue that it should be changed in a way to benefit the person making the argument. IMO: We need some new institutions to displace the Ivy League as the "best." Perhaps, if there are enough schools with differently selective admission criteria, everyone will be able to find a selective school that they can get into?
noobermin 3y ago
This article is actually quite good. Too bad some on HN are too blind to their own life circumstances to examine their biases and perform some introspection.
squokko 3y ago
"We don’t need to sort and classify 18-year olds. It’s absurd. Stop trying to fix it and get rid of it." Would the OP make the same argument about athletics? That 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo and 18-year-old Frankie Fatass, instead of being sorted and classified, should be put into the same soccer program?
- lapcat 3y ago
  Which soccer program are you referring to? At age 18, Cristiano Ronaldo was not attending a nonprofit school, he was a member of a for-profit professional team.
  - squokko 3y ago
    Yes, differences between 18 year olds are extreme when you look at the best vs. the average
    - lapcat 3y ago
      You didn't answer my question.
      - squokko 3y ago
        The "soccer program" is the professional soccer team that Cristiano Ronaldo was on. Should Freddy Fatass have been playing for them too?
        lapcat 3y ago
        No. This is why I said "Cristiano Ronaldo was not attending a nonprofit school, he was a member of a for-profit professional team." Harvard is a nonprofit school, financially supported by the government in various ways. The standards are different. If Harvard wants to act like a business, then it needs to give up its nonprofit status, forsake government support, and pay taxes as a business.
jwie 3y ago
The problem is not that elites exist. The problem is that the current elites hate the people they rule over, and conspire with capital to rob everyone. The dreamworld is not a classless society. But rather one where the leaders love those they lead and work for their betterment. That being said, I’ve met enough Harvard and ivy types to have a low opinion. They’re no smarter than anyone else. These networks are powerful though. They will eventually collapse due to the crushing weight of their own incompetence and greed, but such corrections to the natural order take generational time.
munificent 3y ago
> I think the answer is: Each kid gets whatever experiences maximize their potential. That’s not controversial, is it? Ideally, they’d learn whatever subjects, in whatever style would best help them flourish into rich, happy, successful adults. Actually, that isn't what people want. If your ideal is "what each child receives is what that child deserves" then the only inputs that determine what the kid receives are from the kid themselves. What is missing from that equation? Parents. One of the fundamental goals of almost all parents is help my kid. They want to increase the opportunity and resources their kid has regardless of that kids' potential relative to others or whether the kid deserves those extra resources in any general or moral sense. This is just another way to think of Pinker's trilemma, which is one of the most insightful things I've ever read about human society: "No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."
- r00fus 3y ago
  At what point is freedom mainly about ignoring inheritance taxes? That’s a highly political view of “freedom”.
  - munificent 3y ago
    By "give their wealth to their children", Pinker doesn't mean "when they die". He's referring to the more general observation that parents want to take care of their kids as well as they can. But they do that in a strictly unfair way: they prioritize their kids over all other kids simply because they happened to have spawned them, a property the kid has zero control over.
graycat 3y ago
The OP (original post) describes what we might call problems, issues, or challenges in US formal, academic education, say, K through 4 year college. Here is a theme of a rough solution, necessarily "rough" if only because US education and the problems are not precisely stated or understood. (1) Learning, Knowledge, Understanding. Yup, for doing well in life, learning, ... is usually (being "rough" here) from somewhat useful to crucial. Some of the knowledge is explicitly taught in the education, some is taught outside that education, and still more an individual has to pick up, ..., discover, on their own. E.g., on my own I had to learn the fast Fourier transform and discover office politics. (2) US Academics. The US K through college emphasizes learning. In an old joke the teacher has a full pitcher of knowledge, pours it into the student's empty pitcher, on tests has the student pour back what they have learned, and determines the grade from the fraction that comes back. From this "emphasis" and "process", there can be a LOT of struggle, strain, lost sleep, hard work, anxiety, etc. for a student and their family. (3) Surprise. After 4 year college, US academics no longer much cares what the student has learned and, instead, cares almost only about what the student can DO, especially in delivering new research results. For more, do well in such research and all the student did in education will be forgiven, forgotten, ignored, etc. So, if want a degree from a famous research university, get a graduate degree, Master's and/or Ph.D. Generally admission to such university's graduate school is much easier than to their 4 year college -- also much cheaper. For such admission, doing well on the GRE (graduate record exam) can help. Having done well in an early career can help. Some research can help a lot more, really close the deal, giving the student admission, no tuition, and maybe some money for doing some ugrad teaching, work on some prof's research project, etc. Summary: For a degree from a famous research university, go for a graduate degree and there emphasize research. Or, what US research universities care about, more than nearly everything else, is in just one word research. In my case, while in grad school, I picked a problem, for two weeks did some research, and found a solution, clearly publishable (later did publish the solution). Presto, bingo, magic, I was regarded as a star student in the department, and everything else about my work was irrelevant. I went ahead and did some dissertation research, also clearly publishable, while doing that work was beyond any criticism, had a shiny halo, was untouchable, got my Ph.D., and with great joy LEFT. The OP mentions Harvard; I got into Princeton and Cornell but never applied to Harvard. Sure, going to any such university for any degree can involve more than just "research", but might want to critically evaluate the "more". One more point: Research that finds mathematical solutions, mathematizes the subject, is relatively highly regarded. For that approach, a big issue is learning the math, but in grad school beware of advanced math courses: Commonly the teaching is poor and the hidden agenda is to set up a competition to filter the students. But if mostly know the math before the course, then can be 10 yards from the finish line in a 2 mile race, be by a wide margin the best student in the class, and greatly reduce the chances of being filtered. Yes, doing so well can cause some of the profs to resent you and become hostile. With math, doing the learning before the class is relatively easy: Just get some of the best books, usually from famous authors, study the theorems and proofs, work the exercises, try to find intuitive views of the material, reasons for the particular definitions and theorems, and examples. Beyond calculus, I'd suggest: Abstract algebra, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, measure theory, Fourier theory, differential forms, the Gauss, Green, and Stokes theorems, differential geometry, probability based on measure theory, and statistics based on that probability. Some good authors include Halmos, Nering, Coddington, Rudin, Royden, Breiman, Neveu, Cinlar. To boil it down to just two books to study carefully I'd recommend Halmos for linear algebra (Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces) and Breiman for probability.
lorrainefloyd 3y ago
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Nellyz 3y ago
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Problems, problems, problems. What about constructive ideas?

This article misses the simple fact that the type of fellow students you have will impact how well you do as a student. Humans are social creatures and will influence each other's behavior. That's not even getting into negative pressure from things like bullying. edit: Also their point on the curriculum being similar misses the fact that the standard for doing well differs. Barely learning some material is different from understanding it well. I've had the experience of taking various college math classes from a variety of institutions. There is a very large difference in the effort I had to put in to do well at a top school versus a middling school. This is of course related to my first point on the quality of students mattering as you simply cannot have the same bar given such different student populations.

joelfried 3y ago
Doesn't that enhance the effect of the gate rather than detract from it? If, ceteris paribus, being around the shiniest of gold stars helps you shimmer a little brighter, that seems likely to make the gating-function effect more pronounced, not less. My criticism of the article is that there's no alternative solution given. You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function . . .
- marcinzm 3y ago
  One of the points of the article seemed to be to do gating latter rather than earlier. I'm saying that this is detrimental as being around the dullest stars will make you a dull star more often than not.
  - joelfried 3y ago
    Perhaps I missed it but I didn't see the author put forward a mechanism for how the "gate later" approach was supposed to work. Did I miss it? To your point though, absent an implementation of "gate later", it's not clear to me that what the author would want would put you near the "dullest stars". There's no way Harvard (or any other Ivy+) would accept a "gate later" implementation that would give them the dullest of stars. The differentiators between folks with any non-zero chance of acceptance are already pretty small, and I don't think "allow everyone in" would be feasible as they would not have room to put all of the people who want to be there.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  > You want to abolish all admissions? That's cool. What do we replace it with? A lottery seems like a lead balloon and anything else seems to have an effective gatekeeping function If an institution doesn't want to simply accept the top N performers on one or more standardized tests, they could go one step further and perform an SAT/ACT-weighted lottery followed by a culling. This can be per-major or per-department, but many universities already enforce a set of near-universal required courses. Set a minimum performance requirement on those courses and bada bing bada boom, the institution is getting the cream of the crop for whatever quantitative definition of "cream" they want to set. People will be naturally disincentivized from applying to overly competitive programs in which they're likely to fail. There are probably many effective variations of this idea, too, like using a geographically distributed population-weighted lottery for applicants meeting some threshold score instead. What are the failure modes of such quantitative approaches? Could the outcomes be worse than those of our current system? What are some better alternatives?
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Stratification is inevitable but efforts to disintermediate lifetime quality of life from status (Ivy) is warranted (depending upon your viewpoint on merit).
thorel 3y ago
Isn't this what is suggested below the second picture? > Really, it’s harder than this picture suggests, because many experiences are based on other students. If I want you as my project partner but you want to forget I exist, then something has to give.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  I'm saying that the effect is much much more impactful than they make it seem with their one line throwaway comment in a long article.

HPsquared 3y ago

There is always a ruling class. It's an emergent phenomenon which always reasserts itself after any upset. Basically a law of nature.

BoxOfRain 3y ago
Isn't pre-agricultural society supposed to have been fairly egalitarian in comparison?
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  There were plenty of agricultural societies that were also fairly egalitarian. One interesting bias we tend have is that we identify "advanced" societies by how much they look like our own. This leads to a general bias towards deeply hierarchial, stratified societies being described/perceived favorably in media against their less familiar neighbors.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Which ones were fairly egalitarian compared to others?
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      The ones I was specifically thinking about were the Puebloans of the American Southwest. There's a famous old paper whose title summarizes the situation pretty well: "Although they have petty captains, they obey them badly"
    - trgn 3y ago
      I mean, it doesn't need to be extreme comparisons. We have gini-coefficient already, which captures similar. The rankings correspond reasonably to my intuition too, when I think of which have "elite" universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality#Gini_coefficient,_before_taxes_and_transfers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

sugarpile 3y ago

It has fallen out of favor but I am a massive proponent for graduated drivers licenses. Free toll roads would be silly but higher/removed speed limits seem 100% ok to me as long as it's coupled with an actual assessment of driving ability, semi-frequent required reassessment, and stiffer penalties for things such as DUI when driving in the graduated speed limit range.

Xeoncross 3y ago
On a related note, I consider paying for toll roads to be a form of health insurance. I know the newest teen drivers out cruising with their friends aren't paying $6 to race each other down the toll road and likely crash with me. I've seen some crazy stuff on the freeways and much safer driving on toll roads.
- dublinben 3y ago
  Now imagine how much even more safe you’d all be if you were riding on a train, and those youths were harmlessly racing each other on bikes on a nearby separated bike path.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Now imagine how much safer you’d all be if you stayed home and never went anywhere. This is a ridiculously regressive argument.
    - Xeoncross 3y ago
      I'm all for both of these actually. However, until utopia happens and we don't have to use cars or commute I'm thankful for the little improvements.
jedberg 3y ago
Interesting idea, not sure how enforcement would work. That being said, this pretty much already happens in practice. Many people go their whole lives driving (safely) over the speed limit without ever getting a ticket, because they aren't being reckless about it. Generally police officers will ignore you if you're just going with the flow or slightly faster. It's when you start going a lot faster or weaving or being otherwise reckless that they start to care.

viburnum 3y ago

Every tech company I’ve worked at has been run by Ivy people but all the actual code is written by Cal State graduates and high school dropouts.

waynesonfire 3y ago
Yes. I see people promoted to elevated managerial positions not on merit but were they went to school. We deal with this by "managing up", it's exhausting.
- viburnum 3y ago
  It can be very draining.
flkenosad 3y ago
Ivy has the money, we have the brains.
vkazanov 3y ago
Does that include CTOs? I've been around quite a few companies, and this ivy/oxbridge thingie mostly involves working in areas with a strong prestige element to them. I.e. there get-shit-done areas, and there are showing-off areas, with very different ruling classes in them, different problems too.
endisneigh 3y ago
This is not true of any FAANG and I've worked for all of them. Go to any of them and you will see that most of the SWEs are some combination of MIT, Cal, Stanford, and tier-1 public schools and top 20 (by US News Report) private schools.
- codekansas 3y ago
  From my experience the best people are usually state school undergrad (e.g., Berkeley / UIUC / UNC / UW / GTech) plus selective grad school (Harvard / Stanford / MIT / CMU). At the graduate level those schools are much more meritocratic and it's usually a better indicator of ability. Plus doing well at one of those undergrads is actually really hard.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I find the Harvard angst interesting. I’ve never once felt someone else going to Harvard impacted my life in any way whatsoever. I’ve advanced further than everyone I know that went to Harvard in my career and not once did someone wink at the Harvard guy and pass me over. I’m sure it happens, and I’m sure there are secret clubs I don’t get invited to (well the Harvard club is pretty nice and I was invited there by a great uncle who went to Harvard - they have these really great puffy dinner rolls). But it’s never caused me a moment of anxiety, suffering, doubt, or jealousy. The fascination has never made sense to me.

behnamoh 3y ago
their dropouts impact your life tho.
merth 3y ago
probably nobody felt Salomon Brothers impacted their life but he changed your life more than Michael Jordan, the iPod and YouTube put together. -Big Short
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Given I’ve spent a long time on Wall Street that quote doesn’t quite jibe with me ;-) I’d also say it’s false for almost anyway - YouTube directly impacts most people considerably more than Wall Street shenanigans, and that I lived the plot of the big short and know what actually happened for a first hand fact, I can assure you the big short is extraordinarily short of accuracy.
  - kevinventullo 3y ago
    Maybe this is veering off-topic, but as someone outside of that industry who understands the basic ideas around repackaging loans, etc., I’m very curious to hear which aspects you think are inaccurate!
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago

542458 3y ago

> But we agree on the ideal, right? In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist. Aren’t “path” and “track” essentially synonyms? And why wouldn’t there be advanced classes? Somebody who wants to become a tradesperson needs to know math, but doesn’t need the same level of advanced math that somebody who is interested in particle physics would need.

singron 3y ago
"track" probably refers to "tracking", which is education jargon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_(education) > Tracking is separating students by academic ability into groups...
- Ntrails 3y ago
  Right. And what do you think a path is if not separating students by academic interest into groups? Now, I'll concede there's a difference between interest and ability, but it will probably come out in the wash, as failure to keep up will typically result in a loss of interest

kneebonian 3y ago

No the problem goes thusly. The university was a place of learning, education, and becoming a better person. It was focused on the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Then it became noticed that smart educated people went to college, and so the idea then became if you went to college you to must be smart and educated. Then because that was accepted as true many people saw college as the path to a better life. Then after WW2 because college was seen as the path to a better life the US Govt. decided that everyone should get the chance to go to college with the GI Bill. Then college morphed from a place you went to learn to study and to understand to a place you go so you could get a job. Then because that is why people were going colleges started optimizing as places to get a job. Harvard became optimized for getting certain types of jobs, namely CEO, politician, etc, essentially seen as the jobs of "the elite". But remember for every person who went to Harvard and is now an overqualified CEO there are also 10 Andy Bernards out there. So the whole purpose of the university and higher education has been gutted, as thanks to the introduction of the Business and Communications degrees you can actually be college educated while learning nothing of real value, or of beauty or science or anything that the traditional colleges existed to teach us. As a final though I leave this article against Tulip Subsidies. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie...

fallingknife 3y ago
Very true. After basic needs are met, the majority of people will spend the majority of their efforts pursuing status. So anything that confers status will become focused on that alone to the exclusion of other goals.
programmarchy 3y ago
Seems like you've got your rose tinted glasses on. The first universities were established by religious leaders to organize/control priestly power. Basically the same as today.
- kneebonian 3y ago
  Seems like your off. The first universities were the Acadamy of Plato and the rehtorical schools of the ancient Greeks. During the middle ages the universities were associated with the monastaries because those were the few places where literate people congregated. Plus there were only 5 areas of study in the early university. - Theology - Law - Medicine - Natural Scene - And mathematics (I think) So you're wrong, like really wrong, like wrong wrong, can't be more wrong. But hey I'm sure if you go back to /r/athiesm you'll get some more good talking points.

a2xd94 3y ago

The thing that gets me is that nearly every single podcast or article that talks about admissions and how fair/unfair they are focuses almost solely on Ivy League schools and leaves out the state and local colleges/universities that actually churn out 99% of college graduates in the US. Maybe we tax payers need to do better about steering the conversation towards those institutions that we fund as opposed to those that function almost solely in a closed legacy-admissions environment (regardless of what pretty/diverse narratives those schools would like to have us 'normies' believe).

agloe_dreams 3y ago
That's an 80/20 or I guess 99/1 though. The actual quality of most local colleges is poor and is basically just a loan servicer subsidization program. If you want to be the lead engineer of a Fortune 500....you went to the 1%...not the 99. I think your argument is super solid and highlights what I'm saying here..but also the Ivy League club is basically just a billionaire boys club to keep the others out.
PAPPPmAc 3y ago
Many (most?) state schools don't do significantly competitive admissions, and many have state mandates in the vein of "Anyone who graduated in the top half of their in-state high school gets admitted with the following terms." For most students and employers, they are largely interchangeable except for in-state tuition being cheaper (and to be clear, I think that is a good thing). It's actually a bit of a problem in other ways though. The school I teach at gets an alarming number of students coming in as pre-engineering who have dramatic math or literacy deficits and would be better served with a year or two at a cheaper-for-everyone community college (or a not-broken highschool, but that's way harder to fix) instead of slamming into their first couple technical classes and failing because they don't understand variables and/or don't have the reading comprehension for the course materials unless/until they finish a pile of remediation. Universities have a profit motive to encourage this, since having a student take two years of high-margin large service classes while paying for room and board, then never consume any lower-margin resources, is a financial win for the university.
- 3y ago

fallingknife 3y ago

I have no issue with Harvard existing. However, it should be taxed on its endowment and it should not receive taxpayer support like student loans unless it commits to being a purely meritocratic institution.

aidenn0 3y ago
That fails to address the main thrust of TFA: even if Harvard were to be purely objective in its admissions, it would be anti-meritocratic because of the boost of the credentials and the imperfections in any gating function.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  I disagree that imperfect gatekeeping is worse than no gatekeeping. I also disagree with his point that gatekeeping should come as late as possible. That's how you get graduate students loaded down with debt who can't get a job in the field. Gatekeeping should come as soon as possible to allow the people who don't pass the gate the best opportunity to find some other path to succeed in.

mapgrep 3y ago

Post made some good points but in the end it's pretty nihilistic to say that elite spaces shouldn't exist merely because they tend to cultivate elites and other elite spaces. Also very reductive to say that Harvard exists just to perpetuate elitism (no, it has a genuine educational and research mission, whatever its various flaws, that's patently clear). The world is flawed and imperfect and perfect things don't really emerge from it. Harvard is glorious. Our best and oldest (in the US) university is bad because it's not sufficiently egalitarian, and let's destroy it? It's an engine for our society and other universities have followed in its footsteps. Stanford, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, the Claremont schools, etc etc - none of these were in the original ivy league, all are imperfect to some extent in their admissions and embrace and fulfillment of egalitarian ideals. They are also glorious though. They make our country a dynamic, innovative, intellectually vibrant place and attract students from around the world. They absolutely are key to our (staggering) economic and cultural success (in the US). Elite clubbiness is an unfortunate side effect of success, but it doesn't mean we should then intentionally obliterate the engine of that success out of distaste for the cose of it.

nsenifty 3y ago

Gating as late as possible was precisely the philosophy of the OMSCS program of Georgia Tech. They reduced the bar for admission and admitted as many as they could (given they didn't need to fit everyone in physical classrooms) but kept the same academic rigor. I benefited greatly getting this program, but would have never bothered to apply by taking GRE first (in my 30s, if I may add) otherwise.

aidenn0 3y ago

> [We should maximize individual potential even if this causes more variance than we have now]... But we agree on the ideal, right? Some people absolutely disagree with this ideal. One argument against gifted classes is roughly "Those kids will do alright regardless of the classroom, so we should ignore them and focus resources on less gifted kids"

Chabsff 3y ago

> There’s a reasonable argument for putting the top professors together in one school, sure, and maybe even PhD students. Who's "putting" the professors there? The entire thing seemingly hinges on the idea that Harvard's role in society is somehow intentional and planned, as opposed to emergent and organic. I just don't buy it. The institution's stated objective may be the creation "citizen-leaders", but the influence Harvard has, and the harm this causes, is entirely predicated on our willingness to buy that narrative. Make an argument that Harvard's importance and credibility is vastly overrated, go ahead. I'm fully on board with that. But don't go blaming the institution itself for it. There's a ton of organizations with similarly lofty goals and aspirations, but we don't consider them harmful. That's because the harm is coming from without, not within. Harvard doesn't need to not exist for us to be able to ignore it.

r00fus 3y ago
> The entire thing seemingly hinges on the idea that Harvard's role in society is somehow intentional and planned At some point it doesn’t matter. It’s a self-reinforcing systemic effect now. almost all of the political class having gone to these Ivys means Ivys have vastly more representation than anyone else.
creer 3y ago
These ideas have a lot of following - that things are planned, intentional, designed to be that way. We might hear "why is that job worth so much money and that one isn't?" or here "why Harvard, at all?". And this is worth countering. Society as a whole rarely plans "one more Harvard" - and when it tries, it rarely succeeds. Many people did work hard to make Harvard (or anything that exists now) into what it is now - while from society's point of view, it just happened. At some stage these are the fruit of a market economy: some people put in their effort and now Harvard is what it is. In that case ironically, "putting the top professors together in one school" is pretty universal. High prestige institutions are attractive - for their colleagues, pay, facilities, projects, etc. The good news for the US is that there are many such "top institutions".

glimshe 3y ago

This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation and not a single person is required to go there or hire someone from there. Why do Harvard people "drive 20% above the speed limit"? Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. I've seen dozens of theories on how to interview and triage people, but few approaches beat the cost-benefit of supporting decisions based on a degree from a solid institution. Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees - even though I have managed amazing people without college degrees and bad people with amazing degrees. The top schools can be pretty darn great, Harvard being just one of them. Not very different than an Apple product being generally better than a product from some random vendor from Amazon with names like "GREAT TECH" or "SUPER QUALITY PRO".

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
It used to have excellent reputation.
beebmam 3y ago
I totally agree that Harvard has (and should have) a right to do whatever they want with their institution and admit whoever they see fit. But if we're serious about a liberal/conservative "equality of opportunity" vs a progressive/socialist "equality of outcome" reality, then we should consider that children have very little consent over the kind of education and familial upbringing they get, yet that childhood education and familial upbringing has profound implications as to whether they can get admitted to a school like Harvard or not. If we're serious about equality of opportunity society, then we should take a lottery admissions policy for young adults seriously. But it's fine if you don't care about equality at all, at least be explicit about it.
- whymauri 3y ago
  Why not tackle inequality earlier in the funnel than college admissions? Better primary schooling and family resources? A college admission lottery doesn't seem to be a serious solution.

curiousllama 3y ago

> But we agree on the ideal, right? In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist. If I grew up in this ideal, I'd be a bum. I was a lazy and arrogant teenager; my ideal path was to go "oh, sh*t, I need to work hard or I won't get into a good school" I'm not saying our system is perfect (or even good). But it's easy to critique a system when you acknowledge exactly 0 of its benefits.

Kyragem 3y ago

The existence of these institutions hinges solely on the reputation we assign to them. If we collectively recognize them for their role in perpetuating economic inequality, catering primarily to privileged white adults whose parents bought them a ticket to attend, their worth will diminish rapidly over time.

chinchilla2020 3y ago

The author is pontificating on some very fundamental things without considering reality. 8 Billion human beings cannot be jammed into the same exact university. It's as simple as that. Sorry for being reductive but that's the reality. Naturally, you have to have more universities. Naturally, some will be better than others. The author tries pushing some marxist ideas about how everything can be exactly equal but even in a marxist utopia you are going to have some neighborhoods/schools/universities/hospitals that are better than others.

xwowsersx 3y ago

Related: Glenn Loury in conversation with Jay Kaspian King. "Elite Schools Only Care About Rich Kids" https://youtu.be/lC-rviti8dU https://youtu.be/lC-rviti8dU

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

There have been several studies finding no benefit from going to “top” schools when controlling for student quality. So the entire premise is false.

seydor 3y ago

Bees select their next queens at random. They treat them literally royally and it grows to be a big wise queen and they are loyal to her. Maybe humans are more like other eusocial animals, and things like merit and equality are a comforting charade.

pxx 3y ago

> You can't start a tax-exempt country club. Uh... Sure you can? This is literally section 501(c)7; private clubs in general are exempt from federal income taxation.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
Country clubs have a specific business model and are definitely not exempt from federal income taxes. The Freemasons are exempt from income taxes as an organization though.
- pxx 3y ago
  Some specific country clubs may not be 501(c)7s but country clubs in general often are. See, e.g.: https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2015/01/22/most-local-country-clubs-operate-as-nonprofits-enjoy-some-tax-breaks/ https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2015/01/22/most-loca... https://www.pugetsound.edu/sites/default/files/file/1359_FahningCountryClubsandTaxationACostBenefitAnalysisoftheNonProfitStatusofCountryClubs_0.pdf https://www.pugetsound.edu/sites/default/files/file/1359_Fah... and straight from the horse's mouth, the IRS: > Typical organizations that may qualify for exemption under IRC section 501(c)7) are: ... Country clubs, ..., Yacht clubs https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/atg_social_rec_clubs.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/atg_social_rec_clubs.pdf

sevenseventen 3y ago

A lot of these responses seem to think that Harvard is better to go to because the education is better there, which is explicitly if lightly addressed in the article. The article's thesis is that the benefit of going to Harvard is mostly derived from just from having gone to Harvard irrespective of the education itself. That could accrue just from the credential, or from the enormous and powerful social and support networks that graduates benefit from.

kweingar 3y ago

The most galling part about these institutions is that they have the capacity to teach many, many more students, and they don’t. They can’t expect me to keep a straight face when they prattle on about their "genuine educational mission", while their class sizes are artificially tiny so they can preserve The Brand and make sure The Club doesn’t get so big as to be unwieldy.

jononomo 3y ago

I think once a schools endowment goes over a certain amount they should simply be required to educate more students -- I think Harvard should just admit 10x the number of students that they currently admit.

photochemsyn 3y ago

The issue is that American academic institutions have adopted the inherited-wealth / social-class-based model that was so prevalent in Britain in the early 20th century. Elite schools are not centers of education so much as they are centers of networking for feeding the anoited few into positions in government and business, regardless of what actual skills and talents and abilities they possess. Eliminating legacy admissions and ensuring that K-12 schools across the country are of uniform high quality (in particular in the STEAM fields, yes that includes Art) would do much to reverse this trend, along with reducing college tuition costs. It's like wild salmon vs. farmed salmon - pampered students who never have to swim upstream don't develop the best qualities.

sokoloff 3y ago

> What would happen in schools if we lived in a magical dreamworld? I think the answer is: Each kid gets whatever experiences maximize their potential. That answer sure does sound like the stuff of magical dreamworlds. Whatever experiences maximize their potential is the province of families, not the stuff of society-paid education. It's not that it couldn't be provided by the latter, but the daunting expense means that it will never be funded to a level that maximizes on an individualized basis. What would that require? One teacher for every 4 kids, maybe you could stretch it to 6 or 8. On top of that, a multitude of specialists to ensure that any special needs are addressed in an individually customized fashion to maximize the potential of every kid. In many districts, we can't get agreement that we should feed every kid, let alone agreement that there should be roughly one professional adult in total for every 2-3 kids. > In dreamworld, every kid would follow their own path. There would be no “advanced classes” or “tracks” because those concepts wouldn’t exist. Those concepts would absolutely exist, just under a different label (and maybe not even that), because kids at the very top of the range would be taking something that would be readily recognizable as the close equivalent of today's advanced classes.

agloe_dreams 3y ago
One can argue that this argument is actually what the Soviet Union actually did always. It worked, at least at first. They beat the US to orbit on the back of that despite the US technically having better people. Eventually the US got the game plan in order and got to the moon first but since then the exact argument that the article makes happened. The people in the classroom became the people with the best connections rather than the best abilities.

deleted 3y ago

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endisneigh 3y ago

this article had so many terrible takes I don't know where to begin. the simplest refutation of the entire thing is the extensive evidence that people who are accepted to top schools, but do not attend have similar achieves as those who go. this lends credence to the idea that the top schools are simplest triaging the successful and do not create them, in general. Of course there are specific exceptions to this, such as Supreme Court Justices, but in general it seems to be true. The paper (https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...) is ultimately flawed because it doesn't (and cannot) evaluate the simplest thing: look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with. Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges". In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition. the stratification of society is an emergent phenomenon.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
> the simplest refutation of the entire thing is the extensive evidence that people who are accepted to top schools, but do not attend have similar achieves as those who go. This completely misses the point because 95% of the people that apply do not get in. Please think of the rest of us!

drdrek 3y ago

Equality is one value out of many important values of a society. Looking for ways to over-optimize society for this one thing leads to many silly conclusions.

montyboy_us 3y ago

“If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?" Because success, outside entertainment, is oft detectable through cultural mores; well ingrained and detectable by 18 years of age.

TrackerFF 3y ago

It is much easier these days to interview for top jobs that would have excluded you 20 years ago, because you went to the wrong schools. If you're a smart and ambitious student, don't let your alma mater be the deciding factor in your life. It is true, you may have to work much harder than those that can coast on their HYPS-pedigree, but as the saying goes: You can't keep a good man down. The anxiety of not getting accepted into a top school is mostly a juvenile phenomena.

pphysch 3y ago

If Harvard revolutionized its admissions tomorrow, elite debutants would find a different way to signal.

mbauman 3y ago
That was my favorite part of the article: > We should have a Marxist version of Goodhart’s law, something like: >> When a measure becomes a target, the privileged always find a way to win.

less_less 3y ago

I agree that there are many aspects of how elite universities work that are not what's best for society. I don't think this is the best thinkpiece on it though. One small thing that jumped out at me is the bit about "we don't have to sort kids at 18, because most colleges teach the same stuff". To support this point, the author compared Harvard Math 1a to SIUE Math 150. This is a bad comparison, because these are introductory math classes for first-year students who aren't math majors, used to satisfy distribution requirements or give math background for non-math-intensive courses. There's a placement system to decide what math class to take, probably at both universities, but here is Harvard's (2020-2021): https://www.math.harvard.edu/media/Math-for-first-year-students-2020-2021.pdf https://www.math.harvard.edu/media/Math-for-first-year-stude... As you can see, first-year Harvard math or physics majors sometimes take Math 21, but more likely Math 23, 25, or 55. (Math 55 is weirdly fetishized, but that's another story.) These classes are significantly more rigorous than Math 1. Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
> Having taken math courses for math majors at both an Ivy school and a decent non-Ivy, it is my experience that while they teach roughly the same subjects, they do not teach the same things within those subjects, nor at the same pace, nor to the same level of rigor. Nor are the students in those classes equally good at math. So, while sorting those students can and does contribute to injustice (especially with the actual way it's done!), it's also not a completely pointless just for the sake of giving gold stars. OK, and? How does this change anything? You have to be a PhD to be a mathematician anyway. I've become negatively polarized against this rigor fetishization, which serves exclusively to otherize normal folks in increasingly esoteric ways
- less_less 3y ago

Bostonian 3y ago

Letting employers filter employees by SAT/ACT scores without fear of disparate impact lawsuits would reduce the Ivy League premium.

thatcherthorn 3y ago

The depth of the subject is much too great for an article. But, there's certainly some interesting discussion to be had around the relationship between people's general work outcomes and a strong gating mechanism evaluated earlier in life. I really hope we soon see innovation around education. When the entire corpus of human knowledge became available freely - surely we would've seen changes in higher education by now (if they were/are ever going to happen).

dekhn 3y ago

Harvard exists for strategic reasons. It helps maintain the establishment (that ambiguously defined collection of people and processes that keep the US running and a major world power). Getting rid of it would likely have a very negative effect in the medium-term.

deleted 3y ago

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earthboundkid 3y ago

Working at NYT isn't as gated as the article suggests. I know two people who work there. AFAIK, neither went to an Ivy. (Old joke: How do you know if someone went to an Ivy? They tell you.) You do need a college degree, but you can work at a smaller paper first and get recruited from there.

JoshTko 3y ago

Harvard is obviously a problem. Does any institution work against the interests of the people that fund it? Rich people fund Harvard. Harvard will work in the interests of rich people. Meritocracy is not in the in the interests of rich people. Harvard is just a pay to play gated community.

waffletower 3y ago

Endowments are not meritocratic. While I can't quote data, I imagine that wealthy students provide much more growth for endowments, which in turn contribute not only to reputation, but also research, and ratio boosting hiring capacity. While Princeton and other Ivies, do have aggressive financial aid programs, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/09/08/princeton-will-enhance-its-groundbreaking-financial-aid-program https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/09/08/princeton-will-enh..., it is important for the elite schools to admit the wealthy, particularly students whose families will donate generously initially upon admission, and also throughout the student's life. Less wealthy students are less attractive fiscally, but reputation is influenced by a schools willingness to admit lower income students.

tlb 3y ago

You could base a society on randomly selecting people at a young age to be elite. It would still have advantages over a society with no elites at all. The goal of having an elite class is to make better collective decisions about how society should organize itself. Decisions are best made by people with the best information, and elites (regardless of any intrinsic merit) have better information. By virtue of being elite, they get better educations and more inside access to new information. The classical way of doing this was through inherited privilege. Whatever intrinsic merit first-generation aristocrats may have had to win their position is mostly gone after a few generations, so for example 19th century English aristocrats had little genetic advantage over the average population. But they were selected at birth to receive the best educations and inside access to each other, so they made better decisions than if you chose random citizens in adulthood to put in charge. Part of what Harvard does is to say "You are now an elite. You will shape the future of society." Most students take that seriously and try to become worthy of the challenge. No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge. The closest natural experiment is societies that select leaders based on physical strength and courage. They seem to make fairly bad decisions.

adifgoi0nio 3y ago
>No society has tried selecting random people in adulthood to put in charge. This is a practice called 'sordition'. As evidenced by the fact it has a name and a Wikipedia article, it is not something you just invented. It was famously used in Athens and is how American juries are selected today, I think I would support a revival of sordition. Perhaps we could start small, perhaps by selecting one representative for each state at random.
- tlb 3y ago
  Sortition happened in adulthood, though. The interesting (and untried) experiment is to designate people early in life, so they can grow up being educated and prepared for their future responsibility.

steve76 3y ago

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thrawa8387336 3y ago

"Old man yelling at cloud" Guys can we move on?

gwbas1c 3y ago

A few years ago I read a book called "Listen Liberal." It was a book written by liberals, for liberals. One of the criticisms it made of the Obama Administration's cabinet was that it was far too heavy in choosing Ivy-League graduates. The book pointed out that the cabinet was racially / ethnically diverse, but because the vast majority of the cabinet was Ivy-League educated, it had all of the biases that come with an Ivy-League education. I don't think Harvard is the problem: They are an organization that exists, and the selection criteria they use is to choose people who they believe will graduate. Granted, someone could argue that they should take more risks on applicants, but that's not my argument to make. In part, the value of these institutions is that they are exclusive. Many people argue that the advantage of an Ivy League education, compared to an equivalent, less exclusive school, is the people you meet while on campus. This difference can only be maintained if the schools maintain their selection criteria. I think the bigger problem is that far too many people / organizations put too much weight on an Ivy League education. It's generally unobtainable, even if you "check the boxes," because these schools get far more applicants than they can ever accept. Which is why I don't want to argue that they should change their selection criteria: Who is to say what is the best selection criteria? Everyone will try to argue that it should be changed in a way to benefit the person making the argument. IMO: We need some new institutions to displace the Ivy League as the "best." Perhaps, if there are enough schools with differently selective admission criteria, everyone will be able to find a selective school that they can get into?

noobermin 3y ago

This article is actually quite good. Too bad some on HN are too blind to their own life circumstances to examine their biases and perform some introspection.

squokko 3y ago

"We don’t need to sort and classify 18-year olds. It’s absurd. Stop trying to fix it and get rid of it." Would the OP make the same argument about athletics? That 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo and 18-year-old Frankie Fatass, instead of being sorted and classified, should be put into the same soccer program?

lapcat 3y ago
Which soccer program are you referring to? At age 18, Cristiano Ronaldo was not attending a nonprofit school, he was a member of a for-profit professional team.
- squokko 3y ago
  Yes, differences between 18 year olds are extreme when you look at the best vs. the average
  - lapcat 3y ago
    You didn't answer my question.
    - squokko 3y ago
      The "soccer program" is the professional soccer team that Cristiano Ronaldo was on. Should Freddy Fatass have been playing for them too?
      - lapcat 3y ago
        No. This is why I said "Cristiano Ronaldo was not attending a nonprofit school, he was a member of a for-profit professional team." Harvard is a nonprofit school, financially supported by the government in various ways. The standards are different. If Harvard wants to act like a business, then it needs to give up its nonprofit status, forsake government support, and pay taxes as a business.

jwie 3y ago

The problem is not that elites exist. The problem is that the current elites hate the people they rule over, and conspire with capital to rob everyone. The dreamworld is not a classless society. But rather one where the leaders love those they lead and work for their betterment. That being said, I’ve met enough Harvard and ivy types to have a low opinion. They’re no smarter than anyone else. These networks are powerful though. They will eventually collapse due to the crushing weight of their own incompetence and greed, but such corrections to the natural order take generational time.

munificent 3y ago

> I think the answer is: Each kid gets whatever experiences maximize their potential. That’s not controversial, is it? Ideally, they’d learn whatever subjects, in whatever style would best help them flourish into rich, happy, successful adults. Actually, that isn't what people want. If your ideal is "what each child receives is what that child deserves" then the only inputs that determine what the kid receives are from the kid themselves. What is missing from that equation? Parents. One of the fundamental goals of almost all parents is help my kid. They want to increase the opportunity and resources their kid has regardless of that kids' potential relative to others or whether the kid deserves those extra resources in any general or moral sense. This is just another way to think of Pinker's trilemma, which is one of the most insightful things I've ever read about human society: "No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn."

r00fus 3y ago
At what point is freedom mainly about ignoring inheritance taxes? That’s a highly political view of “freedom”.
- munificent 3y ago
  By "give their wealth to their children", Pinker doesn't mean "when they die". He's referring to the more general observation that parents want to take care of their kids as well as they can. But they do that in a strictly unfair way: they prioritize their kids over all other kids simply because they happened to have spawned them, a property the kid has zero control over.

graycat 3y ago

The OP (original post) describes what we might call problems, issues, or challenges in US formal, academic education, say, K through 4 year college. Here is a theme of a rough solution, necessarily "rough" if only because US education and the problems are not precisely stated or understood. (1) Learning, Knowledge, Understanding. Yup, for doing well in life, learning, ... is usually (being "rough" here) from somewhat useful to crucial. Some of the knowledge is explicitly taught in the education, some is taught outside that education, and still more an individual has to pick up, ..., discover, on their own. E.g., on my own I had to learn the fast Fourier transform and discover office politics. (2) US Academics. The US K through college emphasizes learning. In an old joke the teacher has a full pitcher of knowledge, pours it into the student's empty pitcher, on tests has the student pour back what they have learned, and determines the grade from the fraction that comes back. From this "emphasis" and "process", there can be a LOT of struggle, strain, lost sleep, hard work, anxiety, etc. for a student and their family. (3) Surprise. After 4 year college, US academics no longer much cares what the student has learned and, instead, cares almost only about what the student can DO, especially in delivering new research results. For more, do well in such research and all the student did in education will be forgiven, forgotten, ignored, etc. So, if want a degree from a famous research university, get a graduate degree, Master's and/or Ph.D. Generally admission to such university's graduate school is much easier than to their 4 year college -- also much cheaper. For such admission, doing well on the GRE (graduate record exam) can help. Having done well in an early career can help. Some research can help a lot more, really close the deal, giving the student admission, no tuition, and maybe some money for doing some ugrad teaching, work on some prof's research project, etc. Summary: For a degree from a famous research university, go for a graduate degree and there emphasize research. Or, what US research universities care about, more than nearly everything else, is in just one word research. In my case, while in grad school, I picked a problem, for two weeks did some research, and found a solution, clearly publishable (later did publish the solution). Presto, bingo, magic, I was regarded as a star student in the department, and everything else about my work was irrelevant. I went ahead and did some dissertation research, also clearly publishable, while doing that work was beyond any criticism, had a shiny halo, was untouchable, got my Ph.D., and with great joy LEFT. The OP mentions Harvard; I got into Princeton and Cornell but never applied to Harvard. Sure, going to any such university for any degree can involve more than just "research", but might want to critically evaluate the "more". One more point: Research that finds mathematical solutions, mathematizes the subject, is relatively highly regarded. For that approach, a big issue is learning the math, but in grad school beware of advanced math courses: Commonly the teaching is poor and the hidden agenda is to set up a competition to filter the students. But if mostly know the math before the course, then can be 10 yards from the finish line in a 2 mile race, be by a wide margin the best student in the class, and greatly reduce the chances of being filtered. Yes, doing so well can cause some of the profs to resent you and become hostile. With math, doing the learning before the class is relatively easy: Just get some of the best books, usually from famous authors, study the theorems and proofs, work the exercises, try to find intuitive views of the material, reasons for the particular definitions and theorems, and examples. Beyond calculus, I'd suggest: Abstract algebra, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, measure theory, Fourier theory, differential forms, the Gauss, Green, and Stokes theorems, differential geometry, probability based on measure theory, and statistics based on that probability. Some good authors include Halmos, Nering, Coddington, Rudin, Royden, Breiman, Neveu, Cinlar. To boil it down to just two books to study carefully I'd recommend Halmos for linear algebra (Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces) and Breiman for probability.

lorrainefloyd 3y ago

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Nellyz 3y ago

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