10 ms·

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 require

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.
  - beebmam 3y ago
    You can never make dysfunctional families with awful parents more equal unless you rip all children from families.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      That's true. But dysfunctional families come at all income levels, and making sure kids have enough to eat and somewhere safe to do homework is 100% possible without fixing all of society's problems.
- lapcat 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. From the article: "Some people say Harvard is a private institution and it can do what it wants. These people are wrong." "private universities are non-profits." "When John Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard, that was tax-deductible. If we assume his marginal tax rate was 25%, that’s equivalent to him donating $300 million of after-tax money, and then having the government kick in an extra $100 million. Ivy-league universities also earn insane profits on endowments tax-free and are exempt from local property taxes."
- subpixel 3y ago
  I would like what you envision to exist but to be remotely effective the game has to be played before college. Otherwise the results will be similar to if any 18 year-old could “win” a place in the NFL. Either they have a rough time and get spit out or the system is forced to change to accommodate them.
- phpisthebest 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. I would agree to this under 3 conditions 1. The university can not accept any federally backed student loans, grants, etc 2. The university must self finance any financial aid given using their massive endowments 3. Those loans must be discharged in bankruptcy I dont even care about their non-profit status as others do. I care they are getting billions in federally (tax payer) backed loan, with no accountability for the money, and no skin in the game at all
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- crawfordcomeaux 3y ago
  If we truly consider children's consent, then we would need to actually ask them what they want before bothering with any adult-born ideas. Otherwise, they're still trapped in a system they never designed, only being given the options chosen for them.
harles 3y ago
There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing. What I really don’t get is the conclusion which suggests tearing it all down. Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? Yeah, it’s a tall order, but much more practical (not to mention positive) than getting rid of top schools.
- komali2 3y ago
  > There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing Because it argues for meritocratic rewards in society? Because it pointed out that capital is a gatekeeper? What makes it seem "Marxist" to you? > Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? I think the argument against subsidizing anti-meritocratic institutions such as Harvard is exactly this. The money is better spent on lifting up people regardless of their ability to get into Harvard. I find the ending ambiguous, less "Harvard should be burned to the ground" and more "Harvard shouldn't get subsidies." I think Harvard would survive just fine without subsidies. It's Harvard.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thebooktocome 3y ago
    It’s the same folk-interpretation of Marxism that always goes around. Now that Marxism is dead and can’t defend itself, it’s whatever anyone wants it to be. States that were far closer to Marxism, like the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decimated their universities and dispersed their faculties over the countryside, or to labor camps. This article is not on the same planet as that madness.
    - komali2 3y ago
      Now I'm seriously confused - a major criticism, by communists, of the Cultural Revolution was the blow back against all intellectuals and the destruction of the education system in the PRC. In what was was that Marxist? I mean, I know the arguments the red guard made, but there were other Marxists that disagreed. Are you just saying the red guard interpretation was the correct one?
lapcat 3y ago
> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. I think you missed the point of the article, which was "Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic, and it does that while subsidized by everyone else." > Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. The author discusses this: "The hardest part of Harvard is getting in." "High-stakes college admissions means that much of the value of a college degree is determined before students even start college. If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?" On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money. This was decades ago, so perhaps things have changed recently, but my higher education was gated on my family's wealth, i.e., lack thereof. Was it a "meritocracy"? No fucking way.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  >The hardest part of Harvard is getting in. This is always such an interesting argument people make when nearly every 'next step' after undergrad is more selective than Ivy League schools. Tier-1 Tech/Banking/Consulting/Law School/Med School all reject plenty of people from Harvard because they didn't do a good enough job there. Plenty of Harvard grads languish. It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in, but doing something with it still has capability-based gates.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in Historically, that was at least somewhat true of undergrads in general. But wasn't necessarily the case for the top law schools and Big Law still, as far as I know, has something up an up or out career ladder.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    If they only accept the very best academically there is probably a bias: it may not be that 'simple' to get a degree once you're in but since those who are in are very good they have a high graduation rate.
user3939382 3y ago
> The top schools can be pretty darn great I've seen research suggesting that the schools aren't necessarily great, the students are. They were already great which is how they passed the admissions criteria, and their career success can be attributed to the qualities that they arrived at e.g. Harvard with. They would have been as successful regardless of where they attended. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
- komali2 3y ago
  Given the argument that the wait-list students that didn't get to actually attend did worse in life than wait-list students that did get to attend, how does your implication that the "students were already good and that's why they did well in life" hold up?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Is that what the data shows, though? I've read summaries of papers describing the exact opposite and linked them here before. Here's one such example, with a followup comment describing a study that contradicts the argument you lead with. (I'm merely saying it contradicts it; I'm not vouching that the contradiction is correct.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748063 , summarized as: > For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends. The link to the article and the followup is in the only 2-deep chain linked above.
    - amluto 3y ago
      “For most students” can potentially obscure an enormous difference between mean and median income.
hospitalJail 3y ago
> Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation It used to. Now when I see someone went to Harvard, I imagine they had rich parents or were part of Affirmative Action. Not to mention their cheating scandals and forged data. Heck, I talked to a Harvard law grad last week and asked them for specific points on their speech and they had no follow up, they regurgitated. This was no AAA student, this was someone that benefited from Affirmative Action + had 2 physician parents. Harvard in the modern age hasnt impressed me.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
commandlinefan 3y ago
> "lets all be poor" As the parent of two exceptionally-achieving children who were rejected from the "elite" colleges - I've become a lot more sympathetic to the mindset behind this line of thinking. My kids literally couldn't have done more or tried harder - since kindergarten - than they did. They both graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, scored in the top 99% of the SAT, did sports, did clubs, volunteered, worked, studied... and when they applied to the ivy's, they didn't even get waitlisted. When I see that somebody like, say, Jared Kushner graduated from Harvard... yeah, it makes me mad. I'm mad on behalf of my two kids who tried so hard for so long. But - I don't really see a "solution" besides some sort of "populist revolt" _against_ these "elite" institutions. The solution is - just stop assigning so much importance to colleges like Harvard. This isn't Harvard's problem, it's all of us that are doing it.
- ta8645 3y ago
  Why would Ivy schools pass your children over?
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    Follow the Recent Lawsuit against havard admissions for a clue ;)
  - tristor 3y ago
    Nobody ever openly talks about it, but the East Coast Ivies are still heavily WASPy, and it's largely due to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register Basically, if your family name isn't in that list, you have a massive reduction in your probability of being accepted, regardless of merit. If your name is in that list, then you likely will be accepted regardless of merit.
    - amluto 3y ago
      Do you have a source? I’ve never heard of this, and I would be quite surprised if anyone I know or knew well at any elite school was on this list.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. They are very decent proxies to evade anti-discrimination laws, as well. Just look how many jobs these days require higher education credentials for paper pusher jobs. Sounds innocent on paper - but the reality is that wide swaths of society can now be perfectly legally discriminated against. Poor people or people of color? No way. People with disabilities of all kind? No way. People who have to raise children they got at a young age? No way. All of these people simply (virtually) filtered out from a lot of employment opportunities, simply because their classes are highly likely to never reach higher education.
ghaff 3y ago
Honestly, leading with Harvard is probably a distraction. There are quite a few good schools that don't have the same level of baggage but are pretty competitive with respect to admissions standards. (Of course, the details likely matter depending on the field in question to at least some degree.) Certainly undergrad school is far from a perfect filter but I agree that if that were really all you had to go on, there is signal there whether one likes that fact or not. (And how could there not be? A lot of people who get into top schools could, shall we say, not super-concentrate on academics as undergrads and many will still do pretty well--although others will flame out.)
TheRealPomax 3y ago
> 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. That's... a bullshit argument, and should get called out as bullshit? It's an easy approach, and beats other approaches for HR but says absolutely nothing about whether the person is a good person (both in the "are they a sociopath?" and "are they a good fit for the role we're filling" sense). In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. They're on a fast track career path, no matter what job you're offering them, you're going to have to rehire for it 2 or even 1 year down the road. That's an atrocious cost-benefit ratio: that's not an investment, that's intentionally hiring for the short term and intentionally preventing institutional knowledge from ever building up. If you're a startup, good for you, your goal is to get valuable fast and then cash out. But if you're a real business, and your plan is to own yourself and the market you operate in, it's downright idiotic.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  > In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. citation needed. (plot twist, this is not true).
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    I'm okay with using anecdotal data to refute anecdotes. So, source: me, I've seen loads of high achievers come in, get promoted, stick around for half a year, then job hop to the next company in order to "start without baggage" but at a higher rung. (And of course, while it should go without saying, it very much needs saying because people are very bad at logic: that doesn't mean I claimed that no high achievers stick around, and it also doesn't mean I claimed that people who do stick around are low achievers. Reading the latter would require making not just one but _two_ mistakes)
jyscao 3y ago
>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. There is a better method for selecting candidates: IQ testing. For better or worse, that's illegal. In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data.
- tzs 3y ago
  If the degree is from a college where it takes hard work to get that degree that tells you a lot more than an IQ test would tell you.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >For better or worse, that's illegal. Problematic/controversial but not necessarily illegal. They can probably ask for SAT/ACT scores which are probably a pretty good proxy as well. >In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data Disagree to a fair degree. The college degree (and grades/other experiences) tell more than how well you do on a multiple choice test. One can of course argue how much more.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  SAT is an IQ test in disguise.
- okaram 3y ago
  IQ testing is not illegal in the US ... It may be easier to not use it than to produce evidence that it is relevant, but ...
  - jyscao 3y ago
    You misunderstood. Using IQ scores for the purpose of hiring is illegal.
itoor 3y ago
[dead]
neilv 3y ago
> 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". I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple. So I disagree with the analogy, when we're talking about people who went to big-name schools vs. everyone else.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds w.r.t. this analogy, but generic stuff is very often as good as Apple. It's just that with Apple (substitute another high-prestige name brand, if you prefer) you are typically getting a certain guaranteed level of quality. I've had Apple-branded phone cases. They are always top-tier. I've had generic ones that were just as good or maybe better. Also had some godawful ones. I can afford to experiment with phone cases because I can tolerate a $15 failure that takes a small amount of my time. But this isn't as true for potential hires so companies gravitate toward those "big-name" schools. When you are in a hiring role, it's often impossible to avoid this kind of bias. If you hire a Harvard grad and they don't work out, at least you made the safe choice in your manager's eyes. Much easier to defend than taking a chance on some rando wildcard person.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Also think the analogy should have used more realistic company names like "HYTGH" and "WYSHI".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zzzeek 3y ago
right well, the problem is people are not iphones, they're human beings. we can throw away our cheap android phones and get iphones, but as a society, we might decide that we should not be throwing away humans who don't come from the right "brand"
8note 3y ago
The question is, could you do a similar filter by asking each applicant about their parents wealth? Perhaps ultra-wealthy parents is the decent proxy for productivity?
louthy 3y ago
> 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. This is my exact opposite experience. Degrees are meaningless unless you've literally just left college. Even then, it tells you their scores in particular subjects, it does not tell you their attitude, work ethic, general problem solving ability, etc. I ignore qualifications unless you've just completed it. Experience is a better guide and, I know this is controversial, just talking to the candidate - it's amazing what people will expose once they feel comfortable that they're having a friendly chat.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  Not all jobs require attitude, work ethic and problem solving ability. Some require skills like dress sense, eloquence, table manners, and a refined taste in fine wine and art.
laidoffamazon 3y ago
> 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. What do you recommend those of us who didn't get into any top schools do then? If clearly we're destined to be inferior for life?
- glimshe 3y ago
  I don't think so, but life will be harder. Life is harder if you are born poor. I graduated from an unknown university (in the US) overseas, so I started in lower places and climbed my way up through hard work, study, luck and skill development (which include social skills). You are not destined to be inferior, but if the cards are not stacked in your favor, you will just have to make up for it somehow.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    > you will just have to make up for it somehow. I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      >I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now. I'd like to believe this is sarcasm but it probably isn't.
      - laidoffamazon 3y ago
        It's not sarcasm. I'm told that I'm lesser because I didn't get into any top schools or "deserve" the respect they get - clearly I'm doing worse than Ivy+ folks.
        3y ago
darkclouds 3y ago
Conformity is not scientific, using a university to stealth filter for obedience to (data) authority is both lazy and a fancy dressed deceitful gang mentality on display.
rayiner 3y ago
> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class. Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power. Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power. And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.
- chimprich 3y ago
  > Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. "Relatively"? According to what metric? I think the US has one of the world's highest Gini coefficients, at least among Western countries. "Only"? 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
  - sixstringtheory 3y ago
    > 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed. This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite? How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.
gojomo 3y ago
Harvard's not purely private: it receives massive structural tax advantages, & lots of government funding via many kinds of tuition & research subsidies. Harvard's supposed "excellent reputation" is significantly maintained by the cartel of graduates from it, & its close peers, preferentially touting, publishing, hiring, and funding class-similar people – even when they are no better on objective measures than non-graduates. Your hiring observation is nearly fully driven not by Harvard providing any "educational lift", specific to its educational product, that would justify its state-granted advantages, but simply by Harvard getting "early pick" (pre-career) to place its brand on people who are already talented, ambitious, or highly-prepared before they arrive at Harvard.
deepnotderp 3y ago
> Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees You missed the central point of the article about causality. Of course this will be the case on average, because Harvard gets smarter people on average! Harvard serves no additional value here other than to be a gatekeeper.
toastercat 3y ago
I'm not sure if you didn't read the article, skimmed it, or are mis-representing it on purpose.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
In doing that you're also buying into an exclusionary system that benefits the extravagantly wealthy. These institutions hit a critical mass, then they get powerful alumni and have dynasty that self perpetuates. Everyone knows you don't go to college to get an education... at least not if you're trying to win the US capitalist game (which most educated people realize is their best bet), you go to college to network, and sometimes for hands on experience, which can be gained anywhere. The academic material itself is usually useless. So what you end up with amounts to a privilege factory. Sure you also might have extra opportunities to gain wisdom from exceptional people that don't exist elsewhere, but this is quite rare, and a substantial percentage of students never see it (ie. nuggets of wisdom they couldn't get by grabbing a random engineer with knowledge of the subject). Mostly you're just getting a chance to rub elbows with the elite. See how they function and hopefully gain some allies with power. I think it may often be true that employees from elite schools can do better. You're hiring based on pedigree, which works in many cases, but it's questionable how it impacts society. BTW, I've also heard the opposite about ivy league employees. They tend to be entitled, unwilling to get in the trenches, and always seem to think they could be doing better. Also, I've heard lots of complaints that the personality issues tend to be worse. P.S. I wanted to explain why I think most intelligent people eventually decide to "play the game" and go for money / power. No matter how meaningful your career, you will probably just end up doing the same thing: making the world worse, by helping your corporate overlords, only with far less money. This is very true for almost any calling / "just cause" professions. * Police - spend most of your time ruining poor peoples lives for an injustice system * Doctors - again ruining poor peoples lives, otherwise abusing patients, and trying to prevent them from getting health care * Nurses - Pretty much the above, with less evil decisions, more thankless work, less money * Mental health / psych - Watch people slowly be bled to death by a system that cannot help you. A substantial percentage of your patients will see you as like a horrible witch poisoning them (not just the psychotic ones!). You will "help" by stripping them of rights. * Social worker - you will have all of societies problems dumped on you, overworked and make no money. You also get to play the role of cop and ruin peoples lives (people with horrific upbringings), who will now hate you. It's your job to get the drug addicted SA survivor into jail, sometimes through shady means. * Nonprofit - worse corporate politics and guilt when you realize how much money goes to perpetuating the organization instead of helping. * Engineer - no matter how brilliant you are, you will be implementing someone else's idea. You will be expendable. You will be undermined and blamed. You don't get to own anything and it's mostly thankless busywork. Anyway THIS is why most people eventually decide that they should just maximize money/power. It would arguably be hard to decide if the work lived up to reality. When it's just as hollow and empty, yeah just go for $$$.
dmuso 3y ago
I’ve hired 100+ people with around a 97% hit rate on hiring great employees and great engineers. I don’t look at whether they have a degree or not, I don’t care what school they went to. In my experience it provides no indication of whether they’re good or not.

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.
- beebmam 3y ago
  You can never make dysfunctional families with awful parents more equal unless you rip all children from families.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    That's true. But dysfunctional families come at all income levels, and making sure kids have enough to eat and somewhere safe to do homework is 100% possible without fixing all of society's problems.
lapcat 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. From the article: "Some people say Harvard is a private institution and it can do what it wants. These people are wrong." "private universities are non-profits." "When John Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard, that was tax-deductible. If we assume his marginal tax rate was 25%, that’s equivalent to him donating $300 million of after-tax money, and then having the government kick in an extra $100 million. Ivy-league universities also earn insane profits on endowments tax-free and are exempt from local property taxes."
subpixel 3y ago
I would like what you envision to exist but to be remotely effective the game has to be played before college. Otherwise the results will be similar to if any 18 year-old could “win” a place in the NFL. Either they have a rough time and get spit out or the system is forced to change to accommodate them.
phpisthebest 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. I would agree to this under 3 conditions 1. The university can not accept any federally backed student loans, grants, etc 2. The university must self finance any financial aid given using their massive endowments 3. Those loans must be discharged in bankruptcy I dont even care about their non-profit status as others do. I care they are getting billions in federally (tax payer) backed loan, with no accountability for the money, and no skin in the game at all
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
crawfordcomeaux 3y ago
If we truly consider children's consent, then we would need to actually ask them what they want before bothering with any adult-born ideas. Otherwise, they're still trapped in a system they never designed, only being given the options chosen for them.

harles 3y ago

There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing. What I really don’t get is the conclusion which suggests tearing it all down. Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? Yeah, it’s a tall order, but much more practical (not to mention positive) than getting rid of top schools.

komali2 3y ago
> There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing Because it argues for meritocratic rewards in society? Because it pointed out that capital is a gatekeeper? What makes it seem "Marxist" to you? > Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? I think the argument against subsidizing anti-meritocratic institutions such as Harvard is exactly this. The money is better spent on lifting up people regardless of their ability to get into Harvard. I find the ending ambiguous, less "Harvard should be burned to the ground" and more "Harvard shouldn't get subsidies." I think Harvard would survive just fine without subsidies. It's Harvard.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  It’s the same folk-interpretation of Marxism that always goes around. Now that Marxism is dead and can’t defend itself, it’s whatever anyone wants it to be. States that were far closer to Marxism, like the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decimated their universities and dispersed their faculties over the countryside, or to labor camps. This article is not on the same planet as that madness.
  - komali2 3y ago
    Now I'm seriously confused - a major criticism, by communists, of the Cultural Revolution was the blow back against all intellectuals and the destruction of the education system in the PRC. In what was was that Marxist? I mean, I know the arguments the red guard made, but there were other Marxists that disagreed. Are you just saying the red guard interpretation was the correct one?

lapcat 3y ago

> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. I think you missed the point of the article, which was "Harvard exists to make society less meritocratic, and it does that while subsidized by everyone else." > Because selecting good people in a sea of resumes is HARD. Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. The author discusses this: "The hardest part of Harvard is getting in." "High-stakes college admissions means that much of the value of a college degree is determined before students even start college. If you must mark and sort young people, gross, but OK. But why do it at 18 rather than 22?" On a personal note, I was accepted to an Ivy League school (though not Harvard) as a high school senior, but my family couldn't afford to send me there, so I had to go to a state school instead. My classmate and friend was accepted to MIT but also had to go to a state school because of money. This was decades ago, so perhaps things have changed recently, but my higher education was gated on my family's wealth, i.e., lack thereof. Was it a "meritocracy"? No fucking way.

RC_ITR 3y ago
>The hardest part of Harvard is getting in. This is always such an interesting argument people make when nearly every 'next step' after undergrad is more selective than Ivy League schools. Tier-1 Tech/Banking/Consulting/Law School/Med School all reject plenty of people from Harvard because they didn't do a good enough job there. Plenty of Harvard grads languish. It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in, but doing something with it still has capability-based gates.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >It's true that getting a degree is simple once you're in Historically, that was at least somewhat true of undergrads in general. But wasn't necessarily the case for the top law schools and Big Law still, as far as I know, has something up an up or out career ladder.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  If they only accept the very best academically there is probably a bias: it may not be that 'simple' to get a degree once you're in but since those who are in are very good they have a high graduation rate.

user3939382 3y ago

> The top schools can be pretty darn great I've seen research suggesting that the schools aren't necessarily great, the students are. They were already great which is how they passed the admissions criteria, and their career success can be attributed to the qualities that they arrived at e.g. Harvard with. They would have been as successful regardless of where they attended. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.

komali2 3y ago
Given the argument that the wait-list students that didn't get to actually attend did worse in life than wait-list students that did get to attend, how does your implication that the "students were already good and that's why they did well in life" hold up?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Is that what the data shows, though? I've read summaries of papers describing the exact opposite and linked them here before. Here's one such example, with a followup comment describing a study that contradicts the argument you lead with. (I'm merely saying it contradicts it; I'm not vouching that the contradiction is correct.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748063 , summarized as: > For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends. The link to the article and the followup is in the only 2-deep chain linked above.
  - amluto 3y ago
    “For most students” can potentially obscure an enormous difference between mean and median income.

hospitalJail 3y ago

> Harvard is simply a private institution with excellent reputation It used to. Now when I see someone went to Harvard, I imagine they had rich parents or were part of Affirmative Action. Not to mention their cheating scandals and forged data. Heck, I talked to a Harvard law grad last week and asked them for specific points on their speech and they had no follow up, they regurgitated. This was no AAA student, this was someone that benefited from Affirmative Action + had 2 physician parents. Harvard in the modern age hasnt impressed me.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

commandlinefan 3y ago

> "lets all be poor" As the parent of two exceptionally-achieving children who were rejected from the "elite" colleges - I've become a lot more sympathetic to the mindset behind this line of thinking. My kids literally couldn't have done more or tried harder - since kindergarten - than they did. They both graduated valedictorian with perfect GPAs, scored in the top 99% of the SAT, did sports, did clubs, volunteered, worked, studied... and when they applied to the ivy's, they didn't even get waitlisted. When I see that somebody like, say, Jared Kushner graduated from Harvard... yeah, it makes me mad. I'm mad on behalf of my two kids who tried so hard for so long. But - I don't really see a "solution" besides some sort of "populist revolt" _against_ these "elite" institutions. The solution is - just stop assigning so much importance to colleges like Harvard. This isn't Harvard's problem, it's all of us that are doing it.

ta8645 3y ago
Why would Ivy schools pass your children over?
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  Follow the Recent Lawsuit against havard admissions for a clue ;)
- tristor 3y ago
  Nobody ever openly talks about it, but the East Coast Ivies are still heavily WASPy, and it's largely due to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Register Basically, if your family name isn't in that list, you have a massive reduction in your probability of being accepted, regardless of merit. If your name is in that list, then you likely will be accepted regardless of merit.
  - amluto 3y ago
    Do you have a source? I’ve never heard of this, and I would be quite surprised if anyone I know or knew well at any elite school was on this list.

mschuster91 3y ago

> Degrees aren't amazing proxies for productivity, but they are decent proxies. They are very decent proxies to evade anti-discrimination laws, as well. Just look how many jobs these days require higher education credentials for paper pusher jobs. Sounds innocent on paper - but the reality is that wide swaths of society can now be perfectly legally discriminated against. Poor people or people of color? No way. People with disabilities of all kind? No way. People who have to raise children they got at a young age? No way. All of these people simply (virtually) filtered out from a lot of employment opportunities, simply because their classes are highly likely to never reach higher education.

ghaff 3y ago

Honestly, leading with Harvard is probably a distraction. There are quite a few good schools that don't have the same level of baggage but are pretty competitive with respect to admissions standards. (Of course, the details likely matter depending on the field in question to at least some degree.) Certainly undergrad school is far from a perfect filter but I agree that if that were really all you had to go on, there is signal there whether one likes that fact or not. (And how could there not be? A lot of people who get into top schools could, shall we say, not super-concentrate on academics as undergrads and many will still do pretty well--although others will flame out.)

TheRealPomax 3y ago

> 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. That's... a bullshit argument, and should get called out as bullshit? It's an easy approach, and beats other approaches for HR but says absolutely nothing about whether the person is a good person (both in the "are they a sociopath?" and "are they a good fit for the role we're filling" sense). In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. They're on a fast track career path, no matter what job you're offering them, you're going to have to rehire for it 2 or even 1 year down the road. That's an atrocious cost-benefit ratio: that's not an investment, that's intentionally hiring for the short term and intentionally preventing institutional knowledge from ever building up. If you're a startup, good for you, your goal is to get valuable fast and then cash out. But if you're a real business, and your plan is to own yourself and the market you operate in, it's downright idiotic.

endisneigh 3y ago
> In fact, most high achievers are bad fits for most jobs, because their intention is to not be in that job for long. citation needed. (plot twist, this is not true).
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  I'm okay with using anecdotal data to refute anecdotes. So, source: me, I've seen loads of high achievers come in, get promoted, stick around for half a year, then job hop to the next company in order to "start without baggage" but at a higher rung. (And of course, while it should go without saying, it very much needs saying because people are very bad at logic: that doesn't mean I claimed that no high achievers stick around, and it also doesn't mean I claimed that people who do stick around are low achievers. Reading the latter would require making not just one but _two_ mistakes)

jyscao 3y ago

>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. There is a better method for selecting candidates: IQ testing. For better or worse, that's illegal. In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data.

tzs 3y ago
If the degree is from a college where it takes hard work to get that degree that tells you a lot more than an IQ test would tell you.
ghaff 3y ago
>For better or worse, that's illegal. Problematic/controversial but not necessarily illegal. They can probably ask for SAT/ACT scores which are probably a pretty good proxy as well. >In fact college degrees are merely proxies for the lack of IQ data Disagree to a fair degree. The college degree (and grades/other experiences) tell more than how well you do on a multiple choice test. One can of course argue how much more.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
SAT is an IQ test in disguise.
okaram 3y ago
IQ testing is not illegal in the US ... It may be easier to not use it than to produce evidence that it is relevant, but ...
- jyscao 3y ago
  You misunderstood. Using IQ scores for the purpose of hiring is illegal.

itoor 3y ago

[dead]

neilv 3y ago

> 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". I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple. So I disagree with the analogy, when we're talking about people who went to big-name schools vs. everyone else.

JohnBooty 3y ago
I think "SUPER QUALITY PRO" almost certainly isn't as good of quality as Apple. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds w.r.t. this analogy, but generic stuff is very often as good as Apple. It's just that with Apple (substitute another high-prestige name brand, if you prefer) you are typically getting a certain guaranteed level of quality. I've had Apple-branded phone cases. They are always top-tier. I've had generic ones that were just as good or maybe better. Also had some godawful ones. I can afford to experiment with phone cases because I can tolerate a $15 failure that takes a small amount of my time. But this isn't as true for potential hires so companies gravitate toward those "big-name" schools. When you are in a hiring role, it's often impossible to avoid this kind of bias. If you hire a Harvard grad and they don't work out, at least you made the safe choice in your manager's eyes. Much easier to defend than taking a chance on some rando wildcard person.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Also think the analogy should have used more realistic company names like "HYTGH" and "WYSHI".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zzzeek 3y ago

right well, the problem is people are not iphones, they're human beings. we can throw away our cheap android phones and get iphones, but as a society, we might decide that we should not be throwing away humans who don't come from the right "brand"

8note 3y ago

The question is, could you do a similar filter by asking each applicant about their parents wealth? Perhaps ultra-wealthy parents is the decent proxy for productivity?

louthy 3y ago

> 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. This is my exact opposite experience. Degrees are meaningless unless you've literally just left college. Even then, it tells you their scores in particular subjects, it does not tell you their attitude, work ethic, general problem solving ability, etc. I ignore qualifications unless you've just completed it. Experience is a better guide and, I know this is controversial, just talking to the candidate - it's amazing what people will expose once they feel comfortable that they're having a friendly chat.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Not all jobs require attitude, work ethic and problem solving ability. Some require skills like dress sense, eloquence, table manners, and a refined taste in fine wine and art.

laidoffamazon 3y ago

> 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. What do you recommend those of us who didn't get into any top schools do then? If clearly we're destined to be inferior for life?

glimshe 3y ago
I don't think so, but life will be harder. Life is harder if you are born poor. I graduated from an unknown university (in the US) overseas, so I started in lower places and climbed my way up through hard work, study, luck and skill development (which include social skills). You are not destined to be inferior, but if the cards are not stacked in your favor, you will just have to make up for it somehow.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  > you will just have to make up for it somehow. I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    >I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now. I'd like to believe this is sarcasm but it probably isn't.
    - laidoffamazon 3y ago
      It's not sarcasm. I'm told that I'm lesser because I didn't get into any top schools or "deserve" the respect they get - clearly I'm doing worse than Ivy+ folks.
      - 3y ago

darkclouds 3y ago

Conformity is not scientific, using a university to stealth filter for obedience to (data) authority is both lazy and a fancy dressed deceitful gang mentality on display.

rayiner 3y ago

> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument. It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class. Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power. Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power. And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.

chimprich 3y ago
> Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. "Relatively"? According to what metric? I think the US has one of the world's highest Gini coefficients, at least among Western countries. "Only"? 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
- sixstringtheory 3y ago
  > 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed. This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite? How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.

gojomo 3y ago

Harvard's not purely private: it receives massive structural tax advantages, & lots of government funding via many kinds of tuition & research subsidies. Harvard's supposed "excellent reputation" is significantly maintained by the cartel of graduates from it, & its close peers, preferentially touting, publishing, hiring, and funding class-similar people – even when they are no better on objective measures than non-graduates. Your hiring observation is nearly fully driven not by Harvard providing any "educational lift", specific to its educational product, that would justify its state-granted advantages, but simply by Harvard getting "early pick" (pre-career) to place its brand on people who are already talented, ambitious, or highly-prepared before they arrive at Harvard.

deepnotderp 3y ago

> Having managed over 100+ people, I can say that on average the people from better institutions are better employees You missed the central point of the article about causality. Of course this will be the case on average, because Harvard gets smarter people on average! Harvard serves no additional value here other than to be a gatekeeper.

toastercat 3y ago

I'm not sure if you didn't read the article, skimmed it, or are mis-representing it on purpose.

P_I_Staker 3y ago

In doing that you're also buying into an exclusionary system that benefits the extravagantly wealthy. These institutions hit a critical mass, then they get powerful alumni and have dynasty that self perpetuates. Everyone knows you don't go to college to get an education... at least not if you're trying to win the US capitalist game (which most educated people realize is their best bet), you go to college to network, and sometimes for hands on experience, which can be gained anywhere. The academic material itself is usually useless. So what you end up with amounts to a privilege factory. Sure you also might have extra opportunities to gain wisdom from exceptional people that don't exist elsewhere, but this is quite rare, and a substantial percentage of students never see it (ie. nuggets of wisdom they couldn't get by grabbing a random engineer with knowledge of the subject). Mostly you're just getting a chance to rub elbows with the elite. See how they function and hopefully gain some allies with power. I think it may often be true that employees from elite schools can do better. You're hiring based on pedigree, which works in many cases, but it's questionable how it impacts society. BTW, I've also heard the opposite about ivy league employees. They tend to be entitled, unwilling to get in the trenches, and always seem to think they could be doing better. Also, I've heard lots of complaints that the personality issues tend to be worse. P.S. I wanted to explain why I think most intelligent people eventually decide to "play the game" and go for money / power. No matter how meaningful your career, you will probably just end up doing the same thing: making the world worse, by helping your corporate overlords, only with far less money. This is very true for almost any calling / "just cause" professions. * Police - spend most of your time ruining poor peoples lives for an injustice system * Doctors - again ruining poor peoples lives, otherwise abusing patients, and trying to prevent them from getting health care * Nurses - Pretty much the above, with less evil decisions, more thankless work, less money * Mental health / psych - Watch people slowly be bled to death by a system that cannot help you. A substantial percentage of your patients will see you as like a horrible witch poisoning them (not just the psychotic ones!). You will "help" by stripping them of rights. * Social worker - you will have all of societies problems dumped on you, overworked and make no money. You also get to play the role of cop and ruin peoples lives (people with horrific upbringings), who will now hate you. It's your job to get the drug addicted SA survivor into jail, sometimes through shady means. * Nonprofit - worse corporate politics and guilt when you realize how much money goes to perpetuating the organization instead of helping. * Engineer - no matter how brilliant you are, you will be implementing someone else's idea. You will be expendable. You will be undermined and blamed. You don't get to own anything and it's mostly thankless busywork. Anyway THIS is why most people eventually decide that they should just maximize money/power. It would arguably be hard to decide if the work lived up to reality. When it's just as hollow and empty, yeah just go for $$$.

dmuso 3y ago

I’ve hired 100+ people with around a 97% hit rate on hiring great employees and great engineers. I don’t look at whether they have a degree or not, I don’t care what school they went to. In my experience it provides no indication of whether they’re good or not.