8 ms·

Well... They probably do, I'd be surprised if they didn't. But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you wa

Well... They probably do, I'd be surprised if they didn't. But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted. It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people. Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?

niggler 14y ago
"The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics" I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.
- slg 14y ago
  The hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.
  - niggler 14y ago
    At the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts. It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.
    - mjn 14y ago
      In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (http://www.hmc.edu http://www.hmc.edu). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail. edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.
      - spamizbad 14y ago
        Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too. (Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)
      - kenjackson 14y ago
        HMC academically is as strong as the Ivies in engineering fields. Not really a good school to make your point with.
    - Retric 14y ago
      I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence. But, if you want to go into politics Yale is a far better choice. Rich may be well educated, but it's got little to do with raw intelegence.
      - 14y ago
  - lucidrains 14y ago
    the coursework may be the same, but your peers are smarter and more hardworking.
    - rafcavallaro 14y ago
      Which means that exams need to be much more difficult. When I was a grad student Teaching Assistant at Harvard we had a newly hired professor who'd spent the last decade at Cal Berkley. He decided to give the same midterm exam he'd given many times before at Berkeley. When we TA's saw the exam we politely told him he needed to change it or the whole class would ace it. "Nonsense!" he said, "Harvard students aren't that much smarter than Berkeley students." We had to write and administer a second midterm because everyone scored 98, 99, or 100 on his Berkeley test.
      - argonaut 14y ago
        This is the problem with anecdotes: your experience seriously does not mirror my experiences with top colleges and UC Berkeley. I took several math classes at Stanford and had to repeat them at UC Berkeley, and they were significantly easier (coursework and testing) than the equivalents at UC Berkeley, even considering the fact that when I took the classes at Berkeley I had already covered the basic foundation of the material at Stanford.
      - cycrutchfield 14y ago
        If this was an exam for a freshman/sophomore course, I might believe it since lower-div classes at Berkeley have an exceptionally wide audience with non-uniform levels of prior mathematical experience. However, if this was an upper-div course, I highly doubt your anecdotal experience holds true in general. Source: majored in math at Berkeley, went to MIT for grad school.
      - doktrin 14y ago
        This reads like one of the countless anecdotes about atheist professors that get bandied about Facebook. Berkeley is a top school, and I don't think you'll find much of any evidence to the contrary.
      - 14y ago
  - fyi80 14y ago
    Depends where you draw the line. Compared to a public state school, the Ivy League course cover far more material faster in more depth, because the students are better prepared harder workers and can handle it. Harvard has 4 levels of Multivariable Calculus, for example, whereas most schools have just 1. The 2nd-highest level is basically Real Analysis, except (a) it is more deep/accelerated than the actual Real Analysis class, and (b) it is only taught to first-years. The highest-level class was designed for students who were expected to learn an undergraduate math degree curriculum "on their own time" and pursue more advanced topics in clads.
- hashmymustache 14y ago
  certainly, but those top notch academics are more relevant for graduate research than undergrad courses. with the swarm of ivy graduates going to work on wall st, I doubt the advanced botany course with a medalist in the field is as relevant as the name of the school.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- munchbunny 14y ago
  I did go to an Ivy League school, and I didn't go for the top-notch academics, even though I was at the top of my class in my department. And even if your reason was actually the top-notch academics, you still benefit very much from a strong old boys' network of professors and researchers.
dopamean 14y ago
I went to Penn, my sister went to Yale, and our mother went to Columbia and we all had very different experiences from what you describe here. None of us went for the "old-boys network" nor have we really seen that there is that much of one. Yes, there are a lot of monied alumni but I really dont believe that is what many of the students who want to go to top schools are thinking about. We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.
- fyi80 14y ago
  "and the reputation" "I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go." That's what the old-boys-network IS. It's not literally people smoking cigars, it's the preferential treatment you receive for having the brand name on your degree.
  - dopamean 14y ago
    No I dont think that's what it is. I wanted to go to Wharton because it is the most rigorous undergraduate finance program in the country. And that is why it has a good reputation.
    - argonaut 14y ago
      As someone who works with someone who got an undergrad degree from Wharton, I seriously do not believe you. But I'll assume you are telling the truth - even if so, it certainly does not apply to 90% of Wharton's student body. By my co-worker's own admission, finance is all about prestige, and the primary reason he went to Wharton is because of the name and how it gets you into IB jobs, not because of its rigor. In fact, he didn't want to go to a rigorous school but liked Penn because it was more of a party school than other Ivies.
      - dopamean 14y ago
ethanbond 14y ago
Yeah, no. Did you go to an Ivy or any elite university? My guess would be no, because you're wrong.
nostromo 14y ago
There's a study that concluded that Ivy League schools don't really add value (in terms of lifetime earnings) to non-black, non-latino, non-poor students. Here's a summary: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-... Here's the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159 The study worked by looking at students that got in to a more- and less-prestigious school and chose the less-prestigious one. In short, being good enough to get in to Harvard is what matters, not actually attending.
- aristus 14y ago
  Being non-black, non-latino, and non-poor probably helps lifetime earnings, too.
  - pc86 14y ago
    ...that's the point.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Retric 14y ago
So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit? The dirty little secret is to rank feeder schools vary highly in the admissions process. Few poor people send there kids to 30+k / year private high schools.
sopooneo 14y ago
My experience makes me think otherwise. I didn't attend an elite university, but visited friends that did. I saw a disproportionate number of gifted and extremely hard working people. More so than at my college, which itself was highly ranked.
- tezka 14y ago
  it doesn't matter what you saw there. the point of TFA is there are many equally (if not more) hardworking candidates that don't find their ways to these schools because of existing prejudices and non-transparent admission policies.
tsotha 14y ago
>So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit? If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.
- wildgift 14y ago
  Someone has to do the hard work of keeping the rich people rich. It's not easy.

niggler 14y ago

"The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics" I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.

slg 14y ago
The hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.
- niggler 14y ago
  At the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts. It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.
  - mjn 14y ago
    In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (http://www.hmc.edu http://www.hmc.edu). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail. edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.
    - spamizbad 14y ago
      Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too. (Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)
    - kenjackson 14y ago
      HMC academically is as strong as the Ivies in engineering fields. Not really a good school to make your point with.
  - Retric 14y ago
    I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence. But, if you want to go into politics Yale is a far better choice. Rich may be well educated, but it's got little to do with raw intelegence.
    - 14y ago
- lucidrains 14y ago
  the coursework may be the same, but your peers are smarter and more hardworking.
  - rafcavallaro 14y ago
    Which means that exams need to be much more difficult. When I was a grad student Teaching Assistant at Harvard we had a newly hired professor who'd spent the last decade at Cal Berkley. He decided to give the same midterm exam he'd given many times before at Berkeley. When we TA's saw the exam we politely told him he needed to change it or the whole class would ace it. "Nonsense!" he said, "Harvard students aren't that much smarter than Berkeley students." We had to write and administer a second midterm because everyone scored 98, 99, or 100 on his Berkeley test.
    - argonaut 14y ago
      This is the problem with anecdotes: your experience seriously does not mirror my experiences with top colleges and UC Berkeley. I took several math classes at Stanford and had to repeat them at UC Berkeley, and they were significantly easier (coursework and testing) than the equivalents at UC Berkeley, even considering the fact that when I took the classes at Berkeley I had already covered the basic foundation of the material at Stanford.
    - cycrutchfield 14y ago
      If this was an exam for a freshman/sophomore course, I might believe it since lower-div classes at Berkeley have an exceptionally wide audience with non-uniform levels of prior mathematical experience. However, if this was an upper-div course, I highly doubt your anecdotal experience holds true in general. Source: majored in math at Berkeley, went to MIT for grad school.
    - doktrin 14y ago
      This reads like one of the countless anecdotes about atheist professors that get bandied about Facebook. Berkeley is a top school, and I don't think you'll find much of any evidence to the contrary.
    - 14y ago
- fyi80 14y ago
  Depends where you draw the line. Compared to a public state school, the Ivy League course cover far more material faster in more depth, because the students are better prepared harder workers and can handle it. Harvard has 4 levels of Multivariable Calculus, for example, whereas most schools have just 1. The 2nd-highest level is basically Real Analysis, except (a) it is more deep/accelerated than the actual Real Analysis class, and (b) it is only taught to first-years. The highest-level class was designed for students who were expected to learn an undergraduate math degree curriculum "on their own time" and pursue more advanced topics in clads.
hashmymustache 14y ago
certainly, but those top notch academics are more relevant for graduate research than undergrad courses. with the swarm of ivy graduates going to work on wall st, I doubt the advanced botany course with a medalist in the field is as relevant as the name of the school.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
munchbunny 14y ago
I did go to an Ivy League school, and I didn't go for the top-notch academics, even though I was at the top of my class in my department. And even if your reason was actually the top-notch academics, you still benefit very much from a strong old boys' network of professors and researchers.

dopamean 14y ago

I went to Penn, my sister went to Yale, and our mother went to Columbia and we all had very different experiences from what you describe here. None of us went for the "old-boys network" nor have we really seen that there is that much of one. Yes, there are a lot of monied alumni but I really dont believe that is what many of the students who want to go to top schools are thinking about. We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.

fyi80 14y ago
"and the reputation" "I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go." That's what the old-boys-network IS. It's not literally people smoking cigars, it's the preferential treatment you receive for having the brand name on your degree.
- dopamean 14y ago
  No I dont think that's what it is. I wanted to go to Wharton because it is the most rigorous undergraduate finance program in the country. And that is why it has a good reputation.
  - argonaut 14y ago
    As someone who works with someone who got an undergrad degree from Wharton, I seriously do not believe you. But I'll assume you are telling the truth - even if so, it certainly does not apply to 90% of Wharton's student body. By my co-worker's own admission, finance is all about prestige, and the primary reason he went to Wharton is because of the name and how it gets you into IB jobs, not because of its rigor. In fact, he didn't want to go to a rigorous school but liked Penn because it was more of a party school than other Ivies.
    - dopamean 14y ago

ethanbond 14y ago

Yeah, no. Did you go to an Ivy or any elite university? My guess would be no, because you're wrong.

nostromo 14y ago

There's a study that concluded that Ivy League schools don't really add value (in terms of lifetime earnings) to non-black, non-latino, non-poor students. Here's a summary: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-... Here's the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159 http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159 The study worked by looking at students that got in to a more- and less-prestigious school and chose the less-prestigious one. In short, being good enough to get in to Harvard is what matters, not actually attending.

aristus 14y ago
Being non-black, non-latino, and non-poor probably helps lifetime earnings, too.
- pc86 14y ago
  ...that's the point.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Retric 14y ago

So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit? The dirty little secret is to rank feeder schools vary highly in the admissions process. Few poor people send there kids to 30+k / year private high schools.

sopooneo 14y ago

My experience makes me think otherwise. I didn't attend an elite university, but visited friends that did. I saw a disproportionate number of gifted and extremely hard working people. More so than at my college, which itself was highly ranked.

tezka 14y ago
it doesn't matter what you saw there. the point of TFA is there are many equally (if not more) hardworking candidates that don't find their ways to these schools because of existing prejudices and non-transparent admission policies.

tsotha 14y ago

>So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit? If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.

wildgift 14y ago
Someone has to do the hard work of keeping the rich people rich. It's not easy.