9 ms·

American Horror, Ivy League Edition

69 points by juanplusjuan 12y ago

otakucode 12y ago
I imagine all of those Valedictorians moving on to Ivy League status are simply gathering the benefits of a childhood designed to make them subservient, unquestioning, and anything but self-determined. Of course they end up vomiting in frat basements. They're dumped into adulthood without an iota of experience of being a human being. How are they supposed to know what to do when no one is telling them exactly what to do with every moment of their day for the first time in their entire lives?
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Whatever makes you feel better about yourself, you will believe.
- protonfish 12y ago
  I am not sure why your comment is getting so much hate. Are there that many valedictorians on HN? I read so much about the dangers of performance metrics in the work place, but aren't grades the most widespread and pernicious of them all? Face it, a 4.0 does not require more than average intelligence, only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told.
  - bsilvereagle 12y ago
    > only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told In my experience, my 4.0 existed because I didn't do what I'm told. If I disagreed with a teacher's answer, I would write in "(e) bsilvereagle's answer" and usually get full credit. Similarly, not once did I write a Bing-Bang-Bongo paper in high school as instructed, yet I got top grades in English because I could independently construct a worthwhile essay. I don't think I ever completed a Chemistry lab as instructed either, I would stop half way through and start tinkering around and could usually come up with a hypothesis/experiment/conclusion that was much better than what the lab set out to do. In short, don't assume every 4.0 you see is going to do exactly as they're told.
    - protonfish 12y ago
      Not sure what school you went to (or even in what country - what the heck is "Bing-Bang-Bongo"?) but you only need one teacher that doesn't like your alleged independent methods to put a fly into your perfect score. You must be very fortunate to somehow have avoided this your entire high school career. Bravo.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  I went to Cornell and can only think of one person who comes close to fitting this description. Your imagination is far from reality. I may have a substantial selection bias, so perhaps there are people who fit your description, but they are certainly not typical.
- cafard 12y ago
  I have known (that I can be sure) two high-school valedictorians, one from my own HS class, one much younger. Neither in any way resembled the profile you seem to have in mind. I have no memory of where my HS classmate went, but suspect it was a state school. The younger one got wait-listed for the one Ivy she applied for, and went to a perfectly good school even so.
burgers 12y ago
> Economics, conversely, is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn. In what Deresiewicz calls “a stunning convergence,” it was the top major at 26 of the nation’s top 40 universities and colleges. In a society that sets up severe and aggressive punishments for having less money than someone else, why would anyone go into any other field? Only the masochists and the selfless will be outside the world of finance soon.
- melling 12y ago
  Well, there will probably still be an abundant number of indie developers willing to make $40k/year. They'll move to Alaska so they can live the dream. I should have kept a list of all the recent podcasts and links. Anyway, here's one from today. http://www.developereconomics.com/indie-app-opportunity-gone/ http://www.developereconomics.com/indie-app-opportunity-gone...
  - otakucode 12y ago
    It always amazes me when a future where everyone can make a good living, but where there may be reduced opportunities for insanely extravagant wealth concentration, makes people scoff, but I see it often. Since technology has solved the problem of distribution - the main product that companies were invented to solve - it only seems natural for centralized companies to dissolve entirely. Aside from solving distribution (both of work and of product), everything companies provide can be provided for nearly no cost by software. And companies today have tremendous overhead, doing unwise things like maintaining offices. They do nothing but drain resources and subtract value. Physical co-location of workers is worthless thanks to technology in most every industry. And it always seems to be the people who are most dedicated to economic ideals and capitalism who refuse to see that capitalism dictates that the current system of megacorps will be defeated by capitalism itself because they are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software. Simply because we may never see another 'Goldman Sachs' strangling the wealth out of millions and putting it into the pockets of a handful who did nothing to earn it, they ignore the fact that most people only need $72k/yr to get to a point where more money won't even make them happier.
ddilger 12y ago
Research and business benefit from pooling the best talent in one place. So what if some students get in from legacy or money. That's a price paid to have a large endowment at your disposal. Sounds like the authors of the article and the books referenced are just jealous of Ivy League students. Students joining frats? Glad they don't do that at lesser universities.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
aidenn0 12y ago
As far as access to professors; I went to a school with approximately 30k undergraduates. There were some phenomenal professors there, and if you merely showed up to one of their talks and take an interest and you immediately stood out to them. Going by my data-point of one school, it's not particularly hard to get interaction with professors, even when nearly all the freshman classes are taught by TAs. I got to meet and interact with some wonderful physicists, just by being interested in what they had to say. I wonder if it is easier or harder to do that at an Ivy.
- ISL 12y ago
  Easy to do in physics at Cornell and the University of Washington. Send emails or knock on doors; it's not hard to find a professor who's interested in working with interested people.
  - wiredfool 12y ago
    My recollections of Cornell and UW are the same. Show up and ask questions and you might wind up working in their lab.
- smeyer 12y ago
  I studied physics at Harvard. It was incredibly easy to interact with top shelf professors. It was one of my favorite parts of my education.
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  I have a BS in Physics from UCSB. There were only 5 of us physics majors in my graduating class, compared to 800+ anthropology majors. As a physics major, access to professeurs' time and lab resources was excellent. Back in the 1970s, my education was very much less than it would have been at an ivy league school!
  - Balgair 12y ago
    UCSC, early 2000's: About 15 of us. Faculty interaction was nearly unavoidable, working in labs was a great way to help pay for beer, as they were next to the class rooms and study halls. That said, you could only pay for beer with that cash, as costs of rooms and tuition in Santa Cruz is not student friendly.
Thriptic 12y ago
> Deresiewicz says essentially the same thing, urging students to flee the Ivy League in favor of smaller colleges like Wesleyan, Reed and Grinnell, where the students are more passionate and receptive... This is terrible advice and simply not true. I went to a small, solidly ranked liberal arts school. Most of the students also drank incredibly hard; they had little regard for academics; and while it was true that you could always get in contact with a professor, the faculty was of a far lower quality than you would find at an ivy league university. Research opportunities were also non-existent. > where the students are ... less prone to unseemly résumé-padding It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, and none of my friends / anyone else I knew outside of such fields achieved meaningful employment following graduation.
- thesteamboat 12y ago
  > It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, In my experience (currently a PhD student at a top 10 STEM program) graduate programs only care at about ability to do research. There may be a few non-research activities that demonstrate this, e.g. scoring well on Putnam, but no one scores points for activism or running a club or excelling athletically, or any of the others activities I associate with the phrase resume-padding.
  - Thriptic 12y ago
    This is a fair point, and what I meant was something more along the lines of "It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding or even resume building". No one at my school ever discussed career development, and it was a fundamental disservice to the students. The assumption on the part of the faculty was that students would go to 1 of 3 mediocre grad programs or low tier medical programs that our students were regularly admitted to, and that furthering students' development outside of undergrad was not their concern. The only reason I ended up in a better place was because of fantastic mentoring outside of school. To put this into context, I majored in biochemistry in undergrad, and was the only person in my department (or out of anyone else that I knew in STEM) to do summer research internships at other universities (we didn't have such a thing) / in industry while I was there. I was also the only person to push for a more independent senior research thesis rather than a cookie cutter project which was handed to me. The university I performed research at for two summers had large, well organized career counseling and job placement efforts, including multiple large scale career fairs each year. When I returned to my school and suggested that we organize a trip to a large university career fair nearby, I was met with blank stares by the faculty and the students. When I asked people what their career plans were soon after the start of senior year, no one even had a general sense of what they wanted to do or what opportunities were out there...
sebular 12y ago
This article hits on some good points, but it conflates two separate issues: 1. The quality of education at Ivy League schools isn't living up to the hype (and cost) of their "brand". 2. Fraternities are a destructive force in the lives of college students. I actually agree with both points, but they are, in fact, unrelated to each other.

69 points by juanplusjuan 12y ago

I imagine all of those Valedictorians moving on to Ivy League status are simply gathering the benefits of a childhood designed to make them subservient, unquestioning, and anything but self-determined. Of course they end up vomiting in frat basements. They're dumped into adulthood without an iota of experience of being a human being. How are they supposed to know what to do when no one is telling them exactly what to do with every moment of their day for the first time in their entire lives?

happyscrappy 12y ago
Whatever makes you feel better about yourself, you will believe.
protonfish 12y ago
I am not sure why your comment is getting so much hate. Are there that many valedictorians on HN? I read so much about the dangers of performance metrics in the work place, but aren't grades the most widespread and pernicious of them all? Face it, a 4.0 does not require more than average intelligence, only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told.
- bsilvereagle 12y ago
  > only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told In my experience, my 4.0 existed because I didn't do what I'm told. If I disagreed with a teacher's answer, I would write in "(e) bsilvereagle's answer" and usually get full credit. Similarly, not once did I write a Bing-Bang-Bongo paper in high school as instructed, yet I got top grades in English because I could independently construct a worthwhile essay. I don't think I ever completed a Chemistry lab as instructed either, I would stop half way through and start tinkering around and could usually come up with a hypothesis/experiment/conclusion that was much better than what the lab set out to do. In short, don't assume every 4.0 you see is going to do exactly as they're told.
  - protonfish 12y ago
    Not sure what school you went to (or even in what country - what the heck is "Bing-Bang-Bongo"?) but you only need one teacher that doesn't like your alleged independent methods to put a fly into your perfect score. You must be very fortunate to somehow have avoided this your entire high school career. Bravo.
seanflyon 12y ago
I went to Cornell and can only think of one person who comes close to fitting this description. Your imagination is far from reality. I may have a substantial selection bias, so perhaps there are people who fit your description, but they are certainly not typical.
cafard 12y ago
I have known (that I can be sure) two high-school valedictorians, one from my own HS class, one much younger. Neither in any way resembled the profile you seem to have in mind. I have no memory of where my HS classmate went, but suspect it was a state school. The younger one got wait-listed for the one Ivy she applied for, and went to a perfectly good school even so.

burgers 12y ago

> Economics, conversely, is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn. In what Deresiewicz calls “a stunning convergence,” it was the top major at 26 of the nation’s top 40 universities and colleges. In a society that sets up severe and aggressive punishments for having less money than someone else, why would anyone go into any other field? Only the masochists and the selfless will be outside the world of finance soon.

melling 12y ago
Well, there will probably still be an abundant number of indie developers willing to make $40k/year. They'll move to Alaska so they can live the dream. I should have kept a list of all the recent podcasts and links. Anyway, here's one from today. http://www.developereconomics.com/indie-app-opportunity-gone/ http://www.developereconomics.com/indie-app-opportunity-gone...
- otakucode 12y ago
  It always amazes me when a future where everyone can make a good living, but where there may be reduced opportunities for insanely extravagant wealth concentration, makes people scoff, but I see it often. Since technology has solved the problem of distribution - the main product that companies were invented to solve - it only seems natural for centralized companies to dissolve entirely. Aside from solving distribution (both of work and of product), everything companies provide can be provided for nearly no cost by software. And companies today have tremendous overhead, doing unwise things like maintaining offices. They do nothing but drain resources and subtract value. Physical co-location of workers is worthless thanks to technology in most every industry. And it always seems to be the people who are most dedicated to economic ideals and capitalism who refuse to see that capitalism dictates that the current system of megacorps will be defeated by capitalism itself because they are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software. Simply because we may never see another 'Goldman Sachs' strangling the wealth out of millions and putting it into the pockets of a handful who did nothing to earn it, they ignore the fact that most people only need $72k/yr to get to a point where more money won't even make them happier.

ddilger 12y ago

Research and business benefit from pooling the best talent in one place. So what if some students get in from legacy or money. That's a price paid to have a large endowment at your disposal. Sounds like the authors of the article and the books referenced are just jealous of Ivy League students. Students joining frats? Glad they don't do that at lesser universities.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

aidenn0 12y ago

As far as access to professors; I went to a school with approximately 30k undergraduates. There were some phenomenal professors there, and if you merely showed up to one of their talks and take an interest and you immediately stood out to them. Going by my data-point of one school, it's not particularly hard to get interaction with professors, even when nearly all the freshman classes are taught by TAs. I got to meet and interact with some wonderful physicists, just by being interested in what they had to say. I wonder if it is easier or harder to do that at an Ivy.

ISL 12y ago
Easy to do in physics at Cornell and the University of Washington. Send emails or knock on doors; it's not hard to find a professor who's interested in working with interested people.
- wiredfool 12y ago
  My recollections of Cornell and UW are the same. Show up and ask questions and you might wind up working in their lab.
smeyer 12y ago
I studied physics at Harvard. It was incredibly easy to interact with top shelf professors. It was one of my favorite parts of my education.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I have a BS in Physics from UCSB. There were only 5 of us physics majors in my graduating class, compared to 800+ anthropology majors. As a physics major, access to professeurs' time and lab resources was excellent. Back in the 1970s, my education was very much less than it would have been at an ivy league school!
- Balgair 12y ago
  UCSC, early 2000's: About 15 of us. Faculty interaction was nearly unavoidable, working in labs was a great way to help pay for beer, as they were next to the class rooms and study halls. That said, you could only pay for beer with that cash, as costs of rooms and tuition in Santa Cruz is not student friendly.

Thriptic 12y ago

> Deresiewicz says essentially the same thing, urging students to flee the Ivy League in favor of smaller colleges like Wesleyan, Reed and Grinnell, where the students are more passionate and receptive... This is terrible advice and simply not true. I went to a small, solidly ranked liberal arts school. Most of the students also drank incredibly hard; they had little regard for academics; and while it was true that you could always get in contact with a professor, the faculty was of a far lower quality than you would find at an ivy league university. Research opportunities were also non-existent. > where the students are ... less prone to unseemly résumé-padding It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, and none of my friends / anyone else I knew outside of such fields achieved meaningful employment following graduation.

thesteamboat 12y ago
> It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, In my experience (currently a PhD student at a top 10 STEM program) graduate programs only care at about ability to do research. There may be a few non-research activities that demonstrate this, e.g. scoring well on Putnam, but no one scores points for activism or running a club or excelling athletically, or any of the others activities I associate with the phrase resume-padding.
- Thriptic 12y ago
  This is a fair point, and what I meant was something more along the lines of "It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding or even resume building". No one at my school ever discussed career development, and it was a fundamental disservice to the students. The assumption on the part of the faculty was that students would go to 1 of 3 mediocre grad programs or low tier medical programs that our students were regularly admitted to, and that furthering students' development outside of undergrad was not their concern. The only reason I ended up in a better place was because of fantastic mentoring outside of school. To put this into context, I majored in biochemistry in undergrad, and was the only person in my department (or out of anyone else that I knew in STEM) to do summer research internships at other universities (we didn't have such a thing) / in industry while I was there. I was also the only person to push for a more independent senior research thesis rather than a cookie cutter project which was handed to me. The university I performed research at for two summers had large, well organized career counseling and job placement efforts, including multiple large scale career fairs each year. When I returned to my school and suggested that we organize a trip to a large university career fair nearby, I was met with blank stares by the faculty and the students. When I asked people what their career plans were soon after the start of senior year, no one even had a general sense of what they wanted to do or what opportunities were out there...

sebular 12y ago

This article hits on some good points, but it conflates two separate issues: 1. The quality of education at Ivy League schools isn't living up to the hype (and cost) of their "brand". 2. Fraternities are a destructive force in the lives of college students. I actually agree with both points, but they are, in fact, unrelated to each other.