This is true. You can have the top-tier universities in country X be purely merit-based. France and China come to mind as 2 examples. 清华大学 (Tsinghua) and 北京大学 (Peking) are great universities and in fact I would bet that their students are significantly smarter and more qualified than Harvard students, but most Chinese would prefer to go to Harvard or Princeton and American universities routinely dominate the world rankings of universities.
Maybe the American Ivy League is so special specifically because it's not merit-based and the grads aren't just smart engineers working at big tech companies, they're rich and well-connected business people who can climb their way up the greasy pole and become CEOs of Amazon, GE, JP Morgan, Citigroup, McDonald's, Mastercard, and of course light $1.75B on fire as the CEO of Quibi.
Both have pretty clear elite pipelines into their nominally meritocratic admissions through various forms of private schools - the Eton/Oxbridge education pipeline into the elite is clearly not evidence of meritocracy.
Yes. France has basically parallel high school systems for élites (ultra competitive and highly discipline) and the rest (daycare at best, not even that at worst), then by some presumably totally random effect only the élites make it into the élite universities.
It is highly competitive to live in the right area and have parents with the right background to send your kid to them yes. Which I guess is not what you meant 😁
Can still be, if the elite High Schools teach to the admissions test while the others merely try to teach actual skills. Compare the old Chinese bureaucracy entrance tests - in theory they were meritocratic, in practice they were so weird that you _had_ to go to the schools that taught to the test.
In the UK everyone who gets into an elite university is smart enough to cope with a pretty rigorous workload (although as you say, there's a perception that not everyone smart gets into elite universities). Are you suggesting this not true in the US? That is, there are people at elite universities who legitimately cannot cope with the workload / intellectual standard required? Is there any discrimination against these well-connected-but-dim students? How do they feel about clearly not being up to muster?
> although as you say, there's a perception that not everyone smart gets into elite universities
I did some stats on this recently:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1sK-nWsjHgGRba7IcezTochuKrrPzY3ic The proportion of privately-educated students at Oxford has dropped since my day and continues to drop, but they still take way too many Etonians (who, as I said elsewhere, are far from stupid!) to claim with a straight face that they're taking the academically brightest possible cohort.
In the US and elsewhere almost all students are able to cope with the intellectual standards, because the intellectual standards keep falling. At most institutions if only you pick an easy major and you show up to most classes, you will receive a degree.
Eton/Oxford alumnus here, and I think the situation is more complicated than that. Eton still has a lot of old money, but it no longer lets you put your child's name down at birth: everyone has to pass a fairly rigorous entrance exam, and I never met anyone stupid there. But yes, it is still mostly a school for the sons of the wealthy and privileged (I was there on an academic scholarship, and my family was not especially wealthy but also not poor). Oxford is different: the wealthy and privileged are there, but most of the people I knew there were smart non-rich kids (we had fees in those days, but only £1k/yr - they've gone up since, but to nothing like Harvard's level). It's a lot closer to Scott's picture of Harvard, except the rich/aristocratic students mostly stuck to their little bubble. Maybe I just wasn't useful enough to network with? And, again, Oxford don't do legacy admissions (at least not officially, and I'd hope not in practice), and everyone has to meet the (high) academic standards to get in. Once you're in, though, things change a bit - it's hard to get kicked out of Oxford for not doing any work, so you get people like Boris Johnson (a fellow Eton King's Scholar, incidentally) who neglect their studies in favour of student politics or rowing or theatre or whatever. And *that* brings us to the real sources of Oxford's undue grip on British politics: the pipelines from the Oxford Union (the student debating society) to the Conservative Party and from Oxford University Students Union to the Labour Party (see https://www.ft.com/content/85fc694c-9222-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2 for more on the former); and the Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree that's taken by so many students with aspirations to go into politics, not least because it's known as a degree which allows you to coast academically while you do whatever you really came for: https://theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain
I get a strong impression that US Elite universities are much "worse" in the sense of admitting a lot of people who really aren't there on academic merit (e.g. sports scholarships) than UK ones. I also think Oxford (at least when I went there 20 years ago) is much more exclusively interested in academics than Harvard. I was interviewed twice as part of Oxford admissions (I also had to sit a Maths exam), and every question I was asked was some form of physics or lateral-thinking puzzle. I was not asked about hobbies, achievements, interests, leaderships skills or anything except my ability to think. I don't know whether this has changed more recently, and I have no direct experience of Harvard or other Ivies, but I get the impression they are much more interested in things other than this as well.
That doesn't, of course, mean that Oxbridge admissions are 100% merit-based. Poor/ working class children apply to Oxbridge disproportionately rarely, even controlling for academic ability, for a start. And I'm sure there are other things going on as well.
The sports scholarships are somewhat overblown - yes, they get a lot of attention, but even at the very biggest schools you’re talking at most a few hundred students (even fewer on “full rides”) out of tens of thousands, and they mostly operate in their own little fiefdom that is often entirely financially independent from the rest of the university. The places with the most “egregious” (in terms of letting in the least academically qualified for sports) are big state schools that aren’t particularly selective in the first place. To the extent they network, it’s largely with other athletes, feeding the sports pipelines.
The Ivies don’t even offer sports scholarships, although they do recruit for their teams.
That stereotype is out of date probably by decades.
Eton has a decent record of getting kids into Oxbridge but there are state schools that are better. In the 1970s when my dad went to Cambridge they were trying and succeeding and breaking the link between elite schools and admissions.
Just because a lot of children who studied at elite schools go on to elite universities doesn't mean that the universities are favouring them unfairly. The most parsimonious explanation is that the smart, conscientious and hard-working parents that make enough money to send their children to expensive private schools have smart, conscientious and hard-working children who get in on their own merits.
In fact, Oxbridge openly favours state school students, and there is evidence that private school students are held to higher standards during admissions (they also lower the standards for women applying to STEM subjects):
Now we're in Motte/Bailey land, moving from the initial comment of "the phenomenon of elites getting unjustified access to the most competitive universities does not exist at all in Europe" (which is patently absurd, and also likely not the hill the original commenter wanted to die on) to "individual European countries have very complicated histories of elite preservation through generations and very complicated / sometimes flawed / sometimes successful attempts at addressing these issues" (which I'm fully on board for). So let's not yell at each other in the comments and rather appreciate all you folks sharing fascinating examples of how one could possibly address those issues 😉
But why would that not be equally true in the US? The list of “so elite you can get your kid in no matter how dim” is pretty short, the list of “rich and connected enough that it helps somewhat, but also genuinely has a really good college application” is a lot longer.
Your parsimony is different from mine. I seen numerous extremely hard working parents that didn't get wealthy because of working hard. And I've seen several wealthy folks who weren't all that hard working.
What I haven't seen is numerous hardworking parents who got rich. (I could name a couple, but no more.)
„ The most parsimonious explanation is that the smart, conscientious and hard-working parents that make enough money to send their children to expensive private schools have smart conscientious and hard-working children who get in on their own merits.“
A lot of the hard work there is choosing your parents judiciously, and passing that privilege onto your children.
My experience with Oxbridge (went to a semi-elite private secondary school, was an undergrad and postgrad at Oxford, had a college fellowship and interviewed applicants, but all 20 odd years ago) is that everybody who gets in has to reach a very high level. The elite schools are good at getting people who are capable of getting up to that level up to it and encouraging them through the application process in various ways: they will give mock interviews for example, have special lessons to prepare for the tests and provide advice on which colleges to apply for.
When I was interviewing, I found that about 10% of people were people you obviously wanted to take and stood out, 10% just wouldn't cope with the course and they you had a big grey area of everybody else. It is in that grey area that things like elite schools building relationships with specific tutors can make a difference - if they always send their best students in a subject to a particular college, the tutor there starts to trust the opinions of the teachers. My school had a relationship with one college for my subject (the tutor was a former pupil) and we got a 'private open day'. I chose a different college, but I'm sure if I had been at all borderline, it would have upped my chances if I had applied there.
On the other hand, my personal experience when I was interviewing was that most tutors was trying very hard to take account of the fact that some students are prepared much better by their schools than others. It is the tutors who make the decisions, so in some sense it is a rather fragile system, although there are certainly tutors on the look out for good applicants who haven't been accepted by their first choice college.
Also worth pointing out, that there are a lot of places for classics at Oxbridge, but very few state schools teaching Latin or Ancient Greek - so that is one of the routes in where I think the demographic becomes unfairly biased.
I’d dispute this. Firstly Oxford now admits 70+ % from state schools. Secondly the private schools that dominate oxbridge admissions are the most academically selective with entrance exams at age 11 or 13. The kids smart enough to pass them are likely to do well if they are then put in great schools naturally.
There are plenty of very expensive private schools that send maybe 1 person a year to Oxford because they aren’t academically selective. Eton sending 50 is as much about their intake as about privilege
Elite schools in France (ENA, X, to a lesser degree all the ENS...) all are accessed from a common competitive exam. the 1rst rank nationally chooses first, and so on. Of course, the only ones who have a chance are the students from classes préparatoires who also can present complex subjects orally to a hostile jury in stressfull conditions. And the classes préparatoires draw their students in a biased manner, using both high school grades and the reputation of the high school, who's is indeed a proxy for class, so it might be construed as unfair, low recall. _BUT_, it is a high precision selection: nobody gets in Centrale by legacy admissions! Every single Énarque is an intellectual powerhouse, before party politics rots their young brains. A long running political movement here wants to stop the classes préparatoires + exam as an obviously racist white supremacist classic ploy of elite perpetuation. There are many thumbs on the scale to get a more diverse rse population in elite schools (up to bypassing the selection entirely), but somehow it does not help in the hyper focused, intellectualy grueling prépas....
TL;DR: no lowering of intellectual level, but factors like prestige of high school, parental support during prépas and cultural norms about oral presentation and test taking are known biases.
The mistake here is treating this as an either-or (either admitted on merit OR admitted on pure corrupt legacy) when it’s more of an and. I suspect a high percentage of “legacy admits” have genuinely strong applications.
There’s not a lot of really old money in the US. Most legacies will be only a couple generations at most removed from someone who was highly successful on their own merits in some field. If you believe things like conscientiousness and IQ are heritable, which I think is the party line of ACX, then you’d expect elite to beget elite to some degree without any need for legacy admissions.
Combine good genes, lots of resources, knowing the system, and several years of your parents grooming you for the Ivy League, and I would guess that a lot of legacies have legitimately competitive applications.
(Also I think we might be mixing two things - legacy admits (i.e. get preferred because your relative went to the same school) and literally buying your way in with massive donations (Scott’s examples are all the latter))
IQ is heritable, but there's also regression to the mean! Fortunately Peter Arcidiacono has done some regressions that show just the marginal effect of being a legacy at Harvard, as part of his expert testimony work for the Students for Fair Admissions case.
I have been through the preparatory classes then engineering school branch of the French system and I would somewhat disagree: that system is *very* good at bringing students who are great at math and physics to the very best schools which leads to a lot more students from poor / discriminated backgrounds than I have seen in any other classrooms.
That said, most students were children of engineers or teachers: people who *know* about that pipeline and will encourage their children to go through it. If you are great at math but come from a poor background where no one knows about preparatory classes, you might never know they could be your golden ticket.
(there are other educatory pipelines where things are not so great, civil servants gets to their positions via exams that test you on knowledge highly correlated with a wealthy / cultured background)
We don't have any of the legacy admits bullshit, but we do have Affirmative Action for Aboriginal -or-Torres-Straight-Islander students
I do think that Australia's end-of-school exam system is very well designed, and sufficiently naturally unbiased that the few thumbs applied to the scale are glaringly obvious (AA, and also (at least when I went through school) a grade boost to foreign languages, and English as the only mandatory subject gives Humanities folks a slight edge over STEM types)
I guess "it mostly isn't that obvious" applies. There's plenty of ways to shape the system in ways that privilege familiarity with it (either first-hand or paid-for guidance) without being explicit about it.
(Besides, much of Europe consists of peripheries, where local schools matter less and the best signaling and networking value is acquired by sending your kids to the metropole.)
Harvard tried to recruit a high school classmate because he was an incredible high school hockey player.
Excellent Hockey guy asked if Harvard had any welding classes. This sounds like one of those apocryphal legends that get ginned up out of thin air, but I verified it with hockey guy himself at a class reunion.
He didn’t go to Harvard or any university in the end.
The four most famous universities in the world today are Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale, with Stanford, Princeton, and MIT looking in.
But in 1913, many of the most famous colleges were in Continental Europe. What happened? The alumni of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale won the wars, while Gottingen, Paris, and Parma did not.
It helps that America is the one that designed the university ranking schemes, to favour the Anglo model of universities. Many of the best teaching universities and many of the best research universities in the world are still in Continental Europe, but because they're usually separate institutions from each other they do badly in the rankings that are designed for the weird hybrid Anglo model
What wars? All that's happened is that those unis are represented more in pop culture, which is shaped primarily by the US, and to a lesser extent by the UK. That's why they're more famous.
Among recruiters in Europe, the likes of ETH, the French Grandes Ecoles, etc carry the same weight as Oxbridge.
One of the wars was also closely associated with finding a final solution to a certain question, which led to relocation of a certain intellectually-proficient ethnicity from continental universities to aforementioned ones.
On a historical note, the fact that the Ivy League universities serve a particular social stratum (originally, New England elites) long predates any pretense of meritocracy. The latter dates only to the 1930's. Harvard was founded in 1636.
So when people complain about legacy admissions, there's a sense in which they're confusing which part is the norm and which is the deviation.
For those of us without either kind of privilege, it seems pessimistically like a cruel joke and optimistically like a handy way of sorting who should go first to the wall when the revolution comes. (that's also a joke - the revolution isn't coming and the Ivy grads are safe)
"We've done it, folks. We've developed a revolution-proof system. At last!" I wouldn't tempt fate. My conservative Republican Pop worries about income inequality solely as a pragmatic measure. He thinks IE is acceptable in every way except for how it causes civil unrest.
I propose a metaphor: it's like escape speed. The mass of the primary body is only half of the equation, and an object with low-enough speed can't escape from something the mass of a basketball. It's tautology: that's what 'low-enough' means. Similarly, the 'system' doesn't have to be revolution-proof in any absolute sense, or even be as revolution-proof as systems overthrown by revolutions in the past. It just has to have more mass than the revolution has speed. Not a high bar these days.
You don't have to have a SUCCESSFUL revolution to put a whole lot of people "against the wall." Robespierre killed a lot of people before he got taken out himself. I think the bar is a lot lower for starting a revolution that will eventually fall, but not before causing a lot of "damage." (Or righteous vengeance? One man's terrorist).
The Irish revolt of 1915 is a perfect example of a revolution that failed miserably, but ultimately turned out to be absolutely Worth It for the cause of Irish independence. John Brown's insurrection (that's what all the newspapers called it at the time) may have "failed,* but it sped up the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. So it was Worth It.
You know, that's a very interesting point and you're right those objects didn't have enough speed to escape and yet caused deaths and did something. Perhaps I was needlessly orbital in my original metaphor, and should revise it downward: I don't believe a Revolution now would have enough to get off the ground, with treetop height being the absolute limit.
The laundering actually seems like a good defense against this, because you do *not* want all of the genuinely meritorious young people against the wall or your science and economy will immediately collapse post revolution no matter what system you try to implement afterwards.
It's just an extension of the same laundering system, if you can't tell the difference then you have to treat them all the same one way or another.
Also look at it from the perspective of people who will actually teach these kids. Students in top schools do the readings and understand them better. It is easier to build on the basics and get to the interesting stuff. Students in poorer schools don't do the readings and even if they do have difficulty understanding them. The syllabus and standards have to be watered down. And you have to constantly sit on top of them because they often lack the integrity not to cheat. Teaching the first group is emotionally rewarding while teaching the second group is soul sucking. The difference is big enough that the switch from the second to the first was worth it for me even though I took a 15-20% pay cut. So, people with PhDs will compete to teach and research at where the smart hard-working students are. And given this dynamic, since faculty have say in admissions decisions, they are going to pick the ones they would prefer to teach
I graduated with a degree in English Education, excited to begin teaching. I looked forward to the interesting conversations and perspectives I would get to experience from the students. Full of enthusiasm, I prepared for my first day at my internship with 8th graders.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that 80 percent of students tested below a 5th-grade level, with a solid 25 percent testing at or near Kindergarten level.
Let me reiterate, so there's no misunderstanding: 8th graders were testing at a kindergarten reading level. A quarter of my class would essentially be illiterate, and the rest would not be anywhere near the actual grade level of the readings in the curriculum.
I didn’t last a day. After completing my internship and graduating, I pivoted to tech. Whatever that experience was, it wasn't teaching. Clearly, it wasn’t for me.
I recall advocating during a teacher meeting (while I was a college student interning) that we have to begin teaching phonics and that there was no point in attempting to read actual 8th grade texts (some of which are not particularly easy). No mention of phonics or beginner-reading level support anywhere in the curriculum. "Just differentiate the instruction" was the only thing said about the issue.
And criminal is a good word because that's what it was. I felt disturbed that money was even being wasted in that manner to that extent.
"8th graders were testing at a kindergarten reading level"
Jesus Haploid Christ, the system is FUBAR if those kids were allowed to make it all the way to 8th grade. I know holding a child back a grade is bad optics, but it surely is better (long-term) for the child and for society than this travesty.
Yes, they need a reading specialist, not to be put in a general English class. I am not trained in teaching English at that low of a level. It destroys the classroom environment because while we do manage to separate some kids into an advanced track, we don't do it nearly enough. 30 kids who read at around 7th grade reading level are considered "advanced" so they are taken out of the other classes, but the other classes are still too mixed.
The regular classes have kids with levels from 3rd grade to 6th grade. IMO, once you fall behind 2 grade levels you should immediately be paired with a reading specialist or something. It can be recovered within a few months and they can begin to test at maybe a 5th grade reading level or so, but what am I supposed to do in my class? I don't have time to give a ton of differentiated instruction to that wide of a range of knowledge. It's terrible to put them all in the same class. Kids get bored that way, when you're way over or under your reading level the class becomes uninteresting.
This also goes for the teacher, back to Murali's point. I chose to major in secondary English. If I have to teach what is essentially elementary English to middle schoolers, or middle school English to high schoolers, I will get excruciatingly bored. I would rather work in a different field, make more money, and just fucking read to myself.
At the risk of blaming the victim...why did you accept a teaching job when you knew nothing about the skills of the people you were supposed to teach? Didn't you ask the other teachers how good the students are, look up standardized test scores, talk to the students, or look at graduation rates?
These are fair questions. I didn’t ask those particular questions because I already baked into my priors that the majority of students would not be up to level. I never contemplated the possibility that they would have the literacy of babies.
I just figured they might be one level or so behind, with the students struggling the most around 3 levels behind. The possibility of the majority testing 3+ levels below never occurred to me, so I didn’t consider asking. Also, professors don’t really know as most of them haven’t taught non-college classes in years.
"Let me reiterate, so there's no misunderstanding: 8th graders were testing at a kindergarten reading level. A quarter of my class would essentially be illiterate, and the rest would not be anywhere near the actual grade level of the readings in the curriculum."
On of Charles Murray's points in his book "Real Education" is how *wide* the spread of academic talent is in the general population and also how that talent clusters such that the 'bright' folks often never interact in any meaningful fashion with the folks in the, say, bottom 20%.
8th graders testing at a kindergarten reading level is unfortunate, and not widespread, but not all that uncommon, either.
To illustrate, Dexter Manley managed to get through *college* and be on two Super Bowl winning NFL teams while reading at, essentially, a 2nd grade level.
Incidentally, I think this is an under-appreciated argument against meritocracy -- if your society is run by smart people who interact mainly with other smart people, they're going to (unconsciously) assume that everyone's as smart as they are, and shape society such that only other smart people can navigate it.
I'm pretty sure 'not-smart' people are even _worse_ at shaping a society other not-smart people can successfully navigate. I don't consider our current society/societies to have been mostly/almost-completely shaped by smart people!
I would think that not-smart people would be less inclined to shape society one way or the other. At any rate, western governments' inclination to try and impose top-down social change seems to have increased with their governing classes' perception of themselves as a cognitive and intellectual elite.
Maybe less inclined to _deliberately_ shape society or to explicitly/rhetorically _admit_ that that's what they were doing – sure.
I think "top-down social change" is – thankfully – much less intense now than in it was back in the first half of the previous century. It won't, and shouldn't, entirely die, but it's been tempered, even if it has to be resisted to some degree forever.
What Liam Scott is describing is not a natural consequence of the distribution of academic ability. It's a consequence of the fact that many US schools have been systematically *not* teaching kids how to read for around 50 years, with a peak somewhere in the 2000s-early 2010s.
If we actually teach them, the vast and overwhelming majority of kids can learn to decode quite competently by grade 2-4, at which point the differences in innate aptitudes and interests start to predominate. If we don't teach them, we leave about 1/3 behind completely; the remaining 2/3 will be stunted to varying degrees depending on whether they get professional tutoring or parental instruction or just kind of put the pieces together on their own.
Ugh. I made it one term into a master's in teaching before deciding that I could not possibly go into this field while retaining my integrity and self-respect. How could I teach kids math and critical thinking with a straight face after getting a degree where the main criterion for success seemed to be the ability to pretend to take John Hattie's statistical malpractice seriously? https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/9475
(I knew, coming from a math/physics background, that a field relying on social-science research would require my to lower my standards for accepting claims as 'true.' I didn't know I'd be expected to entertain absolute charlatans and their transparent lies.)
I did Teach For Australia as a 30 year old and went into a school which just qualified (which is to say a mathematically average school in terms of socioeconomic advantage of parents). I love having classes of smart, engaged students. I also love classes of kids who hate school. Their needs are different and I like meeting those needs as much as the intellectual kids. They get treated as less at school, so if you don't do that they'll like you and that's rewarding.
That said, I can imagine the dynamic at universities is totally different. The students are there to learn, not because it's mandated, and more importantly, the type of person who wants to teach at a top university probably doesn't have my goal of "equip my students to have a fulfilling life", rather something about pushing the frontiers of knowledge like that short story Scott wrote about alchemists.
Actually, I use my considerable brains to think up ways to teach kids who aren't terribly smart or motivated. It's a much harder job than transmitting expertise to smart kids.
I like teaching smart kids as well. But there again, I doubt I do it the same way as a subject matter expert.
So if you are a smart subject matter expert who doesn't like teaching (which describes most subject matter experts) then smart students are what you will insist on teaching because all you want to do is create mini-mes. But if you're just a smart person who likes teaching, then you want to improve all kids ability level, and look for the best way to do that. Which takes a lot of brains, too.
I think this is an under-appreciated perspective when trying to figure out why the best teachers go where they do. People who haven't taught may think there is only a difference in degree of motivation between the good classrooms and the bad ones, but there is a difference in *kind*. It is impossible to overstate how much teaching motivated students (especially clever ones) just *isn't the same thing* as "teaching" unmotivated students.
In one case, you are watching with excitement as young people gradually figure out better and better models and tools for understanding the world. In the other case, you're constantly mentally straining to keep yourself from slapping an idiot teenager over the head.
That's true for people who aren't really interested in teaching, but the subject matter. Which is fine, and definitely the type of "teacher" you find in college.
But increasingly, professors are going to be judged on their pass rate by race. Just like high school teachers are.
High school for 40 years. AT this point, there's no point in pretending in high school. College's determination to wipe out the value, which has been ongoing for about a decade, is terrifying.
Yes, witnessed this firsthand with my father. He worked in finance, retired, then decided to try his hand at teaching. The first job he could find to teach a finance class was at a for-profit university (generally speaking, these are bottom of the barrel and admit everyone).
I watched him prepare his Finance 101 course syllabus with great enthusiasm, debating with himself what concepts to cover and how to teach them. He asked every student to bring a financial calculator. One brought a standard calculator, no one else brought any, and he quickly found he had to dumb down his intended material. His first round of dumbing down wasn't enough -- he had to dumb it down again, and again, and again before any students started getting any question right. This whole process completely disheartened him.
He finally found himself teaching a "finance" class that never mentioned numbers and was more like basic concepts in personal finance. Just true/false or multiple choice questions like: "Why should you pay your credit card bill each month?" Needless to say, he resigned after that one class.
Sadly I'm not surprised at this. I taught a technical community college class and had the same experience. I had to keep making the test questions and project requirements easier and easier. Even so some of my students did very poorly even with questions basically being directly from the extremely easy open source text.
A friend of mine left academia (teaching at a Big Ten school) and taught German as a part-time gig at a local community college.
He reported the opposite - the CC students (mostly older) wanted to learn and actually did assignments. The four year college students wanted to do as little work as possible and cared only about the grade.
Interesting. A foreign language seems like one of the best bets for motivated students choosing to take a class, because that's something that has a long history of people trying to self-teach it (cf. Rosetta Stone, Duolingo) purely out of their own curiosity and desire to self-improve.
But to be clear, my father wasn't saying that the students were less motivated than those at an ordinary university. Just that some combination of their native intelligence and prior academic preparation was such that they couldn't work with concepts like Principal * Interest Rate = Interest Payment.
You could argue that there was some intensely negative selection going on for finance in particular, since anyone with any aptitude for finance would probably be at a community college instead of a for-profit college after taking a look at the numbers. And the Bachelor's of Business program (of which the finance class was a part) might well be the lowest of the low, since it's going to select for people who don't have any idea what they want to do besides "make more money."
Could also be that my friend was just burned out from academic politics (he was), he was getting a self-selecting sample (perhaps), some combination of the above, etc..
I found a similar thing transitioning to adult learning after teaching at a secondary school -- it was so refreshing to have students who actually wanted to learn and whom I could trust to actually do the work I set.
It really depends on the course and the voluntariness of taking said course. Many of the worst students I have taught were adult learners. My course is a compulsory course on ethics. And the students were pursuing a degree (usually something hyperspecialised in supply chain management or HR or something similar) just for the paper certification.
Maybe, maybe 20% of high school graduates should go to college. College should be for smart people. And the bottom 2/3 of ability is way dumber than most smart people can really comprehend.
Just a little further, at all levels of education the level of rigor of teaching is pretty much right at the middle of the ability of the classroom. So your experience is, perhaps sadly, don't know, going to be replicated at all levels of education. Teaching a classroom of low ability students will be kind of depressing, teaching a classroom of little Scott Alexanders is going to be awesome.
Back to the original issue, since you always teach to the middle of ability, some kids will be under the curve and ahead of it, it's inevitable. But if you group kids by rough ability, you get the least distance at the ends, teaching to the middle is the right pace/level for more students in each classroom this way.
Just a little further, at all levels of education the level of rigor of teaching is pretty much right at the middle of the ability of the classroom. So your experience is, perhaps sadly, don't know, going to be replicated at all levels of education. Teaching a classroom of low ability students will be kind of depressing, teaching a classroom of little Scott Alexanders is going to be awesome.
Back to the original issue, since you always teach to the middle of ability, some kids will be under the curve and ahead of it, it's inevitable. But if you group kids by rough ability, you get the least distance at the ends, teaching to the middle is the right pace/level for more students in each classroom this way.
I don't know* why people insist on conflating affirmative action with legacy admissions. One is about legally-enforceable racism, and the other is about corporations growing their endowments.
*I suspect and have a few hypotheses, but they're mostly unkind.
Because both are forms of discrimination, and it's not obvious that legally-enforceable racism is worse than legally-enforceable class discrimination. The strongest and most common argument against affirmative action is that people deserve to be admitted based on their merits, not their birth. The same argument applies to legacy admissions.
I'm an adamant opponent of affirmative action, and I fully support getting rid of legacy admissions.
I think I also support getting rid of legacy admissions, but the flip side is those wealthy families are subsidizing the education of the less well-off students. If it costs x dollars to give a student a good education and the average legacy admission will donate 5x dollars, for every legacy you don't admit, you're depriving 5 other students of a good education. This plausibly hurts the other students more than it hurts the rich.
Except most of the money being spent by universities doesn't actually contribute to learning. It's just cost disease. If you took a bunch of top tier high school graduates and stuck them in a room with textbooks and some motivated but underpaid grad students to lead discussions they'd learn just as much as they would at harvard. The value of harvard comes from just getting all the smart people together and that's not expensive.
Yeah, cost disease is a hard problem that needs to be fixed, but if we fixed cost disease, the above principle would still hold. In fact, even more so, assuming rich alumni continued to donate the same amount. If they continue to donate an average of 5x, but the cost of a good education drops to 0.5x, now every legacy you don't admit is depriving 10 other students of education instead of 5.
Universities need staff and campuses and there's always going to be a cost per student. The counterfactual world where universities don't admit wealthy potential donors is a world where, compared to ours, money has moved from the universities to the wealthy.
The only way I can see cost disease making this a benefit to students is if cutting funding to universities helps students by fighting cost disease enough to make up for the lost funding. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
Would we be depriving 5 other students of a good education? Harvard seems to be highly committed to neither growing nor shrinking their enrollments year-over-year no matter how the population or demographics change. If Harvard admits 100 more legacy students, they don't also admit 500 smart students and grow their enrollment by 600 students. They instead keep their top-line enrollment the same and admit 100 fewer smart students.
We're talking about removing legacy students (and in theory funding), which I think is a bit different than adding legacy students. It's easy enough to get extra funding and not admit more students. But what would happen if a policy change caused a university to lose a significant amount of funding? Something would have to be sacrificed. It could be raising tuition for other students, reducing staff, etc.
I don't think they'd deprive 5 students of a good education by admitting fewer students. I think they'd try to keep the number of admissions the same or higher and sacrifice things that affect the quality of education instead. The downside may be spread out among all the students instead of concentrated in 5 literal students, but we're still losing _good_ education overall.
This assumes that universities need their funding to provide good education. But if a university can offer the same benefit to the same number of students with less funding, it means they're wasting money for no benefit. They should either find a better way to spend that wasted money or reduce their funding (possibly by lowering tuitions or stopping legacy admissions).
I don't think that private schools owe anyone admission, so there is no 'deserve.'
What there is, is a law saying "you cannot discriminate on the basis of race" with an exception for schools (and yes other groups). AFAIK, there has never been a law saying you can't discriminate on the basis of how much you expect someone to pay you in the future or their family has paid you in the past.
I mean discrimination per se is not bad -- it's just that certain bases of discrimination are illegal.
So discrimination on the basis of race is legal (for schools, when certain groups are discriminated against), and discrimination on the basis of how much you expect someone to pay you is legal. If both are legal, why is one better than the other? Also, since we're talking about a situation where what's legal changed overnight, why is legality a good guide to morality?
> that's Harvard's fundamental business? They admit actual smart kids on scholarship, alongside the kids of rich people who pay huge bribes. The smart kids get access to rich friends. The rich kids get to go to a college with a smartness rep as well as a richness rep.
What do you think would happen if we forced schools with low acceptance rates to increase their admissions year over year in order to maintain access to public grants and loan subsidies? Would this help them launder priviledge more effectively or dilute their brand? Can we infer anything from the fact that Ivies are so disinterested in growing their enrollment and increasing their impact?
Why are they not doing the opposite? Why not decrease class sizes? Is it really the case that class sizes are already optimal for whatever they're doing and the optimal size doesn't change in proportion to the population or the number of 18 year olds?
I assume class sizes are roughly proportional to the sizes of the existing buildings? Any given campus can comfortably accommodate a fairly fixed number of students; taking less doesn't let you get back the cost of existing buildings, but taking more would require buying more land and building new buildings
I don't buy this with respect to Harvard or Princeton (two elite schools that I know more about than the others) -- both are doing a material amount of new physical building and re-building year-to-year. If their preferred strategy was "don't spend more on building, but do recoup existing investments", their class sizes *would* be shrinking as buildings decayed and weren't refurbished/expanded.
I can't speak to either of those schools, but I have direct experience with this at an urban school that is top 30. If the school tries to raise admission numbers, the neighborhood surrounding the school, which is full of rich people, devote all their resources to stopping it. The schools administration has no back bone so rolls over at this, but its likely even if the administration fought back, they would only win maybe 50% of the time and given the zoning of the area, they couldn't build buildings big enough to raise admission more than maybe 10%.
I suspect Harvard and MIT and other urban schools would have similar issues. Columbia, maybe not. George Washington university (which is not in the same league as these schools but is in an urban area) spent the first two decades of this century buying up all the property around the main campus to redevelop as joint commercial and education spaces. Of course they also had to become one of the most expensive schools in the country to do this.
State universities typically grow as the state population grows. Most private universities seem to have pretty fixed student body sizes, though there are occasionally some small changes.
Harvard is rich enough to do whatever they like, and would continue doing so. The interesting question is what happens at schools without 11-figure endowments. Selective admissions policies obviously benefit the institutions that practice them, and the students who are selected, but I've yet to year a coherent argument for why there is a public benefit worth the public paying for it. In the sketch of an argument that follows, I have the state university systems in mind, and will draw the implication for private universities at the end. (1) The mission of the public university system is ostensibly the higher education of the public. (2) There is no clear public interest in excluding anyone from education, if that person demonstrates ability to succeed at the program. (3) On that point, no program should have to water down admission standards. Fair admission standards can be rigorous in the sense of setting a high bar based on criteria directly related to demonstrated ability to succeed at the program. What they cannot be is selective, in the sense of using additional opaque criteria to choose of those applicants who pass the rigor bar, who gets in? (4) Adult education can scale well, and many programs could admit all qualified applicants. (5) But not everything has a technology solution. If in the program's judgment there are practical limits on the number of students a program can teach at one time, a lottery among qualified applicants or a queue of qualified applicants is also permissibly fair. (6) Public university systems should have to pass a strict scrutiny test to select students on additional or opaque criteria. (7) Regarding private universities, anyone who continues to practice selective admissions is pursuing an institutional interest other than the public's, and the public shouldn't have to pay for it.
It’s interesting teaching at Texas A&M and hearing the complaints every year about the constant growth of the student body, primarily from students annoyed about the way the administrative infrastructure is perennially trying to catch up, and from townies annoyed by the growth in traffic. I think that keeping pace with the population of the state is one of the good things the university is doing, though I agree that it has made many aspects of the bureaucracy less than fully functional.
not even Harvard can do without federal money and continue business as usual. their endowment is 53b but annual operating expenses are 5.4 b. They would run out of endowment in a little over a decade.
Definitely with you on strict scrutiny; far too many effectively government bodies (e.g., public universities) are given too much extraconstitutional leeway by the judiciary.
How can we actually achieve this goal of strict scrutiny in admissions? Universities are staffed by people who are deeply committed to affirmative action. The Supreme Court only takes another bite at this apple once every 10-20 years. In California, affirmative action has been illegal for 25+ years, but by 2019, Asian students still faced an SAT score penalty getting into top UC schools before UC dropped standardized testing entirely.
Everything you said sounds reasonable and I think I agree with it. But one question regarding point 5: If the university has a practical limit on the number of students and resorts to a lottery for admissions, should we require them to take practical steps towards increasing that limit YoY with the goal of one day having the capacity to educate all qualified students? Are there any legitimate reasons for a school to limit its growth?
Qualified yes: the public university system should (and generally does) grow to meet demand, and the how much / how fast questions are things that representative government is competent to answer. And on that basis, I don't see a reason to impose a growth mandate on voluntary institutions.
If you force a school to accommodate an ever-growing student population, isn't that eventually going to cause problems for basically any school?
I'm not sure of all the reasons schools are the sizes they are, rather than bigger or smaller, but presumably for any given school there's SOME reason that it is the size it is.
Would the population continue growing forever? At some point if they grow enough, they'll fall below the selectivity criteria. Maybe that criteria is a 25% acceptance rate? Maybe it's based on accepting everyone with an SAT over 1550? Maybe a combination of the two? Maybe something else entirely? But eventually, the school would either outgrow their selectivity criteria or lose access to funds, which would basically be a death sentence. You could make the penalty less harsh by only giving their funds a haircut proportional to how much they missed their target.
If you "force schools...to increase their admissions year over year" then obviously they must keep growing forever until you stop doing that (or until they fail and die).
Requiring them to accept a percentage of applicants seems obviously crazy; what happens if they get a lot more applications than normal one year? Anyone in the world could destroy the school just by organizing a large number of students to apply. "Everyone with a test score above some threshold" has a similar issue unless you set the threshold so high that they can afford to admit literally every student in the world with that score (which I suspect would make it useless for your goal, although I'm still pretty unclear on what your goal actually is).
If you're trying to prevent the school from making fuzzy judgements that you might not approve of, you could hypothetically require them to make a list of all students who meet some testable criteria (whether determined by them or by you) and then admit students RANDOMLY off of that list. This still lets them choose HOW MANY students they want but prevents them from choosing which PARTICULAR students.
You constructed a thought-experiment whose fundamental premise requires them to grow, so they would grow until your thought-experiment breaks down, at which point your thought-experiment has broken down.
We can tell that their impact is only loosely tied to the volume of students they educate.
But Harvard, specifically, has huge enrollments, but it's in things like their "executive MBA" or their online MBA (which has 40k students). But these programs are just leveraging the prestige of the harvard name.
Anyway, if you force schools to grow then smaller schools will be hurt because they wont be able to get the same students to come. At some point down the line schools start shutting down. When schools were desegregated the schools that were hurt the most were the HBCUs because their top students started going to the integrated top schools. Many of these schools closed.
Harvard et al. would also have to hire more professors and administrators. Where would they get them from? The next tier of schools, making those schools "worse".
So if you force schools to grow, then the losers are the bottom tier schools and the bottom tier students.
I can see how better schools growing would hurt the worse schools. But isn't that just competition working as intended? Walmart and Target outcompete smaller stores. Harvard outcompetes CMU. Maybe eventually we'll be complaining about "big university".
I guess if the policy was implemented naively or with intentional loopholes, then schools could just grow their online MBA programs and everyone would know that's not "real Harvard". But a good policy could treat programs with separate admissions as separate and measure the growth and selectivity of each admissions program separately.
Hmmm, I don't think this would work? Harvard wouldn't be required to let some percentage of applicants in. They would just have to increase the number that they let in next year.
Would it be better to use a different metric like average SAT/ACT score? Or some formula that combines the two? Or some other metric entirely?
Why are so few schools good at creating good signaling? It isn't hard to imagine a world with ten Harvards, yet that isn't our world. I kinda like how Harvard makes such fools of us all.
? Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley and, not to forget the provinces, Oxford, Cambridge and ETHZ. There’s ten for you.
Obviously there are gradations within the ten (with precise rank order depending on what you care most about) but the presumption that Harvard is sui generis is wrong. Usually ‘Harvard’ is being used as a metonym for elite US universities in general (like the subset of the above list which are located in the metropole)
For specific American cultural things, there is no substitute for Harvard. For instance, if you want to write for Saturday Night Live--followed by a career of writing in television comedy, Harvard almost guarantees you a pass. Or gives you very high odds. Those other schools you mention don't give you nearly as good odds.
Harvard's domination of comedy TV is pretty recent. My former neighbor wrote for the meat and potatoes sitcom "Married With Children." She was always ranting about the Harvard Mafia that came to town to write for the Simpsons in the 1990s.
Ok but that's 30 years ago. Norm MacDonald used to make fun of "The Harvard Boys" who wrote for Rosanne when he did. According to Norm, "The Harvard Boys" weren't worth much, but they got hired.
why are you so impressed by Harvards dominance of writing for comedy TV? It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that TV writing was dominated by eg USC, because proximity to Hollywood. that wouldn’t make USC elite.
I'm impressed by the distortion in the TV writers market. If TV writing were dominated by USC grads, that would make sense. It would seem like less of a distortion.
Also, I assume it's not just the TV writing market that has this distortion. I believe the finance world does too. I use the TV market as only an example which might generalize to other industries.
Right, and SNL was, at its creation, an attempt to make a National Lampoon TV show, both on the writing-only side and, if you look at the NatLamp record albums/radio shows, from the performing side. And Lorne Michaels has been in charge of that show almost without a break for the whole time, so that tendency persists.
At one point maybe 25 years ago I read a description of the SNL factions -- possibly from Conan O'Brian -- which was as follows: There were the Groundlings, who specialized in "memorable characters; the Second City people, with a more theatrical/improv background; and the Harvard people, who in this telling were partial to "jokes about sharks and bears".
sure and if you want to go to Silicon Valley then Stanford is where its at, if you want to do physics then MIT can’t be beat etc. Harvard may give the best odds for writing for SNL (I’ll take your word for it) but it ain’t best across the board. Nor is it clear to me that SNL is a particularly important competition to win.
It's important to those interested in it. Also, it proves that the world isn't a meritocracy. Harvard doesn't accept applicants according to their comedic skills. Whereas MIT probably does judge applicants based on their physics skills.
"Harvard doesn't accept applicants according to their comedic skills."
I knew a kid who got a full ride to Stanford, in part because of his high grades and test scores, in part because he was a professional magician on the side with a very witty act.
general intelligence is a thing, so is self selection (whereby eg smart kids interested in SV go to Stanford and those interested in SNL go to Harvard).
That's a good point. Given the state of network tv in general these days, Harvard having a lock on comedy writing there is kind of like if the U of Michigan was bragging that its engineering school grads are the guys who have been running the show at Chrysler for the last 30 years. It sounds impressive until you remember what's happened to Chrysler during that span of time.
while others have pointed out that the signal is field dependant (so eg. MIT is better than Harvard in its niche), in general why wouldn't reputation as 'the best' be stable in whatever field the university is optimising for? Sure, sometimes the 2nd and/or 3rd place are close enough to be very respectable (eg Stanford, Yale), but the best students will want to go to the best school and so assuming the students can be relatively accurately ranked in advance the prestige ladder is extremely stable.
I actually doubt that. He would predict Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as the top 3, and while they’re all in the top 5, I’m not at all convinced he would have expected Stanford or MIT to be anywhere near there. He might have predicted Chicago and Penn to be in the next five, but I suspect that CalTech, Duke, and Northwestern would have been surprises. Dartmouth and Brown in the next five would be surprises only for being this low, while Rice and Vanderbilt would have been recent upstarts, and Wash U might or might not have been familiar.
I think the top half dozen are close enough that its hard to assign an overall (as opposed to field dependent) best and also the differences are small enough to be overridden by location or ‘fit’ preferences or indeed personal idiosyncrasies.
within a field its also not that stable because the gaps are small and it is small number statistics. A handful of star faculty moving for personal reasons, or retirements plus new hires turning out unexpectedly strong/weak, can end up shuffling the rankings. so can subfields rising or falling in relative importance, since best is frequently not just field dependent but also subfield dependent.
Every major state university system in the US has an honors program that is on par with Ivy league schools, but because they are within the state schools system you just dont hear about them.
I think this conflates high-quality professors in the "renowned expert in field" and in the "really good at teaching" sense. It makes sense for the people best in their fields to teach the smartest students.
Partly because they often do get to some work at the edge of the field - see e.g. Scott Aaronson's occasional mention of smart undergrads he did research with - but also because maybe smart people think about the field in similar ways. Brilliant researchers aren't necessarily better teachers, but might be a better fit for brilliant students.
Conversely, what we actually want for the less smart students is to have professors who are better at teaching. They don't necessarily have to be top researchers (those students aren't doing undergrad research anyway), and selecting on top researchers for professors would limit our ability to get top teachers.
Since doing cutting edge research is cooler than being a good teacher, this does naturally lead to the places with the top researchers being more prestigious and having more resources. But this consequence can happen even in a system optimized to teach low performers well!
Brilliant researches might not be the best teachers, but they might possess certain skills that nobody knows how to teach, and that can only be learned by direct observation/contact. That's still the leading explanation for scientific lineages AFAIK.
That's what I meant about them being a better fit for brilliant students - to the degree that they have these, they're more likely to be teachable by example to similarly brilliant students.
One thing to remember, though, is that there are "smart" white and Asian students going through the top 100 universities (and by smart I mean 1200+, which is fine) but you run out of blacks and Hispanic in that category after the top 20 schools. This means that the quality of instruction at the lower tier schools isn't as strong NOT because they don't have smart students, but because the schools are under pressure to keep their 6 year grad rate high with blacks and Hispanics so the courses are easier. Also, because they have so more lower ability students (and once you get lower than the top 100 schools, the average black SAT score is something like 800) remediation and passing kids takes more time and money than offering the right courses every year for the able kids.
So the real reason what whites (not so much Asian immigrants, whose parents are flatly jackasses on the topic of name schools) avoid lower tier schools is because they *can't* get as good instruction reliably.
Interesting comment. I wonder what readers’ thoughts are on the opposing vantage point: what if the “laundering” aspect for the elite actually dampens the meritocratic prestige that the rest of applicants gain.
At what ratio does this become untenable? Or does the ratio not matter because of the chance to network with elites trumps the label of meritocratic prestige? (Cynical view)
We should assume it's relatively close to where it is, to the extent that Harvard's management are good at judging this. Otherwise they would let more rich kids in.
Indeed. I know a lot of people think Harvard is run by idiots who will no doubt destroy it real soon now. But, over its 387 year history, Harvard has generally been managed by smart people who are good at optimizing what's best for Harvard in the long run.
I think this also rests a lot on incumbency advantages that top-tier schools have. It's much harder to turn a bottom-tier school into a top-tier school than it is to simply maintain a school that past generations built.
The meritocratic applicant can prove their merit independently, they're after the parts of the experience that come from the rich and well connected. It's the rich and well connected that require smart people there to mix in the 'merit' signal with the 'upper class' signal and to have the genius entrepreneurs to network the capital with.
I don't know the ratio at which it breaks, in either direction, but I do think that pushing admissions too far towards 'elites' and away from 'merit' would see the top *elites* stop going there just as fast or faster than the top merit students
(1) The first part, why send the top students to the best colleges?, misses one key aspect of this which is that the top students would like to be among other top students. So even if instructional quality, career opportunities, etc., were exactly the same at all universities, there would be some sort of impetus to sort. The question then becomes why should this have any connection to research quality, "elite" faculty, and other such things. It needn't, but there's no good measure of anything related to instructional quality, career opportunities, etc., and we tend to assume (not without reason) that quality in one area implies quality in others. Plus, students in many fields would actually like to work with top people in those fields -- whether or not this is likely to happen -- so there's some direct motivation for the link as well. (And conversely, the top people would like to work with or teach the best students.)
(2) Selection based on merit was always less than ideal, but it is getting worse. Currently, for example, the UC schools won't even *accept* SAT scores from applicants. Whatever biases standardized tests may have, they are less biased than, for example, recommendation letters, flowery essays, and other characteristics. If the trend towards subjectivity continues, will the signals described in the post remain as strong?
(3) As a faculty member at a fairly large public university, I am often annoyed at how discussions of higher ed focus disproportionately on small places like Harvard (edit: 7000 undergrads (I mis-typed 2000 earlier)). I don't particularly care about Arizona State, but its enrollment (112,000 undergrads) and that of similar places should warrant a lot more press than is the case.
(4) I've heard the concept of privilege laundering before; it seems obviously true.
It seems like dropping test scores is very bad for Harvard and very good for Arizona state. How will future editions of US News and World Report rank the schools?
I'm not at all sure that the quality of teaching is better at Harvard than at less prestigious places. I used to have a teaching affiliation with Harvard Medical School and have met some Harvard faculty, and I have had as psychotherapy patients about a dozen Harvard undergrads and people getting advanced degrees at the graduate and professional schools. My observation is that the professors who are so eminent in their fields that they are actually famous are utterly unavailable to undergrads and even to the grad students who are writing dissertations under their supervision, or carrying out their research in the lab. They are always flying off to conferences all over the world and cancelling their lectures & having grad students do them. They are preoccupied with their careers, and hate having to teach: They view teaching as the toilet-cleaning side of being an academic. They teach undergrads via lectures in giant groups in big halls, then have their teaching assistants run weekly discussion groups. The grad students all hate having to be teaching assistants, and try to get paid jobs doing other things, such as being advisor in one of the residence halls or working with other grad students to publish a journal. Out of the half dozen grad students I have seen, at least 2 have been so cruelly neglected and ignored by their famous advisors. that it seemed criminal to me to deal out that kind of treatment to someone so smart, who has worked so hard to get to Harvard, and wants so badly to do really good research that will launch their careers.
My own experience as an undergrad was at 2 places, both ivies. For the first 2 years I was at acollege, at the last 2 a university. I had no lecture classes at all at the college -- class size varied from maybe 10 to 30. At the university I was taking higher level courses, which are always smaller, and mostly avoided lecture classes there too. I only had one genuinely famous professor, and that person did in fact teach via a giant lecture. As for my many other teachers, whose smarts I enjoyed and revered -- they changed my life. They gave me wonderful, accurate flashes of insight into their vision of their field, and they took a lot of interest in me. I really do not know if they were less brilliant than the famous scholars at Harvard, or just much less interested in fame. But even if they were, say, only 80% as smart about Wittgenstein, calculus, history of religion, linguistics, 20th century poets, etc, I do not think I was a developed enough being at that point to benefit from the remaining 20% anyway. And besides, conveying to students your own sharp insights and convoluted intuitions about the field is only one part of teaching. The other part is mentoring the student, and these people were mostly excellent at that.
Quality of teaching is only mildly correlated with the teacher's degree of fame and glory. It's way too simple to say that the more prestigious the school you attend, the better the teaching you receive. I think it's likely I would have had as good an experience at many schools with fairly small class size and teachers who were not egomaniacs.
I interviewed for Harvard in 1975. The Harvard grad said his professors included Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Riesman ("The Lonely Crowd.") I was impressed. "That must have been great," I burbled.
"No, they were terrible teachers. They were always jetting off to Washington at the last moment and leaving us with an unprepared sub."
One of the main great things I would say about the probably not even top 100 university I went to was that it allowed enough of a “big fish in a small pond” effect that I was almost immediately able to make close lifelong friendships with several of the faculty. Which I suspect would have been a lot harder at a university more commensurate with my abilities.
It’s probably the main reason I didn’t transfer out.
Well, "The Status Seekers" by Vance Packard has a chapter titled "Religion: The Long Road from Pentecostalism to Episcopalianism" or something like that.
I have one very relevant question. You can pay a hefty donation and have your child admitted to Harvard even if it lacks intellectual ability to be admitted without big money. But are such students treated differently later, or is anyone treated equally once they are admitted?
University students (at every university) have a lot of control over what happens to them there. The "Yale 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 use a new international airport" admit will flunk out if he tries to study physics. Equal treatment! But no one is required to study physics.
Harvard has lots of money and resources to coddle donors' kids through to a degree in something, so long as they know their limits and don't try to take Math 55 and the like.
This is what I thought (I also forgotten about this strange US system of minors and majors, and that you do not simply enroll at physics or law from the start as everywhere else). This means that the discussion would benefit from distinguishing between subjects (i.e., the situation is quite different in case of "hard subjects" like physics and math, and others like business school and law (and also as somebody pointed out earlier, this is somewhat unique to US)). Even so, I would have expected that studying law at Harward is still quite difficult (though not at the level of physics), and there are many high profile Harward law graduates (like some polititians) which do not look like they would be able to make it. I wonder what it says about actual level of teaching of some subjects at Ivy League (outside sciences)
Hard to say. But as Scott alluded to, once you control for IQ, the selectiveness of a college basically stops predicting for career earnings. My guess would be that Harvard grads, rich kids or not, will have a much easier time in the graduate job market, but ultimately unless you have a family member to gift you a cushy job, you'll ultimately settle back down closer to your intellectual station.
I think society is still meritocratic enough that there is some natural sorting that happens despite all this college prestige nonsense.
I went to a school way below my “IQ” or whatever, however you want to sort/grade it. And at 25 and 30 my earnings were shit. Probably should have worked at say McKinsey, but there was no path to that from where I was.
But now I am 42 and am a highly paid consultant who works for myself, just in a random industry I happened to find myself in and quickly became a national expert.
My son earned a scholarship to a quite expensive prep school and ... it was really, really good.
This is true. You can have the top-tier universities in country X be purely merit-based. France and China come to mind as 2 examples. 清华大学 (Tsinghua) and 北京大学 (Peking) are great universities and in fact I would bet that their students are significantly smarter and more qualified than Harvard students, but most Chinese would prefer to go to Harvard or Princeton and American universities routinely dominate the world rankings of universities.
Maybe the American Ivy League is so special specifically because it's not merit-based and the grads aren't just smart engineers working at big tech companies, they're rich and well-connected business people who can climb their way up the greasy pole and become CEOs of Amazon, GE, JP Morgan, Citigroup, McDonald's, Mastercard, and of course light $1.75B on fire as the CEO of Quibi.
The privilege-laundring concept only applies to the US. In Europe, elite universities do not favour legacies, donors, etc.
True
The French and Brits would like to have a word
What do you mean?
Both have pretty clear elite pipelines into their nominally meritocratic admissions through various forms of private schools - the Eton/Oxbridge education pipeline into the elite is clearly not evidence of meritocracy.
Yes. France has basically parallel high school systems for élites (ultra competitive and highly discipline) and the rest (daycare at best, not even that at worst), then by some presumably totally random effect only the élites make it into the élite universities.
Is admission to those high schools ultra competitive, as you put it? Then you are not refuting tepehuani's point.
It is highly competitive to live in the right area and have parents with the right background to send your kid to them yes. Which I guess is not what you meant 😁
Can still be, if the elite High Schools teach to the admissions test while the others merely try to teach actual skills. Compare the old Chinese bureaucracy entrance tests - in theory they were meritocratic, in practice they were so weird that you _had_ to go to the schools that taught to the test.
Not the same. These schools do a better job at preparing candidates for admission, which I grant you may be unfair. But everyone who gets in is smart.
In the UK everyone who gets into an elite university is smart enough to cope with a pretty rigorous workload (although as you say, there's a perception that not everyone smart gets into elite universities). Are you suggesting this not true in the US? That is, there are people at elite universities who legitimately cannot cope with the workload / intellectual standard required? Is there any discrimination against these well-connected-but-dim students? How do they feel about clearly not being up to muster?
> although as you say, there's a perception that not everyone smart gets into elite universities
I did some stats on this recently:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1sK-nWsjHgGRba7IcezTochuKrrPzY3ic The proportion of privately-educated students at Oxford has dropped since my day and continues to drop, but they still take way too many Etonians (who, as I said elsewhere, are far from stupid!) to claim with a straight face that they're taking the academically brightest possible cohort.
In the US and elsewhere almost all students are able to cope with the intellectual standards, because the intellectual standards keep falling. At most institutions if only you pick an easy major and you show up to most classes, you will receive a degree.
Eton/Oxford alumnus here, and I think the situation is more complicated than that. Eton still has a lot of old money, but it no longer lets you put your child's name down at birth: everyone has to pass a fairly rigorous entrance exam, and I never met anyone stupid there. But yes, it is still mostly a school for the sons of the wealthy and privileged (I was there on an academic scholarship, and my family was not especially wealthy but also not poor). Oxford is different: the wealthy and privileged are there, but most of the people I knew there were smart non-rich kids (we had fees in those days, but only £1k/yr - they've gone up since, but to nothing like Harvard's level). It's a lot closer to Scott's picture of Harvard, except the rich/aristocratic students mostly stuck to their little bubble. Maybe I just wasn't useful enough to network with? And, again, Oxford don't do legacy admissions (at least not officially, and I'd hope not in practice), and everyone has to meet the (high) academic standards to get in. Once you're in, though, things change a bit - it's hard to get kicked out of Oxford for not doing any work, so you get people like Boris Johnson (a fellow Eton King's Scholar, incidentally) who neglect their studies in favour of student politics or rowing or theatre or whatever. And *that* brings us to the real sources of Oxford's undue grip on British politics: the pipelines from the Oxford Union (the student debating society) to the Conservative Party and from Oxford University Students Union to the Labour Party (see https://www.ft.com/content/85fc694c-9222-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2 for more on the former); and the Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree that's taken by so many students with aspirations to go into politics, not least because it's known as a degree which allows you to coast academically while you do whatever you really came for: https://theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain
The situation is of course complicated.
I get a strong impression that US Elite universities are much "worse" in the sense of admitting a lot of people who really aren't there on academic merit (e.g. sports scholarships) than UK ones. I also think Oxford (at least when I went there 20 years ago) is much more exclusively interested in academics than Harvard. I was interviewed twice as part of Oxford admissions (I also had to sit a Maths exam), and every question I was asked was some form of physics or lateral-thinking puzzle. I was not asked about hobbies, achievements, interests, leaderships skills or anything except my ability to think. I don't know whether this has changed more recently, and I have no direct experience of Harvard or other Ivies, but I get the impression they are much more interested in things other than this as well.
That doesn't, of course, mean that Oxbridge admissions are 100% merit-based. Poor/ working class children apply to Oxbridge disproportionately rarely, even controlling for academic ability, for a start. And I'm sure there are other things going on as well.
The sports scholarships are somewhat overblown - yes, they get a lot of attention, but even at the very biggest schools you’re talking at most a few hundred students (even fewer on “full rides”) out of tens of thousands, and they mostly operate in their own little fiefdom that is often entirely financially independent from the rest of the university. The places with the most “egregious” (in terms of letting in the least academically qualified for sports) are big state schools that aren’t particularly selective in the first place. To the extent they network, it’s largely with other athletes, feeding the sports pipelines.
The Ivies don’t even offer sports scholarships, although they do recruit for their teams.
I suspect legacies are more common.
That stereotype is out of date probably by decades.
Eton has a decent record of getting kids into Oxbridge but there are state schools that are better. In the 1970s when my dad went to Cambridge they were trying and succeeding and breaking the link between elite schools and admissions.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11310949/amp/FOUR-state-schools-10-pupils-getting-offers-Oxbridge-better-Eton.html
The French elite pipeline classe prépa - grandes écoles is solidly meritocratic. Science Po is different though.
Just because a lot of children who studied at elite schools go on to elite universities doesn't mean that the universities are favouring them unfairly. The most parsimonious explanation is that the smart, conscientious and hard-working parents that make enough money to send their children to expensive private schools have smart, conscientious and hard-working children who get in on their own merits.
In fact, Oxbridge openly favours state school students, and there is evidence that private school students are held to higher standards during admissions (they also lower the standards for women applying to STEM subjects):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/27/cambridge-accused-social-engineering-state-school-pupils-now/
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/testing-meritocracy-university-admissions
Now we're in Motte/Bailey land, moving from the initial comment of "the phenomenon of elites getting unjustified access to the most competitive universities does not exist at all in Europe" (which is patently absurd, and also likely not the hill the original commenter wanted to die on) to "individual European countries have very complicated histories of elite preservation through generations and very complicated / sometimes flawed / sometimes successful attempts at addressing these issues" (which I'm fully on board for). So let's not yell at each other in the comments and rather appreciate all you folks sharing fascinating examples of how one could possibly address those issues 😉
But why would that not be equally true in the US? The list of “so elite you can get your kid in no matter how dim” is pretty short, the list of “rich and connected enough that it helps somewhat, but also genuinely has a really good college application” is a lot longer.
Your parsimony is different from mine. I seen numerous extremely hard working parents that didn't get wealthy because of working hard. And I've seen several wealthy folks who weren't all that hard working.
What I haven't seen is numerous hardworking parents who got rich. (I could name a couple, but no more.)
„ The most parsimonious explanation is that the smart, conscientious and hard-working parents that make enough money to send their children to expensive private schools have smart conscientious and hard-working children who get in on their own merits.“
A lot of the hard work there is choosing your parents judiciously, and passing that privilege onto your children.
Are good parents a privilege? Is literally everything a privilege?
My experience with Oxbridge (went to a semi-elite private secondary school, was an undergrad and postgrad at Oxford, had a college fellowship and interviewed applicants, but all 20 odd years ago) is that everybody who gets in has to reach a very high level. The elite schools are good at getting people who are capable of getting up to that level up to it and encouraging them through the application process in various ways: they will give mock interviews for example, have special lessons to prepare for the tests and provide advice on which colleges to apply for.
When I was interviewing, I found that about 10% of people were people you obviously wanted to take and stood out, 10% just wouldn't cope with the course and they you had a big grey area of everybody else. It is in that grey area that things like elite schools building relationships with specific tutors can make a difference - if they always send their best students in a subject to a particular college, the tutor there starts to trust the opinions of the teachers. My school had a relationship with one college for my subject (the tutor was a former pupil) and we got a 'private open day'. I chose a different college, but I'm sure if I had been at all borderline, it would have upped my chances if I had applied there.
On the other hand, my personal experience when I was interviewing was that most tutors was trying very hard to take account of the fact that some students are prepared much better by their schools than others. It is the tutors who make the decisions, so in some sense it is a rather fragile system, although there are certainly tutors on the look out for good applicants who haven't been accepted by their first choice college.
Also worth pointing out, that there are a lot of places for classics at Oxbridge, but very few state schools teaching Latin or Ancient Greek - so that is one of the routes in where I think the demographic becomes unfairly biased.
I’d dispute this. Firstly Oxford now admits 70+ % from state schools. Secondly the private schools that dominate oxbridge admissions are the most academically selective with entrance exams at age 11 or 13. The kids smart enough to pass them are likely to do well if they are then put in great schools naturally.
There are plenty of very expensive private schools that send maybe 1 person a year to Oxford because they aren’t academically selective. Eton sending 50 is as much about their intake as about privilege
Things have changed, but only recently :) From Christ Church College Oxford's own site:
https://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/alumni/christ-church-history
"Despite having been described as like cream ('rich, thick and full of clots'), Christ Church has never been just a refuge for the elite..."
Cynically, that’s exactly what you’d expect a privilege-laundering service in 2023 to say.
Elite schools in France (ENA, X, to a lesser degree all the ENS...) all are accessed from a common competitive exam. the 1rst rank nationally chooses first, and so on. Of course, the only ones who have a chance are the students from classes préparatoires who also can present complex subjects orally to a hostile jury in stressfull conditions. And the classes préparatoires draw their students in a biased manner, using both high school grades and the reputation of the high school, who's is indeed a proxy for class, so it might be construed as unfair, low recall. _BUT_, it is a high precision selection: nobody gets in Centrale by legacy admissions! Every single Énarque is an intellectual powerhouse, before party politics rots their young brains. A long running political movement here wants to stop the classes préparatoires + exam as an obviously racist white supremacist classic ploy of elite perpetuation. There are many thumbs on the scale to get a more diverse rse population in elite schools (up to bypassing the selection entirely), but somehow it does not help in the hyper focused, intellectualy grueling prépas....
TL;DR: no lowering of intellectual level, but factors like prestige of high school, parental support during prépas and cultural norms about oral presentation and test taking are known biases.
The mistake here is treating this as an either-or (either admitted on merit OR admitted on pure corrupt legacy) when it’s more of an and. I suspect a high percentage of “legacy admits” have genuinely strong applications.
There’s not a lot of really old money in the US. Most legacies will be only a couple generations at most removed from someone who was highly successful on their own merits in some field. If you believe things like conscientiousness and IQ are heritable, which I think is the party line of ACX, then you’d expect elite to beget elite to some degree without any need for legacy admissions.
Combine good genes, lots of resources, knowing the system, and several years of your parents grooming you for the Ivy League, and I would guess that a lot of legacies have legitimately competitive applications.
Nevertheless the statistics for legacy admits in the U.S. are known and they are not good. (not strong candidates for admission)
Link?
(Also I think we might be mixing two things - legacy admits (i.e. get preferred because your relative went to the same school) and literally buying your way in with massive donations (Scott’s examples are all the latter))
IQ is heritable, but there's also regression to the mean! Fortunately Peter Arcidiacono has done some regressions that show just the marginal effect of being a legacy at Harvard, as part of his expert testimony work for the Students for Fair Admissions case.
I have been through the preparatory classes then engineering school branch of the French system and I would somewhat disagree: that system is *very* good at bringing students who are great at math and physics to the very best schools which leads to a lot more students from poor / discriminated backgrounds than I have seen in any other classrooms.
That said, most students were children of engineers or teachers: people who *know* about that pipeline and will encourage their children to go through it. If you are great at math but come from a poor background where no one knows about preparatory classes, you might never know they could be your golden ticket.
(there are other educatory pipelines where things are not so great, civil servants gets to their positions via exams that test you on knowledge highly correlated with a wealthy / cultured background)
Same in Australia. I wouldn't want any US readers to feel the outcome they is natural or unavoidable, it's very bad and can and should be outlawed.
Same with "extracurriculars" which are the same thing by the back door
We don't have any of the legacy admits bullshit, but we do have Affirmative Action for Aboriginal -or-Torres-Straight-Islander students
I do think that Australia's end-of-school exam system is very well designed, and sufficiently naturally unbiased that the few thumbs applied to the scale are glaringly obvious (AA, and also (at least when I went through school) a grade boost to foreign languages, and English as the only mandatory subject gives Humanities folks a slight edge over STEM types)
I guess "it mostly isn't that obvious" applies. There's plenty of ways to shape the system in ways that privilege familiarity with it (either first-hand or paid-for guidance) without being explicit about it.
(Besides, much of Europe consists of peripheries, where local schools matter less and the best signaling and networking value is acquired by sending your kids to the metropole.)
Oxford do occasionally let someone in just because they're good at rowing.
Harvard tried to recruit a high school classmate because he was an incredible high school hockey player.
Excellent Hockey guy asked if Harvard had any welding classes. This sounds like one of those apocryphal legends that get ginned up out of thin air, but I verified it with hockey guy himself at a class reunion.
He didn’t go to Harvard or any university in the end.
Rarely at undergraduate level these days, though.
The four most famous universities in the world today are Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale, with Stanford, Princeton, and MIT looking in.
But in 1913, many of the most famous colleges were in Continental Europe. What happened? The alumni of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale won the wars, while Gottingen, Paris, and Parma did not.
It helps that America is the one that designed the university ranking schemes, to favour the Anglo model of universities. Many of the best teaching universities and many of the best research universities in the world are still in Continental Europe, but because they're usually separate institutions from each other they do badly in the rankings that are designed for the weird hybrid Anglo model
What wars? All that's happened is that those unis are represented more in pop culture, which is shaped primarily by the US, and to a lesser extent by the UK. That's why they're more famous.
Among recruiters in Europe, the likes of ETH, the French Grandes Ecoles, etc carry the same weight as Oxbridge.
One of the wars was also closely associated with finding a final solution to a certain question, which led to relocation of a certain intellectually-proficient ethnicity from continental universities to aforementioned ones.
Famous to who? I assume you're American?
In terms of worldwide recognition, MIT is easily the most famous, and Yale would not figure in the top 20.
Many elite universities in the US like MIT don't either.
Nor does MIT in the US at least; I think this varies based on what we mean by 'elite' exactly.
On a historical note, the fact that the Ivy League universities serve a particular social stratum (originally, New England elites) long predates any pretense of meritocracy. The latter dates only to the 1930's. Harvard was founded in 1636.
So when people complain about legacy admissions, there's a sense in which they're confusing which part is the norm and which is the deviation.
For those of us without either kind of privilege, it seems pessimistically like a cruel joke and optimistically like a handy way of sorting who should go first to the wall when the revolution comes. (that's also a joke - the revolution isn't coming and the Ivy grads are safe)
"We've done it, folks. We've developed a revolution-proof system. At last!" I wouldn't tempt fate. My conservative Republican Pop worries about income inequality solely as a pragmatic measure. He thinks IE is acceptable in every way except for how it causes civil unrest.
I propose a metaphor: it's like escape speed. The mass of the primary body is only half of the equation, and an object with low-enough speed can't escape from something the mass of a basketball. It's tautology: that's what 'low-enough' means. Similarly, the 'system' doesn't have to be revolution-proof in any absolute sense, or even be as revolution-proof as systems overthrown by revolutions in the past. It just has to have more mass than the revolution has speed. Not a high bar these days.
You don't have to have a SUCCESSFUL revolution to put a whole lot of people "against the wall." Robespierre killed a lot of people before he got taken out himself. I think the bar is a lot lower for starting a revolution that will eventually fall, but not before causing a lot of "damage." (Or righteous vengeance? One man's terrorist).
The Irish revolt of 1915 is a perfect example of a revolution that failed miserably, but ultimately turned out to be absolutely Worth It for the cause of Irish independence. John Brown's insurrection (that's what all the newspapers called it at the time) may have "failed,* but it sped up the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. So it was Worth It.
You know, that's a very interesting point and you're right those objects didn't have enough speed to escape and yet caused deaths and did something. Perhaps I was needlessly orbital in my original metaphor, and should revise it downward: I don't believe a Revolution now would have enough to get off the ground, with treetop height being the absolute limit.
The laundering actually seems like a good defense against this, because you do *not* want all of the genuinely meritorious young people against the wall or your science and economy will immediately collapse post revolution no matter what system you try to implement afterwards.
It's just an extension of the same laundering system, if you can't tell the difference then you have to treat them all the same one way or another.
Jokes about the revolution have already baked into them a certain amount of scientific and economic collapse.
Also look at it from the perspective of people who will actually teach these kids. Students in top schools do the readings and understand them better. It is easier to build on the basics and get to the interesting stuff. Students in poorer schools don't do the readings and even if they do have difficulty understanding them. The syllabus and standards have to be watered down. And you have to constantly sit on top of them because they often lack the integrity not to cheat. Teaching the first group is emotionally rewarding while teaching the second group is soul sucking. The difference is big enough that the switch from the second to the first was worth it for me even though I took a 15-20% pay cut. So, people with PhDs will compete to teach and research at where the smart hard-working students are. And given this dynamic, since faculty have say in admissions decisions, they are going to pick the ones they would prefer to teach
I graduated with a degree in English Education, excited to begin teaching. I looked forward to the interesting conversations and perspectives I would get to experience from the students. Full of enthusiasm, I prepared for my first day at my internship with 8th graders.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that 80 percent of students tested below a 5th-grade level, with a solid 25 percent testing at or near Kindergarten level.
Let me reiterate, so there's no misunderstanding: 8th graders were testing at a kindergarten reading level. A quarter of my class would essentially be illiterate, and the rest would not be anywhere near the actual grade level of the readings in the curriculum.
I didn’t last a day. After completing my internship and graduating, I pivoted to tech. Whatever that experience was, it wasn't teaching. Clearly, it wasn’t for me.
I recall advocating during a teacher meeting (while I was a college student interning) that we have to begin teaching phonics and that there was no point in attempting to read actual 8th grade texts (some of which are not particularly easy). No mention of phonics or beginner-reading level support anywhere in the curriculum. "Just differentiate the instruction" was the only thing said about the issue.
And criminal is a good word because that's what it was. I felt disturbed that money was even being wasted in that manner to that extent.
"8th graders were testing at a kindergarten reading level"
Jesus Haploid Christ, the system is FUBAR if those kids were allowed to make it all the way to 8th grade. I know holding a child back a grade is bad optics, but it surely is better (long-term) for the child and for society than this travesty.
Yes, they need a reading specialist, not to be put in a general English class. I am not trained in teaching English at that low of a level. It destroys the classroom environment because while we do manage to separate some kids into an advanced track, we don't do it nearly enough. 30 kids who read at around 7th grade reading level are considered "advanced" so they are taken out of the other classes, but the other classes are still too mixed.
The regular classes have kids with levels from 3rd grade to 6th grade. IMO, once you fall behind 2 grade levels you should immediately be paired with a reading specialist or something. It can be recovered within a few months and they can begin to test at maybe a 5th grade reading level or so, but what am I supposed to do in my class? I don't have time to give a ton of differentiated instruction to that wide of a range of knowledge. It's terrible to put them all in the same class. Kids get bored that way, when you're way over or under your reading level the class becomes uninteresting.
This also goes for the teacher, back to Murali's point. I chose to major in secondary English. If I have to teach what is essentially elementary English to middle schoolers, or middle school English to high schoolers, I will get excruciatingly bored. I would rather work in a different field, make more money, and just fucking read to myself.
Audio books??
Oh we for sure used audio whenever possible.
At the risk of blaming the victim...why did you accept a teaching job when you knew nothing about the skills of the people you were supposed to teach? Didn't you ask the other teachers how good the students are, look up standardized test scores, talk to the students, or look at graduation rates?
These are fair questions. I didn’t ask those particular questions because I already baked into my priors that the majority of students would not be up to level. I never contemplated the possibility that they would have the literacy of babies.
I just figured they might be one level or so behind, with the students struggling the most around 3 levels behind. The possibility of the majority testing 3+ levels below never occurred to me, so I didn’t consider asking. Also, professors don’t really know as most of them haven’t taught non-college classes in years.
"Let me reiterate, so there's no misunderstanding: 8th graders were testing at a kindergarten reading level. A quarter of my class would essentially be illiterate, and the rest would not be anywhere near the actual grade level of the readings in the curriculum."
On of Charles Murray's points in his book "Real Education" is how *wide* the spread of academic talent is in the general population and also how that talent clusters such that the 'bright' folks often never interact in any meaningful fashion with the folks in the, say, bottom 20%.
8th graders testing at a kindergarten reading level is unfortunate, and not widespread, but not all that uncommon, either.
To illustrate, Dexter Manley managed to get through *college* and be on two Super Bowl winning NFL teams while reading at, essentially, a 2nd grade level.
https://www.commanders.com/news/one-haunting-night-led-dexter-manley-to-confront-illiteracy
Incidentally, I think this is an under-appreciated argument against meritocracy -- if your society is run by smart people who interact mainly with other smart people, they're going to (unconsciously) assume that everyone's as smart as they are, and shape society such that only other smart people can navigate it.
I'm pretty sure 'not-smart' people are even _worse_ at shaping a society other not-smart people can successfully navigate. I don't consider our current society/societies to have been mostly/almost-completely shaped by smart people!
I would think that not-smart people would be less inclined to shape society one way or the other. At any rate, western governments' inclination to try and impose top-down social change seems to have increased with their governing classes' perception of themselves as a cognitive and intellectual elite.
Maybe less inclined to _deliberately_ shape society or to explicitly/rhetorically _admit_ that that's what they were doing – sure.
I think "top-down social change" is – thankfully – much less intense now than in it was back in the first half of the previous century. It won't, and shouldn't, entirely die, but it's been tempered, even if it has to be resisted to some degree forever.
What Liam Scott is describing is not a natural consequence of the distribution of academic ability. It's a consequence of the fact that many US schools have been systematically *not* teaching kids how to read for around 50 years, with a peak somewhere in the 2000s-early 2010s.
This will be one of the most depressing things you ever read/listen to, but it's worth every minute: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
If we actually teach them, the vast and overwhelming majority of kids can learn to decode quite competently by grade 2-4, at which point the differences in innate aptitudes and interests start to predominate. If we don't teach them, we leave about 1/3 behind completely; the remaining 2/3 will be stunted to varying degrees depending on whether they get professional tutoring or parental instruction or just kind of put the pieces together on their own.
How dare you – education (in the 'good places') has always been "evidence-based"! 🙃
Ugh. I made it one term into a master's in teaching before deciding that I could not possibly go into this field while retaining my integrity and self-respect. How could I teach kids math and critical thinking with a straight face after getting a degree where the main criterion for success seemed to be the ability to pretend to take John Hattie's statistical malpractice seriously? https://mje.mcgill.ca/article/view/9475
(I knew, coming from a math/physics background, that a field relying on social-science research would require my to lower my standards for accepting claims as 'true.' I didn't know I'd be expected to entertain absolute charlatans and their transparent lies.)
I did Teach For Australia as a 30 year old and went into a school which just qualified (which is to say a mathematically average school in terms of socioeconomic advantage of parents). I love having classes of smart, engaged students. I also love classes of kids who hate school. Their needs are different and I like meeting those needs as much as the intellectual kids. They get treated as less at school, so if you don't do that they'll like you and that's rewarding.
That said, I can imagine the dynamic at universities is totally different. The students are there to learn, not because it's mandated, and more importantly, the type of person who wants to teach at a top university probably doesn't have my goal of "equip my students to have a fulfilling life", rather something about pushing the frontiers of knowledge like that short story Scott wrote about alchemists.
If you are really smart, teaching very smart students is a lot more fun than teaching pretty smart students.
Actually, I use my considerable brains to think up ways to teach kids who aren't terribly smart or motivated. It's a much harder job than transmitting expertise to smart kids.
I like teaching smart kids as well. But there again, I doubt I do it the same way as a subject matter expert.
So if you are a smart subject matter expert who doesn't like teaching (which describes most subject matter experts) then smart students are what you will insist on teaching because all you want to do is create mini-mes. But if you're just a smart person who likes teaching, then you want to improve all kids ability level, and look for the best way to do that. Which takes a lot of brains, too.
> teaching very smart students is a lot more fun than teaching pretty smart students.
> ways to teach kids who aren't terribly smart or motivated. It's a much harder job than transmitting expertise to smart kids.
It looks to me that you agree with each other. One activity is fun, the other is hard.
Lots of hard things are fun.
I think this is an under-appreciated perspective when trying to figure out why the best teachers go where they do. People who haven't taught may think there is only a difference in degree of motivation between the good classrooms and the bad ones, but there is a difference in *kind*. It is impossible to overstate how much teaching motivated students (especially clever ones) just *isn't the same thing* as "teaching" unmotivated students.
In one case, you are watching with excitement as young people gradually figure out better and better models and tools for understanding the world. In the other case, you're constantly mentally straining to keep yourself from slapping an idiot teenager over the head.
That's true for people who aren't really interested in teaching, but the subject matter. Which is fine, and definitely the type of "teacher" you find in college.
But increasingly, professors are going to be judged on their pass rate by race. Just like high school teachers are.
Dumb it down until everyone can pass (and therefore render the credential worthless) seems to be the path our education system is on.
High school for 40 years. AT this point, there's no point in pretending in high school. College's determination to wipe out the value, which has been ongoing for about a decade, is terrifying.
Yes, witnessed this firsthand with my father. He worked in finance, retired, then decided to try his hand at teaching. The first job he could find to teach a finance class was at a for-profit university (generally speaking, these are bottom of the barrel and admit everyone).
I watched him prepare his Finance 101 course syllabus with great enthusiasm, debating with himself what concepts to cover and how to teach them. He asked every student to bring a financial calculator. One brought a standard calculator, no one else brought any, and he quickly found he had to dumb down his intended material. His first round of dumbing down wasn't enough -- he had to dumb it down again, and again, and again before any students started getting any question right. This whole process completely disheartened him.
He finally found himself teaching a "finance" class that never mentioned numbers and was more like basic concepts in personal finance. Just true/false or multiple choice questions like: "Why should you pay your credit card bill each month?" Needless to say, he resigned after that one class.
Sadly I'm not surprised at this. I taught a technical community college class and had the same experience. I had to keep making the test questions and project requirements easier and easier. Even so some of my students did very poorly even with questions basically being directly from the extremely easy open source text.
A friend of mine left academia (teaching at a Big Ten school) and taught German as a part-time gig at a local community college.
He reported the opposite - the CC students (mostly older) wanted to learn and actually did assignments. The four year college students wanted to do as little work as possible and cared only about the grade.
Interesting. A foreign language seems like one of the best bets for motivated students choosing to take a class, because that's something that has a long history of people trying to self-teach it (cf. Rosetta Stone, Duolingo) purely out of their own curiosity and desire to self-improve.
But to be clear, my father wasn't saying that the students were less motivated than those at an ordinary university. Just that some combination of their native intelligence and prior academic preparation was such that they couldn't work with concepts like Principal * Interest Rate = Interest Payment.
You could argue that there was some intensely negative selection going on for finance in particular, since anyone with any aptitude for finance would probably be at a community college instead of a for-profit college after taking a look at the numbers. And the Bachelor's of Business program (of which the finance class was a part) might well be the lowest of the low, since it's going to select for people who don't have any idea what they want to do besides "make more money."
Interesting points, yourself.
Could also be that my friend was just burned out from academic politics (he was), he was getting a self-selecting sample (perhaps), some combination of the above, etc..
I found a similar thing transitioning to adult learning after teaching at a secondary school -- it was so refreshing to have students who actually wanted to learn and whom I could trust to actually do the work I set.
It really depends on the course and the voluntariness of taking said course. Many of the worst students I have taught were adult learners. My course is a compulsory course on ethics. And the students were pursuing a degree (usually something hyperspecialised in supply chain management or HR or something similar) just for the paper certification.
Maybe, maybe 20% of high school graduates should go to college. College should be for smart people. And the bottom 2/3 of ability is way dumber than most smart people can really comprehend.
Just a little further, at all levels of education the level of rigor of teaching is pretty much right at the middle of the ability of the classroom. So your experience is, perhaps sadly, don't know, going to be replicated at all levels of education. Teaching a classroom of low ability students will be kind of depressing, teaching a classroom of little Scott Alexanders is going to be awesome.
Back to the original issue, since you always teach to the middle of ability, some kids will be under the curve and ahead of it, it's inevitable. But if you group kids by rough ability, you get the least distance at the ends, teaching to the middle is the right pace/level for more students in each classroom this way.
Just a little further, at all levels of education the level of rigor of teaching is pretty much right at the middle of the ability of the classroom. So your experience is, perhaps sadly, don't know, going to be replicated at all levels of education. Teaching a classroom of low ability students will be kind of depressing, teaching a classroom of little Scott Alexanders is going to be awesome.
Back to the original issue, since you always teach to the middle of ability, some kids will be under the curve and ahead of it, it's inevitable. But if you group kids by rough ability, you get the least distance at the ends, teaching to the middle is the right pace/level for more students in each classroom this way.
It also speaks to why not many voices seem to advocate for the elimination of the legacy system?
Eliminating legacies would be a disaster for the Ivies and their equivalents. The colleges see legacies as bankrolling their operations.
True, but plenty of top universities don't do legacies though.
Don't do really, or don't do officially?
There are plenty of examples, but see for example https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/16/top-universities-that-do-not-consider-legacy-when-admitting-students.html
I don't know* why people insist on conflating affirmative action with legacy admissions. One is about legally-enforceable racism, and the other is about corporations growing their endowments.
*I suspect and have a few hypotheses, but they're mostly unkind.
Because both are forms of discrimination, and it's not obvious that legally-enforceable racism is worse than legally-enforceable class discrimination. The strongest and most common argument against affirmative action is that people deserve to be admitted based on their merits, not their birth. The same argument applies to legacy admissions.
I'm an adamant opponent of affirmative action, and I fully support getting rid of legacy admissions.
I think I also support getting rid of legacy admissions, but the flip side is those wealthy families are subsidizing the education of the less well-off students. If it costs x dollars to give a student a good education and the average legacy admission will donate 5x dollars, for every legacy you don't admit, you're depriving 5 other students of a good education. This plausibly hurts the other students more than it hurts the rich.
Except most of the money being spent by universities doesn't actually contribute to learning. It's just cost disease. If you took a bunch of top tier high school graduates and stuck them in a room with textbooks and some motivated but underpaid grad students to lead discussions they'd learn just as much as they would at harvard. The value of harvard comes from just getting all the smart people together and that's not expensive.
Yeah, cost disease is a hard problem that needs to be fixed, but if we fixed cost disease, the above principle would still hold. In fact, even more so, assuming rich alumni continued to donate the same amount. If they continue to donate an average of 5x, but the cost of a good education drops to 0.5x, now every legacy you don't admit is depriving 10 other students of education instead of 5.
Universities need staff and campuses and there's always going to be a cost per student. The counterfactual world where universities don't admit wealthy potential donors is a world where, compared to ours, money has moved from the universities to the wealthy.
The only way I can see cost disease making this a benefit to students is if cutting funding to universities helps students by fighting cost disease enough to make up for the lost funding. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
Would we be depriving 5 other students of a good education? Harvard seems to be highly committed to neither growing nor shrinking their enrollments year-over-year no matter how the population or demographics change. If Harvard admits 100 more legacy students, they don't also admit 500 smart students and grow their enrollment by 600 students. They instead keep their top-line enrollment the same and admit 100 fewer smart students.
We're talking about removing legacy students (and in theory funding), which I think is a bit different than adding legacy students. It's easy enough to get extra funding and not admit more students. But what would happen if a policy change caused a university to lose a significant amount of funding? Something would have to be sacrificed. It could be raising tuition for other students, reducing staff, etc.
I don't think they'd deprive 5 students of a good education by admitting fewer students. I think they'd try to keep the number of admissions the same or higher and sacrifice things that affect the quality of education instead. The downside may be spread out among all the students instead of concentrated in 5 literal students, but we're still losing _good_ education overall.
This assumes that universities need their funding to provide good education. But if a university can offer the same benefit to the same number of students with less funding, it means they're wasting money for no benefit. They should either find a better way to spend that wasted money or reduce their funding (possibly by lowering tuitions or stopping legacy admissions).
I don't think that private schools owe anyone admission, so there is no 'deserve.'
What there is, is a law saying "you cannot discriminate on the basis of race" with an exception for schools (and yes other groups). AFAIK, there has never been a law saying you can't discriminate on the basis of how much you expect someone to pay you in the future or their family has paid you in the past.
I mean discrimination per se is not bad -- it's just that certain bases of discrimination are illegal.
So discrimination on the basis of race is legal (for schools, when certain groups are discriminated against), and discrimination on the basis of how much you expect someone to pay you is legal. If both are legal, why is one better than the other? Also, since we're talking about a situation where what's legal changed overnight, why is legality a good guide to morality?
Eliezer's summary:
> that's Harvard's fundamental business? They admit actual smart kids on scholarship, alongside the kids of rich people who pay huge bribes. The smart kids get access to rich friends. The rich kids get to go to a college with a smartness rep as well as a richness rep.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1677885529491386368
The number of kids of rich people who pay huge bribes is minuscule compared to those who receive affirmative action.
The scholarships are minuscule compared to the huge bribes.
What do you think would happen if we forced schools with low acceptance rates to increase their admissions year over year in order to maintain access to public grants and loan subsidies? Would this help them launder priviledge more effectively or dilute their brand? Can we infer anything from the fact that Ivies are so disinterested in growing their enrollment and increasing their impact?
It would presumably hinder whatever they are doing, otherwise they would already be doing it?
Unless this kind of regulations would help those institutions solve a coordination problem.
Why are they not doing the opposite? Why not decrease class sizes? Is it really the case that class sizes are already optimal for whatever they're doing and the optimal size doesn't change in proportion to the population or the number of 18 year olds?
I assume class sizes are roughly proportional to the sizes of the existing buildings? Any given campus can comfortably accommodate a fairly fixed number of students; taking less doesn't let you get back the cost of existing buildings, but taking more would require buying more land and building new buildings
I don't buy this with respect to Harvard or Princeton (two elite schools that I know more about than the others) -- both are doing a material amount of new physical building and re-building year-to-year. If their preferred strategy was "don't spend more on building, but do recoup existing investments", their class sizes *would* be shrinking as buildings decayed and weren't refurbished/expanded.
I can't speak to either of those schools, but I have direct experience with this at an urban school that is top 30. If the school tries to raise admission numbers, the neighborhood surrounding the school, which is full of rich people, devote all their resources to stopping it. The schools administration has no back bone so rolls over at this, but its likely even if the administration fought back, they would only win maybe 50% of the time and given the zoning of the area, they couldn't build buildings big enough to raise admission more than maybe 10%.
I suspect Harvard and MIT and other urban schools would have similar issues. Columbia, maybe not. George Washington university (which is not in the same league as these schools but is in an urban area) spent the first two decades of this century buying up all the property around the main campus to redevelop as joint commercial and education spaces. Of course they also had to become one of the most expensive schools in the country to do this.
That's a good question.
First, we should check what class size have actually done in the real world. Perhaps they have shrunken or expanded already?
Second, we need to keep in mind that education is there to signal conformity. So status quo bias would be highly prized.
State universities typically grow as the state population grows. Most private universities seem to have pretty fixed student body sizes, though there are occasionally some small changes.
Harvard is rich enough to do whatever they like, and would continue doing so. The interesting question is what happens at schools without 11-figure endowments. Selective admissions policies obviously benefit the institutions that practice them, and the students who are selected, but I've yet to year a coherent argument for why there is a public benefit worth the public paying for it. In the sketch of an argument that follows, I have the state university systems in mind, and will draw the implication for private universities at the end. (1) The mission of the public university system is ostensibly the higher education of the public. (2) There is no clear public interest in excluding anyone from education, if that person demonstrates ability to succeed at the program. (3) On that point, no program should have to water down admission standards. Fair admission standards can be rigorous in the sense of setting a high bar based on criteria directly related to demonstrated ability to succeed at the program. What they cannot be is selective, in the sense of using additional opaque criteria to choose of those applicants who pass the rigor bar, who gets in? (4) Adult education can scale well, and many programs could admit all qualified applicants. (5) But not everything has a technology solution. If in the program's judgment there are practical limits on the number of students a program can teach at one time, a lottery among qualified applicants or a queue of qualified applicants is also permissibly fair. (6) Public university systems should have to pass a strict scrutiny test to select students on additional or opaque criteria. (7) Regarding private universities, anyone who continues to practice selective admissions is pursuing an institutional interest other than the public's, and the public shouldn't have to pay for it.
It’s interesting teaching at Texas A&M and hearing the complaints every year about the constant growth of the student body, primarily from students annoyed about the way the administrative infrastructure is perennially trying to catch up, and from townies annoyed by the growth in traffic. I think that keeping pace with the population of the state is one of the good things the university is doing, though I agree that it has made many aspects of the bureaucracy less than fully functional.
not even Harvard can do without federal money and continue business as usual. their endowment is 53b but annual operating expenses are 5.4 b. They would run out of endowment in a little over a decade.
Definitely with you on strict scrutiny; far too many effectively government bodies (e.g., public universities) are given too much extraconstitutional leeway by the judiciary.
How can we actually achieve this goal of strict scrutiny in admissions? Universities are staffed by people who are deeply committed to affirmative action. The Supreme Court only takes another bite at this apple once every 10-20 years. In California, affirmative action has been illegal for 25+ years, but by 2019, Asian students still faced an SAT score penalty getting into top UC schools before UC dropped standardized testing entirely.
Everything you said sounds reasonable and I think I agree with it. But one question regarding point 5: If the university has a practical limit on the number of students and resorts to a lottery for admissions, should we require them to take practical steps towards increasing that limit YoY with the goal of one day having the capacity to educate all qualified students? Are there any legitimate reasons for a school to limit its growth?
Qualified yes: the public university system should (and generally does) grow to meet demand, and the how much / how fast questions are things that representative government is competent to answer. And on that basis, I don't see a reason to impose a growth mandate on voluntary institutions.
If you force a school to accommodate an ever-growing student population, isn't that eventually going to cause problems for basically any school?
I'm not sure of all the reasons schools are the sizes they are, rather than bigger or smaller, but presumably for any given school there's SOME reason that it is the size it is.
Would the population continue growing forever? At some point if they grow enough, they'll fall below the selectivity criteria. Maybe that criteria is a 25% acceptance rate? Maybe it's based on accepting everyone with an SAT over 1550? Maybe a combination of the two? Maybe something else entirely? But eventually, the school would either outgrow their selectivity criteria or lose access to funds, which would basically be a death sentence. You could make the penalty less harsh by only giving their funds a haircut proportional to how much they missed their target.
If you "force schools...to increase their admissions year over year" then obviously they must keep growing forever until you stop doing that (or until they fail and die).
Requiring them to accept a percentage of applicants seems obviously crazy; what happens if they get a lot more applications than normal one year? Anyone in the world could destroy the school just by organizing a large number of students to apply. "Everyone with a test score above some threshold" has a similar issue unless you set the threshold so high that they can afford to admit literally every student in the world with that score (which I suspect would make it useless for your goal, although I'm still pretty unclear on what your goal actually is).
If you're trying to prevent the school from making fuzzy judgements that you might not approve of, you could hypothetically require them to make a list of all students who meet some testable criteria (whether determined by them or by you) and then admit students RANDOMLY off of that list. This still lets them choose HOW MANY students they want but prevents them from choosing which PARTICULAR students.
So I guess we agree: They would grow until they stop growing.
You constructed a thought-experiment whose fundamental premise requires them to grow, so they would grow until your thought-experiment breaks down, at which point your thought-experiment has broken down.
You seem like an angry person and it's just not worth my time to argue with you
We can tell that their impact is only loosely tied to the volume of students they educate.
But Harvard, specifically, has huge enrollments, but it's in things like their "executive MBA" or their online MBA (which has 40k students). But these programs are just leveraging the prestige of the harvard name.
Anyway, if you force schools to grow then smaller schools will be hurt because they wont be able to get the same students to come. At some point down the line schools start shutting down. When schools were desegregated the schools that were hurt the most were the HBCUs because their top students started going to the integrated top schools. Many of these schools closed.
Harvard et al. would also have to hire more professors and administrators. Where would they get them from? The next tier of schools, making those schools "worse".
So if you force schools to grow, then the losers are the bottom tier schools and the bottom tier students.
I can see how better schools growing would hurt the worse schools. But isn't that just competition working as intended? Walmart and Target outcompete smaller stores. Harvard outcompetes CMU. Maybe eventually we'll be complaining about "big university".
I guess if the policy was implemented naively or with intentional loopholes, then schools could just grow their online MBA programs and everyone would know that's not "real Harvard". But a good policy could treat programs with separate admissions as separate and measure the growth and selectivity of each admissions program separately.
how many colleges are you allowed to apply for? Wouldn't everybody put down harvard and yale knowing it has to let some percentage of applicants in?
Hmmm, I don't think this would work? Harvard wouldn't be required to let some percentage of applicants in. They would just have to increase the number that they let in next year.
Would it be better to use a different metric like average SAT/ACT score? Or some formula that combines the two? Or some other metric entirely?
Why are so few schools good at creating good signaling? It isn't hard to imagine a world with ten Harvards, yet that isn't our world. I kinda like how Harvard makes such fools of us all.
? Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley and, not to forget the provinces, Oxford, Cambridge and ETHZ. There’s ten for you.
Obviously there are gradations within the ten (with precise rank order depending on what you care most about) but the presumption that Harvard is sui generis is wrong. Usually ‘Harvard’ is being used as a metonym for elite US universities in general (like the subset of the above list which are located in the metropole)
For specific American cultural things, there is no substitute for Harvard. For instance, if you want to write for Saturday Night Live--followed by a career of writing in television comedy, Harvard almost guarantees you a pass. Or gives you very high odds. Those other schools you mention don't give you nearly as good odds.
Harvard's domination of comedy TV is pretty recent. My former neighbor wrote for the meat and potatoes sitcom "Married With Children." She was always ranting about the Harvard Mafia that came to town to write for the Simpsons in the 1990s.
Ok but that's 30 years ago. Norm MacDonald used to make fun of "The Harvard Boys" who wrote for Rosanne when he did. According to Norm, "The Harvard Boys" weren't worth much, but they got hired.
why are you so impressed by Harvards dominance of writing for comedy TV? It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that TV writing was dominated by eg USC, because proximity to Hollywood. that wouldn’t make USC elite.
I'm impressed by the distortion in the TV writers market. If TV writing were dominated by USC grads, that would make sense. It would seem like less of a distortion.
Also, I assume it's not just the TV writing market that has this distortion. I believe the finance world does too. I use the TV market as only an example which might generalize to other industries.
I know two guys who wrote quite a few of Norm's funnier lines. They both went to Harvard.
OK but doubt they were as smart or as funny as he was overall.
Is it?
"National Lampoon" is a direct spinoff from/by the Harvard Lampoon, and that was more than 50 years ago.
Right, and SNL was, at its creation, an attempt to make a National Lampoon TV show, both on the writing-only side and, if you look at the NatLamp record albums/radio shows, from the performing side. And Lorne Michaels has been in charge of that show almost without a break for the whole time, so that tendency persists.
At one point maybe 25 years ago I read a description of the SNL factions -- possibly from Conan O'Brian -- which was as follows: There were the Groundlings, who specialized in "memorable characters; the Second City people, with a more theatrical/improv background; and the Harvard people, who in this telling were partial to "jokes about sharks and bears".
sure and if you want to go to Silicon Valley then Stanford is where its at, if you want to do physics then MIT can’t be beat etc. Harvard may give the best odds for writing for SNL (I’ll take your word for it) but it ain’t best across the board. Nor is it clear to me that SNL is a particularly important competition to win.
It's important to those interested in it. Also, it proves that the world isn't a meritocracy. Harvard doesn't accept applicants according to their comedic skills. Whereas MIT probably does judge applicants based on their physics skills.
"Harvard doesn't accept applicants according to their comedic skills."
I knew a kid who got a full ride to Stanford, in part because of his high grades and test scores, in part because he was a professional magician on the side with a very witty act.
Kyle Eschen? His act is hilarious!
general intelligence is a thing, so is self selection (whereby eg smart kids interested in SV go to Stanford and those interested in SNL go to Harvard).
That's a good point. Given the state of network tv in general these days, Harvard having a lock on comedy writing there is kind of like if the U of Michigan was bragging that its engineering school grads are the guys who have been running the show at Chrysler for the last 30 years. It sounds impressive until you remember what's happened to Chrysler during that span of time.
"Government needs to support the universities. Both of them."
—Sir Humphrey Appleby
Harvard is really good at what they do, such as admitting people who will be (or already are) famous.
For example, in 1995 they admitted 25-year-old rock star Rivers Cuomo of Weezer as a freshman.
while others have pointed out that the signal is field dependant (so eg. MIT is better than Harvard in its niche), in general why wouldn't reputation as 'the best' be stable in whatever field the university is optimising for? Sure, sometimes the 2nd and/or 3rd place are close enough to be very respectable (eg Stanford, Yale), but the best students will want to go to the best school and so assuming the students can be relatively accurately ranked in advance the prestige ladder is extremely stable.
F. Scott Fitzgerald could have done a decent job of predicting the 2023 USNWR college rankings in 1923.
I actually doubt that. He would predict Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as the top 3, and while they’re all in the top 5, I’m not at all convinced he would have expected Stanford or MIT to be anywhere near there. He might have predicted Chicago and Penn to be in the next five, but I suspect that CalTech, Duke, and Northwestern would have been surprises. Dartmouth and Brown in the next five would be surprises only for being this low, while Rice and Vanderbilt would have been recent upstarts, and Wash U might or might not have been familiar.
I think the top half dozen are close enough that its hard to assign an overall (as opposed to field dependent) best and also the differences are small enough to be overridden by location or ‘fit’ preferences or indeed personal idiosyncrasies.
within a field its also not that stable because the gaps are small and it is small number statistics. A handful of star faculty moving for personal reasons, or retirements plus new hires turning out unexpectedly strong/weak, can end up shuffling the rankings. so can subfields rising or falling in relative importance, since best is frequently not just field dependent but also subfield dependent.
Every major state university system in the US has an honors program that is on par with Ivy league schools, but because they are within the state schools system you just dont hear about them.
most state flagships also have a couple of departments that are competitive with ivies. just…different departments at different state Us
I think this conflates high-quality professors in the "renowned expert in field" and in the "really good at teaching" sense. It makes sense for the people best in their fields to teach the smartest students.
Partly because they often do get to some work at the edge of the field - see e.g. Scott Aaronson's occasional mention of smart undergrads he did research with - but also because maybe smart people think about the field in similar ways. Brilliant researchers aren't necessarily better teachers, but might be a better fit for brilliant students.
Conversely, what we actually want for the less smart students is to have professors who are better at teaching. They don't necessarily have to be top researchers (those students aren't doing undergrad research anyway), and selecting on top researchers for professors would limit our ability to get top teachers.
Since doing cutting edge research is cooler than being a good teacher, this does naturally lead to the places with the top researchers being more prestigious and having more resources. But this consequence can happen even in a system optimized to teach low performers well!
Good post, thanks :)
Brilliant researches might not be the best teachers, but they might possess certain skills that nobody knows how to teach, and that can only be learned by direct observation/contact. That's still the leading explanation for scientific lineages AFAIK.
That's what I meant about them being a better fit for brilliant students - to the degree that they have these, they're more likely to be teachable by example to similarly brilliant students.
One thing to remember, though, is that there are "smart" white and Asian students going through the top 100 universities (and by smart I mean 1200+, which is fine) but you run out of blacks and Hispanic in that category after the top 20 schools. This means that the quality of instruction at the lower tier schools isn't as strong NOT because they don't have smart students, but because the schools are under pressure to keep their 6 year grad rate high with blacks and Hispanics so the courses are easier. Also, because they have so more lower ability students (and once you get lower than the top 100 schools, the average black SAT score is something like 800) remediation and passing kids takes more time and money than offering the right courses every year for the able kids.
So the real reason what whites (not so much Asian immigrants, whose parents are flatly jackasses on the topic of name schools) avoid lower tier schools is because they *can't* get as good instruction reliably.
Interesting comment. I wonder what readers’ thoughts are on the opposing vantage point: what if the “laundering” aspect for the elite actually dampens the meritocratic prestige that the rest of applicants gain.
At what ratio does this become untenable? Or does the ratio not matter because of the chance to network with elites trumps the label of meritocratic prestige? (Cynical view)
We should assume it's relatively close to where it is, to the extent that Harvard's management are good at judging this. Otherwise they would let more rich kids in.
Indeed. I know a lot of people think Harvard is run by idiots who will no doubt destroy it real soon now. But, over its 387 year history, Harvard has generally been managed by smart people who are good at optimizing what's best for Harvard in the long run.
Same with Yale over the last 321 years.
Very true
I think this also rests a lot on incumbency advantages that top-tier schools have. It's much harder to turn a bottom-tier school into a top-tier school than it is to simply maintain a school that past generations built.
Agree - Thor Odinson also added some thoughts to this effect below
The meritocratic applicant can prove their merit independently, they're after the parts of the experience that come from the rich and well connected. It's the rich and well connected that require smart people there to mix in the 'merit' signal with the 'upper class' signal and to have the genius entrepreneurs to network the capital with.
I don't know the ratio at which it breaks, in either direction, but I do think that pushing admissions too far towards 'elites' and away from 'merit' would see the top *elites* stop going there just as fast or faster than the top merit students
That’s a very true point as well! Pushing the ratio too much would also damage the laundering capabilities. So there is a natural equilibrium
(1) The first part, why send the top students to the best colleges?, misses one key aspect of this which is that the top students would like to be among other top students. So even if instructional quality, career opportunities, etc., were exactly the same at all universities, there would be some sort of impetus to sort. The question then becomes why should this have any connection to research quality, "elite" faculty, and other such things. It needn't, but there's no good measure of anything related to instructional quality, career opportunities, etc., and we tend to assume (not without reason) that quality in one area implies quality in others. Plus, students in many fields would actually like to work with top people in those fields -- whether or not this is likely to happen -- so there's some direct motivation for the link as well. (And conversely, the top people would like to work with or teach the best students.)
(2) Selection based on merit was always less than ideal, but it is getting worse. Currently, for example, the UC schools won't even *accept* SAT scores from applicants. Whatever biases standardized tests may have, they are less biased than, for example, recommendation letters, flowery essays, and other characteristics. If the trend towards subjectivity continues, will the signals described in the post remain as strong?
(3) As a faculty member at a fairly large public university, I am often annoyed at how discussions of higher ed focus disproportionately on small places like Harvard (edit: 7000 undergrads (I mis-typed 2000 earlier)). I don't particularly care about Arizona State, but its enrollment (112,000 undergrads) and that of similar places should warrant a lot more press than is the case.
(4) I've heard the concept of privilege laundering before; it seems obviously true.
Arizona State doesn't require test scores anymore, but when it did, 45% of the students had scores under 1200, and 8% had scores under 1000.
It seems like dropping test scores is very bad for Harvard and very good for Arizona state. How will future editions of US News and World Report rank the schools?
Small world! I was in your “Physics of Renewable Energy” course about 15 years ago, you inspired me to major in physics. Thanks!
That's wonderful to hear -- thanks!
I always thought you wanted to make a cluster of smart people so they could learn and riff off each others ideas. Kinda a Bell labs model.
There should be a science of self-fulfilling prophecies. They turn up in lots of interesting places.
Or is there, under another name?
Game theory?
I'm not at all sure that the quality of teaching is better at Harvard than at less prestigious places. I used to have a teaching affiliation with Harvard Medical School and have met some Harvard faculty, and I have had as psychotherapy patients about a dozen Harvard undergrads and people getting advanced degrees at the graduate and professional schools. My observation is that the professors who are so eminent in their fields that they are actually famous are utterly unavailable to undergrads and even to the grad students who are writing dissertations under their supervision, or carrying out their research in the lab. They are always flying off to conferences all over the world and cancelling their lectures & having grad students do them. They are preoccupied with their careers, and hate having to teach: They view teaching as the toilet-cleaning side of being an academic. They teach undergrads via lectures in giant groups in big halls, then have their teaching assistants run weekly discussion groups. The grad students all hate having to be teaching assistants, and try to get paid jobs doing other things, such as being advisor in one of the residence halls or working with other grad students to publish a journal. Out of the half dozen grad students I have seen, at least 2 have been so cruelly neglected and ignored by their famous advisors. that it seemed criminal to me to deal out that kind of treatment to someone so smart, who has worked so hard to get to Harvard, and wants so badly to do really good research that will launch their careers.
My own experience as an undergrad was at 2 places, both ivies. For the first 2 years I was at acollege, at the last 2 a university. I had no lecture classes at all at the college -- class size varied from maybe 10 to 30. At the university I was taking higher level courses, which are always smaller, and mostly avoided lecture classes there too. I only had one genuinely famous professor, and that person did in fact teach via a giant lecture. As for my many other teachers, whose smarts I enjoyed and revered -- they changed my life. They gave me wonderful, accurate flashes of insight into their vision of their field, and they took a lot of interest in me. I really do not know if they were less brilliant than the famous scholars at Harvard, or just much less interested in fame. But even if they were, say, only 80% as smart about Wittgenstein, calculus, history of religion, linguistics, 20th century poets, etc, I do not think I was a developed enough being at that point to benefit from the remaining 20% anyway. And besides, conveying to students your own sharp insights and convoluted intuitions about the field is only one part of teaching. The other part is mentoring the student, and these people were mostly excellent at that.
Quality of teaching is only mildly correlated with the teacher's degree of fame and glory. It's way too simple to say that the more prestigious the school you attend, the better the teaching you receive. I think it's likely I would have had as good an experience at many schools with fairly small class size and teachers who were not egomaniacs.
I interviewed for Harvard in 1975. The Harvard grad said his professors included Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Riesman ("The Lonely Crowd.") I was impressed. "That must have been great," I burbled.
"No, they were terrible teachers. They were always jetting off to Washington at the last moment and leaving us with an unprepared sub."
One of the main great things I would say about the probably not even top 100 university I went to was that it allowed enough of a “big fish in a small pond” effect that I was almost immediately able to make close lifelong friendships with several of the faculty. Which I suspect would have been a lot harder at a university more commensurate with my abilities.
It’s probably the main reason I didn’t transfer out.
Awesome, now apply this same lens to religion
Well, "The Status Seekers" by Vance Packard has a chapter titled "Religion: The Long Road from Pentecostalism to Episcopalianism" or something like that.
Chapter 14: The Long Road from Pentecostal to Episcopal
I think highly of this Vance Packard book
Text here for folks who care:
https://www.soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0303critic/030321status/status.pdf
I have one very relevant question. You can pay a hefty donation and have your child admitted to Harvard even if it lacks intellectual ability to be admitted without big money. But are such students treated differently later, or is anyone treated equally once they are admitted?
University students (at every university) have a lot of control over what happens to them there. The "Yale 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 use a new international airport" admit will flunk out if he tries to study physics. Equal treatment! But no one is required to study physics.
Harvard has lots of money and resources to coddle donors' kids through to a degree in something, so long as they know their limits and don't try to take Math 55 and the like.
This is what I thought (I also forgotten about this strange US system of minors and majors, and that you do not simply enroll at physics or law from the start as everywhere else). This means that the discussion would benefit from distinguishing between subjects (i.e., the situation is quite different in case of "hard subjects" like physics and math, and others like business school and law (and also as somebody pointed out earlier, this is somewhat unique to US)). Even so, I would have expected that studying law at Harward is still quite difficult (though not at the level of physics), and there are many high profile Harward law graduates (like some polititians) which do not look like they would be able to make it. I wonder what it says about actual level of teaching of some subjects at Ivy League (outside sciences)
Law is not an undergraduate degree in the US, these discussions are usually about undergrad.
Hard to say. But as Scott alluded to, once you control for IQ, the selectiveness of a college basically stops predicting for career earnings. My guess would be that Harvard grads, rich kids or not, will have a much easier time in the graduate job market, but ultimately unless you have a family member to gift you a cushy job, you'll ultimately settle back down closer to your intellectual station.
Where does Goldman Sachs and McKinsey interview? I don't recall them interviewing at Rice U., but that was a long time ago.
I think society is still meritocratic enough that there is some natural sorting that happens despite all this college prestige nonsense.
I went to a school way below my “IQ” or whatever, however you want to sort/grade it. And at 25 and 30 my earnings were shit. Probably should have worked at say McKinsey, but there was no path to that from where I was.
But now I am 42 and am a highly paid consultant who works for myself, just in a random industry I happened to find myself in and quickly became a national expert.