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.
I guess Goldman Sachs' reasoning is that if you are so unambitious as to go to merely the best college in Texas that you aren't likely a good fit for Goldman Sachs.
Well sure, I wasn’t claiming it was perfectly meritocratic or that the changes are immediate. Just that it does work somewhat. The world looks a lot more meritocratic at 40 than it does at 25. At 25 my really bright friends were laboring away at grad programs, or as post docs, or one worked at a fucking book store, another at the night desk at a hotel, another was sort of unemployed, and I graded essays for meager pay.
15 years later and all those people have great jobs. Hell my meth addicted no college degree and total fuckup until well into her 30s sister had a decent job by 35 and has a great job at 40 (freelance political consultant who gets good work). She always was fairly bright despite her issues.
As for kids I had kids at 32 and 35 and it was very manageable financially. Could have had them a couple years earlier if we hadn’t taken a few trips to Europe or bought a smaller house in a less desirable neighborhood.
Anyway, just reinforcing what the OP said when he said people eventually end up at their intellectual station. People love to talk like we live in under serfdom or something.
Professors have no idea who was admitted how. At some universities you do get letters from the athletics department if one of your students is on a team that will miss some classes, but it’s hard for them to pressure you to give “special treatment” rather than mere “accommodations for missing classes”.
Sticking to a less cynical perspective, mixing elites with talented people has networking benefits for both sides. The talented people connect with elites who can help them into more elite-level roles, and the elites connect with talented people who can help them fill whatever important roles they have open.
e.g., The rich kid who is going to inherit his father's successful business finds talented people who can help him run that business, and the talented kids get the opportunity to work in high-level roles in this successful business.
Right. Mid-century American industry was largely run by wealthy men's sons who didn't need to be the smartest guy in the room: e.g., the vastly successful Tom Watson Jr. of IBM.
Here's a take on it: students' intellectual development depends in part on the environment in which they grow. Those who grow among smart classmates become smarter than they would be otherwise. Not only that, but we achieve the greatest overall societal gains by grouping the smartest ones together.
For a very simple mathematical illustration, consider:
(x - y)^2 > 0 , for x!=y
(x - y)^2 = x^2 - 2xy + y^2
therefore: x^2 - 2xy + y^2 > 0
therefore: x^2 + y^2 > 2xy
If x and y are unequal, then you get the best results by matching x with x and y with y.
Illustration: for x=5 and y=2, matching the best with the best gives us 5*5 + 2*2 = 29, whereas matching best with worst only give us 5*2 + 2*5 = 20.
This model only has two variables, but I'm fairly sure it has been generalized long ago.
So the utility of clustering the best students in the best schools stems primarily from maximizing the students' overall potential. It's not only about matching the best students with the best teachers. It is also, and maybe more importantly up to a certain age, about matching the best students with the best classmates.
This makes sense, but it's an argument for elitism. It's fine to have an elite and even to be an elitist, but I think it does raise some questions about what you have to offer people who aren't elite through no fault of their own. What will a 75th percentile IQ person get from this system that assigns a random 99th percentile person as the CEO of their company?
I've seen the word 'elitism' used in some senses that I don't like, but let's assume there is a good sense in which the cultivation of virtue leeds to elitism in that sense.
To answer your question: That 75th percentile IQ person gets a CEO who is very likely to be capable. That's the kind of CEO we need, as well as the kind of doctor, teacher, etc.
"people who aren't elite through no fault of their own"
I think the 'fault' thing misses the broader picture. It's not a punishment if you aren't the doctor or the CEO because you aren't competent enough to do it. Since it's not a punishment, it's of no relevance whether it's your fault or not.
> why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help?
There's a weird assumption in the response (and, I guess, the question) that "the best colleges" provide more help than other colleges do.
In reality, "the best colleges" are, by definition, the ones with the best students. The young Yglesias' question is similar to the philosopher who asks whether it's OK to prefer dating people you find attractive: conceptually incoherent. It isn't possible to do anything else.
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Schools arise as a way for elite children to acculturate to each other. When talented nonelites begin to be let in, we should assume that the reason is to benefit the elites who operate and use the school. There is an obvious symmetry in what happens: the go-getters who make it in on ability get connections to people with power. (As mentioned in the post.) The elites who make it in on pedigree get the same connections, but since they are the other side of those connections, we would describe them as getting connections to people with ability. Connections like that can be important if you're ever put in charge of something!
It isn't necessary to assume that smart people get admitted to Harvard so that elites who also go there can pretend to be smart.
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It also isn't obvious that legacy admissions are of lower quality than "merit" admissions. If all you know about an applicant is their SAT score, you can admit them and watch them regress to the population mean. If you know (1) their SAT score and (2) that both their parents went to Harvard, the same thing will happen, except that the relevant mean toward which they will regress is much higher.
>"The young Yglesias' question is similar to the philosopher who asks whether it's OK to prefer dating people you find attractive: conceptually incoherent. It isn't possible to do anything else."
It's definitely possible to date someone you find unattractive, and happens all the time.
I also don't think the "best" colleges actually have smarter students. Princeton's students test worse than Dartmouth's, but few would argue Dartmouth is a better college.
>"It also isn't obvious that legacy admissions are of lower quality than "merit" admissions. If all you know about an applicant is their SAT score, you can admit them and watch them regress to the population mean."
What metrics are you talking about? Income? Since colleges are academic institutions, it makes sense to prioritize academic credentials eg SAT scores.
>>"It also isn't obvious that legacy admissions are of lower quality than "merit" admissions. If all you know about an applicant is their SAT score, you can admit them and watch them regress to the population mean."
> What metrics are you talking about? Income? Since colleges are academic institutions, it makes sense to prioritize academic credentials eg SAT scores.
I'm talking about SAT scores. The college gets a small number of samples, typically one. The student's true SAT score, the average score they would get if they took the test an infinite number of times, is different. Since we're talking about high scores, they need to be adjusted lower. But the appropriate reduction for the legacy admit is smaller than the appropriate reduction for the non-legacy admit.
For the same reason, you should expect that, given a white student and a black student with equal SAT scores, the white student will be smarter. And in fact when you break down predictions by race, SAT scores overpredict black performance (relative to how SAT scores perform as predictors in general) by a very small amount.
> “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments
“Fairly-earned privilege” sounds more like a contradiction than anything. It's not privilege if it's fairly earned.
Semantics is important. Just as football players must keep their eyes on the ball, reasoners must keep their eyes on their concepts.
When we agree that privilege is wrong, what we agree on is the following: it is wrong for society to bestow benefits on those who have not earned them. A privilege is an unearned societal benefit. Thus a fairly earned privilege is a square circle.
A large portion of the populace can't readily separate fairness from equality.
There will be circumstances that some are treated better than others, and it will be labeled as privilege. Under your definition, the beneficiary can't assert that the privilege was earned and therefore fair.
What term would you suggest to use in place of "fairly earned privilege"?
Fairness is an ambiguous concept. In some situations fairness = equality. In some situations fairness = proportionality. Sometimes fairness = honesty. And who knows what else?
In place of 'fairly earned privilege' I would simply suggest desert. (As in 'deserve', not as in 'desert rose.')
You are taking an English word with many layered meanings and demanding that we only pay attention to your preferred definition.
I don't agree that privilege is intrinsically wrong at all margins, so I'm unclear how to read your entire second paragraph. I think there may in fact be privileges that are unacceptable in some platonic sense, but I don't know what they are.
My preferred equilibrium would be a much more significant estate tax, no income tax exemptions for donations, non-profit income, or religious organizations, and a basic income, then let society distribute status however people want to distribute it.
The "modern left-wing" conception of privilege is based on an elementary conceptual confusion. There is little doubt that this confusion is deliberate. No one is deceived by it, but a lot are annoyed to the point at which they give up.
There are two fundamentally different definitions of privilege at work. In one, the "driving isn't a right, it's a privilege" sense, privilege has to be earned and is supposed to be fairly earned. In the other, the "white male privilege" sense, privilege cannot be either earned or fair. It sucks that the same word has two contradictory meetings, but that's English As She Is Spoke.
I think the last link is probably mostly a prestige thing as well.
Alexander did not become a brilliant general because Aristotle personally taught him philosophy (or strategy), but the circumstances which enabled his father to hire Aristotle as a tutor also placed him in a position where he was able to use his military genius to conquer vast quantities of lands.
Of course, now I wonder how much of the fame of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is causally linked to the conquests of Alexander (and various monarchs seeking to reproduce his education).
"Of course, now I wonder how much of the fame of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is causally linked to the conquests of Alexander (and various monarchs seeking to reproduce his education). "
For the western world Aristotle (via his writings that survive and what others at the time wrote about him) was pretty fundamental. Plato mattered, too. We only know about Socrates because of Plato.
I don't know my ancient Greek philosophers well enough to tell, but I don't think there are other (good) candidates for "important fundamentally to western philosophy."
Part of this may well be survivorship bias (which might be because, hey, let's study what Alexander studied!) -- you can't be terribly influential if all your works are destroyed. Sappho might have been a better poet than Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides but we have a lot more of their works than hers so they are the ones folks study more. Similarly, LOTS of works by other Greek philosophers have been lost or only survive in fragments (and it isn't like we have everything from Plato and Aristotle, either!).
But I think survivorship bias is a thing here, being actually important is a thing (though these intersect because folks are more likely to busily copy your works if you are seen as important) and, maybe, Alexander's conquests mattered, but I expect that to be a 3rd order effect at best.
Not true; Socrates also appears in some preserved ancient dramatic works.
> you can't be terribly influential if all your works are destroyed
This is also untrue, in a more interesting way. You can easily be extremely influential if all your works are destroyed. You may not be remembered by name... or you might! If tradition attributes a lot of existing significant works to the intellectual tradition that, also according to tradition, you founded, how could someone avoid admitting that you are extremely influential?
Classical literature teems with references to very significant works that we no longer have. Nobody believes that those works weren't influential, because you can easily read about how significant they were today.
Suppose that you believe in a historical Jesus. None of that person's works survive. (And perhaps no literary works ever even existed.) Was that person influential? Is that person still influential today?
Famous colleges have no doubt done studies of which applicants are likely to donate the most money over the next 60 years. Have any of these studies ever been published? Anybody have any links?
My impression from looking at the names on college buildings is that big donors tend to be legacies, jocks, men, business-oriented, frat boys, and Republicans or centrist Jewish Democrats (e.g., Michael Bloomberg).
That was precisely the theme of Daniel Markovits' book "The meritocracy trap". Remember that "meritocracy" wasn't initially invented as a positive word, but to denounce privilege laundering in the first place.
That sounds like a weird and misleading way to (mis)use the word though. Postmodernist arguments often use words in (secretly) redefined senses. Sometimes they try to 'prove' that 2+2=5 by redefining +, or redefining 2, or redefining =. Some of them think this makes them whimsical and funny, others even think it makes them smart. But I have never read or spoken to a postmodernist who was not a humorless mediocrity.
What are you talking about? Meritocracy has been invented in 1958 by M.D. Young, and reused by Markovits (prof at Yale) in his recent (2018?) book. I state that the "privilege laundering" interpretation isn't new, and has been arguably proven true already. This doesn't carry any relation with "postmodernism".
Meritocracy hasn't been invented in 1958. Perhaps the precise expression 'meritocracy' has been used for the first time in 1958. But meritocracy has been a liberal ideal since at least the eighteenth century.
You know, I think even more radical things, for instance free will is an illusion and doesn't exist, the individual is powerless and individualism is a stupid ideology, there is no God, and many others :)
Your argumentation has all the wooly and muddy qualities of postmodernism. You are arguing that our ideal of meritocracy is a 'sham' because you are not doing meritocracy right anyway. You are arguing, in other words, that the ideal is wrong because the reality *you* have created is imperfect. Not only that, but you are implying that it's ok to make reality even worse, by such means as affirmative action, because, once again, in reality your country is not perfectly meritocratic (which is primarily the fault of the postmodern left anyway).
Before we get bogged down into further dissecting your sophistry, which is never useful with postmodernists anyway, let us at least agree on the following clear and succinct truths:
* the world is not perfectly meritocratic
* the US is not perfectly meritocratic either
* in the 1960s, the US was more meritocratic than it is today
* one of the primary culprits for reduced meritocracy today is 'affirmative action,' better described as racial discrimination (as well as other forms of unjust and nepotistic discrimination)
* the world would be better if it were meritocratic
* the US would be better if it were meritocratic
* the world would be more just if it were meritocratic
* the US would be more just if it were meritocratic
* the world would be wiser, smarter, and more knowledgeable if it were meritocratic
* the US would be wiser, smarter, and more knowledgeable if it were meritocratic
* a sick patient is not an argument that the patient needs more sickness, or a new kind of sickness; it is an argument that the patient needs more health
* an imperfectly meritocratic system is not an argument that the system needs less meritocracy
* obviously, an imperfectly meritocratic system is an argument that the system needs *more* meritocracy.
No doubt most of this must already be clear to you. The rest is pomo rhetoric.
No, we can't agree. The problem isn't that the current state of meritocracy is imperfect. The problem is that meritocracy *in itself* tries to justify inequality. You start from the axiom that some people are worth more than others; and this is a wrong premise in itself. It's the worst of all premises, actually, that can be used to justify absolutely *anything*. We're already reaching Godwin here.
Inequality arises from several different causes, but one of them is fair merit. Some people are just a lot more intelligent and capable than other people, and that will result in inequality and privilege. If you take two widget makers/sellers across the street from each other, one led by an intelligent, thoughtful leader, and one led by a social justice-y blank slater who never scored extremely highly, it will seem to people like you that the inevitably successful intelligent neighbor has mere rank unfair privilege. When he defends himself by saying the free market is meritocratic and that's why his business is doing so much better, you'll be playing this same tune.
"Merit is a myth."
"No, I'm actually smarter, more capable, and make a better product, and that's why I'm more successful."
There's nothing weird or misleading here, at least once you understand the obvious analogy to "aristocracy", have at least passingly heard of Goodhart's law, and realize that not having a ruling caste at all is also an option.
What's misleading is redefining the word to "we just need to choose the best person for the job, man" and pretending that anyone ever disagreed with that, instead of questioning the choice of the method or the need for some "jobs" to exist in the first place.
(Also, your misunderstanding of postmodernism is ironic on many levels.)
> What's misleading is redefining the word to "we just need to choose the best person for the job, man"
That is exactly what the word means in plain English.
> retending that anyone ever disagreed with that
A whole lot of ruling-class ideologues disagree with that. Have you never heard about 'competence bias'? We are now supposed to believe that it is unfair to hire the more competent applicants.
> your misunderstanding of postmodernism is ironic on many levels
Yes, yes. "You do not understand postmodernism." Where have we seen that move before?
I have indeed never heard about 'competence bias' - which, unsurprising, since neither did, e.g., wikipedia. However, a quick google search would suggest that in the limited use the term sees, it's employed to mean, to quote the very first result, "a tendency to overestimate one's own abilities and the abilities of those who are similar to oneself".
Which, hilariously apropos - both as an example of your (non)understanding of terminology and confabulations that result from it, and as a diagnosis of your absolute refusal to get corrected.
There are many slogans that don't have wikipedia pages, and yet they exist, albeit only recently. I have heard/seen wokes pushing the notion that it's unfair to prefer competent people. Perhaps you haven't seen that yet, but it's likely coming soon to a theater near you...
I've actually interacted with wokies, and "I'm more competent, you just don't see it 'cause you're biased" is precisely their modus operandi. In comparison, you'll never ever catch them saying "I'm actually ignorant and useless but promote me anyway", because, first, culturally acquired (or, in a few unfortunate cases, actual) narcissism, second, nobody ever does that. Nobody. Ever. Think about it for a second.
You, I'm sorry, I don't think you've ever seen one in person. You fit all too well into a stereotype of someone getting all their info from an internet epistemic bubble. And yes, the fact that your go-to example was some niche term that does not even mean what you claimed it means very much adds to that impression - mining for irrelevant, obscure factoids and misrepresenting them is precisely how those bubbles work. But even if you did... and again, your go-to - and so far only - example is demonstrably based on your not understanding - this in addition to the entire discussion arising from your semantic misconception and refusal to give it up. Even if you heard/saw them, there's just no reason to trust you to have comprehended what they were saying.
>Remember that "meritocracy" wasn't initially invented as a positive word, but to denounce privilege laundering in the first place.
Okay...so what? The word is being used to mean something different than what you're claiming it was used by Markovits or whoever. Paying your way into college is pretty obviously counter to what supporters of meritocratic admissions policies would consider 'merit'. So the fact that a substantively different word was used in a negative way is irrelevant.
In a different thread I explain to you why your argument is fallacious.
You reply to me in that thread:
> The problem isn't that the current state of meritocracy is imperfect.
So you admit that you're not concerned with whether it's a lie or not.
Rather, you say, your problem is that meritocracy justifies inequality.
So, when all the sophistry dissipates, you hate meritocracy because you suffer from what used to be called an 'inferiority complex,' and you resent those who are better than you.
Hm hm, I see that finesse and social abilities aren't your forte. Are you an electric blender, maybe? Or a libertarian? Talk about "human qualities"... Geez.
America and much of the west does spend a lot more on poor and bad students than on rich and gifted ones.
Inner city schools in the US are the best funded by a long way, in the UK I got more resources for being mildly dyslexic than for being smart. There are vast resources spent on every kind of learning difficulty even when the financial return is dubious.
At least in my state the inner city schools which are collapsing spend by far the most per pupil among public schools. Way more than rich suburban schools.
This is blatantly false. Western countries spend much more on each privileged student than unprivileged one (even if on aggregate, the sheer numbers may look like "so much is spent on these poor").
For instance France spends 10270€ a year for general University students, but 16370€ for members of the elite "classes prépa". You'll find similar discrepancies everywhere : the best paid and most senior professors of all grades work in the best, most privileged schools, have bigger budget for books and activities, etc.
The continent is very different from the anglosphere. France is much more meritocratic in universities than the USA.
As for spending on students, I suspect Oliver is gesturing more at primary and secondary schools; The resources don't show up in the form of better teacher pay, of course, but in the form of security guards in bad neighbourhoods, in the for of 'aides' for any sort of disability - which are extremely expensive because they're often 1 to 1, compared to teachers that teach 30 at a time
France may be more meritocratic, but suffers from a weird disease : people with a diploma from a prestigious school (X, Mines, Ponts, ENA) will barely talk to people with lowly diplomas about any important business. They wouldn't consider working with you, or signing some big business deal if you're not if not an alumni from their school, at least one from some school or uni as prestigious as theirs.
So "school politics" get in the way of innumerable business ventures, scientific discoveries and governmental decisions. This is truly maddening and it's all too related to el famoso belief in "meritocracy". Because of course it takes "merit" and "'hard work" to get out of Polytechnique with a high grade, doesn't it? To the point where weird aristocratic traditions appear, for instance the head of RATP (company managing metros and buses in Paris) MUST be from Polytechnique (a military, math oriented school). Why is that? Probably because the very first boss if the company 120 years ago was from this school, so it must go on this way like forever...
I already proved his dishonesty in a different thread, and he complained that I lack 'social abilities'. If by 'social abilities' is meant the I'm-alright-you're-alright kind of complacency, then it's about time we stopped being socially able...
Yeah because 10270€ is more than16370€. I had forgotten why I don't participate in these threads of immature shit hurling, thank you for the reminder :)
There must be a problem with my monitor, because it shows you writing "Western countries spend much more on each privileged student than unprivileged one" which as an absolute statement is false.
Maybe in France thigs are different, and maybe in whatever particular caste you've chosen to cherry-pick that could be the case. But to describe the most expensive students (which are those with disabilities) as "most privileged" is... weird even for a fourteen-year-old-who-just-discovered-nihilism.
I think you guys are talking about two different things. I think he's correct about secondary schools. IE, spending per student is very high in cities like New York City, DC, LA, etc., and the ROI is not very high. I think you are correct that at the college level, things are reversed and way more money is spent per student at picky colleges for upper middle class students than at East Nowheresville State College For the Working Poor.
I agree that Community college do get less funding than elite colleges.
But all tertiary education places are middle class institutions even 2 year public colleges only have 33% of their intake from the bottom two parental income quintiles.
Classes prepa are not the equivalent of general university in France and there is nothing similar to them in the UK or US.
Yes there is more spending on engineering and science than on other subjects, but I think that reflects the nature of the subjects rather than their eliteness.
One of the main things driving up the cost of education for inner city schools is the insane insistence on teaching everyone (with IEP, disability helpers etc.)
For instance I know a registered nurse whose full time job the state pays for is helping one single student attend school. That eats up a ton of resources.
The question is incredibly naive, as you would expect from a child. But the frightening thing is how common this naivety is among affirmative action supporters. Grown adults not being able to understand that sending the worst students to the "best" school will stop it being the best school. As if the 'bestness' of Harvard is some kind of intrinsic, durable property.
But I think all of this is rooted in the left-wing education myth. That is, to the extent that academic ability varies between people (and this isn't just white supremacy etc.), it is almost entirely explained by differences in educational "quality", which is obviously false. And I say this because I don't think even they are foolish enough to think that dumb kids graduating from harvard still dumb would be treated the way current harvard grads are treated. But we know clearly from the data that sending black people to college doesn't close the intellectual gap between them and white students. If anything, it grows i.e. the gap between black and white college grads is higher than for black and white high school grads, and this despite the survivorship bias resulting from a much higher dropout rate for black students (assuming dumber students are more likely to drop out).
One issue with https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2002-dale.pdf is that when you slice-and-dice the data post hoc like that, you are undoing the very controlling that was the point of the exercise. If the students who went to the elite college vs students who could've-but-didn't were originally comparable and so let you claim causality, they stop being comparable when you split them back up, and now confounding is back in play (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719). That is, low-income family students are a priori less likely to succeed or benefit for reasons like being more interested in welding than McBain (see the above hockey example), and it's more likely their admission was a fluke, so when they choose not to go to Harvard, they are revealing that they are *not* identical to their control group peer coming from Andover who of course accepts their admission - there may be a good reason they chose to reject their golden ticket, because they don't want it, they aren't ambitious, they know they can't hack it, etc.
Leftists' beliefs make sense if you accept the blank slate assumption, and completely crumble without it. Which is why they hold on to that assumption for dear life.
The Bell Curve (1994) is criticized as racist; well, yeah, kinda, but it stated that the average IQ African Americans was 85; Latino 89; White 103; Asian 106; and Jews 113. This does not seem like a comfortable platform for, say, white supremacists. I'll note that ~60% of the world's population is Asian...
60% of the world’s population lives in the continent of Asia, but Asia is a big and diverse place. if by Asian you implicitly mean East Asian then only 20% of the world population is East Asian
A complication: the world Chinese population > the population of China; lotta emigres, you know? And hey, when did India's population surpass China's?! I missed that one...
A good friend of mine teaches maths at a mediocre university in the UK. This university recently slipped in rank from an already middling position and they had to lower the intake grade requirements one notch to maintain student numbers. Their list of coursee does not look any different from last year or from a list at a top university and it cannot really look very different as they would lose their accreditation if they dropped e.g. differential equations from their maths degree. Even a two page course content sheet does not look very different from one at a top university, at least for a layman. However, as these courses are now taught for lower level students, they need to spend more time at the basics and barely touch the advanced stuff. They still include the advanced stuff in the exams, but they are now just teaching it to ensure reasonable exam pass rates and do not actually achieve reasonable understanding of the subject for any bar a few top students. My friend is now really disillusioned and most of his skills of teaching advanced stuff are now wasted and these students barely get to the level of maths knowledge of an average graduate from a top high school after a 3 years degree. So even if course subjects look the same as ones at a top university , deep down below course contents is very different and require a different skill set to teach, and the first optimistic answer stands.
Math is a particularly fierce field for this. To do understand the advanced stuff, you need both intelligence and diligence. To a degree, you can replace some of one characteristic with considerable amounts of the other, and I've seen people who did this in both directions. But the minimum for both characteristics is considerably above average.
I've skimmed the comments and I'm kinda surprised (not really, since it's sort of a taboo subject in certain circles) the way everyone here including Scott seems to have never heard of Sander and Taylor's work on 'mismatch.' They documented really well that students who are taught with peers of largely similar academic skills actually do better (they specifically looked at bar exam pass rates out of law schools) than similar students who are admitted to universities where the bulk of the class is well above their academic level. I think your anecdote, while understandably depressing, gives a good real world example of why this is true. If one half of the class already knows the fundamentals, one quarter is smart enough to catch on with minimal instruction, and the last quarter is going to struggle to grasp them, that last quarter is going to be largely left behind. They would have done better in an environment that could have provided good grounding in the basics with some additional advanced work.
Yale Law School teaches a lot of boutique theory classes to third year students. Run of the mill law schools spend the third year trying to get their students up to speed to pass the bar exam.
My question is about undergrad engineering programs. How much do they differ in difficulty between colleges?
Difficulty might not be the right word; I'd lean towards comprehensiveness.
Anecdote: I've been mentoring a friend's teenager since high school to get into aero engineering in our flagship state university; I did my undergrad in aero elsewhere at a much more selective school. The major's requirements here only cover up through what I did my junior year.
Is it enough to be a productive new hire for Boeing? Certainly. But they're not going to go to JPL or Skunk Works with just that much.
"My question is about undergrad engineering programs. How much do they differ in difficulty between colleges?"
My younger, mechanical engineer, brother was slated to teach a 3rd year ME class at a public university you have heard of, but not one that makes the top few hundred in USNWR rankings. He handed out a test very early on which included a bunch of fundamental questions about ME so that he could gauge where the class was.
The VAST majority of these 3rd year engineering students didn't seem to understand that a 2:1 gear ratio did NOT double the energy output. And lots of other totally missing concepts that he thought were pretty fundamental to being a successful engineer (*).
I *hope* that the better engineering programs are graduating students who know that energy is conserved (or, in practice, lost due to things such as friction!) rather than something you can manufacture with gears. I hope.
(*) NOTE: My CalState Hayward (not East Bay) educated wife with a degree in Liberal Studies looked at me when asked the question and asked, "Isn't the energy the same?" Conservation of energy doesn't HAVE to be a super-tricky concept.
Im dubious about that. It Engineering wasn’t consistent enough across courses then those engineers in known bad courses, particularly in mechanical engineering where there’s a clear empirical measurement in industry, would be unemployable.
I genuinely wonder how elastic various measures of economic performance are to the ‘quality’ of the workforce. It’s not even obvious that the relationship should be, say, linear, though it is very likely monotonic.
So you're saying that grades at a mid-tier school mean something different than grades at a top-tier school. Which shouldn't be the case, because if all students in a school had ability levels of say, SAT 1200 or higher, everyone would learn. But they don't have a minimum SAT score because that would basically declare the bulk of blacks and Hispanics ineligible for college. So they accept a lot of students with low abilities, requiring the professors to lower the standards for everyone.
Now take that same logic down to high school and you'll see why using grades in college admissions is fucking ludicrous.
I know a kid who recently graduated high school and is off to college in September. In April he was evaluated and his reading level was found to be that of a first-grader. He was accepted without SATs at a number of schools including several Cal State campuses.
I don't know which I'm more dreading more: seeing this nice kid flunk of out his first semester, or seeing him pass, with all that implies about college.
> Their list of coursee does not look any different ... from a list at a top university
I highly doubt this. Here are the Schedules for undergraduate mathematics at Cambridge: https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/files/schedules.pdf . I highly doubt the third year courses (part II) look anything like these ones if the level of the average graduate matches a good high schooler.
Ok, I made two relevant claims in my comment: 1) that a middling university high-level course overview is very similar and even course outline is similar to a layman's view to a top course and that 2) graduates from math BA degree at middling universities are not much better qualified than average graduates from a top school.
The second claim is harder to check, but an average top high school graduate skills are probably at the level of borderline passing Cambridge math entrance STEP exam (see here for problem examples https://undergroundmathematics.org/browse?typeOption=ReviewQuestion&reviewQuestionType=6) . My friend is pretty confident that none of his final year students would pass it.
I think you're conflating how intelligent the students are with how much they've learned. The STEP exams only require knowledge of A level Maths and Further Maths (would be pretty unfair otherwise), and the difference in performance is going to be mostly due to talent/intelligence. Learning more advanced degree-level material is not necessarily going to allow the Sussex students to pass the STEP, but they will still know a lot more maths than the ones about to start at Cambridge.
Ok, let me rephrase. There are two ways for someone to "know" a mathematical theory: W-knowledge when they heard the words and can reproduce the definitions and main theorems and P-knowledge when they can apply this theory in practice.
STEP indeed requires only A level kind of stuff in the sense of W-knowledge. It is quite far outside of A level instruction in the sense of P-knowledge. International Math Olympiad problems are even further in that corner: they can be at the level of 5th grade in terms of W-knowledge and difficult to many PhD mathematicians in terms of P-knowledge.
When we look at a course description we see only a W-knowledge outline of the course and these are quite similar between universities. When a university needs to dumb down the course to accommodate weaker students, they are usually keeping W-knowledge content of the course constant, but dilute P-knowledge exam requirements. It is not yet at the level of questions like "If you have three cotangent bundles and are given one more, how many cotangent bundles do you have?" but is getting close to that.
So I agree with you when you write that "[low ranked university] students will still know a lot more maths than the ones about to start at Cambridge", but only in the sense that they would W-know that. However, they would not have much P-knowledge, and thus would be mostly unable to apply their knowledge to anything. Even worse, W-knowledge instruction is very dulling and boring for those low ranked university students who are bright but were poorly taught at high school.
> That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people.
If we're talking about actually admitting people because their family is donating money, this would seem to be a substantial overestimate. There's actually a term for people admitted because their family donated money, and it's "development case": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_case
At least going by that page (I haven't looked into it much further), the actual fraction of these is no more than about 5%. This linked article says that (at Dartmouth at least) it used to be more like 1% back in the 90s and 00s, and rose to about 5% in the 2010s: https://web.archive.org/web/20190316233913/http://www.dartblog.com/data/2014/09/011686.php So it's *possible* it's larger now? But if so that would seem to be a recent phenomenon.
This does leave the possibility of larger-scale "privilege laundering" via legacy admissions, essays, and activities and whatnot, so it's hard to say exactly what's going on -- and, if such a thing is occurring, it's actually *deliberate* -- but in terms of actual development cases they're much smaller. (With Harvard it does seem like this more general privelege-laundering is likely deliberate, from what I've read. Seems harder to say about other schools, though.)
Back in 2010, a somewhat rich man told me he'd made some calls around to find out how much it would cost to get his daughter into Harvard, where he had met his wife. He said the number he was told was $5 million if she was wait-list worthy, $10 million if she was not. "Damn hedge fund guys ruin it for everybody," he grumbled.
But your numbers are pretty wrong. Harvard accepts 75% smart/talented people, but the lower tiers of those are rich and powerful. Harvard accepts 25% who aren't smart and talented, but most of that group are the affirmative action admits.
The pretense that the rich and powerful's kids aren't also smart is fun, but kinda silly.
On the less cynical side, advanced research has to happen somewhere and the people doing that want more people who can help (despite universities tilting further and further towards undergraduate education from research).
Also, instead of "best", you could say "most advanced". If we optimised for teaching we might put the most knowledgeable people teaching the most advanced students, and the best teachers teaching the students who most need to progress. What actually happens? A bit of both. Advanced universities often have more funding which naturally produces better teaching, but they don't prioritise "good teachers" as much as other things.
From the more cynical end of the spectrum, lots of institutions are "people with influence channelling people with ability". Sometimes the channelling is almost pure parasitism like modern academic journals which add almost nothing to the academic process other than a monopoly. Sometimes the channelling is the most valuable part (I don't know which, but I'm sure SOME big breakthroughs happened because someone had a vision and brought the right smart people together and wouldn't have happened otherwise). Universities used to be more patronage "richduke had money and chose to subsidise some random smart people". You can see that as generosity or monopoly depending whether you see the baseline as "everyone has enough to eat" or "everyone has as much as they can grab".
I think that there is also a spectrum of experience at college; not everyone who goes to the elite colleges (be that the Ivies or Oxbridge) is going to have the same experience. Some of the students will be doing the dining clubs and secret societies and rich dickheads experience, others will be "I'm here to get an education".
The ones there to get advantage from networking opportunities may or may not include some of the "Black, Hispanic, and Native American voices" who are there for the diversity quota. If a smart, poor kid can get a leg-up into the class above their natal one and make connections which they can leverage in their career, good luck to them - but this applies to poor white kids from rural states as well. I wonder how much true diversity was in Maya's "classes, [where] we had discussions about race, identity, and oppression"? If everyone has the same opinion and comes to the same conclusions, how diverse is that?
Like others in the comments here, I think it is as much about networking as signaling and education – but not networking in the shallow sense of “it’s all about who you know, not what you know”, but about meeting people who help you fulfill your potential.
My father’s favorite piece of advice for deciding where to go to college was that “you don’t need Lee Iacocca to teach you about supply and demand”. (Which usually led to quizzical looks, since very few college-bound Norwegians of this millennium know who Lee Iacocca was.)
The suggestion was that going to a top-tier university for your bachelor’s degree was a waste of money. And going for other degrees might also be a waste of money.
Since it influenced some of my own choices, I resented the naivety of that advice for years into my career – until I realized that I probably would have wasted an Ivy League education, and failed to grab the opportunities it afforded me, in much the same way that I wasted my actual education.
However, for those who are wicked smart and know how to take advantage, top-tier universities can offer you a peer group that can challenge you in a way very few others can, motivate you to reach higher that you thought was possible, and give you networking opportunities that open doors you might not even know existed and clear obstacles out of your way.
Genius and talent will often go stale and dull in a pool of mediocrity – unrecognized, unmotivated, confused for eccentricity or confusion, left to stagnate. But when pitted against other genius and talent, professors and peers who get it and challenge it and nurture it, it gets to sparkle and shine. You see it in music and literature and sports and science and business and culinary arts: The very best rarely appear alone.
And so, why do we send the top students to the top colleges? It’s a bit like asking why we send the best athletes to the best sports leagues. (“Send”, as if they don’t have a say in it themselves.) Because that’s where they can meet the people who can help them reach their full potential – not so much by teaching them, even though that is part of it, as by challenging them, supporting them, and putting them in the competition for the highest achievements.
And, when the best athletes and students congregate in one place, others dream of joining, and it becomes a self-perpetuating system for supporting excellence (which is strong enough to withstand some inevitable corruption and gaming of the system).
It would be interesting to study how top college baseball prospects decide where to go. College baseball players tend to be upscale. For example, the most successful major leaguer I ever knew was the son of a lawyer who was a superb Little League coach and his older brother was an accountant who became a highly successful player's agent. The family chose Stanford.
It would be interesting to learn more about how all top athletes decide where to go, and what athletic and financial trade-offs they’re willing to make for a better academic fit and vice versa + how much existing privilege matters to the decision.
Top baseball prospects don’t go to college at all, since they can be drafted at 18 and signed directly into the minor league system, which is generally regarded as better prep for the majors than
So a lot of the top college players are a combination of “not quite good enough to go pro, at least not right away” and “from a posh enough family that Getting a Good Education is more attractive than playing better baseball but living a lower status life in the minors”.
Most of the best college teams are on the West Coast or in the Southeast, which seems to be entirely a weather based phenomenon. It’s a spring sport in college and it doesn’t make enough money to support fancy year round facilities.
Stanford is historically pretty good at baseball, and has the benefits of location and prestigious degree, so it’s not a surprising choice.
My friend's view in the 1990s was that the minors were a waste for a pitcher. His brother got better coaching (and medical care) at Stanford. In the minors, the manager had him doing dumb training stuff when he was suffering a hip injury like running up and down the bleachers. The kid finally walked off the team, came back to L.A. and had Sandy Koufax's old surgeon operate on him. He eventually won a Cy Young.
I'd imagine that front offices in this century have invested in smartening up the minor league experience. But, still, it's hard for a lower minor league team to have the kind of resources that a Stanford has.
If you are drafted out of high school, and don’t sign with the team that drafted you, you have to stay in college for at least 3 years before you are draft eligible again. If you’re good enough to get drafted at 18, you’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table if you commit to 3 years of college ball. Maybe less so in the NIL era?
In hockey, NHL teams retain rights to drafted players for 2 years if they go to a CHL team, or until 30 days after they leave college if they go that route. So in that case the teams potentially have an incentive to keep players in college, since it gives them development time without costing the team anything, or starting the countdown to free agency.
Aside from signaling, one of the functions of the university is acculturation. By admitting a mix of the brightest and the hereditary elite, the Ivies help to build a shared culture under their own influence.
(1) I am always highly suspicious of anecdotes involving cute moppets going "Papa, whither the course of educational attainment amongst the student body of our fair nation?" Maybe Matt's five year old is that precocious, but I do wonder about "what kind of discussion was Daddy having about such topics to set Kiddie up for that cute quote?" Much like all the women who go online about their six year old (and then some other woman goes on to cap it with 'well, my *four* year old did even more achingly woke thing') doing the Wakanda forever salute for Ruth Bader Ginsburg because of LGBT rights.
You thought I was joking about Rutkanda Forever?. Nope, I just got the details wrong:
(2) "Harvard students and faculty who are descended from people held in slavery in the United States"
Good God, how many more euphemisms can we come up with? I had just got used to seeing "enslaved" and "enslavers" used instead of "slaves" and "slave-owners" (which had been replaced first by "slave-holders") and now we're up to "people held in slavery". I now fully expect to see the unironic use soon of "prisoners with jobs" because now "slave" is a slur? How much more can we dilute terms in order to keep the grievance hamster wheel turning?
I think in Germany in certain universities there is a bit of an opposite effect: some of the big technical universities accept all applicants, but then are extremely rigorous in their sorting. Their degrees are prestigious precisely because you are expected to have "fought your way through" an anonymous, underfunded system with very poor tutoring and nobody actually caring whether you show up or not.
The University of California campuses used to be rather like that -- high acceptance rate, high flunk out rate. Six of my high school class of 1976 flunked out of UCLA the next year. But UC schools are easier to get through now but much harder to get into.
I went to an university which accepted everyone (and failed a lot of them in the first semesters), and I actually like this setup better than prefiltering.
Of course, even there, being rich gives lots of slack. A rich kid spending two semesters to figure out subject X is not for them will be in a much better position than a poor kid studying on BAföG (50% taxpayer money, 50% student debt) or someone having to work while studying.
In the final paragraph you say "I expect that without such a system the elites would do their own thing without any concession to merit whatsoever - so maybe it beats the alternative"
So then why does the elite bother at all? If they control access to their ranks, why do they make this concession to merit at all? Certainly in most human societies the elite has never ruled on the pretense of being smarter, so why do it in ours?
Furthermore, does the elite in the US really control access to their ranks? Since more wealth in our society is newly created than is inherited, I would say they do not have this power (look how Zuckerberg vs Winklevoss turned out). If you look at a list of the richest Americans, you have to go outside the top 10 before you see inherited fortunes. And even then, it's only 1 generation inherited (Koch, Walmart). So it makes more sense that the reason for elite universities is that the current elites get to network with the next generation of elites (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, not the children of past elites) than that they just want the aura of "merit" around them.
> Certainly in most human societies the elite has never ruled on the pretense of being smarter, so why do it in ours?
I'm not sure that's true. Medieval nobles definitely believed they were better-suited to rule than the presents, which is essentially just saying "smarter". And up until very recently, voting rights have been restricted on the basis of some people theoretically being better able to make an informed vote, which again is essentially just saying "smarter".
It worked a bit differently than our modern meritocratic notion - i.e. I am elite, therefore I'm smarter and more capable; not I am smarter, therefore I should be elite. But I do think "we're smarter" has always been an important fig leaf for the rulers.
"And up until very recently, voting rights have been restricted on the basis of some people theoretically being better able to make an informed vote, which again is essentially just saying 'smarter'."
It is a mistake to use 'smarter' as a synonym for 'better.'
For voting, I want a few things in a voter besides smart. One thing I want is 'skin in the game.' A landowner is going to be invested in my city/state/country in a way that someone who can just pickup and move is not. It is easier to vote for something that might be destructive of the neighborhood when you are a renter and can just pick up and move if things go south.
I don't know that the initial US voting laws were about getting a 'smarter' electorate as an electorate who had skin in the game.
The idea that you always want someone smarter making the decisions without taking into account their interests (and how those interests may well be in opposition to your own) strikes me as foolish.
They very well may have thought that. But they never bothered to commit significant resources to convincing the population that they were as in the reputation laundering thesis. Therefore, I would say it wasn't an part of their legitimacy as it is today.
"Is is true? An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life. "
A non-sequitur if I ever saw one, given the preceding paragraphs. What does income have to do with finding the cure for cancer? Maybe it ought to; if someone found the forever cure for all the cancers, they'd probably deserve to be among the top earners in the world. But I don't see that as an unavoidable consequence, because scientists in particular seem to be in the game for their personal satisfaction and prestige among peers rather than the big money. At least much more than your typical investment banker or what have you.
They controlled for all the observable applicant characteristics besides which school they went to. Ceteris paribus being smarter increases income (and the effect is large and causal in the smart->income direction, but very weak in the reverse direction) So going to a better school probably doesn’t make you smarter or it would have showed up as a residual in the average incomes.
> But this seems false; most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else; you don’t get into subjects that need world experts until postgrad.
At least in math and physics, the point of elite undergrad education is absolutely not the undergrad classes themselves. The leading incoming freshmen have already taught themselves at least half the undergrad curriculum and are doing graduate-level work by the second year, or sometimes even the first. (I wasn't at that level, but my first quantum field theory had 19 year olds, my string theory class had a 17 year old, and my PhD advisor was in the equivalents of those classes at 15.) Students of this sort clear out the graduate-level classes quickly and then progress to research, so they absolutely benefit from being at top colleges. The research opportunities and the network of peers makes an enormous difference to their lives.
My impression from within academia is that many STEM professors recognize this and therefore want to have such students around, but the admissions officers (except at a few enlightened places) block them. That's because the typical admissions officer is a freshly graduated English major who only views math as an instrument of torture. To these officers, such kids are uncharismatic and alien, and worst of all, their naively enthusiastic essays lack any sense of irony or pathos. It is an easy rejection. All the oddities of college admissions are not centrally planned or rationally chosen, they emerge from the biases and preconceptions of this class of people.
Are there mechanisms that allow them to skip large portions of the curriculum? Presumably they didn’t have to complete all the required classes for these advanced ones
Certainly, in universities set up for this kind of thing, you can skip past many courses as long as you demonstrate competence. It works as long as the professors are judging, rather than administrators.
Hard and fast prerequisites for specific classes are relatively rare, and can often be bypassed by e.g. AP classes or community college credits from high school. And undergrad requirements are often less “take this class” and more “take X credits in this subject”.
Lots of schools also offer some degree of credit sharing between undergrad and grad degrees (I was able to get a masters in a single year through such a program - essentially all my senior undergrad classes were graduate level and the credits double-counted toward both degrees).
So e.g. you might need 12 credits of “math” to get a certain undergrad degree but the smartest kids were filling that with grad level classes in their freshman year.
> but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.
She gets to know lots of presumably smart people to give oil contracts to? (and, like, the very extended interview sort of know, instead of just "ah yes they went to Harvard".)
There's a missing aspect here, at least as the stories always described it some years ago (I'm struggling to find a source). Reportedly, Princeton would admit about 1/5 of the class from rich-but-not-super-rich families that were smart, but clearly a step below the top standard.
Why? Well, in any class, some of the kids will have to be at the bottom; that's how a graded/ranked system works. Super-smart kids are smart and competitive enough to get into Princeton, so they would be unhappy to be at the bottom. The super-rich kids are too few in number and too entitled to form the bottom quintile easily/happily. But students who realize the others around them are smarter would feel lucky to have gotten in at all and have a baseline of gratitude to the school. They'd be perfectly happy to be at the bottom of a *Princeton* class, and after graduation, would form the nucleus of the alumni-jobs-and-donations network.
Being a legacy is probably a significant plus to be a bottom-fifth admit, for obvious reasons.
I don't know whether it's true, but Princeton is perennially #1 in alumni donations and engagement, so if it's true, then it works.
I highly recommend the book “40 colleges that change lives”. There are quite a few colleges which don’t make traditional top 10 lists, which are more likely to provide the an excellent education to a student. As most of us have experienced, having access to a good teacher, makes all the difference, both in terms of how much we learn and how much we enjoy the subject.
When my children were in middle school and high school, I would occasionally get asked by another parent whether I would recommend that their child try to take the harder level of a math class or the less hard level. I always recommended that they try the harder level because our experience was that the “harder” classes tended to be easier and much more beneficial for the students because they would get matched with the better teachers .
One of my friends teaches at the Naval Academy in a technical area and she says that there is a huge difference in her enjoyment and ability to make significant progress when teaching the “best” versus the “worst” students. The category “worst students” includes students that are least prepared, some students that are least motivated, and some students that have the worst study habits. She can make substantial progress with those who want to work hard and learn, but the combination of challenged students in the lowest level classes makes her job very hard. So most teachers enjoy teaching the advanced classes much more.
There are also schools that have attracted some of the best known professors but then don’t have those professors teaching the classes because they’re carrying out research. So doing your homework to try to figure out where you get the best education can really pay off.
My definition of best education for college included some sense of social responsibility and some sense of life work balance. So we were put off by hearing from MIT students that they were overwhelmed by the amount of material and many of them were depressed. We were also put off when Harvard told us that their libraries were open 24 hours a day. My three children picked three amazing schools: McDaniel College, Williams College, and Olin College of Engineering, all of which had good reputations for teaching, and for a balance of education and other life values.
That said, if you wanted to send your child someplace where they would make connections with powerful people, Harvard might still be the best choice.
If the elites control the money supply, they can print money to reward themselves for whatever they deem good and worthy.
If the money supply is not politically controlled, and most wealth is ephemeral (networks, brands, and technologies, not land and physical resources), now the elites _have_ to compete on merit because they have no other means on which to compete.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Consider an oil magnate as a central archetype of a member of the elite.
They are wealthy, but not in control of the money supply (and it would not to their long-term benefit if the fed turned on the printing presses). They could leave all their money to their kids and have them raised by wolves before, but they realize this would not maximize the utility of the money for the kids. So they instead spent a part of their fortune to get their kids an expensive education, buy them a place in a prestigious degree program and generally try to optimize for the best mixture of material and ephemeral benefits.
If you just want a cynical explanatory rather than a justificatory answer, there's no need for most of the interesting speculation about signaling theory.
Top-level professional academics want to work with each other and with top-level students, and top-level students want the same. The people who run Harvard (and most universities) are a mix of idealists who want their university to do the best scholarship possible and cynics who want to attract as much alumni and grant money as possible; therefore, they try to recruit good scholars to make the virtuous scholastic synergism work, while slipping in some proportion of reasonably bright rich elites who can be counted on for automatic prestige and generous alumni donations.
The scholars get to intellectually inspire each other, the reasonably bright rich elites get to socialize with each other in final clubs, and the university gets paid in proportion to its success at making the scholars wealthy geniuses and the elites wealthy well-connected elites. Non-Harvard universities are generally trying to imitate this model as closely as possible, but they're less prestigious (self-fulfillingly) because they are less able to compete for the limited pool of brilliant faculty and brilliant and/or rich students.
Even in undergrad it's not the same material which is a huge part of the explanation that got dismissed here. When I was studying abroad at University of Queensland my girlfriend visited and sat in on a biochem lecture about the electron transport chain. She was amused because they did the standard vague "redox reactions happen and protons cross the mitochondrial membrane" explanation but the Amherst College biochem class went in on the chemical details of how various heme structures actually allow that to happen.
As a funnier example my physics professor told us a story about an acquaintance describing learning Ohm's Three Laws. Impressed, my professor asked what they were since he only knew the one. The three laws were: V=IR, I=V/R, and R=V/I.
More generally everything is like this, knowledge is fractal! You can learn about compact spaces as "closed and bounded" or as "space where every open cover has a finite subcover". Complex impedance helps you understand circuits but you don't strictly need it in an E&M class. And so on. Grouping students of similar ability together allows you to match talent to the appropriate depth and pace; if you randomly sorted students into colleges then for any given class ~40% of students would be overwhelmed and 40% would be bored out of their minds.
A subtlety: you don’t get the full signal just by being accepted to Harvard, you do generally need to actually graduate from Harvard, and Harvard has to put on all the trappings of actually being a highly elite education. In that sense it’s the same (useful, if overpriced) signal as every other college - a graduate has shown some minimum degree of seriousness and studiousness. Not saying there aren’t easy pathways or ways the very tippy top elites might pull the levers to get their most dullard progeny through, but I think that’s more rare than the preference at the admissions level.
Of course they most meritorious thing of all is to drop out of Harvard to go do something earth changing and extremely lucrative. You’re literally too smart for Harvard! But for that to work you have to actually be objectively talented, or at least have one really good idea and the ability to execute it.
I think Gbdub wasn't trying to say that graduating Harvard was difficult once you were accepted, but that if you got accepted and kept the acceptance letter but never graduated (maybe you never attended) you don't get the benefit. Zuck and Bill Gates being obvious exceptions ... but they aren't thought of as "Harvard guys" but as fantastically successful businessmen.
I mean, I’m a smart guy, went to a a selective school. There was zero chance I wasn’t graduating, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard or that I didn’t learn anything.
Like I said, I’m sure there are some easier modes than others at Harvard but I do think there is some base level of effort and conscientiousness required to actually get the degree.
I'm literally a math professor specializing in topology (though not "ten-dimensional hypertopology"). When I was at MIT as an undergrad I took the most advanced topology courses on offer in my sophomore and junior years, and jumped into research. Being around MIT professors was essential to my mathematical development, and so I strongly disagree with the second paragraph of this essay.
Who's this "we" that's sending the best students to the best schools? Nobody "sent" me to an elite school. I chose to go there, and the school chose to allow me to go there. My parents would have contributed financially wherever I chose to go.
Why wouldn't I prefer a good school, as good a school as I could get?
Why wouldn't a good school prefer good students, as good as they could get? The better the students, the better for the professors, the research, and the quality of classroom discussion. (Apart from the handful like legacies and athletes who are admitted for money reasons. Heck, even the good students are admitted partly for money reasons; they're more likely to be rich donors down the road.)
Im not American but these kinds of arguments seem to flounder on the use of affirmative action by the elite universities. Which is pretty significant. There have to be smarter students outside the gates than inside the gates (especially Asians).
Not necessarily. If the institution is assuming or concluding that there's no inherent difference in intelligence between races, affirmative action still enables them to take the cream of the crop. Those outside the gates would be higher-achieving academically but also more likely to grow up in a high-achievement-supporting environment. There's still some institutional cost on helping the disadvantaged students catch up, but it's worth it to support/restore equal opportunity.
>Who's this "we" that's sending the best students to the best schools? Nobody "sent" me to an elite school
Excellent point. I know many people who turned down ivys for other programs due to non-academic factors. Money mostly, but also location, friends, "vibe", hell the quality of dorms is a big factor for many students, so is weather - why else do people go to crap schools in Florida, Arizona, California?
In case anyone hasn't already mentioned it, Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" is very much worth reading if you're interested in learning more about the signaling theory of education. I'm almost finished with it, and I find it to be fairly thorough and comprehensive.
Bryan Caplan's book is utter fucking garbage. His stats are incorrect, he ignores evidence that would contradict his theory, his analysis is cheap and shallow,and unforgiveably for a book on American education, he ignores race.
By the way, when I say his book is garbage, I don't mean that I disagree that much of education is signaling. He's just pig ignorant.
I read the whole thing, and wrote a very thorough and comprehensive series, so welcome to it.
Of course, Caplan wants to not only quit teaching low ability Americans, he wants open borders to bring in lots of cheap labor to screw up their lives even more.
Aggression notwithstanding, thank you for your response. I'm working on reading your series. Are you aware of whether he's written a response to your criticisms? If he has, could you direct me towards it? If not, I just want to let you know that I'll point out your criticisms to him in case there's a chance he'd want to respond. I ultimately don't know who's right broadly speaking, and you do raise some good objections, but the one thing that I do believe about Caplan is that he's not trying to act in bad faith.
The aggression wasn't towards you. Caplan drives me crazy, as does people's response to him. He's generously retweeted my articles but doesn't respond. You'll notice Caplan never discusses race. That's how he avoids the obvious conclusions of his policies.
If he's not acting in bad faith,then he's so ignorant he shouldn't be writing on these topics.
I know the aggression wasn't directed at me. I'm probably more libertarian than him, and I imagine that you'd be right about the racial implications in the short term but that, given time, blacks and latinos would carve out a place in all manner of professional fields. That may not sound correct to you, but it really seems that focusing on letting the best excel within any demographic leads to downstream positive effects for the entire community.
As I said, I don't actually oppose Caplan's primary point. He's just so inept and wrong about implementation and the value of human capital that his way would destroy the country.Not that anyone takes him seriously.
But no, blacks and Hispanics would not carve out a place in all manner of professional fields if we restricted college to, say, 1200 SAT scores and above. Which is why we should probably restrict it to something like 1000 and above. But beyond that, we shouldn't make much distinctions. That is, we shouldn't consider a 1500 better than a 1400 and so on. Just 1000-1200, 1200-1400, 1400-1600. Then lotteries.
I'm actually on board with reducing the prominence of grades at higher levels, simply because it seems that you can communicate a lot more information about a student's particular competencies by describing what topics they studied, how they responded to challenge problems, what (if any) advanced topics/projects they pursued, and which questions (if any) they asked which suggest a predilection for research. But as a matter of economics, grades will always be necessary to have a standard of performance. In a way, we already have most of what we need between grades, standard course curricula, and recommendations at lower levels.
I definitely agree that standardized test scores should be in bins, but the bins shouldn't have uniform width given the normal distribution of test scores. So basically the test score will be boiled down to a rank corresponding to the bin it falls into, and that rank will be what is used in concert with the other admissions information utilized to make a decision.
I think he fully understands the value of human capital, but his argument is that schooling currently is not meeting its goal of producing human capital outside of alright literacy and numeracy. Of course I think school was originally conceived of to groom young people into being compliant workers and indoctrinate them towards the legitimacy of the state (or whatever the status quo is).
My personal view is that education is incredibly valuable for some people if done right — often involving a fair amount of tailoring. Detaching the state from education and instead leaving it to the market will allow such diversity of approach to flourish because of a mix of supply & demand and competition. Change in demographic access *is* possible and (to me) likely given time. Don't get to thinking that how things have been is how it always will be. Blacks and latinos have demonstrated incredibly growth in past decades, and that growth has stagnated most often in places where they are pitied by policy.
it's not just Caplan..This is.part of a pattern in the rationalsphere where one author is considered to have the last word on a subject , even if they are far from expert, and everyone else is ignored.
LIke that unspeakable yutz who says hey, let's start boys in school later than girls, because even though boys get better test scores and make more money,more girls get good grades through conformity so they're smarter.
I think debates about college always get confusing if you lump together the "learning actual necessary knowledge for the future" functions (For say, mechanical engineers) with the signalling/approval/privilege functions (here is your communication major from Bad College X or Harvard). Yglesias' son (unironically) thinks school (where he is learning to read/write) is about learning necessary things for Life (like reading and writing), and so assumes college is like that.
"Best" college has the same issue. Best at what? The 5 year old assumes it means the best at teaching/improving student's knowledge, but we all know that is not what Harvard is best at. Step 1 in any difficult issue is to clarify what we're actually talking about!
Your analysis overlooked the role of competition. I am drawing on my experience as an Ivy League university professor. The most important reason for selecting for student rank is to increase the overall intellectual level of the student body. I am always impressed to watch the transition of students, who were top of the class in high school, and then find themselves in the middle of the pack in college. Ambitious students are also driven by an environment where the professors are at the top of the game in terms of research.
This is too cynical. Highly intelligent take pleasure in each other's company, and universities are the traditional place where they can congregate. The top faculty teach the brightest students because that is more agreeable job than teaching struggling students and they are not primarily motivated by charity.
The problem is that the economic returns to being perceived as intelligent have gotten too high, and this has lent illicit edge to the otherwise innocent and wholesome pleasure of spending time reading and studying with those that share your interests.
The child (and Matt as well) are mistaking "top college" with "has the best teachers for basic material". The two are very different. This might be true for elementary school, but not really above that.
From elsewhere: yes the top colleges use a lot of the same textbooks. They cover a lot more of the text and do it a lot faster. If you need help you don't go to the lecturer to tell him to slow down (he won't), you get your own help (tutors generally). Or you drop the course, or drop out.
This is of course confounded in the States by the athletic "scholarships". This depends heavily on the specific sport, but e.g. the top colleges known for scholarship aren't generally getting lots of money from college football games.
From earlier: I don't know much about Eton etc. apart from that IIRC they are boarding schools, which puts a pretty high lower limit on how poor your family can be if you don't have a "full ride" scholarship. And "full ride" is likely to be a large amount, so they wouldn't hand out a lot of them. So yeah the students will tend to be from rich families.
No idea how many of the French elite schools are boarding (if any).
Why do the best students go to the best colleges? Because that's what makes them the best colleges. To a first approximation, good students make good schools; good schools don't make good students.
If next September, the entering class of Harvard was sent down to Bridgewater State and the entering class at Bridgewater State was sent up to Harvard, Bridgewater would immediately become more intellectually active, along with a lot of extra-curricular activity created by the go-getters who had been admitted to Harvard. Meanwhile, in Cambridge, there would be an immediate drop in energy and intellectual excitement. If you could somehow do the same thing for the next three classes, Bridgewater would now be considered one of the best colleges in the country and Harvard would be considered mediocre on the college level.
It seems like this is the experiment they've tried to do, partially, with readymade extracurriculars in the form of identity group grievance clubs. The latter makes me genuinely sad. To me it seems to show the thing up, and I hate to think the kids admitted in this spirit were not considered real-Harvard material or they never would have been condescended to in this way. But I realize this is a minority view.
Here's what I think would happen. Bridgewater would immediately become more intellectually active, along with a lot of extra-curricular activity created by the go-getters who had been admitted to Harvard. Mainly, though, they'd be trying to transfer out of Bridgewater State and into a better university. Students still want to go to Harvard because a Harvard degree brings in money, next to that it matters little how intellectually stimulating the clubs are.
Then, over the curse of 10-30 years, the economy gradually figures out that a Harvard degree is no longer signals anything, and people will stop wanting to go. But 10-30 years is a long time...
Something I haven't seen mentioned is that rank-matching is not just more effective, it's also more efficient. Anecdote: my school district was 404th in per-capita funding (out of 407 in the state). However they used that money to hire a small handful of really excellent teachers, and ruthlessly tracked their students. Year after year, they produced more National Merit finalists than any other school district in that state.
The reason for undergraduates go to one of the Ivy Leagues is to receive a credential, not an education. It’s a lifetime ticket to the Big Club that George Carlin described. The one you and I are not members of, and never will be, regardless of our capabilities or accomplishments.
One of my Development Econ. profs would always tell us that you'll never be rid of your elites, and so long as they control resources/capital your best bet is to set-up a structure where they're incentivized to act in a beneficial way. From that perspective, there seems to be a potential benefit in letting elites network with the best/brightest students of the next cohort, and of course providing access to capital for the best/brightest students is itself a benefit
It is true that some skills can be learned but cannot be taught. Other skills can be taught but only to those who are capable of learning them.
No amount of instruction will teach a dog to speak Latin; it's not a matter of forcing enough teaching units from enough really talented and motivated teachers and you can get Fido through first year Latin grammar, while Joe "Publius" Brainimax could teach himself as much and get to the same place.
I think the obvious answer (at a system level) I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it aligns the incentives for students in school. If doing really well in school gets you into a top college, then you are incentives to do really well. But if, as the tweet goes, your ticket to a top school is being a really poor student, then you have terribly aligned incentives.
> Earnings are a poor proxy for “teaches better” - it would be great to have something like value-add to GRE scores - but AFAIK no study like that exists.
It seems like for highly ranked students they're already beyond what the SATs/GREs/etc are designed to measure, so it's hard to judge the value of teachers by those metrics. In math, you need a specialized test sequence like the AMC -> AIME -> USAMO to meaningfully distinguish between smart students, and I predict that _could_ pick up meaningful teacher effects.
Of course, the major error in the question "Why do we ...?" is that it assumes that there is a "we" that is deciding this. There are lots of independent actors in the situation and each has its own "incentives" (interests) and the result is some sort of game-theoretic equilibrium. And the sooner the kid learns that the world is not "We are all happily cooperating to advance a common good." the better.
One factor I haven't seen mentioned that I think is important is the use of college admissions as a signal in status competition among high-SES families. The obsession over getting one's child into an "elite" university seems to be much in excess of the educational, financial, and status benefits the child is going to get.
This gets interesting when the family's high SES comes from a high income from running a small business. Successfully running a business requires some intelligence, of course, but it depends a lot more on personality traits like diligence and ability to do well in win-lose negotiations. (Even in the largest companies, the CEOs' educational credentials are mediocre.) So on the average their children are not the highest-IQ despite that elite colleges officially select on things dependent on IQ.
She was no believer in society, but a strong believer in the British (and English) nation. Which is odd. Of course society exists - no man is an Island.
Yep. A related issue is: Why is the high-status education done at the end of a student's time in education?
Clearly the teacher with the biggest leverage over anyone's educational success is a nursery (kindergarten) teacher. But they're not the ones getting the big bucks, or the guest columns in the NYT.
Teachers have relatively little leverage overy anyone's educational success, and nursery school teachers have none at all. And they are a pretty dim group, which is as it should be.
I worked in a newborn through pre-K daycare for awhile. The women were sweet, not very bright although one clearly stood out in terms of leadership (though she just babysat, she didn't run the place - that person presumably had a college degree). They had vaguely messy personal lives, and children of their own. I remember one time they were discussing one of the parents who'd just been in to pick up. They were puzzling over their country of origin. European, they thought. Do they speak European, one wondered. They debated this. I think they ultimately came around to a consensus that there was maybe no pan-European language.
I think of this whenever I read about "high-quality" daycare and its "educational" requirements.
Those women were exactly suited to their jobs - they found children likeable and interesting, they didn't find the work particularly boring, perhaps they had done even harder jobs. They could chat with each other. Now, to me it seemed a hard job. I was very tired by the end of the day. At no time did my admittedly half-assed college degree seem apposite.
your original comment would seem to make sense if you (a) accept a blank slate, such that anyone can excel given the right coaching and (b) believe that kindergarten is more important than middle school which is more important than high school etc. I think both assumptions are completely wrong and the conclusion is not even wrong.
Not... at all. My comment doesn't have anything to do with whether students start off as a blank slate or with a set of innate potentialities/dispositions.
It has to do with time. If you double the quality of a kindergarten teacher, the impact of that doubling will be experienced by the student over 12-20 further years of education. If you double the quality of an undergraduate teacher, the student will get the benefit of that improved teaching, but the benefits may end right there.
I am certainly suggesting that kindergarten is more important than later schooling, because its impacts are longer-lasting.
Whereas I think that the effects of a teachers variance from mean decay over time, especially for 5 year olds who remember basically nothing to adulthood anyway. I think the effects of kindergarten teachers on adult outcomes is zero. within reasonable bounds obviously - let’s assume the teacher isn’t murdering the kids. Why do you think the effects compound? After kindergarten that teacher is no longer around. And the total learning in kindergarten is approximately zero anyway, so the kid with the worlds best kindergarten teacher starts first grade very little ahead of his hypothetical identical twin with an average teacher. In undergrad at least the amount learned (and therefore the variance) can be substantial.
And even if I accepted your compounding model (which I don’t) I think most kids have a ceiling set by innate ability and the max your ideal education system could do is help them reach the ceiling. But for average kids that ceiling is low enough that your compounding effects would be cutoff anyway.
Put another way, I think if you randomly assigned the worlds best tennis coaches to train randomly chosen five year olds (only between the ages of 5 and 6) your chances of producing a grand slam winner would be very low. Much lower than if you gave the same coaches to teenagers who had already shown tennis ability. (Let’s assume everyone gets average tennis coaching at age 5)
This seems a bit mixed up. First, the idea that you don't remember the things you learned when you were five is obviously wrong. Age five is when many children learn to read, and that skill is retained into adulthood. Same for vocabulary and basic arithmetic. I see little basis for thinking that academic skills learned at kindergarten level will be forgotten.
It's certainly possible that teacher impacts decay over time, but all the area under that curve is additional learning.
The "ceiling" thing is just a classic fallacious argument. I suppose it's true that there may be a ceiling. But you haven't given any evidence or arguments to think that children today achieve anything close to that ceiling.
I'll provide a hand-wavy reason for thinking that they may not be: the spread of literacy. Almost all children today in developed countries learn to read. This is a close-to-universal boost in academic achievement that seemed unimaginable a few centuries ago. Really really big improvements in academics clearly are possible for everyone.
You're wrong because people are able to learn vastly more when they're 18 than when they're 5. You'll notice that reflected in the curricula: kindergarteners learn colors; 18 year olds learn calculus. You also see it reflected in the teachers. Kindergarten teachers are less educated, less intelligent, and less well paid. If kindergarten mattered more then you would see that reflected in how the market valued it. Teachers and schools both increase monotonically in selectivity, cost, and prestige as the grades increase. The only thing that 5 year olds learn in school is socialization.
Thanks. There are lots and lots of problems with what you're saying there.
First, "people are able to learn vastly more when they're 18 than when they're 5" - this is the reverse of the truth. Small children are constantly learning and assimilating vast quantities of new knowledge. Think of all the vocabulary, numerical concepts, and motor skills that a child acquires each year of kindergarten. They add up to much more than a university student learns. You just seem to be more impressed by "calculus" than "colours" because everyone knows colours, whereas not everyone knows calculus. That doesn't alter the fact that learning colours is a learning process that can be done better or worse, and a good teacher could make it better.
Second, "The only thing that 5 year olds learn in school is socialization" - this is plainly untrue. 5 years old is the age when many children learn to read. It's the age when many children learn basic arithmetic. These are some of the most important academic skills.
Third, you seem to be assuming that teaching is only about conveying facts. In fact, much of teaching is about other things, including socialisation (which can be done better or worse, and good teachers can make it better), and in the early years, learning skills: things like literacy, numeracy, and love of reading. I teach 6-12 year olds, and when we intake, we ask whether a child reads for pleasure or not; this often tells us all we need to know about how that child is going to perform in the classroom. Improving the teaching of these things could easily make academics better for large numbers of children.
Lastly, you just seem to be describing the status quo to me: "schools both increase monotonically in selectivity" - I agree with your description! This is the situation that currently exists. My point was that if you were designing a system from scratch, it would make more sense to front-load all of those things. In the comments above, several teachers comment on how far below grade standard many children are. Better teaching in the early years would help with that! And we assume that more money and more prestige will attract better teachers.
Show me a single study that demonstrates that quality of early schooling impacts life outcomes after controlling for SES and student quality.
Things that kids learn at that age they learn anyway, independent of teacher quality. You essentially said it yourself: "this often tells us all we need to know about how that child is going to perform in the classroom." The only thing that matters is child IQ and family stability. Elementary teachers are little more than babysitters.
I haven't delved much into education research. Freddie deBoer has kind of put me off delving! Obviously I recognise the challenges that you're talking about, and I know that lots of studies have found zero impact for lots of teaching interventions.
But the idea that you can change a child's level of ability through teaching is... just true. This is one of those cases where I don't give a monkey's what the research shows. I teach ESL to elementary school children. When they come to me, they can't English. When they leave, they can English a bit. Kids who don't come to me (I'm a private tutor outside the school system) don't do as well in English. This isn't something that research can explain away.
"The only thing that matters is child IQ" is a somewhat terrifying statement. Matters for what? I don't have a very clear idea of what I want education to do, to be honest, but it's not purely economic.
(a) I think kindergarten teachers have minimal influence, much less than high school teachers, and (b) that early you don’t know who the exceptional students are and your hypothetical incredible kindergarten teacher will mostly be casting pearls before swine
I think I can see that a lot of people do indeed think (a), but I can't think of any theory of human development that makes it make sense. You'd have to think something like... young children are unformed, and the formation process will inevitably iron out much of the differences caused by the different environments that young children are exposed to? Something like that? It all sounds a bit genetic-destiny to me. I think environments make a difference to children.
(b) Your use of the metaphor "pearls before swine" suggests that you think a good kindergarten teacher would be instructing like lecturers do. I don't know what a good kindergarten teacher does, but I doubt it's anything like that. I assume it would be a combination of training in good habits, encouraging exploration and growth, and delivering helpful information at an age-appropriate speed.
My experience as a parent is that I cast lots of pearls before my very young kids, in the form of the really amazing young children's literature that there is now, and they lapped it up, and both became good readers. That's the kind of thing I'd expect to happen in high-quality kindergarten education, and I think it would have a major and lasting impact.
My experience as a teacher of young children is that you absolutely can make a big difference in a kindergartner's reading level with some basic interventions; and that adapting academic content to their cognitive abilities and concentration spans is a complex task that rewards thoughtful practice.
Let’s say you want to maximize tennis skill in the adult population of whereverstan. Two policies (a) give everyone average quality coaches and resources at age 5, then the players who show most aptitude for tennis get better coaches and resources (court time etc) as time goes on, or (b) distribute the best coaches and resources to a random small % of 5 year olds then from age 6 on everyone gets the same average coaching. Which system do you think produces more tennis skill in the adult population? Do you really think it is (b)? Or do you think tennis and academics are totally different (why?)
I think our baseline assumptions are far enough apart that dialogue is unlikely to be fruitful so I doubt I will engage further. If you would like the last word you can have it.
Yeah... you seem to be very keen on the idea of education-as-selection, which I'm not so interested in. Education clearly has a selective function, I can't deny that. But I'm not very interested in maximising that function, even if it can be maximised. I'm interested in the education-as-improvement function.
I don't really understand your (a) and (b) choices. If you want better tennis players, it would be better to give more resources to early learning. I don't see any reason for talking about "random small %". I'd like to raise tennis (academic) investment for all 5 year olds (acknowledging that there is inevitable random variation in the quality of teachers/resources).
Your example seems poorly chosen, because many girls compete professionally by the age of 14. Of course they need early training, from 5 years old. The Williams sisters are a nice celebrity example.
But of course, I think your example is poorly chosen because any example you pick would be poorly chosen. Because it's obviously better to teach little kids. Imagine if we put reading into your example: should we teach reading at 5, or should we wait for adults to show reading aptitude, then gather those adults together, like... like mediaeval universities? That doesn't seem better to me.
In regard to gifts and admissions, I'm reminded of Matt Levine:
"Analysts don't say to companies, "we will give you favorable research coverage if you will meet with our clients." (Sometimes companies do say that they won't meet with clients of banks who give unfavorable coverage, though.) And they don't say to investors, "we will bring you to a meeting with this company if you pay us a million dollars." An economy exists, but it is a gift economy, one in which it is crass to ascribe precise dollar values or to demand quid pro quos too
I think this idea really underscores that what elite colleges are selling (the merit) is the admissions process and not the education. The fact is for even the children of the rich/powerful-- the students who've been admitted on the basis of prestige and not academic strength-- the undergraduate classwork at every one of these schools just isn't very hard. Especially coming from a rigorous prep school (which leaves many such people with the impression high school was significantly more academically challenging than college!) and especially in our era of grade inflation where even a vague gesture at trying can receive an A-.
>most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else
I see this claim repeated a lot, and I think it's just false. Most of what follows is anecdotal, but 1. I believe my experience is somewhat representative and 2. I think my position agrees with the simple, naïve understanding of the world.
I'm currently a grad student at a top university in a field easily confused with "hypertopology". My trajectory was (high school dual enrolled) small, not bad college -> (undergrad) good, non-elite state school -> (grad) elite school, and at each step, the difference was large and noticeable.
Subjective differences: At each step, everyone (students, professor) are more engaged, invested and knowledgeable. People were smarter, and it showed in the rigor of the classes, discussion and the questions.
Objective differences: (mostly about course content) This may not be only for math-y people, but I think it's my best argument:
Intro calculus: here are formulas, do it -> actual math, applying to situations -> teaches epsilon-delta to history majors.
Multivariate calc: literally no greens theorem -> grad/div/curl/greens theorem, etc -> differential forms (wtf).
Intro proofs: didn't even get to induction -> induction, equiv relations, basically everything you need -> everything on the left for the first half, then analysis for the second half
Analysis I & II: topology of R (limits, etc), sequences, infinite sums -> rigorous Riemann integration, existence/uniqueness of ODEs -> (the advanced one at least) the left plus Hilbert spaces/function spaces (wtf)
... (I could go on)
And these were just the undergrad classes! The grad classes (which undergrads typically have access to in their later years) showed similar difference.
The small college wasn't scraping the bottom of the barrel either--their SAT scores were around the 50th percentile. My general impression is that math graduates from my undergrad have a respectably solid foundation, those from my hometown were not at all prepared for higher math and those here (or the top students at least) are future professionals.
Moreover, I think this state of affairs just makes sense. Like, are you surprised that the smarty pants are over there learning more together? They can and do learn material 3 or 4 times as fast, what do you think they do with that extra time? more studying! Professors are going to pitch to the middle of their class, so a higher average skill will mean more and more rigorous material.
Why put all the smart people in one room together? Because they learn more that way! How else are you going to populate a class on measure theory and Hilbert spaces?
This dovetails (in a far less rarefied way) with what I saw with the "high-performing" public high school my kid attended. Football and the community so created were important, yes, but the house values I'd say owed much more to the perception of the education available, to the children of professionals. Re academics [on extracurriculars, the spring musical was like a Broadway traveling production] nothing especially fancy beyond say computer programming classes, and Latin persisting when most other schools no longer employed a Latin teacher - but solid and what we all seemed to notice about our kids was, they learned them some time management.
Thus despite the hierarchy that existed within high school, when they got to their various colleges they tended to do well, as a body. I recall one boy, likeable and smart but somewhat undisciplined by comparison in this competitive atmosphere - one worried a little how he would do away from home - and I remember his mother reporting that he had had to take a test, at freshman orientation at the state U he went to, for math placement. He found he was the cynosure of all eyes, as the other kids in the room struggled and were amazed at the alacrity with which he performed this sorting test, and the score he got. He in turn was a little amazed at their scores.
My community college calc 1 class spent the first week of the semester reviewing trig and algebra concepts. That, I suspect, doesn't happen at Harvard.
Hmm, I didn’t notice much difference going from an engineering course in Ireland to a masters in Oxford. The students weren’t noticeably smarter either (except in dress)
Well it's clear what we need to do then: regard Harvard graduates as contemptible losers. Leaning much too heavily on one or two personal experiences, this is what I've been doing for years. If more people were like me, the "signal" of having a Harvard degree would have negative value, and they'd be forced to drop the self-undermining privilege-laundering business.
That might be easy if the Harvard grad has the same job you do, or is a generic well-off but not spectacular local doctor who makes a huge deal about where he went to school.
It’s a lot harder when they sit on the Supreme Court.
Honestly, it was just kind of a glib comment. But now that we're parsing it out, I meant "loser" in the sense of "lame": as in "haha, they're such credential-seeking lamos that they went to Harvard, even though everyone knows that Harvard is larded up with rich kids and nepo babies."
As for the Supreme Court specifically, I have long thought it was *lame* that almost every one of them went to either Harvard or Yale. As an institution it should be reflective of a much wider breadth of experience than that. Also, I've heard stories of the general atmosphere of psychopathy at Harvard Law School like would singe your eyebrows, which probably isn't the ideal environment for developing the nation's elites.
Fair enough. That said I don’t think you can call someone who goes to Harvard because they aspire to be on a Federal bench a “credential-seeking lame-o”. That’s a “hate the game, not the player” situation in my mind.
But someone who won’t shut up about being an Ivy grad because that’s literally the only thing interesting about them relative to all the other state-school PMC people around them? Sure, you have my blessing (not that you need it) to mock that.
On the mixing theory, what's the optimal ratio of merit to total? Now that Harvard HAS the prestige, why does it need to keep admitting Princesses of Whaterevstan at all? Does it all come down to who pays full tuition/has the highest expected value of becoming a future donor?
...yes? There's somebody's law about how an organization always becomes governed by those who advance the organization itself, rather than the purported mission of the org.
Those Matt Y blog commenters ;-). They know a lot about "what they've experienced" and they have some fluent ability to argue-amid-near-total-agreement, and to find stats - but their weird long foray into discussing evangelicals demonstrates that they have *no* clue how close of relatives evangelicals and Protestants more generally - are to the progressives who dominate Harvard.
The privilege smuggling makes more sense to me than hand-wavy "excellence" as a reason to want to go to one of these places. If they had just put that in their promotional material, I might have tried harder to go somewhere elite.
I earned an AB at Columbia in 1962. The degree was granted by Columbia College, one of at least three undergraduate operations at Columbia University. It is a truth generally acknowledged that if an organization operates under multiple aliases, that organization must perforce be criminal.
Nevertheless my education was honest and valuable in ways I didn't know. When you attend a selective university you very quickly learn. how good you really are. I was the product of a rigorous selective school system, but I soon met classmates who were smarter than me.
I had to learn coping mechanisms, for the English Department was a formidable place. I became something of a specialist in lesser known but reputable writers and had a knack for inserting them into my many, many papers. A life skill for a future academic.
Had I gone to a less selective school, I might have had an inflated view of my abilities and so suffered both disappointment and helplessness.
So, yes, the selective schools are crooked, at least in America. Secondary education is controlled by local school boards and supervised by state politicoes. The national exams are an embarrassment. Nevertheless talent will out and at least serve as a measuring rod for the bulk of the students accepted by less than honest means.
The mediocre legacy/sports graduate inheriting a business should have at least a sense for ability in his employees. So maybe that suffices.
All of this is correct and well-known. The missing follow-up question is: why, then, don't colleges compete ruthlessly with each other for top students, trying to displace the Ivies as top-rank signalers--and reap the rewards--by offering spectacular incentives to high-ranking students, the way, say, college athletic teams do (often in violation of NCAA rules)?
The answer is that they're all part of a massive cartel zealously guarding their collective position as granters of signaling credentials, and raking in obscene revenues in the process by charging cartel rents. If they began competing for students in an open market for signaling credentials instead of following the cartel's rules, they'd end up both massively reducing the cartel's overall income and revealing the market's true nature, thus opening it up to lots of outside competitors willing to undercut them. So instead they play by the cartel rules, which includes maintaining the fiction that they're providing education rather than signaling credentials, and using that pretense to justify their collusive control of the market and very limited, almost performative competitive practices that never threaten the cartel regime.
I mean, they sometimes try. Oklahoma I think was offering nearly full ride scholarships to anyone who qualified as a National Merit Scholarship Finalist.
A generic 4.0 student is a lot less valuable public perception wise than a single Bill Gates or Tom Brady, and the former is a lot harder to pluck out of the applicant pool than the latter (and the latter was famously undervalued coming out of college, and a well regarded but not exactly blue chip recruit going into college).
And of course, if it really came down to a bidding war, the current elite colleges would absolutely crush anyone else given their existing endowments and alumni bases.
Some public colleges are definitely rewarding top students this way, but my impression is that it's more related to their (real or perceived) mandate as a public institution to serve their state through fostering academic excellence than to their rank in the collegiate pecking order. (I believe schools like Alabama and Florida, that already have strong athletic profiles, are taking this approach. I don't know of any private colleges doing it, though.)
If I were running a mid-tier private college and wanted to rise in the rankings, I'd pick an academic strength or specialty and double down on it, trying to become *the* place for students to go who are interested in pursuing that specialty. I don't see a lot of that, though--all the schools seem instead to be slavishly imitating the Ivies' generalist approach. That smells to me like a cartel in which everyone is afraid to compete seriously, for fear that real competition would reveal the collective scam and ruin it for everyone...
What about someplace like Carnegie Mellon, which has sort of done what you’re talking about in the realm of computer science? (Yes the university has a full slate of majors, but CS is what makes its reputation)
True, STEM-focused schools are different--the teaching and experience they provide has value to students beyond mere signaling, so they can and do compete in various ways. The vast majority of colleges, though, aren't STEM schools, and my description fits them better.
I tend to think this is correct, but that then raises the question: why are the Ivies so intent on maintaining race-based affirmative action policies in admission? Does that not undermine the meritocracy and provide little financial reward, at least in the short run, compared to legacy admits? Maybe the idea is you need to keep a certain number of minorities around to guard against the possibility of those minority groups forming alternative institutions? IE, maybe if Harvard doesn't consider racial backgrounds in admission, black enrollment declines fairly precipitously, black students start thinking of Harvard as kind of a white/Asian school, don't want or try to go there, and head off to HBCU's instead, and the result is that Howard University becomes known sort of as the Black Harvard, with the same status-conferring ability as Harvard, only limited to black students, but which nevertheless represents serious competition for Harvard & Co.
Any other reasons? I'm sure Freddie De Boer has written something about this, but I'm at work and don't have time to look for it.
The answer depends on the question. If the question is "how can we get more blacks and Hispanics performing on par with whites and Asians so the average ability levels as tested are the same?" the answer almost certainly is "we can't".
If the question is "how can we make sure that all kids who are capable of college level work go to college and the value of college isn't decimated by affirmative action and other overt measures to lower standards", the answer is "use congressional action to prevent colleges from doing this."
WTF dude? Neither of those was even remotely the question I posed, so thanks for acting smug and then going on an irrelevant tangent like some kind of nincompoop.
I don't think you need much explanation aside from that the administrators of these schools are at least to some extent genuinely ideological, and will do things that harm their institution for that reason alone.
From the peer-reviewed scientific literature, up to about 2019: it's marketing. Those who are willing to pay the most for college desire to go to a university with above-average diversity. Thus universities let in more diverse students than merit would cause, and over-represent under-represented minorities in their marketing material. Any school's brochure is going to show a higher percentage of Hispanic and Black students than their student body has.
Yeah, I can understand that aspect of it. One would think that at least at the very high end, schools like Harvard-Yale-Princeton could afford not to cater to their customers this way, but I guess they're still competing to some degree with Penn, Cornell, etc., and when the markets speaks it pays to listen, even for them.
I would posit one other thing: on one level, you would think that the customers of these institutions would not be in favor of AA or other such policies that may in fact water down the signal of meritocracy, but then it stands to reason that the costs of such a policy are actually mainly born by the minority students themselves who are admitted to these schools, in the sense that clearly, no one wonders if a Korean American kid who gets into Harvard is really all that smart--of course he is--but people do in fact wonder this about black/Hispanic and other minority students, and not without some reason.
The answer is that Harvard is a gatekeeper for the elite in the US, elite status is an inherently political thing, and therefore Harvard must worry about politics. If Harvard admitted on academics only, it would be 1% black, 2% Hispanic and 43% Asian https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/harvard-admissions-lawsuit-trial-asian-american-discrimination-reports.html. Problem is that the US is 33% black and Hispanic, but Asians are a politically irrelevant minority in every state except CA. You can't have an elite class where 33% of the population only gets 3% of the seats and a politically irrelevant minority gets 43% in a democracy where all races can vote. It's just not possible.
If Harvard did this they would quickly find themselves no longer the gatekeeper to the elite. That is why they are so adamant about their affirmative action policy.
I thought the consensus was that the quality of HBCUs has declined quite a bit precisely because of affirmative action - Howard was “Black Harvard” because the smartest Black students were actively excluded. But now that the racial bias in Harvard admissions has flipped the other way, it turns out the smartest Black kids would rather go to Real Harvard.
They still have a niche but it’s no longer as the best place for smart and ambitious Black students to maximize their academic credentials.
In addition, it serve as daycare for pre-adolescent (elementary school) and day prison for adolescents/ young adults (high school), which most organized societies seems afraid to let roam freely :-).
It also serve as a big sieve, it ranks students into bad/average/good. The western world equivalent of Chinese imperial exams.
And finally, it also act as indoctrination stage to try to keep future citizen in line with the official narrative, and avoid possible troubles ahead/promote societal stability.
Telling which is the most important mission is left to individual appreciation, but my personal belief is that (1) is certainly not top of the list. With possible exception of writing/reading and basic arithmetic, I believe (1) is only a distant fourth goal. The 3 others are far more important, but sorting them out is difficult and tend to change from time/places to time/places...
Using good schools (in the sense they have a good track record of student achievement) to teach the weakest students would maybe make sense for teaching.
But not for daycare/dayprison, not for indoctrination, and certainly not for sorting students.
> (Is is true? An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life. Here’s a gesture at a challenge to these results, apparently supported by Dale and Krueger themselves, though I can’t find any more information. Earnings are a poor proxy for “teaches better” - it would be great to have something like value-add to GRE scores - but AFAIK no study like that exists.)
Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" seems to have a lot of evidence that students learn very little of anything (at least on average) during most education, including college. This includes both specific facts and "critical thinking skills." (His conclusion, of course, is that the primary reason students make more money after getting a degree is signaling; he disagrees that controlling for pre-existing characteristics completely eliminates the college wage premium).
> what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.
A couple of other ideas:
1. She gets an excuse to relax and party for 4 years while pretending to do something productive, relatively out of the Whereverstan public eye
2. The royal family of Whereverstan might be sufficiently disconnected from what American rationalists know that they're still laboring under the impression that a Harvard poli sci degree or something similar would teach information that is useful for a future world leader
3. She gets to meet the kids of other world leaders in a different setting than normal
4. It gives them an air of legitimacy back in their home country (similar to what you said but with more specific motivation)
> This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all.
It might be interesting to look into the history of how this all came to be. As you pointed out in an old SSC post about college admissions, it used to be relatively easy to get in once you cleared a few (mostly class-related) hurdles. I have no idea what kind of prestige (or much) a Harvard degree got you in 1880--my vague impression is that most people didn't really care and it was just sort of expected for certain families, but I don't actually know.
"Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" seems to have a lot of evidence that students learn very little of anything (at least on average) during most education, including college."
He has no evidence. He uses the Adult literacy data and doesn't sort by race, nor does he exclude non-English speakers who weren't educated in America. If you control for race, it shows that high school actually improved black literacy in the 90s (we don't have data for 2000s) and that *college* literacy for blacks decreased .this is almost certainly because they started letting in less qualified blacks, not any element of instruction.
Is there a summary of this argument that isn't mostly just a vitriolic and sarcastic accusation of Caplan being racist?
> The book is crap.
This is quite the strong conclusion to be drawing when you clearly have an agenda and your post has such a high ratio of noise to signal. The effect you highlight is pretty small, practically speaking. You claim to have read the book but if this is the data point that has you so incensed, frankly I don't believe you.
Where did I say Caplan was racist? And if your reading capacity is that gefuckt, perhaps you should look inward for curing your confusion.
The effect I highlight is huge, given that blacks *improved* in high school and got *worse* in college while Caplan is claiming that high school has no value.
I not only read the book,I wrote four articles on it. And Caplan has no evidence. You simply don't know what you're talking about. Caplan is very popular with your crowd.
Well, I have a blog with over a million page views, am followed by a large number of education policy experts, journalists, and people you no doubt read. You have your thumb up your ass.
I'm uninterested in convincing you. People who are interested can click the link or not.
don’t forget, the princess also gets to learn the shibboleths of the US elite, so that when she is ruling her client kingdom she knows what to say and what not to say to maintain Western favor.
I'm genuinely impressed that Scott just signal-boosted Matt Christman, one of the most prominent Marxist podcasters. There's hope yet. (Capital M Marxist, too, not a crypto-Marxist).
Another prosocial reason for elite schools is the fact that smart students simply do better work when surrounded by their intellectual peers. They can bounce ideas off each other, and since they tend to be competitive, they work harder to beat their peers. In fact, I would say that the actual teacher of any given classroom matters far, far less than the quality of its students. The latter is almost always the limiting factor. Top-notch researchers also benefit from having a smart undergraduate population nearby, and vice versa.
Regarding the similar earnings objection, I'll bite the bullet and say that the benefits mentioned above are real (at least for a certain subset) and just don't have much of an impact on earnings
I think ultimately the skills that are highly compensated in the economy just don’t map all that well to the skills that universities optimize for - this has basically always been true, the boss is not necessarily the smartest guy but he’s always made more than the brilliant widget tweaker.
It’s frankly only quite recently that the explosion of tech has made jobs for which the main qualification is being very book smart very lucrative (vs merely very comfortable). And even then, we still usually pay the project manager more than the guy writing code, and those are different skill sets.
I went to a small, private, engineering-focused university. There, I was unamiguously one of the top two students in a class of 50-100 students in my degree program, and tended to be well ahead of course material with relatively little effort. However, when I went to grad school where there was a tighter selection criterion, the courses covered material at a pace that was far more challenging to me.
A few years later, I took a couple of MIT's open courseware practical mathematics courses aimed at undergrads. I was impressed with how quickly they expected students to grasp the fundamental ideas. It was a lot more similar in pace to grad school than to my undergrad.
When I see someone say:
> most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else
I can only interpret that as either
1) Engineering undergrad is notably harder than whatever degrees they're thinking of, or
2) They're ignoring how high up on Bloom's Taxonomy a course gets.
I can't speak to 1. I have only engineering and mathematics degrees, and both seem to have this pattern. But 2 is worth a few words.
Let's take the fundamental mechanical/civil engineering physics course 'Static Mechanics', which has a required equivalent in most or all universities. A local private university has the following course description:
> Subjects cover includes; force and moment vectors, equivalent systems, trusses, frames, and machines, equilibrium of particles and rigid bodies, static friction, centroids and moments of inertia.
(Why do they use a semi-colon instead of a colon? Who knows! Hopefully they're more rigorous in their engineering than in their punctuation.)
And lets take the MIT course description:
> Introduction to statics and the mechanics of deformable solids. Emphasis on the three basic principles of equilibrium, geometric compatibility, and material behavior. Stress and its relation to force and moment; strain and its relation to displacement; linear elasticity with thermal expansion. Failure modes. Application to simple engineering structures such as rods, shafts, beams, and trusses. Application to biomechanics of natural materials and structures.
Those sound really similar. The only concrete difference I can take from those course descriptions is that the MIT one definitely includes deformable solids, and the local one doesn't necessarily. How is that compatible with one covering the material so much faster than the other (suiting their better incoming student class?) It's really simple; if your students can grasp the basic facts and mathematics faster (Bloom's Remember and Understand tiers), you can then actually spend time on how to apply these mathematical facts to problems.
After all, problems do not come to professional engineers neatly giftwrapped with a 'USE ES201 FORMULA ON ME, LIKE WE TALKED ABOUT IN CLASS LAST MONTH' label attached to them. Learning to understand an engineering model is hard work, but it's not sufficient to actually solve problems (outside of very special cases.) You need to be able to apply it, and to analyze how appropriate of a fit the model is to the problem in reality you're trying to solve. Less time spent on learning the model is more time spent on it's limits, when and how to use it, etc.
I guess, in engineering at least, my model isn't any of Scott's. It's not that only the best teachers can teach these incredibly arcane topics. Or that we get the best payoff from matching best teachers and best students. It's that the best universities are those that attract the best students, and because they have the best students they can teach them more and better than they could if they had to slow down for worse students. And because they have more money (due to turning out better engineers who donate more to them, etc.) they can pay better teachers as well; but this is a small part of the improvement. The good teachers at a middling school could do as well as an average teacher at MIT, given the same students and a few years to tune their curriculum to those students.
How far this model extends to non-engineering is a real question; it's worth noting that MIT does not do legacy admissions, and so are not engaged in the proposed privilege laundering. I don't have the experience required to compare, say, HIST 30094: Modern India and Pakistan at a middling university and a top one.
I went to engineering undergrad and grad school at a pretty selective institution (top ten overall, top five in my program). I also have been exposed to the work of engineering undergrads (and non engineering undergrads) at a much less selective but still state flagship school.
The quality difference is, I must say, pretty obvious. The top students at the less selective school could easily fit in at the selective school, certainly, but everyone else is uhh, noticeably not as good, and would have graded very poorly at my school.
Given that the less selective school is not failing half its class, it MUST in some sense be “easier or less rigorous” even as it covers similar material. It might be in a hard to objectively measure way, but I assure you if I put the average student from each in a room with you, you’d easily pick out which was which.
(That said I’ve met some MIT grads who are academically brilliant but can’t get along with anyone and, outside their narrow field, can’t reason their way out of a wet paper bag - so this is definitely a discussion about averages and distributions more than individuals).
The privilege-laundering idea seems kind of far-fetched. I suppose Americans do care enough about 'deserving' to inherit your father's business that it might seem plausible, but isn't the simple theory that colleges need money enough to explain why they continue to accept donations/rich kids?
Why is it harder to explain than any other type of altruism?
Most donors to colleges are not giving “name a building” or even “endow a small scholarship or prize” money. Most will never see any tangible benefit from their donations, other than maybe moving to the front of the line for football season tickets.
And many (most?) big donors aren’t giving money to the fancy school they want their kid to go to - they are giving money to the school THEY went to, even if it’s not particularly prestigious. For example T Boone Pickens (and his foundation after his death) gave over half a billion dollars to Oklahoma State University. Go to any university of any level of prestige and you’ll find most of the newer buildings named after the rich alumni that funded them.
For most donors, the logic is more like “I owe some percentage of my success to my college, so I will give back to the next generations of students at my college”.
Would be interesting to see a bit of a comparison to other countries where this happens far less/not at all.
For instance in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge entry is almost entirely based on exams and aptitude tests and so they raise far less in donations, partly because it’s basically impossible to buy your way in.
Would say this enables courses that are materially different/more challenging than other universities. Does in theory lead to a UK elite that is more academically inclined, but for lots of things outside of academia being a hard working smart nerd isn’t necessarily the most useful skillset to have in charge.
>most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else
I disagree with this, particularly for STEM. The amount of information that faculty are able to productively spew at MIT undergrads is vastly higher than it would be at Midwit State. As a concrete example, Caltech uses Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_ as its undergrad E&M text. That's a book explicitly aimed at grad students. Only at Caltech/MIT/Harvard could it be used as the starting point.
Basic ability matters. When you select for it, you really can do more.
I wish Jackson would be replaced - it's comprehensive but it's really not very good as a teaching tool. And yes that's a great example of how those educated in undergrad Physics at Caltech are ahead of the rest of us. I hold you each in high regard! :)
Don't hold your breath. This is a community that generally believes a) IQ matters and b) we have more of it. We're intellectually elitist and proud of it. If that bums you out then feel free to stick to midwit blogs.
Classy response. Try it on the three sig plumber that fixes your kitchen drain sometime. He’ll just give you one of those knowing smiles he saves for such occasions. Then he’ll go home and read Spinoza.
Well then he's not a midwit, is he? I'm sure he'd enjoy this blogs' elitist attitude and wouldn't appreciate your sniping at the (probably) only place he has to stretch his intellectual legs. Stop bringing Plumber Will Hunting down.
I think you miss the point. No I doubt he would enjoy *any* elitist attitude. High intelligence doesn’t naturally correlate with being a snob.
Many of us use at least part of our cognitive gifts on self work to become better people. I don’t want to hurt your feelings here but I think you should consider that there may be more to life than gaining status and career achievement.
The Will Hunting character had certainly come to know that.
Among elite-college true believers, it's typically believed that the advantage of [elite school X, let's say Harvard] is not in the institution, general curriculum, and staff, but in the (1) classmates, (2) tails of the curriculum, and (3) other-than-classes academic opportunities. So by the steelmanned perspective of the pro-Harvard side, "most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else" and "[elite colleges have] the world’s best writing teacher[s]" are missing the active ingredient of "best schools".
Example of 1: You can teach the students the same subject, but if you've selected a population of more-capable students, they'll have a higher rate of starting world-changing projects when they leave (or by dropping out). So the active ingredient (say the pro-elite-colleges partisans) is matching best students with best students.
Example of 2: "you don’t get into subjects that need world experts until postgrad" is true in the median case, but not true at the 90%tile of eg Harvard students studying technical subjects.
Example of 3: "access to research opportunities w/ faculty (selected for something like their research output)", covered in other comments.
The privilege laundering take is overly reductionist. It assumes that wealth and social capital have no relevant value and so it needs to be laundered with the smart/talented set to hide its inadequacy. But in reality, wealth and social capital are independent factors for the attainment of career prestige and so are valuable as predictors of future success (measured as high prestige leadership roles in society). Harvard is first and foremost an institution to signal prestige, and so their goal is to find the student population that will most likely end up in high prestige roles in society. There is no laundering going on, they are simply maximizing the relevance of a Harvard education in signaling prestige. The key point is to recognize that admission to Harvard isn't a reward for being the top-whatever percent in academic merit, its about what makeup will grow Harvard's prestige brand. This also has explanatory power for why the Asian admission rate is artificially suppressed. Asians tend to not have as many paths to attaining prestige positions in society, and so the value to Harvard's future prestige from admitting an Asian student is lower than a white student of lesser academic merit.
Another somewhat optimistic answer would go along the lines we want to maximize the chance of a genius with a clever idea actually pursuing it successfully and changing the world by researching a new tech or making a startup that uses new tech or something. This is much more likely if instead of having a bunch of average friends who say that's a cool idea and go about their day, they have a bunch of friends who are very competent or ambitious or rich who hear their idea, say let's make it happen, and help them either as hyper competent early employees or by giving them early funding either of which helps get the idea of the ground and gain momentum. Not sure how much I endorse this as accurate but it's more than zero and probably more than either of the optimistic takes you present.
To be clear here Harvard is the place where everyone is some combination of competent, ambitious, or rich. So if a genius goes there all their friends will be like this.
Very good point. In my answer i argue that the primary purpose(s) of education system is not teaching (in the sense let the student knowledge of facts and skills increase), but I focused on primary and secondary school, not college/uni.
I guess tertiary school is more about actual teaching, but your answer makes me thing that even there, teaching is not the only goal, maybe not the actual primary goal (I guess it depends on topic, with STEM being the most teaching-oriented part of the whole system).
Tertiary is not a dayprison, but it also is an indoctrination for social stability (more differentied because you get different population segments already sorted out - also, the indoctrination probably serve the tertiary education system and it's direct sponsors more than top-society - when they differ, which can happen at times ) and a sieve for meritocracy. But it is also a major incubator for the next round of entrepreneurs; academics and politicians (and maybe assortive-mated future couples ;=p ). That's where next generation teams are shaped, meaning the kind of people put together and overall mindset in these institutions have a huge impact 10-30 years onward. Again, pure teaching has little to do with that. Difference between tertiary and secondary education is (in some case) more actual teaching, and social club instead of day prison.
I thought about this as well! That Ultimate optimistic take would be that mixing "Dirty Privilege - money + access" with genuine meritocracy of High SATs, etc - is actually useful.
The hard working smart people need the money, access and manners of the Elite, and they get those by mixing with them at Harvard.
That would mean that moving Harvard to be just meritocratic would hurt society, not improve it.
In addition to providing "merit washing" by association for the children of the hereditary "nobility", the "commoners" admitted to Harvard and other "Ivies" graduate to staff the administrative (i.e. reasonably competent, well-compensated servants of the nobility) backbone of the Anglo empire. This is absolutely required on account of the well-known "regression to the mean" effect -- the nobles no longer have a dozen+ children each and cannot produce competent successors for themselves through purely biological means. So they outsource the "brains", while passing on their estates to biological heirs (often, as discussed, merit-washed for popular legitimacy) who will command the "brains", rewarding the latter with mid-6-figure wages (and sometimes a "lottery ticket" chance of a small share in capital ownership, via e.g. the startup circus.)
"Brain" isn't the primary selection criterion for that servant caste, however: the selected people must first and foremost be unshakeably loyal to their hereditary aristo masters. And so the primary criterion remains political reliability (as proxied by e.g. "affirmative action", aka "Кто был ничем, тот станет всем" ("who was nothing, will become everything", as seen in Ru version of "L'Internationale"), the correct "extracurriculars" (elite bonding rituals: rowing, excursions for imperialist "aid" to the Third World, etc.)
One can compare with the old USSR: as soon as a hereditary elite caste (re)appeared there, that country started behaving like a cheap clone of the Anglo empire, in a number of comically-obvious ways. It turned its Moscow State University into something quite like a copy of Harvard (in this particular respect) -- complete with "affirmative action", "easy majors" for aristo children, guaranteed employment for graduates in the mandarinate, and so on.
Every sclerotic bureaucratic empire must have "a Harvard".
"why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help?"
Because educational resources are wasted on the weakest students.
It makes sense to give the most resources to those who can take advantage of them. Compare to athletics. You want world class facilities, doctors, trainers, etc. to be available to Olympic level athletes, so that they can go win medals for their countries, not to overweight people using the electric scooters at Walmart. The latter group might benefit from some of the resources, but their goal is so crude (lose weight) that they can do it with very basic resources (a street to walk on and some sneakers.) Likewise, the weakest students just need to be able to do the most mundane of tasks. No fancy anything needed to teach that. If you want new genius ideas/products/whatever to be created, you want to match the brightest students with the brightest people in their fields of study and the best equipment, facilities, etc.
How about like admission only high schools, the top schools write their own admissions test and fill the class only based on test score results? The test can cover what might be on an SAT, but also some subject material, but merit admissions would be the result. Yep, the endowments would suffer, but probably not all that much over time as networking and signaling would come in to play.
But that’s precisely what they’ve done - they’ve just selected question for the test like “what color is your skin” and “do you know the correct buzzwords to insert in an essay to signal to a reader that you are One Of Us?”
I think you're wrong to assume that this is designed in rather than naturally arrising.
In any situation where you're trying to find a matching based on mutual acceptance - i.e. where students can choose which universities to apply to and accept offers from, and Universities can choose which students to make offers to and which to reject - and where most of the students have similar rankings of how desirable they find different universities and most of the universities have similar rankings of how desirable they find different students, you're going to end up with the two rankings roughly matching - the most-desired students will end up at the most-desired universities, and so on down.
Most universities would rather have more able than less able students. So, whatever we mean by "best colleges", the most able students are likely to end up there.
'Privilege laundering' sounds a bit paranoid- as though the privileged are actually ashamed of themselves and are trying to pass as meritorious because... the privileged are actually shape-shifting lizards from Planet X! Wake up sheeple!
It may have been true that the sons of robber-barons wished to mingle with clerics and thus to come across as cultured and pious. Universities, after all, were originally ecclesiastical in origin. Similarly, the sons of legal shysters or crooked bureaucrats may have wanted to rub shoulders with the descendants of robber-barons under the pretense of devotion to Humanistic scholarship. Napoleonic France went in a different, supposedly more meritocratic direction. However, it was the intense competition between the Universities of German States which created the Seminar System and the notion of the Doctorate as a Research Degree. In the STEM subjects, this incremental approach meant that there were external economies of scale for Marshallian industrial districts more particularly where Finance partnered with Industry to create a system of cross-holdings.
America's extraordinary rise to Academic pre-eminence was based firstly on expansion of a more academic type of High School to virtually the entire population in the period from 1914 to 1938. In Europe, the assumption was that only a small percentage of scholars would attend 'Grammar Schools' or 'Gymnasiums' as opposed to Technical Schools of some type. Thus Americans were more ready to take advantage of the GI Bill, than any European country.
The second factor was the reputational benefit of creating a University, or endowing an Institute- e.g. that of Advanced Study at Princeton- and the networking benefits of alumni associations. The Land-Grant Universities could emulate this type of success, though, no doubt, some had already attained excellence in some fields- e.g. agronomy.
The third factor was the Cold War and 'Think Tanks' like RAND. Universities were competing for political influence. Chicago was at war with Harvard. This Saltwater vs. Freshwater battle defined the ideological space when I was growing up. Then, in the same manner that 'Independent Expenditure' campaigns disintermediated Political Parties- or, indeed, ideological Punditry- and gave salience to wedge-issues on the one hand, and straightforward, utterly blatant, special interest rent seeking on the other- so too did the run-away success of some, highly technical, research programs which, so to speak, 'unbundled' the Liberal 'idea of the University'.
It is this 'unbundling'- or lack of cross-elasticity, or synergy- which has made the 'matching problem' acute. On the one hand, you have dead-in-the-water research programs which have to fools some seemingly smart kids into signing up for them so as to keep their Ponzi scheme trundling on, while, on the other hand, the opportunity cost for smart, well connected, kids of investing in 4 year College has been rising. Essentially, there is a 'laundering' of worthless nonsense which however does not appear to be any such thing because smart kids of diverse backgrounds are signing up for it and- hoping to get tenure- being very vocal in their support for it, while, on the other hand, there are more and more veils being draped over the truth- viz. kids nowadays need to be like medieval scholars who moved from one campus to another. Indeed, this was a feature of German university life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. That type of mobility is what put Germany ahead by the 1880s which is when John Adams spent a little time at a Gymnasium. However, he came to the conclusion that the future would lie with the Engineer-Savant- guys like Pareto and Barone.
What is the actual 'matching problem' currently faced by students and Colleges? Firstly, the set of students is only well-ordered for particular, quite narrowly defined, research programs- which however are very lucrative and probably vital to our national security. There has to be an unbundling event even if it means killing the sacred cow of tenure. Otherwise, as Vivek Ramaswami seems to be saying, the Chinese will eat our lunch.
A separate issue, the one this post and the comments on it focus on, has to do with coalition formation and stability. Essentially, the claim is that alumni of certain Colleges are dictatorial over the core of particular games in particular industries or particular contexts. However this should only concern us if there is something extraordinary about those recruited by the Colleges in question or, less plausibly, that the Colleges impart extraordinary traits to its students. But, in that case, the relevant 'Structural Causal Model' would enable us to improve outcomes for everybody. That's the opposite of paranoia or the politics of envy or spite.
Still, one might say that there is something egregiously wrong with our Social System if Harvard alumni write the jokes in our favorite TV programs. But, surely, that was a joke created by TV joke-writers to raise their own prestige while acknowledging that White America was white-collar and College educated.
Why do 'elites' want to let their kids play tennis with kids who are really good at tennis rather than the paralytic scion of inbred Aristocrats who can't lift a racquet? The answer is that their kids may benefit by playing more and better tennis. Sports, unlike almost all non-STEM instruction in H.E, is actually good for kids. Universities with good sport facilities- or one's located in big Cities where such facilities are easily accessible to the very rich- are a good place to gain a bit of polish and perhaps- like the Prince of Wales- pick up an acceptable spouse of good breeding stock. Assortative mating at Uni beats caste-based inbreeding. Or so it now appears. Once genetic engineering really takes off, the elite may indeed elect to become a different species. Till then, all we can do is pretend they are shape-shifting lizards who are using Harvard and Yale to camoflauge themselves.
The premise of the question is incorrect: we do not send the top students to the top universities. Instead, we provide equal opportunities to all students, and the schools select whom they accept. What is the motivation for Harvard to accept someone with less-than-stellar grades? There are financial, influential, and prestige reasons as the author describes. But beyond that, the risk of harm to Harvard's reputation is too great. And yes, there's risk: if you meet 6 Harvard graduates in a row and they're each individually morons, Harvard's reputation takes a hit among you and those whom you influence. University quality is based entirely on reputation.
I say we fix that. Here's a plan that's a step too far, so we'll moderate it afterwards but what if: State legislatures require universities to post all graded student work online, as a condition of maintaining their business licenses. Suddenly a grand corpus of college student work is built. After a few years, artificial intelligence agents (and natural intelligence agents) can assess those bodies of student works to determine the actual quality of a degree program at one institution compared to similar programs at other institutions. Prospective students can already determine the cost of education and they can now determine the quality of education being offered, so they are able to make value decisions. This drives cost down and quality up, if the number of seats at universities is collectively more than the number of customers. (It is.)
This proposal, of course, also allows each student's demonstrated knowledge to be evaluated. The up side is that employers (supported by agents that can evaluate the job candidate's artifacts in whole) can weight what they consider to be important. Need a business major with international finance expertise and who speaks Chinese? Need a scientist who understands issues in a global context? Done and done. The knock-on effect is that universities finally learn and become forced to react to what industry actually values. If no engineer from Fictional State University can get a job because their engineers know everything about DEI but nothing about engineering, that sends a message!
But this proposal also means anyone can read the paper that the professor required you to write about how great Slavery is. You had to write it or you would fail the class, but you never believed what you wrote and now you're running for office. So there has to be a way to shield the data from those who should not be viewing it. Fortunately, this is easy and mature. Data is available anonymized and in aggregate, and then students receive keys so they can grant individuals / organizations access to their work for time-limited periods up to one month (for example).
>and they can now determine the quality of education being offered<
You're assuming people are going to read a swath of student essays, and also view themselves a good enough judge of quality to say which ones are the best? Much, much more effective to determine who gets paid more five years after graduation.
Maintaining a website with every student paper from the last thirty years on it is going to be expensive. And what do you do with the essay from the kid who got expelled because he wrote a 30-page screed about how Hitler didn't go far enough*? Are you legally obligated to post it on your site?
Also I hate the idea of having an actual permanent record from school, and would endeavor to undo that legislation as a citizen.
*(For Art class. It looked nothing like the model.)
I'm rather assuming that AI will read huge swaths of student essays and make evaluations of not only how well the essays are written (independent post-facto grading) but also of how well they were graded / the quality of feedback provided, and that the digested information will be available to use as we each use these AI agents to evaluate institutions / programs according to our measures of quality (which don't all have to be the same). I do like the idea of tying this data to longitudinal earnings reporting, but didn't include this in the proposal because it requires a very different data source and introduces many more uncontrolled variables.
Universities will seek out vendors to host that data. Everything I did for my most recent Doctorate (3 years) was under 1 GB; the scale really isn't much compared to what institutions already store and transmit. In fact many universities today require electronic submission so they certainly transmit this much data and likely store all student work for at least the semester, and probably redundantly. Allowing a limited retention period (6 years, for example) would be reasonable, but if employers get used to assessing bodies of work, then eliminating those bodies would be a disservice to alumni.
Probably yes on the specific example. Such a system would eventually require people to accept that (a) hosting does not mean endorsing, (b) people change over time, (c) young adults make dumb decisions, (b+c) old adults used to be young adults and made their own dumb decisions, (d) sometimes people submit work that receives failing grades and (e) we are all more than the sum of the parts we really want to emphasize.
You already have a permanent record from school. It's called a "transcript" and submitting it to your employer is part of many normal hiring processes, even for experienced hires. This body of work can be thought of as a more detailed, granular transcript.; instead of "course name, grade" it's a full record of course assignments, submitted responses and grades.
> ... AI will read huge swaths of student essays and make evaluations of not only how well the essays are written
When this kind of thing becomes standard, moneyed (well-off, but not oligarchically so) applicants will start running their essays through locally-installed AI before sending. Eventually the "application essay" circus will turn into the same kind of arms race as the now-abolished SAT and its prep courses, and the various Harvards might be left with sorting candidates by dossier and pedigree strictly.
Yes, providing the bodies of work to the AI only is one opportunity. But to ensure it's not just one group's AI that has access, it needs to be accessible. I suspect that we would benefit from having multiple system authors, to get more diversity in UIs and measures of quality.
Providing the bodies of work to other interested parties, as controlled by the creators of those works (the students) presents other opportunities. Controlled online repositories by a small number of most-cost-effective vendors is likely the end system design for that data lake.
We are on the road to having AI capable of grading a variety of works, including systems that can assign firm grades, ones that can alert the grader as to where their attention should be spent, and ones that just do some bit of notes over what the student did. These tools will be boons for educators who can then focus on the trends. ("Hmm. None of the students did well on the Green's Function problems - I should go over that in more detail on Monday and also fix my notes for next semester.") Creation of these would be greatly expedited by the corpus that the collected body of work from all universities would provide. Once use of these kinds of grading systems is accepted, then we'll become more comfortable with grades fully assigned by AI (with student ability to challenge grades with a live educator). At the same time we'll be better at the deep fakes, generative AI with subject matter expertise, so we really won't need professional educators so much, like you suggest.
But my time frame for fixing the higher education industry market dynamics is relatively short as my kids are on paths towards college in 4 years and in 8 years. I suspect this approach would have an impact in time, if started immediately.
I read the title and thought "incentives". Students mostly prefer to have good teachers, and teachers, good students. It's really hard to create a performance test that someone can't fail on purpose. If you reward people for failing, the test ceases to be meaningful. Better to have a system where people mostly WANT good grades.
My naive understanding is there is considerable value in the connections made at elite institutations compared to connections made at eastern state university. Connecting the smartest with those of means and influence seems reasonable if goal is to create high value connections and catalyze higher value results.
I don’t believe the article in the link. Probably he was more intelligent than his public image suggested but it claims that W had a kind of analytical or academic intelligence he never showed any sign of in public.
From which of his public interactions (which I hazard to guess you have only ever experienced filtered through a media presentation) would you have expected to be able to discern his “true” intelligence? How do you discern “he’s dumb” from “he has a stereotypically unintelligent accent and he tailors his speeches to an audience that preferred a non intellectual ‘Everyman’ style”?
The article notes that John Kerry is, by public reputation, much smarter than George Bush. And yet he was also a C student.
So maybe he was smart but not academically motivated, maybe a C student Yalie is still actually pretty smart, or maybe lots of people who’ve worked with him directly are lying about being surprised by his intellect and the people who have concluded he’s dumb as a box of rocks because they laughed along with John Stewart at his gaffes are right.
I didn't say he was dumb. I don't have anything against his accent. I don't care much about his grades. And I'm not particularly a fan of Jon Stewart.
The article claims Bush was "highly analytical". He never even claimed that for himself, he said he trusted his "gut".
Bush's speeches, his interviews, and what he wrote are only slightly "filtered through a media presentation". He had plenty of opportunity to present himself as he wanted (not all the time, but a lot of the time). You make it sound as though the only information we had about him was a documentary made by someone who hated him. Or do you think it is impossible to have an opinion about any public figure?
>The article claims Bush was "highly analytical". He never even claimed that for himself, he said he trusted his "gut".
He's a professional politician; did you ever consider the possibility that he might have been *lying* when he said that? The cited source makes it clear that Bush II was smart enough to know that truthfully saying "I am highly analytical" or anything at all like it would have ensured that he was never elected President of the United States.
You know that his public image is made up by the media and is not in any way an accurate representation of the man, right? Have you seen Scott Alexander's public image in the NYT?
Scott Alexander was writing an anonymous blog, not a public figure (at least not in the same way a politician is).
George W Bush was the president of the United States and constantly being interviewed, featured in countless stories, and had a team of people to help shape his public image. He would have had almost unlimited opportunities to demonstrate these purported analytical skills in public if he had been inclined that way.
That article looks like it could be summarised as "Man's friend claims based solely on subjective personal assessment that he would do better academically than he actually did".
But also someone who is in a much better position to know the man than almost everyone who calls him dumb (many of whom have motivations to do so!) - unfortunately the nature of the job makes it hard to discern an unbiased opinion.
Have none of you ever met a really smart person who either didn’t give enough of a shit to bother with getting As, or whose intelligence is just not of the sort that maps well to purely academic success?
I mean it’s still possible that Bush is super dumb. And he’s probably not a literal genius. But other than “the guy has a good reason to be favorable to Bush” what’s the counter evidence against the article?
It wouldn’t be productive to link to articles that articles that argue against Keith Hennessey’s opinion. There are plenty of them. But opinions are like ani. Everyone has one and thinks that everyone else’s stink.
I think he is a reasonably bright guy. I hate to go to here but FWIW the consensus based on his SAT scores estimate his IQ at 125.
And yes I’ve met my share of really smart people who didn’t give a shit about academic performance.
If you’re right about the IQ, that’s certainly enough (almost 2SD above average) to make it true that “most people who think he’s dumb are less intelligent than he is, or at least not appreciably smarter”.
Have you considered that this analysis fails to take into account DEI? For example, if Harvard was 75% merit and 25% nepo babies, that would still be a decent ratio. But in the modern day, I think the ratio for Harvard would be more like 50% merit, 25% nepo babies, and 25% diversity admissions. In that situation, it's much harder to launder privilege because nowadays, hiring a Harvard graduate gives you a 50% chance of them being a moron. I'm not exaggerating here: in fact, the situation is so bad that if I owned a company then when it came to hiring I would not view Harvard as a prestigious school at all and would be weigh a Harvard degree roughly equally to a degree from a state school. The only Ivy League degree I would strongly value would be MIT.
Yes, and I can not resist showing this under more cynical light: DEI picks the brightest of problematic minorities (the ones that challenge established societal hierarchy) and put them in the top, further up than even a pure meritocracy would allow.
Now how problematic those minorities remains with their would-be leaders now happy being part of the ruling establishment? A little bit, but not really threatening anymore, just a small nuisance at worst or a useful paper bogeyman at best.
Lessons from the 60's and 70's have been learned...
Wow, education is one of those topics where everyone is an expert because they went to school and yet we can't just blindly trust the experts as the system we have doesn't match the values of the common person who wants to improve their life. In this way experts are goal aligned and incentive aligned to come up with the system we currently have as a clear tautology. Despite the verbal only and public protestations otherwise, the hoarding and laundering of privilege with some admixture capture of the best commoners is the standard playbook for a successful aristocracy.
The TL;DR - is in line with Scott's final point about why there is a meritocracy at all. I don't think Scott has gone broad enough with his thinking. It isn't a simple matter of reputation or prestige or validity which these commoners lend to the elite/aristocracy. It is an entirely different process where patrons are present to meet promising commoners whom they can extract value and benefits from.
Would we be confused if we saw lesser and fallen nobility along with the top merchant families sending their best and brightest to a fancy meeting ground with the children of the higher aristocrats and nobility? Change a few words and the truth is clear. They don't want to extract privileged status from commoners, they already have that by birth. They want to extract connections, value, and to both cultivate and harvest the best from the herd of commoners.
I.
I find much of the confusion, hand wringing, and democratic discussion goes away if you just replace the word elite with aristocrat and learn a bit of history.
The renaissance model was very very successful for the aristocrats in Europe. They had better living conditions, more technology, an age of colonialism fuelled by improved weapons, and were all around better off and all they had to do was expand the idea of patronage beyond the arts into the areas of learning about the natural world. This attitude of harvesting the minds of the commoners and lower nobility and creating positions for them to study the world to see what they can figure out...this was super super super successful.
Our education system is simply an extension of this model to sort the wheat from the chaff. It is a mining operation by the aristocrats to get all the commoners to sort themselves out in competition. Meritocracy is 100% fully at odds with the core nature of aristocracy and they never ever intended to apply those ideas to themselves. They don't see themselves as the same as the commoners, they really don't and the vast majority of commoners have never met nor been privy to the inner thoughts of the aristocrats.
II.
We are a breeding stock and are like cattle they own. If you had an intelligent flock or herd of animals who might rise up and kill you if you told them the truth or let them learn or know the truth on their own, then you'd have a very unstable system with a lot of dead elite.
The Russian and French revolutions were a wake up call to expand mass indoctrination beyond simple religious compliance of commoners to their 'betters'. A new intellectual edifice would need to be built to contain commoners within a stable framework. I think some aristocrats worked on this problem in a very intentional way, but a lot of this is simply an alignment of incentives. If driving down one road clearly takes you off a cliff and the other to a bridge to cross the gap, then it isn't a particularly difficult choice.
III.
The great incubator of trial and error took hold and many many many diverse attempts, approaches, and styles of commoner management (one of the core tasks of the aristocracy) emerged in this new age of educated commoners who could think and read. The simple printing press which emerged long before commoners could read led to several revolutions around the world. Later on the radio was used by people in the Caribbean to organise revolts and resistance to colonial rule.
But the aristocracy finds a way and from more totalitarian approaches with daily government radio broadcast to owning the airwaves as a matter of governmental proxy of who is allowed to speak all the way to the Twitter Files style active suppression and censorship of speech.
This is nothing new and is a process within the core problem of elites wanting to harvest commoner minds in an extraction operation and the problems that causes. By and large this problem has been solved through a mixture of violence like the selected murders/assassinations of key leaders within commoner movements which challenge aristocratic authority or goals.
IV.
And the other part is a huge mind control operation of values and the stage production of democracy. What makes it so very convincing is the fact that the stage production is somewhat real with a small percentage of choices allowed to the commoners through a process - especially on issues which DO NOT affect the bottom line or power of the aristocrats who call themselves elites now.
The successful formula has proven to match nature, the carrot and the stick. Rewards and consequences. A stable system with some elements of true meritocracy in a bloody, unfair, and arbitrary process which still ends up costing a lot of resources. Combined with a careful sculpting of 'values'. You can read about this from one of the founders of the modern education system in Rockefeller who wanted a compliant and cooperative sea of minds which could be shaped and directed to the purpose of enriching him and empowering him further. He was very very open about it with all those initial grants and bribes to get modern mass education started. He wanted smarter workers, but not too smart.
But hey...a lot of people who went to those schools and picked up 12 plus years of someone else's values and worldview being drummed into their heads are all experts on what happened to them and why it was good and everyone should join the cult. And yet even with all the benefits of integration you find the truly wild peoples of the world are very very very very very resistant and reject schooling due to those embedded values.
What?? Who are the aristocrats running Ivy League universities as their own private stables of intellectual livestock, if I read your metaphor correctly? And why do you expect that those who are educated at such institutions all "join the cult"? On the contrary, the subjects I studied or was exposed to gave me tools to question orthodoxy -- and that includes topics now considered patrician, like classical philology.
At least, this was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, when any undergrad could bump into incarnations of heterodoxy like John Kenneth Galbraith, Stephen Jay Gould or Robert Lowell prowling around the streets near Elsie's delicatessen, or Roberto Mangabeira Unger reading the Pléiade edition of Proust while lounging in a golden jumpsuit in the courtyard of the Blacksmith House café.
We should also distinguish Harvard before those couple of decades and after them. Before them, the transfer of WASP ruling class values probably had more to do with the composition and family background of the student body, rather than what they learned at the university. After them, a new change of values was triggered by the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan -- it was only in the 1980s that the introductory economics course Ec 10 became the most popular.
But that wasn't an endogenous change. What turned Harvard and other institutions into rubber stamps for the ruling class that we may see today was the rise to dominance of **Chicago** economics from the 1980s onward. This is now the dominant doctrine at Harvard, though it's hardly alone in that affliction.
The focus in the first few paragraphs on the classroom teaching skills of the professors is misplaced. Professors at top universities are famously rewarded for research much more than teaching, and there are few courses even at the graduate level that you need a special expert to teach. But when you have a class full of talented students you can go faster and they give each other better insights. This is not to say that the system we actually have isn't a hodgepodge driven by all the forces in the rest of the post.
Incidentally, The Chosen by Jerome Karabel is indispensable reading on this.
If hanlon’s razor is never attribute to malice blah blah, what would we call a razor that says look first to emergence based on game theory to explain real life situations? (So I think the medium cynical is probably the center of gravity, with this proviso: you’d expect the universities to be exactly as merit based as necessary to maintain their rank while gifting the rest of the slots to those likely to give them donations. The college rankings based on selectivity probably also help maintain the equilibrium; otherwise there’d be a much bigger incentive to give away greater and greater percentages of spots while you traded on your name for a while.) maybe assuming it’s that and not some kind of top-down design is also hanlon’s razor?
By my reading of the link, Dale and Krueger don’t support the challenge, they support the author of that article’s interpretation (i.e. that character matters)
While I'm less sure about Harvard my experience with Caltech suggests to me thar:
1) Some students are more capable than others and society benefits if those more capable students are pushed to the limits of their ability.
2) The best way to push students to the limit of their ability is to put them in classes with similarly able students. It's human nature to slack off or grow uninterested if bored and to rise to the challenge if not.
3) Whatever place you concentrate the best students at will become highly desierable to attend so selectivity is necessary to preserve that feature.
4) Wealth and the other trappings follow because producing the most successful graduates draws alumni money.
--
Yes you often get the best professors at the best schools but, while that makes form a nice research opportunity they are usually not the best instructors so really everyone wins.
I don't think the privilege-laundering model is supposed to apply to places like Caltech or MIT. It's specifically about the Ivies (and a handful of other comparable institutions) and Harvard in particular.
I'm sorry, but the expression "Maharaja of Whereverstan" so typically blends American Exceptionalism with White privilege. Not seeing it and/or not understanding why, reeks even more of it. Whoever coined that expression should be first in the line to get their privilege laundered. Other than that the play was great.
This is likely true. I think there are big nuances in the distribution of student quality and of teacher skill-sets though. You touch on the latter; most professors can teach the basics, but few can teach truly advanced skills. There's no point wasting the latter on students who can't learn what they can teach.
Assuming an equal ability to teach things (all teachers teach the same stuff, but some are better at it),
Matt's kid isn't entirely wrong. It *would* work to send the worst students to the best teachers. They'd be better off for the experience. But it would be ridiculously inefficient. The distribution of a class made up entirely of 'worst' students might range between, say, the 10th and 30th percentiles of ability. Teachers teach to the average, at best, and probably more likely to the minimum fixable level (maybe the 15th percentile in this example). So progress is extremely limited, even for the best of the worst. And the difference between 30th percentile ability and 10th is much bigger than it sounds (it's not linear in the tails).
Elite institutions work the same way. It's about teacher quality and class availability, yes, but it's also about the degree to which your classes and teachers are able to be the best versions of themselves. An elite school has elite students; the lowest fixable minimum is irrelevant, because everyone's smart. Teaching to the average still means teaching to a very high level, and because the left tail is truncated there isn't so much of a gap between average and worst. Plus, the best kids in a place like that have ample opportunities to excel; they won't be held back much. Calc at Harvard (or MIT) is not calc at Western Prairie State.
Your theory about laundering privilege still works. Harvard's incentives are to keep quality high to facilitate those dynamics by admitting mostly the best. And it's not like complete idiots get into Harvard anyway, no matter how big the donation. The left tail is still truncated; it's just a bit lower and longer than it would be otherwise.
Thank you l, this is refreshingly in the middle of the argument. On a slightly different note,I've been thinking about and consequently noticing how 'virtue-signaling' is a deception in which people engage no matter the context.
I went to a specialized high school in NYC. We had a 99% college acceptance rate. That was 1000% due to the smartest students testing in, and 0% due to enhanced teaching capabilities. The administration was known to be a joke (teachers got together and wrote a public letter saying the principal was both incompetent and placed by nepotism). If you just put the worst students at the school, scores would plummet immediately. Frankly attending wasn't worth it for me, would have been better to go to my local school.
You focus on rich people laundering their prestige by making themselves look talented/smart, but I think it goes a bit further.
Premier schools also launder the privilege of *being* talented/smart, to make those people look competent/hardworking/trustworthy/etc.
This is in service of the political idea of meritocracy, that being smart/talented is sufficient justification for some people to have control over the lives of others and over the direction of the economy/country, and for them to deserve richer and easier lives with less hardship and more pleasure.
If you know a bunch of precocious 'gifted' children who are smart/talented in some ways but also barely able to take care of themselves and often venal or self-centered, you might question the wisdom or justice of this situation.
Even if all the gifted people you know are saints, you may worry about value misalignment or lack of domain knowledge between them and the masses, or simply be unconvinced that their competence at running the system justifies an unequal system with coercive power.
But a Harvard degree transforms the privilege of smart/talented into an aura of 'competent to lead' and 'part of the natural ruling class'.
Do you have stats on that? Most of the smartest people I knew from Harvard aren't anywhere near the ruling class. (Admittedly, in my 1970s, pre-Reagan class, law and medicine were still seen as the most popular tickets to economic success, rather than finance.) And all the less so if you became a STEM academic, as many of my classmates did. Even as to who rules Harvard itself, it's > 50 years since last time the university president was a Harvard undergrad (Nathan Pusey, who left office in 1971).
I was a Harvard undergraduate in physics in the early-mid 1970s, after attending public schools on the south shore of Long Island (Nassau County, not the Hamptons). The greatest benefit I got from meeting elites was being able to see with my own eyes that coming from money didn't have any correlation with being a decent person. OTOH, the people I knew who had come to Harvard from poorer backgrounds than mine tended to be pretty nice, and often probably a lot nicer than I was. Also, I met a lot of jerks, of various backgrounds.
Obviously this is anecdotal. But thereafter I wasn't ever impressed by people with money just because they had money. Nor did I ever feel that making a lot of money, even from one's wits rather than an inheritance, could excuse someone for being a jerk. This was very liberating. I'm not sure I'd have gotten the same feeling from going to another Ivy, since I might have fantasized that people from Harvard were exceptional in some way.
In the roughly 50 years since, I haven't gotten any contracts in Whereverstan. The only work I ever got from a college connection was from a friend who kindly asked me to do legal work for his venture-backed start-up, at a time when I really needed some work. BTW, he grew up with a single Latin American immigrant parent, and cleaned toilets for a couple of years as his campus job. The start-up failed within three or four years, as most of them do.
My experience with Harvard faculty was mixed. They ran the gamut from inspiring to mediocre to jerks, with most in the middle -- though to be fair, I was too self-involved at that age to know how to build relationships with any of them. There are a couple I really regret not paying more attention to at the time (mathematician Raoul Bott at the top of that list: he was a delightful person, I discovered after I'd cut his class for most of the semester).
The single most life-changing aspect for me was managing a student-run orchestra: so, yes, the peer argument about bright students liking to flock together is pretty cogent. And there were so many ideas floating around in my classes, conversations, in the libraries and bookstores in the area that I've spent much of the past half-century exploring them and seeing them branch into other things. I'd never say that my college years were my best years, but Harvard is why I have a rich intellectual life today.
Which is why I think posts like the one above are simply low-dimensional cartoons, created by people who didn't go to Harvard and who could never imagine that it might be just as complicated as much of the rest of reality.
By contrast, another Harvard graduate once told me that their biggest social surprise there was that there were actually some rich people who weren't jerks.
My background is very similar to yours, in fact it looks like we were in the same graduating class, maybe even in some of the same courses. (I was not a physics major but took Physics 55 freshman year -- great class.)
I think there are two sides of Harvard and while there may be some truth to Scott's post, it could be misleading without perspectives like yours and mine.
My experience is that Harvard, for someone who is interested in a STEM field or a serious scholarly field (e.g. history) Harvard offers a superb education. I only had one bad professor in 4 years, and encountered several Nobelists and world-class experts, all of whom were reasonably accessible and pleasant. The experience in those areas is more about learning and research than connections and prestige. I've also studied at a top European university so I have some basis for comparison and Harvard does just fine.
On the other hand, if your aim is success in politics, entertainment, publishing, Wall Street etc. then course work is indeed less important than connections. But, yeah, don't grouse that you didn't get to drop in on Henry Kissinger during office hours. You're not dropping by to get his opinion on Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. You just want the to drop the name. Too bad.
Now it is probably true that the prestige of the university for the latter group depends in the presence of the former group. Call that prestige-washing if you want. But it would be misleading to think that detracts from the experience of the former group.
There is some overlap in the two groups, for example Gates and Ballmer were STEM types who also benefited from connections. But that is not typical.
Are the serious STEM majors and scholars the product and not the customers as Yudkowsky says? I'd say a bit of both. Their prestige does burnish the credentials of the rich and connected, but the smart serious students also get a good education in the process.
Could you get a comparable education elsewhere or just studying on our own? Absolutely. But it's just easier at a top university. Suppose you are looking for the best book on Reformation politics or the latest paper on cell connections on the visual cortex. You could read reviews or scour the library or PubMed. Or you could ask someone on the faculty who is a world-class expert in the field.
Bottom line: If you go to Harvard to get a great substantive education, you will get that. If you go to get connections, you will get that, if that is your aim. Maybe both in some cases, if you are lucky.
P.S. I recently mentioned my Harvard experience to someone much younger, emphasizing how you were expected to think at a high level (as opposed to memorization or regurgitation.) His reply was "Ah, yes, the Golden Age..." So perhaps things have changed since when you and I were there, especially in the more politicized fields, which is sad.
Yes, one could concurrently have, and maybe realize, various goals at Harvard; my argument with the post is its caricature and reductionism.
I admire your luck with profs. I was Class of ‘76. I couldn’t say that Physics 55 in my freshman year was a good course, though Physics 151 blew my mind, Lagrangians and Hamiltonians were so gorgeous. My sophomore experience, though, is what turned me sour on the field (though my QM section guy later got a Nobel for work he was doing at that time). Junior year I placed my bets on Classics, and while the younger faculty were good, I had one particularly awful senior prof — though thanks to him, I decided not to go to grad school in the arts & sciences, so that was a good thing. My best course was a semester on James Joyce taught by the late Professor of Irish studies, James Kelleher; it wasn't just the subject matter but Prof. Kelleher's human qualities that made it so outstanding.
And a very brief encounter with Calvert Watkins, whose course on Indo-European linguistics I wound up not taking, wound up changing my life when I was past 50: The textbook was in French, and when another student and I asked if there were any alternatives, he responded with what seemed the height of Harvard hubris: "Well, everyone has to learn to read French sooner or later, don't they?" More than 30 years later, when I discovered French writing on degrowth and political ecology, I realized he was right. Though I guess that places me very squarely in the "serious scholarly" constituency you mention.
With regards to the initial point, I went to a top-ranked STEM school and taught/was a grad student at 2 other much lower ranked schools and can confirm that what the two schools taught was completely different. Students at the lower ranked school learned far less theory and weren't exposed to a lot of programming techniques or algorithms that we learned in the first 2 years at the top-ranked school. The grad-level algorithms course I took at one school basically entirely covered material that students at the top-ranked school were required to learn as an undergrad.
Poking my head in to explore, not a hypothetical situation. Relatives of mine (identical twin girls) recently accepted admission to Harvard and a New England state uni. Situationally on the “commoner” strata, if not “poor”(mother’s chronic disabling physical illness, parents divorced, father financially somewhat stable). White female New Englanders. Nearly identical academic achievements, including athletically (although not recruited athletically) at different public high schools. Test well. Constant stream of accomplishments related to very high ability mathematically, also verbally. Adversity also includes chronic illness of their own that requires careful management. Recently witnessed a drive by shooting outside the store where they work part-time. Between the two, had admissions with full scholarships at UNC, Syracuse, etc. One applied to Ivies, one did not. The one who has decided to attend Harvard was reluctant to accept. Why? Partly because her high school friend who resembles her closely, in ability, demographics, struggled greatly with social acceptance there for her freshman year last year. Aside from the accompanying “you don’t belong there” from her sister who did not apply. These two almost instinctively grasp that attending Harvard for them has it’s complications, not being wealthy. Their mom and dad grew up and/or attended college with others of great wealth; their experience was one of sometimes being more beholden than they would have liked, with no obvious long term benefits, because they both chose not to put themselves in service to those with the wealth. One of the twin daughters put her trust in her abilities that would make attending Harvard worthwhile. The other, the far spunkier of the two, did not. Their mom has been supportive of each as they made their choices. It has been interesting so far, to say the least, to read the recent SCOTUS decision in light of their recent experiences.
I kept looking for the /sarc, but it appears your comment is genuinely an example of idiocy.
Among other things: affirmative action acceptance was always supposed to be about giving exceptional but poor kids a chance at an Ivy League education/pedigree - it was never about accepting "average".
The most egregious part of the nonsense about "meritocratic" acceptance policies isn't just that there is clear evidence of lowered (but not clearly low) standards for those that benefited - it is that there is very clear evidence that discrimination was employed against those clearly well qualified but of the wrong minority ethnicity. Asians in particular were actively discriminated against much as the Semites were in the past.
And in all cases, the "legacy" admissions were always about class solidarity as opposed to any other even vaguely "meritocratic" component. It is the literal enshrining of the "lucky sperm".
This is a question that sounds adorable, because it comes from a five-year-old. The same is not true of intelligent adults asking the same question.
My wife did a rotation in admissions, and participated in undergrad admissions decisions, while working as an assistant director at an Ivy. Her career: university fundraising.
(1) “Why do we send” is a false premise, “We” have no agency on admissions. And the only people sending anyone to a university is a situation where a family or equivalent is helping someone pay for & be successful at college. Colleges and universities are registered business entities. “We” refers to society, American society is not granted authority over university/college managers to make decisions about what any given universities and colleges do.
(2). A legit really effective teacher working as a professor is a somewhat rare individual, and highly valued by students, colleagues, the parents of students, alumni, and highly valued and sought after by other colleges and universities. People are free to make their own choices about where to apply to work, and teaching professors or research faculty with really great skills often have a number of nice options available.
In most human endeavors that people are passionate about and deeply invested in, A-players want to work with/collaborate with/mentor other A-players. Less so, mentoring B or C-players. An A-player teaching professor deciding to *focus on* helping C-player students is a pretty rare, laudable situation precisely because they chose something noble and against the grain. The professor who spends her time helping highly intelligent, motivated undergrads or grad students unlock challenging knowledge is no less laudable, and should be equally free of coercion by “We.”
The question implicitly presupposes that the quality of education might be better at a 'better' school. This is not true. Professors at highly ranked schools do not teach better than those at low-ranked schools. There is not some magic pedagogical method that is known only to elite schools. In fact, competition for faculty positions is so fierce that there are many excellent people at quite low-ranked schools. So, there is no reason to want mediocre students to go to a highly-ranked school - they would not benefit at all anyway.
What students benefit from is other students. Scott mentions cynical reasons this is good - hobnobbing with other elites, but there are more virtuous reasons.
One is that tracking is good for students. If all the good students are together they can learn at an accelerated pace and the mediocre students can learn at a slower pace. In the end, both groups are receiving instruction at the optimal level. This is a stable situation. If you try to introduce mediocre students to a good school, they will do poorly relative to other students. I know of students who were asked to withdraw from a good school to go to one more suitable for them, and in the end they were actually thankful for the advice. They learned more at the slower pace and went from being bottom-of the class losers to solid performers, which boosted their confidence.
If you suddenly changed the situation so that the worst schools were where the best students went, in a few years all that would happen is to reverse peoples sentiments about which schools are best/worst.
Young Yglesias's question is interesting because it suggests that the best colleges are the ones accepting small class sizes of highly promising high school students. There's a reasonable argument that Arizona State and the University of Central Florida are the best colleges in America because they produce so many college grads capable of entering the workforce.
Of all the great authors of the world how many of them majored in English lit or creative writing? I tend to the Charles Dickens and Herman Melville stumbled on writing while at University studying law or accounting or something.
Listening to a podcast on the affirmative action in admissions problem, I wondered: why don't we just ask colleges to accept everyone by lottery? Why even bother with SAT/ACT/GPA/GDP/whatever? Everything meritorious is in some way racist; not only is a non-discriminatory lottery non-racist, it also allows colleges to compete on the quality of their product—if you can produce high-earning graduates out of a random grab bag of students, you can claim legitimate prestige.
Definitely an interesting concept. I suppose the problem is that you’d need some way to ensure that all the universities in a given university-ecosystem are adhering to the lottery method. If, as in this example, a university’s prestige is indexed to its graduates’ earnings (or analogous achievements like grad school acceptance, etc), it would be in the university’s interest to handpick students from, say, wealthy backgrounds (the assumption being these individuals/their families have a more established network, and thus more postgrad earning potential). The political scandals we’re familiar with now would likely just give way to false-lottery scandals, or something else of the like.
>colleges to compete on the quality of their product
Did you read this post at all?
The "quality of their product" IS their students. You can't have a "good product" if smart kids are forced to attend courses designed for the dumbest kids to be able to pass and understand. Everything will have to be dumbed down and every college will become equally mediocre.
>if you can produce high-earning graduates out of a random grab bag of students, you can claim legitimate prestige.
Nobody can do this. Being a high earner is primarily a product of intelligence, and "good teaching" can't meaningfully improve people's intelligence generally, but especially not "good teaching" at the college level.
And what happens when it comes time to apply to medical school? Do you have some way of only letting the smartest kids in, which would necessarily be "racist" because the black kids STILL won't be smart enough to get in? Or are we going to be pumping out thousands of dumb doctors, all in the name of equality?
Absolutely terrible, terrible idea except for the fact that it would destroy the college system and potentially allow something better to take its place.
What we would likely see for a number of fields is companies hiring smart students out of high school with their own kind of tests, and putting them into something like a cadetship where they learn on the job through experience and e.g. online learning modules. We should especially expect this in tech jobs where degrees are already much less valuable than actually knowing what you're doing.
But in any case, if we're forced to destroy the college system because it gets accused of "racism", then it doesn't matter what happens next because the country is already toast. There's no way America can remain a first world country over the long term if such idiocy has achieved such a degree of ideological capture in our institutions.
I am late to this but in more meritocratic university admittance policies there would be elite courses not elite universities, not at undergraduate level anyway. Medicine or Engineering would be difficult to get into at any university - and standards within those courses would be fairly uniform across institutions.
This is now Ireland works, the state exam determines what courses you can do and the standard needed for different courses varies significantly within any university.
That said Irish universities are not setting the world alight at research and post graduate level so maybe that’s a reason to concentrate the best in one, or a few, universities.
I think this, like a lot of dysfunction in the american university system, is because students in the US don't chose what they're studying before they apply.
There's no mechanism you could use to say that they're allowed into Harvard but only to study certain subjects.
The UK seems to be somewhere in between, where universities have different reputations overall but also their departments have reputations for being good or bad at their particular field.
For what it’s worth, I think the US system is far preferable. To me, it doesn’t make sense to expect a 17-18 year old to decide what want to study, both because of their youth and because they haven’t been exposed to most of the subjects yet.
They SHOULD have a good idea by the time they're 18, and if they don't then I think it should fall onto schools to remedy that rather than have people waste years of their life and getting into debt for something even less directly applicable in what their job ends up being than that related subjects themselves.
And anecdotally, most kids I know who were smart and hardworking enough to become doctors knew they wanted to be doctors before they had finished high school.
You know what they say about anecdotes. I also know people who didn't know they wanted to become doctors until later, and I know many more who thought they wanted to become doctors when they finished high school and then changed their minds. Let's not oversimplify.
I'm curious how schools might help remedy incoming students not knowing what they want to do without exposing them to different options.
Is there any hard evidence of the theory that diversity causes better educational outcomes? I always see this asserted without evidence as a rationale for affirmative action, but it seems to be on much shakier ground than mismatch theory.
Re diversity improving education, I could easily see it going the other way, because certain groups could be offended by certain facts, so educational content would be santitized or distorted to avoid offending them. In a discussion about supposed racial bias in police shootings, the probability that anyone mentions the numbers on racial disparities in the actual commission of crimes is probably negatively related to the percentage of black people in the room.
That may be true of Harvard, but I think there's a simpler explanation for the broader phenomenon: the brightest students would prefer to be taught by the brightest teachers (they'd learn more), and the brightest teachers would prefer to teach the brightest students (it's more rewarding). The only reason this isn't going on earlier in the education system is that governments feel a duty of care for kids, and make rules to stop it (at least in the UK), but adults are on their own, so the obvious equilibrium follows.
But this is is entirely within the context of people thinking that wealth is an unearned privilege compared with talent. Being born rich and white is as comparably (un) "earned" as is being born black and smart. And yet most people think that a rich white person getting into college over a poorer but smarter black person is unfair.
The example with the writing teacher is a bit absurd. The vast majority of great writers never had *any* formal training in creative writing at all. (or at most, basic)
So I heavily doubt the great writing teacher is going to do anything for the genius writer. The genius writer doesn't need a teacher, probably doesn't even want one.
Writing is not a normal profession - it's very debatable if teaching does anything good for you if your skill level is above mediocre.
A shaky assumption underneath this question is the idea that Harvard admissions committees have highly accurate screening systems that can select for true academic merit. Revisionist History has had several great episodes calling that assumption into question. At an anecdotal level, it's important to remember that Einstein was repeatedly bounced away from undergrad by standardized entrance exams. Then, after he graduated, he was saddled with crummy academic reference letters saying he'd never amount to anything.
Judging academic merit is surprisingly hard. The assumption that Harvard admissions committees are especially good at it doesn't seem well justified. Another possible answer to a five year-old's starting question might be that elite institutions should admit some seemingly sub-par students because some of the sub-par students might actually be geniuses.
>Then, after he graduated, he was saddled with crummy academic reference letters saying he'd never amount to anything.
You need to data to make this argument, not the singular anecdote of Einstein. And in any case, importantly, Einstein managed to absolutely distinguish himself completely in spite of the apparent failure of institutions to recognize his genius! So how this proves that smart people are missing out is beyond me. What this case shows (if it actually is as described), is that very smart people are smart enough to do great things regardless of what others think of their intellect.
>Another possible answer to a five year-old's starting question might be that elite institutions should admit some seemingly sub-par students because some of the sub-par students might actually be geniuses.
That is completely fallacious.
Let's say that 40% of people above average height are good basketball players and 10% of people below average height are good basketball players (4:1 ratio).
If you had to select 5 players for a basketball team and you had large populations of short and tall people to pick from, and had no information on them other than their height, how many short players you pick? 1 out of 5?
No. The rational answer is zero. On average you will get more good players selecting 5 tall players and zero short players. This is a matter of basic mathematics: 0.4 * 5 = 2 good players on average (selecting all tall players) vs 0.4 *4 + 0.1*1 = 1.7 good players on average (selecting 4 tall and 1 short players).
Selecting only those with strong academic achievement will similarly yield more geniuses being selected than selecting a mix of above and below average achievers, even if you're missing the odd under-achieving genius.
Height is easy to measure. The point I was trying to illustrate with Einstein is that academic merit is *not* easy to measure. I know many people reflexively dismiss Malcolm Gladwell as an intellectual lightweight, but he actually has done some important heavy lifting in this subject area. For example, the Revisionist History episode "Outliers, Revisited" makes a convincing case that even seemingly solid measurements like school grades might be accidentally measuring irrelevant variables like birth month.
Admissions committees saw Einstein's poor grade point average and his abysmal test scores in non-math subject areas in college entrance exams and concluded he had poor academic merit. There's no reason to assume Harvard's measurements are any less faulty.
I think there are plenty of elites that can make it into our nation's top schools, and the smartest elites will continue to do so. It will also create a greater incentive for wealthy families to prioritize education.
Alternatively: a sufficiently visible pipeline to success through education socially legitimizes learning as a credible way to achieve wealth and/or status (and achieve it virtuously!). There must be a clear reward within sight of the k-12 slog to focus teenagers and their families on academic success, and ‘go to a great school and you’re set’ might be a more convincing and actionable heuristic than ‘get good at something, wherever and however possible’.
For this reason (and to stick my neck out), we should be inclined to make the pipeline more credibly within reach of traditionally underserved/underachieving groups, perhaps through affirmative action and hamfisted attempts to showcase diversity in higher education.
*First of all, as Scott literally mentions: Going to a good school explains almost none of the lifetime earnings variation after controlling for intelligence. This strongly suggests that sending "Underserved/underachieving groups" e.g. dumb black kids to college won't make them anything close to 'set for life'.
Actually getting good at something is absolutely better advice than advocating ways for black people getting pieces of paper regardless of their intelligence. Having a piece of paper from Harvard is only valuable because Harvard largely only lets smart. hardworking kids in in the first place. The idea that hijacking this signal could set people up for life is insane. Elite lawyers who graduated from harvard are elite lawyers because they're almost always incredibly intelligent and conscientious. A below average student spending a few years at harvard doesn't magically become smart enough for cognitively demanding work like this.
*Secondly, do you have any evidence whatever that lack of motivation explains the black/white academic achievement gap to any meaningful degree? We had affirmative action for decades and it coincided with substantial academic gaps between blacks and whites. Also, black parents more likely to say they want their kids to go to college than white parents are.
This is basically similar to the idea that we need "representation" of blacks so 'black kids know they can succeed'. I've literally never seen any data that supports the idea that this representation improves black school performance, and my subjective impression of things is that stuff like this simply imbues black people with a sense of entitlement, that success is owed to them and not being successful is evidence of "racism".
*Third, black people are not "underserved" by the college system. They simply aren't smart enough to get into good colleges at the rate that whites and asians do. If underperformance in school was a product only of motivation, then without affirmative action white and asians have as much to gain or lose by studying or not. With affirmative action, they actually have less to gain from studying hard than blacks. So if the 'K-12 slog' is something that needs some special motivation to get through, it's unclear why whites and asian have significantly outperformed blacks over the past few decades in spite of the greater returns on educational achievement for blacks.
It seems to me that the better the student is, the worse the professor is able to be. A smart student can teach themselves the material. If you look on MIT opencourseware, their teachers are pretty boring and unengaging. Meanwhile, the teachers at the "Great Courses" (intended for the layman) are quite excellent. This gels with what one commenter wrote about Harvard in 1975 and all the famous teachers being awful.
So the reason we don't send the worst students to the best schools is be because the best schools have the worst teachers, they don't need good teachers precisely because they are selecting for good students. The IVY league is not about making you smart, it is about proving you are already smart.
>So the reason we don't send the worst students to the best schools is be because the best schools have the worst teachers, they don't need good teachers precisely because they are selecting for good students.
No, it's straight-forwardly because these schools wouldn't BE the "best schools" in the first place if they took the worst students. There's nothing inherently "best" about harvard.
"Let’s imagine a stylized world where each applicant is either rich or smart.
If a college lets in only smart kids, it can’t keep the lights on. It goes out of business in short order.
If a college lets in only rich kids, in a year or two, the parents of the next crop of rich kids won’t be interested in making donations or paying tuition to a so-so institution. The rich parents will send their kids and dollars elsewhere.
So, there is some optimal allocation of rich and smart kids. At this optimal point, the rich kids’ parents’ money keeps the institution afloat and builds the labs where the smart kids commercialize nuclear fusion, cook up next-generation antibiotics, etc. The smart kids boost the college up the rankings and provide the prestige that draws in the rich parents.
Colleges have been playing this game for many rounds. They’ve had a chance to learn and tinker. I bet many of them know what that optimal point is. Relatedly, I think private-school applicants are so appealing to prestigious colleges because they sometimes allow admission offices to sidestep the tradeoff between rich and smart kids.
Of course, in real life, colleges are optimizing for more than two traits, some applicants align with more than one of those goals, and the super-selective places have huge endowments and so don’t have to operate from cash flow."
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.
I guess Goldman Sachs' reasoning is that if you are so unambitious as to go to merely the best college in Texas that you aren't likely a good fit for Goldman Sachs.
They're probably right.
Well sure, I wasn’t claiming it was perfectly meritocratic or that the changes are immediate. Just that it does work somewhat. The world looks a lot more meritocratic at 40 than it does at 25. At 25 my really bright friends were laboring away at grad programs, or as post docs, or one worked at a fucking book store, another at the night desk at a hotel, another was sort of unemployed, and I graded essays for meager pay.
15 years later and all those people have great jobs. Hell my meth addicted no college degree and total fuckup until well into her 30s sister had a decent job by 35 and has a great job at 40 (freelance political consultant who gets good work). She always was fairly bright despite her issues.
As for kids I had kids at 32 and 35 and it was very manageable financially. Could have had them a couple years earlier if we hadn’t taken a few trips to Europe or bought a smaller house in a less desirable neighborhood.
Anyway, just reinforcing what the OP said when he said people eventually end up at their intellectual station. People love to talk like we live in under serfdom or something.
Professors have no idea who was admitted how. At some universities you do get letters from the athletics department if one of your students is on a team that will miss some classes, but it’s hard for them to pressure you to give “special treatment” rather than mere “accommodations for missing classes”.
If their last name is on the building you teach in, that may be a hint.
Sticking to a less cynical perspective, mixing elites with talented people has networking benefits for both sides. The talented people connect with elites who can help them into more elite-level roles, and the elites connect with talented people who can help them fill whatever important roles they have open.
e.g., The rich kid who is going to inherit his father's successful business finds talented people who can help him run that business, and the talented kids get the opportunity to work in high-level roles in this successful business.
Right. Mid-century American industry was largely run by wealthy men's sons who didn't need to be the smartest guy in the room: e.g., the vastly successful Tom Watson Jr. of IBM.
Here's a take on it: students' intellectual development depends in part on the environment in which they grow. Those who grow among smart classmates become smarter than they would be otherwise. Not only that, but we achieve the greatest overall societal gains by grouping the smartest ones together.
For a very simple mathematical illustration, consider:
(x - y)^2 > 0 , for x!=y
(x - y)^2 = x^2 - 2xy + y^2
therefore: x^2 - 2xy + y^2 > 0
therefore: x^2 + y^2 > 2xy
If x and y are unequal, then you get the best results by matching x with x and y with y.
Illustration: for x=5 and y=2, matching the best with the best gives us 5*5 + 2*2 = 29, whereas matching best with worst only give us 5*2 + 2*5 = 20.
This model only has two variables, but I'm fairly sure it has been generalized long ago.
So the utility of clustering the best students in the best schools stems primarily from maximizing the students' overall potential. It's not only about matching the best students with the best teachers. It is also, and maybe more importantly up to a certain age, about matching the best students with the best classmates.
The triangle inequality
This makes sense, but it's an argument for elitism. It's fine to have an elite and even to be an elitist, but I think it does raise some questions about what you have to offer people who aren't elite through no fault of their own. What will a 75th percentile IQ person get from this system that assigns a random 99th percentile person as the CEO of their company?
I've seen the word 'elitism' used in some senses that I don't like, but let's assume there is a good sense in which the cultivation of virtue leeds to elitism in that sense.
To answer your question: That 75th percentile IQ person gets a CEO who is very likely to be capable. That's the kind of CEO we need, as well as the kind of doctor, teacher, etc.
"people who aren't elite through no fault of their own"
I think the 'fault' thing misses the broader picture. It's not a punishment if you aren't the doctor or the CEO because you aren't competent enough to do it. Since it's not a punishment, it's of no relevance whether it's your fault or not.
> why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help?
There's a weird assumption in the response (and, I guess, the question) that "the best colleges" provide more help than other colleges do.
In reality, "the best colleges" are, by definition, the ones with the best students. The young Yglesias' question is similar to the philosopher who asks whether it's OK to prefer dating people you find attractive: conceptually incoherent. It isn't possible to do anything else.
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Schools arise as a way for elite children to acculturate to each other. When talented nonelites begin to be let in, we should assume that the reason is to benefit the elites who operate and use the school. There is an obvious symmetry in what happens: the go-getters who make it in on ability get connections to people with power. (As mentioned in the post.) The elites who make it in on pedigree get the same connections, but since they are the other side of those connections, we would describe them as getting connections to people with ability. Connections like that can be important if you're ever put in charge of something!
It isn't necessary to assume that smart people get admitted to Harvard so that elites who also go there can pretend to be smart.
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It also isn't obvious that legacy admissions are of lower quality than "merit" admissions. If all you know about an applicant is their SAT score, you can admit them and watch them regress to the population mean. If you know (1) their SAT score and (2) that both their parents went to Harvard, the same thing will happen, except that the relevant mean toward which they will regress is much higher.
>"The young Yglesias' question is similar to the philosopher who asks whether it's OK to prefer dating people you find attractive: conceptually incoherent. It isn't possible to do anything else."
It's definitely possible to date someone you find unattractive, and happens all the time.
I also don't think the "best" colleges actually have smarter students. Princeton's students test worse than Dartmouth's, but few would argue Dartmouth is a better college.
>"It also isn't obvious that legacy admissions are of lower quality than "merit" admissions. If all you know about an applicant is their SAT score, you can admit them and watch them regress to the population mean."
What metrics are you talking about? Income? Since colleges are academic institutions, it makes sense to prioritize academic credentials eg SAT scores.
> It's definitely possible to date someone you find unattractive, and happens all the time.
It's possible to date them, it's not possible to *prefer* dating them
>>"It also isn't obvious that legacy admissions are of lower quality than "merit" admissions. If all you know about an applicant is their SAT score, you can admit them and watch them regress to the population mean."
> What metrics are you talking about? Income? Since colleges are academic institutions, it makes sense to prioritize academic credentials eg SAT scores.
I'm talking about SAT scores. The college gets a small number of samples, typically one. The student's true SAT score, the average score they would get if they took the test an infinite number of times, is different. Since we're talking about high scores, they need to be adjusted lower. But the appropriate reduction for the legacy admit is smaller than the appropriate reduction for the non-legacy admit.
For the same reason, you should expect that, given a white student and a black student with equal SAT scores, the white student will be smarter. And in fact when you break down predictions by race, SAT scores overpredict black performance (relative to how SAT scores perform as predictors in general) by a very small amount.
> “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments
“Fairly-earned privilege” sounds more like a contradiction than anything. It's not privilege if it's fairly earned.
Semantics is important. Just as football players must keep their eyes on the ball, reasoners must keep their eyes on their concepts.
When we agree that privilege is wrong, what we agree on is the following: it is wrong for society to bestow benefits on those who have not earned them. A privilege is an unearned societal benefit. Thus a fairly earned privilege is a square circle.
A large portion of the populace can't readily separate fairness from equality.
There will be circumstances that some are treated better than others, and it will be labeled as privilege. Under your definition, the beneficiary can't assert that the privilege was earned and therefore fair.
What term would you suggest to use in place of "fairly earned privilege"?
Fairness is an ambiguous concept. In some situations fairness = equality. In some situations fairness = proportionality. Sometimes fairness = honesty. And who knows what else?
In place of 'fairly earned privilege' I would simply suggest desert. (As in 'deserve', not as in 'desert rose.')
Absolutely with you on the imprecision of "fair".
I think that the need to clarify the in-context meaning of "desert" makes in a poor fit for purpose.
Ultimately, I think that stipulating that privileges are inherently undeserved is ceding far too much ground to leftists.
You are taking an English word with many layered meanings and demanding that we only pay attention to your preferred definition.
I don't agree that privilege is intrinsically wrong at all margins, so I'm unclear how to read your entire second paragraph. I think there may in fact be privileges that are unacceptable in some platonic sense, but I don't know what they are.
My preferred equilibrium would be a much more significant estate tax, no income tax exemptions for donations, non-profit income, or religious organizations, and a basic income, then let society distribute status however people want to distribute it.
That's not how the modern left-wing conception of privilege works.
The "modern left-wing" conception of privilege is based on an elementary conceptual confusion. There is little doubt that this confusion is deliberate. No one is deceived by it, but a lot are annoyed to the point at which they give up.
There are two fundamentally different definitions of privilege at work. In one, the "driving isn't a right, it's a privilege" sense, privilege has to be earned and is supposed to be fairly earned. In the other, the "white male privilege" sense, privilege cannot be either earned or fair. It sucks that the same word has two contradictory meetings, but that's English As She Is Spoke.
You are correct that there are these two senses in English.
Four of the most famous people in history had teacher-student relationships: Socrates->Plato->Aristotle->Alexander the Great.
I think the last link is probably mostly a prestige thing as well.
Alexander did not become a brilliant general because Aristotle personally taught him philosophy (or strategy), but the circumstances which enabled his father to hire Aristotle as a tutor also placed him in a position where he was able to use his military genius to conquer vast quantities of lands.
Of course, now I wonder how much of the fame of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is causally linked to the conquests of Alexander (and various monarchs seeking to reproduce his education).
"Of course, now I wonder how much of the fame of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is causally linked to the conquests of Alexander (and various monarchs seeking to reproduce his education). "
For the western world Aristotle (via his writings that survive and what others at the time wrote about him) was pretty fundamental. Plato mattered, too. We only know about Socrates because of Plato.
I don't know my ancient Greek philosophers well enough to tell, but I don't think there are other (good) candidates for "important fundamentally to western philosophy."
Part of this may well be survivorship bias (which might be because, hey, let's study what Alexander studied!) -- you can't be terribly influential if all your works are destroyed. Sappho might have been a better poet than Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides but we have a lot more of their works than hers so they are the ones folks study more. Similarly, LOTS of works by other Greek philosophers have been lost or only survive in fragments (and it isn't like we have everything from Plato and Aristotle, either!).
But I think survivorship bias is a thing here, being actually important is a thing (though these intersect because folks are more likely to busily copy your works if you are seen as important) and, maybe, Alexander's conquests mattered, but I expect that to be a 3rd order effect at best.
> We only know about Socrates because of Plato.
Not true; Socrates also appears in some preserved ancient dramatic works.
> you can't be terribly influential if all your works are destroyed
This is also untrue, in a more interesting way. You can easily be extremely influential if all your works are destroyed. You may not be remembered by name... or you might! If tradition attributes a lot of existing significant works to the intellectual tradition that, also according to tradition, you founded, how could someone avoid admitting that you are extremely influential?
Classical literature teems with references to very significant works that we no longer have. Nobody believes that those works weren't influential, because you can easily read about how significant they were today.
Suppose that you believe in a historical Jesus. None of that person's works survive. (And perhaps no literary works ever even existed.) Was that person influential? Is that person still influential today?
Famous colleges have no doubt done studies of which applicants are likely to donate the most money over the next 60 years. Have any of these studies ever been published? Anybody have any links?
My impression from looking at the names on college buildings is that big donors tend to be legacies, jocks, men, business-oriented, frat boys, and Republicans or centrist Jewish Democrats (e.g., Michael Bloomberg).
That was precisely the theme of Daniel Markovits' book "The meritocracy trap". Remember that "meritocracy" wasn't initially invented as a positive word, but to denounce privilege laundering in the first place.
That sounds like a weird and misleading way to (mis)use the word though. Postmodernist arguments often use words in (secretly) redefined senses. Sometimes they try to 'prove' that 2+2=5 by redefining +, or redefining 2, or redefining =. Some of them think this makes them whimsical and funny, others even think it makes them smart. But I have never read or spoken to a postmodernist who was not a humorless mediocrity.
What are you talking about? Meritocracy has been invented in 1958 by M.D. Young, and reused by Markovits (prof at Yale) in his recent (2018?) book. I state that the "privilege laundering" interpretation isn't new, and has been arguably proven true already. This doesn't carry any relation with "postmodernism".
Meritocracy hasn't been invented in 1958. Perhaps the precise expression 'meritocracy' has been used for the first time in 1958. But meritocracy has been a liberal ideal since at least the eighteenth century.
Yes, and precisely since 1958 it's pretty well-known that it's a sham, an excuse to justify inequality and privileges.
It is truly sad this is what you think of the concept.
You know, I think even more radical things, for instance free will is an illusion and doesn't exist, the individual is powerless and individualism is a stupid ideology, there is no God, and many others :)
Your argumentation has all the wooly and muddy qualities of postmodernism. You are arguing that our ideal of meritocracy is a 'sham' because you are not doing meritocracy right anyway. You are arguing, in other words, that the ideal is wrong because the reality *you* have created is imperfect. Not only that, but you are implying that it's ok to make reality even worse, by such means as affirmative action, because, once again, in reality your country is not perfectly meritocratic (which is primarily the fault of the postmodern left anyway).
Before we get bogged down into further dissecting your sophistry, which is never useful with postmodernists anyway, let us at least agree on the following clear and succinct truths:
* the world is not perfectly meritocratic
* the US is not perfectly meritocratic either
* in the 1960s, the US was more meritocratic than it is today
* one of the primary culprits for reduced meritocracy today is 'affirmative action,' better described as racial discrimination (as well as other forms of unjust and nepotistic discrimination)
* the world would be better if it were meritocratic
* the US would be better if it were meritocratic
* the world would be more just if it were meritocratic
* the US would be more just if it were meritocratic
* the world would be wiser, smarter, and more knowledgeable if it were meritocratic
* the US would be wiser, smarter, and more knowledgeable if it were meritocratic
* a sick patient is not an argument that the patient needs more sickness, or a new kind of sickness; it is an argument that the patient needs more health
* an imperfectly meritocratic system is not an argument that the system needs less meritocracy
* obviously, an imperfectly meritocratic system is an argument that the system needs *more* meritocracy.
No doubt most of this must already be clear to you. The rest is pomo rhetoric.
No, we can't agree. The problem isn't that the current state of meritocracy is imperfect. The problem is that meritocracy *in itself* tries to justify inequality. You start from the axiom that some people are worth more than others; and this is a wrong premise in itself. It's the worst of all premises, actually, that can be used to justify absolutely *anything*. We're already reaching Godwin here.
Inequality arises from several different causes, but one of them is fair merit. Some people are just a lot more intelligent and capable than other people, and that will result in inequality and privilege. If you take two widget makers/sellers across the street from each other, one led by an intelligent, thoughtful leader, and one led by a social justice-y blank slater who never scored extremely highly, it will seem to people like you that the inevitably successful intelligent neighbor has mere rank unfair privilege. When he defends himself by saying the free market is meritocratic and that's why his business is doing so much better, you'll be playing this same tune.
"Merit is a myth."
"No, I'm actually smarter, more capable, and make a better product, and that's why I'm more successful."
"No. Merit is a myth."
There's nothing weird or misleading here, at least once you understand the obvious analogy to "aristocracy", have at least passingly heard of Goodhart's law, and realize that not having a ruling caste at all is also an option.
What's misleading is redefining the word to "we just need to choose the best person for the job, man" and pretending that anyone ever disagreed with that, instead of questioning the choice of the method or the need for some "jobs" to exist in the first place.
(Also, your misunderstanding of postmodernism is ironic on many levels.)
> What's misleading is redefining the word to "we just need to choose the best person for the job, man"
That is exactly what the word means in plain English.
> retending that anyone ever disagreed with that
A whole lot of ruling-class ideologues disagree with that. Have you never heard about 'competence bias'? We are now supposed to believe that it is unfair to hire the more competent applicants.
> your misunderstanding of postmodernism is ironic on many levels
Yes, yes. "You do not understand postmodernism." Where have we seen that move before?
>Have you never heard about 'competence bias'?
I have indeed never heard about 'competence bias' - which, unsurprising, since neither did, e.g., wikipedia. However, a quick google search would suggest that in the limited use the term sees, it's employed to mean, to quote the very first result, "a tendency to overestimate one's own abilities and the abilities of those who are similar to oneself".
Which, hilariously apropos - both as an example of your (non)understanding of terminology and confabulations that result from it, and as a diagnosis of your absolute refusal to get corrected.
There are many slogans that don't have wikipedia pages, and yet they exist, albeit only recently. I have heard/seen wokes pushing the notion that it's unfair to prefer competent people. Perhaps you haven't seen that yet, but it's likely coming soon to a theater near you...
I've actually interacted with wokies, and "I'm more competent, you just don't see it 'cause you're biased" is precisely their modus operandi. In comparison, you'll never ever catch them saying "I'm actually ignorant and useless but promote me anyway", because, first, culturally acquired (or, in a few unfortunate cases, actual) narcissism, second, nobody ever does that. Nobody. Ever. Think about it for a second.
You, I'm sorry, I don't think you've ever seen one in person. You fit all too well into a stereotype of someone getting all their info from an internet epistemic bubble. And yes, the fact that your go-to example was some niche term that does not even mean what you claimed it means very much adds to that impression - mining for irrelevant, obscure factoids and misrepresenting them is precisely how those bubbles work. But even if you did... and again, your go-to - and so far only - example is demonstrably based on your not understanding - this in addition to the entire discussion arising from your semantic misconception and refusal to give it up. Even if you heard/saw them, there's just no reason to trust you to have comprehended what they were saying.
>Remember that "meritocracy" wasn't initially invented as a positive word, but to denounce privilege laundering in the first place.
Okay...so what? The word is being used to mean something different than what you're claiming it was used by Markovits or whoever. Paying your way into college is pretty obviously counter to what supporters of meritocratic admissions policies would consider 'merit'. So the fact that a substantively different word was used in a negative way is irrelevant.
"Meritocracy" is a lie and always was. That's the point. It's not some sort of surprising discovery: M.D. Young coined the term in 1958.
> "Meritocracy" is a lie and always was.
In a different thread I explain to you why your argument is fallacious.
You reply to me in that thread:
> The problem isn't that the current state of meritocracy is imperfect.
So you admit that you're not concerned with whether it's a lie or not.
Rather, you say, your problem is that meritocracy justifies inequality.
So, when all the sophistry dissipates, you hate meritocracy because you suffer from what used to be called an 'inferiority complex,' and you resent those who are better than you.
Hm hm, I see that finesse and social abilities aren't your forte. Are you an electric blender, maybe? Or a libertarian? Talk about "human qualities"... Geez.
But you're not denying that your claims about meritocracy being a "lie" are a ruse, and that you already admitted that your problems are elsewhere.
America and much of the west does spend a lot more on poor and bad students than on rich and gifted ones.
Inner city schools in the US are the best funded by a long way, in the UK I got more resources for being mildly dyslexic than for being smart. There are vast resources spent on every kind of learning difficulty even when the financial return is dubious.
At least in my state the inner city schools which are collapsing spend by far the most per pupil among public schools. Way more than rich suburban schools.
This is blatantly false. Western countries spend much more on each privileged student than unprivileged one (even if on aggregate, the sheer numbers may look like "so much is spent on these poor").
For instance France spends 10270€ a year for general University students, but 16370€ for members of the elite "classes prépa". You'll find similar discrepancies everywhere : the best paid and most senior professors of all grades work in the best, most privileged schools, have bigger budget for books and activities, etc.
The continent is very different from the anglosphere. France is much more meritocratic in universities than the USA.
As for spending on students, I suspect Oliver is gesturing more at primary and secondary schools; The resources don't show up in the form of better teacher pay, of course, but in the form of security guards in bad neighbourhoods, in the for of 'aides' for any sort of disability - which are extremely expensive because they're often 1 to 1, compared to teachers that teach 30 at a time
France may be more meritocratic, but suffers from a weird disease : people with a diploma from a prestigious school (X, Mines, Ponts, ENA) will barely talk to people with lowly diplomas about any important business. They wouldn't consider working with you, or signing some big business deal if you're not if not an alumni from their school, at least one from some school or uni as prestigious as theirs.
So "school politics" get in the way of innumerable business ventures, scientific discoveries and governmental decisions. This is truly maddening and it's all too related to el famoso belief in "meritocracy". Because of course it takes "merit" and "'hard work" to get out of Polytechnique with a high grade, doesn't it? To the point where weird aristocratic traditions appear, for instance the head of RATP (company managing metros and buses in Paris) MUST be from Polytechnique (a military, math oriented school). Why is that? Probably because the very first boss if the company 120 years ago was from this school, so it must go on this way like forever...
"This is blatantly false even if the numbers say otherwise" is a rather overt admission that you're not interested in facts.
I already proved his dishonesty in a different thread, and he complained that I lack 'social abilities'. If by 'social abilities' is meant the I'm-alright-you're-alright kind of complacency, then it's about time we stopped being socially able...
Yeah because 10270€ is more than16370€. I had forgotten why I don't participate in these threads of immature shit hurling, thank you for the reminder :)
There must be a problem with my monitor, because it shows you writing "Western countries spend much more on each privileged student than unprivileged one" which as an absolute statement is false.
Maybe in France thigs are different, and maybe in whatever particular caste you've chosen to cherry-pick that could be the case. But to describe the most expensive students (which are those with disabilities) as "most privileged" is... weird even for a fourteen-year-old-who-just-discovered-nihilism.
I think you guys are talking about two different things. I think he's correct about secondary schools. IE, spending per student is very high in cities like New York City, DC, LA, etc., and the ROI is not very high. I think you are correct that at the college level, things are reversed and way more money is spent per student at picky colleges for upper middle class students than at East Nowheresville State College For the Working Poor.
There isn't college for the poor.
I agree that Community college do get less funding than elite colleges.
But all tertiary education places are middle class institutions even 2 year public colleges only have 33% of their intake from the bottom two parental income quintiles.
My thanks, but I have to say you read my comment a tad overly-literally.
Classes prepa are not the equivalent of general university in France and there is nothing similar to them in the UK or US.
Yes there is more spending on engineering and science than on other subjects, but I think that reflects the nature of the subjects rather than their eliteness.
One of the main things driving up the cost of education for inner city schools is the insane insistence on teaching everyone (with IEP, disability helpers etc.)
For instance I know a registered nurse whose full time job the state pays for is helping one single student attend school. That eats up a ton of resources.
If by "insane insistence" you mean required by federal law, sure.
I mean, I agree with you. I'd ban IDEA and ADA accomodations, I'd allow states to make their k-12 schools citizens only, I'd revoke Lau vs Nichols.
But don't pretend schools do this shit on their own.
As with many (most?) things, we should ask, “What would John Mulaney have to say?”
“I paid you $100,000 for you to tell me to read Jane Eyre . . . and I didn’t.”
"I'm going to leave my wife of 8 years for the first bimbo who smiles at me"
Oh, I doubt she was the first to do that. First to get knocked up by him, maybe.
The question is incredibly naive, as you would expect from a child. But the frightening thing is how common this naivety is among affirmative action supporters. Grown adults not being able to understand that sending the worst students to the "best" school will stop it being the best school. As if the 'bestness' of Harvard is some kind of intrinsic, durable property.
But I think all of this is rooted in the left-wing education myth. That is, to the extent that academic ability varies between people (and this isn't just white supremacy etc.), it is almost entirely explained by differences in educational "quality", which is obviously false. And I say this because I don't think even they are foolish enough to think that dumb kids graduating from harvard still dumb would be treated the way current harvard grads are treated. But we know clearly from the data that sending black people to college doesn't close the intellectual gap between them and white students. If anything, it grows i.e. the gap between black and white college grads is higher than for black and white high school grads, and this despite the survivorship bias resulting from a much higher dropout rate for black students (assuming dumber students are more likely to drop out).
One issue with https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2002-dale.pdf is that when you slice-and-dice the data post hoc like that, you are undoing the very controlling that was the point of the exercise. If the students who went to the elite college vs students who could've-but-didn't were originally comparable and so let you claim causality, they stop being comparable when you split them back up, and now confounding is back in play (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719). That is, low-income family students are a priori less likely to succeed or benefit for reasons like being more interested in welding than McBain (see the above hockey example), and it's more likely their admission was a fluke, so when they choose not to go to Harvard, they are revealing that they are *not* identical to their control group peer coming from Andover who of course accepts their admission - there may be a good reason they chose to reject their golden ticket, because they don't want it, they aren't ambitious, they know they can't hack it, etc.
Leftists' beliefs make sense if you accept the blank slate assumption, and completely crumble without it. Which is why they hold on to that assumption for dear life.
Everyone is fundamentally the same, everyone is fundamentally the same, everyone is fundamentally the same!
The Bell Curve (1994) is criticized as racist; well, yeah, kinda, but it stated that the average IQ African Americans was 85; Latino 89; White 103; Asian 106; and Jews 113. This does not seem like a comfortable platform for, say, white supremacists. I'll note that ~60% of the world's population is Asian...
60% of the world’s population lives in the continent of Asia, but Asia is a big and diverse place. if by Asian you implicitly mean East Asian then only 20% of the world population is East Asian
About 20% is Chinese, sure. About 17.5% is Indian - south Asian - another bright cohort...
A complication: the world Chinese population > the population of China; lotta emigres, you know? And hey, when did India's population surpass China's?! I missed that one...
A good friend of mine teaches maths at a mediocre university in the UK. This university recently slipped in rank from an already middling position and they had to lower the intake grade requirements one notch to maintain student numbers. Their list of coursee does not look any different from last year or from a list at a top university and it cannot really look very different as they would lose their accreditation if they dropped e.g. differential equations from their maths degree. Even a two page course content sheet does not look very different from one at a top university, at least for a layman. However, as these courses are now taught for lower level students, they need to spend more time at the basics and barely touch the advanced stuff. They still include the advanced stuff in the exams, but they are now just teaching it to ensure reasonable exam pass rates and do not actually achieve reasonable understanding of the subject for any bar a few top students. My friend is now really disillusioned and most of his skills of teaching advanced stuff are now wasted and these students barely get to the level of maths knowledge of an average graduate from a top high school after a 3 years degree. So even if course subjects look the same as ones at a top university , deep down below course contents is very different and require a different skill set to teach, and the first optimistic answer stands.
Underlying intelligence differences trump all else
Math is a particularly fierce field for this. To do understand the advanced stuff, you need both intelligence and diligence. To a degree, you can replace some of one characteristic with considerable amounts of the other, and I've seen people who did this in both directions. But the minimum for both characteristics is considerably above average.
I've skimmed the comments and I'm kinda surprised (not really, since it's sort of a taboo subject in certain circles) the way everyone here including Scott seems to have never heard of Sander and Taylor's work on 'mismatch.' They documented really well that students who are taught with peers of largely similar academic skills actually do better (they specifically looked at bar exam pass rates out of law schools) than similar students who are admitted to universities where the bulk of the class is well above their academic level. I think your anecdote, while understandably depressing, gives a good real world example of why this is true. If one half of the class already knows the fundamentals, one quarter is smart enough to catch on with minimal instruction, and the last quarter is going to struggle to grasp them, that last quarter is going to be largely left behind. They would have done better in an environment that could have provided good grounding in the basics with some additional advanced work.
Yale Law School teaches a lot of boutique theory classes to third year students. Run of the mill law schools spend the third year trying to get their students up to speed to pass the bar exam.
My question is about undergrad engineering programs. How much do they differ in difficulty between colleges?
Difficulty might not be the right word; I'd lean towards comprehensiveness.
Anecdote: I've been mentoring a friend's teenager since high school to get into aero engineering in our flagship state university; I did my undergrad in aero elsewhere at a much more selective school. The major's requirements here only cover up through what I did my junior year.
Is it enough to be a productive new hire for Boeing? Certainly. But they're not going to go to JPL or Skunk Works with just that much.
"My question is about undergrad engineering programs. How much do they differ in difficulty between colleges?"
My younger, mechanical engineer, brother was slated to teach a 3rd year ME class at a public university you have heard of, but not one that makes the top few hundred in USNWR rankings. He handed out a test very early on which included a bunch of fundamental questions about ME so that he could gauge where the class was.
The VAST majority of these 3rd year engineering students didn't seem to understand that a 2:1 gear ratio did NOT double the energy output. And lots of other totally missing concepts that he thought were pretty fundamental to being a successful engineer (*).
I *hope* that the better engineering programs are graduating students who know that energy is conserved (or, in practice, lost due to things such as friction!) rather than something you can manufacture with gears. I hope.
(*) NOTE: My CalState Hayward (not East Bay) educated wife with a degree in Liberal Studies looked at me when asked the question and asked, "Isn't the energy the same?" Conservation of energy doesn't HAVE to be a super-tricky concept.
Im dubious about that. It Engineering wasn’t consistent enough across courses then those engineers in known bad courses, particularly in mechanical engineering where there’s a clear empirical measurement in industry, would be unemployable.
You can’t really produce bad engineers or the bridges collapse.
I genuinely wonder how elastic various measures of economic performance are to the ‘quality’ of the workforce. It’s not even obvious that the relationship should be, say, linear, though it is very likely monotonic.
So you're saying that grades at a mid-tier school mean something different than grades at a top-tier school. Which shouldn't be the case, because if all students in a school had ability levels of say, SAT 1200 or higher, everyone would learn. But they don't have a minimum SAT score because that would basically declare the bulk of blacks and Hispanics ineligible for college. So they accept a lot of students with low abilities, requiring the professors to lower the standards for everyone.
Now take that same logic down to high school and you'll see why using grades in college admissions is fucking ludicrous.
I know a kid who recently graduated high school and is off to college in September. In April he was evaluated and his reading level was found to be that of a first-grader. He was accepted without SATs at a number of schools including several Cal State campuses.
I don't know which I'm more dreading more: seeing this nice kid flunk of out his first semester, or seeing him pass, with all that implies about college.
> Their list of coursee does not look any different ... from a list at a top university
I highly doubt this. Here are the Schedules for undergraduate mathematics at Cambridge: https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/files/schedules.pdf . I highly doubt the third year courses (part II) look anything like these ones if the level of the average graduate matches a good high schooler.
Ok, I made two relevant claims in my comment: 1) that a middling university high-level course overview is very similar and even course outline is similar to a layman's view to a top course and that 2) graduates from math BA degree at middling universities are not much better qualified than average graduates from a top school.
The first point is pretty easy to check. Take a ranking of math departments (e.g. https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/rankings/mathematics?tabletype=full-table) , take a university close to the bottom, find their program, and compare to one on your link. I took pretty randomly Sussex: their program is here https://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/mathematics-bsc . I stand by my claim that the list of subjects is not really different. I could not find detailed course contents for Sussex, but is it obvious to a layman that e.g. Partial Differential Equations course description given here http://www.sussex.ac.uk/mps/datamaths/syllabus/current/28223.html# is that different from a similar course at Cambridge?
The second claim is harder to check, but an average top high school graduate skills are probably at the level of borderline passing Cambridge math entrance STEP exam (see here for problem examples https://undergroundmathematics.org/browse?typeOption=ReviewQuestion&reviewQuestionType=6) . My friend is pretty confident that none of his final year students would pass it.
I think you're conflating how intelligent the students are with how much they've learned. The STEP exams only require knowledge of A level Maths and Further Maths (would be pretty unfair otherwise), and the difference in performance is going to be mostly due to talent/intelligence. Learning more advanced degree-level material is not necessarily going to allow the Sussex students to pass the STEP, but they will still know a lot more maths than the ones about to start at Cambridge.
Ok, let me rephrase. There are two ways for someone to "know" a mathematical theory: W-knowledge when they heard the words and can reproduce the definitions and main theorems and P-knowledge when they can apply this theory in practice.
STEP indeed requires only A level kind of stuff in the sense of W-knowledge. It is quite far outside of A level instruction in the sense of P-knowledge. International Math Olympiad problems are even further in that corner: they can be at the level of 5th grade in terms of W-knowledge and difficult to many PhD mathematicians in terms of P-knowledge.
When we look at a course description we see only a W-knowledge outline of the course and these are quite similar between universities. When a university needs to dumb down the course to accommodate weaker students, they are usually keeping W-knowledge content of the course constant, but dilute P-knowledge exam requirements. It is not yet at the level of questions like "If you have three cotangent bundles and are given one more, how many cotangent bundles do you have?" but is getting close to that.
So I agree with you when you write that "[low ranked university] students will still know a lot more maths than the ones about to start at Cambridge", but only in the sense that they would W-know that. However, they would not have much P-knowledge, and thus would be mostly unable to apply their knowledge to anything. Even worse, W-knowledge instruction is very dulling and boring for those low ranked university students who are bright but were poorly taught at high school.
That sounds fair, and I think I know what you mean by W-knowledge and P-knowledge, but what do the letters stand for?
That's something I just made up, derived from Words and Problems respectively
> That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people.
If we're talking about actually admitting people because their family is donating money, this would seem to be a substantial overestimate. There's actually a term for people admitted because their family donated money, and it's "development case": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_case
At least going by that page (I haven't looked into it much further), the actual fraction of these is no more than about 5%. This linked article says that (at Dartmouth at least) it used to be more like 1% back in the 90s and 00s, and rose to about 5% in the 2010s: https://web.archive.org/web/20190316233913/http://www.dartblog.com/data/2014/09/011686.php So it's *possible* it's larger now? But if so that would seem to be a recent phenomenon.
This does leave the possibility of larger-scale "privilege laundering" via legacy admissions, essays, and activities and whatnot, so it's hard to say exactly what's going on -- and, if such a thing is occurring, it's actually *deliberate* -- but in terms of actual development cases they're much smaller. (With Harvard it does seem like this more general privelege-laundering is likely deliberate, from what I've read. Seems harder to say about other schools, though.)
Back in 2010, a somewhat rich man told me he'd made some calls around to find out how much it would cost to get his daughter into Harvard, where he had met his wife. He said the number he was told was $5 million if she was wait-list worthy, $10 million if she was not. "Damn hedge fund guys ruin it for everybody," he grumbled.
But your numbers are pretty wrong. Harvard accepts 75% smart/talented people, but the lower tiers of those are rich and powerful. Harvard accepts 25% who aren't smart and talented, but most of that group are the affirmative action admits.
The pretense that the rich and powerful's kids aren't also smart is fun, but kinda silly.
Interesting questions. I have misc thoughts.
On the less cynical side, advanced research has to happen somewhere and the people doing that want more people who can help (despite universities tilting further and further towards undergraduate education from research).
Also, instead of "best", you could say "most advanced". If we optimised for teaching we might put the most knowledgeable people teaching the most advanced students, and the best teachers teaching the students who most need to progress. What actually happens? A bit of both. Advanced universities often have more funding which naturally produces better teaching, but they don't prioritise "good teachers" as much as other things.
From the more cynical end of the spectrum, lots of institutions are "people with influence channelling people with ability". Sometimes the channelling is almost pure parasitism like modern academic journals which add almost nothing to the academic process other than a monopoly. Sometimes the channelling is the most valuable part (I don't know which, but I'm sure SOME big breakthroughs happened because someone had a vision and brought the right smart people together and wouldn't have happened otherwise). Universities used to be more patronage "richduke had money and chose to subsidise some random smart people". You can see that as generosity or monopoly depending whether you see the baseline as "everyone has enough to eat" or "everyone has as much as they can grab".
I think that there is also a spectrum of experience at college; not everyone who goes to the elite colleges (be that the Ivies or Oxbridge) is going to have the same experience. Some of the students will be doing the dining clubs and secret societies and rich dickheads experience, others will be "I'm here to get an education".
The ones there to get advantage from networking opportunities may or may not include some of the "Black, Hispanic, and Native American voices" who are there for the diversity quota. If a smart, poor kid can get a leg-up into the class above their natal one and make connections which they can leverage in their career, good luck to them - but this applies to poor white kids from rural states as well. I wonder how much true diversity was in Maya's "classes, [where] we had discussions about race, identity, and oppression"? If everyone has the same opinion and comes to the same conclusions, how diverse is that?
Like others in the comments here, I think it is as much about networking as signaling and education – but not networking in the shallow sense of “it’s all about who you know, not what you know”, but about meeting people who help you fulfill your potential.
My father’s favorite piece of advice for deciding where to go to college was that “you don’t need Lee Iacocca to teach you about supply and demand”. (Which usually led to quizzical looks, since very few college-bound Norwegians of this millennium know who Lee Iacocca was.)
The suggestion was that going to a top-tier university for your bachelor’s degree was a waste of money. And going for other degrees might also be a waste of money.
Since it influenced some of my own choices, I resented the naivety of that advice for years into my career – until I realized that I probably would have wasted an Ivy League education, and failed to grab the opportunities it afforded me, in much the same way that I wasted my actual education.
However, for those who are wicked smart and know how to take advantage, top-tier universities can offer you a peer group that can challenge you in a way very few others can, motivate you to reach higher that you thought was possible, and give you networking opportunities that open doors you might not even know existed and clear obstacles out of your way.
Genius and talent will often go stale and dull in a pool of mediocrity – unrecognized, unmotivated, confused for eccentricity or confusion, left to stagnate. But when pitted against other genius and talent, professors and peers who get it and challenge it and nurture it, it gets to sparkle and shine. You see it in music and literature and sports and science and business and culinary arts: The very best rarely appear alone.
And so, why do we send the top students to the top colleges? It’s a bit like asking why we send the best athletes to the best sports leagues. (“Send”, as if they don’t have a say in it themselves.) Because that’s where they can meet the people who can help them reach their full potential – not so much by teaching them, even though that is part of it, as by challenging them, supporting them, and putting them in the competition for the highest achievements.
And, when the best athletes and students congregate in one place, others dream of joining, and it becomes a self-perpetuating system for supporting excellence (which is strong enough to withstand some inevitable corruption and gaming of the system).
It would be interesting to study how top college baseball prospects decide where to go. College baseball players tend to be upscale. For example, the most successful major leaguer I ever knew was the son of a lawyer who was a superb Little League coach and his older brother was an accountant who became a highly successful player's agent. The family chose Stanford.
Agreed.
It would be interesting to learn more about how all top athletes decide where to go, and what athletic and financial trade-offs they’re willing to make for a better academic fit and vice versa + how much existing privilege matters to the decision.
Top baseball prospects don’t go to college at all, since they can be drafted at 18 and signed directly into the minor league system, which is generally regarded as better prep for the majors than
So a lot of the top college players are a combination of “not quite good enough to go pro, at least not right away” and “from a posh enough family that Getting a Good Education is more attractive than playing better baseball but living a lower status life in the minors”.
Most of the best college teams are on the West Coast or in the Southeast, which seems to be entirely a weather based phenomenon. It’s a spring sport in college and it doesn’t make enough money to support fancy year round facilities.
Stanford is historically pretty good at baseball, and has the benefits of location and prestigious degree, so it’s not a surprising choice.
My friend's view in the 1990s was that the minors were a waste for a pitcher. His brother got better coaching (and medical care) at Stanford. In the minors, the manager had him doing dumb training stuff when he was suffering a hip injury like running up and down the bleachers. The kid finally walked off the team, came back to L.A. and had Sandy Koufax's old surgeon operate on him. He eventually won a Cy Young.
I'd imagine that front offices in this century have invested in smartening up the minor league experience. But, still, it's hard for a lower minor league team to have the kind of resources that a Stanford has.
If you are drafted out of high school, and don’t sign with the team that drafted you, you have to stay in college for at least 3 years before you are draft eligible again. If you’re good enough to get drafted at 18, you’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table if you commit to 3 years of college ball. Maybe less so in the NIL era?
In hockey, NHL teams retain rights to drafted players for 2 years if they go to a CHL team, or until 30 days after they leave college if they go that route. So in that case the teams potentially have an incentive to keep players in college, since it gives them development time without costing the team anything, or starting the countdown to free agency.
Aside from signaling, one of the functions of the university is acculturation. By admitting a mix of the brightest and the hereditary elite, the Ivies help to build a shared culture under their own influence.
(1) I am always highly suspicious of anecdotes involving cute moppets going "Papa, whither the course of educational attainment amongst the student body of our fair nation?" Maybe Matt's five year old is that precocious, but I do wonder about "what kind of discussion was Daddy having about such topics to set Kiddie up for that cute quote?" Much like all the women who go online about their six year old (and then some other woman goes on to cap it with 'well, my *four* year old did even more achingly woke thing') doing the Wakanda forever salute for Ruth Bader Ginsburg because of LGBT rights.
You thought I was joking about Rutkanda Forever?. Nope, I just got the details wrong:
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/ruthkanda-forever-memes/
(2) "Harvard students and faculty who are descended from people held in slavery in the United States"
Good God, how many more euphemisms can we come up with? I had just got used to seeing "enslaved" and "enslavers" used instead of "slaves" and "slave-owners" (which had been replaced first by "slave-holders") and now we're up to "people held in slavery". I now fully expect to see the unironic use soon of "prisoners with jobs" because now "slave" is a slur? How much more can we dilute terms in order to keep the grievance hamster wheel turning?
I think in Germany in certain universities there is a bit of an opposite effect: some of the big technical universities accept all applicants, but then are extremely rigorous in their sorting. Their degrees are prestigious precisely because you are expected to have "fought your way through" an anonymous, underfunded system with very poor tutoring and nobody actually caring whether you show up or not.
The University of California campuses used to be rather like that -- high acceptance rate, high flunk out rate. Six of my high school class of 1976 flunked out of UCLA the next year. But UC schools are easier to get through now but much harder to get into.
I went to an university which accepted everyone (and failed a lot of them in the first semesters), and I actually like this setup better than prefiltering.
Of course, even there, being rich gives lots of slack. A rich kid spending two semesters to figure out subject X is not for them will be in a much better position than a poor kid studying on BAföG (50% taxpayer money, 50% student debt) or someone having to work while studying.
Netherlands (e.g. Leiden) too.
In the final paragraph you say "I expect that without such a system the elites would do their own thing without any concession to merit whatsoever - so maybe it beats the alternative"
So then why does the elite bother at all? If they control access to their ranks, why do they make this concession to merit at all? Certainly in most human societies the elite has never ruled on the pretense of being smarter, so why do it in ours?
Furthermore, does the elite in the US really control access to their ranks? Since more wealth in our society is newly created than is inherited, I would say they do not have this power (look how Zuckerberg vs Winklevoss turned out). If you look at a list of the richest Americans, you have to go outside the top 10 before you see inherited fortunes. And even then, it's only 1 generation inherited (Koch, Walmart). So it makes more sense that the reason for elite universities is that the current elites get to network with the next generation of elites (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, not the children of past elites) than that they just want the aura of "merit" around them.
> Certainly in most human societies the elite has never ruled on the pretense of being smarter, so why do it in ours?
I'm not sure that's true. Medieval nobles definitely believed they were better-suited to rule than the presents, which is essentially just saying "smarter". And up until very recently, voting rights have been restricted on the basis of some people theoretically being better able to make an informed vote, which again is essentially just saying "smarter".
It worked a bit differently than our modern meritocratic notion - i.e. I am elite, therefore I'm smarter and more capable; not I am smarter, therefore I should be elite. But I do think "we're smarter" has always been an important fig leaf for the rulers.
"And up until very recently, voting rights have been restricted on the basis of some people theoretically being better able to make an informed vote, which again is essentially just saying 'smarter'."
It is a mistake to use 'smarter' as a synonym for 'better.'
For voting, I want a few things in a voter besides smart. One thing I want is 'skin in the game.' A landowner is going to be invested in my city/state/country in a way that someone who can just pickup and move is not. It is easier to vote for something that might be destructive of the neighborhood when you are a renter and can just pick up and move if things go south.
I don't know that the initial US voting laws were about getting a 'smarter' electorate as an electorate who had skin in the game.
The idea that you always want someone smarter making the decisions without taking into account their interests (and how those interests may well be in opposition to your own) strikes me as foolish.
They very well may have thought that. But they never bothered to commit significant resources to convincing the population that they were as in the reputation laundering thesis. Therefore, I would say it wasn't an part of their legitimacy as it is today.
"Is is true? An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life. "
A non-sequitur if I ever saw one, given the preceding paragraphs. What does income have to do with finding the cure for cancer? Maybe it ought to; if someone found the forever cure for all the cancers, they'd probably deserve to be among the top earners in the world. But I don't see that as an unavoidable consequence, because scientists in particular seem to be in the game for their personal satisfaction and prestige among peers rather than the big money. At least much more than your typical investment banker or what have you.
They controlled for all the observable applicant characteristics besides which school they went to. Ceteris paribus being smarter increases income (and the effect is large and causal in the smart->income direction, but very weak in the reverse direction) So going to a better school probably doesn’t make you smarter or it would have showed up as a residual in the average incomes.
> But this seems false; most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else; you don’t get into subjects that need world experts until postgrad.
At least in math and physics, the point of elite undergrad education is absolutely not the undergrad classes themselves. The leading incoming freshmen have already taught themselves at least half the undergrad curriculum and are doing graduate-level work by the second year, or sometimes even the first. (I wasn't at that level, but my first quantum field theory had 19 year olds, my string theory class had a 17 year old, and my PhD advisor was in the equivalents of those classes at 15.) Students of this sort clear out the graduate-level classes quickly and then progress to research, so they absolutely benefit from being at top colleges. The research opportunities and the network of peers makes an enormous difference to their lives.
My impression from within academia is that many STEM professors recognize this and therefore want to have such students around, but the admissions officers (except at a few enlightened places) block them. That's because the typical admissions officer is a freshly graduated English major who only views math as an instrument of torture. To these officers, such kids are uncharismatic and alien, and worst of all, their naively enthusiastic essays lack any sense of irony or pathos. It is an easy rejection. All the oddities of college admissions are not centrally planned or rationally chosen, they emerge from the biases and preconceptions of this class of people.
Are there mechanisms that allow them to skip large portions of the curriculum? Presumably they didn’t have to complete all the required classes for these advanced ones
Certainly, in universities set up for this kind of thing, you can skip past many courses as long as you demonstrate competence. It works as long as the professors are judging, rather than administrators.
Hard and fast prerequisites for specific classes are relatively rare, and can often be bypassed by e.g. AP classes or community college credits from high school. And undergrad requirements are often less “take this class” and more “take X credits in this subject”.
Lots of schools also offer some degree of credit sharing between undergrad and grad degrees (I was able to get a masters in a single year through such a program - essentially all my senior undergrad classes were graduate level and the credits double-counted toward both degrees).
So e.g. you might need 12 credits of “math” to get a certain undergrad degree but the smartest kids were filling that with grad level classes in their freshman year.
> but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.
She gets to know lots of presumably smart people to give oil contracts to? (and, like, the very extended interview sort of know, instead of just "ah yes they went to Harvard".)
Why does Kim Kardashian list "Harvard" as her alma mater when all she did was attend (read pay for) an executive MBA?
There's a missing aspect here, at least as the stories always described it some years ago (I'm struggling to find a source). Reportedly, Princeton would admit about 1/5 of the class from rich-but-not-super-rich families that were smart, but clearly a step below the top standard.
Why? Well, in any class, some of the kids will have to be at the bottom; that's how a graded/ranked system works. Super-smart kids are smart and competitive enough to get into Princeton, so they would be unhappy to be at the bottom. The super-rich kids are too few in number and too entitled to form the bottom quintile easily/happily. But students who realize the others around them are smarter would feel lucky to have gotten in at all and have a baseline of gratitude to the school. They'd be perfectly happy to be at the bottom of a *Princeton* class, and after graduation, would form the nucleus of the alumni-jobs-and-donations network.
Being a legacy is probably a significant plus to be a bottom-fifth admit, for obvious reasons.
I don't know whether it's true, but Princeton is perennially #1 in alumni donations and engagement, so if it's true, then it works.
The concept “best school” is complicated.
I highly recommend the book “40 colleges that change lives”. There are quite a few colleges which don’t make traditional top 10 lists, which are more likely to provide the an excellent education to a student. As most of us have experienced, having access to a good teacher, makes all the difference, both in terms of how much we learn and how much we enjoy the subject.
When my children were in middle school and high school, I would occasionally get asked by another parent whether I would recommend that their child try to take the harder level of a math class or the less hard level. I always recommended that they try the harder level because our experience was that the “harder” classes tended to be easier and much more beneficial for the students because they would get matched with the better teachers .
One of my friends teaches at the Naval Academy in a technical area and she says that there is a huge difference in her enjoyment and ability to make significant progress when teaching the “best” versus the “worst” students. The category “worst students” includes students that are least prepared, some students that are least motivated, and some students that have the worst study habits. She can make substantial progress with those who want to work hard and learn, but the combination of challenged students in the lowest level classes makes her job very hard. So most teachers enjoy teaching the advanced classes much more.
There are also schools that have attracted some of the best known professors but then don’t have those professors teaching the classes because they’re carrying out research. So doing your homework to try to figure out where you get the best education can really pay off.
My definition of best education for college included some sense of social responsibility and some sense of life work balance. So we were put off by hearing from MIT students that they were overwhelmed by the amount of material and many of them were depressed. We were also put off when Harvard told us that their libraries were open 24 hours a day. My three children picked three amazing schools: McDaniel College, Williams College, and Olin College of Engineering, all of which had good reputations for teaching, and for a balance of education and other life values.
That said, if you wanted to send your child someplace where they would make connections with powerful people, Harvard might still be the best choice.
If the elites control the money supply, they can print money to reward themselves for whatever they deem good and worthy.
If the money supply is not politically controlled, and most wealth is ephemeral (networks, brands, and technologies, not land and physical resources), now the elites _have_ to compete on merit because they have no other means on which to compete.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Consider an oil magnate as a central archetype of a member of the elite.
They are wealthy, but not in control of the money supply (and it would not to their long-term benefit if the fed turned on the printing presses). They could leave all their money to their kids and have them raised by wolves before, but they realize this would not maximize the utility of the money for the kids. So they instead spent a part of their fortune to get their kids an expensive education, buy them a place in a prestigious degree program and generally try to optimize for the best mixture of material and ephemeral benefits.
If you just want a cynical explanatory rather than a justificatory answer, there's no need for most of the interesting speculation about signaling theory.
Top-level professional academics want to work with each other and with top-level students, and top-level students want the same. The people who run Harvard (and most universities) are a mix of idealists who want their university to do the best scholarship possible and cynics who want to attract as much alumni and grant money as possible; therefore, they try to recruit good scholars to make the virtuous scholastic synergism work, while slipping in some proportion of reasonably bright rich elites who can be counted on for automatic prestige and generous alumni donations.
The scholars get to intellectually inspire each other, the reasonably bright rich elites get to socialize with each other in final clubs, and the university gets paid in proportion to its success at making the scholars wealthy geniuses and the elites wealthy well-connected elites. Non-Harvard universities are generally trying to imitate this model as closely as possible, but they're less prestigious (self-fulfillingly) because they are less able to compete for the limited pool of brilliant faculty and brilliant and/or rich students.
Even in undergrad it's not the same material which is a huge part of the explanation that got dismissed here. When I was studying abroad at University of Queensland my girlfriend visited and sat in on a biochem lecture about the electron transport chain. She was amused because they did the standard vague "redox reactions happen and protons cross the mitochondrial membrane" explanation but the Amherst College biochem class went in on the chemical details of how various heme structures actually allow that to happen.
As a funnier example my physics professor told us a story about an acquaintance describing learning Ohm's Three Laws. Impressed, my professor asked what they were since he only knew the one. The three laws were: V=IR, I=V/R, and R=V/I.
More generally everything is like this, knowledge is fractal! You can learn about compact spaces as "closed and bounded" or as "space where every open cover has a finite subcover". Complex impedance helps you understand circuits but you don't strictly need it in an E&M class. And so on. Grouping students of similar ability together allows you to match talent to the appropriate depth and pace; if you randomly sorted students into colleges then for any given class ~40% of students would be overwhelmed and 40% would be bored out of their minds.
A subtlety: you don’t get the full signal just by being accepted to Harvard, you do generally need to actually graduate from Harvard, and Harvard has to put on all the trappings of actually being a highly elite education. In that sense it’s the same (useful, if overpriced) signal as every other college - a graduate has shown some minimum degree of seriousness and studiousness. Not saying there aren’t easy pathways or ways the very tippy top elites might pull the levers to get their most dullard progeny through, but I think that’s more rare than the preference at the admissions level.
Of course they most meritorious thing of all is to drop out of Harvard to go do something earth changing and extremely lucrative. You’re literally too smart for Harvard! But for that to work you have to actually be objectively talented, or at least have one really good idea and the ability to execute it.
"A subtlety: you don’t get the full signal just by being accepted to Harvard, you do generally need to actually graduate from Harvard"
They have a 97% graduation rate. Being accepted pretty much guarantees that you will make it through.
I think Gbdub wasn't trying to say that graduating Harvard was difficult once you were accepted, but that if you got accepted and kept the acceptance letter but never graduated (maybe you never attended) you don't get the benefit. Zuck and Bill Gates being obvious exceptions ... but they aren't thought of as "Harvard guys" but as fantastically successful businessmen.
I mean, I’m a smart guy, went to a a selective school. There was zero chance I wasn’t graduating, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard or that I didn’t learn anything.
Like I said, I’m sure there are some easier modes than others at Harvard but I do think there is some base level of effort and conscientiousness required to actually get the degree.
I'm literally a math professor specializing in topology (though not "ten-dimensional hypertopology"). When I was at MIT as an undergrad I took the most advanced topology courses on offer in my sophomore and junior years, and jumped into research. Being around MIT professors was essential to my mathematical development, and so I strongly disagree with the second paragraph of this essay.
Great post!
Who's this "we" that's sending the best students to the best schools? Nobody "sent" me to an elite school. I chose to go there, and the school chose to allow me to go there. My parents would have contributed financially wherever I chose to go.
Why wouldn't I prefer a good school, as good a school as I could get?
Why wouldn't a good school prefer good students, as good as they could get? The better the students, the better for the professors, the research, and the quality of classroom discussion. (Apart from the handful like legacies and athletes who are admitted for money reasons. Heck, even the good students are admitted partly for money reasons; they're more likely to be rich donors down the road.)
It's microeconomics, not macroeconomics.
Im not American but these kinds of arguments seem to flounder on the use of affirmative action by the elite universities. Which is pretty significant. There have to be smarter students outside the gates than inside the gates (especially Asians).
Not necessarily. If the institution is assuming or concluding that there's no inherent difference in intelligence between races, affirmative action still enables them to take the cream of the crop. Those outside the gates would be higher-achieving academically but also more likely to grow up in a high-achievement-supporting environment. There's still some institutional cost on helping the disadvantaged students catch up, but it's worth it to support/restore equal opportunity.
>Who's this "we" that's sending the best students to the best schools? Nobody "sent" me to an elite school
Excellent point. I know many people who turned down ivys for other programs due to non-academic factors. Money mostly, but also location, friends, "vibe", hell the quality of dorms is a big factor for many students, so is weather - why else do people go to crap schools in Florida, Arizona, California?
In case anyone hasn't already mentioned it, Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" is very much worth reading if you're interested in learning more about the signaling theory of education. I'm almost finished with it, and I find it to be fairly thorough and comprehensive.
Bryan Caplan's book is utter fucking garbage. His stats are incorrect, he ignores evidence that would contradict his theory, his analysis is cheap and shallow,and unforgiveably for a book on American education, he ignores race.
By the way, when I say his book is garbage, I don't mean that I disagree that much of education is signaling. He's just pig ignorant.
I read the whole thing, and wrote a very thorough and comprehensive series, so welcome to it.
On how America's approach to education is different, which Caplan ignores. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-how-did-we-get-here/
On his utter bullshit about how easy it'd be to do employment testing:
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-pre-employment-testing/
On the way he basically lied about how the literacy reports showed Americans weren't learning: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/08/31/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-toe-fungus-prevention/
On his failure to acknowledge he was including non-english speakers who weren't educated in America: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-how-well-are-americans-educated/
And most importantly, on his failure to acknowledge that if America took his advice most blacks and Hispanics wouldn't go past 8th grade: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-average-was-always-over/
Of course, Caplan wants to not only quit teaching low ability Americans, he wants open borders to bring in lots of cheap labor to screw up their lives even more.
Aggression notwithstanding, thank you for your response. I'm working on reading your series. Are you aware of whether he's written a response to your criticisms? If he has, could you direct me towards it? If not, I just want to let you know that I'll point out your criticisms to him in case there's a chance he'd want to respond. I ultimately don't know who's right broadly speaking, and you do raise some good objections, but the one thing that I do believe about Caplan is that he's not trying to act in bad faith.
The aggression wasn't towards you. Caplan drives me crazy, as does people's response to him. He's generously retweeted my articles but doesn't respond. You'll notice Caplan never discusses race. That's how he avoids the obvious conclusions of his policies.
If he's not acting in bad faith,then he's so ignorant he shouldn't be writing on these topics.
I know the aggression wasn't directed at me. I'm probably more libertarian than him, and I imagine that you'd be right about the racial implications in the short term but that, given time, blacks and latinos would carve out a place in all manner of professional fields. That may not sound correct to you, but it really seems that focusing on letting the best excel within any demographic leads to downstream positive effects for the entire community.
As I said, I don't actually oppose Caplan's primary point. He's just so inept and wrong about implementation and the value of human capital that his way would destroy the country.Not that anyone takes him seriously.
But no, blacks and Hispanics would not carve out a place in all manner of professional fields if we restricted college to, say, 1200 SAT scores and above. Which is why we should probably restrict it to something like 1000 and above. But beyond that, we shouldn't make much distinctions. That is, we shouldn't consider a 1500 better than a 1400 and so on. Just 1000-1200, 1200-1400, 1400-1600. Then lotteries.
And no grades.
I'm actually on board with reducing the prominence of grades at higher levels, simply because it seems that you can communicate a lot more information about a student's particular competencies by describing what topics they studied, how they responded to challenge problems, what (if any) advanced topics/projects they pursued, and which questions (if any) they asked which suggest a predilection for research. But as a matter of economics, grades will always be necessary to have a standard of performance. In a way, we already have most of what we need between grades, standard course curricula, and recommendations at lower levels.
I definitely agree that standardized test scores should be in bins, but the bins shouldn't have uniform width given the normal distribution of test scores. So basically the test score will be boiled down to a rank corresponding to the bin it falls into, and that rank will be what is used in concert with the other admissions information utilized to make a decision.
I think he fully understands the value of human capital, but his argument is that schooling currently is not meeting its goal of producing human capital outside of alright literacy and numeracy. Of course I think school was originally conceived of to groom young people into being compliant workers and indoctrinate them towards the legitimacy of the state (or whatever the status quo is).
My personal view is that education is incredibly valuable for some people if done right — often involving a fair amount of tailoring. Detaching the state from education and instead leaving it to the market will allow such diversity of approach to flourish because of a mix of supply & demand and competition. Change in demographic access *is* possible and (to me) likely given time. Don't get to thinking that how things have been is how it always will be. Blacks and latinos have demonstrated incredibly growth in past decades, and that growth has stagnated most often in places where they are pitied by policy.
it's not just Caplan..This is.part of a pattern in the rationalsphere where one author is considered to have the last word on a subject , even if they are far from expert, and everyone else is ignored.
LIke that unspeakable yutz who says hey, let's start boys in school later than girls, because even though boys get better test scores and make more money,more girls get good grades through conformity so they're smarter.
I think debates about college always get confusing if you lump together the "learning actual necessary knowledge for the future" functions (For say, mechanical engineers) with the signalling/approval/privilege functions (here is your communication major from Bad College X or Harvard). Yglesias' son (unironically) thinks school (where he is learning to read/write) is about learning necessary things for Life (like reading and writing), and so assumes college is like that.
"Best" college has the same issue. Best at what? The 5 year old assumes it means the best at teaching/improving student's knowledge, but we all know that is not what Harvard is best at. Step 1 in any difficult issue is to clarify what we're actually talking about!
There's a reason the adjective "academic" can be used as a pejorative.
How bad of a student can you be and still be able to bribe your way into an elite university?
Your analysis overlooked the role of competition. I am drawing on my experience as an Ivy League university professor. The most important reason for selecting for student rank is to increase the overall intellectual level of the student body. I am always impressed to watch the transition of students, who were top of the class in high school, and then find themselves in the middle of the pack in college. Ambitious students are also driven by an environment where the professors are at the top of the game in terms of research.
This is too cynical. Highly intelligent take pleasure in each other's company, and universities are the traditional place where they can congregate. The top faculty teach the brightest students because that is more agreeable job than teaching struggling students and they are not primarily motivated by charity.
The problem is that the economic returns to being perceived as intelligent have gotten too high, and this has lent illicit edge to the otherwise innocent and wholesome pleasure of spending time reading and studying with those that share your interests.
I'd give the same answer for why the strongest athletes have the heaviest weights. Because they can lift them.
The child (and Matt as well) are mistaking "top college" with "has the best teachers for basic material". The two are very different. This might be true for elementary school, but not really above that.
From elsewhere: yes the top colleges use a lot of the same textbooks. They cover a lot more of the text and do it a lot faster. If you need help you don't go to the lecturer to tell him to slow down (he won't), you get your own help (tutors generally). Or you drop the course, or drop out.
This is of course confounded in the States by the athletic "scholarships". This depends heavily on the specific sport, but e.g. the top colleges known for scholarship aren't generally getting lots of money from college football games.
From earlier: I don't know much about Eton etc. apart from that IIRC they are boarding schools, which puts a pretty high lower limit on how poor your family can be if you don't have a "full ride" scholarship. And "full ride" is likely to be a large amount, so they wouldn't hand out a lot of them. So yeah the students will tend to be from rich families.
No idea how many of the French elite schools are boarding (if any).
Why do the best students go to the best colleges? Because that's what makes them the best colleges. To a first approximation, good students make good schools; good schools don't make good students.
If next September, the entering class of Harvard was sent down to Bridgewater State and the entering class at Bridgewater State was sent up to Harvard, Bridgewater would immediately become more intellectually active, along with a lot of extra-curricular activity created by the go-getters who had been admitted to Harvard. Meanwhile, in Cambridge, there would be an immediate drop in energy and intellectual excitement. If you could somehow do the same thing for the next three classes, Bridgewater would now be considered one of the best colleges in the country and Harvard would be considered mediocre on the college level.
It seems like this is the experiment they've tried to do, partially, with readymade extracurriculars in the form of identity group grievance clubs. The latter makes me genuinely sad. To me it seems to show the thing up, and I hate to think the kids admitted in this spirit were not considered real-Harvard material or they never would have been condescended to in this way. But I realize this is a minority view.
Nice. And hi.
Here's what I think would happen. Bridgewater would immediately become more intellectually active, along with a lot of extra-curricular activity created by the go-getters who had been admitted to Harvard. Mainly, though, they'd be trying to transfer out of Bridgewater State and into a better university. Students still want to go to Harvard because a Harvard degree brings in money, next to that it matters little how intellectually stimulating the clubs are.
Then, over the curse of 10-30 years, the economy gradually figures out that a Harvard degree is no longer signals anything, and people will stop wanting to go. But 10-30 years is a long time...
Something I haven't seen mentioned is that rank-matching is not just more effective, it's also more efficient. Anecdote: my school district was 404th in per-capita funding (out of 407 in the state). However they used that money to hire a small handful of really excellent teachers, and ruthlessly tracked their students. Year after year, they produced more National Merit finalists than any other school district in that state.
The reason for undergraduates go to one of the Ivy Leagues is to receive a credential, not an education. It’s a lifetime ticket to the Big Club that George Carlin described. The one you and I are not members of, and never will be, regardless of our capabilities or accomplishments.
One of my Development Econ. profs would always tell us that you'll never be rid of your elites, and so long as they control resources/capital your best bet is to set-up a structure where they're incentivized to act in a beneficial way. From that perspective, there seems to be a potential benefit in letting elites network with the best/brightest students of the next cohort, and of course providing access to capital for the best/brightest students is itself a benefit
It is true that some skills can be learned but cannot be taught. Other skills can be taught but only to those who are capable of learning them.
No amount of instruction will teach a dog to speak Latin; it's not a matter of forcing enough teaching units from enough really talented and motivated teachers and you can get Fido through first year Latin grammar, while Joe "Publius" Brainimax could teach himself as much and get to the same place.
I think the obvious answer (at a system level) I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it aligns the incentives for students in school. If doing really well in school gets you into a top college, then you are incentives to do really well. But if, as the tweet goes, your ticket to a top school is being a really poor student, then you have terribly aligned incentives.
A lot of stuff is downstream from this.
> Earnings are a poor proxy for “teaches better” - it would be great to have something like value-add to GRE scores - but AFAIK no study like that exists.
It seems like for highly ranked students they're already beyond what the SATs/GREs/etc are designed to measure, so it's hard to judge the value of teachers by those metrics. In math, you need a specialized test sequence like the AMC -> AIME -> USAMO to meaningfully distinguish between smart students, and I predict that _could_ pick up meaningful teacher effects.
Of course, the major error in the question "Why do we ...?" is that it assumes that there is a "we" that is deciding this. There are lots of independent actors in the situation and each has its own "incentives" (interests) and the result is some sort of game-theoretic equilibrium. And the sooner the kid learns that the world is not "We are all happily cooperating to advance a common good." the better.
One factor I haven't seen mentioned that I think is important is the use of college admissions as a signal in status competition among high-SES families. The obsession over getting one's child into an "elite" university seems to be much in excess of the educational, financial, and status benefits the child is going to get.
This gets interesting when the family's high SES comes from a high income from running a small business. Successfully running a business requires some intelligence, of course, but it depends a lot more on personality traits like diligence and ability to do well in win-lose negotiations. (Even in the largest companies, the CEOs' educational credentials are mediocre.) So on the average their children are not the highest-IQ despite that elite colleges officially select on things dependent on IQ.
She was no believer in society, but a strong believer in the British (and English) nation. Which is odd. Of course society exists - no man is an Island.
Yep. A related issue is: Why is the high-status education done at the end of a student's time in education?
Clearly the teacher with the biggest leverage over anyone's educational success is a nursery (kindergarten) teacher. But they're not the ones getting the big bucks, or the guest columns in the NYT.
Teachers have relatively little leverage overy anyone's educational success, and nursery school teachers have none at all. And they are a pretty dim group, which is as it should be.
Nice. And hi.
I worked in a newborn through pre-K daycare for awhile. The women were sweet, not very bright although one clearly stood out in terms of leadership (though she just babysat, she didn't run the place - that person presumably had a college degree). They had vaguely messy personal lives, and children of their own. I remember one time they were discussing one of the parents who'd just been in to pick up. They were puzzling over their country of origin. European, they thought. Do they speak European, one wondered. They debated this. I think they ultimately came around to a consensus that there was maybe no pan-European language.
I think of this whenever I read about "high-quality" daycare and its "educational" requirements.
Those women were exactly suited to their jobs - they found children likeable and interesting, they didn't find the work particularly boring, perhaps they had done even harder jobs. They could chat with each other. Now, to me it seemed a hard job. I was very tired by the end of the day. At no time did my admittedly half-assed college degree seem apposite.
Is this a sarcastic comment? Please say it is.
It was not intended as a sarcastic comment. If you want to suggest that I'm wrong, you're welcome to do so, but you'll have to explain.
your original comment would seem to make sense if you (a) accept a blank slate, such that anyone can excel given the right coaching and (b) believe that kindergarten is more important than middle school which is more important than high school etc. I think both assumptions are completely wrong and the conclusion is not even wrong.
Not... at all. My comment doesn't have anything to do with whether students start off as a blank slate or with a set of innate potentialities/dispositions.
It has to do with time. If you double the quality of a kindergarten teacher, the impact of that doubling will be experienced by the student over 12-20 further years of education. If you double the quality of an undergraduate teacher, the student will get the benefit of that improved teaching, but the benefits may end right there.
I am certainly suggesting that kindergarten is more important than later schooling, because its impacts are longer-lasting.
Whereas I think that the effects of a teachers variance from mean decay over time, especially for 5 year olds who remember basically nothing to adulthood anyway. I think the effects of kindergarten teachers on adult outcomes is zero. within reasonable bounds obviously - let’s assume the teacher isn’t murdering the kids. Why do you think the effects compound? After kindergarten that teacher is no longer around. And the total learning in kindergarten is approximately zero anyway, so the kid with the worlds best kindergarten teacher starts first grade very little ahead of his hypothetical identical twin with an average teacher. In undergrad at least the amount learned (and therefore the variance) can be substantial.
And even if I accepted your compounding model (which I don’t) I think most kids have a ceiling set by innate ability and the max your ideal education system could do is help them reach the ceiling. But for average kids that ceiling is low enough that your compounding effects would be cutoff anyway.
Put another way, I think if you randomly assigned the worlds best tennis coaches to train randomly chosen five year olds (only between the ages of 5 and 6) your chances of producing a grand slam winner would be very low. Much lower than if you gave the same coaches to teenagers who had already shown tennis ability. (Let’s assume everyone gets average tennis coaching at age 5)
This seems a bit mixed up. First, the idea that you don't remember the things you learned when you were five is obviously wrong. Age five is when many children learn to read, and that skill is retained into adulthood. Same for vocabulary and basic arithmetic. I see little basis for thinking that academic skills learned at kindergarten level will be forgotten.
It's certainly possible that teacher impacts decay over time, but all the area under that curve is additional learning.
The "ceiling" thing is just a classic fallacious argument. I suppose it's true that there may be a ceiling. But you haven't given any evidence or arguments to think that children today achieve anything close to that ceiling.
I'll provide a hand-wavy reason for thinking that they may not be: the spread of literacy. Almost all children today in developed countries learn to read. This is a close-to-universal boost in academic achievement that seemed unimaginable a few centuries ago. Really really big improvements in academics clearly are possible for everyone.
You're wrong because people are able to learn vastly more when they're 18 than when they're 5. You'll notice that reflected in the curricula: kindergarteners learn colors; 18 year olds learn calculus. You also see it reflected in the teachers. Kindergarten teachers are less educated, less intelligent, and less well paid. If kindergarten mattered more then you would see that reflected in how the market valued it. Teachers and schools both increase monotonically in selectivity, cost, and prestige as the grades increase. The only thing that 5 year olds learn in school is socialization.
Thanks. There are lots and lots of problems with what you're saying there.
First, "people are able to learn vastly more when they're 18 than when they're 5" - this is the reverse of the truth. Small children are constantly learning and assimilating vast quantities of new knowledge. Think of all the vocabulary, numerical concepts, and motor skills that a child acquires each year of kindergarten. They add up to much more than a university student learns. You just seem to be more impressed by "calculus" than "colours" because everyone knows colours, whereas not everyone knows calculus. That doesn't alter the fact that learning colours is a learning process that can be done better or worse, and a good teacher could make it better.
Second, "The only thing that 5 year olds learn in school is socialization" - this is plainly untrue. 5 years old is the age when many children learn to read. It's the age when many children learn basic arithmetic. These are some of the most important academic skills.
Third, you seem to be assuming that teaching is only about conveying facts. In fact, much of teaching is about other things, including socialisation (which can be done better or worse, and good teachers can make it better), and in the early years, learning skills: things like literacy, numeracy, and love of reading. I teach 6-12 year olds, and when we intake, we ask whether a child reads for pleasure or not; this often tells us all we need to know about how that child is going to perform in the classroom. Improving the teaching of these things could easily make academics better for large numbers of children.
Lastly, you just seem to be describing the status quo to me: "schools both increase monotonically in selectivity" - I agree with your description! This is the situation that currently exists. My point was that if you were designing a system from scratch, it would make more sense to front-load all of those things. In the comments above, several teachers comment on how far below grade standard many children are. Better teaching in the early years would help with that! And we assume that more money and more prestige will attract better teachers.
Show me a single study that demonstrates that quality of early schooling impacts life outcomes after controlling for SES and student quality.
Things that kids learn at that age they learn anyway, independent of teacher quality. You essentially said it yourself: "this often tells us all we need to know about how that child is going to perform in the classroom." The only thing that matters is child IQ and family stability. Elementary teachers are little more than babysitters.
I haven't delved much into education research. Freddie deBoer has kind of put me off delving! Obviously I recognise the challenges that you're talking about, and I know that lots of studies have found zero impact for lots of teaching interventions.
But the idea that you can change a child's level of ability through teaching is... just true. This is one of those cases where I don't give a monkey's what the research shows. I teach ESL to elementary school children. When they come to me, they can't English. When they leave, they can English a bit. Kids who don't come to me (I'm a private tutor outside the school system) don't do as well in English. This isn't something that research can explain away.
"The only thing that matters is child IQ" is a somewhat terrifying statement. Matters for what? I don't have a very clear idea of what I want education to do, to be honest, but it's not purely economic.
(a) I think kindergarten teachers have minimal influence, much less than high school teachers, and (b) that early you don’t know who the exceptional students are and your hypothetical incredible kindergarten teacher will mostly be casting pearls before swine
I think I can see that a lot of people do indeed think (a), but I can't think of any theory of human development that makes it make sense. You'd have to think something like... young children are unformed, and the formation process will inevitably iron out much of the differences caused by the different environments that young children are exposed to? Something like that? It all sounds a bit genetic-destiny to me. I think environments make a difference to children.
(b) Your use of the metaphor "pearls before swine" suggests that you think a good kindergarten teacher would be instructing like lecturers do. I don't know what a good kindergarten teacher does, but I doubt it's anything like that. I assume it would be a combination of training in good habits, encouraging exploration and growth, and delivering helpful information at an age-appropriate speed.
My experience as a parent is that I cast lots of pearls before my very young kids, in the form of the really amazing young children's literature that there is now, and they lapped it up, and both became good readers. That's the kind of thing I'd expect to happen in high-quality kindergarten education, and I think it would have a major and lasting impact.
My experience as a teacher of young children is that you absolutely can make a big difference in a kindergartner's reading level with some basic interventions; and that adapting academic content to their cognitive abilities and concentration spans is a complex task that rewards thoughtful practice.
Let’s say you want to maximize tennis skill in the adult population of whereverstan. Two policies (a) give everyone average quality coaches and resources at age 5, then the players who show most aptitude for tennis get better coaches and resources (court time etc) as time goes on, or (b) distribute the best coaches and resources to a random small % of 5 year olds then from age 6 on everyone gets the same average coaching. Which system do you think produces more tennis skill in the adult population? Do you really think it is (b)? Or do you think tennis and academics are totally different (why?)
I think our baseline assumptions are far enough apart that dialogue is unlikely to be fruitful so I doubt I will engage further. If you would like the last word you can have it.
Yeah... you seem to be very keen on the idea of education-as-selection, which I'm not so interested in. Education clearly has a selective function, I can't deny that. But I'm not very interested in maximising that function, even if it can be maximised. I'm interested in the education-as-improvement function.
I don't really understand your (a) and (b) choices. If you want better tennis players, it would be better to give more resources to early learning. I don't see any reason for talking about "random small %". I'd like to raise tennis (academic) investment for all 5 year olds (acknowledging that there is inevitable random variation in the quality of teachers/resources).
Your example seems poorly chosen, because many girls compete professionally by the age of 14. Of course they need early training, from 5 years old. The Williams sisters are a nice celebrity example.
But of course, I think your example is poorly chosen because any example you pick would be poorly chosen. Because it's obviously better to teach little kids. Imagine if we put reading into your example: should we teach reading at 5, or should we wait for adults to show reading aptitude, then gather those adults together, like... like mediaeval universities? That doesn't seem better to me.
In regard to gifts and admissions, I'm reminded of Matt Levine:
"Analysts don't say to companies, "we will give you favorable research coverage if you will meet with our clients." (Sometimes companies do say that they won't meet with clients of banks who give unfavorable coverage, though.) And they don't say to investors, "we will bring you to a meeting with this company if you pay us a million dollars." An economy exists, but it is a gift economy, one in which it is crass to ascribe precise dollar values or to demand quid pro quos too
explicitly."
I think this idea really underscores that what elite colleges are selling (the merit) is the admissions process and not the education. The fact is for even the children of the rich/powerful-- the students who've been admitted on the basis of prestige and not academic strength-- the undergraduate classwork at every one of these schools just isn't very hard. Especially coming from a rigorous prep school (which leaves many such people with the impression high school was significantly more academically challenging than college!) and especially in our era of grade inflation where even a vague gesture at trying can receive an A-.
>most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else
I see this claim repeated a lot, and I think it's just false. Most of what follows is anecdotal, but 1. I believe my experience is somewhat representative and 2. I think my position agrees with the simple, naïve understanding of the world.
I'm currently a grad student at a top university in a field easily confused with "hypertopology". My trajectory was (high school dual enrolled) small, not bad college -> (undergrad) good, non-elite state school -> (grad) elite school, and at each step, the difference was large and noticeable.
Subjective differences: At each step, everyone (students, professor) are more engaged, invested and knowledgeable. People were smarter, and it showed in the rigor of the classes, discussion and the questions.
Objective differences: (mostly about course content) This may not be only for math-y people, but I think it's my best argument:
Intro calculus: here are formulas, do it -> actual math, applying to situations -> teaches epsilon-delta to history majors.
Multivariate calc: literally no greens theorem -> grad/div/curl/greens theorem, etc -> differential forms (wtf).
Intro proofs: didn't even get to induction -> induction, equiv relations, basically everything you need -> everything on the left for the first half, then analysis for the second half
Analysis I & II: topology of R (limits, etc), sequences, infinite sums -> rigorous Riemann integration, existence/uniqueness of ODEs -> (the advanced one at least) the left plus Hilbert spaces/function spaces (wtf)
... (I could go on)
And these were just the undergrad classes! The grad classes (which undergrads typically have access to in their later years) showed similar difference.
The small college wasn't scraping the bottom of the barrel either--their SAT scores were around the 50th percentile. My general impression is that math graduates from my undergrad have a respectably solid foundation, those from my hometown were not at all prepared for higher math and those here (or the top students at least) are future professionals.
Moreover, I think this state of affairs just makes sense. Like, are you surprised that the smarty pants are over there learning more together? They can and do learn material 3 or 4 times as fast, what do you think they do with that extra time? more studying! Professors are going to pitch to the middle of their class, so a higher average skill will mean more and more rigorous material.
Why put all the smart people in one room together? Because they learn more that way! How else are you going to populate a class on measure theory and Hilbert spaces?
This dovetails (in a far less rarefied way) with what I saw with the "high-performing" public high school my kid attended. Football and the community so created were important, yes, but the house values I'd say owed much more to the perception of the education available, to the children of professionals. Re academics [on extracurriculars, the spring musical was like a Broadway traveling production] nothing especially fancy beyond say computer programming classes, and Latin persisting when most other schools no longer employed a Latin teacher - but solid and what we all seemed to notice about our kids was, they learned them some time management.
Thus despite the hierarchy that existed within high school, when they got to their various colleges they tended to do well, as a body. I recall one boy, likeable and smart but somewhat undisciplined by comparison in this competitive atmosphere - one worried a little how he would do away from home - and I remember his mother reporting that he had had to take a test, at freshman orientation at the state U he went to, for math placement. He found he was the cynosure of all eyes, as the other kids in the room struggled and were amazed at the alacrity with which he performed this sorting test, and the score he got. He in turn was a little amazed at their scores.
My community college calc 1 class spent the first week of the semester reviewing trig and algebra concepts. That, I suspect, doesn't happen at Harvard.
Hmm, I didn’t notice much difference going from an engineering course in Ireland to a masters in Oxford. The students weren’t noticeably smarter either (except in dress)
Well it's clear what we need to do then: regard Harvard graduates as contemptible losers. Leaning much too heavily on one or two personal experiences, this is what I've been doing for years. If more people were like me, the "signal" of having a Harvard degree would have negative value, and they'd be forced to drop the self-undermining privilege-laundering business.
"regard Harvard graduates as contemptible losers."
But you don't really believe that, and it shows.
That might be easy if the Harvard grad has the same job you do, or is a generic well-off but not spectacular local doctor who makes a huge deal about where he went to school.
It’s a lot harder when they sit on the Supreme Court.
I have little trouble feeling contempt for certain members of the Supreme Court.
But I don’t think you can call them “losers” in the sense of “academically/professionally unsuccessful”.
Do you find them all equally contemptible? Because they all (other than Barrett) went to either Harvard or Yale.
For those you find contemptible, would your opinion flip if they didn’t go to Harvard or Yale?
Honestly, it was just kind of a glib comment. But now that we're parsing it out, I meant "loser" in the sense of "lame": as in "haha, they're such credential-seeking lamos that they went to Harvard, even though everyone knows that Harvard is larded up with rich kids and nepo babies."
As for the Supreme Court specifically, I have long thought it was *lame* that almost every one of them went to either Harvard or Yale. As an institution it should be reflective of a much wider breadth of experience than that. Also, I've heard stories of the general atmosphere of psychopathy at Harvard Law School like would singe your eyebrows, which probably isn't the ideal environment for developing the nation's elites.
Fair enough. That said I don’t think you can call someone who goes to Harvard because they aspire to be on a Federal bench a “credential-seeking lame-o”. That’s a “hate the game, not the player” situation in my mind.
But someone who won’t shut up about being an Ivy grad because that’s literally the only thing interesting about them relative to all the other state-school PMC people around them? Sure, you have my blessing (not that you need it) to mock that.
On the mixing theory, what's the optimal ratio of merit to total? Now that Harvard HAS the prestige, why does it need to keep admitting Princesses of Whaterevstan at all? Does it all come down to who pays full tuition/has the highest expected value of becoming a future donor?
...yes? There's somebody's law about how an organization always becomes governed by those who advance the organization itself, rather than the purported mission of the org.
Not their own advancement? :)
Those Matt Y blog commenters ;-). They know a lot about "what they've experienced" and they have some fluent ability to argue-amid-near-total-agreement, and to find stats - but their weird long foray into discussing evangelicals demonstrates that they have *no* clue how close of relatives evangelicals and Protestants more generally - are to the progressives who dominate Harvard.
I'm not really sure they are Harvard material.
The privilege smuggling makes more sense to me than hand-wavy "excellence" as a reason to want to go to one of these places. If they had just put that in their promotional material, I might have tried harder to go somewhere elite.
I earned an AB at Columbia in 1962. The degree was granted by Columbia College, one of at least three undergraduate operations at Columbia University. It is a truth generally acknowledged that if an organization operates under multiple aliases, that organization must perforce be criminal.
Nevertheless my education was honest and valuable in ways I didn't know. When you attend a selective university you very quickly learn. how good you really are. I was the product of a rigorous selective school system, but I soon met classmates who were smarter than me.
I had to learn coping mechanisms, for the English Department was a formidable place. I became something of a specialist in lesser known but reputable writers and had a knack for inserting them into my many, many papers. A life skill for a future academic.
Had I gone to a less selective school, I might have had an inflated view of my abilities and so suffered both disappointment and helplessness.
So, yes, the selective schools are crooked, at least in America. Secondary education is controlled by local school boards and supervised by state politicoes. The national exams are an embarrassment. Nevertheless talent will out and at least serve as a measuring rod for the bulk of the students accepted by less than honest means.
The mediocre legacy/sports graduate inheriting a business should have at least a sense for ability in his employees. So maybe that suffices.
All of this is correct and well-known. The missing follow-up question is: why, then, don't colleges compete ruthlessly with each other for top students, trying to displace the Ivies as top-rank signalers--and reap the rewards--by offering spectacular incentives to high-ranking students, the way, say, college athletic teams do (often in violation of NCAA rules)?
The answer is that they're all part of a massive cartel zealously guarding their collective position as granters of signaling credentials, and raking in obscene revenues in the process by charging cartel rents. If they began competing for students in an open market for signaling credentials instead of following the cartel's rules, they'd end up both massively reducing the cartel's overall income and revealing the market's true nature, thus opening it up to lots of outside competitors willing to undercut them. So instead they play by the cartel rules, which includes maintaining the fiction that they're providing education rather than signaling credentials, and using that pretense to justify their collusive control of the market and very limited, almost performative competitive practices that never threaten the cartel regime.
I mean, they sometimes try. Oklahoma I think was offering nearly full ride scholarships to anyone who qualified as a National Merit Scholarship Finalist.
A generic 4.0 student is a lot less valuable public perception wise than a single Bill Gates or Tom Brady, and the former is a lot harder to pluck out of the applicant pool than the latter (and the latter was famously undervalued coming out of college, and a well regarded but not exactly blue chip recruit going into college).
And of course, if it really came down to a bidding war, the current elite colleges would absolutely crush anyone else given their existing endowments and alumni bases.
Some public colleges are definitely rewarding top students this way, but my impression is that it's more related to their (real or perceived) mandate as a public institution to serve their state through fostering academic excellence than to their rank in the collegiate pecking order. (I believe schools like Alabama and Florida, that already have strong athletic profiles, are taking this approach. I don't know of any private colleges doing it, though.)
If I were running a mid-tier private college and wanted to rise in the rankings, I'd pick an academic strength or specialty and double down on it, trying to become *the* place for students to go who are interested in pursuing that specialty. I don't see a lot of that, though--all the schools seem instead to be slavishly imitating the Ivies' generalist approach. That smells to me like a cartel in which everyone is afraid to compete seriously, for fear that real competition would reveal the collective scam and ruin it for everyone...
What about someplace like Carnegie Mellon, which has sort of done what you’re talking about in the realm of computer science? (Yes the university has a full slate of majors, but CS is what makes its reputation)
True, STEM-focused schools are different--the teaching and experience they provide has value to students beyond mere signaling, so they can and do compete in various ways. The vast majority of colleges, though, aren't STEM schools, and my description fits them better.
I tend to think this is correct, but that then raises the question: why are the Ivies so intent on maintaining race-based affirmative action policies in admission? Does that not undermine the meritocracy and provide little financial reward, at least in the short run, compared to legacy admits? Maybe the idea is you need to keep a certain number of minorities around to guard against the possibility of those minority groups forming alternative institutions? IE, maybe if Harvard doesn't consider racial backgrounds in admission, black enrollment declines fairly precipitously, black students start thinking of Harvard as kind of a white/Asian school, don't want or try to go there, and head off to HBCU's instead, and the result is that Howard University becomes known sort of as the Black Harvard, with the same status-conferring ability as Harvard, only limited to black students, but which nevertheless represents serious competition for Harvard & Co.
Any other reasons? I'm sure Freddie De Boer has written something about this, but I'm at work and don't have time to look for it.
", but which nevertheless represents serious competition for Harvard & Co."
hahahaha. Um, no.
What's the answer, then?
The answer depends on the question. If the question is "how can we get more blacks and Hispanics performing on par with whites and Asians so the average ability levels as tested are the same?" the answer almost certainly is "we can't".
If the question is "how can we make sure that all kids who are capable of college level work go to college and the value of college isn't decimated by affirmative action and other overt measures to lower standards", the answer is "use congressional action to prevent colleges from doing this."
WTF dude? Neither of those was even remotely the question I posed, so thanks for acting smug and then going on an irrelevant tangent like some kind of nincompoop.
I don't think you need much explanation aside from that the administrators of these schools are at least to some extent genuinely ideological, and will do things that harm their institution for that reason alone.
From the peer-reviewed scientific literature, up to about 2019: it's marketing. Those who are willing to pay the most for college desire to go to a university with above-average diversity. Thus universities let in more diverse students than merit would cause, and over-represent under-represented minorities in their marketing material. Any school's brochure is going to show a higher percentage of Hispanic and Black students than their student body has.
Yeah, I can understand that aspect of it. One would think that at least at the very high end, schools like Harvard-Yale-Princeton could afford not to cater to their customers this way, but I guess they're still competing to some degree with Penn, Cornell, etc., and when the markets speaks it pays to listen, even for them.
I would posit one other thing: on one level, you would think that the customers of these institutions would not be in favor of AA or other such policies that may in fact water down the signal of meritocracy, but then it stands to reason that the costs of such a policy are actually mainly born by the minority students themselves who are admitted to these schools, in the sense that clearly, no one wonders if a Korean American kid who gets into Harvard is really all that smart--of course he is--but people do in fact wonder this about black/Hispanic and other minority students, and not without some reason.
The answer is that Harvard is a gatekeeper for the elite in the US, elite status is an inherently political thing, and therefore Harvard must worry about politics. If Harvard admitted on academics only, it would be 1% black, 2% Hispanic and 43% Asian https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/harvard-admissions-lawsuit-trial-asian-american-discrimination-reports.html. Problem is that the US is 33% black and Hispanic, but Asians are a politically irrelevant minority in every state except CA. You can't have an elite class where 33% of the population only gets 3% of the seats and a politically irrelevant minority gets 43% in a democracy where all races can vote. It's just not possible.
If Harvard did this they would quickly find themselves no longer the gatekeeper to the elite. That is why they are so adamant about their affirmative action policy.
Very good comment, thank you.
I thought the consensus was that the quality of HBCUs has declined quite a bit precisely because of affirmative action - Howard was “Black Harvard” because the smartest Black students were actively excluded. But now that the racial bias in Harvard admissions has flipped the other way, it turns out the smartest Black kids would rather go to Real Harvard.
They still have a niche but it’s no longer as the best place for smart and ambitious Black students to maximize their academic credentials.
Teaching is only part of school missions.
In addition, it serve as daycare for pre-adolescent (elementary school) and day prison for adolescents/ young adults (high school), which most organized societies seems afraid to let roam freely :-).
It also serve as a big sieve, it ranks students into bad/average/good. The western world equivalent of Chinese imperial exams.
And finally, it also act as indoctrination stage to try to keep future citizen in line with the official narrative, and avoid possible troubles ahead/promote societal stability.
Telling which is the most important mission is left to individual appreciation, but my personal belief is that (1) is certainly not top of the list. With possible exception of writing/reading and basic arithmetic, I believe (1) is only a distant fourth goal. The 3 others are far more important, but sorting them out is difficult and tend to change from time/places to time/places...
Using good schools (in the sense they have a good track record of student achievement) to teach the weakest students would maybe make sense for teaching.
But not for daycare/dayprison, not for indoctrination, and certainly not for sorting students.
> (Is is true? An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life. Here’s a gesture at a challenge to these results, apparently supported by Dale and Krueger themselves, though I can’t find any more information. Earnings are a poor proxy for “teaches better” - it would be great to have something like value-add to GRE scores - but AFAIK no study like that exists.)
Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" seems to have a lot of evidence that students learn very little of anything (at least on average) during most education, including college. This includes both specific facts and "critical thinking skills." (His conclusion, of course, is that the primary reason students make more money after getting a degree is signaling; he disagrees that controlling for pre-existing characteristics completely eliminates the college wage premium).
> what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.
A couple of other ideas:
1. She gets an excuse to relax and party for 4 years while pretending to do something productive, relatively out of the Whereverstan public eye
2. The royal family of Whereverstan might be sufficiently disconnected from what American rationalists know that they're still laboring under the impression that a Harvard poli sci degree or something similar would teach information that is useful for a future world leader
3. She gets to meet the kids of other world leaders in a different setting than normal
4. It gives them an air of legitimacy back in their home country (similar to what you said but with more specific motivation)
> This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all.
It might be interesting to look into the history of how this all came to be. As you pointed out in an old SSC post about college admissions, it used to be relatively easy to get in once you cleared a few (mostly class-related) hurdles. I have no idea what kind of prestige (or much) a Harvard degree got you in 1880--my vague impression is that most people didn't really care and it was just sort of expected for certain families, but I don't actually know.
"Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" seems to have a lot of evidence that students learn very little of anything (at least on average) during most education, including college."
He has no evidence. He uses the Adult literacy data and doesn't sort by race, nor does he exclude non-English speakers who weren't educated in America. If you control for race, it shows that high school actually improved black literacy in the 90s (we don't have data for 2000s) and that *college* literacy for blacks decreased .this is almost certainly because they started letting in less qualified blacks, not any element of instruction.
The book is crap.
Data here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/12/01/the-case-against-the-case-against-education-average-was-always-over/
Is there a summary of this argument that isn't mostly just a vitriolic and sarcastic accusation of Caplan being racist?
> The book is crap.
This is quite the strong conclusion to be drawing when you clearly have an agenda and your post has such a high ratio of noise to signal. The effect you highlight is pretty small, practically speaking. You claim to have read the book but if this is the data point that has you so incensed, frankly I don't believe you.
Where did I say Caplan was racist? And if your reading capacity is that gefuckt, perhaps you should look inward for curing your confusion.
The effect I highlight is huge, given that blacks *improved* in high school and got *worse* in college while Caplan is claiming that high school has no value.
I not only read the book,I wrote four articles on it. And Caplan has no evidence. You simply don't know what you're talking about. Caplan is very popular with your crowd.
You can write as many article as you want; it means nothing if they're all terrible.
Well, I have a blog with over a million page views, am followed by a large number of education policy experts, journalists, and people you no doubt read. You have your thumb up your ass.
I'm uninterested in convincing you. People who are interested can click the link or not.
Thank you for proving my point
don’t forget, the princess also gets to learn the shibboleths of the US elite, so that when she is ruling her client kingdom she knows what to say and what not to say to maintain Western favor.
Yale graduates in the comments: "Nope, nope, nope. You're wrong, Scott! What a SHOCKER."
I'm genuinely impressed that Scott just signal-boosted Matt Christman, one of the most prominent Marxist podcasters. There's hope yet. (Capital M Marxist, too, not a crypto-Marxist).
Another prosocial reason for elite schools is the fact that smart students simply do better work when surrounded by their intellectual peers. They can bounce ideas off each other, and since they tend to be competitive, they work harder to beat their peers. In fact, I would say that the actual teacher of any given classroom matters far, far less than the quality of its students. The latter is almost always the limiting factor. Top-notch researchers also benefit from having a smart undergraduate population nearby, and vice versa.
Regarding the similar earnings objection, I'll bite the bullet and say that the benefits mentioned above are real (at least for a certain subset) and just don't have much of an impact on earnings
I think ultimately the skills that are highly compensated in the economy just don’t map all that well to the skills that universities optimize for - this has basically always been true, the boss is not necessarily the smartest guy but he’s always made more than the brilliant widget tweaker.
It’s frankly only quite recently that the explosion of tech has made jobs for which the main qualification is being very book smart very lucrative (vs merely very comfortable). And even then, we still usually pay the project manager more than the guy writing code, and those are different skill sets.
I went to a small, private, engineering-focused university. There, I was unamiguously one of the top two students in a class of 50-100 students in my degree program, and tended to be well ahead of course material with relatively little effort. However, when I went to grad school where there was a tighter selection criterion, the courses covered material at a pace that was far more challenging to me.
A few years later, I took a couple of MIT's open courseware practical mathematics courses aimed at undergrads. I was impressed with how quickly they expected students to grasp the fundamental ideas. It was a lot more similar in pace to grad school than to my undergrad.
When I see someone say:
> most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else
I can only interpret that as either
1) Engineering undergrad is notably harder than whatever degrees they're thinking of, or
2) They're ignoring how high up on Bloom's Taxonomy a course gets.
I can't speak to 1. I have only engineering and mathematics degrees, and both seem to have this pattern. But 2 is worth a few words.
Let's take the fundamental mechanical/civil engineering physics course 'Static Mechanics', which has a required equivalent in most or all universities. A local private university has the following course description:
> Subjects cover includes; force and moment vectors, equivalent systems, trusses, frames, and machines, equilibrium of particles and rigid bodies, static friction, centroids and moments of inertia.
(Why do they use a semi-colon instead of a colon? Who knows! Hopefully they're more rigorous in their engineering than in their punctuation.)
And lets take the MIT course description:
> Introduction to statics and the mechanics of deformable solids. Emphasis on the three basic principles of equilibrium, geometric compatibility, and material behavior. Stress and its relation to force and moment; strain and its relation to displacement; linear elasticity with thermal expansion. Failure modes. Application to simple engineering structures such as rods, shafts, beams, and trusses. Application to biomechanics of natural materials and structures.
Those sound really similar. The only concrete difference I can take from those course descriptions is that the MIT one definitely includes deformable solids, and the local one doesn't necessarily. How is that compatible with one covering the material so much faster than the other (suiting their better incoming student class?) It's really simple; if your students can grasp the basic facts and mathematics faster (Bloom's Remember and Understand tiers), you can then actually spend time on how to apply these mathematical facts to problems.
After all, problems do not come to professional engineers neatly giftwrapped with a 'USE ES201 FORMULA ON ME, LIKE WE TALKED ABOUT IN CLASS LAST MONTH' label attached to them. Learning to understand an engineering model is hard work, but it's not sufficient to actually solve problems (outside of very special cases.) You need to be able to apply it, and to analyze how appropriate of a fit the model is to the problem in reality you're trying to solve. Less time spent on learning the model is more time spent on it's limits, when and how to use it, etc.
I guess, in engineering at least, my model isn't any of Scott's. It's not that only the best teachers can teach these incredibly arcane topics. Or that we get the best payoff from matching best teachers and best students. It's that the best universities are those that attract the best students, and because they have the best students they can teach them more and better than they could if they had to slow down for worse students. And because they have more money (due to turning out better engineers who donate more to them, etc.) they can pay better teachers as well; but this is a small part of the improvement. The good teachers at a middling school could do as well as an average teacher at MIT, given the same students and a few years to tune their curriculum to those students.
How far this model extends to non-engineering is a real question; it's worth noting that MIT does not do legacy admissions, and so are not engaged in the proposed privilege laundering. I don't have the experience required to compare, say, HIST 30094: Modern India and Pakistan at a middling university and a top one.
I went to engineering undergrad and grad school at a pretty selective institution (top ten overall, top five in my program). I also have been exposed to the work of engineering undergrads (and non engineering undergrads) at a much less selective but still state flagship school.
The quality difference is, I must say, pretty obvious. The top students at the less selective school could easily fit in at the selective school, certainly, but everyone else is uhh, noticeably not as good, and would have graded very poorly at my school.
Given that the less selective school is not failing half its class, it MUST in some sense be “easier or less rigorous” even as it covers similar material. It might be in a hard to objectively measure way, but I assure you if I put the average student from each in a room with you, you’d easily pick out which was which.
(That said I’ve met some MIT grads who are academically brilliant but can’t get along with anyone and, outside their narrow field, can’t reason their way out of a wet paper bag - so this is definitely a discussion about averages and distributions more than individuals).
The privilege-laundering idea seems kind of far-fetched. I suppose Americans do care enough about 'deserving' to inherit your father's business that it might seem plausible, but isn't the simple theory that colleges need money enough to explain why they continue to accept donations/rich kids?
It's not enough to explain why people are willing to donate.
Why is it harder to explain than any other type of altruism?
Most donors to colleges are not giving “name a building” or even “endow a small scholarship or prize” money. Most will never see any tangible benefit from their donations, other than maybe moving to the front of the line for football season tickets.
And many (most?) big donors aren’t giving money to the fancy school they want their kid to go to - they are giving money to the school THEY went to, even if it’s not particularly prestigious. For example T Boone Pickens (and his foundation after his death) gave over half a billion dollars to Oklahoma State University. Go to any university of any level of prestige and you’ll find most of the newer buildings named after the rich alumni that funded them.
For most donors, the logic is more like “I owe some percentage of my success to my college, so I will give back to the next generations of students at my college”.
Would be interesting to see a bit of a comparison to other countries where this happens far less/not at all.
For instance in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge entry is almost entirely based on exams and aptitude tests and so they raise far less in donations, partly because it’s basically impossible to buy your way in.
Would say this enables courses that are materially different/more challenging than other universities. Does in theory lead to a UK elite that is more academically inclined, but for lots of things outside of academia being a hard working smart nerd isn’t necessarily the most useful skillset to have in charge.
>most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else
I disagree with this, particularly for STEM. The amount of information that faculty are able to productively spew at MIT undergrads is vastly higher than it would be at Midwit State. As a concrete example, Caltech uses Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_ as its undergrad E&M text. That's a book explicitly aimed at grad students. Only at Caltech/MIT/Harvard could it be used as the starting point.
Basic ability matters. When you select for it, you really can do more.
Ha, I came here to post this and found that another person from Caltech already said it. :)
I wish Jackson would be replaced - it's comprehensive but it's really not very good as a teaching tool. And yes that's a great example of how those educated in undergrad Physics at Caltech are ahead of the rest of us. I hold you each in high regard! :)
obviously you should start with Schwinger. Or maybe Landau&Lifshitz /jk
I’d really like to see the term ‘midwit’ gone from the lexicon of this site. It’s so utterly graceless.
Don't hold your breath. This is a community that generally believes a) IQ matters and b) we have more of it. We're intellectually elitist and proud of it. If that bums you out then feel free to stick to midwit blogs.
Classy response. Try it on the three sig plumber that fixes your kitchen drain sometime. He’ll just give you one of those knowing smiles he saves for such occasions. Then he’ll go home and read Spinoza.
Well then he's not a midwit, is he? I'm sure he'd enjoy this blogs' elitist attitude and wouldn't appreciate your sniping at the (probably) only place he has to stretch his intellectual legs. Stop bringing Plumber Will Hunting down.
I think you miss the point. No I doubt he would enjoy *any* elitist attitude. High intelligence doesn’t naturally correlate with being a snob.
Many of us use at least part of our cognitive gifts on self work to become better people. I don’t want to hurt your feelings here but I think you should consider that there may be more to life than gaining status and career achievement.
The Will Hunting character had certainly come to know that.
>there may be more to life than gaining status and career achievement.
Indeed. Almost makes one wonder why you're so particular about the vocabulary used to discuss it.
Among elite-college true believers, it's typically believed that the advantage of [elite school X, let's say Harvard] is not in the institution, general curriculum, and staff, but in the (1) classmates, (2) tails of the curriculum, and (3) other-than-classes academic opportunities. So by the steelmanned perspective of the pro-Harvard side, "most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else" and "[elite colleges have] the world’s best writing teacher[s]" are missing the active ingredient of "best schools".
Example of 1: You can teach the students the same subject, but if you've selected a population of more-capable students, they'll have a higher rate of starting world-changing projects when they leave (or by dropping out). So the active ingredient (say the pro-elite-colleges partisans) is matching best students with best students.
Example of 2: "you don’t get into subjects that need world experts until postgrad" is true in the median case, but not true at the 90%tile of eg Harvard students studying technical subjects.
Example of 3: "access to research opportunities w/ faculty (selected for something like their research output)", covered in other comments.
The privilege laundering take is overly reductionist. It assumes that wealth and social capital have no relevant value and so it needs to be laundered with the smart/talented set to hide its inadequacy. But in reality, wealth and social capital are independent factors for the attainment of career prestige and so are valuable as predictors of future success (measured as high prestige leadership roles in society). Harvard is first and foremost an institution to signal prestige, and so their goal is to find the student population that will most likely end up in high prestige roles in society. There is no laundering going on, they are simply maximizing the relevance of a Harvard education in signaling prestige. The key point is to recognize that admission to Harvard isn't a reward for being the top-whatever percent in academic merit, its about what makeup will grow Harvard's prestige brand. This also has explanatory power for why the Asian admission rate is artificially suppressed. Asians tend to not have as many paths to attaining prestige positions in society, and so the value to Harvard's future prestige from admitting an Asian student is lower than a white student of lesser academic merit.
Another somewhat optimistic answer would go along the lines we want to maximize the chance of a genius with a clever idea actually pursuing it successfully and changing the world by researching a new tech or making a startup that uses new tech or something. This is much more likely if instead of having a bunch of average friends who say that's a cool idea and go about their day, they have a bunch of friends who are very competent or ambitious or rich who hear their idea, say let's make it happen, and help them either as hyper competent early employees or by giving them early funding either of which helps get the idea of the ground and gain momentum. Not sure how much I endorse this as accurate but it's more than zero and probably more than either of the optimistic takes you present.
To be clear here Harvard is the place where everyone is some combination of competent, ambitious, or rich. So if a genius goes there all their friends will be like this.
Very good point. In my answer i argue that the primary purpose(s) of education system is not teaching (in the sense let the student knowledge of facts and skills increase), but I focused on primary and secondary school, not college/uni.
I guess tertiary school is more about actual teaching, but your answer makes me thing that even there, teaching is not the only goal, maybe not the actual primary goal (I guess it depends on topic, with STEM being the most teaching-oriented part of the whole system).
Tertiary is not a dayprison, but it also is an indoctrination for social stability (more differentied because you get different population segments already sorted out - also, the indoctrination probably serve the tertiary education system and it's direct sponsors more than top-society - when they differ, which can happen at times ) and a sieve for meritocracy. But it is also a major incubator for the next round of entrepreneurs; academics and politicians (and maybe assortive-mated future couples ;=p ). That's where next generation teams are shaped, meaning the kind of people put together and overall mindset in these institutions have a huge impact 10-30 years onward. Again, pure teaching has little to do with that. Difference between tertiary and secondary education is (in some case) more actual teaching, and social club instead of day prison.
I thought about this as well! That Ultimate optimistic take would be that mixing "Dirty Privilege - money + access" with genuine meritocracy of High SATs, etc - is actually useful.
The hard working smart people need the money, access and manners of the Elite, and they get those by mixing with them at Harvard.
That would mean that moving Harvard to be just meritocratic would hurt society, not improve it.
In addition to providing "merit washing" by association for the children of the hereditary "nobility", the "commoners" admitted to Harvard and other "Ivies" graduate to staff the administrative (i.e. reasonably competent, well-compensated servants of the nobility) backbone of the Anglo empire. This is absolutely required on account of the well-known "regression to the mean" effect -- the nobles no longer have a dozen+ children each and cannot produce competent successors for themselves through purely biological means. So they outsource the "brains", while passing on their estates to biological heirs (often, as discussed, merit-washed for popular legitimacy) who will command the "brains", rewarding the latter with mid-6-figure wages (and sometimes a "lottery ticket" chance of a small share in capital ownership, via e.g. the startup circus.)
"Brain" isn't the primary selection criterion for that servant caste, however: the selected people must first and foremost be unshakeably loyal to their hereditary aristo masters. And so the primary criterion remains political reliability (as proxied by e.g. "affirmative action", aka "Кто был ничем, тот станет всем" ("who was nothing, will become everything", as seen in Ru version of "L'Internationale"), the correct "extracurriculars" (elite bonding rituals: rowing, excursions for imperialist "aid" to the Third World, etc.)
One can compare with the old USSR: as soon as a hereditary elite caste (re)appeared there, that country started behaving like a cheap clone of the Anglo empire, in a number of comically-obvious ways. It turned its Moscow State University into something quite like a copy of Harvard (in this particular respect) -- complete with "affirmative action", "easy majors" for aristo children, guaranteed employment for graduates in the mandarinate, and so on.
Every sclerotic bureaucratic empire must have "a Harvard".
"why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help?"
Because educational resources are wasted on the weakest students.
It makes sense to give the most resources to those who can take advantage of them. Compare to athletics. You want world class facilities, doctors, trainers, etc. to be available to Olympic level athletes, so that they can go win medals for their countries, not to overweight people using the electric scooters at Walmart. The latter group might benefit from some of the resources, but their goal is so crude (lose weight) that they can do it with very basic resources (a street to walk on and some sneakers.) Likewise, the weakest students just need to be able to do the most mundane of tasks. No fancy anything needed to teach that. If you want new genius ideas/products/whatever to be created, you want to match the brightest students with the brightest people in their fields of study and the best equipment, facilities, etc.
Is Matt Yglesia's son volunteering to attend kindergarten in East St. Louis?
Sounds like Rational Altruism being put in practice.
How about like admission only high schools, the top schools write their own admissions test and fill the class only based on test score results? The test can cover what might be on an SAT, but also some subject material, but merit admissions would be the result. Yep, the endowments would suffer, but probably not all that much over time as networking and signaling would come in to play.
But that’s precisely what they’ve done - they’ve just selected question for the test like “what color is your skin” and “do you know the correct buzzwords to insert in an essay to signal to a reader that you are One Of Us?”
I think you're wrong to assume that this is designed in rather than naturally arrising.
In any situation where you're trying to find a matching based on mutual acceptance - i.e. where students can choose which universities to apply to and accept offers from, and Universities can choose which students to make offers to and which to reject - and where most of the students have similar rankings of how desirable they find different universities and most of the universities have similar rankings of how desirable they find different students, you're going to end up with the two rankings roughly matching - the most-desired students will end up at the most-desired universities, and so on down.
Most universities would rather have more able than less able students. So, whatever we mean by "best colleges", the most able students are likely to end up there.
'Privilege laundering' sounds a bit paranoid- as though the privileged are actually ashamed of themselves and are trying to pass as meritorious because... the privileged are actually shape-shifting lizards from Planet X! Wake up sheeple!
It may have been true that the sons of robber-barons wished to mingle with clerics and thus to come across as cultured and pious. Universities, after all, were originally ecclesiastical in origin. Similarly, the sons of legal shysters or crooked bureaucrats may have wanted to rub shoulders with the descendants of robber-barons under the pretense of devotion to Humanistic scholarship. Napoleonic France went in a different, supposedly more meritocratic direction. However, it was the intense competition between the Universities of German States which created the Seminar System and the notion of the Doctorate as a Research Degree. In the STEM subjects, this incremental approach meant that there were external economies of scale for Marshallian industrial districts more particularly where Finance partnered with Industry to create a system of cross-holdings.
America's extraordinary rise to Academic pre-eminence was based firstly on expansion of a more academic type of High School to virtually the entire population in the period from 1914 to 1938. In Europe, the assumption was that only a small percentage of scholars would attend 'Grammar Schools' or 'Gymnasiums' as opposed to Technical Schools of some type. Thus Americans were more ready to take advantage of the GI Bill, than any European country.
The second factor was the reputational benefit of creating a University, or endowing an Institute- e.g. that of Advanced Study at Princeton- and the networking benefits of alumni associations. The Land-Grant Universities could emulate this type of success, though, no doubt, some had already attained excellence in some fields- e.g. agronomy.
The third factor was the Cold War and 'Think Tanks' like RAND. Universities were competing for political influence. Chicago was at war with Harvard. This Saltwater vs. Freshwater battle defined the ideological space when I was growing up. Then, in the same manner that 'Independent Expenditure' campaigns disintermediated Political Parties- or, indeed, ideological Punditry- and gave salience to wedge-issues on the one hand, and straightforward, utterly blatant, special interest rent seeking on the other- so too did the run-away success of some, highly technical, research programs which, so to speak, 'unbundled' the Liberal 'idea of the University'.
It is this 'unbundling'- or lack of cross-elasticity, or synergy- which has made the 'matching problem' acute. On the one hand, you have dead-in-the-water research programs which have to fools some seemingly smart kids into signing up for them so as to keep their Ponzi scheme trundling on, while, on the other hand, the opportunity cost for smart, well connected, kids of investing in 4 year College has been rising. Essentially, there is a 'laundering' of worthless nonsense which however does not appear to be any such thing because smart kids of diverse backgrounds are signing up for it and- hoping to get tenure- being very vocal in their support for it, while, on the other hand, there are more and more veils being draped over the truth- viz. kids nowadays need to be like medieval scholars who moved from one campus to another. Indeed, this was a feature of German university life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. That type of mobility is what put Germany ahead by the 1880s which is when John Adams spent a little time at a Gymnasium. However, he came to the conclusion that the future would lie with the Engineer-Savant- guys like Pareto and Barone.
What is the actual 'matching problem' currently faced by students and Colleges? Firstly, the set of students is only well-ordered for particular, quite narrowly defined, research programs- which however are very lucrative and probably vital to our national security. There has to be an unbundling event even if it means killing the sacred cow of tenure. Otherwise, as Vivek Ramaswami seems to be saying, the Chinese will eat our lunch.
A separate issue, the one this post and the comments on it focus on, has to do with coalition formation and stability. Essentially, the claim is that alumni of certain Colleges are dictatorial over the core of particular games in particular industries or particular contexts. However this should only concern us if there is something extraordinary about those recruited by the Colleges in question or, less plausibly, that the Colleges impart extraordinary traits to its students. But, in that case, the relevant 'Structural Causal Model' would enable us to improve outcomes for everybody. That's the opposite of paranoia or the politics of envy or spite.
Still, one might say that there is something egregiously wrong with our Social System if Harvard alumni write the jokes in our favorite TV programs. But, surely, that was a joke created by TV joke-writers to raise their own prestige while acknowledging that White America was white-collar and College educated.
Why do 'elites' want to let their kids play tennis with kids who are really good at tennis rather than the paralytic scion of inbred Aristocrats who can't lift a racquet? The answer is that their kids may benefit by playing more and better tennis. Sports, unlike almost all non-STEM instruction in H.E, is actually good for kids. Universities with good sport facilities- or one's located in big Cities where such facilities are easily accessible to the very rich- are a good place to gain a bit of polish and perhaps- like the Prince of Wales- pick up an acceptable spouse of good breeding stock. Assortative mating at Uni beats caste-based inbreeding. Or so it now appears. Once genetic engineering really takes off, the elite may indeed elect to become a different species. Till then, all we can do is pretend they are shape-shifting lizards who are using Harvard and Yale to camoflauge themselves.
Yud already wrote this article in < 280 chars
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1677885529491386368
The premise of the question is incorrect: we do not send the top students to the top universities. Instead, we provide equal opportunities to all students, and the schools select whom they accept. What is the motivation for Harvard to accept someone with less-than-stellar grades? There are financial, influential, and prestige reasons as the author describes. But beyond that, the risk of harm to Harvard's reputation is too great. And yes, there's risk: if you meet 6 Harvard graduates in a row and they're each individually morons, Harvard's reputation takes a hit among you and those whom you influence. University quality is based entirely on reputation.
I say we fix that. Here's a plan that's a step too far, so we'll moderate it afterwards but what if: State legislatures require universities to post all graded student work online, as a condition of maintaining their business licenses. Suddenly a grand corpus of college student work is built. After a few years, artificial intelligence agents (and natural intelligence agents) can assess those bodies of student works to determine the actual quality of a degree program at one institution compared to similar programs at other institutions. Prospective students can already determine the cost of education and they can now determine the quality of education being offered, so they are able to make value decisions. This drives cost down and quality up, if the number of seats at universities is collectively more than the number of customers. (It is.)
This proposal, of course, also allows each student's demonstrated knowledge to be evaluated. The up side is that employers (supported by agents that can evaluate the job candidate's artifacts in whole) can weight what they consider to be important. Need a business major with international finance expertise and who speaks Chinese? Need a scientist who understands issues in a global context? Done and done. The knock-on effect is that universities finally learn and become forced to react to what industry actually values. If no engineer from Fictional State University can get a job because their engineers know everything about DEI but nothing about engineering, that sends a message!
But this proposal also means anyone can read the paper that the professor required you to write about how great Slavery is. You had to write it or you would fail the class, but you never believed what you wrote and now you're running for office. So there has to be a way to shield the data from those who should not be viewing it. Fortunately, this is easy and mature. Data is available anonymized and in aggregate, and then students receive keys so they can grant individuals / organizations access to their work for time-limited periods up to one month (for example).
What do you think?
>and they can now determine the quality of education being offered<
You're assuming people are going to read a swath of student essays, and also view themselves a good enough judge of quality to say which ones are the best? Much, much more effective to determine who gets paid more five years after graduation.
Maintaining a website with every student paper from the last thirty years on it is going to be expensive. And what do you do with the essay from the kid who got expelled because he wrote a 30-page screed about how Hitler didn't go far enough*? Are you legally obligated to post it on your site?
Also I hate the idea of having an actual permanent record from school, and would endeavor to undo that legislation as a citizen.
*(For Art class. It looked nothing like the model.)
I'm rather assuming that AI will read huge swaths of student essays and make evaluations of not only how well the essays are written (independent post-facto grading) but also of how well they were graded / the quality of feedback provided, and that the digested information will be available to use as we each use these AI agents to evaluate institutions / programs according to our measures of quality (which don't all have to be the same). I do like the idea of tying this data to longitudinal earnings reporting, but didn't include this in the proposal because it requires a very different data source and introduces many more uncontrolled variables.
Universities will seek out vendors to host that data. Everything I did for my most recent Doctorate (3 years) was under 1 GB; the scale really isn't much compared to what institutions already store and transmit. In fact many universities today require electronic submission so they certainly transmit this much data and likely store all student work for at least the semester, and probably redundantly. Allowing a limited retention period (6 years, for example) would be reasonable, but if employers get used to assessing bodies of work, then eliminating those bodies would be a disservice to alumni.
Probably yes on the specific example. Such a system would eventually require people to accept that (a) hosting does not mean endorsing, (b) people change over time, (c) young adults make dumb decisions, (b+c) old adults used to be young adults and made their own dumb decisions, (d) sometimes people submit work that receives failing grades and (e) we are all more than the sum of the parts we really want to emphasize.
You already have a permanent record from school. It's called a "transcript" and submitting it to your employer is part of many normal hiring processes, even for experienced hires. This body of work can be thought of as a more detailed, granular transcript.; instead of "course name, grade" it's a full record of course assignments, submitted responses and grades.
> ... AI will read huge swaths of student essays and make evaluations of not only how well the essays are written
When this kind of thing becomes standard, moneyed (well-off, but not oligarchically so) applicants will start running their essays through locally-installed AI before sending. Eventually the "application essay" circus will turn into the same kind of arms race as the now-abolished SAT and its prep courses, and the various Harvards might be left with sorting candidates by dossier and pedigree strictly.
If the only ones reading it are AI, there's no reason to keep it online; give it to the AI and post the score the AI gives it.
Although if we have AI capable of doing that accurately, then just let the AI teach everyone and get rid of the universities.
Yes, providing the bodies of work to the AI only is one opportunity. But to ensure it's not just one group's AI that has access, it needs to be accessible. I suspect that we would benefit from having multiple system authors, to get more diversity in UIs and measures of quality.
Providing the bodies of work to other interested parties, as controlled by the creators of those works (the students) presents other opportunities. Controlled online repositories by a small number of most-cost-effective vendors is likely the end system design for that data lake.
We are on the road to having AI capable of grading a variety of works, including systems that can assign firm grades, ones that can alert the grader as to where their attention should be spent, and ones that just do some bit of notes over what the student did. These tools will be boons for educators who can then focus on the trends. ("Hmm. None of the students did well on the Green's Function problems - I should go over that in more detail on Monday and also fix my notes for next semester.") Creation of these would be greatly expedited by the corpus that the collected body of work from all universities would provide. Once use of these kinds of grading systems is accepted, then we'll become more comfortable with grades fully assigned by AI (with student ability to challenge grades with a live educator). At the same time we'll be better at the deep fakes, generative AI with subject matter expertise, so we really won't need professional educators so much, like you suggest.
But my time frame for fixing the higher education industry market dynamics is relatively short as my kids are on paths towards college in 4 years and in 8 years. I suspect this approach would have an impact in time, if started immediately.
I read the title and thought "incentives". Students mostly prefer to have good teachers, and teachers, good students. It's really hard to create a performance test that someone can't fail on purpose. If you reward people for failing, the test ceases to be meaningful. Better to have a system where people mostly WANT good grades.
My naive understanding is there is considerable value in the connections made at elite institutations compared to connections made at eastern state university. Connecting the smartest with those of means and influence seems reasonable if goal is to create high value connections and catalyze higher value results.
George W Bush. BA from Yale, MBA from Harvard. Earned “Gentlemen’s C’s” throughout his academic career.
Commencement Address at Yale:
“And to you C students, I want to tell you that you that you too can be President.”
I guess the whole Skull and Bones thing might help a bit too.
https://www.keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
Well I’ll think about this and look into it some more.
So the the the “to you C students you can be president” was just a joke? Or was he bright but just not motivated in school?
And I’ll add that I don’t think people from Texas are dumb or people that can relate to ordinary people are dumb either. I hate that kind of snobbery.
I am pretty certain that the Skull and Bones connection network played a large part in his rise. Though he did beat John Kerry who was also a member.
Anyway, thanks for an interesting link.
I don’t believe the article in the link. Probably he was more intelligent than his public image suggested but it claims that W had a kind of analytical or academic intelligence he never showed any sign of in public.
From which of his public interactions (which I hazard to guess you have only ever experienced filtered through a media presentation) would you have expected to be able to discern his “true” intelligence? How do you discern “he’s dumb” from “he has a stereotypically unintelligent accent and he tailors his speeches to an audience that preferred a non intellectual ‘Everyman’ style”?
The article notes that John Kerry is, by public reputation, much smarter than George Bush. And yet he was also a C student.
So maybe he was smart but not academically motivated, maybe a C student Yalie is still actually pretty smart, or maybe lots of people who’ve worked with him directly are lying about being surprised by his intellect and the people who have concluded he’s dumb as a box of rocks because they laughed along with John Stewart at his gaffes are right.
I didn't say he was dumb. I don't have anything against his accent. I don't care much about his grades. And I'm not particularly a fan of Jon Stewart.
The article claims Bush was "highly analytical". He never even claimed that for himself, he said he trusted his "gut".
Bush's speeches, his interviews, and what he wrote are only slightly "filtered through a media presentation". He had plenty of opportunity to present himself as he wanted (not all the time, but a lot of the time). You make it sound as though the only information we had about him was a documentary made by someone who hated him. Or do you think it is impossible to have an opinion about any public figure?
>The article claims Bush was "highly analytical". He never even claimed that for himself, he said he trusted his "gut".
He's a professional politician; did you ever consider the possibility that he might have been *lying* when he said that? The cited source makes it clear that Bush II was smart enough to know that truthfully saying "I am highly analytical" or anything at all like it would have ensured that he was never elected President of the United States.
You know that his public image is made up by the media and is not in any way an accurate representation of the man, right? Have you seen Scott Alexander's public image in the NYT?
Scott Alexander was writing an anonymous blog, not a public figure (at least not in the same way a politician is).
George W Bush was the president of the United States and constantly being interviewed, featured in countless stories, and had a team of people to help shape his public image. He would have had almost unlimited opportunities to demonstrate these purported analytical skills in public if he had been inclined that way.
There just isn't any comparison.
That article looks like it could be summarised as "Man's friend claims based solely on subjective personal assessment that he would do better academically than he actually did".
It was the last thing I read before I turned off my phone last night and I wanted to give the article author the benefit of the doubt.
A little Googling this morning showed that Keith Hennessey was an economic advisor to Bush in his second term.
So this was the impression of a person with good reason to be grateful to the former president.
But also someone who is in a much better position to know the man than almost everyone who calls him dumb (many of whom have motivations to do so!) - unfortunately the nature of the job makes it hard to discern an unbiased opinion.
Have none of you ever met a really smart person who either didn’t give enough of a shit to bother with getting As, or whose intelligence is just not of the sort that maps well to purely academic success?
I mean it’s still possible that Bush is super dumb. And he’s probably not a literal genius. But other than “the guy has a good reason to be favorable to Bush” what’s the counter evidence against the article?
It wouldn’t be productive to link to articles that articles that argue against Keith Hennessey’s opinion. There are plenty of them. But opinions are like ani. Everyone has one and thinks that everyone else’s stink.
I think he is a reasonably bright guy. I hate to go to here but FWIW the consensus based on his SAT scores estimate his IQ at 125.
And yes I’ve met my share of really smart people who didn’t give a shit about academic performance.
If you’re right about the IQ, that’s certainly enough (almost 2SD above average) to make it true that “most people who think he’s dumb are less intelligent than he is, or at least not appreciably smarter”.
Have you considered that this analysis fails to take into account DEI? For example, if Harvard was 75% merit and 25% nepo babies, that would still be a decent ratio. But in the modern day, I think the ratio for Harvard would be more like 50% merit, 25% nepo babies, and 25% diversity admissions. In that situation, it's much harder to launder privilege because nowadays, hiring a Harvard graduate gives you a 50% chance of them being a moron. I'm not exaggerating here: in fact, the situation is so bad that if I owned a company then when it came to hiring I would not view Harvard as a prestigious school at all and would be weigh a Harvard degree roughly equally to a degree from a state school. The only Ivy League degree I would strongly value would be MIT.
The diversity admits at Harvard et. al are still the smartest within the "diverse" population.
Yes, and I can not resist showing this under more cynical light: DEI picks the brightest of problematic minorities (the ones that challenge established societal hierarchy) and put them in the top, further up than even a pure meritocracy would allow.
Now how problematic those minorities remains with their would-be leaders now happy being part of the ruling establishment? A little bit, but not really threatening anymore, just a small nuisance at worst or a useful paper bogeyman at best.
Lessons from the 60's and 70's have been learned...
Wow, education is one of those topics where everyone is an expert because they went to school and yet we can't just blindly trust the experts as the system we have doesn't match the values of the common person who wants to improve their life. In this way experts are goal aligned and incentive aligned to come up with the system we currently have as a clear tautology. Despite the verbal only and public protestations otherwise, the hoarding and laundering of privilege with some admixture capture of the best commoners is the standard playbook for a successful aristocracy.
The TL;DR - is in line with Scott's final point about why there is a meritocracy at all. I don't think Scott has gone broad enough with his thinking. It isn't a simple matter of reputation or prestige or validity which these commoners lend to the elite/aristocracy. It is an entirely different process where patrons are present to meet promising commoners whom they can extract value and benefits from.
Would we be confused if we saw lesser and fallen nobility along with the top merchant families sending their best and brightest to a fancy meeting ground with the children of the higher aristocrats and nobility? Change a few words and the truth is clear. They don't want to extract privileged status from commoners, they already have that by birth. They want to extract connections, value, and to both cultivate and harvest the best from the herd of commoners.
I.
I find much of the confusion, hand wringing, and democratic discussion goes away if you just replace the word elite with aristocrat and learn a bit of history.
The renaissance model was very very successful for the aristocrats in Europe. They had better living conditions, more technology, an age of colonialism fuelled by improved weapons, and were all around better off and all they had to do was expand the idea of patronage beyond the arts into the areas of learning about the natural world. This attitude of harvesting the minds of the commoners and lower nobility and creating positions for them to study the world to see what they can figure out...this was super super super successful.
Our education system is simply an extension of this model to sort the wheat from the chaff. It is a mining operation by the aristocrats to get all the commoners to sort themselves out in competition. Meritocracy is 100% fully at odds with the core nature of aristocracy and they never ever intended to apply those ideas to themselves. They don't see themselves as the same as the commoners, they really don't and the vast majority of commoners have never met nor been privy to the inner thoughts of the aristocrats.
II.
We are a breeding stock and are like cattle they own. If you had an intelligent flock or herd of animals who might rise up and kill you if you told them the truth or let them learn or know the truth on their own, then you'd have a very unstable system with a lot of dead elite.
The Russian and French revolutions were a wake up call to expand mass indoctrination beyond simple religious compliance of commoners to their 'betters'. A new intellectual edifice would need to be built to contain commoners within a stable framework. I think some aristocrats worked on this problem in a very intentional way, but a lot of this is simply an alignment of incentives. If driving down one road clearly takes you off a cliff and the other to a bridge to cross the gap, then it isn't a particularly difficult choice.
III.
The great incubator of trial and error took hold and many many many diverse attempts, approaches, and styles of commoner management (one of the core tasks of the aristocracy) emerged in this new age of educated commoners who could think and read. The simple printing press which emerged long before commoners could read led to several revolutions around the world. Later on the radio was used by people in the Caribbean to organise revolts and resistance to colonial rule.
But the aristocracy finds a way and from more totalitarian approaches with daily government radio broadcast to owning the airwaves as a matter of governmental proxy of who is allowed to speak all the way to the Twitter Files style active suppression and censorship of speech.
This is nothing new and is a process within the core problem of elites wanting to harvest commoner minds in an extraction operation and the problems that causes. By and large this problem has been solved through a mixture of violence like the selected murders/assassinations of key leaders within commoner movements which challenge aristocratic authority or goals.
IV.
And the other part is a huge mind control operation of values and the stage production of democracy. What makes it so very convincing is the fact that the stage production is somewhat real with a small percentage of choices allowed to the commoners through a process - especially on issues which DO NOT affect the bottom line or power of the aristocrats who call themselves elites now.
The successful formula has proven to match nature, the carrot and the stick. Rewards and consequences. A stable system with some elements of true meritocracy in a bloody, unfair, and arbitrary process which still ends up costing a lot of resources. Combined with a careful sculpting of 'values'. You can read about this from one of the founders of the modern education system in Rockefeller who wanted a compliant and cooperative sea of minds which could be shaped and directed to the purpose of enriching him and empowering him further. He was very very open about it with all those initial grants and bribes to get modern mass education started. He wanted smarter workers, but not too smart.
But hey...a lot of people who went to those schools and picked up 12 plus years of someone else's values and worldview being drummed into their heads are all experts on what happened to them and why it was good and everyone should join the cult. And yet even with all the benefits of integration you find the truly wild peoples of the world are very very very very very resistant and reject schooling due to those embedded values.
What?? Who are the aristocrats running Ivy League universities as their own private stables of intellectual livestock, if I read your metaphor correctly? And why do you expect that those who are educated at such institutions all "join the cult"? On the contrary, the subjects I studied or was exposed to gave me tools to question orthodoxy -- and that includes topics now considered patrician, like classical philology.
At least, this was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, when any undergrad could bump into incarnations of heterodoxy like John Kenneth Galbraith, Stephen Jay Gould or Robert Lowell prowling around the streets near Elsie's delicatessen, or Roberto Mangabeira Unger reading the Pléiade edition of Proust while lounging in a golden jumpsuit in the courtyard of the Blacksmith House café.
We should also distinguish Harvard before those couple of decades and after them. Before them, the transfer of WASP ruling class values probably had more to do with the composition and family background of the student body, rather than what they learned at the university. After them, a new change of values was triggered by the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan -- it was only in the 1980s that the introductory economics course Ec 10 became the most popular.
But that wasn't an endogenous change. What turned Harvard and other institutions into rubber stamps for the ruling class that we may see today was the rise to dominance of **Chicago** economics from the 1980s onward. This is now the dominant doctrine at Harvard, though it's hardly alone in that affliction.
The focus in the first few paragraphs on the classroom teaching skills of the professors is misplaced. Professors at top universities are famously rewarded for research much more than teaching, and there are few courses even at the graduate level that you need a special expert to teach. But when you have a class full of talented students you can go faster and they give each other better insights. This is not to say that the system we actually have isn't a hodgepodge driven by all the forces in the rest of the post.
Incidentally, The Chosen by Jerome Karabel is indispensable reading on this.
If hanlon’s razor is never attribute to malice blah blah, what would we call a razor that says look first to emergence based on game theory to explain real life situations? (So I think the medium cynical is probably the center of gravity, with this proviso: you’d expect the universities to be exactly as merit based as necessary to maintain their rank while gifting the rest of the slots to those likely to give them donations. The college rankings based on selectivity probably also help maintain the equilibrium; otherwise there’d be a much bigger incentive to give away greater and greater percentages of spots while you traded on your name for a while.) maybe assuming it’s that and not some kind of top-down design is also hanlon’s razor?
Dialectical materialism? Depending on how you set up your game theory,.
I think (?) I know what that means (?) and if I’m right, then yes ;)
By my reading of the link, Dale and Krueger don’t support the challenge, they support the author of that article’s interpretation (i.e. that character matters)
While I'm less sure about Harvard my experience with Caltech suggests to me thar:
1) Some students are more capable than others and society benefits if those more capable students are pushed to the limits of their ability.
2) The best way to push students to the limit of their ability is to put them in classes with similarly able students. It's human nature to slack off or grow uninterested if bored and to rise to the challenge if not.
3) Whatever place you concentrate the best students at will become highly desierable to attend so selectivity is necessary to preserve that feature.
4) Wealth and the other trappings follow because producing the most successful graduates draws alumni money.
--
Yes you often get the best professors at the best schools but, while that makes form a nice research opportunity they are usually not the best instructors so really everyone wins.
I don't think the privilege-laundering model is supposed to apply to places like Caltech or MIT. It's specifically about the Ivies (and a handful of other comparable institutions) and Harvard in particular.
I'm sorry, but the expression "Maharaja of Whereverstan" so typically blends American Exceptionalism with White privilege. Not seeing it and/or not understanding why, reeks even more of it. Whoever coined that expression should be first in the line to get their privilege laundered. Other than that the play was great.
Do you understand why?
This is likely true. I think there are big nuances in the distribution of student quality and of teacher skill-sets though. You touch on the latter; most professors can teach the basics, but few can teach truly advanced skills. There's no point wasting the latter on students who can't learn what they can teach.
Assuming an equal ability to teach things (all teachers teach the same stuff, but some are better at it),
Matt's kid isn't entirely wrong. It *would* work to send the worst students to the best teachers. They'd be better off for the experience. But it would be ridiculously inefficient. The distribution of a class made up entirely of 'worst' students might range between, say, the 10th and 30th percentiles of ability. Teachers teach to the average, at best, and probably more likely to the minimum fixable level (maybe the 15th percentile in this example). So progress is extremely limited, even for the best of the worst. And the difference between 30th percentile ability and 10th is much bigger than it sounds (it's not linear in the tails).
Elite institutions work the same way. It's about teacher quality and class availability, yes, but it's also about the degree to which your classes and teachers are able to be the best versions of themselves. An elite school has elite students; the lowest fixable minimum is irrelevant, because everyone's smart. Teaching to the average still means teaching to a very high level, and because the left tail is truncated there isn't so much of a gap between average and worst. Plus, the best kids in a place like that have ample opportunities to excel; they won't be held back much. Calc at Harvard (or MIT) is not calc at Western Prairie State.
Your theory about laundering privilege still works. Harvard's incentives are to keep quality high to facilitate those dynamics by admitting mostly the best. And it's not like complete idiots get into Harvard anyway, no matter how big the donation. The left tail is still truncated; it's just a bit lower and longer than it would be otherwise.
Thank you l, this is refreshingly in the middle of the argument. On a slightly different note,I've been thinking about and consequently noticing how 'virtue-signaling' is a deception in which people engage no matter the context.
I went to a specialized high school in NYC. We had a 99% college acceptance rate. That was 1000% due to the smartest students testing in, and 0% due to enhanced teaching capabilities. The administration was known to be a joke (teachers got together and wrote a public letter saying the principal was both incompetent and placed by nepotism). If you just put the worst students at the school, scores would plummet immediately. Frankly attending wasn't worth it for me, would have been better to go to my local school.
You focus on rich people laundering their prestige by making themselves look talented/smart, but I think it goes a bit further.
Premier schools also launder the privilege of *being* talented/smart, to make those people look competent/hardworking/trustworthy/etc.
This is in service of the political idea of meritocracy, that being smart/talented is sufficient justification for some people to have control over the lives of others and over the direction of the economy/country, and for them to deserve richer and easier lives with less hardship and more pleasure.
If you know a bunch of precocious 'gifted' children who are smart/talented in some ways but also barely able to take care of themselves and often venal or self-centered, you might question the wisdom or justice of this situation.
Even if all the gifted people you know are saints, you may worry about value misalignment or lack of domain knowledge between them and the masses, or simply be unconvinced that their competence at running the system justifies an unequal system with coercive power.
But a Harvard degree transforms the privilege of smart/talented into an aura of 'competent to lead' and 'part of the natural ruling class'.
Do you have stats on that? Most of the smartest people I knew from Harvard aren't anywhere near the ruling class. (Admittedly, in my 1970s, pre-Reagan class, law and medicine were still seen as the most popular tickets to economic success, rather than finance.) And all the less so if you became a STEM academic, as many of my classmates did. Even as to who rules Harvard itself, it's > 50 years since last time the university president was a Harvard undergrad (Nathan Pusey, who left office in 1971).
I was a Harvard undergraduate in physics in the early-mid 1970s, after attending public schools on the south shore of Long Island (Nassau County, not the Hamptons). The greatest benefit I got from meeting elites was being able to see with my own eyes that coming from money didn't have any correlation with being a decent person. OTOH, the people I knew who had come to Harvard from poorer backgrounds than mine tended to be pretty nice, and often probably a lot nicer than I was. Also, I met a lot of jerks, of various backgrounds.
Obviously this is anecdotal. But thereafter I wasn't ever impressed by people with money just because they had money. Nor did I ever feel that making a lot of money, even from one's wits rather than an inheritance, could excuse someone for being a jerk. This was very liberating. I'm not sure I'd have gotten the same feeling from going to another Ivy, since I might have fantasized that people from Harvard were exceptional in some way.
In the roughly 50 years since, I haven't gotten any contracts in Whereverstan. The only work I ever got from a college connection was from a friend who kindly asked me to do legal work for his venture-backed start-up, at a time when I really needed some work. BTW, he grew up with a single Latin American immigrant parent, and cleaned toilets for a couple of years as his campus job. The start-up failed within three or four years, as most of them do.
My experience with Harvard faculty was mixed. They ran the gamut from inspiring to mediocre to jerks, with most in the middle -- though to be fair, I was too self-involved at that age to know how to build relationships with any of them. There are a couple I really regret not paying more attention to at the time (mathematician Raoul Bott at the top of that list: he was a delightful person, I discovered after I'd cut his class for most of the semester).
The single most life-changing aspect for me was managing a student-run orchestra: so, yes, the peer argument about bright students liking to flock together is pretty cogent. And there were so many ideas floating around in my classes, conversations, in the libraries and bookstores in the area that I've spent much of the past half-century exploring them and seeing them branch into other things. I'd never say that my college years were my best years, but Harvard is why I have a rich intellectual life today.
Which is why I think posts like the one above are simply low-dimensional cartoons, created by people who didn't go to Harvard and who could never imagine that it might be just as complicated as much of the rest of reality.
By contrast, another Harvard graduate once told me that their biggest social surprise there was that there were actually some rich people who weren't jerks.
My background is very similar to yours, in fact it looks like we were in the same graduating class, maybe even in some of the same courses. (I was not a physics major but took Physics 55 freshman year -- great class.)
I think there are two sides of Harvard and while there may be some truth to Scott's post, it could be misleading without perspectives like yours and mine.
My experience is that Harvard, for someone who is interested in a STEM field or a serious scholarly field (e.g. history) Harvard offers a superb education. I only had one bad professor in 4 years, and encountered several Nobelists and world-class experts, all of whom were reasonably accessible and pleasant. The experience in those areas is more about learning and research than connections and prestige. I've also studied at a top European university so I have some basis for comparison and Harvard does just fine.
On the other hand, if your aim is success in politics, entertainment, publishing, Wall Street etc. then course work is indeed less important than connections. But, yeah, don't grouse that you didn't get to drop in on Henry Kissinger during office hours. You're not dropping by to get his opinion on Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. You just want the to drop the name. Too bad.
Now it is probably true that the prestige of the university for the latter group depends in the presence of the former group. Call that prestige-washing if you want. But it would be misleading to think that detracts from the experience of the former group.
There is some overlap in the two groups, for example Gates and Ballmer were STEM types who also benefited from connections. But that is not typical.
Are the serious STEM majors and scholars the product and not the customers as Yudkowsky says? I'd say a bit of both. Their prestige does burnish the credentials of the rich and connected, but the smart serious students also get a good education in the process.
Could you get a comparable education elsewhere or just studying on our own? Absolutely. But it's just easier at a top university. Suppose you are looking for the best book on Reformation politics or the latest paper on cell connections on the visual cortex. You could read reviews or scour the library or PubMed. Or you could ask someone on the faculty who is a world-class expert in the field.
Bottom line: If you go to Harvard to get a great substantive education, you will get that. If you go to get connections, you will get that, if that is your aim. Maybe both in some cases, if you are lucky.
P.S. I recently mentioned my Harvard experience to someone much younger, emphasizing how you were expected to think at a high level (as opposed to memorization or regurgitation.) His reply was "Ah, yes, the Golden Age..." So perhaps things have changed since when you and I were there, especially in the more politicized fields, which is sad.
Yes, one could concurrently have, and maybe realize, various goals at Harvard; my argument with the post is its caricature and reductionism.
I admire your luck with profs. I was Class of ‘76. I couldn’t say that Physics 55 in my freshman year was a good course, though Physics 151 blew my mind, Lagrangians and Hamiltonians were so gorgeous. My sophomore experience, though, is what turned me sour on the field (though my QM section guy later got a Nobel for work he was doing at that time). Junior year I placed my bets on Classics, and while the younger faculty were good, I had one particularly awful senior prof — though thanks to him, I decided not to go to grad school in the arts & sciences, so that was a good thing. My best course was a semester on James Joyce taught by the late Professor of Irish studies, James Kelleher; it wasn't just the subject matter but Prof. Kelleher's human qualities that made it so outstanding.
And a very brief encounter with Calvert Watkins, whose course on Indo-European linguistics I wound up not taking, wound up changing my life when I was past 50: The textbook was in French, and when another student and I asked if there were any alternatives, he responded with what seemed the height of Harvard hubris: "Well, everyone has to learn to read French sooner or later, don't they?" More than 30 years later, when I discovered French writing on degrowth and political ecology, I realized he was right. Though I guess that places me very squarely in the "serious scholarly" constituency you mention.
With regards to the initial point, I went to a top-ranked STEM school and taught/was a grad student at 2 other much lower ranked schools and can confirm that what the two schools taught was completely different. Students at the lower ranked school learned far less theory and weren't exposed to a lot of programming techniques or algorithms that we learned in the first 2 years at the top-ranked school. The grad-level algorithms course I took at one school basically entirely covered material that students at the top-ranked school were required to learn as an undergrad.
Poking my head in to explore, not a hypothetical situation. Relatives of mine (identical twin girls) recently accepted admission to Harvard and a New England state uni. Situationally on the “commoner” strata, if not “poor”(mother’s chronic disabling physical illness, parents divorced, father financially somewhat stable). White female New Englanders. Nearly identical academic achievements, including athletically (although not recruited athletically) at different public high schools. Test well. Constant stream of accomplishments related to very high ability mathematically, also verbally. Adversity also includes chronic illness of their own that requires careful management. Recently witnessed a drive by shooting outside the store where they work part-time. Between the two, had admissions with full scholarships at UNC, Syracuse, etc. One applied to Ivies, one did not. The one who has decided to attend Harvard was reluctant to accept. Why? Partly because her high school friend who resembles her closely, in ability, demographics, struggled greatly with social acceptance there for her freshman year last year. Aside from the accompanying “you don’t belong there” from her sister who did not apply. These two almost instinctively grasp that attending Harvard for them has it’s complications, not being wealthy. Their mom and dad grew up and/or attended college with others of great wealth; their experience was one of sometimes being more beholden than they would have liked, with no obvious long term benefits, because they both chose not to put themselves in service to those with the wealth. One of the twin daughters put her trust in her abilities that would make attending Harvard worthwhile. The other, the far spunkier of the two, did not. Their mom has been supportive of each as they made their choices. It has been interesting so far, to say the least, to read the recent SCOTUS decision in light of their recent experiences.
Except the proportion of rich/powerful isn't 25% - it is at least 36% (legacy) and certainly much higher (donations, "pull").
So really all it is, at this point, is a Veblen good - something rich and powerful do in order to show they are rich and/or powerful.
Of course, legacy admissions are much smarter than the average black or poor student, so its not like they're displacing "disadvantaged" kids anyway.
I kept looking for the /sarc, but it appears your comment is genuinely an example of idiocy.
Among other things: affirmative action acceptance was always supposed to be about giving exceptional but poor kids a chance at an Ivy League education/pedigree - it was never about accepting "average".
The most egregious part of the nonsense about "meritocratic" acceptance policies isn't just that there is clear evidence of lowered (but not clearly low) standards for those that benefited - it is that there is very clear evidence that discrimination was employed against those clearly well qualified but of the wrong minority ethnicity. Asians in particular were actively discriminated against much as the Semites were in the past.
And in all cases, the "legacy" admissions were always about class solidarity as opposed to any other even vaguely "meritocratic" component. It is the literal enshrining of the "lucky sperm".
This is a question that sounds adorable, because it comes from a five-year-old. The same is not true of intelligent adults asking the same question.
My wife did a rotation in admissions, and participated in undergrad admissions decisions, while working as an assistant director at an Ivy. Her career: university fundraising.
(1) “Why do we send” is a false premise, “We” have no agency on admissions. And the only people sending anyone to a university is a situation where a family or equivalent is helping someone pay for & be successful at college. Colleges and universities are registered business entities. “We” refers to society, American society is not granted authority over university/college managers to make decisions about what any given universities and colleges do.
(2). A legit really effective teacher working as a professor is a somewhat rare individual, and highly valued by students, colleagues, the parents of students, alumni, and highly valued and sought after by other colleges and universities. People are free to make their own choices about where to apply to work, and teaching professors or research faculty with really great skills often have a number of nice options available.
In most human endeavors that people are passionate about and deeply invested in, A-players want to work with/collaborate with/mentor other A-players. Less so, mentoring B or C-players. An A-player teaching professor deciding to *focus on* helping C-player students is a pretty rare, laudable situation precisely because they chose something noble and against the grain. The professor who spends her time helping highly intelligent, motivated undergrads or grad students unlock challenging knowledge is no less laudable, and should be equally free of coercion by “We.”
The question implicitly presupposes that the quality of education might be better at a 'better' school. This is not true. Professors at highly ranked schools do not teach better than those at low-ranked schools. There is not some magic pedagogical method that is known only to elite schools. In fact, competition for faculty positions is so fierce that there are many excellent people at quite low-ranked schools. So, there is no reason to want mediocre students to go to a highly-ranked school - they would not benefit at all anyway.
What students benefit from is other students. Scott mentions cynical reasons this is good - hobnobbing with other elites, but there are more virtuous reasons.
One is that tracking is good for students. If all the good students are together they can learn at an accelerated pace and the mediocre students can learn at a slower pace. In the end, both groups are receiving instruction at the optimal level. This is a stable situation. If you try to introduce mediocre students to a good school, they will do poorly relative to other students. I know of students who were asked to withdraw from a good school to go to one more suitable for them, and in the end they were actually thankful for the advice. They learned more at the slower pace and went from being bottom-of the class losers to solid performers, which boosted their confidence.
If you suddenly changed the situation so that the worst schools were where the best students went, in a few years all that would happen is to reverse peoples sentiments about which schools are best/worst.
Young Yglesias's question is interesting because it suggests that the best colleges are the ones accepting small class sizes of highly promising high school students. There's a reasonable argument that Arizona State and the University of Central Florida are the best colleges in America because they produce so many college grads capable of entering the workforce.
How many colleges produce mostly grads not capable of entering the workforce?
Of all the great authors of the world how many of them majored in English lit or creative writing? I tend to the Charles Dickens and Herman Melville stumbled on writing while at University studying law or accounting or something.
It’s even better than that. Neither one of them ever went to college.
And they both had very limited formal education
Listening to a podcast on the affirmative action in admissions problem, I wondered: why don't we just ask colleges to accept everyone by lottery? Why even bother with SAT/ACT/GPA/GDP/whatever? Everything meritorious is in some way racist; not only is a non-discriminatory lottery non-racist, it also allows colleges to compete on the quality of their product—if you can produce high-earning graduates out of a random grab bag of students, you can claim legitimate prestige.
Definitely an interesting concept. I suppose the problem is that you’d need some way to ensure that all the universities in a given university-ecosystem are adhering to the lottery method. If, as in this example, a university’s prestige is indexed to its graduates’ earnings (or analogous achievements like grad school acceptance, etc), it would be in the university’s interest to handpick students from, say, wealthy backgrounds (the assumption being these individuals/their families have a more established network, and thus more postgrad earning potential). The political scandals we’re familiar with now would likely just give way to false-lottery scandals, or something else of the like.
>colleges to compete on the quality of their product
Did you read this post at all?
The "quality of their product" IS their students. You can't have a "good product" if smart kids are forced to attend courses designed for the dumbest kids to be able to pass and understand. Everything will have to be dumbed down and every college will become equally mediocre.
>if you can produce high-earning graduates out of a random grab bag of students, you can claim legitimate prestige.
Nobody can do this. Being a high earner is primarily a product of intelligence, and "good teaching" can't meaningfully improve people's intelligence generally, but especially not "good teaching" at the college level.
And what happens when it comes time to apply to medical school? Do you have some way of only letting the smartest kids in, which would necessarily be "racist" because the black kids STILL won't be smart enough to get in? Or are we going to be pumping out thousands of dumb doctors, all in the name of equality?
Absolutely terrible, terrible idea except for the fact that it would destroy the college system and potentially allow something better to take its place.
What we would likely see for a number of fields is companies hiring smart students out of high school with their own kind of tests, and putting them into something like a cadetship where they learn on the job through experience and e.g. online learning modules. We should especially expect this in tech jobs where degrees are already much less valuable than actually knowing what you're doing.
But in any case, if we're forced to destroy the college system because it gets accused of "racism", then it doesn't matter what happens next because the country is already toast. There's no way America can remain a first world country over the long term if such idiocy has achieved such a degree of ideological capture in our institutions.
I am late to this but in more meritocratic university admittance policies there would be elite courses not elite universities, not at undergraduate level anyway. Medicine or Engineering would be difficult to get into at any university - and standards within those courses would be fairly uniform across institutions.
This is now Ireland works, the state exam determines what courses you can do and the standard needed for different courses varies significantly within any university.
That said Irish universities are not setting the world alight at research and post graduate level so maybe that’s a reason to concentrate the best in one, or a few, universities.
I think this, like a lot of dysfunction in the american university system, is because students in the US don't chose what they're studying before they apply.
There's no mechanism you could use to say that they're allowed into Harvard but only to study certain subjects.
The UK seems to be somewhere in between, where universities have different reputations overall but also their departments have reputations for being good or bad at their particular field.
For what it’s worth, I think the US system is far preferable. To me, it doesn’t make sense to expect a 17-18 year old to decide what want to study, both because of their youth and because they haven’t been exposed to most of the subjects yet.
They SHOULD have a good idea by the time they're 18, and if they don't then I think it should fall onto schools to remedy that rather than have people waste years of their life and getting into debt for something even less directly applicable in what their job ends up being than that related subjects themselves.
And anecdotally, most kids I know who were smart and hardworking enough to become doctors knew they wanted to be doctors before they had finished high school.
You know what they say about anecdotes. I also know people who didn't know they wanted to become doctors until later, and I know many more who thought they wanted to become doctors when they finished high school and then changed their minds. Let's not oversimplify.
I'm curious how schools might help remedy incoming students not knowing what they want to do without exposing them to different options.
Is there any hard evidence of the theory that diversity causes better educational outcomes? I always see this asserted without evidence as a rationale for affirmative action, but it seems to be on much shakier ground than mismatch theory.
Re diversity improving education, I could easily see it going the other way, because certain groups could be offended by certain facts, so educational content would be santitized or distorted to avoid offending them. In a discussion about supposed racial bias in police shootings, the probability that anyone mentions the numbers on racial disparities in the actual commission of crimes is probably negatively related to the percentage of black people in the room.
That may be true of Harvard, but I think there's a simpler explanation for the broader phenomenon: the brightest students would prefer to be taught by the brightest teachers (they'd learn more), and the brightest teachers would prefer to teach the brightest students (it's more rewarding). The only reason this isn't going on earlier in the education system is that governments feel a duty of care for kids, and make rules to stop it (at least in the UK), but adults are on their own, so the obvious equilibrium follows.
“Fairly-earned privilege”
Curious frame to hold on a (correctly ime) hereditarian blog.
This is one context in which I might suggest more utilitarianism would help your argument. It’s not about merit or earning just desserts
it’s about expected return on investment.
But this is is entirely within the context of people thinking that wealth is an unearned privilege compared with talent. Being born rich and white is as comparably (un) "earned" as is being born black and smart. And yet most people think that a rich white person getting into college over a poorer but smarter black person is unfair.
The example with the writing teacher is a bit absurd. The vast majority of great writers never had *any* formal training in creative writing at all. (or at most, basic)
So I heavily doubt the great writing teacher is going to do anything for the genius writer. The genius writer doesn't need a teacher, probably doesn't even want one.
Writing is not a normal profession - it's very debatable if teaching does anything good for you if your skill level is above mediocre.
A shaky assumption underneath this question is the idea that Harvard admissions committees have highly accurate screening systems that can select for true academic merit. Revisionist History has had several great episodes calling that assumption into question. At an anecdotal level, it's important to remember that Einstein was repeatedly bounced away from undergrad by standardized entrance exams. Then, after he graduated, he was saddled with crummy academic reference letters saying he'd never amount to anything.
Judging academic merit is surprisingly hard. The assumption that Harvard admissions committees are especially good at it doesn't seem well justified. Another possible answer to a five year-old's starting question might be that elite institutions should admit some seemingly sub-par students because some of the sub-par students might actually be geniuses.
>Then, after he graduated, he was saddled with crummy academic reference letters saying he'd never amount to anything.
You need to data to make this argument, not the singular anecdote of Einstein. And in any case, importantly, Einstein managed to absolutely distinguish himself completely in spite of the apparent failure of institutions to recognize his genius! So how this proves that smart people are missing out is beyond me. What this case shows (if it actually is as described), is that very smart people are smart enough to do great things regardless of what others think of their intellect.
>Another possible answer to a five year-old's starting question might be that elite institutions should admit some seemingly sub-par students because some of the sub-par students might actually be geniuses.
That is completely fallacious.
Let's say that 40% of people above average height are good basketball players and 10% of people below average height are good basketball players (4:1 ratio).
If you had to select 5 players for a basketball team and you had large populations of short and tall people to pick from, and had no information on them other than their height, how many short players you pick? 1 out of 5?
No. The rational answer is zero. On average you will get more good players selecting 5 tall players and zero short players. This is a matter of basic mathematics: 0.4 * 5 = 2 good players on average (selecting all tall players) vs 0.4 *4 + 0.1*1 = 1.7 good players on average (selecting 4 tall and 1 short players).
Selecting only those with strong academic achievement will similarly yield more geniuses being selected than selecting a mix of above and below average achievers, even if you're missing the odd under-achieving genius.
Height is easy to measure. The point I was trying to illustrate with Einstein is that academic merit is *not* easy to measure. I know many people reflexively dismiss Malcolm Gladwell as an intellectual lightweight, but he actually has done some important heavy lifting in this subject area. For example, the Revisionist History episode "Outliers, Revisited" makes a convincing case that even seemingly solid measurements like school grades might be accidentally measuring irrelevant variables like birth month.
Admissions committees saw Einstein's poor grade point average and his abysmal test scores in non-math subject areas in college entrance exams and concluded he had poor academic merit. There's no reason to assume Harvard's measurements are any less faulty.
I think there are plenty of elites that can make it into our nation's top schools, and the smartest elites will continue to do so. It will also create a greater incentive for wealthy families to prioritize education.
Alternatively: a sufficiently visible pipeline to success through education socially legitimizes learning as a credible way to achieve wealth and/or status (and achieve it virtuously!). There must be a clear reward within sight of the k-12 slog to focus teenagers and their families on academic success, and ‘go to a great school and you’re set’ might be a more convincing and actionable heuristic than ‘get good at something, wherever and however possible’.
For this reason (and to stick my neck out), we should be inclined to make the pipeline more credibly within reach of traditionally underserved/underachieving groups, perhaps through affirmative action and hamfisted attempts to showcase diversity in higher education.
*First of all, as Scott literally mentions: Going to a good school explains almost none of the lifetime earnings variation after controlling for intelligence. This strongly suggests that sending "Underserved/underachieving groups" e.g. dumb black kids to college won't make them anything close to 'set for life'.
Actually getting good at something is absolutely better advice than advocating ways for black people getting pieces of paper regardless of their intelligence. Having a piece of paper from Harvard is only valuable because Harvard largely only lets smart. hardworking kids in in the first place. The idea that hijacking this signal could set people up for life is insane. Elite lawyers who graduated from harvard are elite lawyers because they're almost always incredibly intelligent and conscientious. A below average student spending a few years at harvard doesn't magically become smart enough for cognitively demanding work like this.
*Secondly, do you have any evidence whatever that lack of motivation explains the black/white academic achievement gap to any meaningful degree? We had affirmative action for decades and it coincided with substantial academic gaps between blacks and whites. Also, black parents more likely to say they want their kids to go to college than white parents are.
This is basically similar to the idea that we need "representation" of blacks so 'black kids know they can succeed'. I've literally never seen any data that supports the idea that this representation improves black school performance, and my subjective impression of things is that stuff like this simply imbues black people with a sense of entitlement, that success is owed to them and not being successful is evidence of "racism".
*Third, black people are not "underserved" by the college system. They simply aren't smart enough to get into good colleges at the rate that whites and asians do. If underperformance in school was a product only of motivation, then without affirmative action white and asians have as much to gain or lose by studying or not. With affirmative action, they actually have less to gain from studying hard than blacks. So if the 'K-12 slog' is something that needs some special motivation to get through, it's unclear why whites and asian have significantly outperformed blacks over the past few decades in spite of the greater returns on educational achievement for blacks.
It seems to me that the better the student is, the worse the professor is able to be. A smart student can teach themselves the material. If you look on MIT opencourseware, their teachers are pretty boring and unengaging. Meanwhile, the teachers at the "Great Courses" (intended for the layman) are quite excellent. This gels with what one commenter wrote about Harvard in 1975 and all the famous teachers being awful.
So the reason we don't send the worst students to the best schools is be because the best schools have the worst teachers, they don't need good teachers precisely because they are selecting for good students. The IVY league is not about making you smart, it is about proving you are already smart.
>So the reason we don't send the worst students to the best schools is be because the best schools have the worst teachers, they don't need good teachers precisely because they are selecting for good students.
No, it's straight-forwardly because these schools wouldn't BE the "best schools" in the first place if they took the worst students. There's nothing inherently "best" about harvard.
I wrote about this:
"Let’s imagine a stylized world where each applicant is either rich or smart.
If a college lets in only smart kids, it can’t keep the lights on. It goes out of business in short order.
If a college lets in only rich kids, in a year or two, the parents of the next crop of rich kids won’t be interested in making donations or paying tuition to a so-so institution. The rich parents will send their kids and dollars elsewhere.
So, there is some optimal allocation of rich and smart kids. At this optimal point, the rich kids’ parents’ money keeps the institution afloat and builds the labs where the smart kids commercialize nuclear fusion, cook up next-generation antibiotics, etc. The smart kids boost the college up the rankings and provide the prestige that draws in the rich parents.
Colleges have been playing this game for many rounds. They’ve had a chance to learn and tinker. I bet many of them know what that optimal point is. Relatedly, I think private-school applicants are so appealing to prestigious colleges because they sometimes allow admission offices to sidestep the tradeoff between rich and smart kids.
Of course, in real life, colleges are optimizing for more than two traits, some applicants align with more than one of those goals, and the super-selective places have huge endowments and so don’t have to operate from cash flow."
https://clarkecollegeinsight.substack.com/p/one-more-view-of-the-nyu-orgo-scandal