What we really need to do is just put a social stigma on hiring Harvard or Ivy League graduates.
I also think that Matt might focus a little too much on income, I suspect being a graduating or attending an Ivy League also increases the odds of getting an influential job.
For instance, I have a brother-in-law that runs a construction company that clears over seven figures, but he is not nearly as influential as say Matt is.
Matt has hired two awesome interns, but for whatever reason both of them have come from well to do families and attended Ivy League schools. I have to imagine that writing for Slow boring will give them a boost up if they decide to go into politics or public policy or writing. However, I also have to wonder if there are not more talented riders out there that didn’t attend Ivy League schools, that just didn’t have the connections to get the job.
No, I am not coming at Maya or Milan, they are hard driven talented young adults. Just pointing out how the world works.
I agree with your response, except the first sentence. As long as the Ivy League (and other elite universities) attract an unusually smart cohort of students, there should be no stigma associated with hiring from that pool. Let's not replace anti-elitism with some misguided sense of anti-smart.
Why? There are more talented people who don’t go to Harvard or Yale than go there. So I doubt society suffers. Currently I imagine in certain arenas there is a social stigma against those who didn’t go to elite Universities.
If going to an elite school became a social stigma, I am sure that those who really deserve it could overcome via hard work (isn’t that what they would say about the current status quo).
Why? Because applying social stigma based on where a kid went to college is bad. It is bad if done to a non-elite college graduate and it is also bad if it's done to a Harvard (or even Yale¹) graduate.
I've seen both situations -- I've had people look down on me because I'm a product of a state school but I've also seen elite school grads presumed to be snotty and undeserving. Both situations are unwarranted and the solution is to remove social stigma, not merely move its application to people you don't like.
Good point. I defer to my wife, a UNC grad from the Midwest who notes that she was pressured against attending an Ivy by reverse snob family members. In the interest of full disclosure, yes she got in to an Ivy and yes many of her relatives went to Chicago.
I’m kinda with you John but I do think this is more nuanced than to apply social stigma or not. This seems to me to be more a matter of degree (🙂).
While Ivy’s deserve credit for their abilities and there’s no denying many are amongst the most talented. I think they are getting more than that. There is a form of elite tribalism that goes on. Let’s just end that. You get full credit for who you are but no extra credit.
26% of NYT writers are Ivy’s? As the paper of record and an advocate for diversity and inclusion they should publish a wider range of voices.
Ivy leagues schools reputation is well known for being bastions of the elite. So even kids who came from working class made a conscious choice to go be part of those schools. They purposely went there, too get that Ivy League reputation. So why shouldn’t there be a social stigma against them?
"They purposely went there, too get that Ivy League reputation."
You don't think... ANYONE... went there for other reasons? You think you should take a general rule that may be likely to be true, and apply it to everyone? Like...a stereotype?
Confused: if you somehow got this to stick, wouldn't it just mean than instead of Harvard and Yale, the prestigious school would be called something else? I don't think you can create a situation where there isn't a school (or a small set of them) that acts as a funnel to the prestigious jobs, because as everyone keeps pointing out, the networking effects are real.
My problem with the ivy leagues is there, non-transparency and reliance on connections, money, and secret sauce, to get access to their Corridor’s of power.
I don’t feel that way about Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT , etc... those are all elite schools, which I am happy to leave as elite schools.
There was the Epstein stuff. Plus their Dean of Admissions (Marilee Jones) about 15-20 years back turned out to be a fraud. But I agree, relatively limited given the circles they are usually included in.
“Pure measurab[ility]” isn’t the critical dynamic here, though.
I come from the future and I’m here to tell you how this plays out. The RORY Act (“Restoring Open Responsible [standards at] Yale”) passes, and immediately Yale and Harvard start requiring half a dozen SAT II subject tests and specifying objective metrics for extracurriculars. This has the net impact of keeping admissions mostly the same, plus handing a huge pile of revenue to The College Board.
I don’t truly know you, and we’re not having this conversation over a beer, so I can’t exactly ask outright, but you seem to be strongly indignant at the inequality of influence wielded by institutions that you think aren’t egalitarian enough. That’s fair! And I’m no fan of it either. But these institutions are hundreds of years old. They didn’t get this way overnight, and they aren’t going to change because of your proposal alone. The problem is that the people who run them are _very_ different from you, and have different incentives, not that they're insufficiently constrained by the law.
If you really want education to be about merit, we probably need to take its administration out of the hands of professional bureaucrats and put it back into the hands of the professors. I won’t pretend you’d like their actual politics, but you WILL like the results of having more decisions made on the basis of pedagogical merit than the raw business logic that currently dominates.
I find it so weird that there’s so many people defending the Ivy League’s, and fighting back against my advocating for there to be a social stigma against them. When I’m pretty confident that the view isn’t reciprocated.
When Matt hangs out with his social crowd, whoever that is, do you think there are more Ivy League graduates or State school graduates in the crowd? This is a man who writes articles about equality and reform, yet... his last two interns have been from ivy leagues.
The point is, at this point in time, elite school graduates already have a leg up. They are happy to advocate for treating people equally, because they already have a leg up.
Being a white male already has a social stigma upon it these days. It’s commonly used as an off, handed insult or put down. And yet, I cannot imagine people in the comments defending white males as much as they are defending Ivy League students. And the average Ivy League graduate has a lot more power than the average white male.
If it is socially acceptable to advocate for social stigma against the white males, I feel that I have every right to advocate for the social stigma of Ivy League graduates.
>>I find it so weird that there’s so many people defending the Ivy League’s, and fighting back against my advocating for there to be a social stigma against them. When I’m pretty confident that the view isn’t reciprocated.
To be clear, I'm not defending *them*, I'm just challenging *you* to come up with a workable plan of assault against our common overlords.
I could give less of a shit about stigmatizing them. I just want their insane levels of privilege to be spread more equitably, and I want to do that without lining people up against any walls, nor provoking an endless cycle of backlash. I want *sustainable* justice that will last through the millennia, not just justice for my own satisfaction in my own lifetime. Which means I have to apply a MUCH higher level of scrutiny to my (and yours, by extension) ideas about how to get there.
>>If it is socially acceptable to advocate for social stigma against the white males, I feel that I have every right to advocate for the social stigma of Ivy League graduates.
That's where you lose me. I don't think a society based on stigma is at all the best path, let alone better than its alternatives. Stigma will always have a place in society, but it is more often a tool of the elites than a tool of controlling them.
Just one addendum about something I said on my other comment:
>>The problem is that the people who run them are _very_ different from you, and have different incentives, not that they're insufficiently constrained by the law.
These are people who understand that what matters isn't the letter of the law, but how the law shapes their long-term power. As a class, they've used that perspective for *centuries* to keep us in our place.
The point is, they aren't amateurs. Entire revolutions have been fought against them, and they've still mostly come out on top - cf Russia. All progress against them has been both incremental and sporadic, usually spurred on by major crises.
If you haven't read The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, I highly recommend it. It's kind of depressing, but gives an excellent zoomed-out view on inequality. We're fighting a LONG battle. Not a new one.
Indeed. People are different and therefore never will be all the same (equal). So "our" battle against inequality is never-ending and will never succeed.
Thi matches what I just replied to another commenter on. He argues as an elite lawyer he has no more influence on my BIL. But my BiLs income is not guaranteed and entirely dependent on luck and arbitrary contracts. He has cash now, but next year might be different. And would have no idea how to steer his kid into Harvard.
I think the idea that business owners who make seven figures annually have less influence than the typical person working in journalism or public policy is a bit half-baked. State legislators, city council members, and congressional representatives from less economically active constituencies— who wouldn’t even notice what the average columnist has to say— care a great deal about their preferences and respond to their requests and opinions.
All that said, seven figure business owners are probably an even more family wealth-gated group than Ivy+ grads are; the more relevant comparison class are probably professionals who went to state flagships and graduated in the top 20% of their class. This sort of person has life outcomes fairly similar to the median Ivy+ grad but probably less access to the extreme right tail of fame/wealth outcomes.
I disagree. You would honestly be surprised about how many blue-collar working class millionaires there are. My brother-in-law didn’t graduate high school. Two years ago we were giving him pity jobs at our house. He found his niece, worked hard and is successful. However, there’s no guarantee he’s gonna be making the same money in a year or two years because of the nature of his business.
He isn’t donated that money to politicians, he used it to open up a sprinkler company.
Right now, Washington DC is cracking down on fake temporary license plates… because Matt banged the drum against it.
Matt is probably one of the 50 most visible news/opinion writers in the world. I'm pretty sure the 50 wealthiest people in the world have more clout than Matt does.
There are plenty of millionaire small business owners with low-income blue collar backgrounds in the US— it’s a big, rich country (and there are also plenty of doctors, lawyers, and programmers who came from poor families)— but on average, successful entrepreneurs are even more likely to come from money than high-end knowledge workers.
"I think the idea that business owners who make seven figures annually have less influence than the typical person working in journalism or public policy is a bit half-baked."
Not at all. Power comes from exercising **discretion** to control others. If you are running a business you are totally constrained by market reality and the imperative to make a profit or die. If you own a chain of restaurant you can't make all your customers eat broccoli because you like it. If you are a brain surgeon you don't get to whimsically decide who lives and dies because you always have to exercise your skill to save the life on the table. But if you are a parole officer making $60K a year, you can send people to jail based on whether you are in the mood to violate them. Your actual power is off-the-chart compared to the average Harvard grad.
On the other hand, you may be right about journalists and think tankers not being as powerful as they imagine. They are essentially propagandists repeating the same party line that their institution is designed to propagate. If they hadn't written the latest article about institutional racism or Trump being a "threat to our Democracy," then some generic replacement would have written essentially the same thing. This is just another way of saying they don't have much personal **discretion** to control the message. (And their thinkpiece is probably just preaching conventional wisdom to their own choir, anyway.)
In the real world’s less than perfectly competitive, efficient, and transparent markets, most business owners and operators have a fair amount of wiggle room between their theoretical profit-maximizing course of action and bankruptcy, and exercise quite a bit of discretion in the course of business. And, of course, the wealth and prestige that come with operating a successful business give owners quite a bit of freedom and clout in their personal and political lives.
Agreed, the power to place a phone call to the chair of your state senate appropriations committee during state budget season and be confident the call will be picked up cannot be understated. The power of your network to increase the likelihood that your child will get into an Ivy League is notable, but so is the power of you and your chamber of commerce buddies to cut a percentage of TANF for a percent cut to your CNIT.
To your first point: Malcolm Gladwell suggested a few years ago that top firms not allow applicants to list their educational institutions. You could list GPA, test scores, etc -- just not the name of the school.
A priori, it’s impossible to tell how this would actually affect hiring, but I think it could make for a really cool experiment.
Given what we've seen with banning the box, it's likely that it would actually *increase* the reliance on references and personal networks and lead to an overall reduction in equitable hiring.
This is actually a great point. I honestly can’t offer a rebuttal because I think you might be right. But then again in my defense, I’m traveling today so pretty much this whole thread is me just sort of riling people up. in my day-to-day life, I don’t even know Ivy League people, so it really doesn’t matter to me. Shhhhhh
I think this is especially true for later-career roles -- less so for entry-level gigs or postgraduate training programs. If a role specifically calls for fresh grads, they're simply going to have fewer references available, no matter where they come from.
I think the connections part of the job searches is frontloaded. It gets your name to the front of the queue. It gets you a call back. Lets you know what jobs are available.
As for grade inflation, we’ve been on that trajectory pretty steadily for the past 20 or so years. (I believe there was an SB post on the subject not too long ago.) I’m not sure how much this experiment would exacerbate a trend already underway.
I don't know why MIT does that. I looked it up and the only answer I found was that supposedly it had an "E" grade after D where you could get a 1.0 for "showed up to class and didn't cheat".
So that would affect it... slightly and allow for _slightly_ more granularity (I guess it makes an F bring things down even more, relatively - but Fs are pretty rare, especially since freshman year was PASS/NORECORD so you wouldn't get the ->college transition issue)
And then when the E grade went away they kept it to keep things comparable with their historic scale?
Speaking as a University of Chicago educated lawyer with a prestigious job who knows many people with similar background…I and most of my fellows have about the same influence as a small business owner.
It’s always amusing to me that people think there is some secret influence club that meets on Thursdays or something. It is a high percentage play to try to land a lucrative or otherwise very selective job for the vast majority of folks who attend. There are always a few on the academic / clerkship / aspiring judge or politician path but (a) most of those few wash out and end up at firms anyway and (b) even among those who succeed it’s a small percentage (of that small number) that ever wield any power or heft.
Is your child or my brother in laws child more likely to get into Harvard assuming both are 90-95% scoring kids?
It’s not just political influence. It’s class. It’s the ability to transmit all the correct social cues to your off-spring to ensure they are just as successful as you are.
Also, I suspect you are underestimating your influence. I bet you are only one degree away from someone elected socially.
My BIL wears paint stained gym shorts to work, and has no guarantee that his business will Iast next year. Most small businesses are like this.
Eh I don't know I think this is taking it too far. Kids usually have a leg-up on following in their parents footsteps. That's normal in all times and places and most cures for that problem would likely be worse than the illness.
As a U Chicago grad ES's kids aren't legacy at Harvard. Unless he's in the top 1%+ of incomes he's not going to have a donor advantage. So assuming that's the case we're left with other intangibles or "social cues".
And that's something, but it's not like the barriers are 6ft thick concrete...I know two kids from my high school that went to Harvard. One was the child of a used car salesman (salesman, not dealership owner) and the other was a single mom's kid (although the dead-beat dad was WWE star SupaFly Snooka, fwiw, lol). There's a million unfair things about everyone's birth circumstances and I feel like "50% more likely to get into Harvard" is way down on the list in terms of what I'm concerned about.
I don't really think they are (maybe they would be more likely to get into *Chicago* if Chicago did legacies), controlling for things like "I am the kind of person who will [hopefully] raise successful children" and "genetics".
I am not from a "high class" family, so something of a natural experiment about how much the Chicago degree standing alone is worth (answer: looks really good on a resume as a credible signal of intelligence and work ethic, which has helped my career, which career affords me the same clout as a small business owner, which is not much but is more than most people get because I have some money).
Even if they were, though, their Harvard education would in turn...still be just a high percentage play for a well-compensated or otherwise selective job, just like me, not a ticket to the Room Where It Happens as you seem to think.
I think you are conflating "a disproportionate percentage of elected officials and other influence wielders went to top schools" and "your typical person from a top school has bonus influence". It's a necessary not sufficient condition for sitting on SCOTUS or whatever.
It seems to me that in some sense making people money is more democratic than working in a , small d, democratic institution.
Like if you can make people money no one is going to be so elitist about where you got your diploma from. But it seems to me that public service careers aren’t like this at all.
Seems like the simpler thing is to somehow target the elite firms that are responsible for 99% of the prestige and income hoarding that you're concerned with. The charts in the post make it clear that nearly all of the "problem" is at elite / prestigious firms (also national level GOP politicians but that's my addendum)
The average company doesn't need a stigma against hiring Ivy+ grads if they're only hiring them occasionally anyway.
Honestly I care more about the NYT and the Supreme Court than who elite firms hire. Mainly because it’s makes for a more interesting comment section… people are really invested in defending Ivy League graduates.
I care about SCOTUS because it's one of the most powerful institutions on the planet. The NYT I can care less about by simply not reading the NYT that often.
Not "more talented": Milan and Maya are great! I just think it would be good if the *next* one comes from somewhere else if for no other reason than that signaling is important.
Although I do suspect that the University of Wyoming *does* have more talented riders. :-)
Personally, it is not a matter of talent so much as it is perspective. My default position is that I do not care what anyone thinks about the American Rescue Plan. And I am not fancy enough to know or care about debate. But I do like reading commentary from people who can refract their analysis or storytelling through life experience that is different than my own. In Matt's case, that is largely a function of having access to interesting, influential and knowledgeable people (particularly in DC), which is partly the result of his fancy pedigree, but is mainly the result of his many years working as a journalist. Milan and Maya will probably go on to be those interesting, influential and knowledgeable people. For now, it would be great for Matt to give a platform to some interns whose writing is inflected with a unique point of view.
Too many replies to know whether this is redundant but here’s the issue: not going to an ivy doesn’t mean you’re not smart or talented, but going to an ivy does. Assessing talent without credentials is hard, risky work, and not many employers are actually very good at it. So they use the ivies as talent filters. True, that means there’s a ton of underpriced talent out there for employees brave and resourceful enough to develop alternative ways to evaluate and cultivate it. But I’m not going to say I’m surprised that most companies who can afford ivy grads get them.
Agreed on most of it. I don’t think it would be to terribly difficult to filter. Companies would just go to the best non-Ivy schools. Or even pay more attention to Professor recommendations or GPA.
But when a firm hires an Ivy League kid they aren’t just getting the kid they are getting access to the kids connections as well.
My whole issue with Ivy's is lack and f transparency on admissions which is use to slip in kids of the powerful who benefit from the reputation of the high achievers who do make it on merit.
Does the child of a multimillionaire tech startup dude get in because they were brilliant it because Dad has connections. We never know, because Harvard agents enough brilliantly students to cover for the less than brilliant.
It’s not even that the grads who aren’t brilliant are idiots… they are all smart… just that there were plenty just as smart kids who didn’t get in because they didn’t have the social connections.
I think Milan cold emailed Matt (but I could be wrong) and I’m unsure how Maya got it. The cold email method is something that might be more common in Ivy League students as they carry a confidence that comes with their address being @ivyleagueinstitution but there’s nothing inherent about that go getter attitude that says a UVA grad can’t do the same.
I'm not sure if it's in person but assuming Matt pay his interns well enough for them to live in DC, coming down to DC and meeting all of the cool people Matt interacts with on a daily business for his journalism would be an incredible opportunity in addition to working under an accomplished writer.
I might be wrong, but my impression is that Matt isn't hobnobbing with political elites much. I think he's talked before about spending a lot of time working in a coffeeshop, iirc.
I’ve admittedly never been a hiring manager but I’ve always thought of UVA as a pretty prestigious institution on par with Michigan, Berkeley, etc and a notable tier above Penn State, Ohio, etc. My presumption is that kids sending out resumes to elite jobs with UVA at the top of their resume catch the eye of hiring managers in a way a lot of students don’t. This is all presumption though so I could be wrong.
Sure, but I doubt there are a significant number of jobs where applying with UVA on your resume “hurts” you but, again, I’ve never been a hiring manager at an elite firm.
The comments about Matt’s hiring practices verge on ad hominem. Let’s judge the interns by their work, and they are kicking ass. Matt found two extremely capable young people and is letting them do things that many smart people five and ten and forty years older can’t do. Maya’s article made tenured professors look foolish.
They both had great resumes that grabbed Matt’s attention. If Matt uses a classist heuristic for identifying talent, he used it well, and though I wish Harvard had not wait listed me, I won’t let my envy get the better of me.
Exactly. My construction company BIL has zero influence on whether his son gets into Harvard, but would you bet against Matt’s son getting in? And it’s not because Matt asks a favor, it’s because Matt’s son will be around successful people who will halo give internships in school or encourage him to do the sort of things that get you into Harvard or Yale.
Social influence does more in the long term to keep your kids successful than blue collar success.
To me this is the real problem with it. I went to a state flagship undergrad and a public law school, but being a lawyer in the DC area I occasionally encounter attorneys with ivy league pedigrees. Purely anecdotal, but my general impression isn't that they're idiots whose station in life is solely based on accident of birth. However they are much, much less impressive than they should be, not due to the money they make but the influence they have. At least in the legal world many of them think in overly abstract, philosophical terms, and can be quite rigid, particularly when it comes to that which they don't know about. There's a class component to that but it's also just the way ivy leagues do education.
Now, I don't know that we need Rory's stigma on them but what we ideally would have is an understanding that a sprinkling of them in elite institutions is good but you don't want the kind of total saturation we tend to get. It leads to group think and lack of creativity in problem solving. It's a major source of our political problems and the increasing detachment from important institutions from the day to day reality of American life.
I’ve suggested this here before, I’ll say it again. The party that claims to advance the interests of the working class should make a point to not promote politicians from these elitist places. So I’m with you on stigma at least for Dem politicians
“The party that claims to advance the interests of the working class”
That is both parties. No one is trying harder to market their blue collar bona fides than Republicans. It was Republicans who started saying “Real America” in the Bush years as a reference to places that voted for him.
The Republicans anti-elitist (on the face of it) is a non-insignificant group art of their working class appeal.
It’s sort of ironic now that ivy leagues are associated with Democrats more than Republicans.
But I absolutely agree with your comment. My heart lies with the working class, the blue collar people I work beside, the people serving in the military, and the like.
I don't know how we would impose it. And anyway I'm not sure it makes sense to punish individuals like that. What I don't think we want is every important institution having so many alums they form the clique that totally dominates the place.
However I would ideally severely limit the prestige and influence of Harvard which would feel like I was stigmatizing people who expected to have Harvard be a step up.
Zero sum game however. There’s only so many supreme court judges. More judges from Michigan State and UCLA and university of Florida means less from the Ivy Leagues.
As with my reply to Ken below, I think I'm just using "stigma" differently. To me it doesn't just mean devaluing or discounting, it means disapproval, negative judgement.
I know and work with plenty of Ivy grads who have less influence than an Idaho car dealer with a million-dollar business.
I think people overestimate the influence covered by an ivy league degree. Like, influence people often have ivy league degrees, but many people with ivy league degrees are emphatically not influential people.
Who the hell are you hanging out with? You need to find better friends. Many of the smartest people I know, including my own boss, went to no-name colleges.
I mostly agree with your overall point, but to quibble just a bit - Matt has noted in the past that local car dealers in particular have a lot more power than people realize by virtue of having a great deal of influence over local politics and House races. And as a result, they have been able to get a lot of legal protection and favorable policies passed. It's not *prestige* maybe, but it is *influence*.
I agree with your basic point but the hyperbole goes too far. The successful Idaho car dealer is more influential than *plenty* of Harvard graduates (and also- I’m sure a certain number of Harvard graduates went on to be car dealers, perhaps even in Idaho).
Also, maybe 15 thousand people graduate from ivy league schools every year. Some of them get glorifying press coverage, but most of them are just... people who'll make high incomes and never be remotely famous/noteworthy at all.
I think you are mostly right, but you should also consider the fact that getting on CNBC for a blog post or having a buzzfeed article written about you is worthless except for clout. The Ivy League mafia has tangible non-income benefits over normal people, but many of their benefits are pretty worthless.
Is that influence? It doesn't really sound like it. The car dealer has money and influence. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I think you need better examples of Ivy+ influence.
"Scott Rada: Many writers such as you have a side-hustle as a cable news contributor. Have you ever done that — or even been approached?
I really don’t enjoy doing TV, and I’m not good at it.
In order to secure a contract as a contributor, you need to spend a long time saying yes to bookers who want you to come on for free. You need to do a good enough job that they keep asking you back, and you need to say “yes” frequently enough that you’re someone the bookers think to call. I gave up the aspiration to get good enough at this to be a paid contributor a long time ago, so now on the rare occasion that I do get asked I usually say no, which in turn means I rarely get asked."
There is a general lack of recognition that most people who do journalism or punditry are making real trade offs and spend years grinding away to get there.
As a former TV journalist I still think this is a shortsighted view on Matt’s part. Most people talked to us because they had a perspective they wanted to share, and thought that spending a few minutes of their time (unpaid) on TV was a good way to get it out there (and/or boost their profile, sell a book, etc). Whether or not they got contributor gigs out of it down the line was really tertiary or lower.
I would predict that the Idaho car dealer if he chooses to be politically active has near total control of local politics, is a major player in state politics, and could at least get his House member to pick up the phone. Meanwhile the key political issues in New York and California are basically squabbles over the ideal strategy to eradicate the vermin that are elite-educated tech and finance workers.
You guys remind me of that movie where that little dude is holding the world hostage for “one million dollars”
$1 million is not a lot of money. At least, as far as political influence. You need to be in the hundred million dollar range. Start up on her, or major development company, or own multiple car dealerships to have a seat at the table.
At the state level, I found the opposite to be true, though. When my professional organization hired a lobbyist and paid for him to attend a few political fundraisers, I was shocked at how little money it took to get legislators to listen to us. We don't get close to what we ask for, but we get a heck of a lot more than when we didn't do this at all.
New Car Dealers. Who make 10s of millions a year. Sometimes 100s. They have fuck you money… my BIL had a good year. It is unlikely to last. And it will never be Fuck you money.
Hierarchy is sustained by three powerful forms of inheritance-- genetic, cultural and financial. The combined force of inheritance+ is so powerful that policy tweaks will do little to curb it. Even communist regimes have disproportionate numbers of brahmins in charge-- Lenin was the son of an aristocrat, Ho the son of a senior civil servant, Che of a doctor and Castro of a haciendado. Even Mao was the son is a self made kulak. The only way to seriously curb privilege would be to stunt or ostracize those from good families, and, even if politically possible, it would give us a far less capable professional class.
The focus should be on providing good lives for people in the bottom half of the status distribution, not on obsessing about who gets into the 1% versus merely the 3%.
Of the three inheritenace+ factors, progressives tend to put enormous weight on the financial.
They tend to overstate this heavily for the reasons described in the OP. That is, high test scores etc. from rich kids reflect their genetic and cultural inheritances.
For all the banter about greed, progressives are ridiculously materialistic when it suits them. For instance, when comparing different groups economic outcomes, there is the implicit assumption that all groups have the same preference for money (as compared to non-financial life purposes) and strive to equal levels to attain it. The only meaningful difference is the quality of opportunities afforded by the society, racial discrimination, etc.
Pretty fair to focus on the financial--it's okay that genetic and cultural factors have a huge impact on life outcomes, whereas we'd like to minimize the role that parental finances play
I agree wholeheartedly. It seems to me that after the revolution, the key will be whether your parents served in the 5th People’s Brigade of the Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Army.
As for genetic inheritance, I think intelligence is inherited, but I think there's plenty of intelligence among the lower classes (or whatever we call them if we're considering a historical and cross-cultural scope.) After all, when times are hard for everyone and/or financial means are irrelevant, intelligence is a survival factor.
The related question is to what extent do college entrance exams return adversely impacted results for lower-income students? I suspect that childhood reading habits have a lot to do with this. Some kids instinctively can't stop reading, but other kids need to be in families where reading is valued in order to get a good start. Entrance exams can predict success for people who already possess the reading and [literary and math-word-problem] reasoning skills that you need in college. It would be interesting to know how effective remedial work in post-secondary education is for intelligent students whose prior education was literary and exposed them to less formal math.
But yes, in the meantime, those in the "bottom half of the status distribution" should be able to make a good living in the trades and other hands-on and creative careers.
Man, I’m glad I never cared about any of this stuff. Even talking about it on SB seems exhausting. I realize it’s very important to some people who desperately want to climb the elite status ladder but I’d rather be that dealership owner in Idaho than a politician or newsmaker. Being wealthy without being famous is the best thing in life.
The sheer level of envy -- one of the seven deadly sins -- apparent in the comment sections is amazing to me. It must be terribly difficult to go through life with such a burden one chooses to carry.
It's been funny to see hypothetical car dealers in Idaho get mentioned regularly in this thread. The wealthy profession I'd want is to be a mixed use developer in Boise, except having been YIMBY-pilled by Matt and others might tempt me to not completely avoid fame.
And then there are all the quirky small private schools (and some public ones as well--Evergreen State College comes to mind.) I found out about St. John's College (the "Great Books School", it coincidentally had a campus in my home state, and they were offering lavish regional scholarships to balance out their elite East Coast applicants. That's who's on the list for whatever's left over because if you go there you're pretty much guaranteed to learn how to think critically and read pretty much anything.
I did fine in life with a couple of fascinating careers, without ever having to worry about burning myself out in some kind of high-status elite job or about maintaining some kind of top position in a competitive profession.
Brilliant piece!! Add to it that, that only roughly 1/3 of Americans actually have a college degree and so we spend all of our energy on a very small portion of a minority of the population rather than focusing on the 70%. We need to focus on alternative pathways to the workforce that provide social mobility to a far larger portion of the population.
I think this is one of the great unspoken failings of the Clinton and Obama administration, who were immersed in the D.C bubble, disproportionately likely to attend private schools with involved parents, and thought that the path to prosperity was for everyone to attend the traditional 4 year college. High schools and guidance counselors do a poor job preparing many students for college, and students who aren't ready for college or don't enjoy the academic environment are left to figure it out on their own. Locally, in the NYC metro area as an example, X-ray techs make an average of 75,000 to 80,000 annually, which only requires 2 years of schooling, which means a student who graduates from high school at 17 could be employed in a local hospital or outpatient clinic by the time they're 19. That's just one example of an alternate pathway.
Historically, the best ways to create broad based social mobility have involved improving bargaining conditions across the board for all workers— labor market premia based on idiosyncratic worker traits depend on scarcity and tend to disappear as more of the workforce acquires them. Four big categories of policy that do this:
1: Promoting economic growth (more production -> more labor demanded -> higher wages)
2: Better social safety net floors (improving workers’ BATNA and making “take this job and shove it” more viable)
3: Facilitating union formation and bargaining
4: Restricting the labor supply (immigration restriction, child labor bans).
4 definitely trades off against 1, and 2 and 3 may also trade off against 1 in some cases.
I came here to say this. The "elite firms" select in part based on college, so employment at those firms isn't necessarily a good signal for merit or for success more generally, although obviously getting into one of them is very helpful for climbing certain types of ladders.
They're also very important for simply making money. Like, it may be the case that the metric they're using for eliteness is kind of circular, but just based on pure dollars and cents it really is better to be a senior banker at Goldman Sachs than at some small regional competitor. Same for McKinsey or Skadden or whatever. Once you're actually in that world, people care a lot about which firms make the most money, so prestige is pretty decently correlated with material success.
It's still circular, though. You want to measure whether Ivy grads work disproportionately at elite firms, so you... define an elite firm as one where Ivy grads disproportionately work? Sorry, it doesn't work like that.
Now, if you wanted to go off firms' relative market-cap ratio to the rest of their sector, or the grads' income (again, ratio relative to sector), then those are more objective, if still imperfect measures. And they'd probably tell you a similar story!
But just because the definition they went with is *accurate* doesn't mean it isn't *circular*.
any self reinforcing loop is circular. that’s why it is self-reinforcing. however, saying a process is self-reinforcing is not any kind of logical fallacy. whether a process is self reinforcing is an empirical question that cannot be answered through logic alone.
*Desirable* is a bit of a value judgement, I think. Jordan Peterson and Larry Summers both have talked about this in reference to men outnumbering women in high status roles. There is a kind of person who is willing to dedicate themselves 100% to their professional success, and sacrifice basically all non-work aspects of their life. You are vastly more likely to encounter this type at an Ivy, McKinsey, White House staff, Goldman Sachs.
The question, according to JP, is "What's the matter with these people?"
(I'm a Duke alum and stay-at-home mom tho, so maybe too far at the opposite end of the spectrum.)
It's worth pointing out that the US has a very distinctive culture of testing for college admissions compared to most other countries that have competitive college admissions.
The US uses standardised tests (SAT or ACT), which test - at least in theory - analytical skills rather than subject knowledge.
Almost every other comparable country uses subject-based tests where the students are tested on the specific knowledge they have acquired in high school. That's the basis of the English A Level, the Scottish Higher, the French baccalaureate, the German Abitur, the Chinese Gaokao, board exams in India, or the Center Test in Japan.
The way that this works - broadly - is that there is a national curriculum for each subject (say: mathematics) and students at high school study that subject. Then, instead of getting a class grade, they sit a standard national test in that subject and they get a grade on the test.
The details vary a lot from country to country: in some countries each subject test is independent of the others, and you can take as many or as few as you like, in whatever subjects you like; in others, there's a completely fixed list of subjects that everyone has to take. In most, there are certain required subjects (typically the national language and math) and then a required number of other subjects.
Having nationally-set subject exams (and the details of the curriculums are often heavily influenced by universities) means that university departments can assume a particular set of knowledge for students entering them, rather than having to create a 101 class to get everyone to the same point. So a class can have a requirement of having achieved a certain grade in a particular subject test at high school instead of having the requirement being to pass the 101 class for the department.
Not an objection, just speculation: can you imagine the partisan conflict in the US over trying to set out the knowledge tested by a national exam? There’d be people needing to keep evolution off the tests, people arguing for an exclusive focus on the slave-holding status of the founding fathers, fights over whether and how climate change would be included. Not to mention the various lobbies trying to have themselves well represented in the test banks.
Absolutely I can because every one of these countries has exactly the same conflicts over every revision to the syllabus.
The only period I can think of where there wasn't an ongoing political battle was the English A level syllabus before 1988, when there were a number of independent examining boards, each run by a group of universities: JMB (North), MEG (Midlands), SUJB (South), OCSEB (Oxford and Cambridge), each of which set their own syllabus in co-ordination with their shareholding universities (there were others, but I can't remember them).
Any school could enter their students into any board or any combination of boards (my own A levels were mostly JMB, but I took MEB History because my teachers preferred their periodisation). The result was a bit chaotic, but it worked pretty well - every university accepted all the boards. There was always a bit of a battle (if a board did a syllabus change and universities that weren't part of that board didn't like it, then they'd threaten to stop accepting that A level, then there would be a negotiation, and it would always work out in the end - actually decertifying an A level hadn't happened since the 60s).
Then came the 1988-1995 period when the UK government restructured education in England-and-Wales and forced the many boards to merge into just three (AQA, EdExcel and OCR). They also took much more control over the curriculum. Ever since, we've had exactly the sorts of battles you describe.
I could imagine the Ivy+ colleges setting up their own examination board (instead of paying attention to the College Board) and schools teaching to the Ivy+ examinations.
Totally agree. But also, I worked with people from countries with that one exam thing. They still had nightmares and anxiety about the exams decades later, and I don't really want to replicate that here.
This is downstream of our highly devolved system of government. We’re at least 100-200 years and a good bit of civil strife away from being able to forge a single coherent national identity that would allow us to “upvolve” enough governance to have commonly-agreed standards.
AP classes serve some of that purpose, no? Although Harvard (at least when I went there) was snooty and said that, no, it would teach the basics better than AP.
Yes and no: AP grades are often treated as more important than SATs for American students applying to international universities, which I understand to be the exact opposite of what happens when applying to American universities.
But the other thing is that most of the countries I'm talking about have departmental entry into universities rather than university-level entry. That is, you're admitted by the (say) physics department, and they required you to have (the equivalent of) AP Calculus and AP Physics to get into the university in the first place.
This, by far, is the biggest mental adjustment I have to make as someone educated in the U.S. teaching higher education in the UK: I had a broad liberal education as an undergraduate, which I think is valuable. But students come to our programme to do geography - and only geography (we have a few joint honours [rough equivalent of a double-major], but not many).
Also the the fact that the degree is three and not four years is an adjustment. With only three years there’s not a ton of time for experimentation by taking the proverbial modern dance class.
To your last point, a good friend of mine came into undergrad as a math major, was variously an English lit major and a dance major, and is now a tenured chemistry professor.
Sorry, are you describing "admissions into Ivy League" or "your one acquaintance apparently making $900k at OpenAI"? I'm pretty sure that most people at Harvard wouldn't know what USACO/ARML even are, given how it's primarily thought of as the path into politics rather than Silicon Valley. Also, while we're at it, why stop at USACO, why not go all the way to IOI?
The ability to get a $900k job at OpenAI or HRT is vanishingly small with elite school admittance, too; there's only so many such jobs, and Harvard alone puts out 1600 undergraduates every year. And IOI is the international olympiad that your acquaintances presumably failed to compete in when they were in high school; presumably this makes them terrible failures.
A drawback of that is that schools have to "Teach to the Test." This might indeed result in younger students accumulating higher levels of knowledge than ours end up with, but in the meantime, these countries would also have to find ways to test thinking and writing skills that go beyond "knowledge."
(Teaching English in a post-Soviet country, I was bothered because the entire curriculum after fourth grade was aimed at the baccalaureate test, a collection of all the "gotchas" in English grammar, when what most students really needed to learn was how to actually communicate in English, for working in Europe, for doing IT, engaging with the world online, etc.)
I think that Chetty’s intuition that the main advantage from attending an Ivy comes from the right tail of the distribution is roughly correct.
The median Ivy grad and the typical state flagship grad with comparable high school grades and test scores will have pretty similar life outcomes (a comfortable but not exceptional professional or managerial role if they go that route; a more financially precarious and probably somewhat disappointing life if they go into public service, academia, journalism, or the arts.)
However, Ivy+ grads have much better access to a pool of superjobs which turbocharge your lifetime income or influence potential. On the “getting rich” side, these are positions at a small handful of firms with really high revenue per employee and strong ties with other parts of the commanding heights of the economy. Most Ivy+ grads won’t get jobs at Citadel or Jane Street, but attending an Ivy+ dramatically increases the likelihood you’ll score one— and if you do, you’ll be on a glide path to affluence before 30, with a “call option” to make a lot more if you perform particularly well or leverage your connections to raise capital and a customer base for a startup. Roles at M&A/securities litigation titans like Skadden Arps or Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz play a similar role for top law school grads.
In the cultural sphere, hiring for TV writers’ rooms and at the most prestigious legacy media publications plays a similar role.
Yes, and it’s important to emphasize the “right tail distribution” aspect of this. The Ivy+ degree is not magical. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer just go to the cheapest available good enough option. But everyone who dreams of going to law school earnestly thinks they’re the next Elena Kagan.
Indeed. My parents are both successful lawyers who attended state schools, and over the years, they’ve derived quite a bit of enjoyment from seeing Ivy-educated colleagues follow life trajectories very similar to theirs.
This comment section sounds like something out of 1970s China. The data is there for people to see, and it paints a picture of Ivy League students far more meritorious than people want to admit.
It’s also much harder as a small business without a recruiting department to sift through lots of applications to find the good ones. It’s easier if there’s some sort of pre-filter that you can rely on like Ivy admissions (either implicitly or explicitly). But if a business has the resources to evaluate a lot of applications, it’s definitely worth the effort.
I think if you spoke to a lot of Harvard/Yale types and they were candid with you, what you'd learn is that there's always someone smarter or more successful, and getting fixated on them and feeling yourself to be "second/third class" is really an internal issue not dependent on external facts. Contentment comes from within and if you had gone to Harvard you'd probably feel exactly the same as you do now.
Didn't the entire comment section go with this with somebody just a few weeks ago? I'm talking about the bizarre "woe is me I'll always be a 2rd class citizen thing"? I remember it took up 80 comments one night
I'm being facetious by pointing out his hypocrisy. Matt is saying that the "impact of attending an Ivy+ school is pretty modest". And he talks all about wanting to create a more equitable society.
So which is it? Does it not mean much to go to Ivy+ (which means Matt should diversify his intern hiring practices?) Or it does mean something, and thus we should aim to have the best class as possible in our Ivies.
For the record, I think it's the latter, but that scores aren't the only determinant. Having powerful alums and parents of students is a huge benefit to students at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. The network effects are real, as evidenced by Matt getting the internships at Rolling Stone etc that he did, and the people he now knows running for Congress, having high ranking jobs on Capitol Hill, etc. If he went to Syracuse, he just wouldn't have the same connections, which would lead to him having a less successful career.
>>Does it not mean much to go to Ivy+ (which means Matt should diversify his intern hiring practices?)
This is where you lose me. It's essentially the "iPhone users can't criticize consumerism" fallacy.
Matt could make his hiring decisions for a million different reasons that were completely legit. But we don't know! He hasn't actually said all that much about his reasons, besides to bemoan the mere, superficial appearance of bias in his hiring patterns.
If "it doesn't matter all that much" whether Matt's interns are Ivies, then it also follows that he holds the heuristic itself as invalid (except in the superficial, which he's noted). Therefore, he's absolutely NOT required to change his hiring patterns.
Ahhh if someone were a professional complainer about the excesses of capitalism (as Matt is earning income criticizing the admissions and hiring practices related to Ivy+), I think criticizing their iPhone use would be fair.
I don’t think there’s hypocrisy here. He says that people who are donating should donate to big state schools, and people who want to create significant impacts should restructure things for state schools. But someone who just wants to hire isn’t really his focus at all. I don’t think there is anywhere here where he has said a hiring business should be focusing outside the Ivy+.
I guess you just don’t understand Matt’s words? He doesn’t dispute that Ivy students are smarter on average than most college students. His claim is that the Ivies provide only a modest benefit to the students because students who get into Ivies will be high achievers wherever they go to school.
None of that negates the value to employers of using Ivies as filtering mechanisms when hiring. It is essentially outsourcing your first pass review of resumes to the admissions offices of the universities for free.
Where I live in northwest Wisconsin, the housing shortage is accompanied by a severe construction labor shortage. Reputable builders are on a two year waitlist and they won’t return your calls for a project less than $20,000. Otherwise, you do it yourself or take your chances with a couple of derelicts working for cash.
Society is turning our way more college graduates than what there are suitable jobs for them that utilize their degrees. We should be turning out electricians, plumbers, framers and carpenters.
I think this point is frequently stated but only sort of true. Going into the trades is a better economic choice for marginal college attenders who are likely not to finish, but on average, college graduates still comfortably outperform tradesmen. (Teachers—on the low end of the grad spectrum— have average earnings similar to plumbers.)
Eh, depends where you are. In Middle America, maybe that's true, but here in the NYC suburbs, K-12 teachers via the teacher's unions make $150,000 annually after a couple of years , with the benefits of tenure and summers off. Electricians are probably making $90,000 to $100,000 and the guys who have any foresight start their own business, take advantage of deductions in the tax code with an LLC, and hire younger workers when they can't physically do the work anymore. Small business owners, like a restaurant owner or someone who owns multiple car dealerships may not have the educational credentials, but they can still be much more wealthy than even your typical Ivy grad.
If I were advising college students today, I'd tell them to simultaneously prepare for a backup vocation. In addition to the list here, there are all the various two-year health care certificates (someone mentioned radiology here, but everyone you run across in a hospital or at the doctor's office either has an advanced degree or some kind of vocational certificate. As for me, just being able to type did the trick, but that was a long time ago.
I think I was the one who mentioned radiology, but there's lots of other opportunities like that, in the healthcare field, between medical lab tech, respiratory therapist, nuclear medicine tech, radiation therapist, CNA, LPN, pharmacy tech, that take months or 1-2 yrs to complete and would be offered through the local community college, or another school nearby, and usually require a test at the end to be certified. It all depends on what you're interested in, and whether you want to directly interact with patients. I'm a little less personally familiar with this, but I know the trades have apprenticeship programs, which I think should be extended to high schoolers in their junior or senior years to learn on the job, with a master electrician or construction manager. Even in the IT and computer science field, I've heard of people getting jobs by getting certifications in certain programming languages and building a portfolio of their work without a formal degree. I think Biden has alluded to this, in an almost nostalgic way, but we need more of a clearly defined path for people. The old ideal of the liberal arts education is a nice idea, but I don't think it's viable anymore, with rising tution costs, low ROI for certain majors, and lectures by professors available online. It's never been easier to learn about something you're interested in. I think colleges ultimately will have to adapt, by offering programs that have a clearly defined end goal. Nursing is one example that comes to mind, and coincidentally, its also one of the most popular majors today.
Glad to know that lots of people are going to nursing school. Plus, a lot of those jobs are impossible to outsource. (Hopefully no AI robots - I need a human phlebotomists or anyone sticking a needle in me to chat with as a distraction, and certainly don't want robots operating diagnostic equipment that I'm hooked up to.)
The community colleges are here and offering all this stuff, but you're correct that the career paths need to be embedded as possibilities in our culture. One problem with work is that it's hard to imagine what goes on in those giant office buildings until you can actually wander around and find out what's actually going on between the minds and the screens. With health care and the trades, there could be videos that show quite a bit about the work.
In the meantime, my college is busy expanding their liberal arts offerings to adults on evenings, weekends, part-time degree programs. You can do the liberal arts whenever you wish.
I don’t disagree on policy but on politics I do think education for the skilled trades plays much better in rural areas where Democrats need to start winning for the sake of maintaining a stable majority. It plays better than expanded college and way better than immigration in the rural counties.
I'm not sure how "recent" is being defined here, and I couldn't get the precise percentage of 71.4% to work out. 72.4% would be all SCOTUS justices appointed by Eisenhower or later.
But among the past 19 Justices, all but two of them (John Paul Stevens at Northwestern and Amy Coney Barrett at Notre Dame) attended Harvard, Yale, or Stanford at some point. That's almost 90%! And if you take out Rehnquist and O'Connor from Stanford, that's 15 out of 19, or 79%, at just those two schools. That's really deplorable.
I fit the bill of a good test scores (2250, just about the equivalent of 1500 or so back during the brief period when the SAT was out of 2400) who got into decent enough schools (rejected from Yale, but in at Penn, Johns Hopkins, BU, UConn) and chose UConn because I was able to go for free.
9 years post graduation I am now about 96th income percentile for my age. Not top 1% certainly, and wow does that curve shoot up the next few percentiles, but yeah, I am doing well in the United States of America.
I grew up in Meriden CT which was an interesting place because it has a super poor urban core but a white, upper middle class suburban ring. The best thing I saw for economic mobility was the hard work of identifying talented kids in lower income brackets and getting them into higher level classes, providing them the test prep needed to get the scores, and good guidance counseling to help them navigate the college admissions process. It's just...slow boring of hard boards. No shortcuts.
On a related note, I think urban magnet schools are great, and the fact that so much negative big-media attention is paid to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and (formerly) Lowell is a real problem. Those schools aren't above criticism, but they're also somewhat unusual. In many other cities, the magnet schools are an unqualified good. There are also lots of smaller poor cities where there are no magnet options at all for kids, and where providing that kind of option would likewise be an unqualified good.
I'm 31, and my base salary is $165k. You just disclosed you make around $300k. Just Google stuff if you're so concerned about social standing. You must be near top 1%.
I'm noticing a bit of a fixation on external signifiers (test scores, salary of others, elite degree) when in reality you seem to be doing very well. I'm saying this as kindly as possible, if this is really bothering you I would recommend talking to someone about it, friend or therapist. I am telling you, objectively, that you're doing very well in terms of compensation. A fixation like that is not healthy for you.
And I have to say, at my salary my lifestyle is great! Not like private jet money but great! Maybe my standards are lower! I don't know. My plan was always to get married, buy a house, have kids, and make enough to give my wife the option of staying home if she wants when kids are young. Right on track.
Go serve others less fortunate than yourself. Work in a homeless shelter, food pantry, help asylum seekers or volunteer at a local indigent hospital.
You'll be doing some good and maybe they can help you understand that there are more important things in life than feeling good about yourself because you've achieve the social status you think you deserve.
He didn’t say 2250 was a “bar” for good test scores - he said he got a 2250 and therefore had good test scores.
You seem to be under the impression that there are very strict requirements for admission that are higher than whatever you got, but it really doesn’t seem like these things are strict.
I agree. Most people would say that someone making only $300,000 is a failure, and they would be embarrassed to hear that this was the fate of their son.
I know - most Americans are in class of 16 or 17 from Stanford and so their opinions are broadly representative of the concept of “failure” that “anyone” would agree with.
On “the network” you mentioned, where it’s the most disadvantaged backgrounds that benefit from going to Ivy+. It seems likely that’s it’s not network effects, like, I have a friend who gets me in the door at Fancy Bank. Rather, I think it’s “people like me apply to Fancy Bank” or even simply “Fancy Bank is a job you can have.” This seems consistent with my understanding of other Chetty work on role models, plus just personal experience.
To put it a different way, a lot of people think of networking as nepotism - someone’s dad’s friend giving you an internship. But to me it’s much more about knowing which hoops to jump through. Simply telling someone they need X internship before getting Y job can make a big impact on someone’s career, even if you do nothing to help them get the internship.
Education reform suffered a “strange death” because most of the factors that undermine education outcomes - parents, funding, local opportunities, etc. - are downstream of exclusionary zoning AKA de facto segregation.
Broad upzoning and reform of development policies would be a massive pro-equality/equity move that would remove the most pernicious confounding factors from the education issue and allow us to pursue a reform agenda with far greater epistemic clarity.
Can we pull this apart? Are parents downstream of zoning?
I think Matt also wrote about how the funding gap across public schools has mostly been closed by progressive state and federal funding to compensate for local funding differences, no?
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of reforming zoning, although more for affordability and growth reasons. I'm just not sure whether it's the original sin of education.
Alright, so here's how I unpack it. Let's just stick with the parents as an example.
One thing a lot of educators who work in disadvantaged schools will complain about is that many of the parents either don't give a shit or are overworked (or both - I assume there's a strong correlation). Okay, that's totally believable!
So, what we're really talking about here is the psychological burden of poverty. When you have to work 3 jobs to not even make ends meet, you can't think straight. You don't have time for your kids - to help them with homework, etc- even though you're doing all this to support your kids. If the teacher comes to you with a problem, your first response is, "And? I do MY job - jobs, plural, in fact. You do YOURS."
Okay, why do people live in that kind of poverty? Well, there are entire neighborhoods where people live in poverty, no? Those neighborhoods most often exist because of development decisions made a long time ago. And there's a LOT of different ways that they end up like that - some, like Ferguson, MO, are on their 3rd-4th cycle of the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme; while others, like a lot of the housing projects in NYC, were built in ways that basically kill off ground-floor retail and enable crime.
Regardless, ever since we figured out the failure of the car-centric model and excessive setbacks and a dozen other zoning problems, it's not really a question of technically being able to restore ground-floor retail and build stronger neighborhoods - we theoretically know how to do it. Rather, we have too many zoning-related barriers to actually getting it done. Often, it's just outright illegal to build places back up again.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that poverty would be magically cured within a generation. That's silly. What I'm saying is that our current development pattern is a vicious spiral, and the ideal pattern is a virtuous cycle. It's a chain of growth, where each increment builds the value necessary to get to the next increment. If we hop back onto the virtuous cycle, that means we're rebuilding towns with sustainable tax bases and housing markets that aren't undermining people's ability to build wealth by climbing the housing value ladder (IE to have multiple price points where they can enter and exit the market). It means we're rebuilding places where job opportunities are more plentiful, and it'll be *marginally* easier to not have to live in "3-job poverty" like our starting example. Parents who are only working two jobs, or have a really good (but still modestly-compensated!) single job, can devote more time to their children and schools. Homevoters rule most places, so places with more homeowners up and down the income scale will also see more input from the poor on how they want their schools run.
Moreover, getting the *entire country* onto this virtuous cycle means that we're reducing inequality across the country. A zoning-reformed economy is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
It's not so much that I think zoning is the "original sin of education". I don't believe there IS an original sin in education, at least not one that's fundamentally breaking it. I just believe that zoning and development impact pretty much every stage of the conversation. Because the thing is, at every point in this essay, if I simply ask, "Will this problem be easier or harder if people's housing costs are 30% less of their income?", the answer is, "Duh, EASIER!".
Ed: And to be clear, it DOES go beyond just mere income, but I'm using that as an example of just how intertwined zoning and development are in this, and how they can be upstream of education without being an "original sin".
Hmm. I want to try rephrasing your argument in a way I find more plausible, but might make everyone a little uncomfortable.
First of all I'm with you on the problems poor people have and how that correlates to school performance. Then what I see as step two is basically "white flight" - and I DID this, I moved my family to a high-income suburb for the good schools. Do I think that the teaching is much better versus that the kids are just much better resourced? Oh, I cynically think the latter is an important aspect, but I'm still going to play the game.
You could imagine lower income people wanting to get their kids into this sweet school system too. It would be good for their kids! But there are very few apartments here in town - mostly you need to drop $800k+ on a single family home to move here. So, that keeps a lot of people out of the town. (And I've seen the stats - the small group of lower-income students indeed performs worse than our overall school district numbers.)
So your case for how exclusionary zoning is the underlying issue boils down to "Because well-off people can move to schools that only have other well-off people, because the zoning prevents lower income folks from moving there." Right?
Honestly I have complicated feelings about this because I support equity in theory, but I do not actually love being around poor people.
>>So your case for how exclusionary zoning is the underlying issue boils down to "Because well-off people can move to schools that only have other well-off people, because the zoning prevents lower income folks from moving there." Right?
No, not entirely. I mean, that's PART of it. But a LOT more goes into the underlying inequalities.
The point I was trying to make about poor neighborhoods isn't ONLY that exclusionary zoning keeps poor people in poor neighborhoods -- in fact, that's not even what I was primarily trying to say, though again, it's still true. Rather, I was saying that our entire zoning and development pattern makes it illegal to build neighborhoods that DON'T just inherently MAKE people poor.
Again, take the housing projects. The famous ones in NYC were surrounded with big lawns that would supposedly make for more peaceful, rehabilitative environments for the residents. But what actually ended up happening is that it made it harder to walk through those neighborhoods and get to vital services. It turns 5- and 10-minute walks into 20-minute ones. And all of that green space could have been used for ground-floor retail and services which would employ those residents, and enrich them. Instead, they have to travel further for jobs and services, and those jobs and services can't pay as much.
Similarly, take Ferguson, MO. Because there's so much suburban infrastructure built up, and you can't build and old-school walkable downtown anymore, everyone has to drive everywhere. That means the engineers prioritize moving cars fast, which makes the roads less safe and less walkable. Everyone has to go shop at Wal-Mart, which essentially just ships all their wealth out of the town to Bentonville, Arkansas, instead of keeping it in the pocket of some local greengrocer. All that infrastructure costs the municipal government WAY more than its tax receipts bring in, so they resorted a taxation-by-citation scheme that sparked the infamous riots.
None of this stuff is sustainable. Ferguson tore down its old walkable downtown in order to replace it with strip malls. There is barely any opportunity outside of working at a handful of national chains in those strip malls, chains that suck the life out of people and suck money out of their pocketbooks.
So, it's not JUST "exclusionary zoning". It's an entire development pattern. It's why Ferguson's schools do worse by its citizens than the schools on the other side of STL county. Less opportunity, less revenue, an extractive approach to basically everyone involved.
The point is, if Ferguson rebuilt the downtown it thoroughly destroyed LONG before the riots, it's not like the people there would instantly become richer than their cross-town counterparts overnight. But it would be building real wealth and truly affordable housing, and a real economy of real jobs. Over time, those would restart the virtuous cycle, and the people of Ferguson would catch up to their cross-town peers.
“Everyone has to go shop at Wal-Mart, which essentially just ships all their wealth out of the town to Bentonville, Arkansas, instead of keeping it in the pocket of some local greengrocer”
That’s a laughable economic analysis. Most of the town’s wealth spent at Walmart goes to the producers of the groceries (i.e., not Bentonville) and much of the rest goes to personnel costs, (i.e., local jobs). The same is true of the putative “local greengrocer.” The primary difference is that Walmart is vastly more efficient than a local mom & pop store could ever hope to be, and Walmart’s prices are significantly lower thus keeping more wealth in the community in the pockets of its residents.
It's a pretty picture, but I'm not sure the old model is ever coming back because it was so gosh-darned inefficient. I'm in a wealthy suburb and small-scale retail still struggles, because Walmart and Amazon are actually great at what they do (even if they are not loved).
It's inefficient in terms of national economies of scale, sure. But economies of scale can also be achieved in other ways.
And Wal-Mart sure IS efficient at extracting wealth. TOO efficient. That's kind of the problem - these companies suck too much wealth out of localities.
What the old model's NOT inefficient about is the cost of infrastructure. We're basically sitting on a mountain of infrastructure that we can't afford -- all those strip-malls, drive-thrus, etc. We've spent the last several generations playing hide-the-sausage with various ways of shenaniganizing debt markets - from S&L to the housing bubble - but let's not mistake ANY of that for "efficiency".
The old model basically pays for itself and builds long-term generational wealth. I'm not saying it can't benefit from new technology - it certainly does, and we SHOULD be taking FULL advantage of how much easier it is to build high-quality housing than 100 years ago. But we shouldn't keep building suburbs and housing projects and whatever else that can't pay for themselves or otherwise compromise what DOES work about the old model.
Addendum: But as of right now, "education reform" has been operating like an army of scientists who spend a whole several decades competing with each other for the same 90-day contract to do some sewer work in Manhattan. Sure, you theoretically have the manpower, and you theoretically have enough hydrologists and sanitation scientists on staff to understand how a sewer works in the abstract and how to properly engineer a pipe, but the job keeps not getting done because no one involved understands how to deal with the sheer flow of shit coming their way.
PS: If you're wondering, yes, that started out as an oblique Ghostbusters reference, but I kind of lost the script.
I'm hoping that Matt writes about this soon, he's always looking for ways to point out how housing abundance can make things better, but I don't think I've heard him talk about it with respect to education.
A major reason why admissions policy at Harvard gains attention is the juxtaposition between the institution’s hyper exclusionary (somewhat meritocratic) nature and the whole faux egalitarian messaging about social justice.
It’s a whole the “emperor has no clothes” situation with one of the most culturally influential institutions in the nation.
Before there was the faux egalitarian messaging, there were many decades of more genuine egalitarian concern in U.S. higher education. Although I can't speak to the Ivies specifically, it's been part of liberal culture for quite awhile.
I am 37 years old, attended a state flagship, and have worked in higher education my entire adult life. I was 30 when my salary finally hit the $30k level. There are people in these comments whining that $300k is suggestive of being disadvantaged?
As Logan Roy would say, you are not serious people.
"I ... worked in higher education my entire adult life"
Okay but no one made you do that and "education pays terribly" is not some fact that is difficult to discover. Presumably you're measuring career success in some other way (papers published, tenure, whatever), but if people go into fields where career success is measured in dollars then they are going to have strong opinions about how much they could / should make.
Others have treated the status insecurity displayed here with far more patience than I will, and for that they are better men (and women). $300k is enough, whether someone went to MIT or Fingerpainting College in Bumf**k, Iowa. I will no longer engage with this argument, because it is, frankly, silly.
"Made a mess of what would have been interesting discussion" is almost the raison-d’etre of the common troll, and it's why I hope the Management chooses to exercise their discretion in banhammering that poster, whether they be malignant (my guess) or sincere (truly fucking pitiful).
"Any," really? You don't think any of them got PhDs and stayed in academia? Actually, if they went for PhDs, then five years later they're probably still getting them.
This is false. I literally just looked at all job opening OpenAI has, none of their salary ranges come close to 900K (the highest, Engineering Manager) tops out at 500K.
Look, as you obviously know, people do tend to judge things comparatively and you...well, I can't think of a nicer way to say this, you're the person looking at instagram photos of celebrities and complaining about your life.
I'd strongly second the recommendation to do some volunteer work, or mentor some folks, or do anything that has you interacting 'down' or even sideways (seriously, talk to some folks in the NGO/nonprofit world) on the social scale.
You seem very unhappy. I have a colleague who just left a job where he made more money and supervised a lot of people. He took a job that focuses on the work he loves - dealing with the public - and he no longer has to manage underlings. He took a big cut in salary, and makes a quarter of what you do, but I have not seen him as smiley and relaxed in years. I hope you find work that makes you as happy as his does, no matter the salary.
Ok. But your field is drawing the narrowest of narrow definitions. Harvard publishes their graduating class data. The 2022 median starting salary was $75k. The #1 track is consulting (22.55%). 5 years out the target comp for those students will be $175k and most will need to get an MBA to jump on the next promotion track. I've met like 2 people who did the undergrad to partner route at MBB - it's nearly impossible.
You note that MIT/Chicago don't practice legacy admissions, etc. Is there sufficient data disclosed to confirm that they show the improvements claimed for eliminating those practices?
The one thing he specifically mentioned about MIT and Chicago here is that they are the only two institutions on the list where the members of the top 1% are no more likely to get admitted than people anywhere else on the income spectrum.
What we really need to do is just put a social stigma on hiring Harvard or Ivy League graduates.
I also think that Matt might focus a little too much on income, I suspect being a graduating or attending an Ivy League also increases the odds of getting an influential job.
For instance, I have a brother-in-law that runs a construction company that clears over seven figures, but he is not nearly as influential as say Matt is.
Matt has hired two awesome interns, but for whatever reason both of them have come from well to do families and attended Ivy League schools. I have to imagine that writing for Slow boring will give them a boost up if they decide to go into politics or public policy or writing. However, I also have to wonder if there are not more talented riders out there that didn’t attend Ivy League schools, that just didn’t have the connections to get the job.
No, I am not coming at Maya or Milan, they are hard driven talented young adults. Just pointing out how the world works.
I agree with your response, except the first sentence. As long as the Ivy League (and other elite universities) attract an unusually smart cohort of students, there should be no stigma associated with hiring from that pool. Let's not replace anti-elitism with some misguided sense of anti-smart.
Why? There are more talented people who don’t go to Harvard or Yale than go there. So I doubt society suffers. Currently I imagine in certain arenas there is a social stigma against those who didn’t go to elite Universities.
If going to an elite school became a social stigma, I am sure that those who really deserve it could overcome via hard work (isn’t that what they would say about the current status quo).
Why? Because applying social stigma based on where a kid went to college is bad. It is bad if done to a non-elite college graduate and it is also bad if it's done to a Harvard (or even Yale¹) graduate.
I've seen both situations -- I've had people look down on me because I'm a product of a state school but I've also seen elite school grads presumed to be snotty and undeserving. Both situations are unwarranted and the solution is to remove social stigma, not merely move its application to people you don't like.
( ¹ Just kidding, Milan.)
Good point. I defer to my wife, a UNC grad from the Midwest who notes that she was pressured against attending an Ivy by reverse snob family members. In the interest of full disclosure, yes she got in to an Ivy and yes many of her relatives went to Chicago.
I’m kinda with you John but I do think this is more nuanced than to apply social stigma or not. This seems to me to be more a matter of degree (🙂).
While Ivy’s deserve credit for their abilities and there’s no denying many are amongst the most talented. I think they are getting more than that. There is a form of elite tribalism that goes on. Let’s just end that. You get full credit for who you are but no extra credit.
26% of NYT writers are Ivy’s? As the paper of record and an advocate for diversity and inclusion they should publish a wider range of voices.
Ivy leagues schools reputation is well known for being bastions of the elite. So even kids who came from working class made a conscious choice to go be part of those schools. They purposely went there, too get that Ivy League reputation. So why shouldn’t there be a social stigma against them?
"They purposely went there, too get that Ivy League reputation."
You don't think... ANYONE... went there for other reasons? You think you should take a general rule that may be likely to be true, and apply it to everyone? Like...a stereotype?
I should probably confess Ive been playing devils advocate.
I would totally send my kids to an Ivy League if they got in.
It’s bad if people go to schools that have non-transparent admissions.
How do you do footnotes??
Google "superscript" along with the number you want to use, and copy and paste it in the comment.
Thanks, you lost me at "and" but I appreciate some people have that kind of dedication to well-organized comments.
Confused: if you somehow got this to stick, wouldn't it just mean than instead of Harvard and Yale, the prestigious school would be called something else? I don't think you can create a situation where there isn't a school (or a small set of them) that acts as a funnel to the prestigious jobs, because as everyone keeps pointing out, the networking effects are real.
Yes, a real star-bellied/no-stars Sneetches situation.
My problem with the ivy leagues is there, non-transparency and reliance on connections, money, and secret sauce, to get access to their Corridor’s of power.
I don’t feel that way about Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT , etc... those are all elite schools, which I am happy to leave as elite schools.
If you look at the last graph, Stanford is worse than almost all the Ivies.
Missed that. Screw Stanford now.
I’m a USC fan anyway.
Honestly though, I’m not as concerned about that n one as much as I am transparency. I assumed Stanford has meritocratic admissions.
If wrong, then my stance is the same as the Ivys.
Yes, but I think that's just corridors of power, and if you somehow got them out of Harvard they'd just re-form somewhere else.
There was the Epstein stuff. Plus their Dean of Admissions (Marilee Jones) about 15-20 years back turned out to be a fraud. But I agree, relatively limited given the circles they are usually included in.
Indeed. Rory would merely have us crank up the speed on the treadmill of semantic drift. No thank you!
Negative ghost rider. The elite schools would be the ones that you get in based on pure measurables.
Notice I haven’t gone after MIT or Stanford.
But there is something non-transparent about the Ivy Leagues.
“Pure measurab[ility]” isn’t the critical dynamic here, though.
I come from the future and I’m here to tell you how this plays out. The RORY Act (“Restoring Open Responsible [standards at] Yale”) passes, and immediately Yale and Harvard start requiring half a dozen SAT II subject tests and specifying objective metrics for extracurriculars. This has the net impact of keeping admissions mostly the same, plus handing a huge pile of revenue to The College Board.
I don’t truly know you, and we’re not having this conversation over a beer, so I can’t exactly ask outright, but you seem to be strongly indignant at the inequality of influence wielded by institutions that you think aren’t egalitarian enough. That’s fair! And I’m no fan of it either. But these institutions are hundreds of years old. They didn’t get this way overnight, and they aren’t going to change because of your proposal alone. The problem is that the people who run them are _very_ different from you, and have different incentives, not that they're insufficiently constrained by the law.
If you really want education to be about merit, we probably need to take its administration out of the hands of professional bureaucrats and put it back into the hands of the professors. I won’t pretend you’d like their actual politics, but you WILL like the results of having more decisions made on the basis of pedagogical merit than the raw business logic that currently dominates.
I find it so weird that there’s so many people defending the Ivy League’s, and fighting back against my advocating for there to be a social stigma against them. When I’m pretty confident that the view isn’t reciprocated.
When Matt hangs out with his social crowd, whoever that is, do you think there are more Ivy League graduates or State school graduates in the crowd? This is a man who writes articles about equality and reform, yet... his last two interns have been from ivy leagues.
The point is, at this point in time, elite school graduates already have a leg up. They are happy to advocate for treating people equally, because they already have a leg up.
Being a white male already has a social stigma upon it these days. It’s commonly used as an off, handed insult or put down. And yet, I cannot imagine people in the comments defending white males as much as they are defending Ivy League students. And the average Ivy League graduate has a lot more power than the average white male.
If it is socially acceptable to advocate for social stigma against the white males, I feel that I have every right to advocate for the social stigma of Ivy League graduates.
>>I find it so weird that there’s so many people defending the Ivy League’s, and fighting back against my advocating for there to be a social stigma against them. When I’m pretty confident that the view isn’t reciprocated.
To be clear, I'm not defending *them*, I'm just challenging *you* to come up with a workable plan of assault against our common overlords.
I could give less of a shit about stigmatizing them. I just want their insane levels of privilege to be spread more equitably, and I want to do that without lining people up against any walls, nor provoking an endless cycle of backlash. I want *sustainable* justice that will last through the millennia, not just justice for my own satisfaction in my own lifetime. Which means I have to apply a MUCH higher level of scrutiny to my (and yours, by extension) ideas about how to get there.
>>If it is socially acceptable to advocate for social stigma against the white males, I feel that I have every right to advocate for the social stigma of Ivy League graduates.
That's where you lose me. I don't think a society based on stigma is at all the best path, let alone better than its alternatives. Stigma will always have a place in society, but it is more often a tool of the elites than a tool of controlling them.
Just one addendum about something I said on my other comment:
>>The problem is that the people who run them are _very_ different from you, and have different incentives, not that they're insufficiently constrained by the law.
These are people who understand that what matters isn't the letter of the law, but how the law shapes their long-term power. As a class, they've used that perspective for *centuries* to keep us in our place.
The point is, they aren't amateurs. Entire revolutions have been fought against them, and they've still mostly come out on top - cf Russia. All progress against them has been both incremental and sporadic, usually spurred on by major crises.
If you haven't read The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, I highly recommend it. It's kind of depressing, but gives an excellent zoomed-out view on inequality. We're fighting a LONG battle. Not a new one.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First-Princeton/dp/0691165025
"We're fighting a LONG battle."
Indeed. People are different and therefore never will be all the same (equal). So "our" battle against inequality is never-ending and will never succeed.
Thi matches what I just replied to another commenter on. He argues as an elite lawyer he has no more influence on my BIL. But my BiLs income is not guaranteed and entirely dependent on luck and arbitrary contracts. He has cash now, but next year might be different. And would have no idea how to steer his kid into Harvard.
I think the idea that business owners who make seven figures annually have less influence than the typical person working in journalism or public policy is a bit half-baked. State legislators, city council members, and congressional representatives from less economically active constituencies— who wouldn’t even notice what the average columnist has to say— care a great deal about their preferences and respond to their requests and opinions.
All that said, seven figure business owners are probably an even more family wealth-gated group than Ivy+ grads are; the more relevant comparison class are probably professionals who went to state flagships and graduated in the top 20% of their class. This sort of person has life outcomes fairly similar to the median Ivy+ grad but probably less access to the extreme right tail of fame/wealth outcomes.
I disagree. You would honestly be surprised about how many blue-collar working class millionaires there are. My brother-in-law didn’t graduate high school. Two years ago we were giving him pity jobs at our house. He found his niece, worked hard and is successful. However, there’s no guarantee he’s gonna be making the same money in a year or two years because of the nature of his business.
He isn’t donated that money to politicians, he used it to open up a sprinkler company.
Right now, Washington DC is cracking down on fake temporary license plates… because Matt banged the drum against it.
Matt is probably one of the 50 most visible news/opinion writers in the world. I'm pretty sure the 50 wealthiest people in the world have more clout than Matt does.
It’s all relative. I have zero clout.
You have clout with me!
Of course, that doesn't amount to anything cause I'm not clearing 7 figures nor went to an Ivy+
Lol. Good, because I have zero with my kids.
The power is there for your BIL if he wants it though, in the same way I’m sure plenty of Matt’s Harvard classmates just live quiet, non-public lives.
There are plenty of millionaire small business owners with low-income blue collar backgrounds in the US— it’s a big, rich country (and there are also plenty of doctors, lawyers, and programmers who came from poor families)— but on average, successful entrepreneurs are even more likely to come from money than high-end knowledge workers.
"I think the idea that business owners who make seven figures annually have less influence than the typical person working in journalism or public policy is a bit half-baked."
Not at all. Power comes from exercising **discretion** to control others. If you are running a business you are totally constrained by market reality and the imperative to make a profit or die. If you own a chain of restaurant you can't make all your customers eat broccoli because you like it. If you are a brain surgeon you don't get to whimsically decide who lives and dies because you always have to exercise your skill to save the life on the table. But if you are a parole officer making $60K a year, you can send people to jail based on whether you are in the mood to violate them. Your actual power is off-the-chart compared to the average Harvard grad.
On the other hand, you may be right about journalists and think tankers not being as powerful as they imagine. They are essentially propagandists repeating the same party line that their institution is designed to propagate. If they hadn't written the latest article about institutional racism or Trump being a "threat to our Democracy," then some generic replacement would have written essentially the same thing. This is just another way of saying they don't have much personal **discretion** to control the message. (And their thinkpiece is probably just preaching conventional wisdom to their own choir, anyway.)
In the real world’s less than perfectly competitive, efficient, and transparent markets, most business owners and operators have a fair amount of wiggle room between their theoretical profit-maximizing course of action and bankruptcy, and exercise quite a bit of discretion in the course of business. And, of course, the wealth and prestige that come with operating a successful business give owners quite a bit of freedom and clout in their personal and political lives.
Agreed, the power to place a phone call to the chair of your state senate appropriations committee during state budget season and be confident the call will be picked up cannot be understated. The power of your network to increase the likelihood that your child will get into an Ivy League is notable, but so is the power of you and your chamber of commerce buddies to cut a percentage of TANF for a percent cut to your CNIT.
Part of why the Ivy League is so successful is that people have talked themselves into thinking it gives its graduates magic powers!
To your first point: Malcolm Gladwell suggested a few years ago that top firms not allow applicants to list their educational institutions. You could list GPA, test scores, etc -- just not the name of the school.
A priori, it’s impossible to tell how this would actually affect hiring, but I think it could make for a really cool experiment.
The problem is so much of hiring is based on references. People using their networks I’m not sure how much it would help.
Given what we've seen with banning the box, it's likely that it would actually *increase* the reliance on references and personal networks and lead to an overall reduction in equitable hiring.
This is actually a great point. I honestly can’t offer a rebuttal because I think you might be right. But then again in my defense, I’m traveling today so pretty much this whole thread is me just sort of riling people up. in my day-to-day life, I don’t even know Ivy League people, so it really doesn’t matter to me. Shhhhhh
I think this is especially true for later-career roles -- less so for entry-level gigs or postgraduate training programs. If a role specifically calls for fresh grads, they're simply going to have fewer references available, no matter where they come from.
I think the connections part of the job searches is frontloaded. It gets your name to the front of the queue. It gets you a call back. Lets you know what jobs are available.
Listing GPA but not school would be a huge edge for B-average MIT grads who are on a 5 point scale. (An A is a 5.0 instead of a 4.0)
(And in general it would greatly encourage grade inflation)
That’s… really strange. Why does MIT do that?
As for grade inflation, we’ve been on that trajectory pretty steadily for the past 20 or so years. (I believe there was an SB post on the subject not too long ago.) I’m not sure how much this experiment would exacerbate a trend already underway.
I don't know why MIT does that. I looked it up and the only answer I found was that supposedly it had an "E" grade after D where you could get a 1.0 for "showed up to class and didn't cheat".
So that would affect it... slightly and allow for _slightly_ more granularity (I guess it makes an F bring things down even more, relatively - but Fs are pretty rare, especially since freshman year was PASS/NORECORD so you wouldn't get the ->college transition issue)
And then when the E grade went away they kept it to keep things comparable with their historic scale?
Speaking as a University of Chicago educated lawyer with a prestigious job who knows many people with similar background…I and most of my fellows have about the same influence as a small business owner.
It’s always amusing to me that people think there is some secret influence club that meets on Thursdays or something. It is a high percentage play to try to land a lucrative or otherwise very selective job for the vast majority of folks who attend. There are always a few on the academic / clerkship / aspiring judge or politician path but (a) most of those few wash out and end up at firms anyway and (b) even among those who succeed it’s a small percentage (of that small number) that ever wield any power or heft.
Is your child or my brother in laws child more likely to get into Harvard assuming both are 90-95% scoring kids?
It’s not just political influence. It’s class. It’s the ability to transmit all the correct social cues to your off-spring to ensure they are just as successful as you are.
Also, I suspect you are underestimating your influence. I bet you are only one degree away from someone elected socially.
My BIL wears paint stained gym shorts to work, and has no guarantee that his business will Iast next year. Most small businesses are like this.
Eh I don't know I think this is taking it too far. Kids usually have a leg-up on following in their parents footsteps. That's normal in all times and places and most cures for that problem would likely be worse than the illness.
As a U Chicago grad ES's kids aren't legacy at Harvard. Unless he's in the top 1%+ of incomes he's not going to have a donor advantage. So assuming that's the case we're left with other intangibles or "social cues".
And that's something, but it's not like the barriers are 6ft thick concrete...I know two kids from my high school that went to Harvard. One was the child of a used car salesman (salesman, not dealership owner) and the other was a single mom's kid (although the dead-beat dad was WWE star SupaFly Snooka, fwiw, lol). There's a million unfair things about everyone's birth circumstances and I feel like "50% more likely to get into Harvard" is way down on the list in terms of what I'm concerned about.
I don’t know anyone who got into an Ivy League. My crowd is low brow.
Also, most of my arguments today have been a little disengenuious (Speed check not working). I would 💯 send my kids to Harvard.
I don't really think they are (maybe they would be more likely to get into *Chicago* if Chicago did legacies), controlling for things like "I am the kind of person who will [hopefully] raise successful children" and "genetics".
I am not from a "high class" family, so something of a natural experiment about how much the Chicago degree standing alone is worth (answer: looks really good on a resume as a credible signal of intelligence and work ethic, which has helped my career, which career affords me the same clout as a small business owner, which is not much but is more than most people get because I have some money).
Even if they were, though, their Harvard education would in turn...still be just a high percentage play for a well-compensated or otherwise selective job, just like me, not a ticket to the Room Where It Happens as you seem to think.
I think you are conflating "a disproportionate percentage of elected officials and other influence wielders went to top schools" and "your typical person from a top school has bonus influence". It's a necessary not sufficient condition for sitting on SCOTUS or whatever.
It seems to me that in some sense making people money is more democratic than working in a , small d, democratic institution.
Like if you can make people money no one is going to be so elitist about where you got your diploma from. But it seems to me that public service careers aren’t like this at all.
Seems like the simpler thing is to somehow target the elite firms that are responsible for 99% of the prestige and income hoarding that you're concerned with. The charts in the post make it clear that nearly all of the "problem" is at elite / prestigious firms (also national level GOP politicians but that's my addendum)
The average company doesn't need a stigma against hiring Ivy+ grads if they're only hiring them occasionally anyway.
Honestly I care more about the NYT and the Supreme Court than who elite firms hire. Mainly because it’s makes for a more interesting comment section… people are really invested in defending Ivy League graduates.
I care about SCOTUS because it's one of the most powerful institutions on the planet. The NYT I can care less about by simply not reading the NYT that often.
Agree
Not "more talented": Milan and Maya are great! I just think it would be good if the *next* one comes from somewhere else if for no other reason than that signaling is important.
Although I do suspect that the University of Wyoming *does* have more talented riders. :-)
Agreed.
Basically Matt has to practice Affirmative Action the correct way. By actively seeking out talent from places other than his normal social circuit.
But, I do think the next one has to have a name that starts with M.
Personally, it is not a matter of talent so much as it is perspective. My default position is that I do not care what anyone thinks about the American Rescue Plan. And I am not fancy enough to know or care about debate. But I do like reading commentary from people who can refract their analysis or storytelling through life experience that is different than my own. In Matt's case, that is largely a function of having access to interesting, influential and knowledgeable people (particularly in DC), which is partly the result of his fancy pedigree, but is mainly the result of his many years working as a journalist. Milan and Maya will probably go on to be those interesting, influential and knowledgeable people. For now, it would be great for Matt to give a platform to some interns whose writing is inflected with a unique point of view.
Too many replies to know whether this is redundant but here’s the issue: not going to an ivy doesn’t mean you’re not smart or talented, but going to an ivy does. Assessing talent without credentials is hard, risky work, and not many employers are actually very good at it. So they use the ivies as talent filters. True, that means there’s a ton of underpriced talent out there for employees brave and resourceful enough to develop alternative ways to evaluate and cultivate it. But I’m not going to say I’m surprised that most companies who can afford ivy grads get them.
You are the first to bring up this point.
Agreed on most of it. I don’t think it would be to terribly difficult to filter. Companies would just go to the best non-Ivy schools. Or even pay more attention to Professor recommendations or GPA.
But when a firm hires an Ivy League kid they aren’t just getting the kid they are getting access to the kids connections as well.
My whole issue with Ivy's is lack and f transparency on admissions which is use to slip in kids of the powerful who benefit from the reputation of the high achievers who do make it on merit.
Does the child of a multimillionaire tech startup dude get in because they were brilliant it because Dad has connections. We never know, because Harvard agents enough brilliantly students to cover for the less than brilliant.
It’s not even that the grads who aren’t brilliant are idiots… they are all smart… just that there were plenty just as smart kids who didn’t get in because they didn’t have the social connections.
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Lol. The irony.
I think Milan cold emailed Matt (but I could be wrong) and I’m unsure how Maya got it. The cold email method is something that might be more common in Ivy League students as they carry a confidence that comes with their address being @ivyleagueinstitution but there’s nothing inherent about that go getter attitude that says a UVA grad can’t do the same.
I think Maya applied for an advertised internship and now she is enjoying the humidity. (August is brutal in DC.)
Why would the internship be in person?
I'm not sure if it's in person but assuming Matt pay his interns well enough for them to live in DC, coming down to DC and meeting all of the cool people Matt interacts with on a daily business for his journalism would be an incredible opportunity in addition to working under an accomplished writer.
I might be wrong, but my impression is that Matt isn't hobnobbing with political elites much. I think he's talked before about spending a lot of time working in a coffeeshop, iirc.
She mentioned moving to DC. Some us gave recs on what to do during the summer.
I’ve admittedly never been a hiring manager but I’ve always thought of UVA as a pretty prestigious institution on par with Michigan, Berkeley, etc and a notable tier above Penn State, Ohio, etc. My presumption is that kids sending out resumes to elite jobs with UVA at the top of their resume catch the eye of hiring managers in a way a lot of students don’t. This is all presumption though so I could be wrong.
I definitely agree with you on VCU, though.
Sure, but I doubt there are a significant number of jobs where applying with UVA on your resume “hurts” you but, again, I’ve never been a hiring manager at an elite firm.
We both cold emailed.
The comments about Matt’s hiring practices verge on ad hominem. Let’s judge the interns by their work, and they are kicking ass. Matt found two extremely capable young people and is letting them do things that many smart people five and ten and forty years older can’t do. Maya’s article made tenured professors look foolish.
They both had great resumes that grabbed Matt’s attention. If Matt uses a classist heuristic for identifying talent, he used it well, and though I wish Harvard had not wait listed me, I won’t let my envy get the better of me.
You would be wrong.
Exactly. My construction company BIL has zero influence on whether his son gets into Harvard, but would you bet against Matt’s son getting in? And it’s not because Matt asks a favor, it’s because Matt’s son will be around successful people who will halo give internships in school or encourage him to do the sort of things that get you into Harvard or Yale.
Social influence does more in the long term to keep your kids successful than blue collar success.
To me this is the real problem with it. I went to a state flagship undergrad and a public law school, but being a lawyer in the DC area I occasionally encounter attorneys with ivy league pedigrees. Purely anecdotal, but my general impression isn't that they're idiots whose station in life is solely based on accident of birth. However they are much, much less impressive than they should be, not due to the money they make but the influence they have. At least in the legal world many of them think in overly abstract, philosophical terms, and can be quite rigid, particularly when it comes to that which they don't know about. There's a class component to that but it's also just the way ivy leagues do education.
Now, I don't know that we need Rory's stigma on them but what we ideally would have is an understanding that a sprinkling of them in elite institutions is good but you don't want the kind of total saturation we tend to get. It leads to group think and lack of creativity in problem solving. It's a major source of our political problems and the increasing detachment from important institutions from the day to day reality of American life.
Why is everyone against stigma?
Stigma for behaviors -- fine. Stigma based on where an 18-year old chose to go to college -- not fine.
Why should they not go to a place with the best researchers and hardest working peers if they have the opportunity?
I’ve suggested this here before, I’ll say it again. The party that claims to advance the interests of the working class should make a point to not promote politicians from these elitist places. So I’m with you on stigma at least for Dem politicians
“The party that claims to advance the interests of the working class”
That is both parties. No one is trying harder to market their blue collar bona fides than Republicans. It was Republicans who started saying “Real America” in the Bush years as a reference to places that voted for him.
Republicans are welcome to take my suggestion too. I’m a Dem I care about what Dems do
The Republicans anti-elitist (on the face of it) is a non-insignificant group art of their working class appeal.
It’s sort of ironic now that ivy leagues are associated with Democrats more than Republicans.
But I absolutely agree with your comment. My heart lies with the working class, the blue collar people I work beside, the people serving in the military, and the like.
I don't know how we would impose it. And anyway I'm not sure it makes sense to punish individuals like that. What I don't think we want is every important institution having so many alums they form the clique that totally dominates the place.
Stigma should be directed at people who did something wrong. Do you think someone who went to Harvard did something wrong?
Not really. More making an intellectual argument.
Would totally send my kids to Harvard.
However I would ideally severely limit the prestige and influence of Harvard which would feel like I was stigmatizing people who expected to have Harvard be a step up.
Zero sum game however. There’s only so many supreme court judges. More judges from Michigan State and UCLA and university of Florida means less from the Ivy Leagues.
As with my reply to Ken below, I think I'm just using "stigma" differently. To me it doesn't just mean devaluing or discounting, it means disapproval, negative judgement.
I don't agree that there's a stigma against people who didn't get into Harvard et al. We might be using the term "stigma" differently.
I know and work with plenty of Ivy grads who have less influence than an Idaho car dealer with a million-dollar business.
I think people overestimate the influence covered by an ivy league degree. Like, influence people often have ivy league degrees, but many people with ivy league degrees are emphatically not influential people.
No disagreement here! But I view this as different from "having influence."
Who the hell are you hanging out with? You need to find better friends. Many of the smartest people I know, including my own boss, went to no-name colleges.
I mostly agree with your overall point, but to quibble just a bit - Matt has noted in the past that local car dealers in particular have a lot more power than people realize by virtue of having a great deal of influence over local politics and House races. And as a result, they have been able to get a lot of legal protection and favorable policies passed. It's not *prestige* maybe, but it is *influence*.
OK but as a 'Bama fan I approve of the suppression of Auburn voices.
I agree with your basic point but the hyperbole goes too far. The successful Idaho car dealer is more influential than *plenty* of Harvard graduates (and also- I’m sure a certain number of Harvard graduates went on to be car dealers, perhaps even in Idaho).
Also, maybe 15 thousand people graduate from ivy league schools every year. Some of them get glorifying press coverage, but most of them are just... people who'll make high incomes and never be remotely famous/noteworthy at all.
Car dealers are incredibly influential though. Name another product that literally can’t be sold directly to the consumer.
I think you are mostly right, but you should also consider the fact that getting on CNBC for a blog post or having a buzzfeed article written about you is worthless except for clout. The Ivy League mafia has tangible non-income benefits over normal people, but many of their benefits are pretty worthless.
Is that influence? It doesn't really sound like it. The car dealer has money and influence. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I think you need better examples of Ivy+ influence.
It depends what you mean by being on TV. The guy who got a single Fox News segment usually gets nothing out of it apart from a story he can tell.
Have you ever listened to Matt explain why he doesn't do TV?
For those who aren't aware:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/dont-worry-about-a-mailbag
"Scott Rada: Many writers such as you have a side-hustle as a cable news contributor. Have you ever done that — or even been approached?
I really don’t enjoy doing TV, and I’m not good at it.
In order to secure a contract as a contributor, you need to spend a long time saying yes to bookers who want you to come on for free. You need to do a good enough job that they keep asking you back, and you need to say “yes” frequently enough that you’re someone the bookers think to call. I gave up the aspiration to get good enough at this to be a paid contributor a long time ago, so now on the rare occasion that I do get asked I usually say no, which in turn means I rarely get asked."
There is a general lack of recognition that most people who do journalism or punditry are making real trade offs and spend years grinding away to get there.
As a former TV journalist I still think this is a shortsighted view on Matt’s part. Most people talked to us because they had a perspective they wanted to share, and thought that spending a few minutes of their time (unpaid) on TV was a good way to get it out there (and/or boost their profile, sell a book, etc). Whether or not they got contributor gigs out of it down the line was really tertiary or lower.
I would predict that the Idaho car dealer if he chooses to be politically active has near total control of local politics, is a major player in state politics, and could at least get his House member to pick up the phone. Meanwhile the key political issues in New York and California are basically squabbles over the ideal strategy to eradicate the vermin that are elite-educated tech and finance workers.
Where do I go to collect my extra influence? I have been missing out!
I just reread your comment. And now I’m totally curious about this Harvard graduate in Fox News and fiancé thing. What should I Google?
Women are so much more vicious than men are when relationships end.
She was giving him blowjobs a few weeks earlier and then emasculating the fuck out of him publicly shortly after.
But man, that dude is super punchable.
The whole exchange makes me hate Ivy Leagues even more.
Maybe calm down a bit
I’m glad you are here. I was honestly curious about your input into the debate.
You guys remind me of that movie where that little dude is holding the world hostage for “one million dollars”
$1 million is not a lot of money. At least, as far as political influence. You need to be in the hundred million dollar range. Start up on her, or major development company, or own multiple car dealerships to have a seat at the table.
At the state level, I found the opposite to be true, though. When my professional organization hired a lobbyist and paid for him to attend a few political fundraisers, I was shocked at how little money it took to get legislators to listen to us. We don't get close to what we ask for, but we get a heck of a lot more than when we didn't do this at all.
The alcohol lobby has that too.
Burn the liquor license scheme to the ground.
New Car Dealers. Who make 10s of millions a year. Sometimes 100s. They have fuck you money… my BIL had a good year. It is unlikely to last. And it will never be Fuck you money.
Hierarchy is sustained by three powerful forms of inheritance-- genetic, cultural and financial. The combined force of inheritance+ is so powerful that policy tweaks will do little to curb it. Even communist regimes have disproportionate numbers of brahmins in charge-- Lenin was the son of an aristocrat, Ho the son of a senior civil servant, Che of a doctor and Castro of a haciendado. Even Mao was the son is a self made kulak. The only way to seriously curb privilege would be to stunt or ostracize those from good families, and, even if politically possible, it would give us a far less capable professional class.
The focus should be on providing good lives for people in the bottom half of the status distribution, not on obsessing about who gets into the 1% versus merely the 3%.
I tend to agree with you.
Of the three inheritenace+ factors, progressives tend to put enormous weight on the financial.
They tend to overstate this heavily for the reasons described in the OP. That is, high test scores etc. from rich kids reflect their genetic and cultural inheritances.
For all the banter about greed, progressives are ridiculously materialistic when it suits them. For instance, when comparing different groups economic outcomes, there is the implicit assumption that all groups have the same preference for money (as compared to non-financial life purposes) and strive to equal levels to attain it. The only meaningful difference is the quality of opportunities afforded by the society, racial discrimination, etc.
Everyone is a greedy optimizer.
Funny.
Pretty fair to focus on the financial--it's okay that genetic and cultural factors have a huge impact on life outcomes, whereas we'd like to minimize the role that parental finances play
I agree wholeheartedly. It seems to me that after the revolution, the key will be whether your parents served in the 5th People’s Brigade of the Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Army.
the old bolsheviks came out poorly. but most of them came from the gentry, so maybe that was proletarian justice!
As for genetic inheritance, I think intelligence is inherited, but I think there's plenty of intelligence among the lower classes (or whatever we call them if we're considering a historical and cross-cultural scope.) After all, when times are hard for everyone and/or financial means are irrelevant, intelligence is a survival factor.
The related question is to what extent do college entrance exams return adversely impacted results for lower-income students? I suspect that childhood reading habits have a lot to do with this. Some kids instinctively can't stop reading, but other kids need to be in families where reading is valued in order to get a good start. Entrance exams can predict success for people who already possess the reading and [literary and math-word-problem] reasoning skills that you need in college. It would be interesting to know how effective remedial work in post-secondary education is for intelligent students whose prior education was literary and exposed them to less formal math.
But yes, in the meantime, those in the "bottom half of the status distribution" should be able to make a good living in the trades and other hands-on and creative careers.
Man, I’m glad I never cared about any of this stuff. Even talking about it on SB seems exhausting. I realize it’s very important to some people who desperately want to climb the elite status ladder but I’d rather be that dealership owner in Idaho than a politician or newsmaker. Being wealthy without being famous is the best thing in life.
The sheer level of envy -- one of the seven deadly sins -- apparent in the comment sections is amazing to me. It must be terribly difficult to go through life with such a burden one chooses to carry.
My Arizona State diploma hangs proudly on my office wall. All the rest of it is just exhausting.
Oh, boo, I thought we shared alma maters
It's been funny to see hypothetical car dealers in Idaho get mentioned regularly in this thread. The wealthy profession I'd want is to be a mixed use developer in Boise, except having been YIMBY-pilled by Matt and others might tempt me to not completely avoid fame.
And then there are all the quirky small private schools (and some public ones as well--Evergreen State College comes to mind.) I found out about St. John's College (the "Great Books School", it coincidentally had a campus in my home state, and they were offering lavish regional scholarships to balance out their elite East Coast applicants. That's who's on the list for whatever's left over because if you go there you're pretty much guaranteed to learn how to think critically and read pretty much anything.
I did fine in life with a couple of fascinating careers, without ever having to worry about burning myself out in some kind of high-status elite job or about maintaining some kind of top position in a competitive profession.
Brilliant piece!! Add to it that, that only roughly 1/3 of Americans actually have a college degree and so we spend all of our energy on a very small portion of a minority of the population rather than focusing on the 70%. We need to focus on alternative pathways to the workforce that provide social mobility to a far larger portion of the population.
I think this is one of the great unspoken failings of the Clinton and Obama administration, who were immersed in the D.C bubble, disproportionately likely to attend private schools with involved parents, and thought that the path to prosperity was for everyone to attend the traditional 4 year college. High schools and guidance counselors do a poor job preparing many students for college, and students who aren't ready for college or don't enjoy the academic environment are left to figure it out on their own. Locally, in the NYC metro area as an example, X-ray techs make an average of 75,000 to 80,000 annually, which only requires 2 years of schooling, which means a student who graduates from high school at 17 could be employed in a local hospital or outpatient clinic by the time they're 19. That's just one example of an alternate pathway.
What are we not doing here that’s precluded by the game of musical chairs at ivy plus schools?
Like I think who gets to go to ivy plus institutions is a totally different conversation from ed policy generally.
Historically, the best ways to create broad based social mobility have involved improving bargaining conditions across the board for all workers— labor market premia based on idiosyncratic worker traits depend on scarcity and tend to disappear as more of the workforce acquires them. Four big categories of policy that do this:
1: Promoting economic growth (more production -> more labor demanded -> higher wages)
2: Better social safety net floors (improving workers’ BATNA and making “take this job and shove it” more viable)
3: Facilitating union formation and bargaining
4: Restricting the labor supply (immigration restriction, child labor bans).
4 definitely trades off against 1, and 2 and 3 may also trade off against 1 in some cases.
brilliant
The “elite/prestigious firm” thing seems to be a bit of circular reasoning.
I came here to say this. The "elite firms" select in part based on college, so employment at those firms isn't necessarily a good signal for merit or for success more generally, although obviously getting into one of them is very helpful for climbing certain types of ladders.
They're also very important for simply making money. Like, it may be the case that the metric they're using for eliteness is kind of circular, but just based on pure dollars and cents it really is better to be a senior banker at Goldman Sachs than at some small regional competitor. Same for McKinsey or Skadden or whatever. Once you're actually in that world, people care a lot about which firms make the most money, so prestige is pretty decently correlated with material success.
It's still circular, though. You want to measure whether Ivy grads work disproportionately at elite firms, so you... define an elite firm as one where Ivy grads disproportionately work? Sorry, it doesn't work like that.
Now, if you wanted to go off firms' relative market-cap ratio to the rest of their sector, or the grads' income (again, ratio relative to sector), then those are more objective, if still imperfect measures. And they'd probably tell you a similar story!
But just because the definition they went with is *accurate* doesn't mean it isn't *circular*.
any self reinforcing loop is circular. that’s why it is self-reinforcing. however, saying a process is self-reinforcing is not any kind of logical fallacy. whether a process is self reinforcing is an empirical question that cannot be answered through logic alone.
Sooo... you answer it through magic?
i’d look at the correlations before i cast any spells
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*Desirable* is a bit of a value judgement, I think. Jordan Peterson and Larry Summers both have talked about this in reference to men outnumbering women in high status roles. There is a kind of person who is willing to dedicate themselves 100% to their professional success, and sacrifice basically all non-work aspects of their life. You are vastly more likely to encounter this type at an Ivy, McKinsey, White House staff, Goldman Sachs.
The question, according to JP, is "What's the matter with these people?"
(I'm a Duke alum and stay-at-home mom tho, so maybe too far at the opposite end of the spectrum.)
It's worth pointing out that the US has a very distinctive culture of testing for college admissions compared to most other countries that have competitive college admissions.
The US uses standardised tests (SAT or ACT), which test - at least in theory - analytical skills rather than subject knowledge.
Almost every other comparable country uses subject-based tests where the students are tested on the specific knowledge they have acquired in high school. That's the basis of the English A Level, the Scottish Higher, the French baccalaureate, the German Abitur, the Chinese Gaokao, board exams in India, or the Center Test in Japan.
The way that this works - broadly - is that there is a national curriculum for each subject (say: mathematics) and students at high school study that subject. Then, instead of getting a class grade, they sit a standard national test in that subject and they get a grade on the test.
The details vary a lot from country to country: in some countries each subject test is independent of the others, and you can take as many or as few as you like, in whatever subjects you like; in others, there's a completely fixed list of subjects that everyone has to take. In most, there are certain required subjects (typically the national language and math) and then a required number of other subjects.
Having nationally-set subject exams (and the details of the curriculums are often heavily influenced by universities) means that university departments can assume a particular set of knowledge for students entering them, rather than having to create a 101 class to get everyone to the same point. So a class can have a requirement of having achieved a certain grade in a particular subject test at high school instead of having the requirement being to pass the 101 class for the department.
Not an objection, just speculation: can you imagine the partisan conflict in the US over trying to set out the knowledge tested by a national exam? There’d be people needing to keep evolution off the tests, people arguing for an exclusive focus on the slave-holding status of the founding fathers, fights over whether and how climate change would be included. Not to mention the various lobbies trying to have themselves well represented in the test banks.
Absolutely I can because every one of these countries has exactly the same conflicts over every revision to the syllabus.
The only period I can think of where there wasn't an ongoing political battle was the English A level syllabus before 1988, when there were a number of independent examining boards, each run by a group of universities: JMB (North), MEG (Midlands), SUJB (South), OCSEB (Oxford and Cambridge), each of which set their own syllabus in co-ordination with their shareholding universities (there were others, but I can't remember them).
Any school could enter their students into any board or any combination of boards (my own A levels were mostly JMB, but I took MEB History because my teachers preferred their periodisation). The result was a bit chaotic, but it worked pretty well - every university accepted all the boards. There was always a bit of a battle (if a board did a syllabus change and universities that weren't part of that board didn't like it, then they'd threaten to stop accepting that A level, then there would be a negotiation, and it would always work out in the end - actually decertifying an A level hadn't happened since the 60s).
Then came the 1988-1995 period when the UK government restructured education in England-and-Wales and forced the many boards to merge into just three (AQA, EdExcel and OCR). They also took much more control over the curriculum. Ever since, we've had exactly the sorts of battles you describe.
I could imagine the Ivy+ colleges setting up their own examination board (instead of paying attention to the College Board) and schools teaching to the Ivy+ examinations.
Totally agree. But also, I worked with people from countries with that one exam thing. They still had nightmares and anxiety about the exams decades later, and I don't really want to replicate that here.
This is downstream of our highly devolved system of government. We’re at least 100-200 years and a good bit of civil strife away from being able to forge a single coherent national identity that would allow us to “upvolve” enough governance to have commonly-agreed standards.
AP classes serve some of that purpose, no? Although Harvard (at least when I went there) was snooty and said that, no, it would teach the basics better than AP.
Yes and no: AP grades are often treated as more important than SATs for American students applying to international universities, which I understand to be the exact opposite of what happens when applying to American universities.
But the other thing is that most of the countries I'm talking about have departmental entry into universities rather than university-level entry. That is, you're admitted by the (say) physics department, and they required you to have (the equivalent of) AP Calculus and AP Physics to get into the university in the first place.
This, by far, is the biggest mental adjustment I have to make as someone educated in the U.S. teaching higher education in the UK: I had a broad liberal education as an undergraduate, which I think is valuable. But students come to our programme to do geography - and only geography (we have a few joint honours [rough equivalent of a double-major], but not many).
Also the the fact that the degree is three and not four years is an adjustment. With only three years there’s not a ton of time for experimentation by taking the proverbial modern dance class.
To your last point, a good friend of mine came into undergrad as a math major, was variously an English lit major and a dance major, and is now a tenured chemistry professor.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sorry, are you describing "admissions into Ivy League" or "your one acquaintance apparently making $900k at OpenAI"? I'm pretty sure that most people at Harvard wouldn't know what USACO/ARML even are, given how it's primarily thought of as the path into politics rather than Silicon Valley. Also, while we're at it, why stop at USACO, why not go all the way to IOI?
The ability to get a $900k job at OpenAI or HRT is vanishingly small with elite school admittance, too; there's only so many such jobs, and Harvard alone puts out 1600 undergraduates every year. And IOI is the international olympiad that your acquaintances presumably failed to compete in when they were in high school; presumably this makes them terrible failures.
What are you talking about?
What national recognition did Milan and Maya have?
> students are tested on the specific knowledge they have acquired in high school
This requires students to have learned something in high school…
Until 2021 there SAT national achievement tests for specific subjects- pretty much the same as A-levels
A drawback of that is that schools have to "Teach to the Test." This might indeed result in younger students accumulating higher levels of knowledge than ours end up with, but in the meantime, these countries would also have to find ways to test thinking and writing skills that go beyond "knowledge."
(Teaching English in a post-Soviet country, I was bothered because the entire curriculum after fourth grade was aimed at the baccalaureate test, a collection of all the "gotchas" in English grammar, when what most students really needed to learn was how to actually communicate in English, for working in Europe, for doing IT, engaging with the world online, etc.)
I think that Chetty’s intuition that the main advantage from attending an Ivy comes from the right tail of the distribution is roughly correct.
The median Ivy grad and the typical state flagship grad with comparable high school grades and test scores will have pretty similar life outcomes (a comfortable but not exceptional professional or managerial role if they go that route; a more financially precarious and probably somewhat disappointing life if they go into public service, academia, journalism, or the arts.)
However, Ivy+ grads have much better access to a pool of superjobs which turbocharge your lifetime income or influence potential. On the “getting rich” side, these are positions at a small handful of firms with really high revenue per employee and strong ties with other parts of the commanding heights of the economy. Most Ivy+ grads won’t get jobs at Citadel or Jane Street, but attending an Ivy+ dramatically increases the likelihood you’ll score one— and if you do, you’ll be on a glide path to affluence before 30, with a “call option” to make a lot more if you perform particularly well or leverage your connections to raise capital and a customer base for a startup. Roles at M&A/securities litigation titans like Skadden Arps or Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz play a similar role for top law school grads.
In the cultural sphere, hiring for TV writers’ rooms and at the most prestigious legacy media publications plays a similar role.
Yes, and it’s important to emphasize the “right tail distribution” aspect of this. The Ivy+ degree is not magical. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer just go to the cheapest available good enough option. But everyone who dreams of going to law school earnestly thinks they’re the next Elena Kagan.
Indeed. My parents are both successful lawyers who attended state schools, and over the years, they’ve derived quite a bit of enjoyment from seeing Ivy-educated colleagues follow life trajectories very similar to theirs.
Nice write-up.
Matt, if you really believe what you write, your next intern will come from a school like Florida, Syracuse, or UC Irvine.
This comment section sounds like something out of 1970s China. The data is there for people to see, and it paints a picture of Ivy League students far more meritorious than people want to admit.
That isn't true. He said the kids from Harvard and Yale are smarter than those kids. And they are (in the aggregate, of course).
Also, by the way, Syracuse is a private school known for educating lots of rich kids who couldn't get into Ivies.
It’s also much harder as a small business without a recruiting department to sift through lots of applications to find the good ones. It’s easier if there’s some sort of pre-filter that you can rely on like Ivy admissions (either implicitly or explicitly). But if a business has the resources to evaluate a lot of applications, it’s definitely worth the effort.
There are certainly people on the right side of the bell curve at UCI who would be at or above the median at Harvard.
I think if you spoke to a lot of Harvard/Yale types and they were candid with you, what you'd learn is that there's always someone smarter or more successful, and getting fixated on them and feeling yourself to be "second/third class" is really an internal issue not dependent on external facts. Contentment comes from within and if you had gone to Harvard you'd probably feel exactly the same as you do now.
Didn't the entire comment section go with this with somebody just a few weeks ago? I'm talking about the bizarre "woe is me I'll always be a 2rd class citizen thing"? I remember it took up 80 comments one night
(It's the same guy)
Nope. They aren’t. Everyone reaches their “impostor syndrome” level at some point.
I'm highly skeptical of that, I think a bunch of it being claimed is performative.
But why? This demand is half-baked.
I'm being facetious by pointing out his hypocrisy. Matt is saying that the "impact of attending an Ivy+ school is pretty modest". And he talks all about wanting to create a more equitable society.
So which is it? Does it not mean much to go to Ivy+ (which means Matt should diversify his intern hiring practices?) Or it does mean something, and thus we should aim to have the best class as possible in our Ivies.
For the record, I think it's the latter, but that scores aren't the only determinant. Having powerful alums and parents of students is a huge benefit to students at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. The network effects are real, as evidenced by Matt getting the internships at Rolling Stone etc that he did, and the people he now knows running for Congress, having high ranking jobs on Capitol Hill, etc. If he went to Syracuse, he just wouldn't have the same connections, which would lead to him having a less successful career.
>>Does it not mean much to go to Ivy+ (which means Matt should diversify his intern hiring practices?)
This is where you lose me. It's essentially the "iPhone users can't criticize consumerism" fallacy.
Matt could make his hiring decisions for a million different reasons that were completely legit. But we don't know! He hasn't actually said all that much about his reasons, besides to bemoan the mere, superficial appearance of bias in his hiring patterns.
If "it doesn't matter all that much" whether Matt's interns are Ivies, then it also follows that he holds the heuristic itself as invalid (except in the superficial, which he's noted). Therefore, he's absolutely NOT required to change his hiring patterns.
Ahhh if someone were a professional complainer about the excesses of capitalism (as Matt is earning income criticizing the admissions and hiring practices related to Ivy+), I think criticizing their iPhone use would be fair.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat
Attending an Ivy+ is pretty modest. But in life, a 'pretty modest improvement to your future career prospects' can mean a lot
My read of Matt's article is that *getting in* to an Ivy+ means quite a bit, but once there, the schools do not add that much additional value.
By that reasoning, hiring a Harvard freshman makes perfect sense.
I don’t think there’s hypocrisy here. He says that people who are donating should donate to big state schools, and people who want to create significant impacts should restructure things for state schools. But someone who just wants to hire isn’t really his focus at all. I don’t think there is anywhere here where he has said a hiring business should be focusing outside the Ivy+.
I guess you just don’t understand Matt’s words? He doesn’t dispute that Ivy students are smarter on average than most college students. His claim is that the Ivies provide only a modest benefit to the students because students who get into Ivies will be high achievers wherever they go to school.
None of that negates the value to employers of using Ivies as filtering mechanisms when hiring. It is essentially outsourcing your first pass review of resumes to the admissions offices of the universities for free.
If you think you're pointing out hypocrisy then you aren't being facetious.
Where I live in northwest Wisconsin, the housing shortage is accompanied by a severe construction labor shortage. Reputable builders are on a two year waitlist and they won’t return your calls for a project less than $20,000. Otherwise, you do it yourself or take your chances with a couple of derelicts working for cash.
Society is turning our way more college graduates than what there are suitable jobs for them that utilize their degrees. We should be turning out electricians, plumbers, framers and carpenters.
If construction jobs keep costing $20,000, eventually higher wages will attract more people into construction naturally.
I think this point is frequently stated but only sort of true. Going into the trades is a better economic choice for marginal college attenders who are likely not to finish, but on average, college graduates still comfortably outperform tradesmen. (Teachers—on the low end of the grad spectrum— have average earnings similar to plumbers.)
In this example, a plumber who got paid to be an apprentice and a journeyman is pretty far ahead of a teacher with a bunch of student debt.
Hopefully you're not going to Columbia with a mind to go into teaching as a profession. You're going to Blank State, or even starting out at Blank CC.
Sure, but the plumber is on the high end of the scale for trade workers and the teacher is on the low end for professionals.
Eh, depends where you are. In Middle America, maybe that's true, but here in the NYC suburbs, K-12 teachers via the teacher's unions make $150,000 annually after a couple of years , with the benefits of tenure and summers off. Electricians are probably making $90,000 to $100,000 and the guys who have any foresight start their own business, take advantage of deductions in the tax code with an LLC, and hire younger workers when they can't physically do the work anymore. Small business owners, like a restaurant owner or someone who owns multiple car dealerships may not have the educational credentials, but they can still be much more wealthy than even your typical Ivy grad.
If I were advising college students today, I'd tell them to simultaneously prepare for a backup vocation. In addition to the list here, there are all the various two-year health care certificates (someone mentioned radiology here, but everyone you run across in a hospital or at the doctor's office either has an advanced degree or some kind of vocational certificate. As for me, just being able to type did the trick, but that was a long time ago.
I think I was the one who mentioned radiology, but there's lots of other opportunities like that, in the healthcare field, between medical lab tech, respiratory therapist, nuclear medicine tech, radiation therapist, CNA, LPN, pharmacy tech, that take months or 1-2 yrs to complete and would be offered through the local community college, or another school nearby, and usually require a test at the end to be certified. It all depends on what you're interested in, and whether you want to directly interact with patients. I'm a little less personally familiar with this, but I know the trades have apprenticeship programs, which I think should be extended to high schoolers in their junior or senior years to learn on the job, with a master electrician or construction manager. Even in the IT and computer science field, I've heard of people getting jobs by getting certifications in certain programming languages and building a portfolio of their work without a formal degree. I think Biden has alluded to this, in an almost nostalgic way, but we need more of a clearly defined path for people. The old ideal of the liberal arts education is a nice idea, but I don't think it's viable anymore, with rising tution costs, low ROI for certain majors, and lectures by professors available online. It's never been easier to learn about something you're interested in. I think colleges ultimately will have to adapt, by offering programs that have a clearly defined end goal. Nursing is one example that comes to mind, and coincidentally, its also one of the most popular majors today.
Glad to know that lots of people are going to nursing school. Plus, a lot of those jobs are impossible to outsource. (Hopefully no AI robots - I need a human phlebotomists or anyone sticking a needle in me to chat with as a distraction, and certainly don't want robots operating diagnostic equipment that I'm hooked up to.)
The community colleges are here and offering all this stuff, but you're correct that the career paths need to be embedded as possibilities in our culture. One problem with work is that it's hard to imagine what goes on in those giant office buildings until you can actually wander around and find out what's actually going on between the minds and the screens. With health care and the trades, there could be videos that show quite a bit about the work.
In the meantime, my college is busy expanding their liberal arts offerings to adults on evenings, weekends, part-time degree programs. You can do the liberal arts whenever you wish.
I don’t disagree on policy but on politics I do think education for the skilled trades plays much better in rural areas where Democrats need to start winning for the sake of maintaining a stable majority. It plays better than expanded college and way better than immigration in the rural counties.
wise!
"71.4% of recent Supreme Court justices"
I'm not sure how "recent" is being defined here, and I couldn't get the precise percentage of 71.4% to work out. 72.4% would be all SCOTUS justices appointed by Eisenhower or later.
But among the past 19 Justices, all but two of them (John Paul Stevens at Northwestern and Amy Coney Barrett at Notre Dame) attended Harvard, Yale, or Stanford at some point. That's almost 90%! And if you take out Rehnquist and O'Connor from Stanford, that's 15 out of 19, or 79%, at just those two schools. That's really deplorable.
Perhaps he’s only counting undergrad and not law school?
71.4% is 5 of 7 (or some multiple thereof). But yeah not sure how that fits with 8 of 9 currently being Harvard/Yale.
There was a brief stretch where all 9 justices came from 2 law schools
Specifically, it was from 2010 (when Kagan replaced Stevens) to 2020 (when Barrett replaced Ginsburg).
I didn't realize it was that long. I thought is was Kavanaugh to Barrett or something, not 10 years
I fit the bill of a good test scores (2250, just about the equivalent of 1500 or so back during the brief period when the SAT was out of 2400) who got into decent enough schools (rejected from Yale, but in at Penn, Johns Hopkins, BU, UConn) and chose UConn because I was able to go for free.
9 years post graduation I am now about 96th income percentile for my age. Not top 1% certainly, and wow does that curve shoot up the next few percentiles, but yeah, I am doing well in the United States of America.
I grew up in Meriden CT which was an interesting place because it has a super poor urban core but a white, upper middle class suburban ring. The best thing I saw for economic mobility was the hard work of identifying talented kids in lower income brackets and getting them into higher level classes, providing them the test prep needed to get the scores, and good guidance counseling to help them navigate the college admissions process. It's just...slow boring of hard boards. No shortcuts.
On a related note, I think urban magnet schools are great, and the fact that so much negative big-media attention is paid to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and (formerly) Lowell is a real problem. Those schools aren't above criticism, but they're also somewhat unusual. In many other cities, the magnet schools are an unqualified good. There are also lots of smaller poor cities where there are no magnet options at all for kids, and where providing that kind of option would likewise be an unqualified good.
I'm 31, and my base salary is $165k. You just disclosed you make around $300k. Just Google stuff if you're so concerned about social standing. You must be near top 1%.
I'm noticing a bit of a fixation on external signifiers (test scores, salary of others, elite degree) when in reality you seem to be doing very well. I'm saying this as kindly as possible, if this is really bothering you I would recommend talking to someone about it, friend or therapist. I am telling you, objectively, that you're doing very well in terms of compensation. A fixation like that is not healthy for you.
Happy to talk more if you wanna
And I have to say, at my salary my lifestyle is great! Not like private jet money but great! Maybe my standards are lower! I don't know. My plan was always to get married, buy a house, have kids, and make enough to give my wife the option of staying home if she wants when kids are young. Right on track.
Go serve others less fortunate than yourself. Work in a homeless shelter, food pantry, help asylum seekers or volunteer at a local indigent hospital.
You'll be doing some good and maybe they can help you understand that there are more important things in life than feeling good about yourself because you've achieve the social status you think you deserve.
I have about ten years on you, an engineering PhD, a small-m managerial role, and I make substantially less than your 165.
Which is fine! I'm comfortable as hell.
He didn’t say 2250 was a “bar” for good test scores - he said he got a 2250 and therefore had good test scores.
You seem to be under the impression that there are very strict requirements for admission that are higher than whatever you got, but it really doesn’t seem like these things are strict.
I agree. Most people would say that someone making only $300,000 is a failure, and they would be embarrassed to hear that this was the fate of their son.
I know - most Americans are in class of 16 or 17 from Stanford and so their opinions are broadly representative of the concept of “failure” that “anyone” would agree with.
On “the network” you mentioned, where it’s the most disadvantaged backgrounds that benefit from going to Ivy+. It seems likely that’s it’s not network effects, like, I have a friend who gets me in the door at Fancy Bank. Rather, I think it’s “people like me apply to Fancy Bank” or even simply “Fancy Bank is a job you can have.” This seems consistent with my understanding of other Chetty work on role models, plus just personal experience.
To put it a different way, a lot of people think of networking as nepotism - someone’s dad’s friend giving you an internship. But to me it’s much more about knowing which hoops to jump through. Simply telling someone they need X internship before getting Y job can make a big impact on someone’s career, even if you do nothing to help them get the internship.
I’ve said it a million times, I’ll say it again:
Education reform suffered a “strange death” because most of the factors that undermine education outcomes - parents, funding, local opportunities, etc. - are downstream of exclusionary zoning AKA de facto segregation.
Broad upzoning and reform of development policies would be a massive pro-equality/equity move that would remove the most pernicious confounding factors from the education issue and allow us to pursue a reform agenda with far greater epistemic clarity.
Can we pull this apart? Are parents downstream of zoning?
I think Matt also wrote about how the funding gap across public schools has mostly been closed by progressive state and federal funding to compensate for local funding differences, no?
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely in favor of reforming zoning, although more for affordability and growth reasons. I'm just not sure whether it's the original sin of education.
Alright, so here's how I unpack it. Let's just stick with the parents as an example.
One thing a lot of educators who work in disadvantaged schools will complain about is that many of the parents either don't give a shit or are overworked (or both - I assume there's a strong correlation). Okay, that's totally believable!
So, what we're really talking about here is the psychological burden of poverty. When you have to work 3 jobs to not even make ends meet, you can't think straight. You don't have time for your kids - to help them with homework, etc- even though you're doing all this to support your kids. If the teacher comes to you with a problem, your first response is, "And? I do MY job - jobs, plural, in fact. You do YOURS."
Okay, why do people live in that kind of poverty? Well, there are entire neighborhoods where people live in poverty, no? Those neighborhoods most often exist because of development decisions made a long time ago. And there's a LOT of different ways that they end up like that - some, like Ferguson, MO, are on their 3rd-4th cycle of the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme; while others, like a lot of the housing projects in NYC, were built in ways that basically kill off ground-floor retail and enable crime.
Regardless, ever since we figured out the failure of the car-centric model and excessive setbacks and a dozen other zoning problems, it's not really a question of technically being able to restore ground-floor retail and build stronger neighborhoods - we theoretically know how to do it. Rather, we have too many zoning-related barriers to actually getting it done. Often, it's just outright illegal to build places back up again.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that poverty would be magically cured within a generation. That's silly. What I'm saying is that our current development pattern is a vicious spiral, and the ideal pattern is a virtuous cycle. It's a chain of growth, where each increment builds the value necessary to get to the next increment. If we hop back onto the virtuous cycle, that means we're rebuilding towns with sustainable tax bases and housing markets that aren't undermining people's ability to build wealth by climbing the housing value ladder (IE to have multiple price points where they can enter and exit the market). It means we're rebuilding places where job opportunities are more plentiful, and it'll be *marginally* easier to not have to live in "3-job poverty" like our starting example. Parents who are only working two jobs, or have a really good (but still modestly-compensated!) single job, can devote more time to their children and schools. Homevoters rule most places, so places with more homeowners up and down the income scale will also see more input from the poor on how they want their schools run.
Moreover, getting the *entire country* onto this virtuous cycle means that we're reducing inequality across the country. A zoning-reformed economy is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
It's not so much that I think zoning is the "original sin of education". I don't believe there IS an original sin in education, at least not one that's fundamentally breaking it. I just believe that zoning and development impact pretty much every stage of the conversation. Because the thing is, at every point in this essay, if I simply ask, "Will this problem be easier or harder if people's housing costs are 30% less of their income?", the answer is, "Duh, EASIER!".
Ed: And to be clear, it DOES go beyond just mere income, but I'm using that as an example of just how intertwined zoning and development are in this, and how they can be upstream of education without being an "original sin".
Hmm. I want to try rephrasing your argument in a way I find more plausible, but might make everyone a little uncomfortable.
First of all I'm with you on the problems poor people have and how that correlates to school performance. Then what I see as step two is basically "white flight" - and I DID this, I moved my family to a high-income suburb for the good schools. Do I think that the teaching is much better versus that the kids are just much better resourced? Oh, I cynically think the latter is an important aspect, but I'm still going to play the game.
You could imagine lower income people wanting to get their kids into this sweet school system too. It would be good for their kids! But there are very few apartments here in town - mostly you need to drop $800k+ on a single family home to move here. So, that keeps a lot of people out of the town. (And I've seen the stats - the small group of lower-income students indeed performs worse than our overall school district numbers.)
So your case for how exclusionary zoning is the underlying issue boils down to "Because well-off people can move to schools that only have other well-off people, because the zoning prevents lower income folks from moving there." Right?
Honestly I have complicated feelings about this because I support equity in theory, but I do not actually love being around poor people.
>>So your case for how exclusionary zoning is the underlying issue boils down to "Because well-off people can move to schools that only have other well-off people, because the zoning prevents lower income folks from moving there." Right?
No, not entirely. I mean, that's PART of it. But a LOT more goes into the underlying inequalities.
The point I was trying to make about poor neighborhoods isn't ONLY that exclusionary zoning keeps poor people in poor neighborhoods -- in fact, that's not even what I was primarily trying to say, though again, it's still true. Rather, I was saying that our entire zoning and development pattern makes it illegal to build neighborhoods that DON'T just inherently MAKE people poor.
Again, take the housing projects. The famous ones in NYC were surrounded with big lawns that would supposedly make for more peaceful, rehabilitative environments for the residents. But what actually ended up happening is that it made it harder to walk through those neighborhoods and get to vital services. It turns 5- and 10-minute walks into 20-minute ones. And all of that green space could have been used for ground-floor retail and services which would employ those residents, and enrich them. Instead, they have to travel further for jobs and services, and those jobs and services can't pay as much.
Similarly, take Ferguson, MO. Because there's so much suburban infrastructure built up, and you can't build and old-school walkable downtown anymore, everyone has to drive everywhere. That means the engineers prioritize moving cars fast, which makes the roads less safe and less walkable. Everyone has to go shop at Wal-Mart, which essentially just ships all their wealth out of the town to Bentonville, Arkansas, instead of keeping it in the pocket of some local greengrocer. All that infrastructure costs the municipal government WAY more than its tax receipts bring in, so they resorted a taxation-by-citation scheme that sparked the infamous riots.
None of this stuff is sustainable. Ferguson tore down its old walkable downtown in order to replace it with strip malls. There is barely any opportunity outside of working at a handful of national chains in those strip malls, chains that suck the life out of people and suck money out of their pocketbooks.
So, it's not JUST "exclusionary zoning". It's an entire development pattern. It's why Ferguson's schools do worse by its citizens than the schools on the other side of STL county. Less opportunity, less revenue, an extractive approach to basically everyone involved.
The point is, if Ferguson rebuilt the downtown it thoroughly destroyed LONG before the riots, it's not like the people there would instantly become richer than their cross-town counterparts overnight. But it would be building real wealth and truly affordable housing, and a real economy of real jobs. Over time, those would restart the virtuous cycle, and the people of Ferguson would catch up to their cross-town peers.
“Everyone has to go shop at Wal-Mart, which essentially just ships all their wealth out of the town to Bentonville, Arkansas, instead of keeping it in the pocket of some local greengrocer”
That’s a laughable economic analysis. Most of the town’s wealth spent at Walmart goes to the producers of the groceries (i.e., not Bentonville) and much of the rest goes to personnel costs, (i.e., local jobs). The same is true of the putative “local greengrocer.” The primary difference is that Walmart is vastly more efficient than a local mom & pop store could ever hope to be, and Walmart’s prices are significantly lower thus keeping more wealth in the community in the pockets of its residents.
It's a pretty picture, but I'm not sure the old model is ever coming back because it was so gosh-darned inefficient. I'm in a wealthy suburb and small-scale retail still struggles, because Walmart and Amazon are actually great at what they do (even if they are not loved).
It's inefficient in terms of national economies of scale, sure. But economies of scale can also be achieved in other ways.
And Wal-Mart sure IS efficient at extracting wealth. TOO efficient. That's kind of the problem - these companies suck too much wealth out of localities.
What the old model's NOT inefficient about is the cost of infrastructure. We're basically sitting on a mountain of infrastructure that we can't afford -- all those strip-malls, drive-thrus, etc. We've spent the last several generations playing hide-the-sausage with various ways of shenaniganizing debt markets - from S&L to the housing bubble - but let's not mistake ANY of that for "efficiency".
The old model basically pays for itself and builds long-term generational wealth. I'm not saying it can't benefit from new technology - it certainly does, and we SHOULD be taking FULL advantage of how much easier it is to build high-quality housing than 100 years ago. But we shouldn't keep building suburbs and housing projects and whatever else that can't pay for themselves or otherwise compromise what DOES work about the old model.
Addendum: But as of right now, "education reform" has been operating like an army of scientists who spend a whole several decades competing with each other for the same 90-day contract to do some sewer work in Manhattan. Sure, you theoretically have the manpower, and you theoretically have enough hydrologists and sanitation scientists on staff to understand how a sewer works in the abstract and how to properly engineer a pipe, but the job keeps not getting done because no one involved understands how to deal with the sheer flow of shit coming their way.
PS: If you're wondering, yes, that started out as an oblique Ghostbusters reference, but I kind of lost the script.
I'm hoping that Matt writes about this soon, he's always looking for ways to point out how housing abundance can make things better, but I don't think I've heard him talk about it with respect to education.
A major reason why admissions policy at Harvard gains attention is the juxtaposition between the institution’s hyper exclusionary (somewhat meritocratic) nature and the whole faux egalitarian messaging about social justice.
It’s a whole the “emperor has no clothes” situation with one of the most culturally influential institutions in the nation.
I don’t think it’s faux egalitarian. And the faculty who are all about egalitarian ideology don’t really have any input on undergraduate admissions.
Then what values does all the DEI-washing appeal to? (It is such a consultanty term.) Generally political progressives appeal to egalitarian values.
Though there might be a better descriptor that the one used in my framing.
Before there was the faux egalitarian messaging, there were many decades of more genuine egalitarian concern in U.S. higher education. Although I can't speak to the Ivies specifically, it's been part of liberal culture for quite awhile.
I am 37 years old, attended a state flagship, and have worked in higher education my entire adult life. I was 30 when my salary finally hit the $30k level. There are people in these comments whining that $300k is suggestive of being disadvantaged?
As Logan Roy would say, you are not serious people.
"I ... worked in higher education my entire adult life"
Okay but no one made you do that and "education pays terribly" is not some fact that is difficult to discover. Presumably you're measuring career success in some other way (papers published, tenure, whatever), but if people go into fields where career success is measured in dollars then they are going to have strong opinions about how much they could / should make.
Sorry you don't make much money?
What does this have to do with people complaining that their smart and deserving kids are having a hard time getting into an elite college?
Others have treated the status insecurity displayed here with far more patience than I will, and for that they are better men (and women). $300k is enough, whether someone went to MIT or Fingerpainting College in Bumf**k, Iowa. I will no longer engage with this argument, because it is, frankly, silly.
I think this same poster was involved in dozens and dozens of comments of this same type a couple weeks ago, all of which went nowhere as well
I now regret even my one comment. He really made a mess of today's thread. can't follow any of it.
"Made a mess of what would have been interesting discussion" is almost the raison-d’etre of the common troll, and it's why I hope the Management chooses to exercise their discretion in banhammering that poster, whether they be malignant (my guess) or sincere (truly fucking pitiful).
"Any," really? You don't think any of them got PhDs and stayed in academia? Actually, if they went for PhDs, then five years later they're probably still getting them.
This is false. I literally just looked at all job opening OpenAI has, none of their salary ranges come close to 900K (the highest, Engineering Manager) tops out at 500K.
Look, as you obviously know, people do tend to judge things comparatively and you...well, I can't think of a nicer way to say this, you're the person looking at instagram photos of celebrities and complaining about your life.
I'd strongly second the recommendation to do some volunteer work, or mentor some folks, or do anything that has you interacting 'down' or even sideways (seriously, talk to some folks in the NGO/nonprofit world) on the social scale.
You seem very unhappy. I have a colleague who just left a job where he made more money and supervised a lot of people. He took a job that focuses on the work he loves - dealing with the public - and he no longer has to manage underlings. He took a big cut in salary, and makes a quarter of what you do, but I have not seen him as smiley and relaxed in years. I hope you find work that makes you as happy as his does, no matter the salary.
Ok. But your field is drawing the narrowest of narrow definitions. Harvard publishes their graduating class data. The 2022 median starting salary was $75k. The #1 track is consulting (22.55%). 5 years out the target comp for those students will be $175k and most will need to get an MBA to jump on the next promotion track. I've met like 2 people who did the undergrad to partner route at MBB - it's nearly impossible.
https://features.thecrimson.com/2022/senior-survey/after-harvard/
You note that MIT/Chicago don't practice legacy admissions, etc. Is there sufficient data disclosed to confirm that they show the improvements claimed for eliminating those practices?
The one thing he specifically mentioned about MIT and Chicago here is that they are the only two institutions on the list where the members of the top 1% are no more likely to get admitted than people anywhere else on the income spectrum.