I'm surprised that this scandal doesn't seem to be causing anyone to think one step further and realize that the entire premise of "elite" colleges with competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards.
I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.
As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.
The problem with elite colleges like Harvard, has nothing to do with meritocracy. In fact, it's the opposite. They use opaque and subjective criteria in their admissions process, in order to favor those born into privilege.
For a better example of a meritocracy, take a look at New York's elite magnet schools like Stuyvesant. Their admissions process is a pure meritocracy - based entirely on a standardized exam that is taken by all applicants. The end result - Stuyvesant has far more economic diversity than any elite university. Almost half the students come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. Harvard would do the nation a tremendous service if it became more meritocratic, not less
What ratio of the races can be said to be diverse? At a minimum, wouldn't one need to know the racial breakdown of the applicant pool before being able to conclude that Stuyvesant is not racially diverse?
I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian" one big race, but (for example) Caucasian and Hispanic two different races? It just seems so arbitrary.
Do you have an opinion on Stuyvesant's admission policy? Your comment seems rather pointed but stops short of condemning it.
I don't know the answer, so I was just pointing that out since the word diversity rarely comes with with economics. However, I think that since OP pointed out it's a meritocracy you get kids whose parents really care, and not poor kids whose parents are working all the time. That tends to be cultural to some extent.
Yes race is arbitrary but it is easy to catch on to what a society is referring to.
Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.
I'm glad this distinction got teased out. I find that it rarely does.
When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can).
For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy.
It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty.
The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course).
In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.
Are you saying that for example if someone's parents make over $150k/year, he better show 800 on SAT, but if the income is less than say $50k, 600 is fine?
Absolutely not. I suspect that the folks in admissions had more than enough 800's (from all walks of life) to choose from admission-wise. Their balancing act was trying to offer competitive scholarship and aid packages that would seduce the right mix of kids into taking their admission offer over the other admission offers they received.
Not an easy task, but an important one!
600's (literally or metaphorically) were a non-starter. Those kids got chewed up and spit out. Putting a perfectly innocent, well-meaning, ambitious high-school grad in that position was not a desirable outcome for anyone.
Perhaps you're not from the US? There is a strong current of sentiment in some quarters of the US that this is exactly what should happen if society's playing field is every going to be leveled.
How does letting in stupid people level the playing field? I want a doctor who is qualified to be a doctor, not someone who got by because they checked a diversity box.
The reason graduating from a prestigious school is valuable is because the graduates have some expected level of quality. Letting in stupid people doesn’t do the stupid people much good, and it certainly harms the prestige of an institution that was supposed to be focused on academics.
Would you add an obese minority to the olympic track team because the minority is underrepresented?
But it's not the Olympic track team, and we know disadvantaged kids placed into an advantaged situation demonstrate an IQ increase and perform up to par.
Education is uniquely different from training and certification. I say that as someone who has been through some of the most rigorous programs in both worlds. Education has no immediate impact on the outside world. You don't get to stamp a bridge design as a PE because you went to Stuy and MIT. You have to go through on-the-job training and certification exams. Same for physicians and attorneys. Education is part of it, but you absolutely have to pass the boards to practice.
Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
Also, this is Hacker News, why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
You missed the point. Schools are only prestigious because of an expected quality of students. Nobody is clamoring to hire random folks that took free online MIT courses and there is a reason for that.
>Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
I don’t know, a gay Muslim, a queer Christian, what does it matter? Once you’ve started selecting for diversity rather than merit, you’ve failed no matter which minority you choose.
>why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
I don’t care about education, but that’s because in my field it’s relatives easy to check expertise with hands on exercises. But that misses the whole point of the conversation.
The only reason anyone cares about education on the hiring side is that it’s supposed to be an intelligence/competency signal. If you just let whoever into the MIT electrical engineering department because their skin is the right color then there really isn’t much to say for the aptitude of MIT EE grads.
Finally, if disadvantaged people performed up to par when placed in school and intelligence didn’t matter, then schools could simply save hundreds of thousands of dollars by firing the admissions department and replacing it with a random number generator.
Many of these "elite" colleges are one of the best avenues to eliminate inequality. Many of them have significant (at least double digit) percentages of the student population that are first generation college students. Elite universities often have the greatest degree of racial diversity.
They don't eliminate inequality, they just facilitate a game of musical chairs. America has a very high and very well documented level of income inequality. It's also well documented that the people at the top often change. There's a lot of turnover at the top from generation to generation.
But the system property of inequality -- that is to say that American society is a highly stratified society with huge winners and huge losers -- is not going away, in fact American society is becoming more stratified. The elite universities perpetuate this system by conferring exceptional career benefits to their alumni.
Even though a few people will get promoted to the top, and nowadays some of them will even be women, people of color, etc., this system of inequality has some pretty painful drawbacks for most Americans, which manifest in long working hours, higher rates of mental illness, etc. as compared to more equal societies.
Richer rich people leads to higher inequality but it really says nothing about the quality of life for the average person. If we euthanized the top 1% of the US, how much do you think the lives of the other 99% would improve?
The racial diversity and non-legacy admits are there to prop up the prestige of the school. They get the the odd genius admitted, so that the wealthy can brush elbows with him/her. It may lift those select few out of poverty, but it in no way helps the average smart person get ahead of the average smart rich person.
Screw that. If you work hard people take notice, that's it. You can go to a CC, grind hard through your classes, transfer into a school with a better network, continue to grind hard, and land the job because anyone who sees your CV will see that you are a fighter who gives a shit.
Some of the richest kids in my high school paid full tuition to ivy league schools, didn't come to play school, and ended up with a scrappy job anyone could have gotten from just about any school. Work hard.
I think there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program (SAT score, etc) that I simply don't have. That doesn't help matters at all.
> there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program
Yeah, the ability to be accepted into an elite program. This often has little bearing in real life (honestly, how much do you really care about the ability to get a good SAT score anymore?).
you can grind your way to a high SAT score (I know this personally because in a span of 2-3 months i went from mediocre to 'great' SAT scores just from grinding), you can grind your way to great grades, you can grind your way to an "elite" college. But ultimately, while those things may help you get ahead, they don't make or break you. What is needed to be successful is hard work, creativity,risk taking and luck. Your woe is me attitude is going to hold you back much more than your not attending an elite university.
I also grinded my way into an "OK" SAT score (2230 superscored, 1500/1600) but that isn't good enough to get into any of the elite schools. Worse yet all of my friends got 2250+ :(
Why not? The relationship between colleges and the accomplishments of the people attending them is tenuous at best. There are thousands of people at good universities that do essentially nothing, and wherever you are you have the opportunity to do better than them.
The cool stuff projects are never the right career move, the work/life balance doesn't exist, and even then you have to be on constant lookout for the right team to join.
"I'm willing to put up with insanity" is a more important criteria for working on cool projects than what school you went to.
Source: I've been on those cool projects, I've hired for them as well. End of the day, the questions "want to write an OS, work 70hrs+ a week and live under constant fear of not having a job when you come in tomorrow?" get asked, alma mater, not so much.
Of course at the end of the day, you get some great stories out of it. You also get literal grey hair, potential lost friendships (I lucked out there! Saw plenty of it around me though.), and an ongoing base level of stress that is very unhealthy.
I graduated from a state school over a decade ago. I'm working at a good company now doing things that some people would consider "cool". And I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head what university a single one of my coworkers went to.
I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
And the farther out you are from college, the less and less it matters. In programming, past a certain number of years out, it may not even matter if you have a degree at all.
Well, my state school (rank #50+) is quite a bit different from yours in terms of quality (rank #25 or less) for starters. I didn't get anywhere close to an 800 on my Math SAT, whereas I'm sure a lot of people at UMD CS did (and a few at my school did too!).
>I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
Right, it's more of a correlation for inherent inferiority in my case more than anything else, but that's besides the point.
Ultimate accomplishment is driven more by hard work than by innate talent. I coasted on my talent in school through most of school and came into the working world unprepared to seriously go do cool stuff for quite awhile. It wasn't until much more recently that I buckled down and got better at applying myself that I really started to see an upward trajectory. And none of this has anything to do with what school you went to for undergrad awhile ago.
You're too hard on yourself. I know lots of people who went to elite universities and haven't done any really cool stuff.
More broadly, from an economic perspective, there are outliers, but most people only move one income quintile up or down from where their parents are (or don't move at all). So while we have some leverage over our futures, this suggests that we have less leverage than we believe. (So, for example, does the fact that 65% of millennials think they'll be millionaires by age 45, even though only 6% of Americans are millionaires.)
Certainly there's no reason to beat yourself up for not achieving things that are exceptional on an absolute scale (unless maybe you were born at the top and blew all your advantages).
Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). Never had any of that or knew how to do it.
I helped design/write an embedded runtime when I was ~29. Got a lot of patents out of it.
If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS.
Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare.
You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions.
Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.
No problem! If you are willing, for only a few thousand I'm willing to sit down and write a 1 page draft on a variety of topics!
Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything!
> I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless).
For each of those people there are a hundred that haven't done anything like that. "Ability" is a continuum: there are levels between "not doing anything" and "at the top of everything". Join your local research lab, try some competitive programming, do some open source work–just try your best and see what you can do! Not everyone can be the very best (though, it's entirely possible that you can, if you work hard and get lucky, so I don't want to close that off to you), but that doesn't make you unable to do cool things.
(FWIW, I'm in a middling undergraduate program, have no patents or papers in my name, and while I've competed in olympiads I have probably not done so at the level you're thinking of; I still feel that I've done cool things. YMMV, but if you want to chat personally feel free to shoot me an email.)
Are you dying soon? If not, there's no deadline. If the people you know did a cool thing at 20 or 21, and you do a cool thing at 24 or 25 (or 45 or 55 or 65 or ...), it is still cool, is it not?
It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.
If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”.
Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead.
That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into.
A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.
Perhaps you are focusing on a wrong sort of accomplishments. Do you really crave to be a highly paid Boeing PR drone, twisting the truth to protect their corrupt management from legal responsibility for 737-MAX screw-up?
You shouldn't feel that way at all, there are lots of unsuccessful people from each year's class at those kinds of universities, you just don't hear about them.
If you want to feel that condemned for life by the capitalist caste system feeling, read the part in The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz where people are trying to stop them from hiring Mark Cranney, even though he is apparently the best sales exec they have ever seen, because he went to "a weak school". They even admit he could be the CEO of IBM instead of a sales guy at a floundering startup if he didn't have "those things wrong with him".
No they are not. The numbers of first generation college students there are too small and the objective is to produce compliant members of establishment, not to rock the boat or derail the gravy train.
Back a while high school was the sort of "standard education" things have changed and now college is considered the default level people should have in the workforce, back when college was rare I think private colleges made sense, they were more of a final specialty training step at the end of your education - now that has shifted over to PhDs - let PhD programs remain privatized for whatever reasons, but we should extend government grants to cover all two and four year degrees and publicize the sector. Some kids will still stop their education at middle school - or high school, but we as a society benefit if everyone who wants one can get a college education.
So that college can have the same drop in quality that high schools have had, and PHD’s can be the next bachelors degree and we can continue pouring more and more of the GDP and percent of people’s lives into “education”? Why?
The whole labor dynamic has changed in the US over the last half century. Manufacturing left and never came back. Unskilled labor is not in demand any longer, skills are, so it's no wonder that there are a lot of people with bachelors degrees. Most PhDs, at least in stem, are fully funded at least.
Well, I guess that opinion just depends on how well you did on standardized tests in 5th grade. I smoked all my peers on that test they give you at the end of elementary. It would have been great if some communist party bureaucrat swooped in and took me to a school full of high scorers. Too bad that was my peak academically. Ha.
Many people would argue that "We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards." is exactly the point of higher education, and serves the goal of sustaining the power structures that currently exist.
That's why "legacy admissions" even exist. If your dad or your mom went to Harvard, of course you'd want to sustain the family line and have an easy time to get admitted to Harvard too.
I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.
As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.