Post: #1

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/educat...leges.html

I stumbled on this article in the times today. It's not my go-to news place, but this caught my eye because it hit home.

Basically, it says the real lack of diversity at the top colleges and universities is the very small proportion of students from poor to lower-middle class and working class families. This is right on the money.

I went to large urban high school in a working class neighborhood where my friends Dads' had occupations like metal worker, taxi driver, or no Dad at all, etc. My high school was almost all "minorities", and if they were "white", they were nearly all "immigrant white".

After that I went to one of the elite" places where most people were Wasp White, Jewish, or Asian. A lot had come out of private preparatory schools. Their parents were executives, bankers (a banker to me growing up was the guy behind the counter of B of A), lawyers, consultants, etc. I got lucky with a lot of free scholarships. And frankly it was absolutely worth it in the long run for me, career-wise.

What struck me was how different the elite college culture was compared to my experience in high school. I did well mostly by sheer effort and luck. I fit in well enough and made good friends.

But clearly most of my friends in college saw a different world growing up. I felt lucky that although my family was comparatively unsophisticated with money and education, it was rich with culture and stability. I'm not sure though, without that kind of family support if I would have had a chance.

Ethnic, racial, cultural diversity gets a lot of attention. Economic diversity is the bigger issue.

Post: #2

I didn't know what "Heritage Applications" were until AFTER I had a doctorate ( not from an elite school).

It's how the George Bush IIs get into elite schools.

Post: #3

Very true. As a recent college grad of a decent state school, I am in a line of work where I am surrounded by Ivy League and other top tier graduates. I've heard more than once, "Hey, you're pretty smart. Why did you go to xxx?"

They don't understand that not everybody attends these schools because a lot of [working class] high schools simply don't send their top students to these schools whereas it was a very normal thing at their [upper middle class] high schools. I've also learned that you shouldn't assume students who attend top schools are anything more than hardworking. True intelligence is an uncommon trait no matter where you go.

Post: #4

A lot has to do with this:

   

Albeit in the US it is highly exacerbated as great wealth simply can buy itself into the top colleges. Also being descended from a previous graduate is a feudal assessment system, that is simply bullshit meritocracy-wise.

Real social mobility is actually lower now in the US, since a lot of old data is included and those statistics are fudged to a high degree.

Maybe the new eugenics-maniacs will dust off the poverty-gene again and try to prove that the lower 80% have an innate gene that predisposes them to being poor.





http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669034

The plutocracy always loves to tell the peasants that their superiority is based on superior genes. While in reality almost all great fortunes have been created by one or two generations coming from humble origins. The subsequent ones just went to the right schools or entered nobility, while their robber-baron grandfather has his history rewritten.

Post: #5

I was in some litigation once that involved a guy who went to Harvard and his high school records were a part of discovery. He was a "legacy" and I was shocked how low his grade and SATs were. Not that he was dumb at all, was well above average but way below what a non-legacy would expect to be admitted to Harvard with.

Post: #6

Intelligence has a strong genetic basis. Intelligence is correlated with both working in high pay fields and academic achievement. Even if you had a perfectly meritocratic admissions system and every child had access to the same quality of schooling and tutoring, the wealthy would still be be over-represented at elite schools.

Australian universities have a very meritocratic admission process which based entirely on your academic results. No interviews, no extra-curricular's, no sports, just your academics. There are no legacy admissions, next to no affirmative action unless you are Indigenous (who is a very small % of the population) and elite universities cost the same as lower tier ones within each course. The most expensive Bachelors degrees like Law, Medicine and Commerce cost only $9k a year, and all students qualify for interest-fee inflation adjusting loans you don't have to start paying back until you make $45k a year.

Even with such a system the elite universities are still dominated by students from $25k+ a year elite private high schools. Those who aren't, are either 2nd generation Chinese or Indians etc. who might've gone to a selective-entry public school, or international students who are the children of Asia's nouveau riche. Students from your run of the mill public schools are in the distinct minority, and are virtually non-existent in the most selective courses. There are even more Jewish students (who mostly went to elite private Jewish schools) around then non-selective public school students, and Jews are less than 1% of the country's population. If things are so skewed here I can only imagine what it must be like in America's fucked up system.

No doubt the better teachers, facilities and the tutoring that money buys plays a big role in disparity, but at the end of the day there's a good chance that a child of the well-off has inherited the genes that helped their mum and dad be a doctor and a lawyer in the first place, and there's no affirmative action policy in the world besides intelligence's long-run regression to the mean that can change that.

Post: #7

This is more or less common knowledge; you can be upper-middle class and get very great grades/test scores along with an insane amount of extracurriculars to receive admission or you can have wealthy parents. There are a some that enter without those qualifications but they're few and far between.

Has anyone read this scathing article by a former Yale professor? His goal is to dismantle the idea of the Ivy League being a place of intellectual growth and refers to the students as a race of bionic hamsters.

"It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.

The sign of the system’s alleged fairness is the set of policies that travel under the banner of “diversity.” And that diversity does indeed represent nothing less than a social revolution. Princeton, which didn’t even admit its first woman graduatestudent until 1961—a year in which a grand total of one (no doubt very lonely) African American matriculated at its college—is now half female and only about half white. But diversity of sex and race has become a cover for increasing economic resegregation. Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the 1960s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy."

Post: #8

(08-27-2014 03:32 AM)Lucky Wrote:  This is more or less common knowledge; you can be upper-middle class and get very great grades/test scores along with an insane amount of extracurriculars to receive admission or you can have wealthy parents. There are a some that enter without those qualifications but they're few and far between.

Has anyone read this scathing article by a former Yale professor? His goal is to dismantle the idea of the Ivy League being a place of intellectual growth and refers to the students as a race of bionic hamsters.

"It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.

The sign of the system’s alleged fairness is the set of policies that travel under the banner of “diversity.” And that diversity does indeed represent nothing less than a social revolution. Princeton, which didn’t even admit its first woman graduatestudent until 1961—a year in which a grand total of one (no doubt very lonely) African American matriculated at its college—is now half female and only about half white. But diversity of sex and race has become a cover for increasing economic resegregation. Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the 1960s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy."

What does this even mean though? It's just postmodern progressive gobbledy gook. It never ceases to amaze me how people who supposedly earn a living by being thinkers, particularly in the humanities, are so downright ignorant of the human condition. I wonder how much that former professor would like it if his neighbourhood or family suddenly became a lot more "diverse".

Of course people self-segregate. Elite universities are not just places of learning in the same way that an overpriced bar is not just about the consumption of alcohol. It's about making sure the right and wrong people are in the correct places. If such places didn't exist, they would soon form, abroad if necessary, because people are social animals concerned with hierarchies and social circles.

A lot of this is about Veblen goods. Maybe a lot of kids at top universities shouldn't be there. Maybe they're there because it's expected of them, either for getting a job or to satisfy their parents or some other social circle. So let's imagine for a moment that all of those guys didn't go to elite universities. What's the alternative? One is that there would still be a whole lot of smart people who deserved to go to such universities. Yet who would pay for them? Currently, the dumbies on legacy admissions subsidise the smart, but poor, people. The other possibility is that they'd just start admitting a whole lot of poor people who weren't up to scratch. How would that help those poor people to do a couple of years, or maybe even a full degree (but be unable to get into anything great afterwards), and accumulate a whole lot of debt and false expectations? Of course, they could just lower the standards, but then those universities would no longer be desirable places to attend.

I teach groups of kids. There are kids who are not up to scratch. You try to tell the parents in a diplomatic way that their kids need to work harder and so on at the start. After that, it's on them. They're adults. They can figure this stuff out. Yet maybe they're aware that their kids aren't that smart and they're still okay with it for any number of reasons. The point is though that if I only took kids who were really smart, the classes would be so small that no one would be able to afford them, and so everyone from the smart kids to the parents of the not so smart kids to me would lose.

Deluge: I went to a private school that back then was middle of the road, but is now pretty elite. We did have some very wealthy kids at our school, including some overseas students. Mostly though, the kids at my school came from families where they poured all of their resources into their kids' educations. One of my friends' parents ran a bicycle shop for crying out loud, and he used to commute more than an hour each way from the outer suburbs/borderline countryside. My family didn't take vacations, for a long time my parents had one car (a second hand piece of crap at that), and so on. They made sacrifices. I don't have much sympathy for people (and there are a lot out there like this) who complain about private school kids.

Also, having been on both sides of the desk, and having taught at both private and public schools, I would say the biggest issue is not even to do with the quality of the teaching per se. It's to do with the culture at the school. At private schools, there are a whole set of expectations that get fulfilled. Classes start on time and kids are on task the entire lesson. They do their homework, and lots of it. They are expected to engage in extracurricular activities or attend school events as a matter of course. They wear their uniform correctly. All of these attitudes set the kids up for success, even in a non-academic sense, later in life because the kids internalise a value system. The parents are paying too much to let their kids slack off, and they expect the teachers to be equally as committed. On the other hand, I think the majority of government schools can best be described as having an air of slackness about them. Kids look sloppy. They roll in anywhere up to fifteen minutes late, spend half the lesson off task (and many don't have the required materials, i.e. a pen and some paper, yet have plenty of money for new shoes or phones), and getting homework from them is like pulling teeth. Hardly any engage in any sort of extracurricular activities. I've even taught in some of the highly desirable government schools (non-selective though) and seen this to an extent. Is it any wonder then that good universities in Australia are dominated by private school kids, as are top companies?

I also agree with you about the genetic component of all of this. There's evidence to this effect anyway, but it also stands to reason as again, people self-select their associations.

I once taught at one of the good public schools (one where the local real estate prices are inflated because people are so desperate to move within the catchment zone). Without my prompting, one of the students started telling me how private schools are a waste of money. I asked her what sorts of jobs the parents of the kids at the elite schools have, and she agreed with me that those parents are in elite positions where you have to be pretty smart to get such jobs and hold onto them. Also, that such people often have to make decisions regarding tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis. So then I asked her why, if such people could competently handle tens of millions of dollars, would they not be able to competently handle tens of thousands of dollars regarding their kids' education? Because obviously, Joe, who works down at the local fish and chip shop and doesn't know what CPI stands for, knows something that William, who is a top executive at KPMG, doesn't. She shut up.

I really think a lot of it's sour grapes and the politics of envy.

Post: #9

After mingling with rich bitches all I'm going to say is


My family is poor but at least it's stable and sticks together. Those bitches have broken homes and can't keep their children under control. It's not all good as it seems at the top, rowdy and Shitty children... Beta and drunk husbands... Wives who spend money. Moral problems and money problems abound.

Post: #10

(08-27-2014 05:35 AM)Feisbook Control Wrote:  Deluge: I went to a private school that back then was middle of the road, but is now pretty elite. We did have some very wealthy kids at our school, including some overseas students. Mostly though, the kids at my school came from families where they poured all of their resources into their kids' educations. One of my friends' parents ran a bicycle shop for crying out loud, and he used to commute more than an hour each way from the outer suburbs/borderline countryside. My family didn't take vacations, for a long time my parents had one car (a second hand piece of crap at that), and so on. They made sacrifices. I don't have much sympathy for people (and there are a lot out there like this) who complain about private school kids.

Also, having been on both sides of the desk, and having taught at both private and public schools, I would say the biggest issue is not even to do with the quality of the teaching per se. It's to do with the culture at the school. At private schools, there are a whole set of expectations that get fulfilled. Classes start on time and kids are on task the entire lesson. They do their homework, and lots of it. They are expected to engage in extracurricular activities or attend school events as a matter of course. They wear their uniform correctly. All of these attitudes set the kids up for success, even in a non-academic sense, later in life because the kids internalise a value system. The parents are paying too much to let their kids slack off, and they expect the teachers to be equally as committed. On the other hand, I think the majority of government schools can best be described as having an air of slackness about them. Kids look sloppy. They roll in anywhere up to fifteen minutes late, spend half the lesson off task (and many don't have the required materials, i.e. a pen and some paper, yet have plenty of money for new shoes or phones), and getting homework from them is like pulling teeth. Hardly any engage in any sort of extracurricular activities. I've even taught in some of the highly desirable government schools (non-selective though) and seen this to an extent. Is it any wonder then that good universities in Australia are dominated by private school kids, as are top companies?

I also agree with you about the genetic component of all of this. There's evidence to this effect anyway, but it also stands to reason as again, people self-select their associations.

I once taught at one of the good public schools (one where the local real estate prices are inflated because people are so desperate to move within the catchment zone). Without my prompting, one of the students started telling me how private schools are a waste of money. I asked her what sorts of jobs the parents of the kids at the elite schools have, and she agreed with me that those parents are in elite positions where you have to be pretty smart to get such jobs and hold onto them. Also, that such people often have to make decisions regarding tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis. So then I asked her why, if such people could competently handle tens of millions of dollars, would they not be able to competently handle tens of thousands of dollars regarding their kids' education? Because obviously, Joe, who works down at the local fish and chip shop and doesn't know what CPI stands for, knows something that William, who is a top executive at KPMG, doesn't. She shut up.

I really think a lot of it's sour grapes and the politics of envy.

I believe you're originally from my city. My family is smack bang in the middle of the income spectrum, but I went to one of the elite private schools. I also grew up near one those public schools with a good reputation and highly inflated house prices inside the school zone because of it. There's only a handful of them, you might have even taught at the same one. There is no comparison between them, not in the slightest. Even at this top public school there was still the occasional teen pregnancy, fights and a gang problem with some of the Chinese/Vietnamese dudes, a couple of them even slinging heroin on the side. Each of those top public schools have good private schools nearby, the extra money spent on buying a house in the zone would've been much better spent on private school fees.

(08-27-2014 06:16 AM)Cattle Rustler Wrote:  After mingling with rich bitches all I'm going to say is


My family is poor but at least it's stable and sticks together. Those bitches have broken homes and can't keep their children under control. It's not all good as it seems at the top, rowdy and Shitty children... Beta and drunk husbands... Wives who spend money. Moral problems and money problems abound.

This is the complete opposite of the truth. As Feisbook's already mentioned from his experience teaching at both private and public schools, the "rich" kids are extremely well behaved compared to their less fortunate peers. Fights, truancy and teen pregnancy just don't happen and the kids actually pay attention in class and are very respectful towards their teachers. Less use drugs as well, although the ones who do can more easily afford the expensive stuff. The broken homes thing is bullshit too, the strongest predictor of divorce and substance abuse problems is a lower income. Divorce and alcoholism is relatively rare amongst these types of families. I only knew one person out of hundreds who fit the out of control dysfunctional rich kid fucked up family stereotype, he was actually one of my bestfriends. Ironically his mother was a former Senator for the Liberal Party (the main Centre-Right party here), his dad worked for PwC. He ended up getting expelled. The high maintenance big spender wives aren't as common as you'd think, most of them are professionals of similar income and education to their husbands, classic examples of assortative mating.

Post: #11

Wow, Lucky links to a really interesting article. I knew I only got into a top college because I was really interested in and good at Latin and Greek and my teacher had connections, but I just kept studying hard without worrying about networking (I was blue pill, but had access to ass via oneitis) and went to grad school in a similar field.
That article releases me from some regret on that score.
The ultimate liberal arts school which the writer doesn't mention is St. John's College in Annapolis and Sante Fe, which probably deserves its own thread at some point.

Post: #12

Nothing would make me happier than to see the higher education industry fall flat on its face.

I went to school for a BS in bedding sluts and a minor in regurgitating bull shit.

Nothing of value has come from those degrees.

Post: #13

(08-27-2014 06:16 AM)Cattle Rustler Wrote:  After mingling with rich bitches all I'm going to say is


My family is poor but at least it's stable and sticks together. Those bitches have broken homes and can't keep their children under control. It's not all good as it seems at the top, rowdy and Shitty children... Beta and drunk husbands... Wives who spend money. Moral problems and money problems abound.

I went through University on a charity, and my every experience with the upper-middle class taught me to despise their fragile, hyper-sensitive minds. For all the talk of Social Justice Warriors being a new thing, trust me, these exact same people with the exact same concerns all existed back in the 1980's. The only difference is the internet allows them to type and whine and gather and seem more important than they really are. That and they preferred to affect bohemian pretensions, which the modern kids are too terrified of being uncomfortable to do, which is why inner city living has gone from university kids squatting to their parents dropping $4000 a month rent.

I'm a smart guy, but all my mates are working class. I genuinely enjoy them on the intellectual level I can, because they don't pretend to be geniuses, and, they have their own ideas about things, and there's often a rough brilliance in their thinking. I've got to admit, for this reason, I'm often intellectually-thrilled by societal outliers.

The Educated though? Mundane thinkers who think they're elite, and are absolutely insufferable to be around. Look at every Social Justice Warrior typist: they're in their ivory tower, casting their every pearl of wisdom down to what they consider the swines down below. Their contempt for the lower social classes drips from everything these people say.

I'd welcome a new reign of terror. Yeah, yeah, the neo-reactionaries would shake their fists at me, but what would we lose? The gadgets and over-pontificating that divides us?

Post: #14

A new article by Steven Pinker called The Trouble With Harvard was posted today on New Republic rebutting Deresiewicz claim that Ivy League students are faulty bionic hamsters. Pinker is on point as usual.

My favorite passage:

"The charges on which Deresiewicz indicts students are trumped-up. He waxes sarcastic that they try to get an A in every class (would he advise them to turn in shoddy work in his course, or in some other professor’s?); that they don’t read every page of every book they pick up, or of every book whose review they have read (confession: neither do I); that they seek affluence, success, and prestigious careers (better they should smoke weed and play video games on their parents’ couches?)"

Post: #15

Another interesting response from a strong writer: http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2...rself.html

TL;DR: Yeah... and? Elite institutions have always served one purpose.

All the more interesting coming from an elite graduate and career investment banker.