<p>OTOH, people get credit when they dont deserve it. Someone gets to claim the discovery of ATP while the real person got thrown under the bus by Harvard.</p>
<p>[Yellapragada</a> Subbarao - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellapragada_Subbarao]Yellapragada”>Yellapragada Subbarow - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>I’ll take the tax breaks. I’d much rather keep the $500 mill I earned rather than rely on the whim of the govt to give me $500 mill of other peoples’ money.</p>
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<p>I know the Harvard endowment has done better in the recent past and was being deliberately conservative. An 8% return may be what one can expect from the stock market.</p>
<p>@LF wrote;</p>
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<p>Yes. Yes I am. Cause this is AMERICA I can do whatever I please. We miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. Because I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character! There is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.</p>
<p>Aim high! For the greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.</p>
<p>“How do we know that what is interesting to one or two admissions officers reading an application will be interesting to college classmates or professors looking for research assistants?” </p>
<p>You don’t. So I guess you just have to be authentic to your true self, which I suppose is problematic for those who don’t conceive of any true self beyond what the Harvard adcoms think of them.</p>
<p>How whiny. “how am I supposed to know?” Stop acting as though life carries guarantees.</p>
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<p>“High” for many young people is not What Prestigious Undergraduate Institution They Get Into. It’s being a good person. Balancing school and friends. Pursuing an interest (or two) with heart and soul. Taking the long view about life after high school. The majority of successful, happy people in this country (and the world) did not go to HYPSM. </p>
<p>Yes, this is America and people can do whatever they please. But they are naive, to say the least, if they walk like lemmings off the elite-college cliff just because that is what they are “supposed” to do.</p>
<p>^agree 100% whatever “aiming high” is, it is to the individual. My post is about following your dreams and “trying” to satisfy yourself. Not play to the masses. And @LF seemed to be taking a position that; if something isn’t likely? then it shouldn’t be pursued. And that is BS.</p>
<p>Like I wrote upstream. I know a handful of kids who applied at the Ivy’s, some got in and went, other didn’t get in, and a few got in and decided to go elsewhere. All were good choices for the kids.</p>
<p>LF clearly said: following my logic, one would be analytical. Do the homework. and assess your shot. </p>
<p>Why do you think that means something shouldn’t be pursued?</p>
<p>But, pursue implies work toward, not shoot scattershot and hope something sticks.</p>
<p>Next time someone accuses the top schools of manipulating to get more applications, to gain all that app money and so usnews bumps their rating based on admit rates, maybe I’ll quote you: this is America I can do whatever I please.</p>
<p>Harvard’s endowment down 4% in FY 2012</p>
<p>“HARVARD’S ENDOWMENT was valued at $30.7 billion as of June 30, the end of fiscal year 2012—down 4.1 percent from $32 billion at the end of fiscal 2011—according to the annual report released today by Harvard Management Company (HMC).”</p>
<p>Absweetmarie,</p>
<p>The educational credentials of S Ct justices simply serve as a proxy for the disproportionate share of old boy network jobs that go to grads of Ivy and a few other top schools. The pipeline between Ivy and Wall Street/large law firms is well charted and so let’s look at large companies. </p>
<p>Looking at Fortune 100 jobs, 42 of 100 Fortune 100 CEOs attended an Ivy school (mostly undergrad and indeed just 1/3 of these CEOs even have MBAs). [Where</a> the CEOs of America’s Largest Companies Went to College](<a href=“Web Page Under Construction”>Web Page Under Construction)</p>
<p>If we expand the pool to the Fortune 500, 99 of these CEOs came from just three schools: Harvard, Columbia, and Penn. [Where</a> the Fortune 500 CEOs Went to College](<a href=“Web Page Under Construction”>Web Page Under Construction) </p>
<p>The other top schools in terms of producing CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are Stanford, MIT, Michigan, Notre Dame, Virginia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Indiana, Northwestern, MIT, Rutgers, and Indiana. [Fortune</a> 500 CEOs: Which Universities Did They Get Their Degress From?](<a href=“Fortune 500 CEOs: Which Universities Did They Get Their Degress From? | HuffPost College”>Fortune 500 CEOs: Which Universities Did They Get Their Degress From? | HuffPost College). Other than the last two, which are both very good publics, all of these other schools are T25 and save for UM these are small and medium sized universities making these percentages even more disproportionate.</p>
<p>“Would you really reject an Einstein so that the women’s rowing team has a good coxswain so that Harvard’s women can row a boat 1 second faster than Yale’s?”</p>
<p>One of Harvard’s famous alumni had an IQ measured at 167 and matriculated at the age of 16…</p>
<p>Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. ;)</p>
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<p>Well, in those days, there were so few smart people that they used them as lab rats for psychological experiments. 
They didn’t know what else they were for.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> and the Making of the Unabomber - 00.06](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.htm]Harvard”>Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>My dad had that IQ and went to City College and graduated at 19. He could learn anything he wanted quickly, but his idea of great literature was a potboiler called Anthony Adverse, and his idea of great music was Tschaikovsky, now Chaikovsky I think. Nothing wrong with that music, but not exactly Bach.</p>
<p>He had jobs in corporate America, earned a normal for times upper middle class salary, played golf every Sunday morning, like to garden and sang “On the Road to Mandalay” at the slightest provocation.</p>
<p>He was an officer in the Air Corps, a trained fighter pilot and eventually in the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA.)</p>
<p>I don’t think he had deep thoughts, enjoyed Shakespeare or ever read philosophy not assigned to him. </p>
<p>He was an applied math and statistics major so I assume he was good with figuring, though I never saw anything to support that.</p>
<p>He might have aced the SAT’s but I can’t see him bringing much to Harvard.</p>
<p>It was fun waking up Sunday mornings after he’d gotten home from golf and singing with him though.</p>
<p>There was such a strong Jewish quota, I doubt he could have gone to Harvard anyway. He went to city with cardboard in his shoes, so his parents couldn’t have paid for it either.</p>
<p>As I posted earlier, one of Richard Feynman’s books said he had an IQ of 125.</p>
<p>Closer evaluation of the USNWR study shows other interesting data: </p>
<p>Institution Total degrees earned
Harvard University 65
Stanford University 27
University of Pennsylvania 24
Columbia University 18
University of Michigan 14
University of Notre Dame 14
University of Virginia 14
Cornell University 13
Dartmouth College 12
Indiana UniversityBloomington 11
Northwestern University 11
Rutgers, the State University of New JerseyNew Brunswick 11
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10</p>
<p>Given that some CEOs have earned multiple degrees from the same university the data is somewhat skewed. Case in point, five of the degrees from Harvard are from only two men. Roger Ferguson, Jr., holds a B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. from Harvard and Charles Haldeman, Jr., of mortgage firm Freddie Mac, earned both an M.B.A. and J.D. from Harvard. Perhaps a better statistic would be counting a school only once if a CEO received multiple degrees from that school. But doing so would not serve USNWR’s purpose which is to validate their college rankings.</p>
<p>See:
<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-schooll[/url]”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/articles/2012/05/14/where-the-fortune-500-ceos-went-to-schooll</a></p>
<p>A study done by Aron A. Gottesman and Matthew R. Morey reveals that “Using a relatively broad sample of 390 US firms, we find no significant evidence that the type or selectivity of the education of the CEO is related to firm’s financial performance.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://webpage.pace.edu/mmorey/publications%20pdfs/CEO%20educational%20background%20and%20firm%20performance.pdf[/url]”>http://webpage.pace.edu/mmorey/publications%20pdfs/CEO%20educational%20background%20and%20firm%20performance.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Yeah, he also won the Putnam exam (in college,) won the New York University math championship (in high school,) and apparently won all the school-wide awards given for each subject. He even won the school-wide award in English by imitating the florid language of the people he saw winning.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Obviously, the first thing you go on to evaluate someone’s ability is what they are able to do. Occasionally, talk shows have on one of those people with 200 IQs who work for the New York Times making crosswords puzzles. They don’t strike me as geniuses. </p>
<p>There are different kinds of genius even within math/science, though it surprises me that Feynman didn’t score higher, considering his abilities seemed tailor-made for the IQ test. Other than the analogies, where he might have been tripped up by vocabulary, the guy was a master at the sort of visual manipulations that are required by the shapes-and-patterns part, the sequences would have been easy for him, and all accounts are that his memory was basically photographic (so the part where you recite a story you are told would be easy). Years later when his rival and fellow physics Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger and Feynman got together, they recited some of the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica that they had read when they were teenagers. It sounded like they had memorized the whole thing. I have heard that some of the Group IQ tests that are administered have a ceiling in the high 120’s–I wonder if Feynman’s IQ test was one of these. Anyway, these tests are not the be-and-end-all of intelligence–I agree with you there. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like David Hilbert, a giant in mathematics, wouldn’t have scored higher than the 140’s, but that’s just my guess.</p>
<p>If we were to think of elite undergrad schools as finishing schools for the scions of the 1%, much of that angst would not be so badly misplaced.</p>
<p>Whether it is a good thing is another matter. That really has more to do with ones personal self-interest than anything else.</p>
<p>Do continue.</p>
<p>"The educational credentials of S Ct justices simply serve as a proxy for the disproportionate share of old boy network jobs that go to grads of Ivy and a few other top schools. The pipeline between Ivy and Wall Street/large law firms is well charted and so let’s look at large companies. "</p>
<p>Well, so? This is 2012, not 1952. Wall Street jobs and large law firms are not the only game in town, haven’t been for years, and aren’t “special” jobs in any way. I am really, really tired of the unsophisticated fawning over those jobs. First, if the goal is big money, there are plenty other ways to do it, and second, those jobs aren’t even more “prestigious” these days. A big law lawyer. Yawn. </p>
<p>Second, I’ve been in management positions of a Fortune 30 company. I consult for similar brand name companies all day long. I agree a good college helps get in the door, but once you’re in, it doesn’t matter. It’s what you do that counts, both in your job and in real life that counts.</p>
<p>But suppose, for the sake of argument, that my kids, not going to Ivies, will never be “allowed” to be CEOs. So what? Is that seriously a “dream” they should have? Does that therefore mean All is in Vain in life?</p>
<p>My biggest disappointment was when I learned I could never be the President of the US because I wasn’t born here. I really thought that was unfair.</p>
<p>It seems that muckdogs is changing Beliavsky’s argument from “it’s not fair they don’t let in all the super geniuses who could be making scientific discoveries which will now go undiscovered” to “it’s not fair if a kid doesn’t get in, since he’ll never become a CEO or Supr Court justice.” Well, muckdogs, leaving aside the dated view that CEOs of big companies are where the money is at, how do you propose colleges “select” for the kids most deserving of CEO spots in the future?</p>
<p>'The educational credentials of S Ct justices simply serve as a proxy for the disproportionate share of old boy network jobs that go to grads of Ivy and a few other top schools."</p>
<p>The old boy network is far, far less important than it used to be. It was prevalent when Ivies were indeed finishing schools for St Grottlesex kids. It’s irrelevant, though, for the vast majority of people and professions in this country. Sometimes I think I’ve stepped back in time when I visit CC, with all the fawning over Wall Street and white shoe law firms.</p>