This resonates. I could also easily see “Selling out” (or “Herd Mentality”) being conflated with steel sharpening steel.
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Shhhh. USN&WR and the rankings crowd might come for you.
They also make handcuffs out of steel . . . .
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UCLA itself is an elite institution. I’m a big fan. When my youngest son (who was a competitive applicant to top schools) was applying, UCLA was 1 of only 2 out of state public universities where I would let him apply (he was rejected by UCLA, by the way). The weather, the campus, the area, the proximity to the beach & the mountains for skiing….it is as if someone came up with the perfect college experience.
However, the quote above is provably not true. There is plenty of real fresh meat on the bone when it comes to criticizing the ivy league (and other very selective institutions). There is no need to dabble in inaccuracies.
I will disagree with you, because I think that, once you factor in both the boost that family wealth gives to kids from wealthy families, as well as the effects of legacy, donors, etc, you will get the same distribution of excellent, very good, and around average.
I did select UCLA in particular, because it is a top university. I do think that Harvard is a very good college, but I also think that UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, and a few more publics are its peers. In some majors, such as engineering, Harvard’s peers are a much larger group, with many publics being superior.
I do, however, understand that these are my opinions, and you disagree with at least some of them.
You managed to stereotype a group I know very well, and I am going to call you out on it.
Many and perhaps most students don’t know what they want to study in college. With my child, it was the opposite. It was clear from a very early age that he was going to do math. Nothing gave him more joy, and he was very good at it. We were stunned when we discovered that he taught himself algebra in first grade, and again in third grade when he independently discovered a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. We redirected him to other activities because we wanted his life to be about more than math, but no matter how much he enjoyed other activities, he kept returning to math. Without getting into the details of his later accomplishments, he is pretty far along on the right hand tail for math talent.
The most important criteria for him choosing a college were Peer Group, Fit, and Career Prospects. Yes, we are privileged in that cost was not a selection criteria.
Peer Group was critically important. He wanted to be around students as strong or stronger than he was. It’s the same thing as a really talented basketball player wanting to play against other equally talented players. It raises everyone’s level, or as has been said on this thread “steel sharpens steel”. There are a few colleges that have a disproportionate fraction of these students, and they are led by MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. If a student is admitted to one of the colleges above and UCLA, what fraction do you think will choose UCLA, assuming both were affordable?
My son chose Harvard over others in significant part because it had Math 55, a class where everyone would be his math peer (or in some cases far stronger). He spent about 25-35 hours per week on that class alone, more than he spent in other years on all of his classes put together. It was his defining classroom experience while at Harvard.
Oh, and he became a “finance bro”. Why? Because he gets to do math all day, surrounded by other really smart people who also like doing math all day. The money is certainly great, but he would likely choose the same job even if FAANGs paid the same.
Too many students want to do finance for the money. But if you look at how quant finance companies recruit, they want the kids that love math and science. That’s why they have long sponsored math competitions that start in middle school. And why they started sponsoring YouTube STEM videos that have absolutely nothing to do with finance. They want smart and curious people who really enjoy the problems they are solving.
What is telling is that the biggest competition for these kids is not some other high paying job, but a PhD program where the students live on meager pay for 5 years, and then enter the rat race to try and become a tenured professor. Everyone in Math 55 would have been coveted by a finance firm (or these days by AI firms as well). But most chose PhD programs instead.
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This gets at the heart of my frustration earlier in the thread about the definitions of “ambition” being solely centered on wanting to get into the top 1% of earners. These Math 55 folks you describe had incredible ambition that involved turning down the 1% salaries of finance for the low pay and hard work of the academic tenure track. Their ambition was not tied to maximizing wealth. That is not to say that those seeking such finance jobs are not ambitious, but that money only framing some have highlighted misses the breath of what ambition can look like for highly talented or passionate people. Thank you for the concrete example.
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Actually, that doesn’t surprise me. Any society that could effectively keep its numbers below “the 400” probably includes a lot of inbreeding. The interesting thing is that it really wasn’t that easy for one of them to become elected president. Post-Civil War, almost all of our presidents were ex-generals (Grant, Hayes, Garfield and Arthur), and tended to be from Ohio (Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley.) In fact, if it hadn’t been for an assassin’s bullet killing McKinley in 1901, the world would probably never have heard of the Roosevelts. On the contrary, everything suggests that they had to work hard to overcome their patrician backgrounds in order to become successful politicians.
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According to the different webpages dedicated MATH 55, Math 55 at Harvard is the class that is taken by math majors who want to do a PhD in math. According the the MATH 55 websites, fewer than 50 students finish MATH 55 every year.
According to the Crimson, of Harvard’s graduating class of 2025, 20.9% of graduates were going into finance and 13.5% were going into consulting. According to the Harvard fact book, there were 2,025 in the class of 2025 (weird). Of these, around 432 were finance career bound and 273 were going into consulting.
Only a small fraction of the graduates going to finance actually take MATH 55 ( 10-20 of 432), your son being one. I will agree that these 10-20 are probably not really “Finance Bros”. You don’t become a Finance Bro simply by working in the finance sector.
Those are Finance Bros, and, as I showed, the vast majority of the Harvard graduates who go to finance are not taking classes like MATH 55. They also do not engage in the activities in which your son engaged while growing up. Most kids like your son end up in academia or in basic research, or work in Finance without being Finance Bros.
[aside]
I don’t want to derail the thread to talk about who does a PhD and why, but people who do PhDs have brains that work differently, and those who do PhDs in math take this to an extreme. For every person who does a PhD, there are three who have the ability to do a PhD, but are sane.
[/aside]
Beyond that, using the fact that a Harvard student spends time in the most difficult math class with other similar students as demonstration of “steel sharpens steel” actually clearly demonstrates that having “a higher concentration of smart people” is not important for this type of interaction.
If the main place and time that this so-called “sharpening” is happening is in specific very challenging classes, all good universities have such classes, and the students who attend these classes are as good as the ones who attend these classes at Harvard.
The most challenging classes at, say, UIUC are at the same level as similar classes at Harvard. Like at Harvard, the main place that top students meet and start interacting with other top students are in these classes. So top undergrads at UIUC have the same opportunities to experience the so-called “steel sharpens steel” as their peers at Harvard. Unless somebody is rabidly classist, they will not claim that there aren’t at least 50 students a year at UIUC who could pass Harvard’s MATH 55.
It does not matter if there are 5,000, 15,000, or 50,000 other students at the college. These other students are not attending the challenging classes, nor are they at the events that attract these students.
Students don’t get into discussions about theoretical math with random people in the dining halls, nor do they get into discussion on points of law with random students on the Quad. Top biology students are not walking around campus trying to start a conversation about protein folding with everybody they meet on campus either.
So how is Harvard “better” because a student MAY, on average, find a person with similar interests and of similar level once in every 20 random student on campus versus once every 100 random student?
Oh - I will ignore all responses that include something like “so you’re saying that there are no differences between any colleges” or other such straw person arguments (I may respond with an emoji though)
@hebegebe - So as not to derail the thread, I’ll concede the right to the “last word” on “Finance Bros” to you (since I had the first), if you wish to do so.
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It isn’t the academics that set Harvard apart. It’s the connections, the name, the network. There is a reason that Harvard wins most of the cross admit battles. Anecdotally, in S22’s class two students were admitted to both MIT and Harvard. Both planned to major in CS. Both picked Harvard. I can’t imagine that it was because the CS program there is better - they went for the name. Edited to add - going for the name can be a totally rational choice as it does confer benefits so I’m
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In some circles, MIT > Harvard in terms of name. And according to Parchment’s cross-admit data, about 63% of students admitted to both choose MIT over Harvard. Now Parchment isn’t scientifically rigorous, but it fits with our observations.
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No, I think we have both expressed our views, and others can decide what they want to believe.
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Can we get this pinned for folks to see how to end a discussion and not derail a thread? It might be useful to other threads. 
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I was about to say the same thing. In my circle I don’t know anyone who was accepted to MIT that didn’t go. And usually those students had HYPS acceptances as well. And MIT also trumped Caltech, but Caltech would have also won out over HYPS for these students. (Again, totally anecdotally in my circle and honestly there aren’t that many).
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I think I may need to borrow this for future mod notes. 
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Caltech kids always seemed a very particular type to me, even moreso than MIT. So not surprised at many students one knows picking MIT over it. Plus MIT is bigger. What I wonder though, is of the students who chose Caltech, how many of them turned down MIT. I’d suspect a good number.
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I agree. Caltech is a very small, very niche school. MIT itself is pretty focused for undergrad, much more so than a Harvard-type school. But I think a decent number of kids are interested in the size and relative focus of MIT, but Caltech would be taking it too far for them.
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I’m sure MIT trumps (pardon the expression) Harvard in certain circles. And, as I didn’t finish writing above, I completely understand why some people might choose Harvard over other Ivies etc. due to the name. It opens a lot of doors. I have a lot of respect for Harvard, MIT etc. They are excellent institutions. I just dislike the cultural fixation on them because among certain students it can breed an Ivy+ or bust mentality which I think is unhealthy.
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I think there are good reasons to choose Harvard over MIT, even apart from the name. My child chose it because of fit. Almost all of MIT’s classes have a pretty high level of intensity, whereas Harvard’s classes range from pretty easy to very difficult, allowing him to decide where to focus his effort. And he wanted to explore other fields, such as Government. But he took a lot of ribbing from others about his decision.
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