A bit of a word salad with a catchy title…meritocracy is the last thing I would blame for the Ivy League problems. Maybe the lack thereof. The schools that are thriving are precisely those which rely on meritocracy and simple metrics like test scores and GPA for admission.
1 Like
I’m not talking about landing the first job where schools like MIT certainly can have advantages. I’m talking about the next job. That’s where the sorting takes place. People don’t recruit for those positions based on your school. They recruit based on what you DID at your first job. There’s little correlation to those positions, meaning second jobs and beyond, and undergraduate institution.
I agree with what you cited, even though they are just claiming empirical evidence. Taking that one step further, it is not only true for STEM majors, but for all FGLI students according to Dale and Krueger.
2 Likes
My thoughts about this as I read it…
- blah blah blah paragraphs of author editorialized history lesson of college back in the good ol’ days
- babble about how in the good ol’ days, you could go into journalism w/o a college degree. Whatever. Don’t care.
- paragraph about ONE specific study talking about the hiring process at specific elitist employers…as if the entire country is yearning to work there.
- blah blah blah paragraphs about politics
- oh great, now he’s finally going to talk about the meritocracy, but starts of to brag about how he’s spent his entire adult life at elite institutions. Ok, buddy, like that matters.
- now he’s talking about SAT/ACT scores and how because of that, colleges won’t read your essays. Um, whatever dude, there’s a boatload of colleges out there which are still test optional.
- Now I’ve gotten through his Reason #3. So far, his article has become a long diatribe complaining about Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, etc.
- ok, now he’s talking about the ‘cognitive elite.’ Sort of feels like he thinks that everyone wants to be in the cognitive elite, which would be a faulty assumption.
- Ok, now onto Reason #5. This author needs some therapy.
- Summary of Reason #6: “it’s not fair that some kids’ parents can afford expensive private schools.” Life isn’t fair. life is also all about choices. you know what? We chose to put our kids in a charter school…one where we drove 35-45 min each way 5 days a week to get out kids to & from school. A school that is demanding, but overall has had pretty amazing teachers. A school which has this unique culture where everybody really is accepted, bullying is minimal and when bullying does occur, other students squash it and they stick up for the proverbial little guy. A school where you’re accepted and celebrated for being a nerd and being into random things that the average teenager might not care about. My kids have had a counselor-to-student ratio of about 50-to-1. And in senior year, one of their classes is all about college counseling and applying to college. Other people I know have said that because we put our kids in that school, “it isn’t fair,” yet those same people chose to enroll their kids elsewhere. That’s not my problem.
- now author is talking about the working class & looping it into politics. Ok, buddy, that wasn’t necessary.
- blah blah blah more babble about progressivism vs working class & politics. not relevant to whatever the point is that he’s trying to make.
- ok, here’s the real reason for his article…a paragraph ends with his opinion on the presidential election results.
- the whole title of the article is click bait.
- More talk now from the author about politics, but now it’s about Gaza.
- “A successful meritocracy will value people who see their lives as a sacred mission.” What?
- more talk in another paragraph about high paid equity firms. I don’t care. Why does everybody act like the #1 goal in life should be to work at Goldman Sachs?
- couple of paragraphs about mental agility vs IQ. Ok, kind of interesting. But what does that have to do with how the Ivy League allegedly has broken America?
- skimmed the rest of it. Couldn’t take it anymore. He could have made his points in a couple of pages instead of going on and on and on. Whole thing sort of was full of “I’m mad about something and I’m going to ramble about it until I run out of gas.”
But did the Ivy League really break America? No. That’s a ridiculous notion.
12 Likes
The best CS students are mostly from Cornell, Berkeley, UIUC, U-Dub, U Michigan, not to mention MIT, Stanford, and Caltech (and a few others), are far more in demand at top CS jobs than Harvard CS graduates. Because of their obsession with hiring from Ivies, some banking companies may prefer to hire Harvard graduates for their tech jobs, because there is a wide streak of elitism in these companies, which is not satisfied by a degree from any colleges which is not an Ivy (except maybe Stanford and MIT).
Harvard may take its place there among the top CS programs, because they are investing a lot in CS. However to achieve these, they need to do other things besides dumping money. Among these other things, they need to think like an engineering school, rather than like an Ivy-League university, when hiring and supporting faculty. We’ll see how that works.
5 Likes
Brooks writes about how the “game is rigged” toward the wealthy. I think it would be fair to at least mention the generous financial aid policies of elite schools, and the fact that a sizable portion of Harvard students receive aid. Those with family incomes under $85k go for free.
Please move on from the “value” of elite schools which has been discussed in countless other threads.
Back to discussing this specific article please.
1 Like
Yesterday I was operating on too little sleep, and today I am operating on too little time, to contribute meaningfully to this thread.
I do think some of you are missing the forest for the trees. There is huge, and growing, wealth inequality in the US. And one reason is the selective/elite college credential. Which is the reason for the premium placed on attending that sort of college by so many people. And admission to such a college is heavily skewed towards the top 1% (or whatever top percentage you choose) despite the best of intentions by the schools themselves.
I contend that any college that has legacy admissions does not have the best of intentions.
7 Likes
Fair, but I am referring to the generous financial aid these schools have, and the effort they make to find “diamonds in the rough”.
They are generous, but if Johns Hopkins with its $11B endowment can thrive without legacy and meet the full need of its students without requiring loans, I am sure that Harvard can do the same with its $50B endowment.
4 Likes
So I would suggest it helps to distinguish different levels of growing disparity in outcomes.
One level is the top 10-15% or so, mostly made up of working professionals with college and often postgrad degrees, although some are small business owners and such. As a group (YMMV) it has experienced inflation-adjusted income and net worth increases that have put increasing distance between it and ordinary working households, meaning mostly non-professional, non-managerial workers.
One can argue the observed career returns to college are contributing to this effect, although again there is a chicken and egg problem there. But as far as this effect is concerned, obviously the Ivies and such cannot possibly be major players, they are too small.
This is what I mean when I refer to Cal Poly SLO . . . the returns to attending colleges like that can in fact place you within this top 10-15% group. And to the extent there are people who resent that difference in outcomes, that could become a political issue.
OK, then there is like the top 1-2%. These are often still working professionals, but at the high end–surgeons, large law firm partners, high level managers, and so on. Increasingly, these families are also benefiting from, and planning to continue, multigenerational accumulation of wealth. These people as a group are observably going up even faster than the rest of the top 10-15% in terms of income and even more so net worth.
Which could include 529s, for that matter. These are then making up a lot of full pay families and such. Not coincidentally, they are also overrepresented at expensive privates, expensive OOS programs, and so on. Not just Ivies, though.
It would be too political to dive into this too much, but I will just note I don’t think the resentments Brooks is describing (or perhaps encouraging) really distinguish between the top 10-15% and the top 1-2%.
OK, then you have the top 0.1%, or even rarer. These families are again outracing even the rest of the top 1-2%. These are getting into families that can make large donations and such. And again, they are even more disproportionately represented at expensive privates and OOS publics, still not exclusively Ivies though.
At this point I think you are getting into really widespread concerns, about that class of families and their role in American society. But again, not necessarily the specific issues Brooks is raising, or not framed like he is framing them.
So like I said before, I think there are plenty of real issues here to discuss about the role various higher education institutions may be playing in reflecting and perhaps sometimes reinforcing these effects.
But an awful lot of what Brooks is talking about is already an issue at that 10-15% level. And that is not an Ivy versus other colleges line. That is really capturing most reputable non-profit four year colleges.
1 Like
I think it helps to understand Harvard intends to stay at the top of the endowment rankings for the indefinite future. So to the extent its ancient (and some new) rivals are also planning to not just use but keep dramatically growing their endowments, Harvard is too.
And if Harvard thinks legacy admissions is a good long term strategy for helping that happen, they will not give them up easily.
In fairness to Brooks, he probably did not have a hand in choosing the title attached to his article; that’s usually the editor’s job. If you read the body of the text carefully, he never uses the phrase, “Ivy League” although, as I mentioned upstream, he leans heavily on one speech delivered by James Conant who happened to be the president of Harvard in 1940 when he gave it. In retrospect, I’m sure he regrets relying on a lazy trope (that nothing happens in higher education unless it happens at HYP first) in order to introduce his broader thesis that “meritocracy” as a concept has not proven any more resilient to the needs of a modern America than the old WASP Establishment.
2 Likes
I don’t think the article was, in general, very well written. It rambled on and on and at the end of it, it left me thinking, “So…what was the point you were trying to make?” Like, what’s the conclusion we’re supposed to draw from this?
Is the author trying to say that all of the problems in the US are because of a small handful of colleges + politicians on a particular end of the political spectrum? Or is he also saying that the problem is also because too many Goldman Sachs-type of recruiters & tippy top law firms want to hire a specific type of candidate…and THAT is contributing to all that ails in the United States today?
He also seemed to try to say that he doesn’t like the focus on IQ tests. Well, IQ tests aren’t used for college admissions. SOME colleges use SAT & ACT scores, but those are different than IQ tests.
The author also doesn’t seem to realize that the majority of America doesn’t really care all that much on a day to day basis what a small handful of small elite colleges are doing.
Is the author also saying that there’s something that needs to be fixed in the K-12 education system in the US? Or that something needs to be fixed in college education in the US? If yes, what specifically?
Changes in the K-12 education system, in my opinion, are best handled in a local and state level. Well, that’s where the average citizen would be able to have the most influence anyway.
If the author wants to do something to help with diversity, equity, & inclusion in college admissions, then he should put his money where his mouth is and volunteer to be a mentor with Scholar Match.
The author needs to come down out of his ivory tower once in awhile and live in the real world.
3 Likes
There is huge, and growing, wealth inequality in the US. And one reason is the selective/elite college credential.
That isn’t among the top 100 reasons for it - at best it is a scapegoat to direct the anger of those feeling the inequality and feeding that distracts from addressing the real reasons.
3 Likes
They can’t…living in an ivory tower is a requirement if you write for the Atlantic…
2 Likes
He’s saying they go together like a hand and glove.
But, people have been saying for years that they are proxies for IQ. I have no argument with Brooks on that point.
I don’t think that’s his point at all. He thinks the “choke hold” in American society lies in what happens after high school.
How to “come down and live in the real world” which I gather is the world of living from pay check to pay check AND acquire the skills to write about it fluently is a little like trying to fly an airplane while building it.
2 Likes
Not really. The main reason is the massive economic shift from manufacturing to service-based, where those particular new skills are primarily gained through a college education (any college, not just an elite college). One could even blame global capitalism in general.
4 Likes
I think you guys are basically saying the same thing.
And so not to appear totally negative and dismissive, here is something I liked and think is important:
When the education scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine toured America’s best high schools for their book, In Search of Deeper Learning, they found that even at many of these top schools, most students spent the bulk of their day bored, disengaged, not learning; Mehta and Fine didn’t find much passionate engagement in classrooms. They did, however, find some in noncore electives and at the periphery of the schools—the debate team, the drama club, the a cappella groups, and other extracurriculars. During these activities, students were directing their own learning, teachers served as coaches, and progress was made in groups. The students had more agency, and felt a sense of purpose and community.
As it happens, several types of schools are trying to make the entire school day look more like extracurriculars—where passion is aroused and teamwork is essential. Some of these schools are centered on “project-based learning,” in which students work together on real-world projects. The faculty-student relationships at such schools are more like the one between a master and an apprentice than that between a lecturer and a listener. To succeed, students must develop leadership skills and collaboration skills, as well as content knowledge. They learn to critique one another and exchange feedback. They teach one another, which is a powerful way to learn.
Mehta and Fine profiled one high school in a network of 14 project-based charter schools serving more than 5,000 students. The students are drawn by lottery, representing all social groups. They do not sit in rows taking notes. Rather, grouped into teams of 50, they work together on complicated interdisciplinary projects. Teachers serve as coaches and guides. At the school Mehta and Fine reported on, students collaborated on projects such as designing exhibits for local museums and composing cookbooks with recipes using local ingredients. At another project-based-learning school, High Tech High in San Diego, which is featured in the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, one group of students built a giant wooden model with gears and gizmos to demonstrate how civilizations rise and fall; another group made a film about how diseases get transmitted through the bloodstream.
In these project-based-learning programs, students have more autonomy. These schools allow students to blunder, to feel like they are lost and flailing—a feeling that is the predicate of creativity. Occasional failure is a feature of this approach; it cultivates resilience, persistence, and deeper understanding. Students also get to experience mastery, and the self-confidence that comes with tangible achievement.
Most important, the students get an education in what it feels like to be fully engaged in a project with others. Their school days are not consumed with preparing for standardized tests or getting lectured at, so their curiosity is enlarged, not extinguished. Of course, effective project-based learning requires effective teachers, and as a country we need to invest much more in teacher training and professional development at the elementary- and secondary-school levels. But emerging evidence suggests that the kids enrolled in project-based-learning programs tend to do just as well as, if not better than, their peers on standardized tests, despite not spending all their time preparing for them. This alone ought to convince parents—even, and perhaps especially, those parents imprisoned in the current elite college-competition mindset—that investing aggressively in project-based and other holistic learning approaches across American education is politically feasible.
This is important! I completely agree the project-based learning model is extremely promising, and that we should invest in transitioning our public schools into integrating much more project-based learning. I am skeptical this really is reinforcing Brooks’ general thesis about what is “breaking” America, but in terms of laying out a vision of something that could help improve education in America, I think this is a nice section.
4 Likes