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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

A professor in my social circle has taught at various schools across North America including Harvard, University of Toronto and a few prominent USA state schools. He says in his experience there's no difference between the intellect and quality of work he sees at the schools he's taught at but the Harvard students are more ambitious and more entitled.

In my own personal experience Harvard, Princeton, Stanford types often carry an elitism that they need to justify the work they put in to get to that school and the amount the school prestige means to their own self worth.

There's also a classic OpEd from I believe the Harvard Crimson from a Harvard admin officer saying Harvard could admit sufficiently qualified students from it's applicants several times over the actual count of its freshman class. So basically you have to have rich parents or be lucky not just be qualified. The elitism exists nonetheless and it's a fraud.

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Something I did as I did when younger that annoyed more ambitious friends: go to Wikipedia and find the incoming freshman class size for the top schools (say Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT). Add them together. Now look up the number of high schools in the US and assume there’s 1 valedictorian per school. There just aren’t enough spots to even fit them.

Now complicate things more: all the elite high schools like Groton or something are gonna be sending way more than their top 1 student to these programs.

My conclusion was that it frankly doesn’t matter how much you compete with your personal classmates unless you have some other angle.

However outcompeting your classmates might get you a full scholarship to the state flagship, which is actually massive if you don’t use it completely imprudently.

> Harvard could admit sufficiently qualified students from it's applicants several times over the actual count of its freshman class

The key word there being "sufficiently". The academics at Harvard are not unusually difficult (relatively easy in some majors), and I would argue that the content in the coursework is distinctly not what makes Harvard what it is.

If Harvard only accepted their third-tier of admits (i.e., ~4000th to 6000th ranked applicants) for a decade, I imagine that you would find that it will have lost quite a bit of its shine. Not that they still wouldn't produce great people who do great things, just that they would produce much fewer of them. The ambition and capability of the top 30ish percent of each of Harvard's entering classes is a game changer, imho.

As opposed to the current 1/3 legacy, unclear percentage propped up by wealthy parents, elite prep school system that consistently and efficiently finds the best students.

There are still plenty of directionless Harvard kids that end up back in their parents's basements after graduation.

Also have you ever stopped to ask yourself who reads and evaluates these admission packets? How often do we complain about hiring here on HN? That it's hard, that you can't tell enough from the slice of information you have about a person. Do you really think the admission people at Harvard have such a gift to accurately tier these teens futures?

And if they had such a gift, why are they admission officers at a university and not in a position where their impeccable qualitative assessment skills can be better leveraged to make tons of money or truly great careers? The same people assessing these applications are the same, reasonably intelligent but flawed people that are doing recruiting and hiring and screening in every other prestigious institution that struggles to choose the best candidates.

Anyway I'm not trying to argue most people are undeserving (except for the legacy and wealthy parents kids, who are again, a very sizable percentage). But the idea that we actually have a finely enough tuned comb and good enough data to actually pick the children with the most elite futures is on its face absurd. And culturally both the benefactors and the people in awe of the halo of achievement around our elite universities are taking it too far.

> As opposed to the current 1/3 legacy, unclear percentage propped up by wealthy parents, elite prep school system that consistently and efficiently finds the best students.

This is a (despicable) feature. Harvard isn't trying to find the most capable students, they're trying to find the students that will most succeed. And they deny that they know there's a difference.

If you are talking about the most capable of success, there is no difference. The fact that the rules of the game which determine success isn't what you'd prefer (or what I'd prefer!) is, well, not principally Harvard's doing.

I think the problem is that you want Harvard to favor those who would be most capable of success, if the rest of society other than the individual and Harvard were (your version of) ideal.

I don't believe Harvard is choosing the wealthy kids and the legacies because they are most likely to succeed, I believe Harvard is choosing those people because they are most likely to have the highest ROI for the Harvard endowment & future donations. Someone from a low socio-economic status or otherwise marginalized background that has worked hard enough and smart enough by 17 or 18 to be a good candidate for admission at Harvard is an outstanding bet to have the determination to succeed later on in life.

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