Harvard Must Fall | Hacker News Reader

Harvard Must Fall

unherd.com

40 pointsRickJWagner22 comments

I moved to this country, one of the reasons was great education system. Now I'm here it seems really confusing and overwhelming. Lots of tiger moms pressing overworked kids to get into Ivy league, and so much wokeness. The problem being that Ivy students really dont sound like they're smart or creative, they seem just people who are out of touch with humanity, doing what they're told on the first step of the corporate rat race.

I definitely think the big famous schools are great for post-grad, but undergrad I'm not so sure. I'm thinking of some cheap local college is good enough and save the money.

Cheap local colleges are good “enough” but it also depends on the student body, teachers and community.

I personally have come to the conclusion that if you’re an American, you will benefit more from doing it a bit DIY via Western Governors University while you live abroad. That’s what I did and I’m glad for the experience, I was able to enroll into local universities in Japan and complete a Bachelors at WGU.

It’s a great talking point when it comes up for the HR screenings and credits transfer to higher education if I want - but I don’t think I need more than a bachelors.

If short of WGU I’d say find a program abroad that is recognizable by a USA credit body.

Credentialism is a scam, our corporations are soaking up too much talent and this latest round of layoffs shows that the corps don't know what to do with the mess of half talented half nots they hired.

This isn’t really a fair stereotype of Ivy League undergrads at all. Parental pressure doesn’t translate into admission as much as you might think, given how transparently manufactured their applications end up looking.

The Ivy League graduates I know went there because they were naturally high achievers, more or less. They liked being challenged, accepting challenges, and working hard to complete them. Ivy Leagues deliver challenges and high expectations non-stop. Anyone who isn’t naturally the type of person to seek out and complete challenges isn’t going to last long there.

> I'm thinking of some cheap local college is good enough and save the money.

I really don’t understand this notion that Ivy League universities are somehow no better than community colleges. Everything from the faculty to the coursework to the buildings and resources are world-class. It really is a step above and I do encourage ambitious young people to take a serious look at top-tier universities, including (but not limited to) Ivies. The benefits are very real, but only for people who want that level of challenge.

On the other hand, if your goal is simply to graduate college and move on then Ivy League would be a terrible choice. They really are much more difficult.

In the wake of the admissions scandals, I'm not so convinced that the Ivy elite are really as special or gifted as you say. If anyone who gets in on a golfing coach's bought recommendation can complete the coursework with all these supposed high achievers, then something seems off. If you define high achievement/accepting challenges as devotion to the institution and a willingness to do whatever it takes to enter and graduate, then I think the picture comes into better focus. Just my take - I'm certainly not Ivy material myself.

> The Ivy League graduates I know went there because they were naturally high achievers, more or less.

Surely that's not the only factor.

Wealth still seems to be a key factor in admissions. 67% of students at Harvard are from the top 20%, just 4.5% from the bottom 20%.[1]

And various forms of discrimination remain. Asian Americans, in particular, have sued because Harvard discriminates against them in admissions, and:

"Harvard’s internal statistical analyses, released over the course of the lawsuit, revealed that the [subjective] personal ranking carried the most weight and the academic ranking the least."[2]

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths...

Thanks for taking the time to reply on this. Like I said I'm relatively new here and dont really have a good feel of the different university cultures. I see lots of other families put a lot of pressure on kids and do extra-curriculars because "that is what admissions wants". My natural inclination is to recommend my children is do what I did, work studiously but also have a life. I dont really know if this is good or not until its too late.

> if your goal is simply to graduate college and move on then Ivy League would be a terrible choice. They really are much more difficult.

I'm not sure what you meant about this. To me most undergrad courses aren't that different from school, if you're using the same text books, similar curriculum it doesn't really matter so much where you are. For post-grad yes the differences make more of an impact.

>I really don’t understand this notion that Ivy League universities are somehow no better than community colleges

It has not been my experience that their graduates are any better educated than less prestigious universities. Post graduation at the undergrad level their value seems to be just the prestige of the university’s reputation on a resume and the social network it offers to other graduates for upward mobility.

I am being honest, I’d consider a degree from Ivy League university a possible negative for an job candidate if I am hiring. One, it speaks to a likelihood of a possible wealthy background growing up and my three decades of experience, I have not found that to be a consistent precursor to capability of the candidate. Two, it creates a higher likelihood that a recent graduate would use my opportunity as a quick stepping stone to the next big thing sooner rather than later.

You are right but for all the wrong reasons.

What a stinker. A Hoover fellow complaining the same way legacy students complain, whining and moaning that there are consequences for pointless, exclusionary language. “Wokeness” is their scapegoat when the reality is there are absolute idiots with 1-2 generations of Ivy degrees sharing rooms with smart people from diverse backgrounds, not prep school detritus. They aren’t struggling or being excluded because of their backgrounds, but because of their lack of ability and cultural literacy. Can’t blame them, it’s not their choice to be coddled

The article sounded more like whining because the author does not like the present currents of thought in Harvard and elsewhere in the academia.

I'm not intimate with Roland Fryer or his research, but the phrase the author chose to quote from him ("no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account") does make him seem like an apologist of racial oppression.

Not to mention the closing quote (by the author) "truth is the first casualty of progressivism".

Harvard may need to fall, but for completely different reasons.

This is a fairly ridiculous article that draws far ranging conclusions based largely on a 5 session course with 10 students.

One expects nothing less than a moral panic and, dare I say, cancellation of an entire university, from the intellectual dark web types after such a representative sample.

These comments alone provide more intellectual stimulation than their entire front page.

This submission just got flagged, so I guess the moral panic lies elsewhere.

Having standards is not the same. Not even close.

UnHeard itself is usually a mindless partisan paper that outright refuses to engage with arguments outside their own preconceptions.

>Yet what they taught me in the five sessions we had together was the near-absence of critical thinking and free inquiry in their respective universities.

Maybe they can start with their own paper.

Funny enough it was safer to say that Brezhnev is an idiot on the campus of MGU in 1980 then it is to say that you voted for Trump at any Ivy school in US now.

Wow wow wow what an absolutely horrible article, I can not believe this has got to the front page of HN. First of all, Roland Fryer was indeed suspended for sexual harassment. He himself admits that and has talked about the work he's done to improve himself after learning the affect that his comments had on young people. That's behavior very unbefitting of someone who got fired for "just spitting facts in the face of the woke mob". You'd expect him to, you know, actually fight the claims if it was the case.

Quote from Fryer: “I apologize for the insensitive and inappropriate comments that led to my suspension, which I regret deeply and which brought shame on the department and disrepute on me personally,” Fryer wrote. “I didn’t appreciate the inherent power dynamics in my interactions, which led me to act in ways that I now realize were deeply inappropriate for someone in my position.”

Failing to mention any of that is 100% journalistic malpractice and should immediately tip anyone off that this is not a real piece of journalism, it's a quick, hacked together culture war piece. It even says this "Gone are those such as Roland Fryer who sought to inquire freely into the most important questions facing society today through well-gathered evidence and rigorous logic." one paragraph after talking about how Fryer was welcomed back. Truly masterful levels of journalistic trash.

The rest of the article is just your standard fox news CRT bait piece about how every classroom (including, somehow, all the engineering and maths classes) are teaching your kids that America is bad and racist and only you can save them by teaching them the lost, forgotten idea that America is actually exceptional and never once destabilized a South American government to make bananas cheaper. There's no real evidence in the article to support this, you just have to take the author (who has already established themselves as someone willing to hide information to make a point).

If you want to criticize Harvard and other major institutions, I have no problem with that. They are institutions that admit legacy candidates by the boatload despite what often is a lack of merit, for example. But this isn't criticism here, it's just culture war. Its just "cultural Marxism" but avoiding saying that so that it can appear credible. But read any article about cultural Marxism and you'll find practically copy pasted content. What's cultural Marxism? A conspiracy theory that was originated by the Nazis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism) and is being peddled by neo-nazis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_...) try to justify the idea that people are actively destroying "culture". The Nazis did it to justify the most industrial genocide ever committed. Please don't buy into genocidal conspiracies because of hacked articles like this.

The presidents of Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania (perhaps even Dartmouth) all have something in common with Marxism. I suppose pointing our this fact is what is called Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory?

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