If/when I become President of the United States, I will hold back all education dollars on cartel-controlled education institutions, and heavily tax their endownments.
The fact that most people can name the most famous schools seems to imply they are rare.
They are perceived as having better outcomes than regular state schools. Do they or dont they? If their grads do get better jobs and end up more successful - then they are genuinely better? People from state Universities end up sitting next to Ivys etc there is no difference - this is what I believe. We'll see if everyone else's perceptions change in the future as well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/this-...
The US median income is still around $70k. An extra 40k - $3 grand a month - goes far.
All the people I know who went to Stanford got very nice, “cushy” jobs straight out of college. Most of the people I know who went to state schools had to bust their asses for years at much less pleasant work before they worked their way up to the nicer jobs.
The head start you get from an elite school in the US, in things that have nothing to do with education per se, can not be overstated.
Yes it can be, and you just did.
The people who routinely get the best jobs and keep them into their 30s and beyond are well connected people. It doesn’t matter whether they go to Ivies or other schools.
If connectedness could be controlled for, I think you would find that the most connected people at Ivies, Stanford, UMich, UTexas, NYU, etc. (let’s call it top 10%) are much more similar in terms of steep career trajectory than less connected top graduates (e.g., top 10% in gpa) even from the most prestigious schools. This is doubly true if you control for SES in addition to connectedness.
For folks who are not natively from these well-connected classes of people, it is possible to make a big jump in “opportunities”, but in practice that means socially integrating oneself into the elite class as an outsider (tough to do and rare) or finding work in a handful of places that facilitate social climbing (e.g., Goldman, also relatively rare).
Your median elite school grad will find it slightly easier to end up on the higher end of the SES class that they were already in, although even that is not a guarantee.
This is not nearly as life-changing as you make it out it be.
> All the people I know who went to Stanford got very nice, “cushy” jobs straight out of college. Most of the people I know who went to state schools had to bust their asses for years at much less pleasant work before they worked their way up to the nicer jobs.
I’m pretty sure that there are a large number of SJSU grads (a CSU school, of all things!) who would like to say hello. Plenty of them got and get “cushy” jobs straight out of school, with the folks who were already connected and/or worked on their connections taking the lead.
I have posted about this before on HN: One thing that is frequently overlooked, better schools (usually) have better/smarter students. My first uni was medium famous. My second uni was part of Cal[ifornia] State. The first was full of intelligent, highly engaging students. The second was... well, much less. The best parts of my uni education were working with other highly intelligent people on hard engineering problems. My second uni felt like an intellectual desert, but, hey, I got my degree.
More: Good schools act as a filter for employers. Why look for "diamonds in the rough" at a low quality school, when you can pay marginally more salary and get much better students at medium quality and above schools? I am on the hiring side now. I rarely find a diamond in the rough from a low quality school. The best candidates are mostly from the best unis. The same is true for former employer. If your CV has a bunch of low quality companies, you are also likely low quality. Again, rare exceptions exist. I won't name the employer: But one has had a 100% failure rate during interviewing. It is so bad, that I now regularly discard CVs with this current employer... unless the CV has something exceptional.
In closing, what if you are a diamond in the rough? My advice: Change employers as often as possible in your industry & country. Each change needs to be a step up the reputation ladder. If a sideways move, make sure you get title and/or money. In my last employer move, I move down one step in reputation. The quality of employees is much lower here than my other higher rep employers.
As for whether these schools are "precious", well, their students certainly are judging by the number of trigger warnings and emotional support pets.
I wonder if it legal to completely clone a curriculum? Like could you clone an MIT EECS education? Down to the coursework? Or alternatively - force elite schools to license and manage franchisees?
I'd vote for you.
> is it legal to completely clone a curriculum?
Gray area. I'm no lawyer but AFAIK professor's syllabus/tests/etc. (being written documents) are subject to automatic copyright, I imagine the university is the holder of the copyright given that the prof is an employee. That being said, how many profs clone their syllabus/coursework directly from textbooks? The content of most online universities (Khan Academy, Coursera, etc.) is already superior to Ivy League based on first-hand experience of both.
The bigger problem IMHO is that very little of the overall $$$ and energy at Ivy League is actually spent on course content. For many profs, esp. in STEM, teaching undergrad courses is a "chore" / distraction from their research work. I think there is opportunity to make a "lean-and-mean" physical university (perhaps online hybrid) with minimal admin overhead, which a degree could be on-par with MIT in terms of prestige. Is anyone doing this?
MIT will do that for you themselves. https://ocw.mit.edu/
Schools don't compete on curriculum. Nobody pays for it. Nobody cares about it.
And in one particular case, I think the "conventional wisdom" has it right - the lectures don't really matter. You can record a lecture and then play it for any number of people, very cheaply. I recently watched a Chinese drama in which a minor plot element was a character (in the 80s) getting a degree from "the TV university", lectures available to the television-viewing public. (Having your own TV was out of the question, so she and her "classmates" would make long commutes to places that had a TV showing the lectures. This educational format has been very affordable for a very long time.)
That format is not as good as actually having a lecturer, or a TA, who you can ask questions of. If you lose track of a recorded lecture, it will not help you find the thread. All a recorded lecture can ever do is repeat itself. A lecturer versus a lecture is the difference between moving forward and getting stuck.
In western Europe and Asia all college education is more rigorous than American college.
And yet I don’t have the overall impression that the international bachelor’s people I know got something correlated out of the difference in rigor. It would be as obvious as the difference in rigor itself. It’s not.
Many industries in the USA are quasi cartels, 2-5 companies own most of the market and competition is quashed by it being very difficult to break in. The airlines are a cartel but occasionally you see a new airline or there is a private equity attempt to cartel the vet business dispite the fact that some new independent vets can enter the market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/01/10/fede...
The story doesn't even claim they collude on pricing! It just says that admissions is not needs blind, the way that these universities claim it is.
"Back in the 1990s, the Justice Department charged several elite colleges with price-fixing, including many current members of the 568 Presidents Group. Those colleges regularly communicated and gave "essentially the same financial aid award" to any student who was admitted to multiple schools, according to congressional research. The suit ended with a settlement, and a 1994 law allowed colleges to keep working together on financial aid packages."
"In writing the law, Congress specified that its goal was to spread the benefits of financial aid as broadly as possible."
And if they're discriminating against lower-income families, that aid won't go to those who ostensibly need it most. Being that the filthy poors won't receive that aid, they will pay more.
The dismissal was refused in August, the case is proceeding, I expect there is something veracious about it, huh?
The plural of (obsolete) anecdotes isn’t evidence!
Limit competition: How many new entrants to the prestiguous university club (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc.) have there been in the last 50 years?
Fix prices: How do you explain tuitions growing at 5x inflation consistently since 1990, in an era where information itself has become dirt cheap (the internet.)
There does likely not need to be quid-pro-quo "collusion". I am not envisioning a shadowy meeting room where all the university heads smoke cigars and agree on tuitions. There doesn't need to be. Has any of the elite universities ever cut tuitions, in order to compete with the others?
Well, there are many functions (mostly to do with abrading things) where diamonds are useful for the purpose and a substitute is much, much less so. If you're distinguishing "precious" from "rare", this would seem to be proof that they are precious.
Also there is heavy rhethoric from diamond industry that "natural" are better