35% of the wealthiest people in the US attended one of just 8 elite universities
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
The conclusion the article seems to be drawing is – regular people can't become centimillionaires because they can't get into Harvard. But is that really what this data shows? If someone pulled up the demographic of top country clubs, for example, they could similarly conclude that everyone who is a member of these clubs is rich, so if we just forced them to let in poor people we'd solve poverty.
The boring answer instead is – forget about Harvard and MIT and the rest of the top 10-20 "elite" schools and instead fund the state university system (funding still hasn't been restored since it went away nation-wide during the 2008 financial crisis), community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeship programs. All of these are a way more effective solution to getting a large number of people educated than constantly crying about Harvard's admission policies, but the latter is what drives online outrage and gets clicks.
Kids don't take out loans to join country clubs.
I'm not sure why you're talking about poverty, which is not the subject of the linked article.
" The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.
Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the College a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped."
The Education of Henry Adams*, Chapter IV, "Harvard College". (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044.txt
You need money to make money.
Eye'm not vary smart, butts why knot me admitted to Harvard? Eye only gots a C- avrage in hi skool, butts if we going to bee equal, then us knot smart peeple must bee admitted at them universities, two.
Eye hate the discrimination against us. Maybee they need to take the same ratio of GPAs - only 5% A students, 25% B students and 60% C students and 10% hi skool dropouts so that Harvard and all of thems eleet skools "look like America."
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Produced doesn't sound right. If anything, wealth attainment has declined with the rise of post-secondary schooling. Incomes have held stagnant. There is no sign of economic production.
"Those who come from wealthy families likely to choose amongst eight universities when selecting a university to attend" might be the most realistic way to frame this.
And about wealth attainment declining, we’re literally talking about the specific people that attained incredible amounts of wealth here… centimillionaires. Those are specifically what we’re counting. Your points about wealth attainment may hold true as an average of our whole population, but it’s specifically not the case for centimillionaires.
And both the way that I apparently unintentionally “framed” it and the way that you framed it are accurate. The people that attend these elite universities usually(not always) did come from backgrounds with a lot of “help” AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). It doesn’t have to be an either/or.
Doubtful. The data just doesn't support it. Having connections and the capability to excel in that environment saw them more likely to be accepted into these schools, maybe.
> It doesn’t have to be an either/or.
It (university) also doesn't have to have any impact. It can just be a thing off to the side that someone does as a hobby. Just because it costs money doesn't mean it produces economic value. 35% of these people likely also own some kind of exotic sports car, but is the car the reason for their position? Not likely.
Which data doesn’t support it? The data that we’re talking about that shows that 35% of the richest people went to one of these 8 schools? Or is there some data that you have that shows similarly gifted students that come from similarly “helpful” backgrounds but went to average-or-worse universities, end up at least as wealthy as these students on average?
I get and also believe that these schools probably get more credit than what they actually provide, but I don’t agree that they provide no added value compared to average universities.
> It (university) also doesn't have to have any impact. It can just be a thing off to the side that someone does as a hobby. Just because it costs money doesn't mean it produces economic value. 35% of these people likely also own some kind of exotic sports car, but is the car the reason for their position? Not likely.
At this point I’d like to ask you if you truly think that you are furthering some understanding or if you are just trying to be “right”? I’m not sure how to respond to someone that thinks they’re making a point by saying that owning an exotic car might have the same affect on overall life productively as going to an elite university. :/
You don't have to respond if you don't have the education necessary to contribute. Not every comment necessitates a response. Particularly when you think I'm trying to make some point, which would be a pretty silly thing to do. What would I gain in making a point?
Ok but how about if I buy an exotic car? :)
> Particularly when you think I'm trying to make some point, which would be a pretty silly thing to do. What would I gain in making a point?
Don’t worry, I think we’re both agreed that there is no point to your comments. :)
Definitely a good idea. Clearly exotic cars produce education. I mean, when was the last time you saw someone with a crippling mental disability driving around in an exotic car? Exactly.
Which one will you choose?
What would you have expected exactly, and why?
For reference, there are around 4000 universities and colleges in the US.
I personally had no priors about this issue. If you had asked me, what % of US centimillionaires attended these 8 universities, I would have said, I have no idea. So I find it interesting that you already had an estimate.
But the way that I understood the original question was “what percentage of centimillionaires attended the 8 universities which produced the MOST centimillionaires”. When you pick the subset that produced the most of something out of a group, you should expect the subset to be over represented compared to the group. Sort of like the Pareto principle.
Also, part of the reason that I was surprised it was so low was that the numbers in the article were intentionally picked to invoke a reaction from the reader, and so if I’m coming from the angle of “let’s see how much wealth these fatcat elitists are hovering up!!” Then I’m a little surprised it’s only 35%.
However you want to frame the question, what were your priors, and why? You haven't said what exactly you would have guessed. I had no priors for either framing of the question.
Stepping back, the point is that putting the disparity of wealth into numerical terms is important because otherwise we generally have no measure of wealth disparity, just a vague recognition that some people are wealthier than others. It's unclear why you or I or anyone would have prior % estimates, based on no empirical studies, only vague impressions of society. There's a point to studying things empirically and comprehensively, which is to teach us things we didn't know before. I'm skeptical of any claims that "This is nothing new or surprising", as if laymen magically had intuitive access to these empirical facts.
Also, what's notable about those 8 universities is not just that they produced the most centi-millionaires but also that they're very difficult to get into and obscenely expensive. Access is extremely limited. And of course they have "legacy" admissions. We know that wealthy and well-connected people go there, and we know that ambitious kids want to go there (as evidenced by their very low acceptance rates).
I have no interest in discussing with you why or why not some off-the-cuff comment on something I might have thought if I put some thought into it, was wrong.
Because your comment was very dismissive. It began,
> So? Is this supposed to make me angry or something?
And your comment about the percentages was seemingly trying to justify this dismissive attitude:
> Tbh that’s actually lower than I would have expected
By the way, it's important not to take the existence of centi-millionaires for granted. The moral of the story isn't necessarily "Centi-millionaires should be spread out among more universities." Rather, the question is why we have and support these elite institutions seemingly designed to produce extreme disparities of wealth in the hands of a few people.