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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

University affiliation is a lagging indicator.

At least in my friend group (mostly White, Asian, and Latiné who attended the Top 50 ranked US News schools), most of us already knew each other via competitive high school extracurriculars (eg. Debate, Sports, DECA, MUN, Science Olympiads, Quiz Bowl, SAT Bootcamp, Intel Science Fair, Cyberpatriot, etc) and because we all attended the same 200-300 high schools nationally, did the same 5-7 majors, and are working in the same 3-4 industries.

Flagship Public Schools are becoming elite as well now that they are becoming much more selective, as well as the fact that STEM is increasingly valued outside the STEM industry (eg. PE/IB loves hire CS and Applied Math grads from target schools due to their analytical background)

Y'all boomers are arguing over a tree while ignoring the forest.

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You already knew your friend group because you attended the same "2-300" high schools?

Flagship Public Schools have long been limited elite. Hence the concept of the "Public Ivies".

Ivy does STEM, but STEM isn't the point of going Ivy. Public Schools will continue to be fine institutions for technical workers, who were and will never considered to be elite in the class sense. Real elites tend toward history and art majors, if any college at all. Even medicine is middle class.

> STEM isn't the point of going Ivy

It is.

Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia are all Top 10 CS programs.

For natural sciences, all the Ivies top the charts.

For med school, same story.

> Real elites tend toward history and art majors.

Some children of HNWI do major in history and art. Others will gladly major in STEM. Look at people like Bill Gates or half my hs.

This isn't the 80s or 90s anymore. Post-2008, top public schools have gotten as selective as Ivies were in the 2000s (7-15% acceptance rate [actually around 15-25% as BlackJack below points out]) while Ivies and Ivy Adjacent private schools (eg. UChicago, CMC, etc.) have dropped to the 1-6% acceptance rate.

Also, "elite" industries like PE, IB, Management Consulting, and VC all bias hiring in favor of STEM majors, which automatically prioritizes selective public schools like Cal, Mich, UCLA, etc.

> You already knew your friend group because you attended the same "2-300" high schools?

Pretty much. I had 2nd degree connects at just about every top university and I myself attended a top uni.

We all ended up working in the same handful of industries (Government, Media, Finance, Tech, Management Consulting, Politics) in the same handful of cities (SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston, DC) which further enhances the general alumni network as there are only a handful of top employers in each of those.

I agree but want to correct you on the public school point. Excluding the service academics, there are 2 or 3 schools with sub 20% acceptance rates, and every other public school is above that.

See [1] and [2]. And these are the best public schools. The average of the top50 public schools is probably 40%ish, and the average of all public schools is 70%.

[1] https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/rank/public-colleges/... [2] https://www.oedb.org/rankings/acceptance-rate/

Good catch!

At the macro-level this is true, but at that point we'd also end up selecting based on major.

For example, the acceptance rate for a BSBA@McCormick will reach the 7-15% range.

Attending an elite private school, an elite public school (UCB, UCLA, UMich, UVA), or an elite program at a selective public school (Accounting@UCSB, CS@UIUC, Business@McCormick) will give you enough of a path to mingle with the elite.

FWIW, the parts of those "elite industries" that STEM majors are hired into are more upper-middle class than you might believe, in terms of their capacity for the accrual of significant wealth/status. I'm not saying they're not well-paid or that they can't buy a house, but it's a cut below anything that might be called "ruling class".

If you study the backgrounds of capital allocators, a disproportionate percentage of the top ones had a combination of privileged backgrounds and technical educations, but the vast majority have privileged backgrounds and no technical educations.

Yes, and the issue is the "capital allocators" of today graduated in 1980-2000.

The "capital allocators" of 2030-2050 will have attended a more diverse set of schools for their undergrad, but will have still attended the same handful of High Schools. I'm saying this from experience as someone who went thru the college application process only 10-13 years ago and with a sibling who went through it 3-5 years ago.

Then again, most people in top industries in their 20s and early 30s aren't on HN. The CTO of Loom was right about HN tbh.

Read "Class" by Fussell. Or don't and continue to guess where the lines are. Class distinctions and behaviors aren't intuitive. That book will help you.

I did.

I wrote my final thesis about this issue and initially entered the policy space to help solve this issue before I left out of disgust.

There is a good grad seminar about this at Princeton from a couple years ago - https://www.princeton.edu/~starr/560syl2020.html

The issue is the Fussell book represents the 80s/90s. Public institutions have gotten much more exclusive since then.

You're obviously a bullshit artist

It's certainly a lagging indicator for 1/N of the people at those schools.

For the other 1-(1/N), it's more like the "last" of the leading indicators – i.e. their last shot at a significant step change in career outcomes before beginning a career.

The ability to get a great technical education is more a function of who your parents are and how involved they want to be in your education than anything else, me thinks. "Top N schools" at any stage from pre-K to college is a lagging indicator of that.

What do you think the forest is?

By lagging indicator I mean traditionally less selective public schools have become extremely selective now.

When I was in elementary school, I assumed I'd get into Cal because everyone did in the 90s and 2000s. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, it's selectivity dropped to the 10-20% range and is dropping further. This is the same at other flagships as well (eg. UCLA, UVA, Mich, etc).

With this drop in acceptance rate, programs also shot up in US News Rankings. Everyone took UChicago's playbook and copied it.

> What do you think the forest is?

Inequality at the K-12 level.

In my age group (20-35) we're already socially stratified largely because we attended the same 200-300 elite HSes which were feeders to the handful of top colleges nationally.

Most Americans won't be able to attend such high schools as they are expensive af - either directly via Tuition if they're private, or indirectly by having houses starting at the million mark for public schools.

The elite of society has become much more diverse racially, but this is very shallow as most Americans

1. Don't attend college 2. Don't attend college track high school programs 3. Don't attend high schools with enough ECs to be competitive 4. Don't attend high schools which provide the level of guidance and counseling needed to apply and get selected at one of those top colleges.

This kind of social stratification already exists in the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia, and is starting to occur in the US again.

I see and agree that education and support at the earliest levels of education are heavily correlated with inequality in elite outcomes. However, I think this has always been the case in American history, no?

There were brief periods where this wasn't true for the richest people in the US, but the majority of the top 1% has always been bred for the top 1%. If you accept that it's more or less constant and think that the magnitude of inequality is the bigger issue, this isn't necessarily a bad thing: as long as the top 1% continue to allocate capital effectively, and don't get too greedy (i.e. leave enough wealth for the rest of society to lead fulfilling lives / don't exacerbate the inequality gap).

For what it's worth, I think the primary issue today is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to live a "dignified life" (i.e. free from debt or peonage), unless you fall on the right side of the inequality distribution. That quality-of-life-burden is less severe of an issue in the other countries you mention. Unfortunately, expanding higher-quality education does not solve this problem.

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