Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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> 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

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