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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31451 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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It is a crime against humanity to shaft their futures and potential livelihoods for social engineering.

Are their livelihoods actually negatively affected by being denied admission to Ivy League schools? My impression is that by future income and most other material measures of success there isn't any effect. In the same way, when Jews were kept out of Harvard all their Nobel Prize-winning scientists went to CUNY instead, and didn't seem any worse off for it.

I don't think going to a local community college and then transferring to a school that hasn't rejected an application since the 80's has a huge effect on private sector prospects, but it does have a pretty big effect on prospects for joining academia, which is important for shaping societal consensus.

It hurts you in certain careers, notably law. How many Supreme Court justices hail from the American Samoa Correspondence Law School?

Hell, look how similar all of their career trajectories are. Barret's not having been on the DC circuit was somehow a mark against her.

But are we to believe the life of the AA admit is made worse off by going to another lesser school? That is, school only matters if you aren’t brilliant?

Going to prestigious schools is important, not because of income, but because of connections. The connections available to you socializing while at MIT or Harvard are vastly stronger and more likely to land a person in the top 0.01%, than if you go to OSU.

The key to getting into the ground floor of facebook or netflix or paypal wasn't technical skill, it was who they knew.

Going to prestigious schools is important, not because of income, but because of connections. The connections available to you socializing while at MIT or Harvard are vastly stronger and more likely to land a person in the top 0.01%, than if you go to OSU.

This. This is what parents paying up the nose for "elite education" are paying for, but people do have to pretend politely that secret of Harvard is some superior knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere, some superior teaching skills that cannot be replicated.

As a corollary, if Junior is autistic who cannot make friends or schizoid who doesn't want to, if Junior actually spends his time in prestigious university studying instead of boozing, all your money spent on elite education is wasted.

The key to getting into the ground floor of facebook or netflix or paypal wasn't technical skill, it was who they knew.

For the tech ground floor, I suspect a Harvard degree would mean quite a bit less than it usually does, though. Aren’t the big (and notoriously hard) schools still MIT, Stanford, and CMU closely followed by Berkeley?

Which leads me to think — it’s true that Harvard is universally regarded as elite by Everyone, but when we take into account specific disciplines, different schools start to jump up; and the more specialized you go, the more true this is, to the extent that some people going for a PhD in the hard sciences will forgo Ivy League invitations in favour of offers by schools with that one specific professor.

Which fits into the original point by the OP — this sort of skill and display of intelligence is nerd stuff, only distantly related to class signaling.

They’re not talking about getting in at interview stage, they’re talking about the fact that the earliest Facebook guys were literally Zuck’s fellow Harvard students.

Ah, I see. That makes more sense then.

It was both. And that also means the dude who got rejected lost that “key.” So there was measurable harm.

Point is, if you want to be a regular tradesperson, make up to 200k+, maybe climb the corporate ladder, you can do that with any other kind of technical degree, or even just skill alone if you're good enough.

But to graduate from NPC-hood and become an actual ascending elite, making marks on society, for that, connections with those who have gobs of money to fund your ventures, matter much more.

This is true, although to be honest even 95% of Harvard graduates aren’t “true” elites by this definition, they’re just median private equity guys and consultants and corporate lawyers and staff writers for ‘The New Republic’ or Vox or whatever.

Most people do not make meaningful personal marks on society, it's true.

But then the point is that those who are unfairly rejected from the elite university is actually harmed.

Yes.

If you’re an elite aspirant it might. If you’re an average Joe looking to make his way in the world, probably not. But if you’re the latter, you’re probably not attending an Ivy League school in the first place. Most people go to those institutions for the prestige and networking. A dense and rigid education is incidental and secondary to that aim.

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