Now, I'm 30. I have a very well paying job. I have quite a bit of money in my bank account. Things are good for me. Much better than some people I know who started off with less than me and worked twice as hard. I cant help but think that my own status in life can mostly be attributed to the access I had to people of power and wealth. Though my family could hardly be considered part of the 1% I did manage to rub shoulders with enough of them that I have received some residual benefit. School was a huge part of that.
It's a weird thing. I sometimes feel guilty about it. Particularly when I meet people who are smarter or harder working than I am.
As someone from a middle class background who went to a top-tier school, you have no idea what you are talking about. Sure, there were/are plenty of humanities majors who had relatively light workloads, but as an engineering major I worked my ass off 8 days/week.
While they worried about buying food and paying the rent, you "worked your ass off" doing homework in total safety and comfort.
But I was wrong. Poor kids who get into MIT ("Recipients of a Federal Pell Grant") only graduate at a rate of 87%. It's just the wealthy students with such incredibly high graduation rates.
OTOH, that sounds like a pretty darn good "intangible" to me and would certainly warrant further consideration in my book.
(a) If you are underprivileged, you might have time to volunteer somewhere, but typically supporting your family doesn't count as helping the underprivileged. Changing grandma's bedpans isn't volunteer work, and it's kind of exploitative to make that a major portion of your college application.
No, nobody at my school was doing this[1]. Top-tier schools leverage their massive endowments to provide substantial need-based financial aid. Basically their mission is to ensure, if you get in, that there is absolutely no financial friction to attend. In one high-profile instance Princeton University provided a full scholarship entirely from its own endowment to a formerly homeless undocumented immigrant who went on to become his class's salutatorian[2].
[1] except the cockroaches but that applied to everyone as many of the dorms were quite old.
I don't know that this is bad as such but the high end schools aren't exactly very good about educating large numbers of people. That is, very large endowments per student. Large state universities do much better in this area. Also large state universities do a better job of recruiting students outside of the top 0.1% of society.
That said, MIT has an unfair reputation of containing geniuses. Elite schools do have a greater impact, but only the true theories/discoveries stand the test of time.
I care more about stress, how many months to go before I go broke, if I can get a job or not, or if I can keep a job, or what is my working condition, how many vacation days I get off, and so on.
How lazy are the 1%ers don't concern me.
Harvard is basically free for low income students, yet they make up a very small percentage of total students.
One thing they could do is to increase their outreach to lower income students. When I was in high school, I had no idea that Harvard was affordable for me. Looking back, I probably had the SAT scores and grades to get in, but I never even considered it as a possibility.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/26/diversity-lack-f...
“We are spending the most money as a society educating the wealthiest people.” -- Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell University Higher Education Research Institute
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/21/rich-universi...
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/28/pf/college/ivy-league-low-in...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/04/09/what-like-po...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2013/11/27/the-cha...
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/16/top-1-of-harvard-grads-richer...
"A median 16 percent of their 2012-13 enrollees received Pell Grants, a form of federal aid only available to low-income students, according to an analysis of federal data."
What's low-income? If you define low-income as the bottom 20% of income earnings, that would be very close to proportional representation. That's outstanding, given all the confounding factors connecting performance and income.
- http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/9/4/freshman-survey-a...
less than 2% of families earn more than $250,000 / year.
- http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/apr/10/bar...
The point I'm making is that inequality in colleges is due to better preparation by higher-earning families and not some conspiratorial old-boys club. The hypothetical "some poor person, who went to a shitty college, that's even smarter" the original commenter referred to would have had as fair a shot as any of their caliber to get into the top schools. It's the poor precocious 5 year old that doesn't get read to every night and falls behind because both parents are working late at minimum wage jobs that defines the difficulty of escaping poverty through education. Top schools get to the table wayyy too late to heap the blame on them.
Including: Harvard MIT Stanford Princeton Columbia
etc.
No. If you're insanely hard working, passably smart and somehow lucky, you can get in. I knew someone like that - and she reported that she was one of the dumber people there. If 0.1% have their kids there, these are not slacking at all.
> test for getting in is so gameable and rigged that almost no one pretends it isn't anymore.
SAT tests are rigged?
>It's not hard to graduate, it's just hard to get in,
These two things are related
I bet he's entirely blind to the fact that the only reason his paper is getting so much attention is that he's an "MIT graduate".
Attending an elite school like MIT is not even a 1%'er thing, it's a 0.1% thing.
There's probably some poor person, who went to a shitty college, that's even smarter and has a better theory but we'll never hear about it. Think about their career trajectories and the inequality of their outcomes.
Of course the 99.9% contains almost all of the smartest people, but they get almost none of the opportunity. This elitism is absolutely pervasive in American society.
Microsoft: "Harvard dropout inks deal with IBM"
Google: "A new search engine from Stanford."
Facebook: "The exclusive Harvard social network"
Dropbox: "Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup".
This paper: "MIT graduate student says income inequality is actually about housing"
Something like 95%+ of people that get into elite schools graduate. It's not hard to graduate, it's just hard to get in, and the test for getting in is so gameable and rigged that almost no one pretends it isn't anymore.
As long as the rich can spend fortunes buying elite credentials for their children, we're going to have a ruling class and a worker class.