More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs. Beyond the anti Asian bias, I think something more revealing will be the number of legacy admits.

Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network.

If that is indeed a good analogy, then it makes sense Harvards admission criteria is a trade secret.

This is simply not true. I went to what I would call a tier 3 school for undergrad and then ended up at MIT for graduate work. The difference between the two institutions was really night and day. Not only are the classes more rigorous and the instructors objectively better at MIT, but the students just think differently: they have much more ambition and are far less constrained by the status quo / what their parents did. Being around that totally changed my outlook of what is possible and what I should expect from myself, and really pushed me to make huge career and self-education strides.

There's also a difference in mindset - there's an appreciation of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and there's a presumption that you can get up to speed with the basics of things quickly even if it is outside of your subject. I distinctly remember discussing calcium channels with the medical students (at an event where there was also a lot of drinking), and discussing economics with the economists.

From my first hand experience as a graduate student at MIT, a lot of the research produced at MIT generates a disproportionate amount of buzz - essentially identical work (in terms of quality) produced by a student in a "tier 3" school will not generate the same kind of recognition. The reasons for this lie in the network effects; people read and cite people who they can attest to with less effort and scrutiny.

The points regarding the instructors and student body are definitely valid and should not be ignored.

Example from my field: silicon photonics project which got a lot of press and all of them mentioned MIT, usually in the headlines. U boulder contributed to the project and got e near zero recognition.

They always were, to some extent. Comparably, they are considerably more egalitarian now than they were even 50 years ago.

"so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network"

Whatever the admissions problems - they are still very good schools. They tend to have better profs and better students and that counts for a lot. Also huge financing basis, and due to 'brand' they get visitors from prominent individuals the world over.

I think the problem is not the schools - it's the way we treat 'brand value' particularly in places like the Silicon Valley.

I wonder if during interviewing, what would happen if interviewers were simply not allowed to know the educational background of the candidate - after all, once they have been admitted for an interview, does that information really matter at all (i.e. in the context of a specific interview?).

It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.

Particularly when it comes to socialization - I find that Ivy League types are confident and polished communicators, so I particularly enjoy the process of trying to 'see past the nice smile' to find what counts ... but fully aware of how important it is to still have 'brand recognition' even at the company early on, as this actually does help to recruit more talent and investment, sadly.

I've been heavily involved in interviewing, from the hiring side. You are actually correct.

From the hiring party's perspective, the cost of interviews is the time of the current employees administering them. The candidate's entire resume is thus taken into account before making the expensive decision to fly them over and have 5-10 people interview them in person.

In other words, there certainly is some weight given to a candidate's educational credentials, but it's almost completely limited to the decision whether to interview them at all.

Once a candidate is in front of an interviewer, their resume only matters as a jumping point into live discussion, typically of topics like past projects and interests. The brand of their school makes zero difference at this point.

> It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.

The unpleasant truth is that unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance.

Nobody flies a candidate for a full day of interviews just to reject them based on something that was already known.

Not every candidate from a top school is smart. There's plenty of terrible candidates from top schools, and they bomb interviews just like everybody else, and when they do they get rejected.

Finally, I'd say that nowadays, the benefit of the handful (say top 10) schools is far less obvious. There's plenty of "2nd-tier" engineering schools that will easily get you into most interviewing processes.

"unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance."

I disagree with this point (and FYI I don't think I've been rejected due to this).

I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation.

I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise.

Tech is generally a little better than other fields because it's a little easier to intelligently discriminate between good and bad ... but in my view it's problem.

I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out' - but I also believe that if you did not allow interviewers to see the resumes ... that'd you get different results.

I'm only really familiar with engineering interviews, but for those, in the past decade and especially recently, most of these factors are irrelevant.

The trend since at least 2005 has been ever more strongly favoring real, quantifiable, comparable, job-related challenges. Most everything else is a distraction, which interviewers are trained to ignore.

This was a result of scientific studies of the older interview paradigms, which indeed suffered from some of the biases you mentioned and were - for these and other reasons - inefficient at predicting good job performance.

This is doubly true for intellectual work like engineering, where quirky folk (including those who have poor appearance, not much interest in non-geeky culture, etc.) are common and often the best candidates.

Bottom line: performance is measured and quantified on well-defined tasks, the rest is largely fluff, unless the candidate is being a blatant jerk or something of that extreme nature.

> I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise.

Do you have any data or evidence to back this up?

I'm inclined to believe that someone like that would, if anything, stand out if they performed well on the technical part. They'll be the "CS genius hillbilly".

That's another thing you're missing: the main challenges provide such a strong and salient signal of performance, that the rest of the data is largely interpreted in light of that performance.

That goes for school brand too, by the way.

If a candidate from MIT does very badly, the reaction is not "let's forgive him, he's from MIT" but rather "for someone who got accepted and graduated MIT, this guy sure did underperform" and a prompt rejection.

> I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out'

School brand alone will not get you a plane ticket. It might get you a phone screen. There's too many bomb candidates from top schools to just freely shower them all with plane tickets.

By the way, I agree with the claims made in the article. With top schools like Harvard giving legacy candidates 6 times chances of admission, you're going to have a lot of Harvard students who got there because their parents did, and/or their grandparents before them, etc.

That means a lot of bomb candidates from even the very, very best schools. Hiring businesses are aware of this.

The brand power of these top schools therefore falls short of what you seem to believe.

Sure, you can get a phone screen with a Harvard degree. But you can get the very same one with an NYU degree too. And once you do, it doesn't matter that you're "only from NYU".

Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites

For those who didn't go to prestigious schools, don't come from money, and aren't interested in sports and booze—it's near impossible to gain access to the best paying jobs.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruit...

A prestigious school brand will help you to get into the hiring process. I did hear that for certain roles in certain companies, such prestigious brand is effectively a requirement to enter the process. This is rare in software engineering, because there's so much demand, that even the top tier employers can't limit themselves to top school graduates, not if they want to fill up all openings.

The other reason is that these top schools churn out a lot of legacy graduates - people who got in and graduated because their parents attended the school and/or donated money. That means there's a lot of top school graduates who aren't that bright, and many of the brightest people who went to less prestigious schools.

I agree with basically everything you said except this part. These schools very actively attempt to boost their brand. OTOH, silicon valley stands out as being one of the few places to place relatively less weight on such pedigrees and has even developed alternatives, e.g. the Thiel fellowship.

My ex's internship at Harvard was as simple as her dad knowing a prof that is friends with a harvard one. No prep, no interview, no nothing. It opened a lot of doors and that's great, but the interesting thing was that when things are so easy to attain, I had to do a lot of convincing to actually get her to attend it.

And when I contrast it to the amount of stones that were thrown in my way, I can't help but be a little bit jealous

Mind you - at least these days law has changed and nobody really cares about how posh your relatives are, just how much money they have....

To clarify: "public school" here means "private school" in American, yes?

At the school I went to, even before I applied I knew that their admissions process funneled legacy applications into an entirely separate pool from normal applications.

They don't try that hard.

Being vaguely involved with the Oxbridge undergrad admissions process in CS/Math i can tell you there is very little trying. A fuss is being made about coming from a disadvantaged background but in practice sadly the people running it only care about one thing: how well you can grind out an answer to a math olympiad style question in 15 minutes. Yes, extra-curriculars and well-roundedness don't matter which I think is a good thing because I believe in focusing on being great at one thing.

What it comes down to nonetheless is preparation and school support, e.g. via training for math competitions. Saying the interviews are about 'evaluating the thinking process' of the applicant is a fantasy when most applicants come from schools where they have been trained to do them for years. Oxbridge are not forthcoming about this but ultimately they take people who are already well groomed Math olympiad winners, not raw potential.

It's probably still better than opaquely selecting for race and like-ability and if this means many math undergrads are Asian, why should that be a problem? It's still unfair to disadvantaged children and this sucks, but at least the criteria are clear.

Ps: on your question how they recruit rowers: They let them study land economy, that's the joke at least.

The things that struck me were that a lot is dependent on the individual interviewers. I tried hard to look for potential as did most of the interviewers I spoke to did but can be easier said than done. The exam wasn't a big factor in the decision making I found, unless somebody did really well or really badly, as the marks were all very bunched up and we couldn't see the scripts to see what people were getting right and wrong.

Also, the course is really hard for somebody who hasn't done double maths A-level, so if somebody only has single maths, you have to pretty confident that they will be able to basically teach themselves further maths A-level. There is obviously some support from tutors with that, but the set-up is aimed at people with double maths.

They definitely don't only take groomed Maths Olympiad winners and the questions are much easier than Olympiad questions (in my undergraduate year there were only two of us who had made it to the top 20 country in the British Maths Olympiad stuff for example - Cambridge filters them all off!)

I also don't think even the top schools train up for the interviews as much as you say - I went to a school that was top ten in the A-level league tables nd only had one mock interview.

The point is that if you go to a target school doing Math olympiads throughout your school life, the admissions exam and interview is a walk in the park. The applicants who didn't have any of this preparation can still do well but will fare relatively worse against that group, and I think this is very obvious in the ultimate intake.

I don't believe anyone wants the course to be easier. So how do you enable people who are underprivileged to catch up with a shitload of additional tuition which has been offered to other applicants? How do you distinguish effectively between the two, whilst also accepting high aptitude students?

It's not that I think any elite university does this brilliantly - but as someone with a decent level of exposure do you have a feeling on whether there are complete solutions?

The interview process is relatively standardized, and if my results were to differ starkly from what more experienced interviewers do they would be disregarded, and the director of studies for that college would simply not invite me back to help.

I would add that asking PhD students to do this is not the worst thing because via supervisions and other teaching efforts, we have a good picture of what undergrads here need to be able to do. An interview is a like a short supervision.

It varies a lot between colleges/interviewers. I initially interviewed at Trinity (Cambridge), and there was an admissions exam (roughly STEP I/II level) and the interview was solely focused on that. I was then pooled to Selwyn, and there was no admissions exam and the interview was much more general (split into three parts - NatSci DoS-barely even about the subject, more about yourself generally/why Cambridge; CompSci DoS-more general questions, it was more about coming up with an idea, or how you would implement something, and broader CS concepts, than being able to chase down a specific answer to a set question; Physics DoS-focused around a particular question, but was more interested in you being able to come up with a viable method, and explain your reasoning, than being able to do every single step there and then (I needed _a lot_ of hints, and was still admitted for CompSci, and that DoS later said that wasn't an issue - I could see the broader idea, and would have got there with time/being able to look things up)). Someone who interviewed directly with Selwyn said they had the same experience.

I'm from the U.S., so take my input with a grain of salt with regards to applying it to the English school system, but in my experience the majority of mathematical talent comes from outside work, with next to zero support from schools.

This results in for instance there being proportionally many more Romanians at Oxbridge Cs/Math/Physics than you'd expect by population.

I don't know if that analogy holds, since the emperor made a habit of writing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court arguing (metaphorically) "I'm nude and that's OK! Though it would be awfully inconvenient for you to say I were naked. I just prefer a holistic fashion policy which includes nude among a range of options such as deshabille, birthday suit, unclothed, etc."

Verbatim quotes:

Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.

...

Amici accordingly urge the Court to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process.

I'd like to see proof of above with data. I think "they" want everyone to believe that they try hard to let in disadvantaged kids

I'm not sure the dons themselves can do much about it, it seems like they only get to see a small sample of the total pool of applicants. I only met a couple of them when I was applying, and after I got in it didn't look like they had a full view.

As for data, it's not obvious what data would tell you whether they did or didn't try.

Elite schools in the US know and admit this, too. They are constantly trying to figure out how to minimize the duds.

> I would assume they claim this because they are being sued by Asians about bias

This claim is made so often, yet it is so fantastically short-sighted. It boggles my minds that people think that great grades and great standardized test scores are the best predictors for being a strong contributor in an elite academic setting (yes, it's great for predicting more good grades, but that's a shallow definition of success in an elite school setting -- the resources available can be and are used so much more productively).

Things like charisma (incl. leadership), curiosity, drive, and creativity make a huge difference, and those things are fantastically difficult to quantify in a reliable way that can scale. Things like financial capital and social capital are real things that keep a school healthy and strong over time.

If a person from a given group feels like they were discriminated against, I would ask them to try to answer better the question of what do they think that they are giving to the school. Directly or indirectly, almost all admits to an elite school have a very solid answer to that question.

University admissions are not just a means of selecting people - they are also important behavioral incentives for teenagers. I'd much rather encourage high schoolers to focus on a wide variety of interests (for some that might be academics, for others, the arts) rather than coerce everyone into caring about grades at the expense of everything else.

At least with a test the playing field is way more leveled.

If you want extra info, add another test. You want to major in Math? Cool, you also have to pass a geography/history/biology/whatever test (you choose which one and it only counts 15%).

Most will admit it's subjective as well (Cambridge). I've had at least two Directors of Studies tell me that half of the point of the interview is finding someone they want to teach/work with.

Perhaps I'm just cynical, but when I'm walking around Harvard Square, I always assume the point of "excellence" is that intelligence and money should get married.

[0] http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/31/only-ten-black-students-were...