I went to a very privileged high school. There were so many eyeballs on my class' test scores, recommendations, personal essays...of course we were going to succeed. Most of us got into our top choice schools. You often need a lot more than money to get into these schools.
And the benefits are growing. Duke, for example, will waive tuition for all students from NC and SC whose families earn less than $150k. Automatic Room and board and supply support kicks in at $65k. Davidson was one of the first, but a lot of schools don't include loans in their aid packages any more*.
These aren't special named scholarships either! These are automatic benefits to all admitted students. If the school wants a particular student, there are extra pots of discretionary money available as scholarships, prizes, etc.
If you're in the top 10% of your HS class and you can afford to leave home and study full-time for a few years, you really should swing for the fences. The best private schools tend to have higher 4-year graduation rates, so you win coming (out of pocket) and going (opportunity cost).
*) Middle-income houses probably need to take out loans to match their obligation.
**) Me: Public HS, Private BS, Public PhD
Personally, I've benefited from the Netherlands' older equal opportunity system; my parents weren't rich (working class, single income, house bought at inopportune times) so they wouldn't have been able to put me through college, but thanks to a government funding - only a few hundred per month - plus affordable colleges - iirc it was €1500 per year + a few hundred tops in books but the books felt optional since piracy was a thing - meant that I could get a college degree and a subsequent job in a highly desired field (software development) and comfortably move up to middle class.
Of course, thanks to inflation and whatnot, I'm not significantly better off than my parents were - I bought a house ten years later in life than they did, half the size and twice the price, and I got lucky - but I'm still fortunate that we had this opportunity.
Some years ago, the government sliced into this equal opportunity program though, turning the 'free' government student funding into a loan so there's a generation now starting out with a college degree and 15-25K in debt and a completely inaccessible housing market even if they were to combine incomes with a significant other.
There is no inherit weight, but humans are drawn to shiny things. Similarly, someone who turns up in a Ferrari is going to be seen differently than someone who shows up in a rusty old farm truck. If someone establishes an emotional connection to a school, perhaps because they are alumni themselves, that just might be the shiny they need to see, whether it is meaningful or not.
A big issue here is that all degrees with the same title are not equal between universities. If nothing else; as long as MIT is more selective than Indiana University of Pennsylvania, you're going to have a a general average quality of graduate produced.
This seems like a wild assertion to make, and here's something by Scott Alexander that points in the other direction:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-f...
* Privilege
> “One obvious answer would be “privilege”. It’s not completely wrong; once the first talented individual makes a family rich and famous, it has a big leg up.”
But this answer isn’t politically viable for him so he glosses over it.
* Genetics
> “The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk.”
He spends a lot of time trying to make this one work but of course it has all the well-known problems that all the eugenicists of the past ran into (e.g., assortative mating doesn’t completely explain Ashkenazi Jews).
* Education
> “Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird.”
* Yudkowsky’s “Hero License”
> “. . .which I have no evidence for.”
> Suppose Erasmus Darwin had a genius-level IQ of 150.
Not really a strong basis for an argument if you ask me.
The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional. The schools filter so harshly that just getting admitted already means you are exceptional. And they can do that because of their good reputation, which is mostly based on tradition and perception.
And possibly based somewhat on quality of education
After all, if someone came in a straight A student, and graduated a straight A student - can the school really claim credit for that?
I went to a state school and studied CS. I have done OK for myself; started at a startup and have made steady progression.
A friend of mine went to a ~top 5 CS school - started at same startup I did, same month, for ~50% more $$. Did he learn more than me in school? Honestly talking through course loads and the like - he really did. I had to learn a ton independently/in the field that he had showed to him in a sophomore CS class.
That doesn't mean he was inherently a better engineer than me (~10 years later) - but it did mean he had a big leg up Day One.
You see this all the time. People think it's the institution that makes the person but it's actually the person that makes the institution. It's the problem with admitting people into an institution that can't play at the level of everyone else there. A lot of people actually think that by simply going to the elite institution that the non-elite person will somehow end up with the same abilities as the others.
You can give me all the resources an elite athlete will have access to but at the end of the day I'll never be able to play at their level. For some reason this is widely understood. But when it comes to intellectual capacity, many people think everyone is the same and it's access to the institutions that they are lacking.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
Neither of these need to be true. It's a incestuous system where it's easy to believe that people of average IQ have been born into privilege for generations and succeeded only because of their family wealth and connections.
MIT and Caltech are not Ivy League but even then I'm sure they have a lot of students who benefit from private schools, private tutors, and pricy college prep programs. What differentiates the ones who get accepted from the ones who don't?
That wasn't your claim:
> You're assuming that people who are admitted to Ivy League schools a) have higher IQs than average and b) have parents with higher IQs than average.
>What differentiates the ones who get accepted from the ones who don't? At Caltech and MIT?
Possibly the most meritocratic schools in the US?
Idk, .001 on your GPA or a single point on your SAT and AP scores? Or the fact that you didn't win an IOM medal or Intel Talent Search?
>Neither of these need to be true.
As George Orwell said, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool".
That said, your statement does not follow from your argument. The heritability of IQ is unrelated to whether people's potential is wasted by being denied access to a nepotistic college system. The school system is not a meritocracy either.
There were plenty of studies that popped up; I just picked one. Wikipedia for something controversial like IQ is iffy which is why I didn't link that.
About heritability, that doesn't say that if your parents had an IQ of X you will have an IQ of ~X. It says, two people with "identical" DNA will have IQs that are very similar! There's also the big caveat that many scientists think these studies have confounds that overstate the results. But even if they are real, they don't mean what you think they do.
That must be part of the answer, but it can’t be the whole answer, or close to the whole. There’s huge variation in educational outcomes among those who get the access that you describe. What explains why some people in this group have such good outcomes, while most have relatively lackluster outcomes?
He did also go to school and even tried to go to college, he even got a scholarship! He had a lot of issues with the non math coursework however and did not finish any degree that I am aware of.
The reality of his life is a bit more complex than "oh a poor boy found a basic math text book and taught himself to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history"
What is more interesting here is to imagine if he grew up with wealth and formal training, would he have died at 32? Would he been given the time and resources to actually become one of the greatest math geniuses out there?
Ramanujan had a lot of raw talent, but it wasn't honed, and ultimately it was cut extremely short and wasted.
By definition, we know of zero examples of geniuses who were never discovered due to poverty, which makes it hard to extrapolate the rate at which this happens. But we do have examples of geniuses who grew up poor but were discovered nonetheless, which gives us hope that exceptional people in similar situations will be discovered. Especially today with global primary school enrollment rates close to 90% [1], and secondary school rates around 76%.
In at least one study I've seen, smaller class size didn't have much effect, but private tutoring did.
Yes a really "dumb" kid will still be "dumb" academically, but people here are severely underestimating what money can buy in education. I've seen really "dumb" kids be brought up to the level of "passably smart" simply because of resource access.
When you have teachers who are not overworked and are paid lovely salaries (ie 6 figure salaries), imagine every teacher you have actually cares and invested in your education? Imagine every class has recordings of every lecture as well as a curriculum that has a lot of forethought and time put into it? And imagine if the school has a lacking teacher, than the parents hire some ex-olympian, or ex-superstar coach or teacher to make up for that? I've seen parents hire ex-olympic athletes to get some untalented rich kid to close to olympic level.
Honestly, I think it's really understated how much educational spending can affect a kid. Most people will not see what I've seen, and even from someone who came from a middle class background who used to believe wealth does not matter when it came to education, even I was shocked by what money can buy in "academic success" and my opinion changed. I at this point, don't need to see a study because it was that drastic.
There is such a difference in environments in this country's education system. I was doing math in my sophomore year of high school that some don't see until college (or ever). Was I inherently smarter? Of course not. I had good teachers and books, I didn't have to work a job at night, etc.
A lot of people don't really care about doing much more than the minimum. Even talented people are like this. I'm sure a lot of us know (or, let's be honest, are the) people who busted their ass when they were younger, only to hit their 30s-40s and coast.
Who says these people would have kept busting their ass out for so long if they had a pot of gold waiting for them right after college?
I've had the unique experience of private tutoring many "elite" students in high school for math and physics for nearly a decade in Los Angeles a while back. Basically both rich kids and less fortunate kids who can only afford my tutoring rate every once in a while vs rich kids who can if they wanted to afford my help every day.
It's not simply "better textbooks" or "better schooling", the difference in education is VERY DRASTIC and being in LA I was able to see kids from drastically different backgrounds. Rich kids with having tutors for every class, maids for every other side chore so parents can actually pay attention to their kids, private high schools and middle schools that cost nearly $30-50k per year can buy you so many advantages most people can't even comprehend.
The biggest advantages I saw was better resources, better textbooks, curriculums that are ACTUALLY made with care and time, and most importantly teachers who were paid very very comfortable (ie, 6 figure salaries) who have the luxury to not be overworked, and can actually attend to their students as needed. Imagine every one of your teachers in middle school and high school, putting top notch effort into providing a great learning experience for you? Most people probably only had one teacher like that in their entire lifetime. And not to mention if the school was lacking in any area, many of the rich parents would hire their own private ex-olympian or ex-superstar specialist of whatever they desire.
People here are DRASTICALLY underestimating what extra educational resources can buy.
I saw that you copied this comment and replied to another comment below with it. I'm concerned that folks might see that as against HN guidelines. Again, I agree with what you're saying, and I just don't want you to be seen as a spammer.
It’s all about incentives and availability of resources, time and attention. When life gives too many shit lemons to both students and teachers, there’s no breathing room left for any of them to care a little bit more about any taught subject. When teachers are overburdened and children not supported by their environments, they just want to get rid of each other ASAP, and then it’s on parents to berate their kids for not wanting to study because whatever reason.
But if you can unburden both a teacher and a student from hardships of life even just a little bit, somehow a lot of attention and time free up to care about any subject, and explore it in different directions, not necessarily by what’s included in curriculum. Suddenly learning about something and practicing it can be actually fun.
Fun and joy of exploring stuff is so important yet so missing. Having some not even too fat stacks of cash can help with that drastically.
Social mobility is not universally seen as a good thing by everyone in society. Specifically to those at the top of the social hierarchy it can be a threat because a wide gap and inequality helps maintain a position of power: if everyone has equal power, noone does.
So it's silly to expect elite universities to follow a broader economic incentive when it comes to who gets in, who graduates and who receives preferrential treatment. There are certainly economic factors at play but ultimately the entire system is heavily built around nepotism (which in this case is hardly a modern invention given that universities used to be very much run by and for the hiearchial elites of society). Sure, the more direct incentives may be financial (e.g. donations) but ultimately power and hierarchies are a better lens than the economist one of the article if you want to make sense of this.
That's not true. For instance, in NYC Asians have the highest rate of poverty. And yet they also have the highest rate of advanced placement in schools. [1] And many of these kids are from these poor families. It's because their culture values this and Asian students tend to put more effort into school. Many Asian cultures believe in the connection between effort and achievement and it shows. [2]
The first explanation suggests that Asian-American youth’s academic advantage can be attributed to advantages in socio-demographic factors. Relative to whites, their parents tend to be better educated, and they are more likely to live in stable, two-parent families with higher incomes (5). This explanation, however, is insufficient because advantages in socio-demographic factors only partially explain the achievement gap (2, 3, 5). Moreover, Asian Americans are not uniformly advantaged in terms of family socioeconomic background. For example, the poverty rates of Chinese and Vietnamese are higher than they are for whites (5). However, the disadvantaged children of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant families routinely surpass the educational attainment of their native-born, middle-class white peers (6, 7).
[1] http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/?forum-post=resear....
Only a few colleges matter. A degree from the others is “actually a dunce cap” according to Peter Thiel.
Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities, which of course have developed completely ludicrous property prices. Nothing happens anywhere else, so if you want a good career you have to at least spend time in one of these.
Markets are winner take all with one or maybe a few companies taking each vertical.
I have asked older people about this, especially the urban elitism of only a few cities matter. Most of them have confirmed what I have observed (I am 45) namely that these trends massively accelerated roughly after the year 2000.
It could be due to the Internet, historically low interest rates redistributing wealth to those that can easily net investment or cheap corporate debt, or some other factor, but I do think it’s real. I also suspect it’s a hidden driver of our political hyper polarization.
The urban elitism seems to have been dented a little by telework and COVID, and we seem to be entering an unbundling phase with social media. Maybe the trend is reversing.
Let's see. Bill Gates dropped out. So did Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs went to Reed College (where?) and didn't graduate.
Maybe Peter Thiel's perspective is a bit distorted?
> Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities...
Maybe Peter Thiel isn't the only one with a bit of a distorted perspective?
Thiel suggests that the "colleges that matter" offer more, e.g. research labs, that bring more to the table. That may justify going further in some cases. Certainly researchers at Harvard have done a lot of ground breaking things. Can Reed College say the same?
Thiel's perspective may very well be skewed, but I am not sure these examples show that. More interesting would be to look at what game changing things the graduates of Reed College have done, not those who ran away.
In contrast, he suggests that a Reed College has no such opportunity. Let's say Jobs did graduate. Then what? Maybe he'd become a professor there? What can one really get out of Reed College? More likely he'd just end up back in industry, at which point it was a waste of resources to invest in academia; a waste which Thiel would consider to be a dunce move.
No, they realized that they had a limited time-window opportunity on their hands that has a potential for a lot more value than the degree, as long as they executed on that opportunity well and had a bit of luck.
Neither Gates nor Zuck just dropped out with nothing going on for them, and only then started their respective companies. IIRC Zuck quit because he was busy running Facebook during its explosive growth phase, and he had to make a choice between allocating his time to running FB and school.
Most people who decide to drop out don't have an explosively-growing business on their hands that they have a limited time-window to execute on. And while this is a pure guess, but I don't think Zuck would drop out just because, without something like FB fighting for his time and attention.
I think a lot of people, myself included, want to believe this. It's nice to think that all humans have great potential inside of them!
Unfortunately, reality might not respect our perfectly reasonable sensibilities. After having a child, I began to research the things I could do to enrich her environment, maximize her intelligence, etc. One depressing thing I learned is that intelligence is more-or-less a purely genetic trait. Your intelligence is highly correlated with your biological parents' intelligence, to the same degree as something like height.
https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2019/06000/When_Ch...
* edit: easy, of course, if you don't work a night job and have the time to read multiple books to your child every day
This study just says that kids who are read to are exposed to more words. It's basically like saying kids who go outside more are exposed to more sunlight. Sure, this is definitely a true fact. But does it matter? This study says nothing about how reading effects outcomes in childhood or in life.
Wikipedia has a good article on the heritability of IQ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
> Various studies have estimated the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.
One thing that is interesting is that children have very random IQs that eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs. Perhaps this is explained by things like an early-life word gap that eventually gets filled with age.
Yes, it does. It matters a lot. "The Word Gap ... has important consequences for children’s later vocabulary, literacy and school performance" [0]
Even if this whole line of research gets debunked, reading to your kids won't hurt!
> eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs
I haven't read much about this research, maybe it holds more water than I think. But does it matter? Do you really think disadvantaged youth are such because of genetics?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08852...
So, no, I’m not saying success is purely genetic. But, I also think there is a strong genetic component to one’s intrinsic ability and so not everyone can reach the top even if they work really hard.
The word gap research isn't a randomized trial. It mostly shows that children from poorer families in the US hear fewer words.
It's difficult to study because interventions often produce positive effects in the short term that disappear by the time the child reaches adulthood.
sure, that would be nice. it does seem pretty clear that as a general rule, well-resourced students are more likely to get accepted into, and graduate from, elite schools. Happy to back that claim up with some research if you like.
> The word gap research isn't a randomized trial
No, its a growing body of research including many studies. [0] And it was an example I used to illustrate how well-resourced students achieve more in school, even from a young age.
We agree on this, but it's also a major confounder for observational word gap studies. And though we try, it's very difficult to fully control for confounders.
The holy grail would be interventions that can improve adult intelligence but unfortunately a lot of interventions that look promising in short term studies see their benefits disappear by the time the children reach adulthood. There don't appear to be any long term studies on this yet (I know this is a big ask).
Sounds like a good investment opportunity. Fund a child into wealth now and take a cut of their much greater wealth created by their talents later on.
Investors have certainly flirted with the idea before, but it has never caught on. Perhaps it isn't the sure ticket you make it out to be?
> what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs
I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school. If the same money was put toward social mobility, the most successful people in our country could be folks who grew up in poverty. Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.