https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/this-...
Do feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem here, e.g. legacy admissions are more likely to land a plum job at their family’s business/through family connections so there isn’t a guarantee that those higher earnings are solely because of Ivy League attendance. But the pattern is there.
> By comparing two groups of waitlisted students — those who are admitted to Ivy-Plus universities and those who are rejected — they note that the successful are much more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school and work for a prestigious firm[...] One in six students at Ivy League schools has parents in the top 1% of the income distribution. This is not just because the children of the rich are more likely to apply to elite colleges. Nor is it because the children of the rich have higher academic scores than middle class applicants: Children from the top 1% of the income distribution (more than $611,000) are 55% more likely to secure admission than a typical middle-class applicant with the same SAT or ACT scores, and children from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in. It is because elite colleges deliberately discriminate in favor of the rich.
Neither chickens nor eggs need be harmed to see that this prima facie has something wrong with it.
1. <https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...>
Yes, going to these universities probably makes some difference, but it probably doesn't explain all the difference, so if you take poor but talented kids and have them go to these universities, I expect the salary difference is much smaller.
Sure, we can debate the exact earnings multiplier endlessly but it still stands that attending an Ivy League institution is better than not attending one. And attendance of those institutions is artificially gated.
There is more than one way to make more money.
Legacies are just one aspect of this, though it is particularly visible. Being able to break into that is a huge leg up, not just for you but for people around you in society. And being kept out reinforces that your group isn't suited to that kind of wealth production, even though it has nothing to do with either your skills or the quality of education you received.
This isn't just an Ivy League problem - this is a problem that has an effect on the entire college admissions pipeline in the US (plenty of Ivy/UMich/UVA caliber students took seats at top public+private programs, students meant for top public+private programs ended up at regional flagships, etc). As the number of seats is finite, this leads to a massive misallocation across the board.
That said, the same kind of elitist sorting still happens in Europe - it's just done at the grade school level instead
Children of well educated parents almost always end up at a Gymnasium from which their career path ends up leading them to a university degree. Those in others types of schools have a tougher path leading to university education and will most likely end up in the equivalent of community colleges, vocational training or apprenticeship. Since recommendation by teachers counts for admission to a Gymnasium and this is often subjective, children of parents from less privileged backgrounds (blue collar workers, immigrants etc.) often end up in other schools. Sometimes this is an example of how society is stratified - a place for everyone and everyone in their place.
Apart from the public schooling there are also private schools which are almost entirely for children of very well to do types since they come with a significant fee.
Where it does get selective is at the prep-school level. But AFAIK this is based on the high-school grades, and it would seem that being very good in a "bad" high-school nets you better chances of being picked than being average in an "elite" high-school.
Classmates of Sarkozy's and Lagardère's kids at École Jeannine Manuel will continue to leverage their network from there no matter if they attended a Grande école or a random generic university. And there are plenty of schools like those to this day in France.
This is the exact kind of network that Americans complain about with regards to legacy.
Most HNers did well enough on their SATs and ACTs to attend a target public school or non-legacy private like UC Berkeley or MIT respectively, and around 75% of students at Harvard didn't get in via Legacy admissions yet we (rightfully) still complain about that 25% who leveraged their network and class background to get in.
I doubt that if they were somehow forbidden to put their kids in the same school, Sarkozy's and Lagardère's kids would be total strangers and completely unlikely to "network". Just as there are cliques in all schools, even if their kids went to the same school as younger me, an immigrant, we would probably not have been friends, just like I was friends with kids whose "social level" was close to mine.
Yep.
Most reputable schools in the US are actually public flagships (UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UT Austin, UWisc Madison, UWashington, Georgia Tech) or private universities (MIT, CalTech, CMU, JHU, Amherst College, Pomona College) which don't actually consider alumni or legacy.
There are 2 concurrent trains of thought in opposition to legacy in the US
1. It's an insult to the meritocratic nature of the US. (I agree with this aspect)
2. Any kind of networking is an unfair advantage (I disagree with this, but plenty of HNers and Americans in general appear to agree with this)
In the US, there is an assumption that after legacy is removed, there is never a need for legacy and someone from Podunk State will have equal standing as an MIT graduate all variables being equal. This is never going to happen, as you know well in France as well. ENS or SciencesPo grads will always be viewed as "better" than, idk, Université Toulouse II (not picking on Toulouse, just randomly selecting a city and number).
Plenty of Americans want to remove this kind of hierarchy, period. In reality, even if that happens, networking will continue and elites will continue to send kids to elite grade schools.
Grandes Écoles students are correlated with higher social classes, but that's due to socio-cultural background, family discipline, ability to dedicate to 100% to syudying without taking a student job, etc. more than anything else. Admission are purely on anonymous competitive exams, and no amount of money will get you there if you suck at them.
Foreign students are something else though.
Ah, the typical French delusion that entrance exams make Grandes Ecoles admission somewhat fair.
The fact is that most of the students who succeed at these entrance exams and land position in the most successful of Grandes Ecoles come from the same highschools. These highschools all happen to be in Paris or Lyon and due to how the French system works, your family has to live in one of these very affluent and costly neighborhood for you to attend. Amusingly, practices which are mercilessly squashed by the administration in most highschools throughout the country like skill-based sorting of students or going at a faster pace that the official curriculum are tolerated in these few highschools. I let guessing where our elected politicians put their children as an exercise for the reader.
As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
As I mentioned, it's highly correlated with students socio-economical status; now at least it's not conditioned on your grandparents stuffing an Ivy League with money, with your parents having time and money to send you on tons of extra-curricular, your family having been at Eton for centuries, or your father being an oligarch and sending you to Switzerland at 18 y.o.
You can spit on and scorn us and our system all you want (it's quite in fashion on the Internet, I'm sure you'll get a lot of upvotes for it), but at least it tries; and in my experience, it's the best one with the ex-soviet ones to balance high quality education with meritocracy.
> As usual in France, there is one rule for the plebeian and another one for the ruling class.
Sure, that's so typically French. It's true that Eton, Princeton and Beijing University frequently display students coming from the most remote and poorer part of their country.
Sure and I went to ESSEC after doing my prépa in Tours and grewing up in the countryside. Guess where did 95% of my classmates came from. The plural of anecdata, something, something…
The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago. It’s not even cheap which could have been its sole redeeming quality. Social mobility indicators in France are even worse than in the UK, a case study of what not to do.
Then you got shafted. It's a couple of hundred euros per year when you're on a stipend.
> The system is utter garbage as was pointed by Bourdieux decades ago
And what did Bourdieux propose?
I was talking about what it costs to the state. You do realise it’s heavily subsidised, don’t you?
BTW, what did Bourdieux propose?
Bourdieu didn’t need to propose anything. He proved data in hand that the system was unfair. A quick look at the current situation of France should tell you all you need to know about how effective the system actually is.
But finding ideas is not that hard. We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results. Spoiler alert, the answer is not a system generalising the structure of military schools to whole areas of higher educations put in place by a military dictatorship to curb the emergence of dissenting elites in the university system. It still baffle me that this has to be pointed to the average French. This country really deserves what it has become.
La crtitique est aisée, l'art est difficile.
> We could just get our heads out of our asses and copy what’s done in a country having better results.
Id est? The US system, where you can get a pass into an Ivy league if your granddaddy paid enough money, the Chinese system where any exam can be skipped with a few millions yuans, or the Russian system where the children are taken from their families at 12y.o.?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the...
I studied politics and quickly realised there was a huge divide between those of us who wanted to study a broken system from the outside and those who coveted being one of the jeering bores in the House of Commons. Helped me lose whatever faith I had left in the political system.
( * not public as in the US sense but in the UK sense - yes it's backwards)
Schools, plural? I got the impression that Eton alone was more than half of them?
It's a difficult problem to fix without liquidating the millionaire and billionaire class which society does not have the stomach for currently.
Yikes. Posting like this will get you banned here. No more of this please.
In addition, I need to ask you to stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments generally, because your account has unfortunately been doing a lot of that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This is the only part I can read before the paywall kicks in. But I wonder why they think that top universities are the drivers of social mobility.