Let's face it. The "top" students that Harvard and Stanford accept are past experts at gaming the system. They are total believer in and are totally committed to climbing the existing social-economic hiearchy. They worship the authorities, are perfectly content in following established lines of research, and pad themselves in the back when they re-search past results to apply to an arcane area, which in all probability ten people are ever going to find interesting and never useful. They are the perfect sheeps pretending to be lions.
Talk about entitlement.
What proof of this do you have? Quick looks over Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, or even lists of top scientific breakthroughs demonstrate that top rate universities do produce far more scientific breakthroughs than other universities.
If you want to challenge that the top schools have much more productive researchers (and those making significant breakthroughs) on average, feel free to present evidence. Any metric I can find for which I can get enough information implies otherwise.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_univ...
So if the rest of us lazy slobs in the 99% are unworthy to get into the best grad schools or Y Combinator, I'm to assume we should just find ourselves a quiet spot in the midwest in which to shoot ourselves in the face and get of your way? But then who will be around to pay the tuitions at your overpriced institutions, or buy your latest social media software?
Empathy is free; it don't cost a thing for people to show compassion for those who struggle, but it sure seems like a rare and precious jewel among the tech nerd crowd.
Resources; time, energy, attention; are limited. If you allocate resources to less-than-best people, you get less-than-best results, most of the time.
If these people are the kind of weak, selfish pricks who think that the world owes them a world-class experience just for existing, they'll give up half-way through the most difficult thing they've ever done(if they ever start), and your investment in them will be lost forever, without outcomes.
That kind of investment crashes your economy, and in the long run gets your species killed.
I can't be a first-rate baker and a blacksmith and a shipwright and a miner and a fisher and a farmer and and and ... the specialists in the city do one thing excellently: they bring down the cost while also bringing up quality, raising quality-of-life for people in the city. If I'm an average farmer and average blacksmith, perhaps I'll produce $10 worth of goods in an hour, $5 worth of crops and $5 worth of tools. As an exceptional farmer, I can produce $20 worth of crops, trade $10 of them for tools, and end up with $10 each of crops and tools. It's as simple as that - trading between people with different specialties / needs leaves both people better off, and you can't do that subsistence farming.
Public infrastructure in cities has also always been much better, such as roads, communication systems, police, fire fighting, etc. Trade was much easier because there were more people to trade with, a larger market for your goods. On a small subsistence farm, any excess that you cannot save or reinvest is wasted; in a city, it can be sold or traded to accumulate wealth.
There are certainly people who are attracted to the city because they can't hack it (beggars, etc.), but they are in the minority. In the modern era, something like 3% of the population are farmers, and they are so exceptionally effective (supported by agricultural scientists, robotics engineers who build automated farming machinery, etc.) that the rest of us have plenty of food, freeing us up to specialize in other things (like robotics).
I believe this cycle of technological enrichment fundamentally requires specialization. This is not to say that anyone is wrong for wanting a simpler or more communal form of living, but I doubt the motivations are anything economic. The reason that so many people end up working in cities, in factories (sweatshops) today is simple: they can accumulate more wealth specializing in even a mundane repetitive task (quickly, cheaply, and with quality) than they could by subsistence farming.
* There was an article on Hacker News recently about the historical cost of clothing, how it used to cost thousands of modern-equivalent dollars for a shirt. Thus why people wore clothing until it was rags. The cost of clothing and all such goods came down dramatically due to peoples' specialization as spinners, weavers, sewers, tailors, etc. Now clothing is cheap and plentiful.
[Update: found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950 ]
* There was another HN thread discussing the fall of the Roman empire and the "dark ages". A commentator who seemed to be a historian reinforced the idea that yes, there really was a dark ages. The fall of the empire shut down trade, which led to a marked decline in the pottery available in Britain. Previously they had been able to import plentiful, high quality pottery from elsewhere. With the fall of the empire and the collapse of trade, they began to make it themselves, and were terrible at it. Even the kings of the era had worse pottery than the common person centuries earlier. (This is more about trade than about cities, but the effectiveness of trade increases with density.)
[Update: not the HN comment I was looking for, but similar information about pottery: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/1391 ]
The power of specialization and trade
Winners take that praise
Losers seldom take that blame
---
This can be used to point at both victim-of-circumstance "losers" and it-was-all-me "winners", depending on your viewpoint.
That's still just the social and environmental part, of course. You'd still have to have some chops. But if you're anywhere as close to as smart as you think you are, that won't be a problem at all.
The only story that I know about that: A professor of trombone at the nearby state university started telling his students that he was happy to teach them, but that there were no jobs for trombonists. He lost his job, but he felt that he shouldn't build his success on the false hopes and eventual failure of his students.
In my own experience, as a grad student at a second tier university, when I fully realized that tenure track was not in my stars, I shifted my own focus to preparing as well as I could for an industry career. My advisor accepted my decision, but admitted that he had no advice for me. That was 20+ years ago. I was fortunate to have two industrial scientists as role models: My parents. Continuing with my PhD might have been a mistake, but I'm living with it OK.
One thing he did, to his credit, was to start bringing in all of his former students who were in industry, to give talks. That was his own idea, but a few other profs began to follow suit.
Another question: If your students are headed into job markets where publications don't matter, how do you maintain your own publication record?
It depends a lot on the student. I've had 3 Ph.D. students graduate already (and 1 grad student/post doc), and they all now have good jobs in industry (e.g., 2 as software engineers at Google). I also have several students right now. My students often do a lot of work on SageMath (http://sagemath.org), so at least get relevant experience that makes them employable outside pure math academia. I also encourage them to get involved with or start other open source projects (example: http://cython.org), which might have basically nothing to do with their thesis, but which makes them more employable. In short: 100% of my students leave grad school with tons of experience doing open source software development, in addition to whatever else they do. I do have a student right now who has turned out to be very good at number theory research, and wants an academic job -- it will be interesting to see if he gets one...
> My advisor accepted my decision, but admitted that he had no advice for me. [...] One thing he did, to his credit, was to start bringing in all of his former students who were in industry, to give talks.
I go out of my way to try to understand something about the world outside academia, so at least I don't have 0 advice for my students. It's great that your adviser did something that he could to help.
> Another question: If your students are headed into job markets where publications don't matter, how do you maintain your own publication record?
Surprisingly, most conventions involving publication in pure mathematics are somewhat different than in much of the rest of the academic sciences. For example, pure mathematicians always list authors in alphabetical order. Pure mathematics is also unlike most of the sciences, because professors write their own papers. There are exceptions of course, but usually you can only be a co-author on a paper if you actually write part of it (!). Grad students do not write papers for their advisor (modulo rare exceptions). Last week I had one of my grad students get a paper accepted in a very good journal on things I met with him every week about, and I'm not a co-author. With this paper (http://wstein.org/papers/bs-heegner/) the student went to work at Google right after graduating and stopped doing math, so I had to do the work of writing up for publication and submitting the paper, just to ensure it got published. Frankly that's just fine; if that paper would have been 100% written up and submitted by the student, I definitely wouldn't have been a co-author.
My degree was in physics, but I followed a similar theme of studying my chosen field while developing a strong sideline with reasonable market demand.
I live near a major university, and know a lot of academics. What I've noticed is that the demise of academic careers has made it harder for professors to maintain their research programs and to publish. Once a student kinda figures out the lay of the land, they focus on finishing their dissertations ASAP, and their advisor is left with a lot of loose ends to tie up on their own if they want to publish the work. This can be prohibitive if there is lab work to be done.
I can tell you growing up from a small high school without any prestige there was very much a hard cap on how many students from our school a Harvard(or other top institutions) would except. To the point where top students would bargain with each other about which schools to apply to so they didn't steal someone else's acceptance offer on a 3rd choice etc.
Secondly, the tech world has been a glaring example of while one can use Harvard's selections as a signal to find talent, there are many, many, many exceptions to that rule. And your comments are quite sad to read in light of that new information.
I'm a college drop-out who barely graduated high school, went to community college and then a couple of years at an agricultural college before striking out into industry. I'm doing just fine.
I think the really hard work took place after I was employed.
I'm not impressed with whether someone went to Harvard or Stanford. I just look at resumes and what people have done. Schools are not a great signal.
Disclaimer: my first job was being a sysadmin and programmer for an applied math group at MIT.
I would even say there's a substantial difference between a typical grad student from a top-10-and-not-top-5 university and a typical grad student from Harvard; this is not at all meant to disparage the former schools, but basically every student I met from Harvard REALLY knew their stuff.
By the way, to those saying the system is not a meritocracy, I got into UCLA coming from an undergraduate institution that's not even top-100 because I was bright and I worked my tail off. Would it have been easier if my parents were buddies with the president of Harvard? Sure, but life's not fair.
My partner is in academia outside of STEM, and I've seen some of the 'winners' that come out of Stanford and Harvard whose only contribution is that they had a lot more funding available for their fieldwork. They didn't tend to be any more intelligent, and certainly were on average less hard working.
They did have wealthier parents on average, however.
A different take on Computer Algebra.
>Such entitlement. I got into UC Berkeley (1995-2000) where I received $13K/year to live on from them (for TA'ing), and I made it work by having a roommate, being frugal, and getting some student loans (the minimum I needed), which I paid off within 2 years of graduation. It sucked, but I had to just be lean and deal with it, and reminded myself that I was a student.
By the CPI Inflation Calculator, that's roughly equivalent to $20k in today's money[1]. The average rent for a 1-bedroom place in Berkeley today is ~$3000/month[2], and a quick glance at Craigslist[3] shows the average rent for a room in a shared apartment to be around ~$1000/month. This does in fact mean a graduate student on the equivalent of your stipend today is spending 60% of their gross income on rent, or finding some mysterious way to live not only far away from work, but in fact in a mysterious, magical part of the Bay Area that has low rents.
Actually, to my knowledge, what actually happens is that elite schools in high cost-of-living locations just give larger stipends these days. I've heard from MIT grad-students that they certainly get higher stipends than I've seen elsewhere, as a result of which, indeed, they just have to live with roommates.
But God help them if their institution doesn't pay a higher stipend!
>Also, there is a naive and incorrect (in math at least) assumption in this article that the only difference between a graduate student from a top-10 university and a top-100 university is the name of the university where they graduated.
That assumption does not seem to have been made. The correct view is that there is a continuous slope from the top handful of departments to the top 20/30/50 (where you draw the line depends on what field you're in) to the top 100, to everyone else.
But unless the data supports calling it less of a continuous slope downwards from the top than a discrete, discontinuous jump where researchers outside the top 20 institutions are nigh-incapable of doing good research, I would certainly say the datum that the top 20 universities' PhD graduates get 50% of all new tenure-track jobs, including those in much lower-tier institutions, supports a view that there exists a prestige problem or an extreme glut of PhDs[4], or both. Personally, I lean towards the issue mostly actually being the latter: there is simply a glut of PhDs, and so otherwise irrelevant factors like prestige get seized-upon as providing the very tiniest edge once the competition has already gotten tough enough that almost nobody actually has an advantage on merit alone anymore.
(I've seen people from mere top-25 institutions chairing first-tier conferences, which seems to me to militate against the idea that the "top-10" occupying a qualitatively separate tier.)
> In research, learning from the masters is often critical to becoming one, since the habits, tricks, ideas, intuitions, etc. are very hard to convey in writing.
Excuse me, but in my experience, and that of most other graduate students, we don't learn from the masters, because advisors' minds are largely impenetrable!
(In fact, if I may gossip publicly, I think it's not too much to say that my current advisor in particular has implied that he prefers to spend far more time worrying about the finery of how he presents our work in papers than the rigor or methodology with which we did it!
Whereas I've developed into something of a methods geek, but also realized that nobody actually cares about your methods in the "real world" of top-tier conferences anyway ;-).)
>The article reminds me of this quote -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos: "André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters."
I think we ought to reevaluate whether this law really applies in difficult labor markets. To me, it looks like when there's a glut of candidates and a shortage of positions, we routinely see good people shunted down to lower-tier institutions at every level, even as prestige becomes a form of "privilege" (in the sociological sense), even as actual differences of merit shrink.
Personal confession: I attended a top-20 institution for undergrad, and am finishing my research MSc at a top-tier institution. When I have self-studied and made software contributions to prepare myself, I would like to apply to a couple of MIT's PhD programs. But I also think the job market for academics is fucking terrible, and that my situation does reflect a form of inherited privilege. For one thing, my stepfather is a tenured professor of EE at a second-tier institution, and had friends in the department I attended for undergrad (whose classes I avoided because I like PL and they did networking :-p, but still) -- I literally grew up with an academic pedigree!
[1] -- http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=13000&year1=199... [2] -- https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-berkeley-rent-tre... [3] -- http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/roo?query=berkeley [4] -- http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2008/05/dont-become-scientist...
The 99% of us knows perfectly well that getting in and getting access to the network is the ral value and so those who get in tend to be mostly from those who could afford the right path for their kids.
The author says: "The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less."
Such entitlement. I got into UC Berkeley (1995-2000) where I received $13K/year to live on from them (for TA'ing), and I made it work by having a roommate, being frugal, and getting some student loans (the minimum I needed), which I paid off within 2 years of graduation. It sucked, but I had to just be lean and deal with it, and reminded myself that I was a student.
Also, there is a naive and incorrect (in math at least) assumption in this article that the only difference between a graduate student from a top-10 university and a top-100 university is the name of the university where they graduated. There may be some truth to this for undergraduates, but for graduate students---who spend between 4 and 10 years busting their ass full-time on their research area---the situation is completely different.
The author thus seems to discount the possibility that the very best students who go to graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. are often be the best job candidates. Harvard/Berkeley/etc. gets the best potential grad students in the first place -- I was on the grad admissions committee in math at Harvard for years, and we would make offers to the top (or so) American students, and pretty much get most of them. These were extremely strong enthusiastic students who had invested often a decade of their lives into mathematics already; the education these students then got at grad school was by top researchers. In research, learning from the masters is often critical to becoming one, since the habits, tricks, ideas, intuitions, etc. are very hard to convey in writing.
Also, not everybody gets into graduate school at Harvard/Berkeley/etc. via "inherited wealth". At least I didn't -- I was an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University, and got into Berkeley entirely by being crazy in love with doing mathematics and also relatively good at it. The undergrad institution definitely matters in grad school admissions. However, being sufficiently good regularly gets around being from a non-top-10 university.
The article reminds me of this quote -- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Halmos: "André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters."