I am someone from outside the US.
I am shaking my head in disbelief (though you are conflating the issues of funding and admissions preferences and athletic recruiting here).
The point remains, many American kids (including the underprivileged ones) would benefit greatly from spending more time on academics and less time on sports, and the existing incentive system (and the prevailing culture) is not exactly clear in delivering this message or encouraging this behavior.
Please move on from discussing athletic hooks or take it to pm. Further posts will be deleted.
Which is ironic that itās now considered a sport for wealthy whites given itās indigenous origins.
Which is probably why MIT values their athletes. While you still have to meet a very high academic bar, being a successful athlete can tip the scales in your favor. Most people donāt realize how competitive MIT is in D3 sports.
We arenāt outside the US.
We are discussing a very small subset of schools within the US. One of the great things about our system is that there are literally hundreds of schools discussed on CC everyday where a high performing student can receive a great education and become a teacher/scientist/engineer. Students with those outcomes as goals have absolutely no need to attend one of the schools that are the focus of this discussion.
Understood, and you are frustrated that the admissions process in elite admissions values factors in addition to and beyond those that you do. That does not make the criteria for admission used by elite college admissions wrong and in need of change. They are not perfect but these schools have earned their position and right to build their cohorts in line with what they feel is best for their institutions.
Having grown up in rural upstate NY I still shake my head and wonder how that happened.
And there is a more cynical but equally valid way to put this point.
Holding aside the ātechā schools (and even those are only partial exceptions), all the Ivies, all the traditional āIvy plusā colleges, and all the ātopā LACs follow this āholisticā model.
In that sense, there is an essentially perfect correlation between a non-tech college being popularly-recognized as āeliteā (as per US News and such) and actually being āelitistā (as defined by this study).
I think there are a couple rational responses to that.
You can reject that way of thinking and believe these colleges are not truly the best colleges, despite their US News rankings and popular acclaim and such. Fair enough.
Or you can, even if just cynically, believe this shows that elitism works to this particular end, and want to get a piece of that action for yourself. Also fair enough.
But what I do think is a difficult position to justify is that you want to get a piece of that action for yourself, meaning you want to go to one of these schools that has successfully followed that elitist approach to get to the top of the US News rankings and such . . . but you donāt want them to be so elitist.
I know that makes sense to people, but I think it is defining a hypothetical which is not really possible in practice.
Someone speculated upthread that maybe the rich students donāt go into finance/consulting as much as the poor/middle class students at IVy+. That is wrong:
https://twitter.com/james_s_murphy/status/1684034349627478016?s=46&t=Rj8bJmSvYNwbKOalo1Ig0w
According to this new Chetty study, the richest 1% of households benefit exceptionally disproportionally (and the richest 0.1% even more disproportionally) from 3 factors:
legacy preferences
preferences for recruited athletes
non-academic ratings
Obviously, not all who benefited from these 3 factors are among the richest, but the study shows that the rich benefit much more from them than from academic factors.
Hard to stomach James when he makes broad based judgments saying things like bankers and consultants donāt help others/society, either thru their job, or outside their job, or after that job.
I have a hard time believing anywhere close to 50% of the class went onto finance/consulting. There were engineers, pre-meds, future lawyers, architects, journalists, future academics in all those classes
Check figure 18 on page 96:
I may be misreading the chart, but I thought it only indicates 50% of the students from very high income families (top .1%) who go into finance & consulting. And then something like 20% of those very high income students go into non-profits & public jobs. So presumably another 30% of high income kids do other sorts of jobs (engineers, pre-meds, future lawyers, architects, journalists, future academics). Still I find it strange that at all income levels, the chart seems to indicate that the majority (at least 60%) go into the finance or non-profit. I would have thought that the majority would go into those other categories that you mention. Wouldnāt there be more careers available that are neither finance/consulting nor non-profit/public?
Leaving aside the percentage of graduates from Ivy+ schools who went into finance/consulting and how those careers benefit the society as a whole, we do have an issue with allocation (or misallocation) of human capital in this country. US is currently relying on importing talents to bridge the talent deficit in areas outside of finance/consulting. TSMC, for example, said this week that it couldnāt find enough qualified people to make its state-of-the-art chips in the US next year.
Oh, looking at it again, I misread the chart labels. The green line is Finance/Consulting/Tech. I overlooked the last word because SouthYankie wrote,
The chart from the actual report differs from the tweet ( perhaps intentionally??). In the report, the top line in the chart includes alumni in finance, consulting and technology ( which broadly construed likely captures the entire engineering cohort) while the lower line was those employed in government, education, health, and civic nonprofits. Interestingly, the next accompanying chart shows that percent of graduates in what the report defines as elite jobs or grad schools is quite stable by income but actually declines for the very wealthiest students.
Nevermind
Actually it looks like the twitter chart does show tech. My mistake. Can we still call it twitter?
As others also noted, Figure 18a combines finance, consulting, and tech.
A lot of these schools do senior surveys and publish the results, so here is Harvardās for the class of 2023:
58.8% are going into jobs, 14.5% grad school, 6.3% professional school, 6.3% fellowships, and 14.3% donāt know or are travelling.
Of the 58.8% going into jobs, 22.1% are going into finance, 19.6% into consulting, so that is about 24.5% of the total so far. Of course this is just at graduationāsome of those people will leave those industries, but others will enter, including out of those who were going on to post-graduate education and fellowships, or didnāt know/travel.
Tech is 12.1% of jobs immediately, so another 7.1% of the total immediately, but again eventually some will leave, and others will join from other first-steps.
Figure 18a suggests eventually something a little over 40% of Ivy/Ivy Plus grads end up in finance, consulting, or tech. Weāre only at 31.6% of the Harvard class at graduation, but I can see once the other 41.2% of the class actually get their final job, that number getting up to 40%+.
Indeed, just very crudely, weāre at 53.8% of the people who have jobs so far. The remainder will probably mostly do other things, but if say half that percent, 26.9%, eventually found their way over, .269 * . 412 is .111, so weād be looking around .427 total in the end.
Thatās a very crude (and frankly contrived) model, but I think it shows how Harvardās senior survey is broadly consistent with Figure 18a.
But it does rely on including tech to get that high.
I note this has been true in many āboomā periods of US history. Meaning in many such periods, the observed expansion and increasing productivity of the US economy in that period depended on āimportedā human capital in the form of international immigrants who were educated, skilled, entrepreneurial, and/or simply hard-working adults.
And to return more directly to the topicānot to be cynical about it, but the self-conception of these āeliteā colleges was not typically to think that they needed to try to produce all that human capital themselves. Their self-conception was more that they would train the leaders who would then be able to put that human capital to its most productive use.
And while in certain circles, finance and consulting is deemed a useless activity, in truth the basic nature of those industries is to provide for/inform the efficient allocation of economic resources, including human capital. Of course some people think capitalism in general is bad, but assuming you are talking about at least a mixed economy (one where at least a lot of resources are allocated through competition among for-profit entities), then these are necessary functions within such an economy.
So for good or ill, these āeliteā colleges being relatively more focused not on educating the people who do the work, but on educating the people who decide what work should be done, is just continuing their long-standing self-appointed mission to educate āleadersā, as they define leadership.