The astonishing datapoint in that Harvard survey is the pay disparity between male and female grads. Perhaps much of that is attributable to choice of major.
Also a big gap between respondents not receiving financial aid and respondents on full financial aid. This makes me wonder whether male and female Harvard students are otherwise the same in terms of their distribution of characteristics like this, or in fact different in potentially relevant ways.
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I donât know if you also noticed that there were many âbustsâ in history that were caused by misallocation of human capital. For example, in the â08 financial crisis, an excessive concentration of human capital in the financial sector caused those in the sector to maximize their individual, and their firmsâ, financial gains at the expense of everyone else. It wasnât a productive use of human capital. Since this thread is about the impact of wealth, Iâll also note that political and economic elites would use their power in allocation to maximize the benefits to themselves at the expense of the majority (most of whom are in the middle class), widening the gap between themselves and the rest of the country. Itâs just human nature.
This is a key point. We see excellent students with tremendous credentials who post on this site and say that they are interested in majoring in Engineering and their target schools are some collection of Ivy+ institutions. People react as if they say the moon is made out of cheese. They belittle these students and say they are throwing money away thinking about attending Yale or Harvard when certain state flagships are cheaper and âbetterâ Engineering schools. These people never have a single thought that this really bright student might be more interested in leadership and deciding what work should be done instead of actually doing the work.
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These institutions changed their criteria before and will change them again. Some of that will happen for self-serving reasons, and some in reaction to societal demands.
I do not see why their admission practices should be beyond reproach.
âTo prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way which is at the same time straightforward and effective, and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admissions authorities.â (Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933)
And thus the institute of holistic admissions was born.
By this logic, Harvard earned that right too. Can Harvard ever do wrong?
ETA: Not sure why this post was hidden. Is citing historical documents somehow a taboo?
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I sure have! Not just human capital, though, all forms of economic resources have been misallocated in various busts.
This then becomes an argument for regulated capitalism. Left to their own devices, self-dealing among the managers of capitalist systems will ruin the supposed broader benefits of capitalism, and so we need regulation and other public activity to, in part, prevent that from happening.
Iâll also note that political and economic elites would use their power in allocation to maximize the benefits to themselves at the expense of the majority (most of whom are in the middle class), widening the gap between themselves and the rest of the country.
And this is then the basis of the argument for robust progressive taxation and social insurance programs and public education and so on.
The aforementioned regulations are supposed to make sure that, say, ordinary stockholders still get their share of the benefits. But generally, over time, that system will still lead to increasingly concentrated capital, and increasingly concentrated allocation of the benefits of capitalism. If nothing is done. But then taxation and social insurance and public education and so on can partially undo those effects. But of course if they entirely undid those effects, the incentives required for capitalist systems to work would be destroyed.
Of course you have to believe the capitalist system has efficiency and productivity benefits in the first place, or else you will be fine with destroying them.
But if you do believe they have benefits, then you can think we need to balance capturing those benefits with also preventing the runaway concentration of those benefits among just a few winners in that system.
But none of this necessarily has much to do with the role that these âeliteâ colleges are going to play. Sure, some of their graduates will be academics and scientists and (these days) engineers and such, and some will go into NPOs and government offices and teaching and such. But a lot will go into jobs which are fundamentally about managing the capitalist part of our economic system.
And unless you want to entirely get rid of the capitalist part of that systemâas of course some doâthere are going to be jobs like that. And so these elite colleges see part of their mission as being to educate the sorts of people who will get jobs managing the capitalist system, and likely that will continue as long as such jobs exist.
The question then is how you regulate. If those who regulate (regulators, risk managers, etc.), make only a tiny fraction of those whom theyâre supposed to regulate, which side do you think is going to attract the most talents and win the battles (and the war)? Also, wouldnât those who regulate (or risk-manage) want to join the other side, if and when they have a chance? They wouldnât want to be too harsh on the other side, would they?
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That is an excellent take, and the one with which I have myself wrestled.
A kid with an elite level of talent in a STEM field where relative rank order is established in a fairly straightforward manner (and my admittedly limited view of the world is one of a parent of two such kids) is interested in studying with his/her already limited peer group.
If there exists a set of institutions that are not individually optimizing for such peer group, but nonetheless collectively leave few of highest-levels peers for other institutions, it is not unreasonable for such kids to want to hold the nose and play the game, so they can be where they can find their peers (even if they are not the majority and not the primary target of selection).
And to your earlier point, yes, tech schools like MIT and Caltech also use the âholisticâ model (of which I am not a fan in principle), but they donât do legacies, and their athletic preferences arenât as strong, or close to none in Caltechâs case, and it results in a markedly different student body.
And their charts of parental income-to-attendance look a lot better to boot.
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At a high level, this is a question of whether we can make capitalism work at all. The good news is it appears some humans have a strong rule-enforcement motive, enough that they do not need financial incentives alone to play that role. Of course there can be social status and other rewards too.
But if that is not enough? Not sure that is solvable.
But anyway, elite colleges do educate both of those sorts of people. Whether there needs to be as many rules-enforcers as capitalism managers is not obvious. And how much they get paid is outside of their jurisdiction.
And of course there are also tech schools within a lot more colleges, including many excellent public universities.
This was actually long the answer. If you were a top student and wanted an engineering degree, youâd usually go to an engineer school, either standalone or within a public university. The idea youâd go to an Ivy or Ivy Plus was not necessarily all that appealing, unless it was one of the standalone tech schools or the few such colleges that actually had such a tech school within it.
But I gather thanks to crossover fields like CS, and perhaps the influence of US News, and also these colleges themselves starting to invest more in competing in âtechâ, and maybe just the basic concept of STEM (which blends tech with natural sciences and math)âmore people are looking to more of these colleges as âgoodâ places for tech.
Which is fine, but then expecting them to act just like more pure tech schools is not necessarily going to work out well.
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The country that does the best is Singapore, at least partly because itâs a much more meritocratic society. Its current Prime Ministor studied math at Cambridge (he could have graduated there in two years, instead of the usual three years). Other public servants in high positions are also selected by merits and paid well. By almost any measure, Singapore is arguably the best run country on this planet.
I also want to point out another thing that some people often say why other schools canât operate like these two. They claim that the other schools donât have the research funding that these STEM schools have, and therefore, must rely on donations from alumni and other wealthy donors. It should be noted that both MIT and Caltech receive plenty of donations without relying on legacy and donor preferences (Caltech is explicit about not giving donors any consideration, and MIT is a little less explicit but in practice it gives little consideration). The other elite schools should be able to do the same.
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Relative strengths of places like Purdue and Princeton notwithstanding, top OOS publics cost as much as top privates (and in some cases more if parents get significant aid at the latter).
Itâs a harsh landscape, in many directions, and top privates can be desirable for many reasons besides prestige-chasing.
Yes, in our particular case itâs CS theory and pure math.
Expect/work out in what way/at which stage? During admissions? Or some time later?
Say you have a kid who is top of their game in one of the aforementioned disciplines. Letâs say, conservatively, that in any given year there are fewer than a hundred kids matriculating who are at their academic level in these chosen fields.
Shouldnât they aspire to be at an institution where they wonât be the smartest kid in every room?
I am sorry if this suddenly sounds elitist, but we are discussing elite academic institutions here, are we not? Or is elite and academic measured across different dimensions there?
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So to be precise, what you are discussing is more of a technocracy. Aristocrats and such believed aristocratic systems were meritocratic, they just defined merit for leadership in a different way.
And I think it is a correct observation that the Ivies and Ivy Plus are still not defining merit in the way technocrats would generally prefer. And while that may frustrate some, I would again point out they are just the middle part of a chain that goes from before birth to career peak, and that whole system is also not technocratic in the way some would prefer.
So if a given âeliteâ college decided to go full technocratic instead, it likely would not play the same role in filling out the ranks of U.S. leadership positions, or not for long. Because these colleges are not forcing their alternative definition of leadership merit on an unwilling system, they are reflecting back to that system the same common definition of leadership merit.
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But some of these schools have fairly decent math departments 
Again, MIT gets a far lower percentage of its operating budget that way than colleges like Harvard or Princeton. Indeed, tech subunits within Harvard get a lower percentage of their operating budgets that way than non-tech subunits, although all those units rely on more gift revenue than MIT.
So if Harvard generally, or non-tech subunits in Harvard more specifically, tried to rely only on the relative levels of gift revenue that MIT uses, they could not balance their budgets without dramatically cutting them.
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To rephrase this, borrowing a phrase from MIТ Admissionsâ Chris Petersonâs âWe Donât Do Legacyâ essay:
if a given âeliteâ college decided to stop being interested in simply reproducing a multigenerational lineage of educated elite, it would stop reproducing a multigenerational lineage of educated elite?
Indeed!
The basic model here, at least since WWII and in fact a bit before, is that these elite colleges are bringing together students from already socioeconomically elite families and very smart students from âmiddle Americaâ to their mutual profit. In other words, they are places where people with high social and financial capital and people with high intellectual capital can begin the process of networking and collaborating in new and productive ways.
Given this model, you canât only admit the very smart students and none of the socioeconomic elite students. You also canât admit only the socioeconomic elite students and none of the very smart students. And these days, you might well focus on the smartER socioeconomic elites.
But still, it is a balancing act to make sure all the relevant forms of capital are represented at high enough levels to support the strategy. So if you have to admit some smartER socioeconomic elite applicants over some of the smartER-ER middle american applicants in order to have enough representation of socioeconomic capital . . . oh well.
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