That reminds me: when the wife of a guy I knew was coming out of HBS, evidently being a buyer for The Gap was a hot sexy job among that crowd (he didn’t understand it either).
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Hi - yeah, I’m well aware of all this. And none of it negates what I’ve been saying here. You’re talking past it, not to it.
Nowhere am I saying that all rich kids are ambitious and bright. (Trust me, I know.)
Nowhere am I saying that all elite-U students are ambitious and bright and employable. (Hoo boy.)
Nowhere am I saying that all elite-U students go on to do worldchanging work.
Nowhere am I saying that elite-U curricula are magical and 100% on-point.
Nor am I saying that there are not exceptional – truly exceptional – students at state universities.
Nor am I saying that you don’t see terrific resumes from state-school kids.
None of that is in what I have been saying. But what I am saying does wind up leading to “yes, it’s the college (and what leads to the college), and not so much the person, to a far greater extent than I’ve seen in my lifetime – and that’s a major problem.”
I am saying that the odds of getting to that kind of work are far higher if you’re starting from one of these elite Us – much more so than used to be the case. And I am saying that your odds of getting to that elite U in the first place are much crushed if you’re not a rich kid to begin with. I am further saying that this is bad.
If you want to engage with what I’ve actually said, you’ll need to do two things. (1) Recognize that the world now is a different one, in terms of equality, than it was through the first half to two-thirds of your career, and (2) think in terms of odds and how the odds get to be what they are, and what the consequences of those things are.
You’re a corporate recruiter. In order for people to find you, they have to know that people like you exist. At a minimum, they have to know how to be findable by you. That’s already a long step for most of the students at my university, grad and undergrad. They haven’t the least clue about all that, and their working-class parents certainly aren’t telling them how to work LinkedIn to advantage. Their departments haven’t arranged sessions to teach them what to do. Their professors, frankly, have no idea, and staff do not exist to organize these things on the profs’ behalf. There’s a beleaguered career center that gives out vanilla advice that winds up pertaining to no one.
Furthermore, they have to know that they have to run hard after opportunities. It’s of no help to have grown up in a family where good behavior (which is how you keep low-level, lower-middle-class jobs) is prized more highly than enterprise (which is how you become annoying and bounce around a lot in low-level jobs). When you’re a good-behavior lower-middle-class employee, you don’t develop initiative. You wait to be told what to do, and then you do that well, but not well enough to aggravate people. That’s how you remain housed and fed. Same at school: the kids obey the teachers; they don’t question the teachers and come up with more interesting things to do and demand special treatment and challenge. That’s called “acting up”.
Compare with the proportion of kids at, I don’t know, Vassar who’ll be taught by both parents and advisors at school to compete, innovate, take themselves seriously as societal movers, and put themselves together and in a place to be noticed by you. Compare with the proportion at Vassar whose parents will in fact insist on going over their resumes and intros and making introductions to the right people. The pool you’re pulling from will already be substantially enriched with those kids. Their odds, relative to the odds the kids at my school have, are enhanced.
But suppose some 10-20% of the kids from my flagship U do find their way to some useful “how to be in a position where blossom will notice you” bit of advice, which sounds about right to me, proportionwise. Unless they’ve managed to find a coach – and most will not – I’ve seen their resumes and cover letters, and how they don’t actually jobhunt. Their parents are not successful professionals or successful business people, and they haven’t grown up hearing the chatter of people in that class and those concerns. Unless they’re going to a business college and paying to find out, they generally don’t know what a business is. It doesn’t occur to them that they might have a significant role to play in operating the society, because nobody has trained them in this direction and taught them that they’re likely to be that important. Their university doesn’t teach them any of this. They’re not aware of how to present themselves, and it doesn’t occur to them to think in these terms in the first place. Again, nobody’s going to catch them by the arm and say “hey, you have to do this.”
And you’ll never hear of them. Never know they exist, never see how clever they are, never hear the depth of their conversation.
Do that over and over for a while, all over the country, while also reducing the number of recruiters who’ll even bother looking at grads from my flagship R1 U and others like it, and while continuing to defund public education from pre-K through grad school, and you wind up with rather stark stratification. Which, surprise, we now have.
I am significantly underpaid for what I do; in other places I’d get about 2-2.5x the salary for the same or similar work. Among the things I haven’t been paid to do in the last couple of days: woke up a poor-family near-PhD student with children to the fact that he has a spectacular resume, including an NSF GRFP, and has a minority hook, and can more or less write his own ticket: employers are just listening to hear what the hell he wants, where he sees himself, what he wants to do in the world, make of the world. He hasn’t been taught to think in a focused way about his own arc because he has no such family to push his mind in that direction. His program and advisor will not do this for him. So we spent a good long time talking about that, and then he wanted to go back to focusing on his research and put this off: I said no, man, you have to do both. You have to wake up and want it and get it, and you have to think big, because you’re capable of big. These are things he has not heard often, but Miss Vassar has heard every day since she was old enough to walk, whether or not she’s really got the stuff.
Today, in conversation with my chair, I said, “Let’s survey the faculty and get federal-agency alumni from their group; we have people graduating interested in agency work but they don’t know what the hell it is and don’t know anyone, let’s have a networking event, zoom works fine for this.” It is not my job to do such things. I’m not paid for them. Nobody else is doing them. This is not unusual.
You mention Truman scholars. Truman scholars are highly unusual people. I am not talking about the odds that highly unusual, really spectacular people have. I know about those odds because I’m one of those people and always have been. In my case, and the case of other wild outliers, yes, it’s absolutely true: the person matters more than the school. The only obstacles I’ve run into have had to do with misogyny encoded into law. Otherwise? Every door has been open.
But I’m talking about the people who are merely very good to excellent. Those are the people who have no problem getting where they want to go from Elite U, and – unless unusually lucky – ain’t going there from State U anymore. There are far more people like that than there are people like me – and we need them. Arguably, we need a lot more of them than we need people like me. And highly preferentially, we’re drawing them from households and schools that are already rich, already making things go.
(It’s also much harder to be a Truman-type student now than it used to be if you’re not rich, because when are you going to have time to do all that public service when you have to work and take care of family members whenever you’re not in school? Eh? How exactly do you think most people manage to get good grades? It takes time, doesn’t it. Enough sleep. Time to think. Time to talk to people. Do you know what students in many of my classes are? ASLEEP. Because they have no choice but to work 30-40 hours while also doing well enough in school to maintain their scholarships. As soon as they sit down in a warm room, they’re out cold. They don’t have brilliant records of highschool community service, either, because they started working at age 12 and saving money for college, or they had to mother their sibs as soon as school was over, because Mom wasn’t going to get off work till 9 and there wasn’t household staff. So please, don’t talk to me about what terrific odds the wonderful bright ambitious not-rich students have of making it. Also don’t talk to me about that unless you’re also ready to talk about their mothers’ health, and how wrecked their mothers’ health is by the effort to get them through college, because those mothers are sleeping 3-4 hours a night for decades, eating garbage, and never getting exercise while trying to keep a roof over the kid’s head and get the kid everything they need to have a shot at all. And unless you’re ready to talk about what it’ll mean for the kid when the kid is 28, flying high, and someone has to take care of Mom now because she blew out her health for the kid(s) for 25 years, and there isn’t anyone else, because of the same mechanisms that have caused the inequality I’ve been describing throughout this screed. Yes, you see the few who managed to get there anyhow – not the hundreds more who had the stuff and were never given the opportunity.)
If I sound irritated, it’s because I am. I shouldn’t have to be explaining these things to the people on this board. I do, however, plan to run a class introducing state-U students to this thread and others like it, because another thing they don’t know about is the kind of attitudes about what’s possible in their lives that show up routinely here, and they should know what they’re up against.
(Also, you’ve got to be kidding me about Sandberg. She’s a bajillionaire with a doctor daddy, and she went to Harvard. She’s a shining example of the problem I’m describing. The only thing that was different in her day was that the state-U kids without doctor daddies also had a decent shot.)
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Oh, no, there are very good consultants out there. They’re people who know the industries they advise well because they come from those industries, understand what the conversation and the numbers mean, and still have a lot of friends in the business. They keep very careful watch and also sense when they’re losing their edge.
And they’re very, very expensive, as they should be.
Your run-of-the-mill EY/Deloitte/Bain consultant, though? Baloney top to bottom. They’ve never worked in business, most of the time, actually making and selling stuff apart from baloney reports, which someone else sells for them, and they know nothing real about the industries they’re consulting on. They swan in, collect puzzle pieces shaped and colored like ones they’ve been taught to look for, arrange them in a report, done, billed.
And no, it’s not generally elite, society-defining work, management consultancy. Political consultancy can be but on the whole consultancy is a sidelines job, advisory. You’d have to really stand out.
A very insightful post. I’d like to comment from the experience of a US/U.K. citizen who applied to college in both countries.
Although access to top schools in the U.K. definitely needs to be widened further, I was shocked at how much more elitism there is in the US system. For starters, the concept of legacy students was entirely foreign to me. I still can’t wrap my head around the idea that you can have a higher chances admission to a top school because your parents went there.
Cost is also an obvious one. In the U.K. the government caps all tuition fees at £9000 (roughly $12,000). As I started getting into US schools, I was hit with tuition tags of upwards of $80,000. For most students that’s entirely unaffordable without lots of aid or scholarship money. I come from a middle-class/upper middle-class background, and my parents could probably pay full-price if they stretched themselves extremely thin and took loans, but I don’t think any family should need to sacrifice that much for education.
Comparisons between countries are often futile but I find it interesting nonetheless. The U.K. is still very much a capitalist + meritocratic society but education is a lot less monetised. My experiences speaking to people in both the Cambridge and Brown admitted students chat largely corroborate these impressions.
Everyone deserves a shot at their dream schools, and I hope some reform happens to give more kids a fighting chance.
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As far as costs Is it £9000 total for 3 years or per year? And does that include room and board?
Also as regards legacy, do UK schools maintain relationships with their alums the way US schools do, engage in capital campaigns, ask for annual giving donations, have alums donating funds to build libraries, athletic centers, fund scholarships and so forth ?
As far as having a shot? Elite schools have large outreach programs for kids in the lower SES tiers. At most if not all “dream schools” provide unbelievable financial aid. For example in 2019 Harvard awarded $207,459,480 in FA, that’s over $200 million. Dartmouth awarded $106,624,599 in 2019. In the same year Vanderbilt awarded $167,021,750, which doesn’t include athletic scholarships of $14,000,000.
I agree that you can’t compare UK and US universities because there are so many meaningful differences between them. But the amount of money that’s awarded by schools each year to help students attend college in the US is quite substantial. Many many students pay no where near full sticker price.
“Cost is also an obvious one. In the U.K. the government caps all tuition fees at £9000 (roughly $12,000). As I started getting into US schools, I was hit with tuition tags of upwards of $80,000. …”
Noted that the $80,000 is for the tuition AND room-and-board in the US for private colleges, not tuition alone; yes, they are still high.
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The 9k refers to tuition per year and each school’s room and board costs vary on top of that.
Alumni networks are definitely well-developed, I can’t speak for direct comparisons since I’m obviously not part of any alumni network. And yes people donate to build libraries at their alma maters but they don’t increase their kids’ admissions chances by doing so.
I don’t dispute the huge amount of financial aid that many US schools provide. But being middle-class can leave you squeezed between a rock and a hard place. My sister is still paying off her Columbia debt almost a decade after graduating, and I know that this is far from a unique situation. I got into Brown but i quite simply can’t go unless I want to drastically decrease my parents’ quality of life.
Like I said, this is all just personal experiences and impressions! No hate intended whatsoever. Just my own personal outtakes from the brutal covid-era application process.
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Thanks for clarifying! I Should’ve been more precise
I’m sorry to hear that Brown can’t work for you. But you’re clearly a mature and thoughtful person to realize the burden it would place on your parents. Good luck in your studies!
Thank you!
Financial situations for international students are often not a good representation of domestic students. “Elite” private colleges are almost always need blind for domestic students, but are often need aware for international students and have limited FA. Many “elite” privates are quite affordable to for lower/middle income domestic families. For example, Harvard claims that they are less expensive than state schools after FA for >90% of US families. Harvard and several others claim ~$0 cost to parents for families that make slightly below the US median income and have a sliding scale of increased cost as income increases beyond that point.
I expect a similar statement could be made for domestic students at Oxford/Cambridge vs US residents studying internationally. I see that Oxford’s website reports course fees of £26,770 ($37k) to £37,510 ($52k) for international students. When you add on room + board + travel, it doesn’t sound like a big bargain over domestic options.
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My year it was being a brand manager at Clorox or P&G.
My oldest son’s Oxford college has never asked me for a dime in four years.
My second son’s US college has sent me probably a dozen fundraising emails in the course of his freshman year.
Part of the relatively recent change in attitude around FA at schools with extremely large endowments (like the Ivies) is the legislative threat to their tax-exempt status. People aren’t joking when they refer to the Harvard Corporation as the world’s largest tax-exempt hedge fund. Sen. Grassley in particular has been very vocal in the past about taxing their investment income. The whole “zero cost to attend for families under $75k in income” routine is, in my opinion, a fairly transparent attempt to keep the wolf from the door. Harvard earned 7.3% on $41 billion last year. That’s $3 billion in investment income. Yes, I know that some of that is used to subsidize their operations, but compare $200mm in FA to say $600 million that they would have owed in taxes at a 21% corporate tax rate if they were taxed like any other for-profit investment vehicle. A modest insurance premium.
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Yes! My D’s Scottish uni told us they’re not legally allowed to contact us for fundraising due to privacy laws. We have to opt-in to receive any type of fundraising or development emails from them.
Oh I didn’t mean to imply elites school FA policies are primarily altruistic. More to point out that many kids go to excellent schools for significantly below full sticker price, and definitely closer to the prices charged in the UK.
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Ironically, nowadays you are extremely unlikely to become a Truman scholar if your family is rich. They are looking for superhuman students who managed to do all of those things at once (although they explicitly say that perfect grades are not the highest priority) - just look at the profiles and how many first gen and non-traditional winners there are. I’m sure many of those students have mentors who have helped them along the way. And maybe sometimes that’s something they found at elite schools, but for most of the winners it’s not, simply because they started their involvement in service activities even before attending college.
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Sorry to disillusion you but UK alumni networks have nothing on US ones. I’d never dream of calling up someone on the basis that they went to the same college. Only in the last decade have Oxbridge colleges started keeping in touch more regularly than the traditional once a decade invite to a reunion dinner (and some still do no more than that).
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I’m a dual US and U.K. citizen, so I was a domestic applicant in both countries. Your point stands true for international students, though!
I didn’t say they had anything on US ones, I just said they can be quite well-developed. At least that’s what I’ve observed through my parents. No doubt it’s more prevalent and normalised in the US, though- I didn’t mean to frame my statement as a comparison.
This is very well put
My daughter studies at Oxford as an international. The fees for her course are £23k, room is £4.5k per year; food is cheap; travel overseas was not expensive either, especially pre-Covid. The bachelors are 3 yrs (no gen ed courses which I see as a plus, especially since she studies PPE), masters is 4 yrs total. The bachelor degree cost us $150k altogether which is half of what it would have cost had she attended Brown or Stanford where she was also admitted. This is comparable to a 4-yr UC in-state. We are full pay everywhere. I assume most 2-income families in our area are.
She went there somewhat apprehensive that she would meet rich entitled kids. This is very far from the truth. Her friends are not rich, are very mature as to money and are fully prepared to take care of their student loans once they graduate. A key difference with the US is that you do not have to pay your loans if your salary post-graduation is below a certain threshold. It’s a more egalitarian society and has stronger safety nets (the universal health coverage being one), from my point of view which is admittedly of somebody who never lived there. I am sure they have plenty of their own problems, two obvious ones being the weather and Brexit 
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