Sure. All the flagships and a lot of the minor state schools have sprinklings of these kids. They get advertised over and over, they know the university comms staff and a dean or two by first name, they justify some honors-program or grants-office staffer’s job, and you can see them walking in the door as freshmen. Pretty fast you know their story, why they’re at this school. In no way are they representative of most of the kids there, which is why they get asked to please come to dinner with donors and do this and do that. To be frank, they’re exploited.
Because I see the process up close and often wind up working with the kids like that here, I also see what doesn’t happen. The institution is not there to back them. After they graduate, the institution doesn’t care what happens: it has to find a new Rhodes or Fulbright or whatever scholar or two or six (out of the tens of thousands of undergraduates). About half the time, it seems to me, the kids will know one or two profs who’ll grab them by the shoulders and steer, and have personal networks strong enough to boost them out the door to a place worth going to. But there is no institutional support for this, and the steering may or may not last all four years. It’s professorial volunteer work that comes with no reward.
For the university, the win is not that the kid will go on to be a powerful and influential whatever and be a new node in its network. For the more-beer university, the show starts and stops with the famous scholarship or fellowship win.
The most common colleges on LinkedIn for SEC interns were as follows. Georgetown appears, but no others that I’d consider “elite” privates make the top 5. The college names seems to be more correlated with location. It suggests that attending a college near Washington DC may be particularly beneficial for obtaining government internships in Washington DC, such as at the SEC.
Georgetown
American University
University of Maryland
George Washington
University of Virginia
I’m not an expert on law clerkships, but I expect this has far more to do with law school than where you attended undergrad. Top law schools certainly do not limit acceptances to just kids who attended “elite” privates for undergrads.
There are many NEA judging panels. I selected Literary Arts Panel A 2021 as an arbitrary example. I see the following colleges for undergrad. It doesn’t exactly suggest you need to start your trajectory at an “elite” private to have a chance.
Dara Beevas – Mary Baldwin University
Rafay Khalid – Cal State Fullerton
Juan J Morales – UC Berkeley
Lynne Nugent – University of Iowa?
Peggy Shumaker – University of Arizona
Spencer Wise – Tufts University
I’d be hard pressed to find any field in which relationships made 20 years ago during undergrad are more likely to be influential than relationships made with people you have been working with during recent years. It certainly isn’t that way in my field, but I don’t claim to be working an “elite society defining” job.
Such comparisons are not meaningful unless you also consider how many applied, particularly how many well qualified students applied. Many public HSs of that size have less than 13 students in total who apply to Ivies, so it would be impossible to have 13 matriculations, even if they had a 100% acceptance rate.
Unfortunately very few “elite” private HSs publish this level of detail. I expect that a list showing that the vast majority of applicants to Ivies are rejected would harm the image that such “elite” private HSs want to project. Far better for the image is just listing the number of matriculations and minimal further detail. However, some public HSs do publish this level of detail – both selective magnets with a high concentration of great students and non-selective publics with few students who are academically qualified for Ivies.
For example, a particularly detailed report for a public HS in NYC is at https://www.roslynschools.org/cms/lib/NY02205423/Centricity/Domain/70/2019%20BOE%20Presentation.pdf . I know little about Roslyn high school, but it seems to have an average SAT scores near 1300, so I expect there is a high concentration of quality students. It also has a good number who apply to Ivies, so it follows that there should be a good number of acceptances, and there were many. The report shows the number of applications and admit rate for different Ivies and compares that to both peer HSs and the overall national rate. Some specific numbers are below. Having only 1 kid accepted to MIT doesn’t sound impressive, until you consider that only 8 kids applied. 1 in 8 is not bad for a college with a <10% overall acceptance rate among the full national/international pool.
Cornell – 13/43 accepted for 29% acceptance rate
Duke – 8/31 accepted for 26% acceptance rate
Harvard – 2/15 accepted for 13% acceptance rate
MIT – 1/8 accepted for 13% acceptance rate
@data10, I see what you’re trying to do, how you’re trying to analyze this, but you’ve got your nose pressed up against the plate glass of the restaurant and can’t smell the cooking. You’re not going to get the answers with lists from the internet. In these situations, what matters in the choice of who does what is the proximity to power in any given field, which is a matter of personal networks. Where do those networks coincide and grow from? Schools. But you’re not going to see those networks displayed in internet lists. That’s why I said that I looked up from my facebook feed and at my grad students and thought “they don’t know this conversation is going on.”
If that leaves you feeling frustrated, because how are you supposed to evaluate a claim if you don’t have access to the info, then that’s right. That’s exactly the point. You don’t have access to the info. You have to be in those networks already to have access to the info.
Once again, it’s not about “can you get a job that’ll pay comfortably”; it’s about “can you get your hand on society’s tiller.” It’s not about “can you get an internship” – internships are products now – it’s “can you get an interesting internship.”
Try this one for NEA, rather than the panel you fill out an online form to join: National Council on the Arts. Harvard, Hopkins, Northwestern, Brearley, Berkeley, Chicago, Dartmouth, Williams, etc., etc. Which panel has more power? Not hard to guess.
So I’m not going to find evidence supporting the claims. Instead you’ve just got to have faith that it’s true and ignore all evidence to the contrary because the contrary evidence applies to regulars. It’s different for the “elite society defining” type, and only the people who are already in the special elite private undergrad club know the truth and can provide evidence (for the record, I did my undergrad at Stanford).
A list of undergrad colleges is below. I do see a couple attended Ivies, which is more than the other list I checked. However, they are in the clear minority. Instead it seems like the members attended a wide variety of different types of colleges for undergrad, certainly not suggestive of needing to attend an “elite” private for undergrad to get the required special connections.
Ann Eilers – Northwest Missouri State?
Bruce Carter – Virginia Polytechnic
Aaron Dworkin – Penn State
Lee Greenwood – Scholarship to College of the Pacific, but did not attend
Deepa Gupta – University of Chicago
Paul Hodes – Dartmouth
Maria Rosario Jackson – USC
Emil J. Kang – University of Rochester
Charlotte Power Kessler – Denison
María López De León – UT El Paso
Rick Lowe – Columbus State
David “Mas” Masumoto – University of California Berkeley
Barbara Ernst Prey – Williams
Ranee Ramaswamy – University of Madras?
Tom Rothman – Brown
Olga Viso – Rollins College
You’re completely wrong on this. Scientists and mathematicians, by training, deal in facts and reasoning. Engineers are trained to solve practical problems. One of our current problems is that our educational system produces too few people who can identify facts, who are equipped to deal with the rigors of science and math, and who are trained to solve practical problems. Instead, it produces abundance of people who don’t believe in science, or at least don’t understand science, whose “critical thinking skills” are limited to criticizing “the other side”, and who don’t examine, or don’t wish to examine, the weaknesses, or even falsity, in the premises of their arguments. The system also produces a professional class of clever politicians and would-be politicians whose main skill is in manipulating other people’s opinions, taking advantage of their biases, their inability to identify facts, and their lack of true critical thinking skills.
US isn’t going to have a scientist, like Angela Merkel in Germany, to lead her country anytime soon.
I wasn’t attempting an apples-to-apples comparison to privates; I was addressing the contention that “most good, highly-ranked suburban public schools might send say no more than 3 kids (who are not URMs) to Ivies or T20s, if that.” I know firsthand that this is most certainly not the case in NY, NJ, and CT, and I’m reasonably confident it isn’t true for MA, PA, MD, VA, and CA and FL and TX and Atlanta and Denver etc etc etc either
As a former fed, I am still astounded that anyone thinks federal employment is an elite society defining job. It can be important and honorable work, but few regard it as elite.
It’s true in our town in MA. We have a very good public HS, but it isn’t Lexington or Brookline and they still send about 5-10 kids to Ivy+ colleges every year (of course a couple are always athletic recruits - others appear to be unhooked) and many more to top 30 type schools - depending on the year that would include schools like Tufts, Vanderbilt, NYU, Johns Hopkins as well some top Northeast LACs. But to be fair, our town is pretty affluent and a fair number of my friends and neighbors are Ivy type school grads themselves so there is a level of cultural awareness. Still, every year there are more disappointed students than not when it comes to these schools - even among really strong, super kids.
This assumption about public schools has been bothering me. Elite prep/private schools are not the only pipeline to top colleges. There are public schools throughout the country that have experienced counselors and robust networks to help students get into top colleges. From my daughter’s graduating class at a highly-ranked public school, 40 students (~10% of the class) went to Ivies/T20s. Most kids went to Michigan (5) followed by Cornell, Stanford, and UC Berkeley tied at second with 4. It was not an anomalous year.
ETA: In my example, I only provided the number of students who chose to attend. The actual number of students admitted per Naviance: Michigan (10), Cornell (8), Stanford (5), and UC Berkeley (12).
To accurately compare admit rates, you would need to take out the hooked kids from both schools. Prep schools are far more likely to have kids that are legacy or are skilled athletes in sports that the elites like, such as fencing.
Only in the sense that a scholarship athlete is “exploited”. A lot of kids are happy to make the trade of a free education at a lower ranked university instead of an expensive education at a higher ranked one. And there is often plenty of attention and support lavished on the kids with these full ride scholarships, especially the cohort ones.
If they go on to top grad programs afterwards then it doesn’t seem to be holding back their careers. Will they remember and support their undergrad institution later on? I don’t know, but some do (eg Tim Cook and Auburn).
I like your persuasive writing style, @bennty, I really do. But you are making the assumption that your particular anecdotal view, as thoughtful as it is, represents widespread reality.
There is a quote commonly attributed to Bloomberg, but was first said by Edwards Deming: “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” Data10 and others have provided evidence that some of your beliefs are not supported by data.
You also mention prestigious law school clerking positions, but that’s entirely determined by the law school, and law school admissions is predominantly determined by undergraduate GPA and LSAT score, not the undergraduate institution.
My D is in one of those scholarship programs. The claim that those in her cohort are exploited is simply ridiculous and without any support whatsoever. She has had more attention and opportunities than she would have had at Harvard. And no, the school doesn’t “abandon” them. Although, the suggestion that a school can even abandon a Rhodes Scholar, for example, shows a total lack of understanding. The title Rhodes Scholar opens more doors than attending an elite school ever will.
I was also thinking: If you’re talking about influence on society, honestly, the NEA just doesn’t matter than much. Economists do. So I took a look at where the Fed Board of Governors came from. They mostly went to prestigious grad schools (PhD or JD). For undergrad, they’re from (with grad school in parentheses):
Princeton (Georgetown)
UIUC (Harvard)
Columbia (Yale)
Wesleyan (Harvard)
Kansas (Washburn)
Bemidji St. (WSU)
Now, obviously, they are from an earlier generation. Is the path from non-prestigious undergrad to paths of power being closed off now? Not so much law schools, but top econ PhD programs do require a strong quantitative grounding, which a lot of undergrad econ programs don’t require. Though nothing is stopping an undergrad from seeking that out. And in that case, it may matter which public a student goes to. Many flagship publics would have their econ department filled with profs who got their PhD from top econ programs and so know what is required but some publics would not.
I would also be interested in seeing which schools the interns at top think tanks come from. That would again seem to be more relevant to longer term influence on society than the NEA.
BTW, I mentioned this earlier but no one seem to noticed: if you’re lower-middle class, yes, a lot of options (top OOS publics , schools that aren’t great at meeting need, and foreign schools other than maybe the no-tuition ones) are off the table, but a number of LACs do meet need yet aren’t as crazy difficult to get in to as the Ivies/equivalents. Though you still have to be a stellar student assuming you’re unhooked.
A pre-PhD economics student anywhere would need to take more advanced math and statistics than needed for a baseline economics major just about anywhere. But it would probably benefit such a student to be in an economics department where the economics courses use more math, versus a department where they use less math.
STEM is hardly monolithic or uniform the way people on these forums seem to write about it. Different STEM subjects have very different characteristics in terms of college curricula as well as major-related career paths. Biology, computer science, and civil engineering are quite different from each other.
The misconception that any STEM major will give you a “safe living” (presumably you mean decent job and pay prospects) seems to lead many to assume that this applies to biology (one of the most common types of STEM majors), which usually shows up as one of the majors where recent graduates have pay levels at the low end.
It is also a misconception that all STEM majors have voluminous major requirements that prevent the student from taking courses in other subjects. Indeed, the volume of major requirements for most science and math majors is often similar to that of humanities and social science majors (40-50% of the total credit needed to graduate). It is true that engineering majors typically have more voluminous major requirements, though they still have humanities and social science breadth requirements.
From any college major, one can go into law, government, arts, etc…
And the lack of quantitative understanding in many of these fields is really a big problem. Frankly, I’m not seeing the problem as being attributable to curriculum at all, but instead about curiousity and openness to ideas. Doing math, I had the narrowest possible curriculum in the UK and didn’t write a single essay from the age of 14 to 21. But I spend my life working in a very cross-functional environment (doing lots of writing and no degree-level math) and I suspect most people would consider it an elite job.