Indeed, they held the number one spot for many years. It was a prime goal of former president Boren (as well as the Davis Cup for the most United World College students) but since his departure the University has lowered its aspirations.
I agree with much of this, but I'm not so sure about the emphasis on "repression", which indicates active, malign intent. Certainly there is some of that, but it's also likely that some groups value prestigious academic credentials more than others do, and behave accordingly.
A potentially relevant paper is the Hoxby and Avery (2013) analysis of demographic differences in college application behavior. The authors separated high-achieving high school students into those from high-income households and those from low-income households. They further separated the high-achieving, low-income students into "achievement-typical" students (those who applied to selective colleges like affluent high-achieving students) and "income-typical" students (those who applied to college in an "unsophisticated" manner, like other low-income students).
Look at Table 7 on page 37 of the paper, and note the difference between white students in the high-achievement-but-low-income category and black, Hispanic, and Asian students in that same category. The difference in behavior between smart-but-poor whites and smart-but-poor Asians is particularly striking; the Asians are far more likely to gun for admission to elite universities than the whites are.
Part of the story here seems to be that white people, especially those from rural areas, are some combination of less savvy about and less obsessed with the status hierarchy associated with the Ivy League and its peers. On the individual level, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; a smart Evangelical kid from the rural South might lead a better life, when judged on his deathbed, by taking a free ride to a conservative school and staying close to home than by going to an Ivy and entering the Eastern Corridor IQ Shredder. But, on the group level, this behavior cedes control of the society to others.
Interesting points. I'd have a hard time sending a kid to the Ivy League, even if it were free. This strikes me as a fundamental tension. We need better elites, but the bugman life an elite striver has along the way, net of the uncertainty of achieving elite status, is not one I would recommend for an individual's probability-adjusted well-being. My resolution is that there are enough ambitious heartland kids who would choose this if they were more aggressively recruited and felt like they had a chance for admission with a good scholarship.
The real way to resolve this is not to get more smart rural kids into Ivies but to break the colleges’ control of the credentialing pipeline. Conservatives have long bemoaned the fact that these places are left-wing, but the problem goes well beyond that. The current system is massively inefficient and ridiculously expensive. Students spend years getting the degrees and more years getting out from under their student loan debt. The normalization of master’s degrees makes things worse. Our credentialing system is probably a significant contributor to the fertility crisis, among other things.
The new MAGA-Silicon Valley alliance is ideally positioned to attack the college cartel. Both groups contain many people who are highly skeptical about the current system and tend to value real-world demonstrations of talent.
Imagine if Peter Thiel (a famous college skeptic), Mark Zuckerberg (college dropout), Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey (homeschooled, no high school or college degree), and others allied with the Trump administration to create a program that combined a hard-to-prep aptitude test with an internship. A smart 18-year-old could opt out of college and be working at Meta, Tesla, Ford, or the CIA right away, and have a path to an adult job and salary at 19. They would be years ahead in life and debt-free.
I would apply Zuckerberg’s model. He started Facebook at Harvard and then expanded through the status hierarchy from the top down. Make the credential very difficult to get at first; require very high test scores and limit the internship opportunities to glamorous organizations. Give the participants some prestigious name like “Thiel Fellow”. Then, once there’s sufficient demand, create additional tiers associated with more modest test scores and a wider pool of job opportunities. I think this could actually work.
That might help some, but to have a widespread effect it is almost certainly necessary to drive a stake through the heart of Griggs v. Duke Power; otherwise the risk averse won't sign on.
The format of my theoretical program could be massaged enough to at least plausibly fit it into the category that colleges fit into, allowing it to use testing for admissions. Then the employers could just hire interns who are part of the program, outsourcing the selection process the way they already do with colleges.
Moreover, I suspect that Griggs (though it should be overturned) doesn't really matter as much as people think. Over the years, various elite companies like Google and Jane Street have famously given applicants the functional equivalent of IQ tests without paying any legal price. The real reason that testing isn't used more for hiring is probably that both executives (as Tom wrote) and HR find the idea distasteful.
Our valedictorian National Merit kid had a 1570 SAT and didn’t get into a single one of the top 20 schools he applied to. I think he was waitlisted at a half dozen. He’s now at a very good state school - thankfully we’re able to pay the out of state prices to send him there. both my husband and I are Ivy grads, thanks to the GenX era where your SAT score did matter at giving you a shot (we went to a poorly rated semi rural public school).
Interestingly, the girls (even with lesser scores/grades) are still getting the Ivy admissions it seems. As are others with demographics desirable to admissions offices (often without submitting SAT scores). One girl in my kid’s class was accepted to an engineering school where my kid had been waitlisted, but left the first week after deciding it wasn’t going to be good for her GPA…
Cash Flow From Operations is the single best stock screen I have found. It backs out the GAAP pseudo-money and leaves the actual, real, bankable cash.
Is the company making cash money doing what it ostensibly exists to do? And is it growing year over year at a reasonable rate for the industry in question, and perhaps the dividend yield?
What would a mediocre business rather have--an indentured servant, or a somewhat higher-paid superstar (or even just a journeyman player-above replacement-level, but not an All-Star candidate) with a good network and maybe a million or two of FU money in the bank--not enough to want to retire on, but enough to retire on in a pinch?
If you're not in the business of honest-to-God transformation--or your department isn't--you probably don't want the worries of your best assets turning in their notice because they got a better deal somewhere else, you tried something shady that didn't pass the sniff test, or they got terminally hacked off one day because of the a-hole you can't seem to fire or run off.
In some regards, you're paying for problems--if you're not playing to win.
As a Canadian I find Americans’ obsession with college status quite odd. In Canada, a more prestigious program will provide a leg up, but past an early point in your career no one really cares where you went. I once read an article about Ivy League admissions and the odd thing was that it was basically rather low level people make calls between interchangeable people based on gut instincts.
It seems to only make a big difference in truly elite careers in the Northeastern US. I suppose elite firms are impart selling social cachet, but it seems truly bizarre that a few universities have effectively gained dominance for their graduates. Perhaps some of the value lies in simply narrowing options , which is necessary in a country of 300 million people.
Alabama doesn't seem to provide "free room" when I read their offering. They are offering 4 years of dorm at regular rates, whereas some universities restrict dorms to lower years.
If you look at the asterisk on their site (linked in post), they clarify the type of room provided by the "housing scholarship." I agree it is confusingly worded.
I was in the 99.5th percentile by ACT (34) in Oklahoma and missed national merit by 3 points because I had to pee in the middle of one of the sections and couldn't finish a few questions. I also got 98th percentile on the GRE so by standardized test metrics I probably have some intellectual "talent". Not trying to brag, just giving context.
I think the problem is the Midwest is not repression of talent, but a complete lack of network, know-how, inroads into the corridors of elite schools and institutions. No one anywhere around me had any idea what I should do with my life, I had no role models or anyone who could suggest a path to follow. I received no university guidance whatsoever from anyone because I was first gen and my high school counselors were overbooked and jaded.
As a result I applied to the two universities I could think of: Harvard, and the University of Oklahoma; the latter gave me a full ride and it was 20 minutes from home so I went there, why not. I didn't know (and still don't know) much about the whole higher ed game in the US, but I certainly didn't know much about the signalling value of good name schools and how I would get trapped in a cycle of directionless mediocrity for the rest of my life. I was raised a "smart" kid with all the psychological baggage that implies and I suffer for it. I just don't know what to do with my life now.
I've gotten some okay jobs and worked in several countries, learned multiple languages, but I just don't feel I'm doing anything worthwhile professionally and don't know how to get to a point where I can.
The union did not precede the states, as one great man (according to the usual slavering suspects) so self-servingly put it.
& the “game” never precedes the “players,” either.
The players make the game, are the game, are predator & prey, fuel & lube in this clockworks “cleaning” machine … where so many have Chicago on permanent loop in the elevator, if not elevated, mind shafts of “light” between their synapses: “Does anybody really know what time it is?”
Same war of all against all, Cold Mountain, Ruby Thewes, on that chapter of the continuous “external revenue service” conflict:
There may be some rule-proving exception billionaires who are great men, but the billionaire with the most billions isn’t. Certainly isn’t.
Glenn Campbell sang, in his Rhinestone Cowboy,
There's been a load of compromisin'
On the road to my horizon
Compromised is the word, one of them, that describes the s/he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins “philosophy.”
Pathological appetite is not a philosophy, however. Neither is utilitarianism, or ends justifies means pragmatism. It’s just the jungle, via Ikea (veneers).
Not just humanimal, either.
A possum got into our pheasant coop. Appetite was murder, not calories, & it killed every bird before being dispatched in its turn.
Noble savages are said to take what they need, & leave the rest. But what about all those ignoble savages that approve of the monopoly message & don’t - can’t - disprove the rule?
I've worked with Indian coders. They only have enough skill to pretend to have skill. Companies would save more longterm hiring a White guy because the code won't have to be rewritten every 3 months due to crashes. But you have women and manginas ins power.
I have worked with Indian coders on a few occasions as outsourcers. My experience was that they were impeccably polite and eager to please, but struggled to understand the scope and specifications on a project, putting me in a revision loop that caused me to cancel the project. Later, I hired an American (specifically asking for a National Merit Scholar in the ad, and familiarity with regex, which is its own sort of IQ test) at $30 an hour 20 years ago as my first technical outsourcer. The experience was night and day, as he delivered a functional application at lower cost, and huge savings on my time reminding him of specifications. A key skill for a programmer is to make reasonable assumptions and ask good questions. The ease of working with him caused me to start new, more technical projects that I would have considered too painful or complicated for foreign outsourcers.
I believe the U. of Oklahoma does much the same as the U. of Alabama and has a lot of National Merit Scholars.
Indeed, they held the number one spot for many years. It was a prime goal of former president Boren (as well as the Davis Cup for the most United World College students) but since his departure the University has lowered its aspirations.
I agree with much of this, but I'm not so sure about the emphasis on "repression", which indicates active, malign intent. Certainly there is some of that, but it's also likely that some groups value prestigious academic credentials more than others do, and behave accordingly.
A potentially relevant paper is the Hoxby and Avery (2013) analysis of demographic differences in college application behavior. The authors separated high-achieving high school students into those from high-income households and those from low-income households. They further separated the high-achieving, low-income students into "achievement-typical" students (those who applied to selective colleges like affluent high-achieving students) and "income-typical" students (those who applied to college in an "unsophisticated" manner, like other low-income students).
Look at Table 7 on page 37 of the paper, and note the difference between white students in the high-achievement-but-low-income category and black, Hispanic, and Asian students in that same category. The difference in behavior between smart-but-poor whites and smart-but-poor Asians is particularly striking; the Asians are far more likely to gun for admission to elite universities than the whites are.
Part of the story here seems to be that white people, especially those from rural areas, are some combination of less savvy about and less obsessed with the status hierarchy associated with the Ivy League and its peers. On the individual level, this isn't necessarily a bad thing; a smart Evangelical kid from the rural South might lead a better life, when judged on his deathbed, by taking a free ride to a conservative school and staying close to home than by going to an Ivy and entering the Eastern Corridor IQ Shredder. But, on the group level, this behavior cedes control of the society to others.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2013a_hoxby.pdf
Interesting points. I'd have a hard time sending a kid to the Ivy League, even if it were free. This strikes me as a fundamental tension. We need better elites, but the bugman life an elite striver has along the way, net of the uncertainty of achieving elite status, is not one I would recommend for an individual's probability-adjusted well-being. My resolution is that there are enough ambitious heartland kids who would choose this if they were more aggressively recruited and felt like they had a chance for admission with a good scholarship.
The real way to resolve this is not to get more smart rural kids into Ivies but to break the colleges’ control of the credentialing pipeline. Conservatives have long bemoaned the fact that these places are left-wing, but the problem goes well beyond that. The current system is massively inefficient and ridiculously expensive. Students spend years getting the degrees and more years getting out from under their student loan debt. The normalization of master’s degrees makes things worse. Our credentialing system is probably a significant contributor to the fertility crisis, among other things.
The new MAGA-Silicon Valley alliance is ideally positioned to attack the college cartel. Both groups contain many people who are highly skeptical about the current system and tend to value real-world demonstrations of talent.
Imagine if Peter Thiel (a famous college skeptic), Mark Zuckerberg (college dropout), Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey (homeschooled, no high school or college degree), and others allied with the Trump administration to create a program that combined a hard-to-prep aptitude test with an internship. A smart 18-year-old could opt out of college and be working at Meta, Tesla, Ford, or the CIA right away, and have a path to an adult job and salary at 19. They would be years ahead in life and debt-free.
I would apply Zuckerberg’s model. He started Facebook at Harvard and then expanded through the status hierarchy from the top down. Make the credential very difficult to get at first; require very high test scores and limit the internship opportunities to glamorous organizations. Give the participants some prestigious name like “Thiel Fellow”. Then, once there’s sufficient demand, create additional tiers associated with more modest test scores and a wider pool of job opportunities. I think this could actually work.
That might help some, but to have a widespread effect it is almost certainly necessary to drive a stake through the heart of Griggs v. Duke Power; otherwise the risk averse won't sign on.
The format of my theoretical program could be massaged enough to at least plausibly fit it into the category that colleges fit into, allowing it to use testing for admissions. Then the employers could just hire interns who are part of the program, outsourcing the selection process the way they already do with colleges.
Moreover, I suspect that Griggs (though it should be overturned) doesn't really matter as much as people think. Over the years, various elite companies like Google and Jane Street have famously given applicants the functional equivalent of IQ tests without paying any legal price. The real reason that testing isn't used more for hiring is probably that both executives (as Tom wrote) and HR find the idea distasteful.
Our valedictorian National Merit kid had a 1570 SAT and didn’t get into a single one of the top 20 schools he applied to. I think he was waitlisted at a half dozen. He’s now at a very good state school - thankfully we’re able to pay the out of state prices to send him there. both my husband and I are Ivy grads, thanks to the GenX era where your SAT score did matter at giving you a shot (we went to a poorly rated semi rural public school).
Interestingly, the girls (even with lesser scores/grades) are still getting the Ivy admissions it seems. As are others with demographics desirable to admissions offices (often without submitting SAT scores). One girl in my kid’s class was accepted to an engineering school where my kid had been waitlisted, but left the first week after deciding it wasn’t going to be good for her GPA…
Cash Flow From Operations is the single best stock screen I have found. It backs out the GAAP pseudo-money and leaves the actual, real, bankable cash.
Is the company making cash money doing what it ostensibly exists to do? And is it growing year over year at a reasonable rate for the industry in question, and perhaps the dividend yield?
What would a mediocre business rather have--an indentured servant, or a somewhat higher-paid superstar (or even just a journeyman player-above replacement-level, but not an All-Star candidate) with a good network and maybe a million or two of FU money in the bank--not enough to want to retire on, but enough to retire on in a pinch?
If you're not in the business of honest-to-God transformation--or your department isn't--you probably don't want the worries of your best assets turning in their notice because they got a better deal somewhere else, you tried something shady that didn't pass the sniff test, or they got terminally hacked off one day because of the a-hole you can't seem to fire or run off.
In some regards, you're paying for problems--if you're not playing to win.
As a Canadian I find Americans’ obsession with college status quite odd. In Canada, a more prestigious program will provide a leg up, but past an early point in your career no one really cares where you went. I once read an article about Ivy League admissions and the odd thing was that it was basically rather low level people make calls between interchangeable people based on gut instincts.
It seems to only make a big difference in truly elite careers in the Northeastern US. I suppose elite firms are impart selling social cachet, but it seems truly bizarre that a few universities have effectively gained dominance for their graduates. Perhaps some of the value lies in simply narrowing options , which is necessary in a country of 300 million people.
Alabama doesn't seem to provide "free room" when I read their offering. They are offering 4 years of dorm at regular rates, whereas some universities restrict dorms to lower years.
If you look at the asterisk on their site (linked in post), they clarify the type of room provided by the "housing scholarship." I agree it is confusingly worded.
I was in the 99.5th percentile by ACT (34) in Oklahoma and missed national merit by 3 points because I had to pee in the middle of one of the sections and couldn't finish a few questions. I also got 98th percentile on the GRE so by standardized test metrics I probably have some intellectual "talent". Not trying to brag, just giving context.
I think the problem is the Midwest is not repression of talent, but a complete lack of network, know-how, inroads into the corridors of elite schools and institutions. No one anywhere around me had any idea what I should do with my life, I had no role models or anyone who could suggest a path to follow. I received no university guidance whatsoever from anyone because I was first gen and my high school counselors were overbooked and jaded.
As a result I applied to the two universities I could think of: Harvard, and the University of Oklahoma; the latter gave me a full ride and it was 20 minutes from home so I went there, why not. I didn't know (and still don't know) much about the whole higher ed game in the US, but I certainly didn't know much about the signalling value of good name schools and how I would get trapped in a cycle of directionless mediocrity for the rest of my life. I was raised a "smart" kid with all the psychological baggage that implies and I suffer for it. I just don't know what to do with my life now.
I've gotten some okay jobs and worked in several countries, learned multiple languages, but I just don't feel I'm doing anything worthwhile professionally and don't know how to get to a point where I can.
The union did not precede the states, as one great man (according to the usual slavering suspects) so self-servingly put it.
& the “game” never precedes the “players,” either.
The players make the game, are the game, are predator & prey, fuel & lube in this clockworks “cleaning” machine … where so many have Chicago on permanent loop in the elevator, if not elevated, mind shafts of “light” between their synapses: “Does anybody really know what time it is?”
Same war of all against all, Cold Mountain, Ruby Thewes, on that chapter of the continuous “external revenue service” conflict:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_cVZmhu0es
There may be some rule-proving exception billionaires who are great men, but the billionaire with the most billions isn’t. Certainly isn’t.
Glenn Campbell sang, in his Rhinestone Cowboy,
There's been a load of compromisin'
On the road to my horizon
Compromised is the word, one of them, that describes the s/he-who-dies-with-the-most-toys-wins “philosophy.”
Pathological appetite is not a philosophy, however. Neither is utilitarianism, or ends justifies means pragmatism. It’s just the jungle, via Ikea (veneers).
Not just humanimal, either.
A possum got into our pheasant coop. Appetite was murder, not calories, & it killed every bird before being dispatched in its turn.
Noble savages are said to take what they need, & leave the rest. But what about all those ignoble savages that approve of the monopoly message & don’t - can’t - disprove the rule?
Not that Dixie was any better:
Back with my wife in Tennessee,
When one day she called to me,
"Virgil, quick, come see,
there goes Robert E. Lee!"
Now I don't mind choppin' wood,
and I don't care if the money's no good.
Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest,
But they should never have taken the very best.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WclbiyYj5c
I've worked with Indian coders. They only have enough skill to pretend to have skill. Companies would save more longterm hiring a White guy because the code won't have to be rewritten every 3 months due to crashes. But you have women and manginas ins power.
I have worked with Indian coders on a few occasions as outsourcers. My experience was that they were impeccably polite and eager to please, but struggled to understand the scope and specifications on a project, putting me in a revision loop that caused me to cancel the project. Later, I hired an American (specifically asking for a National Merit Scholar in the ad, and familiarity with regex, which is its own sort of IQ test) at $30 an hour 20 years ago as my first technical outsourcer. The experience was night and day, as he delivered a functional application at lower cost, and huge savings on my time reminding him of specifications. A key skill for a programmer is to make reasonable assumptions and ask good questions. The ease of working with him caused me to start new, more technical projects that I would have considered too painful or complicated for foreign outsourcers.