Make education expensive enough, and only rich kids can get one. Not hugely surprising. Education used to be a lot cheaper and you got a lot more first generation graduates.
Not in the US it wasn't? Costs for higher education have tripled in the past couple decades, to say NOTHING of costs in the 80s or 90s.
Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are:
Rarely profit. But it goes towards higher salaries, larger administrations, financial aid, and various amenities that today's college-bound kids' parents demand, like comfortable dorms, gyms, etc. College in the 80s didn't look much like college today.
For many schools, the actual cost the average student pays has not changed as much as the sticker price. One reason is that some colleges discovered they could price discriminate: by charging $XXk/yr as the sticker price, they could let in some fraction of students who can afford to pay full fare, and use that money to offer financial aid to the students they want to attract but who can't pay full fare. Another reason is that basically no college competes on being less expensive, because that might imply that they're not "worth it".
Higher education was only made affordable after WW2 in the western world, and has been rising ever since then (at least in the USA). Before WW2, it was something mostly rich kids did.
As siblings note, the "historically" I'm talking about is pre-WW2.
Life in the US from 1950-2000 will one day be seen as a historical blip, not a state of being the US can ever return to. In that period, the US reaped massive profits from its position as sole industrial powerhouse for the first 20-30 years of that period (thanks to the destruction of the rest of the world's industrial capacity in WW2), and then as the world's bank for the following 20-30 years. It was a privileged position that--combined with the rise of the automobile and the opening up of cheap hinterlands for suburban development, without accounting for the externalities of course--enabled all sorts of leverage and quality of life for the working and middle classes, including massive subsidies for higher education.
Those days are over. Labor has little leverage these days, there's little exploitable land, and the middle class is more or less gone.
We could definitely decide to bring back the massive subsidies for higher ed -- after all, they're present in much of the EU. But it's not clear why one would think that heavily subsidized education would have an appreciably better effect here than it does in the EU.
What you’re seeing is an entirely different effect, which is that academic hiring focuses intensely on pedigree. Professors are drawn from the ranks of a handful of elite schools: Harvard, Yale, etc. Graduates of those schools are much more likely to be elites. For example, the vast majority of law school professors went to Harvard or Yale.
Also a lot of lifetime academics are generally insufferable. Hugely important vision of themselves, lack of knowledge of reality, and are totally useless if they had to do a job outside of their hyper-specialized area.
I see a lot of value in hard-science / math research. Don’t see a lot of value in yet another 80 page treatise on Proust that only 8 people will ever read.
Hopefully everything gets priced so high that the vast amounts of money wasted on universities will be greatly reduced.
Well some of it is used a LOT - for example all of digital technology is basically applied boolean algebra, and calculus is the base of physics. Granted, the original research for those was 200-400 years ago, but the current day applications are everywhere.
So while a new research paper on some obscure subset of point-set topology may not appear to be useful today, it is possible that in the future it will be. :)
EDIT: misread your comment as "widely used", not "widely read", my bad.
Isn't this to be expected with any similarly weighted network?
Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco.
Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perception.
Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering. It's all about what you can do, and in larger corporations, also how politically savvy you are. Most of middle and upper management (VP / SVP) also has degrees from no-name schools. If anything, they'll have degrees from worker bee / nerd schools like CMU, Caltech, and UC Berkeley, not Ivy degrees (except for Cornell, which is basically a public school). Upwardly mobile engineers are usually immigrants with high IQs who don't have connections and so have to work 60-80 hour weeks to make up for what they normally could have gotten "for free" with a more privileged upbringing.
The C-suite is a different story: The Ivy Grads are either joining their parents' companies, going into VC, or starting their own companies (YC), not working as lowly "senior" ICs at say Amazon. Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad who spent their school years partying and networking in social clubs instead of studying...
You might further split Ivy into HYPS and others (Stanford is much more like the other Ivies than Cornell). The others like Brown and Dartmouth are more like a Northwestern / U-Chicago, for people who didn't quite make the cut or for good test takers from upper middle class rather than upper class backgrounds.
UPenn and Columbia lean in the middle. Sure, Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to UPenn, but the school itself still mainly graduates "just" worker bees in finance / investment banking. Your coworkers at Google didn't go there, though.
There are always outliers at all of these schools, but by definition, they are the exception rather than the rule...
> Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad...
Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point.
My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition.
Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling that is hard to break through.
If Harvard went away, I would be VERY happy. Schools like Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 are much more meritocratic. Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible, and given the history of the early US, it's not surprising that this insular Victorian / London culture of poshness also permeated into 17th / 18th century Ivy League schools in the Puritanical US. I'm amazed at what abject conditions Eastern Europeans overcome to earn top international ranks in IOI competitive programming, for example.
> Oxford / Cambridge are also very "exclusive" in the worst way possible
I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in.
The place was non-elite enough that I never even realized the Bullingdon Club was a thing until after I left.
As you might expect though, a fairly large proportion of kids came from wealthy backgrounds. Private schools that cost way more than university tuition, that kind of thing.
Your first point seems paradoxical but I might be misunderstanding. When you said 'dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in', are you inferring that although the right to decide is owned by the dons, they are 'ordinary' so there is less selection pressure for people from powerful backgrounds?
Basically I got the impression that the Dons/profs would not like if the college master tapped them on the shoulder and said "Little Johnny's dad gave us some money, please let him into your tutorial group".
If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions.
There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.
Can confirm. Just went to open days at Oxford and Cambridge with my son. We are Americans. Both my wife and I are double ivy grads.
Totally different than the US and much more meritocratic. Steps are:
1. Be qualified to apply. In UK this means at least AAA if not more. Varies by course. US equivalent is have at least three 5s on AP and above 1450 on SAT. This is roughly equivalent to top 10% of uk graduates.
2. Take the entrance exam. Huge weed out. This really separates the grinders vs the smart kids as the tests are based on what you intend to study, but most are more intelligence based and cannot necessarily be prepped for.
3. Assuming you make it past that, you get two sets of interviews. They are testing for the ability to go toe to toe in an intellectual conversation on your subject. This is obviously biased toward a certain "type", but given the small group tutorial teaching, it is really a responsibility of the student to engage this way to provide a good experience for all. No sitting in the back of the room taking notes!
4. There are some additional crazy things like applying to specific colleges, and wildly different admit rates based on the course you choose. But the overall impression I got was that for a well prepared and smart kid, it is much more straightforward than the so called elite US schools.
> But the overall impression I got was that for a well prepared and smart kid, it is much more straightforward than the so called elite US schools.
Yes, plus you can skip applying to all the US schools if you get accepted, because you get the acceptance letter in December.
I went to a high school that sent kids to both US and UK universities, and the US ones are incredibly onerous, not to mention expensive to even apply for. Multiple teacher references, essays that are supposed to be some sort of work of art, requirements to do extracurricular stuff. I did the SATs, got the Oxford acceptance, and just dropped all the US stuff entirely.
>This really separates the grinders vs the smart kids as the tests are based on what you intend to study, but most are more intelligence based and cannot necessarily be prepped for.
Can you expand on that? I would be amazed to find tests that truly measure intelligence and where your score doesn't improve with practice.
Not sure I agree with it. I think you get a lot of Asian kids passing because they teach a lot of advanced things in their education system that are just beyond the curriculum in the West. Thus when it comes time to ask the clever questions, some kids already know the answer.
I think in general people who know the answer to something misjudge how hard it is to figure out from first principles.
The grinds that can ace the test but can't speak are weeded out by the interview part.
Just look on oxfords website for the admissions test. The TSA test for example is required on top of the math test.
Of course you can train yourself to do these better, but because they are so specific to each major, there is not a test prep industry behind them. So it is a more natural test.
There's no separate test prep industry, but private secondary schools will have extra classes for people based on what they intend to apply for. They also prep the kids for the interviews, for instance with mock sessions. That kind of thing is not available to ordinary kids. There's a wealth of Oxbridge application experience that is basically what such schools sell. I'm currently looking at them as a parent.
Isn't this what was depicted in The History Boys? The extra class for kids who wanted to get into Oxford? Can't quite remember.
I don't know if you are from US or not, but the stuff over there cannot hold a candle to what happens in the US. I'm not saying it's totally meritocratic, but compared to US system, it is WILDLY more so for high performers.
I agree on that. There's no back door in the UK system, whereas the US system seems to be a front door with 1% acceptance plus a back door with maybe 40%. Choose your door with money.
In the UK system, even if you do have privilege, you still have to do the same exercises and the same work, and impress the same person to get in.
Sorry posted to the child comment below. It can certainly improve with practice but since these are so specific to each major, there is not a test prep industry geared up behind them. (you can do it on your own though, as they post the tests and most answer keys for prior years.)
What does the entrance process for Tsinghua, IIT, and C9 look like? I'm just wondering how they are more meritocratic, do they just have less side-door admissions?
IIT is pseudo-meritocratic.
It's a very rigorous exam and the person who can spend their whole high school time studying phy, Chem and maths and who can spend the most money joining the best coaching institutions and best mentors bacially get the admission. Doesn't matter if someone has an IQ of 200 or India's best football player or coding genius unless they get the highest marks in physics chemistry in maths they aren't allowed. It's technically meritocratic but it is a really flawed system that rewards rigorous practice over skill, interest and other aspects of a student.
There's nothing "flawed" about rewarding rigorous practice over irrelevant "skills" like being a good football player or scoring well on an I.Q. test. Sure it might be nice to pick up other meaningful predictors of achievement including e.g. deep interests, but that's very hard to do reliably in any sort of high-stakes situation, and school admissions are no exception.
There are no side door admissions basically. You have to write a National level entrance exam and get the best rankings to get into the best universities and departments.
come on you can't make blanket statements like that. Plenty of my Ivy friends who took the tech path are senior ICs at big tech, startups (not founders), etc. Same as the stanford, caltech, MIT kids.. some are managers now of course.
they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a handful have the personality traits for C-suite or founding a company anyway. they're mostly just nerds who went to a top private HS and got perfect SAT scores.
Nope, I worked at two FAANG companies and with not a single Harvard or Stanford graduate. I hosted an intern from Stanford once who received a top of band return offer and rejected it for a "better option." I had one coworker from MIT who admitted he should have gone in finance instead. He later left for a prestigious hedge fund and 7 figure compensation. Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top schools in their home countries, but no network or strong family wealth here in the US. I always joked that Harvard graduates are above putting up with the semi-annual hoop jumping FAANG companies have for "performance reviews."
I'm a mid career staff engineer & manager, and like many I filter out recruiter cold emails.
Plus I wouldn't let that dissuade me from attempting to figure out how to break in if it lead to x2 FANG compensation rates consistently at the same work load.
> Most of my coworkers ended up here on H1-B visas from top schools in their home countries, but no network or strong family wealth here in the US.
That's an interesting matter on its own. Americans are jumping through 12 stage interviews at a chance for a job and getting ghosted while somehow people from other countries are quickly filling up corporations.
It's also weird that so many people with no local connections and no reason to stay in the country get important roles in tech companies, return home, and data is consistently being leaked or "hacked" through various vulnerabilities obvious to employees.
it says more about your skill that someone from 3rd world country, whose parents earn $10/mo is more skilled and smart to pass interview.
Keep in mind it is more expensive for company to hire foreigners as there are 12 hoops to bring foreigner in board, they just desperate for any talent that can do the job (at high bar though)
Nah. H1B sponsor mills are a well documented issue that the US government has been trying to handle for a while now. These organizations go as far as filing multiple applications so they can more easily push one through. [1] It's nothing to do with "skill level" but everything to do with employers pushing down wages and wanting employees that are easily churned when necessary and kept obedient with the threat of their contract and thus visa and livelihood being cut at any time.
The "Americans just aren't good enough!" excuse hasn't been bought by anybody for years now. It's boring and desperate sounding.
There's nothing wrong with hiring workers from other countries. The H1B system just promotes abuse.
"Normal people" aren't afforded the same opportunity or even half the chances in that just so happens from "being from wealthy backgrounds.". I think that's the issue.
"Nobody cares where you graduate from school in engineering."
Oh yes they do. It definitely opens doors. After that, depending on the role, it can have subtle effects. For mid-level management, right in the grinder, probably no as you say. For externally facing things, yes. They also might have more opportunities for lateral moves, into BD/Sales etc..
Regardless of school, I would be hard pressed to find someone in my engineering organization who is an extroverted native English speaker with the very high EQ needed to hack it in sales. We're all better at working with computers than people.
Yeah probably not, because those people would realize they'll make more money for less work, being in sales.
I'm aware of at least one company a friend works at in the marketing department, and works directly with salespeople, and at that company a single salesperson brings in 40% of the entire company's revenue, makes 7-figures, and non-execs in the company complain they can't get him to do anything else in the job, like provide data for presentations and the like (personally I'm of the opinion that if they're generating that much revenue for the company, the salesperson has already done their job, and C-suite seems to think so too, but I digress).
Other salespeople at that company pull in a lot less but are still difficult to get them to do other work (except attend meetings here and there), just slightly less so. They're still making good money. And that seems to be the norm at all the companies my friend has worked at.
I imagine sales is more of a grind when you're starting from the bottom, and/or for companies where the margins are much smaller, but Corp2corp salepeople in particular seem to have a pretty sweet gig.
Tech has started to absorb more and more Ivy/HYPS kids, many whom would have chosen a more traditional path (consulting/banking) before eventually going to graduate school. I guess the current pay is too good for many to pass out on - even though careers in finance and consulting will pay more, if you manage to climb all the way up.
But I guess it's the more "polished" post-MBA candidates from said schools that go on to become product managers, and eventually become executives.
What school you went to, what your 2-4 first years of work experience was like, and what business school you went to, seems to work pretty well when signaling potential and success - especially when trying to either come up with funding, or convincing some big corporation that you're the man to lead their product XYZ.
> Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of an meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco.
No. This has not been my experience working at bigcos -- the opposite is true. This isn't even hard to disprove -- just take a look at any large company (outside of those with Ivy funnels like management consulting). Just go to their websites. Many executives often did not attend Ivy league colleges.
You'll find that most US executives actually didn't go to prestigious schools. This fact surprised me when I first observed it, but it makes sense. Assuming US management is a meritocracy, those who make it to the top are those who are in some way good with people. Ivies optimize for intellect, but this often has a negative correlation with social skills.
Even in tech, the majority of executives don't have Ivy League degrees. Some of them might have MBAs from good schools, but many went to ordinary colleges. I work in tech and in my entire reporting line, there is exactly 1 Ivy league graduate. Tim Cook went to Auburn (MBA at Duke). Satya Nadella went to Manipal Institute of Technology (then UW-Milwaukee, and later an MBA at UChicago Booth).
Check Linkedin, it's been a revelation for me. Filter by company and school and you will find hundreds of Ivy League+ types as Upper Level Management. Idk why one would only look at C-suite
Given that many managers/executives are horrid when it comes to people, I think the Peter Principle explains that a lot better: People who can do (and won't get promoted because their productivity is needed where they are). People who can't will get promoted out of the way.
I think this take is too cynical. Many executives are by definition good with people -- politics included. There are negative forms of this, but there are also positive forms. I've had really good managers who could work across orgs and manage expectations and drive results. Tech ICs typically don't have this aptitude. Andy Grove's book "High Output Management" explains how good middle management ought to be, and I've experienced it first hand.
The Peter Principle is widely known and modern orgs are designed to account for it (American management is constantly evolving) -- for instance, promotions today are based on personnel already performing at the next level rather than them just showing good results at their current level.
For a person that isn’t from a wealthy background already, it’s hard to justify the path of academia when a more lucrative path has much more potential to be life changing for them and their family.
Same. The best decision I could have made was skipping 4+ years of adult daycare. When my peers were getting out of college I was already in senior positions and 6 years of experience on my resume.
My working class zip code public schooling presented a narrative that academics make low wages. Later I realize the wages of STEM PhDs in industry. I known this does not generalize among discipline but I regret not taking an academic path.
"Academics" usually means "university faculty or people working in research labs." These people tend to make low wages compared to typical industry positions. PhDs also don't tend to open too many doors in industry. At the major tech companies, they are roughly equivalent to 3-6 years of industry experience. They might make a resume more attractive, but you end up going through the same hiring process and largely working on the same stuff.
This is only applicable to a very small subset of STEM academics and is definitely not the expected career outcome for a STEM PhD.
There are indeed people with CS PhDs at Google and Microsoft whose primary job involves publishing papers rather than building applications. But that's not the norm.
i think what he meant was, pursuing a PhD opens the possibility of entering academia, and if not, the time and attainment is not wasted financially.
also, he might include that STEM professors earn higher than other academics and have many opportunities to earn high rates of consulting pay, and or spin off to found companies, etc.
It's very hard to come back to high-tier academia from a PhD in industry. Let alone becoming a professor. And clumping STEM together is always a bit silly when we're discussing such topics, not all fields are the same. The opportunity cost and ROI of a PhD in CS is going to be vastly different than one in biochemistry, for instance.
Interesting. Although US graduate students are only 53% white [1] (while the US is 57.8% white [2]) and women account for 53% of doctoral degrees [3], all 5 of the people in the generic stock photos in the article are white males, despite making up only an estimated 25% of graduates. A striking deviation from the photographic trend if one e.g. google image searches for "phd graduate".
You could go further and observe that all of the article's pictured students are graduating from Oxford, whereas the article discusses students at US universities.
But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.
This is especially true of PhD/DPhil programmes at places like Oxford: their intake is massively international, unlike their undergraduate provision which hews to (a small slice of) England.
You usually see men hanging with other men, and women with other women.
There are 2 pictures shown.
If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random, it would be completely common for both pictures to end up like the ones in the article.
> If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random
Yes. But if a Washington Post photographer went (or chose the pictures), it's vanishingly uncommon. A duckduckgo image search, limited to washingtonpost.com, of "phd graduation", "phd students", "phd graduate", "graduation", or "university students", yields almost no such pictures. Almost all are either very diverse, or entirely black.
They only find whites when it comes to "elites" "dominating".
Yes, it's true that stock photos usually have this "checkbox diversity" where the photo must contain one of each (one white, one black, one man, one woman, etc)
I wouldn't call it propaganda. It's just part of a narrative. Not saying the narrative is wrong, but if you're going to write an article you're trying to convince your readers.
These studies are lagging behind reality by about a quarter century. Academia was obviously starting to become dominated by financial elites as early as 30 years ago.
The non-lagging metric is: how many high-performing students, from non-elite backgrounds, are refusing to pursue academic vocations?
This number has been decreasing steadily since the late 80's, and this has been very well documented in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
From my own experience in academia I was surprised by how many of my peers went into academia because they were expected to do so by their parents, who were also academics. It's a smallish sample, but ~90% of the people I talked to never considered other careers paths. Their parents were academics, so it's just natural that they become one too. They already knew this ever since high school.
As someone who got into academia "by chance" this was quite a shock to me.
Not unheard for me too: it seemed for some that having both parents with PhDs, and a partner too, basically made them feel like they needed one.
Plenty going on in such a phenomenon I feel. There’s the relative directionless-ness that can plague smart people coming out of unchallenging high school environments; the often accompanying “prestige for the sake of prestige” logic that you can get in middle-upper class culture, and, IMO, the inflated value and prestige of actually having a PhD in the modern (ie production-line) education system. A healthy dose of cynicism about the corporate world is often involved too I’d say.
I personally find it unfortunate how classist and stupid Grad school would feel at times.
I wonder if that will maintain going forward. All the doctors I am business partners/friends with advise their kids to go into commercial real estate/tech/law/finance/engineering.
They say declining pay and difficulties negotiating with bigger players such as governments and larger and larger healthcare employers in combination with the bad quality of life at work no longer make the costs of becoming a doctor worth it.
That was me, 20 years ago. Going to grad school after college was just automatically assumed, like going to college after high school. And why not? My parents had made a nice life for themselves, going from farms to a secure upper-middle-class existence. Seemed like a relatively low-stress occupation that provided a lot of intellectual variety.
Of course, the level of competition changed dramatically between their generation and mine. Then you could go directly from grad school to a tenure-track position and generally expect lifetime employment. Now, in the sciences, you're expected to live a nomadic life as you go from postdoc to postdoc, making less than $50k, perhaps eventually landing that coveted tenure-track. In the humanities it's even worse, where you work adjunct jobs that pay less than minimum wage.
It's no surprise that people with family money are most likely to win these contests of endurance. If you need to earn your own money, it's simply irrational to persist in the academic rat race.
Higher education is the most socially acceptable form of capitalism. You invest in large upfront costs with the hopes that the multipliers of your capital will make it all worth it. Here, capital includes skills, knowledge, relationships, and human networks.
"Intellectual upbringing" is huge: correctly pronouncing the shibboleths, hearing all of the dog-whistles, yet never whistling the wrong one. Saying the right thing, but in the wrong way, has ended many an academic career.
Ex-wife is an English professor. Department-wide "purges" were not unheard of. She was spared, though this was probably because she was a lowly adjunct.
> In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.
> This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.
So % of parents with college degree increased by 3.5x (from 4% to 14%) and % of students coming from parents with college degree increased 3.3x (from 1/5 to 2/3). That more than explains it, doesn't it?
Also there should be a high correlation between kids being college-material and parents being college-material. Whether you believe in nature (genetics) or nurture (good parenting, high standards, role model, access to education, etc), or a mix of both, either way, you should not expect the % of college students from graduate families to match the % of graduate families in the country. So not sure what point the article makes.
I had the same thoughts. The country is now more educated than it was before, and they want to paint that as a bad thing. And point some fingers at the “elite,” Which is now people who’s parents have a college degree I guess.
And realistically we are at point where having a degree doesn't make you an "elite" anymore. Not necessarily even having PhD... The value of degrees has also inflated.
If a graduate degree is not in some sense an elite marker something is messed up. A graduate degree should guarantee the holder could be admitted into a decent doctoral programme. Obviously this isn’t true, education schools exist, but it should be. If graduate school isn’t for an educational elite the material should be in a Bachelor’s.
Well, most of the press is desperate to find a new big bad to generate clicks… and the in the case of the Washington Post to make us forget that they were the ones that gave a column to Amber Heard
This article’s point is that economist graduates now are more likely to have come from a parent who is also an economics grad than compared to other points in time and against other graduate programs.
It doesn't scale like that, though. If the % of people with college degrees had increased by 6x, to 24%, would you expect 6/5 of students to have parents with a college degree?
Not exactly like that, but close. As % of people with college degrees approaches 100%, all students will have parents with a college degree, so it will approach 5/5. The logic in the parent comment still stands.
What you care about is how much more likely a person with parents who had degrees is to have a degree over one who doesn't.
In 1970 4% of people had degrees and 20% of degree holders had parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 5 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.
In 2020 14% of people have degrees and 66% of degree holders have parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 4.7 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.
Which is the opposite of what the article assumes.
% of degree holders as a population vs % parents of people with degrees is misleading - trend for getting degrees as a % of population is increasing and parents with degrees is lagging by around 10-20 years (ie. it will be 10-20 years before all the people that have degrees now can have children old enough to attain a degree).
So even if this probability reduces to 4 times more as likely, the % of population with degrees keeps increasing you'll see the pattern article is describing.
> That means that children of degree holders got 4.7 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.
That doesn't follow at all? You can't just divide the two percentages and get that conclusion?
In 2020 children of degree holders got twice as many degrees as children from non-degree holders; 66 vs 34. In 1970 children of degree holders got 1/4 as many degrees as children of non-degree holders; 20 vs 80.
>If you put it in absolute numbers. In 1970 among 1000 people 40 had degrees and of those 40 20% so 8 people had parents with degrees. On the other side you have 32 degree holders to 960 non degree holder parents, so just 3.3% of their kids got degrees.
>In 2020 among 1000 people 200 had degrees and of those 200 66% so 132 people had parents with degrees. On the other side you have 68 degree holders to 800 non degree holder parents, so just 8.5% of their kids got degrees.
You're confusing the total number of people who have degrees with new graduates. The only thing we can calculate with the numbers given is the ratio of new graduates who have parents with degrees to those who have parents without degrees.
> You're confusing the total number of people who have degrees with new graduates.
Yes you're right. The original data said new graduates. I got sidetracked by the formulation in your comment. I removed the false calculation.
> The only thing we can calculate with the numbers given is the ratio of new graduates who have parents with degrees to those who have parents without degrees.
Yea that ratio is 2 and 1/4 respectively? I don't even know how to put in words what we get by dividing the percentage of new grads with degree holding parents by the percentage of degree holders with college age children among the general population. Nothing useful?
It doesn't work like that because you need to include the rates of people who have a degree and whos parent's don't.
CD = Child has a degree
PD = Parent has a degree
Your rates would be calculated with P(CD|PD)/P(CD|notPD) = [4x20/(4x80+96A)]/[4x80/(4x80+96(100-A))]
where A = Probability of parent having a degree and child not having degree
This is wrong. By this logic, "25% of people have degrees and 100% of degree holders have parents with degrees" is better than the 4%/20%, because it's only 4 times instead of 5 times. One of the better methods would be to calculate the "Bayes factor"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_factor) for estimating possibility of holding degree given the evidence of "parents holding degree". In this case, we need to know the parents degree percentage for both people in 1970 and 2020.
- If 4% of parents have degrees, something like 7% of the next generation has at least one parent with a degree. Because children have two parents, and only one of those two parents needs to have a degree. So the correct number to compare 20% against is ~7%, not 4%.
- Suppose a child of a degree-holder is 3 times as likely to become an economics PhD as a child of no degree-holders. Then, if 7% of children have a degree-holding parent, you would expect (7 * 3) / (7 * 3 + 93) = 21 / 114 = ~18.4% of economics PhDs to have a degree-holding parent, not 21%. If 25% of children have a degree-holding parent, you'd expect (25 * 3) / (25 * 3 + 75) = 75 / 150 = 50% of economics PhDs to have a degree-holding parent, not 75%.
Eyeballing the last few numbers, it does look like the value of having a degree-holding parent may have increased significantly, from a ~3.3x multiplier to almost 6x. But the error bars on this back-of-the-napkin analysis are pretty wide.
> If 4% of parents have degrees, something like 7% of the next generation has at least one parent with a degree.
Are you presuming marriage and degree-holding are independent variables? Although I presume there are fewer female degree holders, so perhaps it makes little difference.
“Something like 7%” is noticeably less than twice 4%, so no, I didn’t make that assumption. (I also explicitly stated that this was a back-of-the-napkin-quality analysis.)
It is noticeably closer to 8% than to 4% though. 7% would imply graduates exhibit a rather strong preference for marrying non-graduates over other graduates, which I find hard to believe.
At a time when only 4% of the population had graduate degrees, if 25% of married grad-degree-holders were married to another grad-degree-holder, that would constitute a large preference in favor of other graduates.
For simplicity let’s assume a static equilibrium (i.e. the rate of degree holders doesn’t change across cohorts and people don’t marry outside of their class).
Obviously in such case the probability to get a degree if your parents have a degree are 20% (in 1970) and 66% (in 2020).
Now let’s calculate the probabilities to get a degree if your parents don’t have a degree:
1970: 0.04*0.8/0.96 = 3.33%
2020: 0.14*0.34/0.86 = 5.53%
Even a “whooping” 1.7 increase doesn’t make much of a difference.
The 1970 stats are just saying that of the 4% of people who held a degree, 20% had parents who also had a degree (the 20% is a subset of the 4%, the 2 numbers are not directly comparable). This in fact means that graduates-with-degreed-parents were rarer than graduates without.
This situation has changed when we look at 2020. The overall number of degree holders is still relatively low compared to overall population (14%) but of this number a full 2/3rds now have degreed parents. The situation within this group has reversed.
I guess like plenty of bounded processes in nature, this is likely a sigmoid-ish function where close to zero you can approximate the function linearly. Yet yeah, there is some error.
It's an oversimplification of course, but let's try another oversimplification just for argument's sake and to highlight the mechanism.
Let's say you are born without parents, and your parents get picked at random once you enter university (a completely fair system in that there is no bias involved).
If 4% of all "available" parents have a degree, your chance that you'll get at least one of those "assigned" to you is 7.84% (1 - ((1 - 0.04)^2)).
If 14% of all parents have one, this probability rises to 26.04% (1 - ((1 - 0.14)^2)).
I think your analysis mixes up college degrees and graduate degrees. 'College degree' refers to a 4-year BA/BS, whereas 'graduate degree' typically refers to a PhD, Master's degree, or professional degree (JD/MD/MBA).
I'm just saying that to people outside the US, the article is unclear because the words mean different things in different countries, which could affect some commenters.
Disclaimer: I only know what we call degrees in NZ so I am just trying to say why people from different countries could be confused. And this comment probably is confused itself, sorry.
In the UK you do GCSEs about age 16, A-Levels about age 18 (there are some vocational certificates too), both while typically living at home.
You then typically go away for a Bachelor degree which lasts 3-4 years and gives you a BSc, BA or similar. After that you might do a Masters degree which would be 1 year (full time) which gives you an MSc/MA, then you'd start a doctorate which takes several years before getting a PhD
At 16 people leave that track and do formal qualifications in more vocational areas (bricklaying, farming, etc), at 18 people who didn't do vocational training from 16 may leave, a gap year is quite popular at that point, where you have a year off and travel the world.
Most people who do BA/BSc level courses will finish after graduation, typically age 21-23 (depending on gap year and length of course). Some stay direct on, plenty of people do Masters remotely part time later in their careers.
Yeah GP seems to be missing something. PhD programs at top schools are somewhat hereditary at this point. It’s so competitive and there’s too much stuff to just know how to do; spending time with a family member who’s done it before is a huge leg up vs. figuring it out on your own.
It's also an extremely stupid thing to do financially, in almost every case. There are intangible benefits to it, but you need someone coaching you on them in order to accept the choice to actually halve (or more) your income. (Take it from a 2nd generation PhD who has halved his salary being a professor vs. working in industry.)
> Also there should be a high correlation between kids being college-material and parents being college-material. Whether you believe in nature (genetics) or nurture (good parenting, high standards, role model, access to education, etc), or a mix of both, either way, you should not expect the % of college students from graduate families to match the % of graduate families in the country. So not sure what point the article makes
Just because something can easily be explained using logic doesn't mean that it's outcomes can't be negative. Perhaps this indicates that our society is further stratifying into different classes and upward mobility is being reduced for a portion of the population which I think most people would agree is a bad thing
I'm not sure it suggests that society is stratifying, though. People didn't go to college nearly so much prior to the 70s. Once college became ubiquitous, I would expect that the number of people who's parents went to college could have to go up no matter what. ie, there is a smaller and smaller pool of people who's parents did not go to college since the 1970s. I'm not even suggesting that society is not stratifying; I just don't think this is proof of it.
"caste", the word you are looking for is "caste". It's not just a difference in incomes, it's a closed system for reproduction (college educated often meet their future spouse in college, and even if not are rarely willing to marry non-college educated). Closed system for reproduction plus inheritance (genetic and cultural both) is the predecessor to castes, given a few more generations of this kind of separation.
> So % of parents with college degree increased by 3.5x (from 4% to 14%) and % of students coming from parents with college degree increased 3.3x (from 1/5 to 2/3). That more than explains it, doesn't it?
Just wait until percentage of parent with a degree reaches 25%. Then you'll see 120% of students having a parent with a degree. Hope that your explanation that "everything is normal" will still hold then.
Elite schools want people from the power class. A lot of this is explicitly baked into admissions. Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.). This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.
There is some amount of meritocratic admissions as well, but you can't look at this as an accident.
And all of this contributes to extremely low intellectual diversity at Ivy Leagues. I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Harvard students and it is consistently true that they are always unremarkable individuals. These schools simply breed a managerial class that is capable of grinding hard and following orders.
Less popular but still hardcore places like Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, some state schools like Ohio State, UMich come to mind. Just stay away from woke ivy league
- Clever financial schemes and complex conflicts-of-interest
- Incredible salesmanship relative to the amount of substance
- ... and so on.
I've seen criminal activity there too (which I can't elaborate on), but I suspect the Institute is waiting for an Enron-style collapse. It will be a soft landing. The endowment is obscene at this point; the Institute can weather a lot.
I’ve suspected this. There was always some seed corn of this type at MIT, even in the old days. I got SB, 1968-72. Hacker was a new word, and nerd was often spelled with a “u.” It would have been unthinkable to try to prosecute Jonathan Swartz then.
>Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems.
Computer Science used to be for nerds that were into neat tech problems. Now it's just seen the same as business/law/finance/whatever. And accordingly, we now have a deluge of CS graduates that want nothing to do with tech and simply move into management as fast as possible.
I would agree that high-value donors definitely access a side-door. I know of one university that had an admissions officer who dealt with children of famous people and big donors.
But I think that children of faculty and legacies are not as clear-cut a case. For example, it takes a lot of skill and hard work (and luck) to become a faculty member at Harvard. If you are still there when your kids are college-aged, you are very likely tenured. It would not at all be surprising if your children were significantly above-average in terms of academic achievement. This would be the result of your intelligence, drive, mate selection, and parenting. The fact that your kids are much more likely to get into Harvard (probably around 40%, versus 4%) is due in large part to these facts. The admissions office may put a thumb on the scale, but it's undoubtedly the case that the average faculty child applicant has higher qualifications than the average Harvard applicant.
These same arguments apply to legacy admits, but to a much lesser degree. Harvard did not used to be much of an academic/intellectual filter, but since the 90s or so it was very difficult to get in. If you are applying now and your parents went there, there's a good chance that the hard work and skill that got them in was passed down to you, by nature or nurture.
I don't disagree with you entirely, but I do disagree with the last sentence that frames 'meritocratic' admissions as distinct from children of legacy and faculty who are admitted at higher rates than the average applicant.
However, Harvard admissions keeps a special list of ALDC students and admits from that list. It's not that there are no standards, but the standards are much, much lower.
Is this true for children of faculty? I realize it is certainly true for the A (athletes) and D (donors' kids). Are there any sources that break the standards/cutoffs out by subgroup? These are very different groups of applicants, and I would be surprised if they were all subject to the same processes.
Or, maybe they don't anymore. But I bet that historically, there must have been some baked-in probability of how much a student will potentially give back in the future.
Not sure how that correlates with old vs new money. But coming from old money has some clear advantages, like knowing how to play the game.
(I'm fairly sure at least business schools judge applicants on their potential power and influence, in the future.)
What you say is true for undergraduate admission but unless you’re from an URM that’s not how graduate admission works. They admit people they think will make excellent researchers, or that they think are capable of graduating, for URMs. Law school, need school and business school may pay more attention to those kinds of concerns but I’m not aware of e.g. Yale Law having legacy preferences.
> Over 40% of white students at Harvard are side-door admissions (legacy, donors, children of faculty, etc.).
I'm sure it's over 40%. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 70. There are a lot of side doors.
My information is dated, but as of circa-2008, the Ivies were including ZIP code and paternal (but not maternal) profession in their predictive modeling. The interviews (which are evaluative, even when people say they're not) are also driven more by class markers than academic factors.
> This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.
This. Which is why I get so angry about right-wing populism. Yes, DEI initiatives mostly come from a place of insincerity. Corporates care about more about making the elite look more palatable than changing how it actually governs, and the minorities being accepted into the outer fringes of the (still inbred at heart) corporate elite will be discarded the minute they are no longer needed. But, nevertheless, the causes (racial, social, and gender justice) from which "wokeness" sprung are still quite laudable and necessary. The fact that we've allowed insincere corporate assholes to carry a banner on these issues is a travesty... because, while they don't know it, a lot of the right-ish populists are motivated by justified anger at the corporate system... and for us on the left to say that they're actually motivated by "anti-woke" racism does no good for anyone.
Thank you for this. I’ve tried explaining this to many of my peers and family but even now, this viewpoint is considered bigoted by many, at least in major metro areas on the west coast. I think part of the problem is people are responding to the messenger (the right) rather than the message.
It's 43%. You can do a web search. It came up in legal discovery for a perfectly reasonable discrimination law suit.
It distorts things a lot.
* Coveted non-ALDC slots are that much more limited and exclusive. Harvard looks harder to get into.
* Since close to half of the white slots are pre-stuffed, that makes the remaining ones that much harder to get into. That, in turn, leads to extreme affirmative action and no slots for Asians.
It's almost as if the move away from merit-based acceptance (purely driven by test scores) in the name of equity has led to increased nepotism. Who could have saw that coming?
This makes sense as graduate school gets more and more competitive. Getting a tenure track position nowadays often requires being among the best students of a top graduate program. Even just getting into a PhD program can be difficult depending on the subject.
If your parents have graduate degrees or are professors its likely that graduate school was on your radar much earlier in life. You probably had more time to consider what steps you'd need to take to get there. You're also probably more likely to be interested in graduate school at all, since many people don't even view it as an option for themselves at all.
> People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia
Even if your system was pure Meritocracy that'd make 16th century Anglos proud, you'd still expect it to eventually come to this (smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids)
I can't believe this comment hasn't been downvoted into oblivion, but I tend to agree. It's a markov model. Educated people care about educating their children. Uneducated either a) want their kid to be the first to reach higher education (but struggle to do so or b) don't value education.
Pretty rare to find a well educated person who places no value on education. Guys like Peter Thiel (educated, but promote non-traditional routes) are outliers on that spectrum, in my experience.
Parents also provide pretty bad advice if they don’t have experience in your path. My parents aren’t really uneducated, but they didn’t go to 4 year schools, and so I was pretty much on my own from high school on in figuring out how to go about getting into university and such. I got lucky, but I always feel like I could have done better with some better advice.
Millennials who entered college in 2010-2015 -- prior to the deep learning era -- are more subject to placing less value on education. Attention was turned to business, not education.
While this is a very inflamed area of discussion, there's a considerable portion of right-wing politicians - even some with degrees from prestigious school - that are becoming more and more hostile against education.
It is current day anti-intellectualism. Nothing new, but unfortunately not dead either.
Education in the broadest sense isn’t all positive. It comes at a cost of time and money. There are certainly institutions and endeavors that might not have a yield on the time and money spent. For profit colleges capitalizing on student loans are not a good thing for society.
Downvoted because 16th century Britain was anything but a Meritocracy, and throwing around cliches about demographics and history lowers the value of a discussion
Let's play it forward where in some alternate reality we were able to reset the current "inequity" and give lots more people from non-elite backgrounds a good shot at proving their capabilities. Or even have that as an ongoing policy in a very fair way. ("Fair" being the problematic word which will constantly be debated.)
Do you imagine that a new elite of some new type of class would not emerge? Would that new elite be more acceptable?
Is the problem that we just don't like our current kind of elite? That it doesn't provide for "fair" resetting of the system periodically? (or within each generation) Does it unfairly give children of the elite access to things they wouldn't otherwise be qualified for, compared to some other better system? What is that system? Some kind of setup where every kid gets to have equal access to showing his/her value -- yet you don't like having tests to do that?
I am not against the idea of an elite class. There will always emerge people who succeed and pass on their success. The question is, what is the outcome we're trying to achieve?
Since elite classes are probably inevitable without significantly reengineering the human condition, we at least want elite social structures that...
1. Do not stifle the well-being of lower classes
2. Allow upwards mobility into the elite class from lower classes
Today's elite caste fails both criteria: the current elites have architected the US, if not the world, to the detriment of the working class. Upwards mobility is very low - which drives resentment and distrust. The elite tends to select for its children moreso than any hypothetical notion of "merit", which gives the feeling that they are less "the best our country has to offer" and more "space aliens that happen to run everything".
would a new elite emerge? Probably, if there are certain traits which tend to predict success in a given endeavor, the new elite would tend to have those traits.
But one would hope for an elite rather like the Navy SEALs, where selection is based on the ability to handle difficult conditions, not one where selection is based on being born to the right family.
Yes, there is evidence that intelligence is at least partially hereditary, so if we assume intelligence is correlated with academic success, one would expect children of academic successes to have a slightly higher chance of academic success. Similarly, if we assume that height is correlated with success in basketball, since height is partially genetic we should expect children of basketball successes to have a slightly higher chance of success in basketball.
Still, I think an elite based on "fair" selection in the form of some set of hard-to-game test (for an unfeasible example, give everyone who wants to apply to a PhD program a 3-6 month mini-research internship, select the best ones and ignore all other criteria) would create a society where the people in charge tend to make better decisions/increase the global utility function more/produce better research in the case of academia than one where it's just rich kids aping their parents.
It's interesting that it starts off talking about elite backgrounds by discussing graduate degrees, and only later talks about wealth as an influence.
Wealth seems like such a huge factor in who is successful in this country. Whereas I know quite a few people with college degrees, even graduate degrees, that aren't using that knowledge in their work.
Going into academia is usually not the best way to maximize your financial earning potential.
So usually people who go into academia value pursuit of knowledge over money.
Academics tend to raise children with those values.
It's also well known that connections are extremely important for academic positions, especially so in humanities academia where TT positions are so rare and hyper competitive. The name appeal of the Ivy's can have huge sway, and it leads to a flattening of intellectual diversity in scholarship as whole fields are shaped by certain "schools" or movements that are more often just former fellow students mutually citing each other and their former supervisors. A lot of brilliant research gets passed over because it's not coming from the right school.
Most of the people I know that get into academia do it because traditional work sounds awful to them but they're really good at school, so they stick with what they know. My ex got a PhD just so she didn't have to work for 5 years in a traditional office style job in finance.
Many big tech companies are indeed led by people from Worker Bee schools (Midwestern state schools, SEC, ACC, etc.) Except for Google, famously founded by Stanford students. Or Microsoft & Facebook: Harvard dropouts.
It's quite a different story when you get to the people who really consider themselves Elite: big consulting firms, white shoe law firms, large media companies, and top echelons of the government. For those people, an Ivy League degree or equivalent is money, if not mandatory.
I think, in addition to the percentage of incoming students who are historically marginalized, those schools should track "percentage of students whose parents did NOT go to college." If they really cared about providing opportunity for upward mobility, those are the people they'd go after.
Most colleges actually do track this metric - generally it's reported as "first-generation students." (Generally defined as parents without a four-year degree, not parents with zero college education, but same concept.) Here's Harvard's press release for the class of 2026, saying "Students who will be in the first generation of their family to graduate from a four-year college or the equivalent represent 20.3 percent of this year’s admitted class."
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/03/harvard-to-ex...
This is true, but also doesn't conflict in any way with the 20% first-generation statistic. After all, the corollary of "20% first-generation" is that the vast majority of Harvard students do have one or more parents with a college degree.
If anything, I think this just goes to show again how much of a scam higher education is. The demographic of those seeking a better education wouldn't have changed as much if the availability of those services hadn't been made artificially scarce. I think we have a combination of greedy businesses practices by university administrations and the weird culture of ivy league worship to thank for this.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadYour claim is not just cause-and-effect, it's historical fact too.
Note that I already knew this, having a free ride thanks to the U.S. Pell Grants, however I DID to a basic google search. Among many other sources, this one is eye opening. Curious as to what your thoughts are:
https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-ongoi...
In case you think I'm shilling a link (I'm not, first i've seen of this), here is another:
https://res.cloudinary.com/value-penguin/image/upload/c_limi...
and one more: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-education/
Even being at the edge of a boomer and a millennial, I particularly love that last link.
For many schools, the actual cost the average student pays has not changed as much as the sticker price. One reason is that some colleges discovered they could price discriminate: by charging $XXk/yr as the sticker price, they could let in some fraction of students who can afford to pay full fare, and use that money to offer financial aid to the students they want to attract but who can't pay full fare. Another reason is that basically no college competes on being less expensive, because that might imply that they're not "worth it".
Life in the US from 1950-2000 will one day be seen as a historical blip, not a state of being the US can ever return to. In that period, the US reaped massive profits from its position as sole industrial powerhouse for the first 20-30 years of that period (thanks to the destruction of the rest of the world's industrial capacity in WW2), and then as the world's bank for the following 20-30 years. It was a privileged position that--combined with the rise of the automobile and the opening up of cheap hinterlands for suburban development, without accounting for the externalities of course--enabled all sorts of leverage and quality of life for the working and middle classes, including massive subsidies for higher education.
Those days are over. Labor has little leverage these days, there's little exploitable land, and the middle class is more or less gone.
We could definitely decide to bring back the massive subsidies for higher ed -- after all, they're present in much of the EU. But it's not clear why one would think that heavily subsidized education would have an appreciably better effect here than it does in the EU.
What you’re seeing is an entirely different effect, which is that academic hiring focuses intensely on pedigree. Professors are drawn from the ranks of a handful of elite schools: Harvard, Yale, etc. Graduates of those schools are much more likely to be elites. For example, the vast majority of law school professors went to Harvard or Yale.
I see a lot of value in hard-science / math research. Don’t see a lot of value in yet another 80 page treatise on Proust that only 8 people will ever read.
Hopefully everything gets priced so high that the vast amounts of money wasted on universities will be greatly reduced.
So while a new research paper on some obscure subset of point-set topology may not appear to be useful today, it is possible that in the future it will be. :)
EDIT: misread your comment as "widely used", not "widely read", my bad.
But actual education and attainment of knowledge is cheaper than ever. Just YouTube alone is a massive driving factor. Or Kahn Academy.
But to benefit from things like these, you have to have a culture that values education and actively seeks it out.
Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco.
Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perception.
The C-suite is a different story: The Ivy Grads are either joining their parents' companies, going into VC, or starting their own companies (YC), not working as lowly "senior" ICs at say Amazon. Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad who spent their school years partying and networking in social clubs instead of studying...
You might further split Ivy into HYPS and others (Stanford is much more like the other Ivies than Cornell). The others like Brown and Dartmouth are more like a Northwestern / U-Chicago, for people who didn't quite make the cut or for good test takers from upper middle class rather than upper class backgrounds.
UPenn and Columbia lean in the middle. Sure, Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to UPenn, but the school itself still mainly graduates "just" worker bees in finance / investment banking. Your coworkers at Google didn't go there, though.
There are always outliers at all of these schools, but by definition, they are the exception rather than the rule...
Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point.
My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition.
Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling that is hard to break through.
I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in.
The place was non-elite enough that I never even realized the Bullingdon Club was a thing until after I left.
As you might expect though, a fairly large proportion of kids came from wealthy backgrounds. Private schools that cost way more than university tuition, that kind of thing.
If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions.
There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.
Totally different than the US and much more meritocratic. Steps are:
1. Be qualified to apply. In UK this means at least AAA if not more. Varies by course. US equivalent is have at least three 5s on AP and above 1450 on SAT. This is roughly equivalent to top 10% of uk graduates.
2. Take the entrance exam. Huge weed out. This really separates the grinders vs the smart kids as the tests are based on what you intend to study, but most are more intelligence based and cannot necessarily be prepped for.
3. Assuming you make it past that, you get two sets of interviews. They are testing for the ability to go toe to toe in an intellectual conversation on your subject. This is obviously biased toward a certain "type", but given the small group tutorial teaching, it is really a responsibility of the student to engage this way to provide a good experience for all. No sitting in the back of the room taking notes!
4. There are some additional crazy things like applying to specific colleges, and wildly different admit rates based on the course you choose. But the overall impression I got was that for a well prepared and smart kid, it is much more straightforward than the so called elite US schools.
Yes, plus you can skip applying to all the US schools if you get accepted, because you get the acceptance letter in December.
I went to a high school that sent kids to both US and UK universities, and the US ones are incredibly onerous, not to mention expensive to even apply for. Multiple teacher references, essays that are supposed to be some sort of work of art, requirements to do extracurricular stuff. I did the SATs, got the Oxford acceptance, and just dropped all the US stuff entirely.
Can you expand on that? I would be amazed to find tests that truly measure intelligence and where your score doesn't improve with practice.
I think in general people who know the answer to something misjudge how hard it is to figure out from first principles.
Just look on oxfords website for the admissions test. The TSA test for example is required on top of the math test.
Of course you can train yourself to do these better, but because they are so specific to each major, there is not a test prep industry behind them. So it is a more natural test.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
Isn't this what was depicted in The History Boys? The extra class for kids who wanted to get into Oxford? Can't quite remember.
In the UK system, even if you do have privilege, you still have to do the same exercises and the same work, and impress the same person to get in.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a handful have the personality traits for C-suite or founding a company anyway. they're mostly just nerds who went to a top private HS and got perfect SAT scores.
Plus I wouldn't let that dissuade me from attempting to figure out how to break in if it lead to x2 FANG compensation rates consistently at the same work load.
That's an interesting matter on its own. Americans are jumping through 12 stage interviews at a chance for a job and getting ghosted while somehow people from other countries are quickly filling up corporations.
It's also weird that so many people with no local connections and no reason to stay in the country get important roles in tech companies, return home, and data is consistently being leaked or "hacked" through various vulnerabilities obvious to employees.
Keep in mind it is more expensive for company to hire foreigners as there are 12 hoops to bring foreigner in board, they just desperate for any talent that can do the job (at high bar though)
The "Americans just aren't good enough!" excuse hasn't been bought by anybody for years now. It's boring and desperate sounding.
There's nothing wrong with hiring workers from other countries. The H1B system just promotes abuse.
[1] https://content.techgig.com/us-govt-to-end-h1b-visa-abuse-he...
Oh yes they do. It definitely opens doors. After that, depending on the role, it can have subtle effects. For mid-level management, right in the grinder, probably no as you say. For externally facing things, yes. They also might have more opportunities for lateral moves, into BD/Sales etc..
I'm aware of at least one company a friend works at in the marketing department, and works directly with salespeople, and at that company a single salesperson brings in 40% of the entire company's revenue, makes 7-figures, and non-execs in the company complain they can't get him to do anything else in the job, like provide data for presentations and the like (personally I'm of the opinion that if they're generating that much revenue for the company, the salesperson has already done their job, and C-suite seems to think so too, but I digress).
Other salespeople at that company pull in a lot less but are still difficult to get them to do other work (except attend meetings here and there), just slightly less so. They're still making good money. And that seems to be the norm at all the companies my friend has worked at.
I imagine sales is more of a grind when you're starting from the bottom, and/or for companies where the margins are much smaller, but Corp2corp salepeople in particular seem to have a pretty sweet gig.
I have witnessed numerous times hiring managers that would request that HR only sends them resumes from 1-2 target schools, specified by name.
But I guess it's the more "polished" post-MBA candidates from said schools that go on to become product managers, and eventually become executives.
What school you went to, what your 2-4 first years of work experience was like, and what business school you went to, seems to work pretty well when signaling potential and success - especially when trying to either come up with funding, or convincing some big corporation that you're the man to lead their product XYZ.
That's weird, because all those schools you mentioned are ivy leagues in the comparative sense.
No. This has not been my experience working at bigcos -- the opposite is true. This isn't even hard to disprove -- just take a look at any large company (outside of those with Ivy funnels like management consulting). Just go to their websites. Many executives often did not attend Ivy league colleges.
You'll find that most US executives actually didn't go to prestigious schools. This fact surprised me when I first observed it, but it makes sense. Assuming US management is a meritocracy, those who make it to the top are those who are in some way good with people. Ivies optimize for intellect, but this often has a negative correlation with social skills.
Alphabet - Sundar Pichai (IIT, Stanford, Wharton)
Amazon - Jeff Bezos (Princeton)
Apple - Tim Cook (Auburn, Duke)
Microsoft - Satya Nadella (MIT Manipal, UW–Milwaukee, UChicago)
Meta - Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard - dropped out)
Tesla - Eleon Musk (UPenn / Wharton, Stanford - dropped out)
Nvidia - Jensen Huang (Oregon State, Stanford)
Broadcom - Hock E. Tan (MIT, Harvard)
Oracle - Safra A. Catz (UPenn)
Adobe - Shantanu Narayen (Osmania University, Bowling Green State University, University of California, Berkeley)
Cisco - Chuck Robbins (UNC)
The Peter Principle is widely known and modern orgs are designed to account for it (American management is constantly evolving) -- for instance, promotions today are based on personnel already performing at the next level rather than them just showing good results at their current level.
The undergrad curriculum in Physics at MIT and a good state school are hardly dissimilar.
There are indeed people with CS PhDs at Google and Microsoft whose primary job involves publishing papers rather than building applications. But that's not the norm.
also, he might include that STEM professors earn higher than other academics and have many opportunities to earn high rates of consulting pay, and or spin off to found companies, etc.
[1] https://www.equityinhighered.org/indicators/enrollment-in-gr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[3] https://www.statista.com/chart/15685/doctoral-degrees-awarde...
But that's grasping at straws — it really has no bearing on the article itself.
There are 2 pictures shown.
If you went to a campus and captured 2 such pictures of people at random, it would be completely common for both pictures to end up like the ones in the article.
Yes. But if a Washington Post photographer went (or chose the pictures), it's vanishingly uncommon. A duckduckgo image search, limited to washingtonpost.com, of "phd graduation", "phd students", "phd graduate", "graduation", or "university students", yields almost no such pictures. Almost all are either very diverse, or entirely black.
They only find whites when it comes to "elites" "dominating".
The non-lagging metric is: how many high-performing students, from non-elite backgrounds, are refusing to pursue academic vocations?
This number has been decreasing steadily since the late 80's, and this has been very well documented in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
As someone who got into academia "by chance" this was quite a shock to me.
Plenty going on in such a phenomenon I feel. There’s the relative directionless-ness that can plague smart people coming out of unchallenging high school environments; the often accompanying “prestige for the sake of prestige” logic that you can get in middle-upper class culture, and, IMO, the inflated value and prestige of actually having a PhD in the modern (ie production-line) education system. A healthy dose of cynicism about the corporate world is often involved too I’d say.
I personally find it unfortunate how classist and stupid Grad school would feel at times.
MD's kids are 24x more likely to become MDs as well.
They say declining pay and difficulties negotiating with bigger players such as governments and larger and larger healthcare employers in combination with the bad quality of life at work no longer make the costs of becoming a doctor worth it.
Of course, the level of competition changed dramatically between their generation and mine. Then you could go directly from grad school to a tenure-track position and generally expect lifetime employment. Now, in the sciences, you're expected to live a nomadic life as you go from postdoc to postdoc, making less than $50k, perhaps eventually landing that coveted tenure-track. In the humanities it's even worse, where you work adjunct jobs that pay less than minimum wage.
It's no surprise that people with family money are most likely to win these contests of endurance. If you need to earn your own money, it's simply irrational to persist in the academic rat race.
- Above-average IQ
- Intellectual upbringing
- PhD, i.e. spending five years of your life in your mid to late 20s getting your union card
- During those five years, at least one of: no other mouths to feed, a working spouse, independent wealth, or well-off parents willing to support you
- Willingness to get a PhD for a less than <30% chance of ever getting a tenure-track job (though much higher if you are black or hispanic)
- Left-wing cosmopolitan social and political views
A lot of this depends on your advisor, but some programs are a lot more than that.
Ex-wife is an English professor. Department-wide "purges" were not unheard of. She was spared, though this was probably because she was a lowly adjunct.
> This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.
So % of parents with college degree increased by 3.5x (from 4% to 14%) and % of students coming from parents with college degree increased 3.3x (from 1/5 to 2/3). That more than explains it, doesn't it?
Also there should be a high correlation between kids being college-material and parents being college-material. Whether you believe in nature (genetics) or nurture (good parenting, high standards, role model, access to education, etc), or a mix of both, either way, you should not expect the % of college students from graduate families to match the % of graduate families in the country. So not sure what point the article makes.
Nitpick: the degree has inflated. Its value has decreased. If something’s value inflates its price has deflated.
I would think it's obvious to anyone that the bad thing is the creation of a caste system and lack of social mobility.
In 1970 4% of people had degrees and 20% of degree holders had parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 5 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.
In 2020 14% of people have degrees and 66% of degree holders have parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 4.7 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.
Which is the opposite of what the article assumes.
So even if this probability reduces to 4 times more as likely, the % of population with degrees keeps increasing you'll see the pattern article is describing.
The point is that if anything degrees now provide less generational predictability than they used to 50 years ago.
The article is trying to argue the exact opposite.
That doesn't follow at all? You can't just divide the two percentages and get that conclusion?
In 2020 children of degree holders got twice as many degrees as children from non-degree holders; 66 vs 34. In 1970 children of degree holders got 1/4 as many degrees as children of non-degree holders; 20 vs 80.
Edit: removed math based on wrong assumption
>In 2020 among 1000 people 200 had degrees and of those 200 66% so 132 people had parents with degrees. On the other side you have 68 degree holders to 800 non degree holder parents, so just 8.5% of their kids got degrees.
You're confusing the total number of people who have degrees with new graduates. The only thing we can calculate with the numbers given is the ratio of new graduates who have parents with degrees to those who have parents without degrees.
Yes you're right. The original data said new graduates. I got sidetracked by the formulation in your comment. I removed the false calculation.
> The only thing we can calculate with the numbers given is the ratio of new graduates who have parents with degrees to those who have parents without degrees.
Yea that ratio is 2 and 1/4 respectively? I don't even know how to put in words what we get by dividing the percentage of new grads with degree holding parents by the percentage of degree holders with college age children among the general population. Nothing useful?
CD = Child has a degree PD = Parent has a degree
Your rates would be calculated with P(CD|PD)/P(CD|notPD) = [4x20/(4x80+96A)]/[4x80/(4x80+96(100-A))] where A = Probability of parent having a degree and child not having degree
- If 4% of parents have degrees, something like 7% of the next generation has at least one parent with a degree. Because children have two parents, and only one of those two parents needs to have a degree. So the correct number to compare 20% against is ~7%, not 4%.
- Suppose a child of a degree-holder is 3 times as likely to become an economics PhD as a child of no degree-holders. Then, if 7% of children have a degree-holding parent, you would expect (7 * 3) / (7 * 3 + 93) = 21 / 114 = ~18.4% of economics PhDs to have a degree-holding parent, not 21%. If 25% of children have a degree-holding parent, you'd expect (25 * 3) / (25 * 3 + 75) = 75 / 150 = 50% of economics PhDs to have a degree-holding parent, not 75%.
Eyeballing the last few numbers, it does look like the value of having a degree-holding parent may have increased significantly, from a ~3.3x multiplier to almost 6x. But the error bars on this back-of-the-napkin analysis are pretty wide.
Are you presuming marriage and degree-holding are independent variables? Although I presume there are fewer female degree holders, so perhaps it makes little difference.
Since ~80s there are more female undergraduate students than male.
EDIT: with graduate degrees it got equal just in 2005. Which is relatively close to the age of current students...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185167/number-of-doctora...
Obviously in such case the probability to get a degree if your parents have a degree are 20% (in 1970) and 66% (in 2020).
Now let’s calculate the probabilities to get a degree if your parents don’t have a degree:
1970: 0.04*0.8/0.96 = 3.33%
2020: 0.14*0.34/0.86 = 5.53%
Even a “whooping” 1.7 increase doesn’t make much of a difference.
This situation has changed when we look at 2020. The overall number of degree holders is still relatively low compared to overall population (14%) but of this number a full 2/3rds now have degreed parents. The situation within this group has reversed.
Let's say you are born without parents, and your parents get picked at random once you enter university (a completely fair system in that there is no bias involved).
If 4% of all "available" parents have a degree, your chance that you'll get at least one of those "assigned" to you is 7.84% (1 - ((1 - 0.04)^2)).
If 14% of all parents have one, this probability rises to 26.04% (1 - ((1 - 0.14)^2)).
The quotes from the article seem to be using graduate in the US sense, which is what would be called post-grad in NZ.
FYI, AFAIK college degree or professional degree means little in New Zealand, and probably not the UK either.
Also see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergraduate_degree
I'm just saying that to people outside the US, the article is unclear because the words mean different things in different countries, which could affect some commenters.
Disclaimer: I only know what we call degrees in NZ so I am just trying to say why people from different countries could be confused. And this comment probably is confused itself, sorry.
You then typically go away for a Bachelor degree which lasts 3-4 years and gives you a BSc, BA or similar. After that you might do a Masters degree which would be 1 year (full time) which gives you an MSc/MA, then you'd start a doctorate which takes several years before getting a PhD
At 16 people leave that track and do formal qualifications in more vocational areas (bricklaying, farming, etc), at 18 people who didn't do vocational training from 16 may leave, a gap year is quite popular at that point, where you have a year off and travel the world.
Most people who do BA/BSc level courses will finish after graduation, typically age 21-23 (depending on gap year and length of course). Some stay direct on, plenty of people do Masters remotely part time later in their careers.
Just because something can easily be explained using logic doesn't mean that it's outcomes can't be negative. Perhaps this indicates that our society is further stratifying into different classes and upward mobility is being reduced for a portion of the population which I think most people would agree is a bad thing
Isn’t this like saying, “The number of professors whose parents have a car is up 3x since the 1930s?”
Just wait until percentage of parent with a degree reaches 25%. Then you'll see 120% of students having a parent with a degree. Hope that your explanation that "everything is normal" will still hold then.
...or nepotism, which is known to be extremely common in both academia and among billionaires.
There is some amount of meritocratic admissions as well, but you can't look at this as an accident.
Historically, MIT faculty were nerds into neat tech problems.
New MIT faculty are slick politicians with an increasing sleazy Enron-style vibe. That's true of MIT leadership as well.
- Clever financial schemes and complex conflicts-of-interest
- Incredible salesmanship relative to the amount of substance
- ... and so on.
I've seen criminal activity there too (which I can't elaborate on), but I suspect the Institute is waiting for an Enron-style collapse. It will be a soft landing. The endowment is obscene at this point; the Institute can weather a lot.
though Jonathan Schwartz did get metoo'd (not prosecuted) and kicked off WNYC
Computer Science used to be for nerds that were into neat tech problems. Now it's just seen the same as business/law/finance/whatever. And accordingly, we now have a deluge of CS graduates that want nothing to do with tech and simply move into management as fast as possible.
But I think that children of faculty and legacies are not as clear-cut a case. For example, it takes a lot of skill and hard work (and luck) to become a faculty member at Harvard. If you are still there when your kids are college-aged, you are very likely tenured. It would not at all be surprising if your children were significantly above-average in terms of academic achievement. This would be the result of your intelligence, drive, mate selection, and parenting. The fact that your kids are much more likely to get into Harvard (probably around 40%, versus 4%) is due in large part to these facts. The admissions office may put a thumb on the scale, but it's undoubtedly the case that the average faculty child applicant has higher qualifications than the average Harvard applicant.
These same arguments apply to legacy admits, but to a much lesser degree. Harvard did not used to be much of an academic/intellectual filter, but since the 90s or so it was very difficult to get in. If you are applying now and your parents went there, there's a good chance that the hard work and skill that got them in was passed down to you, by nature or nurture.
I don't disagree with you entirely, but I do disagree with the last sentence that frames 'meritocratic' admissions as distinct from children of legacy and faculty who are admitted at higher rates than the average applicant.
However, Harvard admissions keeps a special list of ALDC students and admits from that list. It's not that there are no standards, but the standards are much, much lower.
Is this true for children of faculty? I realize it is certainly true for the A (athletes) and D (donors' kids). Are there any sources that break the standards/cutoffs out by subgroup? These are very different groups of applicants, and I would be surprised if they were all subject to the same processes.
Or, maybe they don't anymore. But I bet that historically, there must have been some baked-in probability of how much a student will potentially give back in the future.
Not sure how that correlates with old vs new money. But coming from old money has some clear advantages, like knowing how to play the game.
(I'm fairly sure at least business schools judge applicants on their potential power and influence, in the future.)
I'm sure it's over 40%. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 70. There are a lot of side doors.
My information is dated, but as of circa-2008, the Ivies were including ZIP code and paternal (but not maternal) profession in their predictive modeling. The interviews (which are evaluative, even when people say they're not) are also driven more by class markers than academic factors.
> This is especially true for minority admissions. For the most part, Harvard won't admit lower-class African Americans; they'll select from a much smaller pool who have already moved into the power networks. That's important for maintaining power networks now that the DEI movement means minorities will likely e.g. serve on corporate boards.
This. Which is why I get so angry about right-wing populism. Yes, DEI initiatives mostly come from a place of insincerity. Corporates care about more about making the elite look more palatable than changing how it actually governs, and the minorities being accepted into the outer fringes of the (still inbred at heart) corporate elite will be discarded the minute they are no longer needed. But, nevertheless, the causes (racial, social, and gender justice) from which "wokeness" sprung are still quite laudable and necessary. The fact that we've allowed insincere corporate assholes to carry a banner on these issues is a travesty... because, while they don't know it, a lot of the right-ish populists are motivated by justified anger at the corporate system... and for us on the left to say that they're actually motivated by "anti-woke" racism does no good for anyone.
It distorts things a lot.
* Coveted non-ALDC slots are that much more limited and exclusive. Harvard looks harder to get into.
* Since close to half of the white slots are pre-stuffed, that makes the remaining ones that much harder to get into. That, in turn, leads to extreme affirmative action and no slots for Asians.
... and so on.
If your parents have graduate degrees or are professors its likely that graduate school was on your radar much earlier in life. You probably had more time to consider what steps you'd need to take to get there. You're also probably more likely to be interested in graduate school at all, since many people don't even view it as an option for themselves at all.
Even if your system was pure Meritocracy that'd make 16th century Anglos proud, you'd still expect it to eventually come to this (smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids)
Pretty rare to find a well educated person who places no value on education. Guys like Peter Thiel (educated, but promote non-traditional routes) are outliers on that spectrum, in my experience.
It is current day anti-intellectualism. Nothing new, but unfortunately not dead either.
Huh?! 16th century's UK was a feudal society.
> smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids
You are confusing intelligence, effort, education and opportunities.
Do you imagine that a new elite of some new type of class would not emerge? Would that new elite be more acceptable?
Is the problem that we just don't like our current kind of elite? That it doesn't provide for "fair" resetting of the system periodically? (or within each generation) Does it unfairly give children of the elite access to things they wouldn't otherwise be qualified for, compared to some other better system? What is that system? Some kind of setup where every kid gets to have equal access to showing his/her value -- yet you don't like having tests to do that?
I am not against the idea of an elite class. There will always emerge people who succeed and pass on their success. The question is, what is the outcome we're trying to achieve?
1. Do not stifle the well-being of lower classes
2. Allow upwards mobility into the elite class from lower classes
Today's elite caste fails both criteria: the current elites have architected the US, if not the world, to the detriment of the working class. Upwards mobility is very low - which drives resentment and distrust. The elite tends to select for its children moreso than any hypothetical notion of "merit", which gives the feeling that they are less "the best our country has to offer" and more "space aliens that happen to run everything".
> 1. Do not stifle the well-being of lower classes
> 2. Allow upwards mobility into the elite class from lower classes
is not possible without significantly reingeneering the human condition.
But one would hope for an elite rather like the Navy SEALs, where selection is based on the ability to handle difficult conditions, not one where selection is based on being born to the right family.
Yes, there is evidence that intelligence is at least partially hereditary, so if we assume intelligence is correlated with academic success, one would expect children of academic successes to have a slightly higher chance of academic success. Similarly, if we assume that height is correlated with success in basketball, since height is partially genetic we should expect children of basketball successes to have a slightly higher chance of success in basketball.
Still, I think an elite based on "fair" selection in the form of some set of hard-to-game test (for an unfeasible example, give everyone who wants to apply to a PhD program a 3-6 month mini-research internship, select the best ones and ignore all other criteria) would create a society where the people in charge tend to make better decisions/increase the global utility function more/produce better research in the case of academia than one where it's just rich kids aping their parents.
Wealth seems like such a huge factor in who is successful in this country. Whereas I know quite a few people with college degrees, even graduate degrees, that aren't using that knowledge in their work.
Academics tend to raise children with those values.
Or status over money, similar to upper-class careers in journalism.
""" In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, [...] """
These numbers (1/5, 2/3) refer to US-born PhD graduates (in economics).
But the number of US-born PhD students is very small. The vast majority of PhD students are immigrants.
It's quite a different story when you get to the people who really consider themselves Elite: big consulting firms, white shoe law firms, large media companies, and top echelons of the government. For those people, an Ivy League degree or equivalent is money, if not mandatory.
I think, in addition to the percentage of incoming students who are historically marginalized, those schools should track "percentage of students whose parents did NOT go to college." If they really cared about providing opportunity for upward mobility, those are the people they'd go after.
Yale doesn't report this statistic as far as I could find, although I found a blurb that says "more than one out of every six" (https://admissions.yale.edu/advice-first-generation-college-...).
Princeton's class of 2025 was 22% first-generation (https://www.princeton.edu/news/2021/04/06/extraordinary-year...).