> Economics, conversely, is as popular as beer, topping all majors at Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Penn. In what Deresiewicz calls “a stunning convergence,” it was the top major at 26 of the nation’s top 40 universities and colleges.
In a society that sets up severe and aggressive punishments for having less money than someone else, why would anyone go into any other field? Only the masochists and the selfless will be outside the world of finance soon.
Well, there will probably still be an abundant number of indie developers willing to make $40k/year. They'll move to Alaska so they can live the dream. I should have kept a list of all the recent podcasts and links. Anyway, here's one from today.
It always amazes me when a future where everyone can make a good living, but where there may be reduced opportunities for insanely extravagant wealth concentration, makes people scoff, but I see it often. Since technology has solved the problem of distribution - the main product that companies were invented to solve - it only seems natural for centralized companies to dissolve entirely. Aside from solving distribution (both of work and of product), everything companies provide can be provided for nearly no cost by software. And companies today have tremendous overhead, doing unwise things like maintaining offices. They do nothing but drain resources and subtract value. Physical co-location of workers is worthless thanks to technology in most every industry.
And it always seems to be the people who are most dedicated to economic ideals and capitalism who refuse to see that capitalism dictates that the current system of megacorps will be defeated by capitalism itself because they are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software. Simply because we may never see another 'Goldman Sachs' strangling the wealth out of millions and putting it into the pockets of a handful who did nothing to earn it, they ignore the fact that most people only need $72k/yr to get to a point where more money won't even make them happier.
People with kids need to pay $1000/month for day care in the NYC area. The price for an average 3 bedroom home that's commutable to NYC has to be over $500,000.
I think you underestimate the cost of living in Alaska. I live in Juneau and it is very expensive. Maybe not NYC or SF expensive, but in 2012 the median value of a single family home was $332,000. Food and gas are also very expensive. Things might be slightly cheaper in Anchorage or Fairbanks. You might be able to find some cheap land somewhere undesirable and build a house or a cabin, but it's going to be very expensive to get building materials shipped there.
$72k/year is above average in Alaska; it is above average in every state. If you look at the census data you cite, you can see that Alaska is #7 in terms of median household in the US. I doubt that means that Alaskans are significantly richer than average Americans, it probably means that Alaska is more expensive.
It looks like melling is using Alaska as an example of a cheap place; somewhere your dollar goes farther. If you look at the "Real Value of $100" maps you see floating around[0] you'll see it is not a particularly cheap state. It might be cheaper than New York City, but I'm not at all sure it's cheaper than New York State. In fact, New York looks like it has a median income of 53k, so plenty of New Yorkers scrimp by on $72k. Based purely on maximizing the difference between their income and their neighbors, the hypothetical indie dev should go to Mississippi.
I think looking at the cost of living in a state is a better guide than median income. This cost of living chart[2] says that the cheapest states are Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Indiana, whereas the most expensive states are Hawaii, DC, New York, Alaska (ha!), and New Jersey. Based purely on minimizing their cost of living, the hypothetical indie dev should still go to Mississippi.
I am a little surprised to see that the median income of New York is so low compared to its cost of living, so a New Yorker, on average, might be better off moving to Alaska, but not by as much as some other state, I'd wager.
My surprise got me thinking, so I did a tiny bit of excel analysis, where I normalized median wages[0] based on the value of a dollar data[1], then sorted states based on normalized median wage / cost of living[2]. Utah, Nebraska, Virginia, Iowa, and Wyoming are the top 5 with that ratio, while Hawaii, New York, DC, California and Oregon (Oregon pips Alaska here, by one rank, but my point stands, Alaska is many things, but cheap isn't one of them) are the bottom 5. I think that maps roughly with my intuition that big coastal places are sort of expensive for their average salaries and that boring, but not poor places are cheap for their salaries. I'm not sure this is relevant to the indie dev who doesn't have an employer, but for those of us who work in the flesh, I guess we should go to Utah?
Tell that to software companies that love having everyone in the same place in the same office if possible. Like Google.
If a company is going to have remote workers, they need a culture of supporting remote workers, and they need to be writing things down a lot more, which does have it's own overhead compared to talking to someone beside you.
As peoplesoft said, when you add more programmers to a project, you increase communication overhead. Working in the same office probably has something to do with that overhead.
Also you want to make more than $72k/yr (which is about $120-150k pre-tax btw) on a savings and investment aspect. And to fund projects that matter to you.
> everything companies provide can be provided for nearly no cost by software
Good software is more expensive than you seem to think.
> [megacorps] are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software
That may be true. Or not. It's a big assertion. Lots of projects are more efficient if they have a stable set of maintainers. Could you swap out Linus and his lieutenants in favor of swarms of freelancers and still produce quality Linux kernels? I doubt it.
"According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm."
That seems plausible to me. If we're truly interested in deprecating megacorps, we should reduce transaction costs for laypeople, including by making rules, regulations, and laws easier to grok if they are needed at all.
That's kind of my point. How is forcing that indie developer in live in Alaska, much different from the Soviets shipping someone off to Siberia because they didn't get with the plan?
Finance will continue to grow as the preferred choice of those who want to avoid being punished by US society and forced live in Alaska or not have enough to eat or a safe place to live.
>How is forcing that indie developer in live in Alaska, much different from the Soviets shipping someone off to Siberia because they didn't get with the plan?
Because one of them involves the choice between the gulag and death and the other involves the choice between being a poverty-stricken artist and anything else you might decide to do once you get over your art and quit.
But maybe people who ended up in the Gulag were because they chose not to go along with what the state wanted them to do? It seems quite obvious that the United States strongly discourages going into any other field outside of economics. That is by far the easiest low risk high income path a person can take in the US. So by becoming an artist, you are going against the framework set up by US society to convince you to go into finance. That's why there are so many punishments and risks involved. Just like the Gulag was set up to convince people to follow the framework set up by the Soviets.
14,000+ people were murdered in the US. Many of those people died simply because they had a low enough ratio of money to others to force them to live in a dangerous place. Not because of any other reason than having less money that others.
So were political activists and other people "forced" to go to the Gulag? Or, like US citizens who live in poverty for being artists, did they "choose" to do something the government did not want and faced a punishment for it?
When force is used someone is being forced. No one in this country is forced to be an artist nor are they punished for making that choice. Having to support yourself is not punishment, it's just part of being an adult.
The majority of the Ivy league comes from one particular demographic: the upper middle class. These families might have an HHI of $100-500k; very comfortable, but not so much that the kids don't have to work for a living. There is a strong risk aversion in this demographic, because falling out of this class has really significant quality of life repercussions.
And it's not just the money. For ambitious kids, it's a fear of hitting artificial limits on career progression. Working your way up in a corporation isn't a common career trajectory anymore. Instead, companies hire executives from a particular track, which starts with an Ivy-league school, involves a stint at an investment bank or consulting firm, perhaps an Ivy-league MBA, and from then forward a series of management and executive positions.
The tech industry is somewhat of an exception to this rule, but only somewhat. Elon Musk has a bachelors degree in Economics from Penn's Wharton School (in addition to his degree in Physics); Peter Thiel majored in Philosophy at Stanford, and so went to law school like the other English/Philosophy majors, and then did a stint in investment banking.
And even in entrepreneurship, you'll spend a lot of your time pitching VC's, and guess what's the easiest way to become a VC: Ivy-league, stint at an investment bank or consulting company, then an MBA. If you as an entrepreneur have that same background, that removes one level of insulation between you and the people you need to fund your company.
Considering all of these things, if you're smart enough to get into an Ivy-leaguge school, why wouldn't you major in economics?
You're right, and it's relevant to the narrative. Thiel jumped into finance from a legal career, which can be difficult to do unless you capitalize on a market shift (e.g. bankruptcy lawyers jumping to distressed asset funds in the most recent recession). Derivatives was a growing area in the early 1990's, which presumably made it easier for him. Which was fortuitous, because since he didn't come from money, he might not have been in a position to start his first fund without his Wall Street connections.
This aspect of finance, the difficulty of getting into the field later on in one's career, is a major reason why so many Ivy-leaugers pursue it right out of school.
I agree it's relevant, but not because it supports the argument. While investment banking is, at least today, seen as prestigious and a pathway to executive management, trading is viewed as boarish and generally does not carry over to anything outside of trading. So Thiel may have gained access to capital from connections he made in finance but not substantial leadership-related prestige.
(Also I don't think jumping from super-elite-law to finance is particularly difficult, it seems pretty common).
My point is that Thiel probably wouldn't have been able to raise a million dollars to start his own fund if he hadn't worked at Credit Suisse, and it wasn't a "gimme" for him to get that job having started outside of finance originally. That's relevant to any entrepreneurial Ivy-student who contemplates starting his career outside of finance or consulting.
I agree with you, I just wanted to make the important distinction between investment banking and trading careers, which are often conflated. The difference isn't whether trading is as hard to get into but what are the "exit ops" and how they compare to those in IB. Trading has few, investment banking has many, especially in business-analyst/management-track roles in industry. The upshot of trading is that it is potentially more lucrative.
You may want to read what I wrote one more time. I did not say that those outside of finance deal with lack of food, safety and health. I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.
So it just seems obvious that if you don't want to deal with these punishments for finding yourself with less money than 50 to 60 percent of the population, you would go into finance as it gives you the best chances of having more money than most and therefore dealing with less, if any, of the punishments US society hands out for having less money than others.
>I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.
So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?
Well, if you read the article, you would have read about two students, 1 went to Dartmouth and the other went to Yale. The former worked at a bar, if I remember correctly and the latter worked at the airport. Neither graduated with economic degrees. ;)
All jokes aside, indeed when you live in a country that hands our very severe punishments(just look up the murder rate in less expensive neighborhoods etc) for having less money than someone else. Real estate is directly tied to the amount of money you have compared to others so could explain how that analogy is that far off?
If someone lived in New York City, they might have to trade quite a bit of safety in neighborhood for having a less profitable degree than someone who graduated with an economics degree. So indeed US society hands out a weighted lottery about getting murdered based upon how much money you make, even at middle class levels.
Being a graduate student who is paid just under the living wage for the city I live in, I probably have less money than you. In fact, I probably have less money than 60 percent of the population.
I am not more likely than you to be assaulted, killed, or go hungry. Here is a more extreme example to show how misguided your statement is: a millionaire has less money than a billionaire, but that does not imply the millionaire is more likely to deal with being assaulted or killed or going hungry either.
You should really go reevaluate what you think you know about finance and how money affects life. Go read some papers about how money changes quality of life, and you'll see that above a certain (relatively small) threshold, more money doesn't make much of a difference. There is certainly no "aggressive" punishment for deciding to have a lucrative career in, say, medicine, as opposed to having a more lucrative career in finance.
Engineers have better outcomes at the start of their career and have better odds of starting their own company successfully. If you're a good economist, you'll go into economics. If you're a great economist, you'll go into engineering.
I imagine all of those Valedictorians moving on to Ivy League status are simply gathering the benefits of a childhood designed to make them subservient, unquestioning, and anything but self-determined. Of course they end up vomiting in frat basements. They're dumped into adulthood without an iota of experience of being a human being. How are they supposed to know what to do when no one is telling them exactly what to do with every moment of their day for the first time in their entire lives?
I am not sure why your comment is getting so much hate. Are there that many valedictorians on HN? I read so much about the dangers of performance metrics in the work place, but aren't grades the most widespread and pernicious of them all? Face it, a 4.0 does not require more than average intelligence, only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told.
> only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told
In my experience, my 4.0 existed because I didn't do what I'm told. If I disagreed with a teacher's answer, I would write in "(e) bsilvereagle's answer" and usually get full credit. Similarly, not once did I write a Bing-Bang-Bongo paper in high school as instructed, yet I got top grades in English because I could independently construct a worthwhile essay. I don't think I ever completed a Chemistry lab as instructed either, I would stop half way through and start tinkering around and could usually come up with a hypothesis/experiment/conclusion that was much better than what the lab set out to do.
In short, don't assume every 4.0 you see is going to do exactly as they're told.
Not sure what school you went to (or even in what country - what the heck is "Bing-Bang-Bongo"?) but you only need one teacher that doesn't like your alleged independent methods to put a fly into your perfect score. You must be very fortunate to somehow have avoided this your entire high school career. Bravo.
I have known (that I can be sure) two high-school valedictorians, one from my own HS class, one much younger. Neither in any way resembled the profile you seem to have in mind. I have no memory of where my HS classmate went, but suspect it was a state school. The younger one got wait-listed for the one Ivy she applied for, and went to a perfectly good school even so.
Research and business benefit from pooling the best talent in one place. So what if some students get in from legacy or money. That's a price paid to have a large endowment at your disposal.
Sounds like the authors of the article and the books referenced are just jealous of Ivy League students. Students joining frats? Glad they don't do that at lesser universities.
As far as access to professors; I went to a school with approximately 30k undergraduates. There were some phenomenal professors there, and if you merely showed up to one of their talks and take an interest and you immediately stood out to them.
Going by my data-point of one school, it's not particularly hard to get interaction with professors, even when nearly all the freshman classes are taught by TAs.
I got to meet and interact with some wonderful physicists, just by being interested in what they had to say. I wonder if it is easier or harder to do that at an Ivy.
Easy to do in physics at Cornell and the University of Washington. Send emails or knock on doors; it's not hard to find a professor who's interested in working with interested people.
I have a BS in Physics from UCSB. There were only 5 of us physics majors in my graduating class, compared to 800+ anthropology majors. As a physics major, access to professeurs' time and lab resources was excellent.
Back in the 1970s, my education was very much less than it would have been at an ivy league school!
UCSC, early 2000's: About 15 of us. Faculty interaction was nearly unavoidable, working in labs was a great way to help pay for beer, as they were next to the class rooms and study halls. That said, you could only pay for beer with that cash, as costs of rooms and tuition in Santa Cruz is not student friendly.
> Deresiewicz says essentially the same thing, urging students to flee the Ivy League in favor of smaller colleges like Wesleyan, Reed and Grinnell, where the students are more passionate and receptive...
This is terrible advice and simply not true. I went to a small, solidly ranked liberal arts school. Most of the students also drank incredibly hard; they had little regard for academics; and while it was true that you could always get in contact with a professor, the faculty was of a far lower quality than you would find at an ivy league university. Research opportunities were also non-existent.
> where the students are ... less prone to unseemly résumé-padding
It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, and none of my friends / anyone else I knew outside of such fields achieved meaningful employment following graduation.
> It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs,
In my experience (currently a PhD student at a top 10 STEM program) graduate programs only care at about ability to do research. There may be a few non-research activities that demonstrate this, e.g. scoring well on Putnam, but no one scores points for activism or running a club or excelling athletically, or any of the others activities I associate with the phrase resume-padding.
This is a fair point, and what I meant was something more along the lines of "It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding or even resume building".
No one at my school ever discussed career development, and it was a fundamental disservice to the students. The assumption on the part of the faculty was that students would go to 1 of 3 mediocre grad programs or low tier medical programs that our students were regularly admitted to, and that furthering students' development outside of undergrad was not their concern. The only reason I ended up in a better place was because of fantastic mentoring outside of school.
To put this into context, I majored in biochemistry in undergrad, and was the only person in my department (or out of anyone else that I knew in STEM) to do summer research internships at other universities (we didn't have such a thing) / in industry while I was there. I was also the only person to push for a more independent senior research thesis rather than a cookie cutter project which was handed to me.
The university I performed research at for two summers had large, well organized career counseling and job placement efforts, including multiple large scale career fairs each year. When I returned to my school and suggested that we organize a trip to a large university career fair nearby, I was met with blank stares by the faculty and the students. When I asked people what their career plans were soon after the start of senior year, no one even had a general sense of what they wanted to do or what opportunities were out there...
Just so you know how different the other side of the coin is, I go to a top research university similar to the Ivies, and of around 50 STEM students I know, every single one did some form of summer research or STEM internship. An additional 2 semesters of research are required for most STEM majors.
That's interesting, isn't it? The concept of "holistic" admissions is far less prevalent in PhD programs in general, and this is probably because of the laser-like focus on research. I'm surprised this hasn't been discussed more often in the general media and even here on HN where people tend to know quite a bit more about these things.
"Holistic" undergraduate admissions, especially in elite American universities, is extremely prevalent (less so at elite publics than privates). Sports, drama, music, art, volunteer work, "leadership potential", and so forth are all a really big deal. Personal statements tend to be about the applicant as a person. Interestingly, in this regard, professional schools may be more like undergraduate admissions than PhD programs. Personal statements do need to be more specific - you should be able, for instance, to articulate why you want to study law when you apply to Yale law school, whereas it's ok to be applying to Yale undergrad without a very clear academic plan, but they're still very interested (or at least claim to be) in holistic, well rounded individuals.
This probably shouldn't be such a surprise, people often say "you can do anything with a law degree", whereas people tend not to say that about a PhD in biochemistry. Not that you can't, but nobody thinks it makes sense to do that as a generalist degree. So it's ok to go to law school with the intent of becoming a generalist, or just a "leader" (attrition rates at elite law schools are close to zero anyway, so you can pursue your studies somewhat indifferently if you aren't keen on law review or being at the top of your class). It's unlikely that you could pursue a PhD in Mathematics with this attitude or approach (many of the hard science PhD programs have close to a 50% attrition rate).
Another big factor is that graduate students in STEM programs aren't really students in the same way an undergraduate is (or a Law or MBA student, or to a lesser extent a first or second year med student). STEM Phd students are really (to put the most positive spin possible on this) low paid apprentices who generate far more in value than they recoup in teaching or research stipends.
I've read plenty of valid criticisms of "holistic" admissions, now and in the past. But I actually do think that the absence of the generalist STEM degree does harm our field. We could benefit from people who believe "you can do anything with a STEM MS or Phd" but who intend to work in government, for instance. As it stands, most of our leaders are lawyers who encourage engineering for others…
Those schools seem like the worst buys: almost as expensive as the Ivies, but nowhere near the name recognition. State schools as community colleges have decent value propositions.
Uhh, as someone who did go to Wesleyan. I can tell you bulk of the student body was there to pad their resume for med school and investment banking. Of course, we said it with a straight face that we did it to help people or go to banking to help environmental/alternative energy startups.
As someone graduated 6 years ago, I can safely say that even the hardest hippie holdouts from my class have opted for med school or registered nursing or business school.
Going to the Ivy League is like a big production Michael Bay Hollywood movie with proven star-power and focused grouped screenplay aiming to please the audience.
Going to Wesleyan, Reed or Grinnell is like a quirky indie production aiming to please the art cinema crowd. To outsiders, it looks original but it's just as trite and formulaic as a Hollywood production.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadIn a society that sets up severe and aggressive punishments for having less money than someone else, why would anyone go into any other field? Only the masochists and the selfless will be outside the world of finance soon.
http://www.developereconomics.com/indie-app-opportunity-gone...
And it always seems to be the people who are most dedicated to economic ideals and capitalism who refuse to see that capitalism dictates that the current system of megacorps will be defeated by capitalism itself because they are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software. Simply because we may never see another 'Goldman Sachs' strangling the wealth out of millions and putting it into the pockets of a handful who did nothing to earn it, they ignore the fact that most people only need $72k/yr to get to a point where more money won't even make them happier.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-20/goldman-sachs-said-...
People with kids need to pay $1000/month for day care in the NYC area. The price for an average 3 bedroom home that's commutable to NYC has to be over $500,000.
Yes, $72k/year will go a long way in Alaska.
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/
It looks like melling is using Alaska as an example of a cheap place; somewhere your dollar goes farther. If you look at the "Real Value of $100" maps you see floating around[0] you'll see it is not a particularly cheap state. It might be cheaper than New York City, but I'm not at all sure it's cheaper than New York State. In fact, New York looks like it has a median income of 53k, so plenty of New Yorkers scrimp by on $72k. Based purely on maximizing the difference between their income and their neighbors, the hypothetical indie dev should go to Mississippi.
I think looking at the cost of living in a state is a better guide than median income. This cost of living chart[2] says that the cheapest states are Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Indiana, whereas the most expensive states are Hawaii, DC, New York, Alaska (ha!), and New Jersey. Based purely on minimizing their cost of living, the hypothetical indie dev should still go to Mississippi.
I am a little surprised to see that the median income of New York is so low compared to its cost of living, so a New Yorker, on average, might be better off moving to Alaska, but not by as much as some other state, I'd wager.
My surprise got me thinking, so I did a tiny bit of excel analysis, where I normalized median wages[0] based on the value of a dollar data[1], then sorted states based on normalized median wage / cost of living[2]. Utah, Nebraska, Virginia, Iowa, and Wyoming are the top 5 with that ratio, while Hawaii, New York, DC, California and Oregon (Oregon pips Alaska here, by one rank, but my point stands, Alaska is many things, but cheap isn't one of them) are the bottom 5. I think that maps roughly with my intuition that big coastal places are sort of expensive for their average salaries and that boring, but not poor places are cheap for their salaries. I'm not sure this is relevant to the indie dev who doesn't have an employer, but for those of us who work in the flesh, I guess we should go to Utah?
[0] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/ [1] http://taxfoundation.org/blog/real-value-100-each-state [2] http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/ind...
If a company is going to have remote workers, they need a culture of supporting remote workers, and they need to be writing things down a lot more, which does have it's own overhead compared to talking to someone beside you.
As peoplesoft said, when you add more programmers to a project, you increase communication overhead. Working in the same office probably has something to do with that overhead.
Also you want to make more than $72k/yr (which is about $120-150k pre-tax btw) on a savings and investment aspect. And to fund projects that matter to you.
Good software is more expensive than you seem to think.
> [megacorps] are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software
That may be true. Or not. It's a big assertion. Lots of projects are more efficient if they have a stable set of maintainers. Could you swap out Linus and his lieutenants in favor of swarms of freelancers and still produce quality Linux kernels? I doubt it.
This whole line of thought (why firms and not markets?) is a branch of economics. If you haven't, read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm.
"According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm."
That seems plausible to me. If we're truly interested in deprecating megacorps, we should reduce transaction costs for laypeople, including by making rules, regulations, and laws easier to grok if they are needed at all.
Finance will continue to grow as the preferred choice of those who want to avoid being punished by US society and forced live in Alaska or not have enough to eat or a safe place to live.
user: burgers created: 8 days ago karma: 91
Have fun. I'm outta here...
Because one of them involves the choice between the gulag and death and the other involves the choice between being a poverty-stricken artist and anything else you might decide to do once you get over your art and quit.
14,000+ people were murdered in the US. Many of those people died simply because they had a low enough ratio of money to others to force them to live in a dangerous place. Not because of any other reason than having less money that others.
And it's not just the money. For ambitious kids, it's a fear of hitting artificial limits on career progression. Working your way up in a corporation isn't a common career trajectory anymore. Instead, companies hire executives from a particular track, which starts with an Ivy-league school, involves a stint at an investment bank or consulting firm, perhaps an Ivy-league MBA, and from then forward a series of management and executive positions.
The tech industry is somewhat of an exception to this rule, but only somewhat. Elon Musk has a bachelors degree in Economics from Penn's Wharton School (in addition to his degree in Physics); Peter Thiel majored in Philosophy at Stanford, and so went to law school like the other English/Philosophy majors, and then did a stint in investment banking.
And even in entrepreneurship, you'll spend a lot of your time pitching VC's, and guess what's the easiest way to become a VC: Ivy-league, stint at an investment bank or consulting company, then an MBA. If you as an entrepreneur have that same background, that removes one level of insulation between you and the people you need to fund your company.
Considering all of these things, if you're smart enough to get into an Ivy-leaguge school, why wouldn't you major in economics?
This aspect of finance, the difficulty of getting into the field later on in one's career, is a major reason why so many Ivy-leaugers pursue it right out of school.
(Also I don't think jumping from super-elite-law to finance is particularly difficult, it seems pretty common).
So it just seems obvious that if you don't want to deal with these punishments for finding yourself with less money than 50 to 60 percent of the population, you would go into finance as it gives you the best chances of having more money than most and therefore dealing with less, if any, of the punishments US society hands out for having less money than others.
So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?
All jokes aside, indeed when you live in a country that hands our very severe punishments(just look up the murder rate in less expensive neighborhoods etc) for having less money than someone else. Real estate is directly tied to the amount of money you have compared to others so could explain how that analogy is that far off?
If someone lived in New York City, they might have to trade quite a bit of safety in neighborhood for having a less profitable degree than someone who graduated with an economics degree. So indeed US society hands out a weighted lottery about getting murdered based upon how much money you make, even at middle class levels.
I am not more likely than you to be assaulted, killed, or go hungry. Here is a more extreme example to show how misguided your statement is: a millionaire has less money than a billionaire, but that does not imply the millionaire is more likely to deal with being assaulted or killed or going hungry either.
You should really go reevaluate what you think you know about finance and how money affects life. Go read some papers about how money changes quality of life, and you'll see that above a certain (relatively small) threshold, more money doesn't make much of a difference. There is certainly no "aggressive" punishment for deciding to have a lucrative career in, say, medicine, as opposed to having a more lucrative career in finance.
In my experience, my 4.0 existed because I didn't do what I'm told. If I disagreed with a teacher's answer, I would write in "(e) bsilvereagle's answer" and usually get full credit. Similarly, not once did I write a Bing-Bang-Bongo paper in high school as instructed, yet I got top grades in English because I could independently construct a worthwhile essay. I don't think I ever completed a Chemistry lab as instructed either, I would stop half way through and start tinkering around and could usually come up with a hypothesis/experiment/conclusion that was much better than what the lab set out to do.
In short, don't assume every 4.0 you see is going to do exactly as they're told.
I may have a substantial selection bias, so perhaps there are people who fit your description, but they are certainly not typical.
Sounds like the authors of the article and the books referenced are just jealous of Ivy League students. Students joining frats? Glad they don't do that at lesser universities.
Going by my data-point of one school, it's not particularly hard to get interaction with professors, even when nearly all the freshman classes are taught by TAs.
I got to meet and interact with some wonderful physicists, just by being interested in what they had to say. I wonder if it is easier or harder to do that at an Ivy.
Back in the 1970s, my education was very much less than it would have been at an ivy league school!
This is terrible advice and simply not true. I went to a small, solidly ranked liberal arts school. Most of the students also drank incredibly hard; they had little regard for academics; and while it was true that you could always get in contact with a professor, the faculty was of a far lower quality than you would find at an ivy league university. Research opportunities were also non-existent.
> where the students are ... less prone to unseemly résumé-padding
It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding, and the end result was that none of my friends who majored in STEM related fields got into top graduate programs, and none of my friends / anyone else I knew outside of such fields achieved meaningful employment following graduation.
In my experience (currently a PhD student at a top 10 STEM program) graduate programs only care at about ability to do research. There may be a few non-research activities that demonstrate this, e.g. scoring well on Putnam, but no one scores points for activism or running a club or excelling athletically, or any of the others activities I associate with the phrase resume-padding.
No one at my school ever discussed career development, and it was a fundamental disservice to the students. The assumption on the part of the faculty was that students would go to 1 of 3 mediocre grad programs or low tier medical programs that our students were regularly admitted to, and that furthering students' development outside of undergrad was not their concern. The only reason I ended up in a better place was because of fantastic mentoring outside of school.
To put this into context, I majored in biochemistry in undergrad, and was the only person in my department (or out of anyone else that I knew in STEM) to do summer research internships at other universities (we didn't have such a thing) / in industry while I was there. I was also the only person to push for a more independent senior research thesis rather than a cookie cutter project which was handed to me.
The university I performed research at for two summers had large, well organized career counseling and job placement efforts, including multiple large scale career fairs each year. When I returned to my school and suggested that we organize a trip to a large university career fair nearby, I was met with blank stares by the faculty and the students. When I asked people what their career plans were soon after the start of senior year, no one even had a general sense of what they wanted to do or what opportunities were out there...
"Holistic" undergraduate admissions, especially in elite American universities, is extremely prevalent (less so at elite publics than privates). Sports, drama, music, art, volunteer work, "leadership potential", and so forth are all a really big deal. Personal statements tend to be about the applicant as a person. Interestingly, in this regard, professional schools may be more like undergraduate admissions than PhD programs. Personal statements do need to be more specific - you should be able, for instance, to articulate why you want to study law when you apply to Yale law school, whereas it's ok to be applying to Yale undergrad without a very clear academic plan, but they're still very interested (or at least claim to be) in holistic, well rounded individuals.
This probably shouldn't be such a surprise, people often say "you can do anything with a law degree", whereas people tend not to say that about a PhD in biochemistry. Not that you can't, but nobody thinks it makes sense to do that as a generalist degree. So it's ok to go to law school with the intent of becoming a generalist, or just a "leader" (attrition rates at elite law schools are close to zero anyway, so you can pursue your studies somewhat indifferently if you aren't keen on law review or being at the top of your class). It's unlikely that you could pursue a PhD in Mathematics with this attitude or approach (many of the hard science PhD programs have close to a 50% attrition rate).
Another big factor is that graduate students in STEM programs aren't really students in the same way an undergraduate is (or a Law or MBA student, or to a lesser extent a first or second year med student). STEM Phd students are really (to put the most positive spin possible on this) low paid apprentices who generate far more in value than they recoup in teaching or research stipends.
I've read plenty of valid criticisms of "holistic" admissions, now and in the past. But I actually do think that the absence of the generalist STEM degree does harm our field. We could benefit from people who believe "you can do anything with a STEM MS or Phd" but who intend to work in government, for instance. As it stands, most of our leaders are lawyers who encourage engineering for others…
As someone graduated 6 years ago, I can safely say that even the hardest hippie holdouts from my class have opted for med school or registered nursing or business school.
Going to the Ivy League is like a big production Michael Bay Hollywood movie with proven star-power and focused grouped screenplay aiming to please the audience.
Going to Wesleyan, Reed or Grinnell is like a quirky indie production aiming to please the art cinema crowd. To outsiders, it looks original but it's just as trite and formulaic as a Hollywood production.
1. The quality of education at Ivy League schools isn't living up to the hype (and cost) of their "brand".
2. Fraternities are a destructive force in the lives of college students.
I actually agree with both points, but they are, in fact, unrelated to each other.