In France, for example, you're far more likely to get into a top university if you have a parent that's a teacher. I postulate here: the interdisciplinary learning system, vs. the Anglo subject focused system, that looks good on paper works out quite hard to find success in without knowing success in navigating it and putting the pieces together.
In Germany, good luck becomming the CEO of a large company without the right breeding. It happens, but not a lot. There's turtles all the way down, from managing relationships with other stakeholders (i.e., knowing who runs them) to bank funding (funding from stock is less prevalent than Anglo, it's mainly debt funding, importance of Landesbanks). Screw the well qualified engineers, middle management will squash them sucking up the class divide at the top.
Sweden, prized for community. "So fucking claustrophobic I had to leave", "curtains twitch, everyone watches each other", "if you don't conform to the system, you need to be strong" "a nice place to retire, possibly" not only one Swede has said to me on their experiences on getting out [emigrating], interestingly all from smaller southern towns. [Interestingly, 'Collectivism' being the flip-side of 'Individualism' can mean those on the 'outside' of the collective have a much harder time than when there's no, or a weak, collective. See [1] Geert-Hofstede 'Model of national culture'].
Europe's very class based, it's less transparent, more insidious.
[1] https://geerthofstede.com/culture-geert-hofstede-gert-jan-ho...
France also had a pretty strong influence on the founding fathers apparently. From what I've heard English are much nicer than we are
Nobody? I think what you mean is "nobody in the middle class cares". Clearly they are very prestigious universities in Europe (Sorbonne) that open doors other universities don't.
What I've noticed in the US is that the middle class (and even lower) aspire to the top colleges. In Canada? Not as much.
In France, La Sorbonne isn't considered particularly prestigious. Grandes Ecoles (ENS for research across various topics but especially science; Polytechnique for engineering; HEC for business; ENA/Science Po for politics) are considered much more prestigious and elite (getting there is harder than for La Sorbonne, you have to undergo 2 years of prep schools and then take an exam, where only the top scorers get into these Ecoles), and will get you the higher paying jobs.
Outside France, seems that these Grandes Ecoles don't hold much prestige against La Sorbonne which seems to be considered more elite.
Harvard, on the other hand, lets in a few thousand students a year and I am pretty sure that has barely changed for decades. This changes a ivy degree from not just a good degree to a good degree with a high elitism and increasing scarcity associated with it.
Like a lot of things in Canada the bell curve is flatter -- but it doesn't mean there isn't a bell curve.
But this obsession is not without its merits either - some leadership positions are exclusively carved out of the ivy league bunch
Things like Hedge fund CEOs and/or Presidents, Supreme Court Justices[1], Presidents and such.
Europeans are not entirely devoid of some form of elitism either in picking their leaders.[2]
[1] The Road to a Supreme Court Clerkship Starts at Three Ivy League Colleges
The chances of obtaining a coveted clerkship, a new study found, increase sharply with undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
The justices themselves are products of elite educations. Eight of them attended law school at Harvard or Yale, and six of them have undergraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale or Princeton. And six of them had themselves served as law clerks at the Supreme Court.
[2] Don’t Call Me Doktor
German politicians are obsessed with earning Ph.D.s—but plagiarism scandals tend to catch up to them and derail careers.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/04/germany-politics-higher...
If you don't believe me just look at where members of your government went to school.
These less prestigious schools, lower than state universities, which are often quite prestigious, have drastically lower entry standards. You quickly go from "needs a solid resume, with good academics, and participation in extracurriculars", to "accepts anyone".
Just because a University accepts everyone, doesn't mean it's "bad". I went to a good university with loose entry; they'd let anyone flunk out after the first year. That said, we look heavily at "pedigree" in the US. You need top academics to get into university, and usually have to be somewhat talented to meritfully advance (and we know who succeeded by merits). With pedigree you look at someone's full lineage and accomplishments. In theory you should look at what someone did in university and all these impressive sounding companies, but too often they just look at the letterhead!
I'm astonished by how reliably the "elite" are able to hold their position. In some cases, it doesn't even seem to make sense. For example there was this really insecure, power hungry kid for a Uni group, that wound up getting a pretty high position, quickly. He really clearly succeeded because of these insecurities, only to find that he was very wealthy.
I've become increasingly aware how people at higher levels in software have money, and seem to rise to the level of their wealth. Even I do pretty well, and I'm the grandson of an accomplished chemical engineer. Yet so, many of my managers are just a couple rungs above me, proportional to their wealth.
I've digressed, but I'd argue that in a country like the US, selecting based on pedigree, is not necessarily a bad decision. It's just shitty, discriminatory, even racist perhaps. Still, hiring the "elite" from society probably "works".
In CS in Germany this is not the case. There are better or worser schools but it is not a big thing. More important, github profiles, experience etc.
For the Politicians I dont see a common pattern. There are diversity issues (rather male, mostly Lawyers or Political Scientist) but German politicians are quiet diverse by background. Example by chancellors Scholz: Rather worser law university Merkel: Good, but not best Eastern Germany University in physics. Schröder: From a very poor family, but rather good law university.
Except Bucerius law school I am not aware of any university with lots of politicians aspirants. (And Bucerius is not that big)
You see I was very bored for doing research.
Asian to Indian, Chinese, Korean, other
White to WASP and other -- maybe geographical
Jewish to observant and non-observant
Hispanic to ?? It's a loose category it seems to me. Is DeSantis Hispanic?
It's the most linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse bucket imaginable.
It reads like something someone on 4chan would make to backup their soapbox, not an actual scientific study.
(If you think assuming 100% of college students applied to Yale is sound methodology, maybe you don't need to worry about who goes to what Ivy.)
This is a distraction.
White 0.381106
Black/African American 0.0544724
Hispanic/Latino 0.111558
Asian/Asian American 0.414271
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.00100503
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.00261307
Two or More Races 0.0349749
Sources:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_226.10.a...
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r...
This is the mainstream discourse imo. The SFFA case didn't argue against affirmative action for non-white people, they argued against it for white people. They tried to make the case that whites were disproportionately legacy and athlete admits so therefore were dumb. (In my other comments I show that legacy students at Harvard actually had higher SAT scores). The SC of course had an ax to grind against Affirmative Action but the actual evidence, especially in light of the SAT distribution from GP, that there was AA for whites specifically I think is extremely lacking.
It's quite the opposite. Actually, using the same arguments SFFA made, it looks like Ivies discriminated against whites more than Asians. Remember that almost 1 million white students took the SAT in 2021. That leaves a huge number of high scoring students but somehow between only about 25-40% representation at Ivy League and Ivy League adjacent universities.
I think the myth of the privileged, entitled dumb white student with rich parents is pretty commonly used now. The excuse that high scores are a result of having rich parents who bought tutoring only seems to matter when the race of the student is white. It's ironically also the case that whites are the least likely group to take test prep and that test prep only seems effective in the style that East Asians tend to use which is the cram school variety or hagwon.
https://nypost.com/2018/10/17/harvards-gatekeeper-reveals-sa...
There is no information in these charts about the test scores of those admitted.
You'd need the scores their admissions team has, not graphs that include a randomly decided multiplier to determine white vs jewish SAT scores (seriously, read the methodology section at the bottom)
"Their 100- and 177-point SAT score lead ... seems to have hurt, not helped, their chances of admission"
Why is that deflection the depth of the discussion, not everyone is trying to exclude Jewish people or start a pogrom over these observations, but the depth of the discussion seems more like a deflection just in case, and I dont think its that helpful
like, is there something other groups could learn, perhaps even the less privileged Jewish people?
I observe a similar effect in my partner's family. My partner is Vietnamese, and their family placed heavy value on personal success, or the success of who they married. I can't speak for Vietnamese culture, but it may be a cultural value too. The result? One half of the family is incredibly well off, and the other half is supported by them to help raise them beyond their circumstance. It isn't a conspiracy as some posit, it's familial love and mutual support.
One could argue they are doing the same as what Jews who came to the US also did: stick together and help each other, because it's a rough world out there. Some decry it as nepotism, as if those who are wealthy are not allowed to have preference for their own kind simply because they are wealthy. In that same vein, not everyone proves to be successful. It can simply be a matter of statistics or circumstance, but people place the blame on the individual or the group at the wrong times.
I for one avoid any discussion on the matter because all too often it proves non-conductive to actually useful conversation.
Eh, I don’t think it was okay for the WASP owners of the Los Angeles Country Club to “prefer their own kind”.
Maybe the right heuristic is something like: the more power and dominance a group of people have, the less okay it is for them to have preferences for others within that group.
- minority X
- minority Y
- minority Z
- the uncategorized ones
Is going to find weird behavior around the last group, regardless of whether it's skin color or some other feature that's chosen to generate the partition.
Something about remarkableness (being a minority and being in the ivy league are both remarkable traits) not being evenly distributed.
Cornell is consistently seen as "not elite" and in a sense it isn't, same with Berkely. Each of these top 5 schools, besides Harvard, exude a scrappy spirit for challenging the status quo. HYP, is focused on dominating the EXISTING power structure, whereas Stanford, MIT, Berkely, and Cornell are focused on building their own power structure.
https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/top-universities-recent....
The world sends it best and brightest to these institutions.
Breaking it down by race as if it's a zero sum game is a distraction to get people fighting amongst themselves. What is the point in arguing about the relative fairness if most of the spots are taken by people who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise. Open their slots and it relieves most of the pressure on the admissions system, no?
* uses a mix of sources from different years
* a lot of guesses eg. arbitrary calculation with international students and Jewish SAT scores
* Uses Mean SAT Scores nationally, not from Ivies
* "This guaranteed to not unfairly over- or under-count any demographic" lol
* Commentary makes conclusions about entrance based solely on SAT scores despite that not being anywhere near the full picture of an application