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I think the point about college mobility rates was an interesting one. But then the author lost me a bit:

> what is the economic rationale for having a bunch of educational resources and top students concentrated in a few small elite schools? ... the country’s most talented people into the country’s most important jobs

I don't think that's it at all. I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school. If the same money was put toward social mobility, the most successful people in our country could be folks who grew up in poverty. Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.

> toxic elitism that has permeated American society over the last four decades ... where only a few people and institutions matter and everyone else is left to watch...

That's been happening for much longer than four decades, lol

9 comments

> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.

That must be part of the answer, but it can’t be the whole answer, or close to the whole. There’s huge variation in educational outcomes among those who get the access that you describe. What explains why some people in this group have such good outcomes, while most have relatively lackluster outcomes?

A lot of the comments here come from a place of ignorance...

I've had the unique experience of private tutoring many "elite" students in high school for math and physics for nearly a decade in Los Angeles a while back. Basically both rich kids and less fortunate kids who can only afford my tutoring rate every once in a while vs rich kids who can if they wanted to afford my help every day.

It's not simply "better textbooks" or "better schooling", the difference in education is VERY DRASTIC and being in LA I was able to see kids from drastically different backgrounds. Rich kids with having tutors for every class, maids for every other side chore so parents can actually pay attention to their kids, private high schools and middle schools that cost nearly $30-50k per year can buy you so many advantages most people can't even comprehend.

The biggest advantages I saw was better resources, better textbooks, curriculums that are ACTUALLY made with care and time, and most importantly teachers who were paid very very comfortable (ie, 6 figure salaries) who have the luxury to not be overworked, and can actually attend to their students as needed. Imagine every one of your teachers in middle school and high school, putting top notch effort into providing a great learning experience for you? Most people probably only had one teacher like that in their entire lifetime. And not to mention if the school was lacking in any area, many of the rich parents would hire their own private ex-olympian or ex-superstar specialist of whatever they desire.

People here are DRASTICALLY underestimating what extra educational resources can buy.

I don’t know why this was flagged, because to me it rings very true. I’m from a different country but I have been on the receiving end of poverty and teachers who at least tried to give a damn about their pupils, and some tutors too. At some point I was very surprised to learn that being not fucked up by life and having a teacher who gives a shit can work wonders on you, if circumstances allow.

It’s all about incentives and availability of resources, time and attention. When life gives too many shit lemons to both students and teachers, there’s no breathing room left for any of them to care a little bit more about any taught subject. When teachers are overburdened and children not supported by their environments, they just want to get rid of each other ASAP, and then it’s on parents to berate their kids for not wanting to study because whatever reason.

But if you can unburden both a teacher and a student from hardships of life even just a little bit, somehow a lot of attention and time free up to care about any subject, and explore it in different directions, not necessarily by what’s included in curriculum. Suddenly learning about something and practicing it can be actually fun.

Fun and joy of exploring stuff is so important yet so missing. Having some not even too fat stacks of cash can help with that drastically.

I vouched for this comment and brought it back from being flagged/dead/whatever because I think you're making a great point, and not calling anyone specific out. I would caution you from calling folks ignorant, even indirectly, as it can be taken the wrong way and can cause your comment to be flagged.

I saw that you copied this comment and replied to another comment below with it. I'm concerned that folks might see that as against HN guidelines. Again, I agree with what you're saying, and I just don't want you to be seen as a spammer.

That's an interesting comment; can you put a burner email in your profile?

Respectfully, I think you're missing the point too. You are right that many folks who get access to these top resources don't then go on to become so successful, however you might define success. But a larger proportion of them do compared to other groups. I'm not saying that an individual is guaranteed success if they're born into a wealthy family. But I am saying that a wealthy neighborhood of kids who have access to more resources growing up will have a much higher rate of Ivy League admissions than a poor neighborhood across the railroad tracks.

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteins brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould.

Srinivasa Ramanujan would be a counterexample. He grew up poor with no formal training in mathematics but was nonetheless one of the world's greatest math geniuses.

He certainly was brilliant. But compared to his contemporaries he died really young, at age 32.

He did also go to school and even tried to go to college, he even got a scholarship! He had a lot of issues with the non math coursework however and did not finish any degree that I am aware of.

The reality of his life is a bit more complex than "oh a poor boy found a basic math text book and taught himself to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history"

What is more interesting here is to imagine if he grew up with wealth and formal training, would he have died at 32? Would he been given the time and resources to actually become one of the greatest math geniuses out there?

Ramanujan had a lot of raw talent, but it wasn't honed, and ultimately it was cut extremely short and wasted.

I think you mean “exception to the rule” and not “counterexample”. Different meanings.

Without randomized controlled trials, there's no easy way to separate the effects of increased educational spending and tutoring from hundreds of other factors that might affect someone's admission rate. Clearly we expect it helps or we wouldn't spend money on it. But it's not clear if educational spending is the dominant factor in academic success or a small factor among many.

In at least one study I've seen, smaller class size didn't have much effect, but private tutoring did.

As someone who has privately tutored many rich kids vs poor kids for nearly a decade, I don't think I need to see a study to see how much more advantages they have. It's pretty apparent the advantages.

Yes a really "dumb" kid will still be "dumb" academically, but people here are severely underestimating what money can buy in education. I've seen really "dumb" kids be brought up to the level of "passably smart" simply because of resource access.

When you have teachers who are not overworked and are paid lovely salaries (ie 6 figure salaries), imagine every teacher you have actually cares and invested in your education? Imagine every class has recordings of every lecture as well as a curriculum that has a lot of forethought and time put into it? And imagine if the school has a lacking teacher, than the parents hire some ex-olympian, or ex-superstar coach or teacher to make up for that? I've seen parents hire ex-olympic athletes to get some untalented rich kid to close to olympic level.

Honestly, I think it's really understated how much educational spending can affect a kid. Most people will not see what I've seen, and even from someone who came from a middle class background who used to believe wealth does not matter when it came to education, even I was shocked by what money can buy in "academic success" and my opinion changed. I at this point, don't need to see a study because it was that drastic.

Anecdotally, I heard a story from a teacher I worked with who spent a lot of time with a student who was lagging behind their peers in school and was given extra support through the special education program. Their family decided to move away, so the school put together a file about how the student's progress. They later heard that the receiving school system found that student to be far ahead of their peers and put them into a gifted program.

There is such a difference in environments in this country's education system. I was doing math in my sophomore year of high school that some don't see until college (or ever). Was I inherently smarter? Of course not. I had good teachers and books, I didn't have to work a job at night, etc.

These people won the genetic lottery and can do anything they want, this includes doing nothing.

A lot of people don't really care about doing much more than the minimum. Even talented people are like this. I'm sure a lot of us know (or, let's be honest, are the) people who busted their ass when they were younger, only to hit their 30s-40s and coast.

Who says these people would have kept busting their ass out for so long if they had a pot of gold waiting for them right after college?

I've been in a run-of-the-mill state school and an elite Ivy, and I can tell you that yes, a lot of the students in the latter were born extremely smart. Yes, there are smart people in the former, but the difference in the distributions is not small. IMO

The long and short of it is that when it comes to education, the US needs equal opportunities. This means paid-for education and an equalization of education knowledge / lessons, and less emphasis (in hiring) on what schools you went to. A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at.

Personally, I've benefited from the Netherlands' older equal opportunity system; my parents weren't rich (working class, single income, house bought at inopportune times) so they wouldn't have been able to put me through college, but thanks to a government funding - only a few hundred per month - plus affordable colleges - iirc it was €1500 per year + a few hundred tops in books but the books felt optional since piracy was a thing - meant that I could get a college degree and a subsequent job in a highly desired field (software development) and comfortably move up to middle class.

Of course, thanks to inflation and whatnot, I'm not significantly better off than my parents were - I bought a house ten years later in life than they did, half the size and twice the price, and I got lucky - but I'm still fortunate that we had this opportunity.

Some years ago, the government sliced into this equal opportunity program though, turning the 'free' government student funding into a loan so there's a generation now starting out with a college degree and 15-25K in debt and a completely inaccessible housing market even if they were to combine incomes with a significant other.

> A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at.

There is no inherit weight, but humans are drawn to shiny things. Similarly, someone who turns up in a Ferrari is going to be seen differently than someone who shows up in a rusty old farm truck. If someone establishes an emotional connection to a school, perhaps because they are alumni themselves, that just might be the shiny they need to see, whether it is meaningful or not.

> A college or uni degree should carry the same weight wherever you study at

A big issue here is that all degrees with the same title are not equal between universities. If nothing else; as long as MIT is more selective than Indiana University of Pennsylvania, you're going to have a a general average quality of graduate produced.

> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart. They're exceptional because they were given access to what they needed to succeed.

The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional. The schools filter so harshly that just getting admitted already means you are exceptional. And they can do that because of their good reputation, which is mostly based on tradition and perception.

> The most ironic part here it isn't the school and education there that makes them exceptional.

You see this all the time. People think it's the institution that makes the person but it's actually the person that makes the institution. It's the problem with admitting people into an institution that can't play at the level of everyone else there. A lot of people actually think that by simply going to the elite institution that the non-elite person will somehow end up with the same abilities as the others.

You can give me all the resources an elite athlete will have access to but at the end of the day I'll never be able to play at their level. For some reason this is widely understood. But when it comes to intellectual capacity, many people think everyone is the same and it's access to the institutions that they are lacking.

Unless you're a legacy or a child of a donor or professor. (There are a lot of legacies and children of donors, somewhat fewer children of professors.)

> And they can do that because of their good reputation, which is mostly based on tradition and perception.

And possibly based somewhat on quality of education

I believe that ascar is arguing that when you're Harvard you don't actually need particularly good teaching, because you've already recruited students who are good at studying, taking tests, motivating themselves and suchlike. Don't you need to be a straight A student just to get in?

After all, if someone came in a straight A student, and graduated a straight A student - can the school really claim credit for that?

> can the school really claim credit for that?

I went to a state school and studied CS. I have done OK for myself; started at a startup and have made steady progression.

A friend of mine went to a ~top 5 CS school - started at same startup I did, same month, for ~50% more $$. Did he learn more than me in school? Honestly talking through course loads and the like - he really did. I had to learn a ton independently/in the field that he had showed to him in a sophomore CS class.

That doesn't mean he was inherently a better engineer than me (~10 years later) - but it did mean he had a big leg up Day One.

I agree that toxic elitism isn’t new, but I do also agree with the author that it has intensified.

Only a few colleges matter. A degree from the others is “actually a dunce cap” according to Peter Thiel.

Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities, which of course have developed completely ludicrous property prices. Nothing happens anywhere else, so if you want a good career you have to at least spend time in one of these.

Markets are winner take all with one or maybe a few companies taking each vertical.

I have asked older people about this, especially the urban elitism of only a few cities matter. Most of them have confirmed what I have observed (I am 45) namely that these trends massively accelerated roughly after the year 2000.

It could be due to the Internet, historically low interest rates redistributing wealth to those that can easily net investment or cheap corporate debt, or some other factor, but I do think it’s real. I also suspect it’s a hidden driver of our political hyper polarization.

The urban elitism seems to have been dented a little by telework and COVID, and we seem to be entering an unbundling phase with social media. Maybe the trend is reversing.

"Actually a dunce cap"?

Let's see. Bill Gates dropped out. So did Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs went to Reed College (where?) and didn't graduate.

Maybe Peter Thiel's perspective is a bit distorted?

> Absolutely everything happens in only a few cities...

Maybe Peter Thiel isn't the only one with a bit of a distorted perspective?

Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs all recognized that the value proposition was not there and moved on. They did not stick it out to receive the graduate/dunce cap just to sooth their sunk cost pangs. Indeed, had they continued with it just because they started, that would be dunce-worthy.

Thiel suggests that the "colleges that matter" offer more, e.g. research labs, that bring more to the table. That may justify greater investment. Certainly researchers at Harvard have done a lot of ground breaking things. The role it played in those discoveries is why it is considered a college that matters. Can Reed College say the same?

Thiel's perspective may very well be distorted, but I am not sure these examples show that. More telling, if we want to play with anecdotes, would be to look at a graduate of Reed College, not someone who ran away as fast as possible because he felt the college was not offering him much.

OK on Steve Jobs, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were at Harvard. And they decided the value still wasn't there - even with Harvard's "ground breaking things" and "college that matters".

And let's not even pretend race doesn't factor into this. The reason so many Asian students excel is that they're the children of (reasonably) high status immigrants. Even if the wealth in the country of origin doesn't directly translate, the social status still carries over. Likewise the reason so many Black students underperform or only gain access via Affirmative Action is that they largely originate in families of lower social status with little access to education, carried over ultimately from slavery but more directly a familial legacy pruned by centuries of racism.

Social mobility is not universally seen as a good thing by everyone in society. Specifically to those at the top of the social hierarchy it can be a threat because a wide gap and inequality helps maintain a position of power: if everyone has equal power, noone does.

So it's silly to expect elite universities to follow a broader economic incentive when it comes to who gets in, who graduates and who receives preferrential treatment. There are certainly economic factors at play but ultimately the entire system is heavily built around nepotism (which in this case is hardly a modern invention given that universities used to be very much run by and for the hiearchial elites of society). Sure, the more direct incentives may be financial (e.g. donations) but ultimately power and hierarchies are a better lens than the economist one of the article if you want to make sense of this.

> The reason so many Asian students excel is that they're the children of (reasonably) high status immigrants.

That's not true. For instance, in NYC Asians have the highest rate of poverty. And yet they also have the highest rate of advanced placement in schools. [1] And many of these kids are from these poor families. It's because their culture values this and Asian students tend to put more effort into school. Many Asian cultures believe in the connection between effort and achievement and it shows. [2]

The first explanation suggests that Asian-American youth’s academic advantage can be attributed to advantages in socio-demographic factors. Relative to whites, their parents tend to be better educated, and they are more likely to live in stable, two-parent families with higher incomes (5). This explanation, however, is insufficient because advantages in socio-demographic factors only partially explain the achievement gap (2, 3, 5). Moreover, Asian Americans are not uniformly advantaged in terms of family socioeconomic background. For example, the poverty rates of Chinese and Vietnamese are higher than they are for whites (5). However, the disadvantaged children of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant families routinely surpass the educational attainment of their native-born, middle-class white peers (6, 7).

[1] http://www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/?forum-post=resear....

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1406402111

> I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school.

Sounds like a good investment opportunity. Fund a child into wealth now and take a cut of their much greater wealth created by their talents later on.

Investors have certainly flirted with the idea before, but it has never caught on. Perhaps it isn't the sure ticket you make it out to be?

Cash alone doesn't work, you need the parenting, role models, nice local institutions and schools, etc.

Yeah, at the individual level this isn't cut and dry. When I wrote my comment I was talking about aggregate groups of students, apologies if that wasn't clear.

> Most Ivy League students weren't born smart.

This seems like a wild assertion to make, and here's something by Scott Alexander that points in the other direction:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-f...

None of the subsections in that essay do much more than “point”; in classic Scott Alexander fashion he makes a lot of noise and gestures at. . . something. . .

* Privilege

> “One obvious answer would be “privilege”. It’s not completely wrong; once the first talented individual makes a family rich and famous, it has a big leg up.”

But this answer isn’t politically viable for him so he glosses over it.

* Genetics

> “The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk.”

He spends a lot of time trying to make this one work but of course it has all the well-known problems that all the eugenicists of the past ran into (e.g., assortative mating doesn’t completely explain Ashkenazi Jews).

* Education

> “Overall I’m not sure I can find any commonalities in these families’ educational styles except that they were all pretty weird.”

* Yudkowsky’s “Hero License”

> “. . .which I have no evidence for.”

That article seems incredibly hand wavy and useless.

> Suppose Erasmus Darwin had a genius-level IQ of 150.

Not really a strong basis for an argument if you ask me.

> I believe nearly anyone could be among "the country's most talented people" if they were wealthy, given access to near-limitless resources, accepted into an elite school.

I think a lot of people, myself included, want to believe this. It's nice to think that all humans have great potential inside of them!

Unfortunately, reality might not respect our perfectly reasonable sensibilities. After having a child, I began to research the things I could do to enrich her environment, maximize her intelligence, etc. One depressing thing I learned is that intelligence is more-or-less a purely genetic trait. Your intelligence is highly correlated with your biological parents' intelligence, to the same degree as something like height.

Well here's an easy* win for any new parents reading this: read to your kids. As much as you can. They will start school with a significant leg up!

https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2019/06000/When_Ch...

* edit: easy, of course, if you don't work a night job and have the time to read multiple books to your child every day

> Results: Parents who read 1 picture book with their children every day provide their children with exposure to an estimated 78,000 words each a year. Cumulatively, over the 5 years before kindergarten entry, we estimate that children from literacy-rich homes hear a cumulative 1.4 million more words during storybook reading than children who are never read to.

This study just says that kids who are read to are exposed to more words. It's basically like saying kids who go outside more are exposed to more sunlight. Sure, this is definitely a true fact. But does it matter? This study says nothing about how reading effects outcomes in childhood or in life.

Wikipedia has a good article on the heritability of IQ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

> Various studies have estimated the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.

One thing that is interesting is that children have very random IQs that eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs. Perhaps this is explained by things like an early-life word gap that eventually gets filled with age.

> But does it matter?

Yes, it does. It matters a lot. "The Word Gap ... has important consequences for children’s later vocabulary, literacy and school performance" [0]

Even if this whole line of research gets debunked, reading to your kids won't hurt!

> eventually converge to something approximating their parents' IQs

I haven't read much about this research, maybe it holds more water than I think. But does it matter? Do you really think disadvantaged youth are such because of genetics?

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08852...

I think there are two types of properties: intrinsic and extrinsic. Your intelligence is intrinsic. It’s internal to you and is highly correlated with your genetics. Your success in life is extrinsic. It’s based on factors outside of you, like the circumstances of your family, etc.

So, no, I’m not saying success is purely genetic. But, I also think there is a strong genetic component to one’s intrinsic ability and so not everyone can reach the top even if they work really hard.

FWIW, most Ivy League and other top schools (MIT, Stanford) offer extreme discounts on tuition for students with household income under around $150K. Often times they'll pay somewhere between 0-10% of the actual tuition. If your family makes less than $75k, I think you can go to most or all of these schools for free (in tuition at least, not sure about room/board/food).

I'm glad they do that. But those kids still have to get in. Which is much more difficult for a kid graduating from an under-resourced high school.

I went to a very privileged high school. There were so many eyeballs on my class' test scores, recommendations, personal essays...of course we were going to succeed. Most of us got into our top choice schools. You often need a lot more than money to get into these schools.

Money is at the root of everything you just mentioned.

For competitive students, private universities often are substantially cheaper than their state institutions.

And the benefits are growing. Duke, for example, will waive tuition for all students from NC and SC whose families earn less than $150k. Automatic Room and board and supply support kicks in at $65k. Davidson was one of the first, but a lot of schools don't include loans in their aid packages any more*.

These aren't special named scholarships either! These are automatic benefits to all admitted students. If the school wants a particular student, there are extra pots of discretionary money available as scholarships, prizes, etc.

If you're in the top 10% of your HS class and you can afford to leave home and study full-time for a few years, you really should swing for the fences. The best private schools tend to have higher 4-year graduation rates, so you win coming (out of pocket) and going (opportunity cost).

*) Middle-income houses probably need to take out loans to match their obligation.

**) Me: Public HS, Private BS, Public PhD

So do you believe these schools are unbiased regarding admission to students that require such aid (nonprofitable) versus wealthy students that require no aid (profitable)? This article is pointing out that these (and likely lower ranked schools) are biased toward the profitable candidates. Given that is the case, it is a long-shot on top of a long-shot to be admitted to Ivy League without paying out of pocket.