Why can't you Americans just stop fetishizing university brands? In Europe nobody gives a shit if you graduated from, say, University of Frankfurt and not La Petit de Academy Francois Internatzionale. It's the content of the education that matters not the brand. You have a masters in archaeology? Ok, good luck finding a job. You have a masters in civil engineering? Good for you, you won't need luck. We even have evidence in forms of things like Mathematical Olympiads and coding competitions which are full of university students. Are they dominated by Ivy league students? No.
American culture is almost entirely based on English not European culture. England historically was highly class based, heirarchical and had no revolution to upset the system. You might just as well attack Oxbridge. The Ivies are modern day route to preferment in presteige industries like big law and finance. Industries in which (for better or worse) US and UK firms are globally dominant. So it was less about education and more about training a ruling class.
Europe's far from one single entity in education systems, and social system that's part of.
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.
The influence consisted of money, arms, and troops, for the most part. They learned some rhetoric from the French, but I don't think that the cultural influence was at all deep.
In Europe nobody gives a shit if you graduated from, say, University of Frankfurt and not La Petit de Academy Francois Internatzionale.
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.
Funny how things are perceived differently between inside France and outside France.
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.
I think the difference is that, certainly in Canada, the top universities have grown their enrollment as the population grew (uoft increased degrees awarded around 30% from 2011 to 2021 for example from:https://governingcouncil.utoronto.ca/degrees-diplomas-and-ce..., I am sure enrollment is way up recently as well because it looks like there are 90k students enrolled and I swear that number was more like 65K 4-5 years ago, although I don't have hard data).
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.
I'm in Canada and there is definitely a strong aspiration to top colleges. UBC, U of T, McGill are generally recognized as top schools, and kids definitely aspire to them. U of Alberta generally gets a lot of attention for engineering, esp. Oil & Gas.
Like a lot of things in Canada the bell curve is flatter -- but it doesn't mean there isn't a bell curve.
Sure, but that's true everywhere I've lived - people want to get into "good" schools.
But the difference is that in the US, it's pretty common for families or students to aspire to the "best". That's true even in middle and low-middle class families. That's something I never saw in Canada.
That kind of thinking in Canada is limited to the upper class and old money in Canada.
I work in academia and this is the first time I've heard about Sorbonne. I can guarantee you that if I asked 10 colleagues which is better, Sorbonne or Bordeaux (random French city), none would be able to answer with confidence. Maybe it is different in France, but outside of its borders, the name has not much value.
I don't know where you work in academia, but even as an undergrad in the 90s, both hard and soft science majors at the UC system knew about the Sorbonne, and usually it was the first name people could mention outside of other US and UK institutions.
After that you might have heard people mention Canadian options like McGill and Waterloo, and then MAYBE a handful of European options in Germany and Switzerland.
But the Sorbonne was distinctly understood by a majority of peers for its status.
Also: generalizing something for all of Europe is as about as useful as generalizing for the US. Both span a huge landmass with diverse populations, but often people generalize from their point of view to the whole.
I would argue that the US are large enough that the diversity in the in the population is more extreme than in a single European country. Yes, they all identify as (US) Americans, but if you compare e.g. California to Minnesota the difference is more comparable to Germany vs. Ukraine than two regions in Germany.
Yes, and I don’t know why the OP thought otherwise. Most other European countries also have “elite” universities, even if they lack the gravitas of Harvard or Yale.
Because some schools are better than others. They have better incoming students and better teachers. You claim the content of the education matters, well some schools have better content than others.
I fully agree that these alma maters shouldnt be fetishized.
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.
That's because Europe doesn't have as many world renowned institutions. And for the few that it does have, people absolutely care. There's a difference between EFPL and University of Delft, or Oxford and University of Southampton...
If you don't believe me just look at where members of your government went to school.
First of all, many of us don't. I will say I don't know those "brands". Are they both fairly major universities? The US has lots of universities, and I think there's less "lower tier" ones in Europe. In fact, I had family move to the US for it.
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".
I think it really depends on your major. In Business studies and Germany this is absolutely the case. Mannheim, St. Gallen, Milano, TUM.
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)
Is this normalized by number of each demographic that sits for the test? (Sorry if that's answered in the PDF but maybe someone with more time or statistical understanding than me can check it.)
If the mainstream discourse was "yes, whites are underrepresented, but they deserve it because they're dumb", that would be progress compared to the current "there are too many whites in the Ivies due to white supremacy (and the SAT is racist)" narrative. Sources:
>If the mainstream discourse was "yes, whites are underrepresented, but they deserve it because they're dumb",
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.
The SFFA case used some research from Princeton(I was told this so I never verified it was from Princeton) which showed that among Asians with a 1550+ on the SAT, the top one percentile of Asian students taking the test exceeded the number of seats at Harvard, etc. for freshman. The SAT has some stats here https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-r...
So the SFFA case argued that the Ivies must be suppressing high scoring Asians. Although ultimately the court case came down to whether or not it was legal for schools to use race for admissions. But, for example, nearly 1 million white students took the SAT in 2020. The top 1 percentile of 1 million is ~10000. Yet the white enrollment at Harvard was only about ~37% that year but discrimination against whites didn't seem to be a factor because SFFA argued that legacy and athletic admissions were secret backdoors allowing AA for white students, without any evidence for this claim.
There is a fair bit of research done about the East-Asian style "shadow education" as they call it. It's worth looking into. As well, the College Board has historically not done a good job of securing the test especially on the international level where a lot of cheating scandals have arisen. The same test prep companies that operate in China and Korea also have operations in the US. This is worth looking at https://theconversation.com/test-prep-is-a-rite-of-passage-f... because it presents evidence that test prep is only really effective in the way East Asians use it which is for long periods of time.
Furthermore, why use 1500 SAT score? Because it gives the distribution you like? Harvard's cutoffs are 1100 for Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics, 1350 for Asian women and 1380 for Asian men, and 1310 for "white wannabe students in states that don’t see a lot of Harvard attendees":
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?
Hispanic is one of those really funny ones. A catchall for people with wildly different backgrounds. My wife and I are both eligible for to tick that box due to Spanish ancestry, but everyone understands that it’s basically a proxy for mestizo. I’ve heard that a lot of African-descended people from Spanish colonies do identify as Hispanic though. I don’t know about Indios.
I always liked how one option can contain half the world’s population, including two of the world’s most populous countries with very, very different cultures, looks, and basically everything. And then there would be 5 different options for various Native American tribes.
"Mean SAT score for non-Jewish Whites was derived by assuming the mean Jewish SAT score is a generous 1268."
Very scientific.
And the conclusion:
"Their 100- and 177-point SAT score lead over Hispanic and Black students seems to have hurt, not helped, their chances of admission.
On the other hand, the smaller 73-point lead of Asian students over Whites helped greatly."
They're using scores from across the 100% of college applicants when less than 1% of them apply to Ivy League schools.
If they had used more natural language I'd be charitable and say they didn't know better, but not after they went out of their way to invent numbers to... separate out Jewish people from whites? While also insisting they're a small group so it doesn't matter?
I'm going to guess the admissions numbers didn't show the kind of dramatic gap they wanted so off to town they went.
> While also insisting they're a small group so it doesn't matter?
Doesn't matter for calculating the non-Jewish White SAT is how I interpreted that. Since white_SAT = (2.4*jewish_SAT + 55.4*non_jewish_white_SAT) / (2.4 + 55.4), it means that even if your Jewish SAT estimate is off by ~100 points, it will only change the non-Jewish White SAT estimate by ~4 points.
Is there something non-scientific about estimates? Or do you think this is not a reasonable estimate, i.e. it may be significantly off? The charge of "non-scientific" is very vague - can you be more specific? What do you think is wrong, and by how much?
Specific to the estimate... it's not scientific to guess a number because you proved guessing isn't a risk because it's such a non-factor. In general you just remove the non-factor.
But, realizing you're OP...
> They're using scores from across the 100% of college applicants when less than 1% of them apply to Ivy League schools.
Respectfully, you need to go back to high school stats if you're trying to salvage this. Or maybe a bit earlier, since I'm pretty sure my 8 year old niece could see what's wrong there.
> it's not scientific to guess a number because you proved guessing isn't a risk because it's such a non-factor. In general you just remove the non-factor.
But then you don't have a reasonable lower bound, and someone trying to debunk the analysis could, instead of throwing un-falsifiable claims of un-scientificness, make the much stronger accusation that the combined white+Jewish mean SAT score is being unfairly attributed to non-Jewish whites alone.
> They're using scores from across the 100% of college applicants when less than 1% of them apply to Ivy League schools.
Seems relevant to me - it would be very surprising if the mean of the SAT score distribution didn't strongly affect its top percentile. If you're not satisfied with reasonable extrapolation, you can find what the SAT scores are for the top percentile of white/Hispanic/Black students. I wager that sorting the SAT scores by mean or by top percentile gives the same order. But as you say, I failed high school stats, so I'm probably wrong.
You might have twice as many overall openings for non-legacy students if you brought that into balance. Or you can complain that one subcategory of asian has a disparity from others and dig into it. That takes time and energy and publicity that is better spent on the real issue.
Now do the same thing for legacy admits versus non-legacy admits.
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?
I think the over/under representation stuff is suspect. If you want to start with the right candidate population, it is not all US university students. It is better to start with the population of students that scored over 1500 on the SAT.
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.
People look at these stats and come up with all sorts of theories to explain them besides the obvious one: income and cultural differences highly correlated with race and leading to better testing and outcomes.
Every time people try to point this out, a less privileged Jewish person points out the less privileged Jewish people as if proof that nobody can see with their own eyes that, yes, there is also heavily disproportionate representation of Jewish people in an influential caste of US society
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?
Because the discussion unfortunately devolves almost immediately into appallingly anti-semitic nonsense. I think that many minority groups tend to stick together because not only is it practical, but it keeps them close to their culture. The side effect of that is that success "stays in" the group.
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.
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.
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.
Well mainly because the universities themselves frame it antisemitically, by tacitly splitting up a certain number of "white" seats between Jews and non-Jews. If they threw Jews in with the "diversity seats" or with Asians you wouldn't hear so much about the Jews taking away "our" (eg: non-Jewish white) university seats, since the minority with which we were being made to "compete" would be a lot smaller.
Not all Ivy leagues are on the same pedestal: H(Harvard), Y(Yale), P(Princeton) are seen as elite. Demographics just masquerade the real composition of students: kids of elite (billionaires and presidents of countries that matter to the national interests of the states) across the world are admitted. One has to dig into the pedigree of these students to get a real handle: otherwise, admitting a kid of a black billionaire is sold as doing 'justice' to past injustices of Slavery.
HYP may be elite but quite frankly it's to their own disadvantage. For funded startup founders as of 2023, the ranking list was 1) Stanford, 2)MIT, 3)UC Berkely, 4) Harvard, 5) Cornell.
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.
Well, this is a strong counterpoint to the alumni/patronage theory. All the Ivies seem to be selecting the smartest of the bunch. Grades and standardized test scores matter.
How? Do you think the median student applies to an Ivy league?
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)
* 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
The emphasis on alleged Jewish and Asian over representation really strikes me as someone’s personal project. I don’t think they track who’s Jewish anymore at these schools. They certainly used to. Anonymous posters of demographic information with those emphases… leaves me with 4chan vibes.
In 2013, the Pew Research Center's Portrait of Jewish Americans found that more than 90% of Jews who responded to its survey described themselves as being non-Hispanic whites, 2% described themselves as being black, 3% described themselves as being Hispanic, and 2% described themselves as having other racial or ethnic backgrounds. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews
Well yes, if you define Iran as a "white" country of origin, all of LA's Persian Jewish exiles will report themselves as "non-Hispanic white", as if they were somehow akin to Boston Brahmins for having come to the USA from Iran in 1979.
US demographics surveys typically lump the entirety of Europe (except Spain), most of Russia, and the middle east into "Non-Hispanic White". Iranians would definitely be marking themselves down as such. Occasionally you'll see one that has subdivisions of "White", typically splitting it up into Eastern and Western Europe, and Middle Eastern.
We can debate the various subtleties of "white" till the cows come home, but that is irrelevant to how accurate those graphs are. Let's assume the graphic erroneously counted 100% of Jews as white, instead of 90%. That would change the estimate of non-Jewish whites in the US from 55.4% to 55.64%, and the estimate of non-Jewish whites in the Ivies from 29.2% to 30.63%.
This changes the under-representation of non-Jewish whites from 0.53 to 0.55.
Is this so significantly different that the entire graphic can be dismissed?
It’s an ethnic group with an associated religion. I don’t know about race in the sense it’s used today, but it makes sense to disentangle it from White here given its wildly divergent pattern. That said, White here presumably still includes other populations originating in Asia and Africa that aren’t likely to be considered White colloquially.
Do you feel the same about other peoples? It seems like a very over-the-top response to a common and thoroughly inoffensive understanding of Judaism as a religious rather than an ethnic group. I mean, how do you feel about similar questions regarding Palestinians?
