How the Ivy League Broke America

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Boy- those down-to-earth, average to low intelligence really stuck it to us. They stuck it to America and their own safety because they believed the snake oil salesman.

Now we have an anti-vaxxer for public health who will take us back to the 1800s. Remember Polio, Measles, Small Pox, a flu epidemic before vaccines?

We have a pedophile with less than 2 years of law experience for Attorney General.

We have a conspiracy theorist, friends with Putin and other dictators for our National Security.

We have a President using his private security to vet these people since they’d never pass an FBI background check. And using his office to exact revenge for selfish purposes.

I don’t think intelligence is what broke America. These people were full on Trump regardless. And, let’s see where that gets us.

Well he’s going to get rid of the Dept of Education so things should get better.

[Anonymous]

The media broke America. Sensational, stupid journalists like the one that wrote this article.

The Koch brothers broke America.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kind of a bit of aside that is mentioned in the article, is that how the rise of Generative AI will make traditional academic skills even less important.

Linked to a study at Harvard where someone used ChatGPT 4 (paid version) to write a bunch of papers on different topics and then told the Harvard professors grading, that some of the papers were written by ChatGPT and others by qualified humans.

In reality, they were all written by ChatGPT. Papers received mostly As. Basically, the person would have received a 3.6 for the semester just having Chat GPT crank out the papers.

given that a 3.6 is the bottom 25% of Harvard, not too impressive. Harvard median GPA is 3.83.

Sure, but the 3.6 was earned with 5 minutes of effort and still resulted in more A grades than B grades from the same Harvard professors awarding the 3.83 to the kid that spent 200 hours to achieve that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kind of a bit of aside that is mentioned in the article, is that how the rise of Generative AI will make traditional academic skills even less important.

Linked to a study at Harvard where someone used ChatGPT 4 (paid version) to write a bunch of papers on different topics and then told the Harvard professors grading, that some of the papers were written by ChatGPT and others by qualified humans.

In reality, they were all written by ChatGPT. Papers received mostly As. Basically, the person would have received a 3.6 for the semester just having Chat GPT crank out the papers.

given that a 3.6 is the bottom 25% of Harvard, not too impressive. Harvard median GPA is 3.83.

Sure, but the 3.6 was earned with 5 minutes of effort and still resulted in more A grades than B grades from the same Harvard professors awarding the 3.83 to the kid that spent 200 hours to achieve that.

Cheating is rampant in public universities too. Kids don’t even go to class. Cue the thread about the UVA cheating this week.

Really?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The critique is fine; the proposed solution is insipid. Brooks is pretty good when it comes to summarizing things that other people have been thinking and writing about for years. He isn’t much of an original thinker.

Yes. He’s proposing to rearrange the deck chairs. The fundamental problem is that the Ivies are too small for the social role they are trying to fill, and they refuse to grow. It doesn’t really matter how they fill their classes: their role as gatekeepers, and the ever-growing number of people locked out, will continue to fuel an ever-expanding populist backlash.

The populist backlash isn’t really about limited access to Ivies. The Ivy hatred is just one manifestation of the grievances of LC/LMC people (mostly but not exclusively White) display because they feel left behind. Their bigger beef is with globalization. You could get rid of tho Ivies tomorrow and some average Joe in Ohio would still be getting hooked on opiates and supporting Trump because the Chinese and Indians are working harder and outperforming them.

This.

+100

But, this would not get as many clicks or likes as this stupid article.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The critique is fine; the proposed solution is insipid. Brooks is pretty good when it comes to summarizing things that other people have been thinking and writing about for years. He isn’t much of an original thinker.

Yeah, I would be less negative on it but in general I found the research linked and quoted as the most interesting part.

[Anonymous]

Well, the author, Brooks attended the University of Chicago, not an Ivy. Apparently, still bitter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Read the article. The title is click bait.

After reading it, you will see it actually makes the case for having to attend an elite school.

Oh, and by the way, many of us who have kids at an Ivy were not Tiger moms. We didn’t pay for private counselors or tutors. We weren't gunning for Ivies at a young age. My kid didn’t even consider them until December of Senior year. The grades and scores were unprepped. He had a job and played a sport.

We actually got out of the rat race and he wasn’t even in GT in elementary which was reserved for the kids whose parents thought they were geniuses and lobbied the principal or donated $$$$.

Ironically, none of the ultimate Tiger moms in our hood had kids accepted to an Ivy. They can see through the BS.

+ a million. True of my ivy kids, their friends there(most of whom are on at least some financial aid), and other students from the high school who landed there. Attending Ivy/+ schools offers a boost going forward, this and many articles &experts acknowledge it, thus making elite schools permanently in demand. The tiger mom over-prepped and tutored kids who come from extraordinary wealth all ended up shut out of all top 20s, and are at SMU, W&L, Colby, Bucknell...and a few at UVA in state.

What year, though?
there’s plenty of brilliant Asians who do not come from wealth finding themselves shut out of ivies bc Asian

Trans is a big + tho

[Anonymous]

I liked this article (even though I'm not a conservative like David Brooks). He makes several insightful points.

In addition, this paragraph should resonate with DCUM community:

-------
Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I liked this article (even though I'm not a conservative like David Brooks). He makes several insightful points.

In addition, this paragraph should resonate with DCUM community:

-------
Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

This part summarizes the College Forum on DCUM perfectly to a tee. So incredibly sad the impacts on childhood in the name of helping our kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I liked this article (even though I'm not a conservative like David Brooks). He makes several insightful points.

In addition, this paragraph should resonate with DCUM community:

-------
Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

Suggesting this is a society wide change is just the kind of lazy inaccurate “analysis” you can expect from Brooks. No one is more in a bubble than he is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Read the article. The title is click bait.

After reading it, you will see it actually makes the case for having to attend an elite school.

Oh, and by the way, many of us who have kids at an Ivy were not Tiger moms. We didn’t pay for private counselors or tutors. We weren't gunning for Ivies at a young age. My kid didn’t even consider them until December of Senior year. The grades and scores were unprepped. He had a job and played a sport.

We actually got out of the rat race and he wasn’t even in GT in elementary which was reserved for the kids whose parents thought they were geniuses and lobbied the principal or donated $$$$.

Ironically, none of the ultimate Tiger moms in our hood had kids accepted to an Ivy. They can see through the BS.

+ a million. True of my ivy kids, their friends there(most of whom are on at least some financial aid), and other students from the high school who landed there. Attending Ivy/+ schools offers a boost going forward, this and many articles &experts acknowledge it, thus making elite schools permanently in demand. The tiger mom over-prepped and tutored kids who come from extraordinary wealth all ended up shut out of all top 20s, and are at SMU, W&L, Colby, Bucknell...and a few at UVA in state.

What year, though?
there’s plenty of brilliant Asians who do not come from wealth finding themselves shut out of ivies bc Asian

Trans is a big + tho

Umm no ... are you JD Vance? How many families with a child dealing with trans issues do you actually know where you can test this theory out? I'm in SF a city where the right assumes every other family's kid is trans and after 20 years here and with 2 kids going through the K-12 system, I have met exactly one family that has one kid who is trans. Despite my kids' schools making space not to discriminate against trans, hardly any one actually is so it's a microscopic minority to begin with. And then, the one person I know who has that identity was a straight A student at Lick-Wilmerding (the #1 private in SF) and did not get into a top private school or top or mid-level UC either. Being trans did not help him. He's currently at an OOS school. So while I understand n=1 in my anecdote, it's incredibly hard to find even one actual example given how small this population is. Why such a tiny, microscopic minority that most people will never meet or come across has triggered half the country or been presented as a giant bogeyman and way white students "cheat" to get into college to scare mainstream USA is so deceptive - in reality most are very rare and just want to quietly blend in without attention.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The critique is fine; the proposed solution is insipid. Brooks is pretty good when it comes to summarizing things that other people have been thinking and writing about for years. He isn’t much of an original thinker.

Yes. He’s proposing to rearrange the deck chairs. The fundamental problem is that the Ivies are too small for the social role they are trying to fill, and they refuse to grow. It doesn’t really matter how they fill their classes: their role as gatekeepers, and the ever-growing number of people locked out, will continue to fuel an ever-expanding populist backlash.

The populist backlash isn’t really about limited access to Ivies. The Ivy hatred is just one manifestation of the grievances of LC/LMC people (mostly but not exclusively White) display because they feel left behind. Their bigger beef is with globalization. You could get rid of tho Ivies tomorrow and some average Joe in Ohio would still be getting hooked on opiates and supporting Trump because the Chinese and Indians are working harder and outperforming them.

This.

+100

But, this would not get as many clicks or likes as this stupid article.

I heard Bill Clinton talk about the perils of globalization when he was out of office during the GWB administration. He totally had his finger on the pulse of where this was all going to lead - it's great for a lot of people, and really bad for many others in terms of how they feel sidelined and marginalized.

I'm not saying his own policies when President didn't contribute to the current situation, just that he articulated really well how this was going to play out. I don't think politicians like Obama or Harris could ever address this as objectively, because they are more interested in proving that they are part of the club. And of course Hillary herself had no problem crapping on the "deplorables."

Right now you've got a huge number of people convinced that Trump is going to look out after them, but the disappointment is going to be massive if and when they figure out he's looking out after himself, and the interests of other business oligarchs, not the little guy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The media broke America. Sensational, stupid journalists like the one that wrote this article.

The Koch brothers broke America.

Yes, exactly. I won’t feed into the far-right narrative that liberal elites at Ivy schools broke America bc it’s not true. FRNJ are just mad that it’s one of the bastions of America that they can’t influence. I’m tired of the FRNJ distractions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I liked this article (even though I'm not a conservative like David Brooks). He makes several insightful points.

In addition, this paragraph should resonate with DCUM community:

-------
Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

+1