How the Ivy League Broke America

[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.

Please prove the bolded. There are only so many spots at the kind of employers who prefer to hire from the 3 same Ivy and Ivy-adjacent schools.

The Ivies aspire to be more than an HR department.

+1 this is such dumb take on education. Most people who attended these schools are working right along side all the people who didn't anyway.

[Anonymous]

This article is stupid for many reasons but one is that if employers are only hiring from Ivies then that’s a problem with employers not with Ivies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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:

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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.

eh, kids at Ivies today were parented during covid. Get real, David Brooks.

Please, that is a blip on the radar of their 18 year childhood. And don't think for a minute kids were not moving forward during COVID. I have a kid in college now (not an elite school), and COVID barely disrupted his life, and certainly not his sport or his education at all. It was weird times for sure, but it didn't stop the college prep process. Mostly he couldn't do his service work for about a year because he used to work with the elderly. If anything, for a lot of public school kids aiming for an ivy, it simply guaranteed a 4.0UW.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This article is stupid for many reasons but one is that if employers are only hiring from Ivies then that’s a problem with employers not with Ivies.

It's also a tiny percentage of employers who even have this silly "problem."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I found this interesting. I'm glad I chose to invest the money instead.
"According to the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits, the author of The Meritocracy Trap, if the typical family in the top 1 percent of earners were to take that surplus—all the excess money they spend, beyond what a middle-class family spends, on their child’s education in the form of private-school tuition, extracurricular activities, SAT-prep courses, private tutors, and so forth—and simply invest it in the markets, it would be worth $10 million or more as a conventional inheritance."

The problem with this theory is that many kids wouldn't even be marginally successful or happy if the parents didn't spend that money.

We have three SN kids with combinations of ADHD and dyslexia. They would end up in jail or dead if we didn't spend a fortune on interventions and EC's just so they have tolerable lives.

[Anonymous]

I like reading David Brooks. He’s a little too limousine liberal for me, but I appreciate the analysis. Both he, and Trump, want to move manufacturing jobs back to America. The problem with this plan is that these jobs are being automated. We can’t social engineer a middle class by creating work for them that the free market doesn’t need.

We are a knowledge based society and everyone needs a skill to receive a decent paying job. It can be trades, but it’s got to be something. Many of the people I see that are disenchanted with current American society are those that do not have a skill. Even soft science college graduates are working at Starbucks. They really don’t have a skill.

High schools need to do a better job at ensuring each graduate has a path towards employment. If college is out of the picture, then a trade.

I agree with public service as an option. It would give kids not interested in military service a place to get a skill. So many trades jobs are going to immigrant labor.

And we need to push science. As a country, we’re still importing scientists. We have good paying jobs in American. We don’t have enough students willing to take hard science classes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I like reading David Brooks. He’s a little too limousine liberal for me, but I appreciate the analysis. Both he, and Trump, want to move manufacturing jobs back to America. The problem with this plan is that these jobs are being automated. We can’t social engineer a middle class by creating work for them that the free market doesn’t need.

We are a knowledge based society and everyone needs a skill to receive a decent paying job. It can be trades, but it’s got to be something. Many of the people I see that are disenchanted with current American society are those that do not have a skill. Even soft science college graduates are working at Starbucks. They really don’t have a skill.

High schools need to do a better job at ensuring each graduate has a path towards employment. If college is out of the picture, then a trade.

I agree with public service as an option. It would give kids not interested in military service a place to get a skill. So many trades jobs are going to immigrant labor.

And we need to push science. As a country, we’re still importing scientists. We have good paying jobs in American. We don’t have enough students willing to take hard science classes.

I don't think that's true. Kids are clamoring to get into engineering programs and get shut out. Most kids in LACS are in the science programs. Maybe we need more seats in the schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I like reading David Brooks. He’s a little too limousine liberal for me, but I appreciate the analysis. Both he, and Trump, want to move manufacturing jobs back to America. The problem with this plan is that these jobs are being automated. We can’t social engineer a middle class by creating work for them that the free market doesn’t need.

We are a knowledge based society and everyone needs a skill to receive a decent paying job. It can be trades, but it’s got to be something. Many of the people I see that are disenchanted with current American society are those that do not have a skill. Even soft science college graduates are working at Starbucks. They really don’t have a skill.

High schools need to do a better job at ensuring each graduate has a path towards employment. If college is out of the picture, then a trade.

I agree with public service as an option. It would give kids not interested in military service a place to get a skill. So many trades jobs are going to immigrant labor.

And we need to push science. As a country, we’re still importing scientists. We have good paying jobs in American. We don’t have enough students willing to take hard science classes.

He's a super conservative. He was once the conservative side of a two-man talk show. He's the conservative opinion writer for the NYT.

He's saying Democrats with people like Biden (u of Delaware) and Harris (Howard) are totally elitist. Trump (Wharton) and Vance (Yale) are the anti-elites.

[Anonymous]

and more manufacturing jobs were created under Biden than Trump.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I like reading David Brooks. He’s a little too limousine liberal for me, but I appreciate the analysis. Both he, and Trump, want to move manufacturing jobs back to America. The problem with this plan is that these jobs are being automated. We can’t social engineer a middle class by creating work for them that the free market doesn’t need.

We are a knowledge based society and everyone needs a skill to receive a decent paying job. It can be trades, but it’s got to be something. Many of the people I see that are disenchanted with current American society are those that do not have a skill. Even soft science college graduates are working at Starbucks. They really don’t have a skill.

High schools need to do a better job at ensuring each graduate has a path towards employment. If college is out of the picture, then a trade.

I agree with public service as an option. It would give kids not interested in military service a place to get a skill. So many trades jobs are going to immigrant labor.

And we need to push science. As a country, we’re still importing scientists. We have good paying jobs in American. We don’t have enough students willing to take hard science classes.

He's a super conservative. He was once the conservative side of a two-man talk show. He's the conservative opinion writer for the NYT.

Lmao, no.

“Super conservative” and “writes for the NYT” = a huge contradiction in terms

PP who said limousine liberal is right

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I found this interesting. I'm glad I chose to invest the money instead.
"According to the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits, the author of The Meritocracy Trap, if the typical family in the top 1 percent of earners were to take that surplus—all the excess money they spend, beyond what a middle-class family spends, on their child’s education in the form of private-school tuition, extracurricular activities, SAT-prep courses, private tutors, and so forth—and simply invest it in the markets, it would be worth $10 million or more as a conventional inheritance."

The problem with this theory is that many kids wouldn't even be marginally successful or happy if the parents didn't spend that money.

We have three SN kids with combinations of ADHD and dyslexia. They would end up in jail or dead if we didn't spend a fortune on interventions and EC's just so they have tolerable lives.

Pretty sure most kids would be perfectly happy and successful without a multitude of tutors and bought and paid for ECs.

What you are talking about for your kids is very different from what the article is referring to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I like reading David Brooks. He’s a little too limousine liberal for me, but I appreciate the analysis. Both he, and Trump, want to move manufacturing jobs back to America. The problem with this plan is that these jobs are being automated. We can’t social engineer a middle class by creating work for them that the free market doesn’t need.

We are a knowledge based society and everyone needs a skill to receive a decent paying job. It can be trades, but it’s got to be something. Many of the people I see that are disenchanted with current American society are those that do not have a skill. Even soft science college graduates are working at Starbucks. They really don’t have a skill.

High schools need to do a better job at ensuring each graduate has a path towards employment. If college is out of the picture, then a trade.

I agree with public service as an option. It would give kids not interested in military service a place to get a skill. So many trades jobs are going to immigrant labor.

And we need to push science. As a country, we’re still importing scientists. We have good paying jobs in American. We don’t have enough students willing to take hard science classes.

He's a super conservative. He was once the conservative side of a two-man talk show. He's the conservative opinion writer for the NYT.

Lmao, no.

“Super conservative” and “writes for the NYT” = a huge contradiction in terms

PP who said limousine liberal is right

David brooks also thinks working women are bad for America. Hardly a limp liberal

[Anonymous]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/trumpism-republican-party-exile-david-brooks/680243/

He describes himself and a “longtime conservative”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Oh for the love. When you are status-obsessed, you have such a different view. Most people don't care about the Ivy League. They go to colleges in their general region and are just fine. They aren't constantly looking to the Ivy League or working at a select few companies (which the author can't even name).

DCUM doesn’t understand that most people don’t want to work at McKinsey and enable companies like Purdue Pharma.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
That's how every developed country functions: they have evolved a small number of elite schools from whence they pick their governing elite. It happens in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc.

It's not deliberate. It's a natural evolution that springs from a very understandable human desire to cut through the noise and streamline the job application process.

Or you can do what China started two thousand years ago and have the civil service exams. They lasted until the turn of the 20th century. People studied for years. 1% made the cut.
Now India has a similar system.

This was my point above about accepting the class system. You can try to take money out of it, but you won't fully succeed. Ex: if you have civil service exams, the UMC will have the most resources to study for them (and the UC will find some way to circumvent them).

Exactly.

There are no reasonable performance measures that can’t be significantly improved by targeted coaching which is most readily accessible to those with parental resources. Once in a blue moon you might get the rare raw genius, but almost always performance reflects the investment.