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| ▲ | otterley 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| OP wasn't talking about Ivy-league schools. He said that if you don't admit the privileged elite (regardless of their academic skills and knowledge), "all you succeed in is making your college irrelevant." But we know that cannot be true, because there are many universities that admit few (if any) legacy students, continue to attract applicants, and continue to graduate successful, talented people who do well in life. |
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| ▲ | notahacker 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Apart from anything else, some members of the "elite" are actually smart and driven enough to be able to parlay their early life advantages into meeting the academic requirements of top schools, and those who aren't tend to end up with top school alumni running many aspects of their affairs for them anyway. Especially if they're the sort of elites that are interested in investing in startups or being active in politics or having science endowments named after them. Top schools are also entirely capable of attracting members of privileged elites to network at their events without shepherding them through the curriculum. |
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| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The point of going to an Ivy is to interact with the rich and powerful I went to an Ivy. That was not the point, and a lot of these comments have little in common with reality. Let's be real, legacy admissions are about increasing donations to a school - everything else is just BS rationalization. |
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| ▲ | terminalshort 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And the last person you want to found a startup with is a legacy dumbass who fronts all the money. In that scenario you aren't a co-founder, you're an employee. The VC industry exists for a reason. |
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| ▲ | laidoffamazon 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You're making a great case to shut all of them down and shun the graduates |
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| ▲ | com2kid 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Why? The current system graduates kids from poor to not poor. Sure it is a small number, but it is one of the pathways for social mobility in our society. | | |
| ▲ | isaacremuant 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Or it perpetuates the poor, by allowing only a few to change. The way some of you explain it makes it look like a crude hunger games kind of system. | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 6 days ago | parent [-] | | College in general was meant as a way for people to rise up, and for my generation (early millennials) it worked. My first job in software engineering paid way more than my parents combined income. Society has managed to mess that pipeline up, first through massive student loans, and now through just general unemployment. But the system worked for a long time. The Ivy leagues are something different. Society can only have so many "elites", or else they stop being elite and just start being irritating rich people. There needs to be a path for new blood to enter the elites, so feeder lanes exist. This all worked rather well for at least half the 20th century, but recently the elites have gone a bit too far into the "eat the poor" territory, and society is starting to crumble around the edges. | | |
| ▲ | corimaith 5 days ago | parent [-] | | >College in general was meant as a way for people to rise up No, college started out as academic institutions of learning, not instruments of social mobility. It was never intended as a job training program, rather a place of academics to work together on a topic, and was heavily restricted to the aristocrats and elites from the start. Alot of the problems here is stemming precisely from trying to use higher education for a purpose it was not originally designed to do. | | |
| ▲ | mathiaspoint 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes. University needs to be university. It's never been good at being other things. People have completely forgotten why it mattered on resumes to begin with. Association with a university signaled an appreciation for philosophy, now it signals tolerance for administrative abuse. |
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