I've spent so much time on not-Harvard college tours that I should have an option. But I try not to think about it.
I did meet a math professor from the Harvard of Michigan. She was touring the Harvard of Lorain County, Ohio.
I spent some time at a summer math program for high school students which was maybe originally envisioned as a pure place for students to love math but has been hijacked into a vehicle for extremely ambitious students to craft high school resumes as early as possible. I felt very discouraged after hanging out with the adorable-but-impossibly-stressed-out 15 year olds.
Yeah. If math were real, at least it would be learning a skill.
At every small liberal arts college, they will go on about how easy it is to talk to your professors, but never mention that you're applying there because you won't get into Harvard where you can't talk to your professors because they're editing newspapers.
It's easy for my students to talk to me. I'm very nice.
Maybe the fairest system would be to go on demonstrated interest. Everyone touches Harvard and the last couple thousand to let go are the freshman class.
No, the education is indistinguishable from that at lots of good schools, but yes, maybe the networking is incomparable.
If I wanted to prove this rigorously, I'd make up lists of careers reflecting academic excellence versus reflecting power/fame/media importance, and see how strong the Harvard premium was for each one. I would bet you that a Harvard education is a lot more effective at getting you a high-powered government or media job than it is at getting you a tenured position in either, e.g., French literature or chemistry. (I would guess that there's some Harvard premium for the latter list of jobs, but a much bigger one for the former.)
Most of my bosses have gone to Yale or Bowling Green State.
2: Oh, are you on fucking college tours? So, Oberlin and Kenyon. not sure if Portage was a stop (Hiram) or just a drive through, guessing it was the latter as I assume was Summit.
Kenyon has a nice Hogwarts dining hall. But IIRC Harvard has one that was even more so.
I've never been to Massachusetts, but Kenyon's dining hall is so Harry Potter-y, I was surprised they asked every kid to give the pronouns they would like used to refer to them.
I was just driving through Portage and Summit.
One would have one's Platonic Harvard as the capstone of a unified pyramidal national education system reaching with perfect standardization from the lowest elementary school to the highest postgraduate study, an escalator smoothly lifting the best and brightest of every age cohort from their birthplaces, wherever those may be, to the very pinnacle of the nation, whose good they would go on to serve from those most exalted positions of society to which their merit entitled them.
I believe 9 is probably right. A specific networking benefit I have seen from Harvard/Yale from several athletic admits I have known is that the Harvard/Yale clubs are great places for snaring gigs (not necessarily high-powered ones but sustaining ones) if your academic record/personal connections would otherwise have you as just a random college grad in the big city.
"Your journalism class is taught by an actual former editor of the NYT"
Is an actual former editor of the NYT a good teacher? Maybe. Does an actual former editor of the NYT have useful connections? Almost certainly.
Anyway, to answer heebie's question - I would use a lottery system. To qualify for the lottery, you have to have an excellent GPA and decent standardized test scores and want to go to this highly elite place where everyone is miserable.
1. At the graduate level definitely not and at the undergraduate level only if you assume spherical student interests and even then probably not. Assuming a spheroid undergraduate who is definitely interested in space engineering, they're going to be far better off at Caltech or Harvey Mudd than Harvard because the first two are 30 miles from JPL and the third is 3000 miles away.
I think if we're going to have a discussion, it's going to be in divining the differences between "unmatched" and "extremely good."
2. Semi-randomly above a certain level of achievement or ability. So we can argue about how to define or discover those levels, and where to place weights in the randomness.
Everyone touches Harvard and the last couple thousand to let go are the freshman class.
I like the part where we relocate Harvard to Longview, Texas.
16: where everyone is miserable.
Can't find the exact thing, but someone on twitter* quipped that a lot of the right wing intelligentsia seems to be guys who went to Harvard but viewed themselves as disrespected there.
*I am one day into my attempt to wean myself from Twitter. Should have been done long ago, but I am weak. Keeping the account alive as Twitter still has far and away the best election night coverage. Many local experts that really helps for things like Ohio Issue 1.
A much more interesting question would be: are Cal Tech and Harvey Mudd as good as MIT or is there something uniquely great about MIT?
They're not as good as CMU, because they aren't on the 61 bus routes.
Better than Brown doesn't mean unmatched. I got a math education at Harvard that not many places could match and which I think is clearly better than what I'd have gotten at Brown, but it's not that different from MIT, Chicago, Caltech, nowadays Stanford, etc. (Though the flipside is that MIT, Caltech, and Chicago are maybe too hardcore. Harvard is a more pleasant way to get that kind of education.)
19: it's an act. Ross was massively successful at Harvard, very high up at the Crimson.
Further to 22, of course there's lots of places where I could have gotten similar classes. Any place with a top 25 grad school (or probably top 50) would be fine. But what's different is being in a cohort where you're the norm rather than a weird exception where your only academic peers are grad students. There's real value to the peer aspects of being the median person in your freshman math class.
I was the median person in my freshman math class at Nebraska.
I like the idea of admitting kids by lottery, with the standard for getting into the lottery set very high, as opposed to impossibly high, as a means to put a cap on the arms race of child enrichment programs that smart kids are expected to spend their precious youth on these days.
Does anyone understand why all other businesses are completely obsessed with growth, but almost no universities who were ever interested in large scale expansion? Why aren't there 10 Harvards?
(The University of California is an important exception, as it often is.)
16.1 is right. also 17.1.
22 - a v good friend got a perfectly good undergrad education at brown while acquiring an amazing social network, just astonishing the people she is still close with decades later, hanging out in privileged perches around the globe. a younger friend who went to reed has a similar network ripening into similar status as they mature. i conclude if you put a socially talented smart young woman in a small, wealthy & reasonably geographically diverse community for 4 years she will cultivate an amazing network.
are the overwhelming majority of undergrads even interested in the outer reaches of either academics or greasy pole climbing? i don't think so. if they get a solid education & create a decent social life i think that's mostly what they want out of it.
Probably I'm missing some important aspects of history, but if you're looking at what higher education should look like at a large scale, I think the answer is just what California had before tuition got crazy. UC, Cal State, community colleges where it's normal and manageable to move to a UC after two years. Great research at a large number of UCs, and two universities (Berkeley, UCLA) in the top tier in the world, each of which educate more Pell Grantees than the whole Ivy League combined.
To 16.1, I think you're also missing an important third aspect. It's not even necessarily the connections, it's that you see the model of how you can become a NYTimes editor, and you see it as a reasonable achievable goal with a relatively clear pathway. Someone who hasn't met a former NYT editor might just have no idea who does that or how they got there. Just knowing what the career path looks like and seeing yourself as already on it is a huge leg up.
Is some of it learning how to not make rich assholes nervous?
The Grant Study could have done some matched pairs with other people from the feeder private academies in New England, but instead they just looked at all the Harvard men in exhaustive detail, who graduated at top status a time of great opportunity, then pretended that had external validity. In fairness I guess matched pairs weren't as much of a thing in 1938.
(I think I've worn this story down in the telling, but my dad went to one of these academies in the 60's, and they had a Harvard rep come down and give everyone a quick yes, no, or maybe.)
30, absolutely. The California system as conceived is one of the wonders of the world. Particularly that community colleges are an unstigmatized on-ramp to some of the best universities that exist, which is just not true of community colleges outside CA.
Every state should have the same.
I have an extremely snobby and biased attitude about this question, coming from Reed. For one thing, my friends who were at Harvard had much less rigorous experiences in many fields. For another thing, TWO kids I knew got put on academic probation at Reed and went to Harvard for a semester and a year respectively before coming back, and they also said it was nearly impossible to get a grade below a B there.
(Plus of course being a brilliant leader in a field in no way guarantees that you're a brilliant educator, TAs and class sizes aside.)
My guess is that the ceiling for the quality of education in some areas is higher than many other schools, but the floor is way lower too. I would never assume that someone who had a Harvard BA had a particularly good education; I usually assume the opposite until proven wrong.
28: You can't grow if what you sell is exclusivity. You can raise your margins, but not your volume.
30, 34 - completely agree & also the ucs provide for undergrads a full range of solid education to amazing opportunities to have outstanding peers & teachers in so so many fields.
when i started practicing ~20 years ago there was a california-specific elite network among older male partners at certain firms that was formed at ucb & to a lesser extent ucla. interestingly stanford wasn't part if it that i could see, the farm men probably had their own network just at different firms. it's all much more diffuse now.
Part of what I was alluding to in 22 is that I think it's actually counterproductive to have too many rigorous classes. You're not going to have time to run The Crimson and turn that into a job at the NYTimes if you're spending too much time on all your classes. There should be some rigorous classes and a very rigorous capstone, but half of your classes being pretty easy is good.
(That said, my intro French class at Harvard was *much* more rigorous than my intro German class at Berkeley, so I'm sort of skeptical of Harvard is easy claims in general. But I buy them when you're comparing specifically to "hard core" schools.)
This is all helpful. I'm guessing that Upetgi is putting his finger on what the key essence that my conversation-mates were getting at in this:
it's that you see the model of how you can become a NYTimes editor, and you see it as a reasonable achievable goal with a relatively clear pathway. Someone who hasn't met a former NYT editor might just have no idea who does that or how they got there. Just knowing what the career path looks like and seeing yourself as already on it is a huge leg up.
Which is different from the rigor of classes or quality of the instruction.
Everyone touches Harvard and the last couple thousand to let go are the freshman class
In Soviet Harvard anthropology department, Harvard touches you.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/6/29/comaroff-amended-complaint/
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/09/accused-harasser-john-comaroff-returns-harvard
It's kinda the same stuff we talk about a lot with first generation college students, where there's this secret curriculum and where it's hard for first gen kids to see certain careers as available to them.
Does anyone understand why all other businesses are completely obsessed with growth, but almost no universities who were ever interested in large scale expansion? Why aren't there 10 Harvards?
Universities do grow. Oxford went from 3,000 to 12,580 undergraduates over the last century - and from 100 to 13,445 postgraduates over the same period. That's 800% growth over a period when the population only grew by about 50%. I would imagine that when Harvard opened its doors, in 1892 or whenever it was, it was pretty small as well.
Of course, Oxford's market share has gone down over the same period. Back in 1920, only 4,357 people in the entire country graduated with a first degree. So if you earned a bachelor's degree in Britain in 1920, there was a pretty good chance it was an Oxbridge degree. Last year it was closer to 350,000.
To keep its market share over the last century, Oxford would now have to have a student body of about 250,000 people.
Businesses which want to grow have four options: serve more customers from the existing footprint, expand the existing site, open new sites, or acquire other businesses. University brands are so tied up with location - and with existing infrastructure - that it would be difficult for Oxford to set up the greenfield site University of Oxford at Birmingham or wherever. Equally difficult to complete an acquisition of another university. So they're left with 1 and 2, both of which they have done.
Zero growth in undergraduates at Harvard in the last 40 years. I'm sure there's some growth if you go back far enough, but it's a long long time ago. Some of the other Ivies are a little better, but it's still pretty small potatoes.
A second Harvard in Texas (either by buying a site or purchasing a university) is exactly what I had in mind, and I'm not sure why it's so difficult.
I dug into this a bit (quiet day) and was fascinated to discover that there were 35,000 primary schools a century ago and now there are only 21,000. Why? Partly, there are fewer pupils - 5.9 million vs 5 million. Ageing population.
And also, I would guess, moves to bigger schools for greater efficiency, and because you can do that when your population is urbanising.
Does anyone understand why all other businesses are completely obsessed with growth, but almost no universities who were ever interested in large scale expansion?
NYU has established a bunch of satellites at rich places. Many universities have building programs that look like metastatsis- Penn, Wash U are both physically unrecognizable compared to 20 years ago. Those buildings are full of all kinds of activity that's good for th the institution without bringing in a ton more students. The opportunity is outside the US, satellite campuses, IMO, and at least some places are aggressively taking that route. Also saves visa hassle, and the embarrasment of brining Emirati youth to either StL or Philly.
It does sound like the setup for a 1980s comedy film. In a desperate effort to expand, a snobbish East Coast university ships all its least popular academics off to a brand-new campus in the middle of the Texan desert, with orders to set up a replica university identical in every detail. When they run into the local population of cowboys, meth cookers, wildcat oil men, Mexican immigrants and insane reusable-rocket entrepreneurs, sparks are going to fly!
The opportunity is outside the US, satellite campuses,
Yes, I think a few UK universities have set up satellites in China and Malaysia.
A second Harvard in Texas (either by buying a site or purchasing a university) is exactly what I had in mind, and I'm not sure why it's so difficult.
Seriously? Have you been paying attention to the news lately? Texas and Florida are fucked, higher education speakingly.
Texas is not in the same boat as Florida on higher ed, for better or for worse. Cold-blooded murder of refugees, we're worse. Higher ed, we're not.
I too support the idea of a lottery - perhaps with a couple of tranches for people from different SES's. I can think of no better lesson for the privileged than to realize that luck is part of the system. There is also the possibility of adding a match system, similar to medical residency programs. You could do it in two phases to allow for interviews - first a lottery to determine an applicant pool, then interviews to determine 'fit' for both applicants and schools, then a ranked match where the students' preferences take priority. If the Ivys did it first, then more schools could enter the system so it could grow slowly. I am sure there are pitfalls, and I do think that fixing primary and secondary education is more important, but perhaps if the goal of high school is just to meet a certain bar that lets you into the lottery it will take off a lot of pressure, allowing children to do other things besides trying to game the system.
Also, WVU (headed by the former head of OSU fired for making public anti-Catholic remarks) is cutting foreign languages.
my intro French class at Harvard was *much* more rigorous than my intro German class at Berkeley,
I wonder how much variation there is across languages. I took a Russian immersion class at Middlebury and my impression was that Berkeley's first-year Russian covered as much as or more than a first-year course at Harvard or other elite-ish schools. Probably basically equivalent. There were definitely schools where it took 1.5-2 years to cover the same material. With a lot of schools using the same textbooks, it wasn't entirely arbitrary to compare among them.
Meant to add that the Middlebury program I did was a summer program that drew students from all over the US.
41: first generation college students, where there's this secret curriculum and where it's hard for first gen kids to see certain careers as available to them.
My own minor personal version of this is why I did not major in Geology at DFHC. At the time that degree required a summer of field work (in Wyoming I think). In my limited worldview every summer needed to be spent working to earn money to live on for the coming academic year. In retrospect in my case something involving parents and/or the college/department almost certainly could have been worked out, but I did not even think to ask. I was certainly not not underprivileged (both my parents graduated from the Harvard of Madison) but I did have a pretty limited worldview re: that kind of thing. Similarly the thought of building a potentially career-useful network was not a thought I ever had.
when Harvard opened its doors, in 1892 or whenever it was
Deep cut.
I too support a lottery solution, for this as for even more important things.
My wife, who graduated from the same low-class commuter college that I did, worked for awhile on the US News Report college rankings. Her colleagues asked her what it was like to go to a fourth-tier university. I told her to ask them what it was like working for a fourth-tier newsmagazine.
My sister graduated from an Ivy League school -- and went on to a hugely successful career in a field almost as disreputable as the US News college rankings (university administration). She contends that the education is basically the same, but the students are more carefully vetted.
Someone who hasn't met a former NYT editor might just have no idea who does that or how they got there. Just knowing what the career path looks like and seeing yourself as already on it is a huge leg up.
Someone in my grad school year but an adjacent program is now King of Spain. Tough career path to get on if you haven't chosen Bourbon ancestors. The only alternatives I can see are choosing Savoy or Habsburg ancestors, or the Bonapartist approach of having your brother invade from France. Assuming a spherical brother, of course.
Another guy in the adjacent program had the foresight to choose just the right flavor of Glücksberg ancestors. Unfortunately, when he was about six some colonels had the right idea about monarchy (among a plethora of bad ideas), and so now he's stuck being the Greek pretender.
Anyway, what were we saying about inequality?
Since math has come up, I am going to take this as an opportunity to post a sort of odd Alfred North Whitehead quote I came across in his Introduction to Mathematics.
Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle-- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments,
The context is introducing the use of symbols in math and how they simplify thinking about the expressions represented.
I assume ajay or someone can weigh in on the aptness or not of his cahracterization of calvary charges
53: West Virginia was trying to get remote workers to move there with tax incentives, but I think politically it's a non-starter.
I too support a lottery solution, for this as for even more important things.
You mean like, Taylor Swift tickets?
People sit around the house complaining that they can't get a ticket even in Toronto.
53: I can't believe Elwood is still working. This is truly the age of gerontocracy.
King of Spain
Obligatory Moxy Fruvous link.
65: I saw him once walking across the oval with an aide who was carrying a life-sized Gee cutout.
66.2 Sorry they are cancelled retroactively.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jian-ghomeshi-judge-ruling-1.3504250
61: Actually I quite like Whitehead's lead in to the cavalry charge analogy.
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can do without thinking about them. [cavalry analogy]
went to Harvard for a semester and a year respectively before coming back, and they also said it was nearly impossible to get a grade below a B there.
I've mentioned my road trip/summer insanity of 1998 a lot, but maybe not that the three of us had all flunked out of college, the other two from Harvard. My friends were both brilliant people with at-the-time real executive function problems, and all of us managed to crawl back and get our degrees after a year or so out. But a third friend told me bluntly: "It is absolutely possible to get C's at Harvard, and you know a lot of people who did." (I've been wondering if any of them lurk here for years.) I think, as with anywhere else, this tends to be a matter of gross negligence rather than lack of ability -- never showing up to class, never giving the instructor anything remotely acceptable, not putting on a show of giving a shit. It sounds like you do get pretty unlimited tries to come back and get your Harvard diploma, though, as opposed to other schools (MIT, Chicago, etc.) that will cut you off after ~two failures.
61, 69: Civilization has now advanced so far, that operations of thought, like cavalry charges, are futile and most likely to be suicidal.
Yeah, I had a conversation with two colleagues who are both Harvard grads who were arguing that a big difference is that there's a much more thorough safety net for failing students at Harvard than at a lot of schools to make sure all the students succeed. And I was expressing my skepticism that this was needed given how hard it was to fail. And one of them was like "oh, no, I would have failed out if they hadn't done a lot for me." Of course he now doesn't submit his grades until months too late, but he is a more successful researcher than me.
Is that just undergrad though? Maybe I should have gone there for my PhD instead of the other place.
You went to graduate school at Facebook?
West Virginia was trying to get remote workers to move there
I read somewhere that the university pursued a plan for growth that was unrealistic, expensive, and failed, leaving them with massive debts, and that's why they're firing lots of people.
There's a real negative feedback loop where you lose enough young adults that the older adults vote in such shits that the younger adults who want to stay find they can't, so they move to Pittsburgh to find a job that pays money and complain about snooty liberals.
You can't grow if what you sell is exclusivity. You can raise your margins, but not your volume.
Yes, this is what's going on with the Ivies. As many people have pointed out, many other university systems have grown immensely. The Ivy no-growth strategy is a deliberate choice to maintain their prestige.
I recall a Crooked Timber post a while back where Quiggin (I think) was flabbergasted to discover how small the Ivies are. "But you'll never eliminate societal inequalities that way!" Yes, precisely.
Operations of thought retain value as reconnaissance before committing the main effort of mindless toil?
Anyway, yes, lottery of those getting the grades and expressing interest. Alternatively I suppose you could do a competitive exam with the first X students making the cut - in a sense that's still a lottery, just one based on the inherent variability of the students' performance from test to test (or if you like, the exam's test-retest stability)
the university pursued a plan for growth that was unrealistic, expensive, and failed
AFAICT basically every non-selective school* in the country did this because none of them could read a fucking birthrate table.
*is there a less-snobby phrasing for this? I know it's not a controversial concept, but I feel like there must be a euphemism. Like, there are plenty of genuinely good schools that also accept most qualified applicants.
Yale built two new residential colleges in the past decade or so, which increased enrollment by something less than 1000 students. But as a percentage increase I guess it was a lot.
Anyway, all this discussion led me to checking in on alma mater, which opened a campus in Qatar almost 20 years ago and has branches in (per Wiki, this is news to me) Australia, Rwanda, Singapore, and various US cities. When I attended 30 years ago, it was (roughly) 4500 undergrad and 1500 grad; it's now 7300/8400. So pretty substantial growth, at least partly in response to a rise in reputation and selectivity--I don't recall the numbers anymore, but it was much easier to get in in 1990 than it was by 2000 (varied by major, of course).
I believe most of the satellite campuses are grad students only, but Qatar, at least, is undergrad only, with 400 students. So the Pittsburgh campus has added something like 2500 undergrads, or 55%.
The freshman orientation still doesn't explain to them how if you stand in the aisle of a bus with your giant backpack on, turning to the side doesn't make it easier for someone to get past you.
Some new students have never even seen a giant backpack.
61: as the Duke would say, "other generals' operations of thought win them battles. Mine invariably get me into scrapes."
Like, there are plenty of genuinely good schools that also accept most qualified applicants.
I'm getting the impression that large generic landgrant Harvard of your Region of your State are a hell of a lot more competitive than they were in the 90s. A sharp student wouldn't have trouble, but a merely qualified student might.
89: That's something I can't tell. I mean, it's definitely more true than it used to be, but that's because it used to be that even the flagships accepted almost anyone with a degree. Like, there was a climb from nonselective to minimally selective; I'm not sure how far beyond minimally they've gone.
Or rather: the top 20% of flagships are definitely selective these days because enough people figured out that you were giving up very little compared with even elite schools. But that's not the case academically with the middle they're of flagships, and I don't know where their selectivity is.
And all of this is confounded by the crazy way that kids these days apply. Among Iris' cohort, old school safety/middle/reach applying was a tiny minority, and applying to 10 schools was not uncommon. So what does it mean to accept 50% of applicants when there are 2X as many applications as there used to be?
89: I also think it's pretty sensitive to the state. Flagships in bigger states often aren't bigger than in smaller states, so they become very competitive. So like Illinois and Michigan are very competitive. Then the states next to them make their money getting the out-of-state students from the big states. A lot of flagships aren't *that* competitive. Obviously SATs have huge problems, but you can get some idea by looking here:
https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/rank/public-colleges/highest-sat-scores/
A 1300 is enough for lots of flagships.
I am really puzzled by the modern college process. My son's mediocre high school record got him more offers of aid than my daughter's absolutely stellar record. I can't account for it. Are we in the age of affirmative action for college men?
Harvard professors are all nuts, though. It's something in the water. It happens to everyone who's had tenure for long enough. I mean, you've got your Stev/en Pin/kers, your A/vi L/oebs, ... who wants to deal with all that craziness?
Right, 91 is a key development. As far as I can tell there's two main factors here:
1) Students are more willing to go to college further from home, and so are often doing national searches instead of regional searches. This increases the number of schools that they're interested in and thereby increases applications.
2) Up until recently US News included acceptance rate as a factor in their rankings, so it was important for universities to increase applications thereby decreasing acceptance rate.
Another possible driver is the corporatization of the university leading to universities hiring more recruiters. This might be driven by 2, but also probably takes on a life of its own. Once you have a big unit whose job is increasing applications they're going to just keep pushing for that because it's their whole reason to exist.
93: Absolutely, especially at liberal arts colleges which are good but not in the top handful.
But also maybe already having one student in school changed the need-based portion of their calculations?
93: The modern college admissions process seems to be sensitive enough to so many fine-grained demographic factors that there's really no way to tell what's going on. While everything has turned out very nicely, I remain astonished by the schools Newt didn't get into.
I've had the same experience with the oldest batch of kids in my friend group - just bizarre who gets rejected from which schools. Like accepted to Princeton but rejected from Tulane level of weird.
Colleges may be rejecting some applicants based on not expecting them to enroll. I'm not sure if that extends as far as thinking "this person is probably going to an Ivy or similar, so why would they come here" but I wouldn't be surprised if some "we need X students in the fall, not a lot more or less than that" projections lead to weird outcomes at individual levels. There have been a couple UC campuses that had housing crises because way more people decided to accept than they expected.
Yeah, Newt had just barely shy of perfect SAT's and had a straight A average in enough math classes at Columbia to be done with about half the requirements for a math major. Didn't get into Case Western, CMU, or Georgia Tech.
Looking at the link in 92, the flagship U I attended now has an average SAT that is higher than what I had when I got in there, and the only reason I got in there was my high SAT score.
Are the SATs really that much easier these days?
My impression is that New Yorkers (in both the state and the metro area senses) face unusual difficulties getting into colleges. Californians too, and maybe some other places like Boston or Seattle, but NY worst of all.
101: Probably more about test prep or taking the test multiple times. Though if you took it pre-1995 you should definitely add 100 points due to the 1995-recentering. Other than that, I don't think they're supposed to have changed in difficulty.
101: I just checked and it's the same story for me... but in regards to 103, I'm pretty sure Spike took the SAT before 1995, and I know I did.
Speaking of test prep, it turns out that if you didn't do anything with mathematical symbols, terminology, or problem sets for 30 years, it can take a while to review the basics of college algebra, all the while having to remind yourself that you've actually covered the material before, it just doesn't feel like it.* I will have to find out how I do on a placement exam soon because the program I'm going to do (CS, not math) keeps telling me I'd better take the placement exam.
*I actually think math education may have changed a lot in approach since the early 90s. I don't remember so much emphasis of working from reference functions/graphs of functions. I did not use a graphing calculator when I was in school.
"rationalize the following expressions": the triumph of reasoning over radicalization
Their explanations of why were examples like, "Your journalism class is taught by an actual former editor of the NYT"
Wow, journalism! There's a field with a bright future! Thanks Harvard!!
It's really weird that high school students use graphing calculators that appear to be identical to what college students had in 1990.
It's because there's no function for graphing calculators other than as a non-internet connected device for high school math students to use on tests. That's the whole market, so there's no reason for the product to change at all.
What's weirder is that the price hasn't changed. The cost to manufacture them now must be peanuts.
We don't allow graphing calculators on exams, so I'm always trying to convince my students to use their phones instead when we're doing groupwork. But they're so used to their graphing calculators that I haven't made any substantial progress. Not sure if they have some other class that's making them bring a calculator or whether they're just so used to bringing them to class that they do it out of habit.
WVU's actual explanation for dismantling all of its foreign language programs is that they can use apps for that now? Wow.
I was glad to find some graphing calculator programs for free, as I don't really need a separate calculator. Turns out Macs have a graphing calculator app that comes with the system.
113: out with double majors, in with duolinguo majors
It sounds like you do get pretty unlimited tries to come back and get your Harvard diploma, though, as opposed to other schools (MIT, Chicago, etc.) that will cut you off after ~two failures.
I've mostly stopped having dreams in which I find myself back there trying to finish an undergraduate degree and running into all sorts of problems with degrees I already have, papers I really don't want to write, etc. etc. etc.
your A/vi L/oebs
Fuck every bit of that guy. There's a very deep asshole streak along with the self-promoting craziness
My spouse and I argue over the "better education" question (I went to a top-ranked SLAC, they went to Harvard), but I'm glad my kid picked Harvard over my SLAC: I still think the classroom education wasn't as good (either in the curricular design or the delivery), but there is no doubt that the co-curricular experiences and internships along the way and the post-graduation opportunities have been great.
I've held faculty or research faculty positions at Princeton, U of California, Caltech, and a good SLAC, and unfortunately UC was a pretty distant fourth for educational quality. Even with great faculty, the classes are simply too big, the TAs too green and under-supervised, the support resources too limited. The PhD student experience in a strong department at UC is just as good as it is at Harvard or Princeton or Caltech, and in some ways the faculty experience was even better -- I chose to leave Princeton to join UC -- but the funding gap was simply inescapable for the undergrads.
112: I knooooooooow. Those fucking graphing calculators have a stranglehold on their brains. I make them use Desmos as much as possible, and then dinky calculators for exams.
109/110: Also because TI is in bed with standardized test writers. I guess that's covered by 111.
109 is what people said, but I didn't believe it because 110. Anyway, my son uses Desmos too. But he's decided he's not going to do anything STEM after high school.
FA: wait, did I miss that you're going back to school?
113 is bothering me more than it should, despite being the least surprising development ever and despite the fact that classroom instruction in foreign languages tends to be ineffective (although I managed to learn surprisingly well through, I guess, zeal?). I feel like my view of education in the U.S. is getting darker by the day.
You should go on college visits. Everyone is really cheerful.
117.2 & generally in the category of news you can use - mine & my kid's experience at ucb leads me to very strongly recommend the following strategy at a uc:
1) figure out your general area of interest
2) i.d. the typical or expected major in this area & contemplate the ginormous class sizes
3) look to the right & to the left of this typical major & identify the much smaller, possibly oddball departments teaching a variant/dub specialty of the area of interest
4) if possible, scope out the quality of the faculty and *the undergrad advisor* - they can be invaluable with i.d.ing cool opportunities
5) pick the smallest dept that offers coursework of interest combined with good faculty & if possible a really good undergrad advisor
6) sit back (e.g., work your ass off) & enjoy private school class sizes & faculty contact at uc rates (alas this used to be even more of a ridiculous bargain than it is now)
124: I did not find them so cheerful but I enjoyed seeing the different places. And it was at Kenyon where some asshole parent belligerently asked the guide: " Why did only xx% of your students do a junior year abroad?" The guide handled was clearly nonplussed but handled it much better than I would have.
If your kid is at all interested in Kenyon I'd suggest you or he read Alma Mater: A College Homecoming written by PF Kluge (Eddie and the Cruisers) about returning there to teach after having gone to college there. When I visited he had just written an article about Kenyon in which he was bit harsh about what he perceived as the coddling of students and called it Kamp Kenyon. I had read it and had an interesting talk about it with some admissions folks who were not that thrilled with him.
I think the kids doing the tours or talks all use the same script. My favorite part is when they say "And we support each other in our work. It's not competitive, where you want other students to do worse so you get a higher class rank." I have to stop myself from asking them why they don't give it a try because it might work.
Oh, Harvard is in the NE and I had promised someone in another thread that I would discuss the semi-parallelism of the Hudson and the Delaware which are in the NE. But have no fear I will not do that here. But it did lead me to think about how there is a switch from the rivers to the Atlantic going generally N-S (Delaware, Hudson, Connecticut, Merrimack (ignoring the right turn to the coast--also ignore the Charles...), the ones in Maine) to WNW-ESE starting with the Potomac. I have no idea if there is any grand pattern or useful generalizations but something I want to look at a bit and possibly bore everyone with at some future date.
Anyway, if I won't read a link here, what are the odds I'll read a whole book for a college I'm not even going to.
I did read the book on trails and like it. All the other hiking books are written by people who don't really write that well and it annoys me.
At Hamilton College (a lovely place) we had a very glib kid who was somehow connected to Nepalese royalty. And I was the asshole who quipped "Well, I think *somebody* is paying for after the nth time he pointed out some perk which was "free."
I guess I meant if you were me I'd recommend it. Such is the life of a bit of a self-absorbed bore. But an occasionally self-aware one.
The dorm rooms are suitably bleak at the places I've seen so far. Not been to Hamilton, but maybe.
The problem with college in Ohio is that I've heard Ohio doctors think the covid vaccine makes you magnetic. That doesn't sound like good sciencing.
131 Geez Stormcrow, I hope it wasn't this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipendra_of_Nepal
42. et seq. One point that ajay left out is that Oxford is a collegiate university and did create a large number of new colleges in the last century to help facilitate the expansion that he describes. But it created them in Oxford. In contrast, Reading University (Reading is a town about 20 minutes drive from Oxford, not a measure of literacy) started out as Oxford's school of agriculture, but was spun off and became a well regarded university in its own right with no connection to its parent institution. So that happens too.
135: No. It was 2003 so right after the fireworks. I have no idea how it came up but the kid was a lot of TMI in general. I think somehow we learned that he was not able to return to Nepal at that time so probably just from a prominent/politically-connected family who were on the outs after the bloodletting. He had gone to some fancy prep school.
95: Up until recently US News included acceptance rate as a factor in their rankings, so it was important for universities to increase applications thereby decreasing acceptance rate.
I recall my eldest coming back from some local Princeton admissions event grousing about how it seemed to be designed to boost applications even from hopeless cases. In the event he did apply and did not get in. He had perfect or near-perfect SATs and a stellar academic record on paper, but nothing extracurricular and I'm guessing pretty lukewarm recommendations. Neither he nor us had any expectation that he would be accepted. His disappointment and our surprise was his not getting into his first choice of Haverford.
137: Oops,, that was my youngest so more like 2007 but still a lot of political turmoil there.
136: "Oxford A&M" was right there.
Hmm, in my field I'd say it's a mixed bag. Undergrad at MIT I think was stronger in one subfield (not mine); I took two grad level courses as an undergrad and then when I did grad school at Harvard I still hadn't learned a whole lot of what was considered foundational knowledge for incoming grad students. OTOH teaching undergrads I think the curriculum in intro courses where I was a TA (excuse me, TF- Harvard has Fellows not Assistants) kind of sucked.
Anyway grad school is much more dependent on a particular prof than the department as a whole. Strong departmental resources are useful but can't make up for a weak advisor. In my area Harvard is among the very best in the world for making connections to strong professors/startups.
The one thing MIT undergrad was really good at that I didn't see happening as much at Harvard or Brown (SPouse and soon oldest kid) is making you independent and resourceful at just figuring shit out. Maybe that's the personality of the students (hacker ethos) but there were all kinds of tricks with housing, IT systems, course selection, extracurriculars that weren't formally taught anywhere but that upperclassmen imparted to freshmen and that everyone eventually seemed to pick up. As a consequence I think the bonds to your class cohort at MIT are much weaker than Ivies. You had a strong network of people maybe two years ahead and two years behind you, not all within your year.
So I think MIT undergrads are far superior at problem solving than Ivy undergrads. And the networking in the most popular undergrad fields, ie tech startups, is at least as good as Harvard.
No idea whether this is still true, but when I was at Harvard in the 80s one frequently heard the phrase "the hardest part is getting in." That seems right as a description of my experience. (Pre-med types and others probably had a different four years.) What took place in the classroom almost certainly wasn't that extraordinary. And I know several more Harvard professors as colleagues in my field now than I ever did as a student, so it wasn't any kind of personalized education. The value for me, as a very first gen student, was in learning that I could hang academically with most everyone else there, and in the conversations in the dorms and the dining halls. Some of this is due to my youth and inexperience then versus my comparative jadedness now, I'm sure, but only rarely since have I felt like I've been part of such an extraordinary community of people.
SBF getting his bail revoked because he had to watch a football game with a VPN is hilarious, not to mention a little witness tampering.
Sad news, albeit a long life well lived. Pause/play not needed for this quote:
Ben Lerner, a poet and novelist, wrote in The New Yorker in 2013 about taking a class from Professor Waldrop at Brown. It was, he wrote, "a class composed, on the one hand, of young writers eager to listen to one of the best-read humans on the planet talk about literature, and, on the other, of sleeping athletes who knew Waldrop pretty much gave everybody an A."
Definitely a lottery system for the Ivies, and I suppose Cal should have one too.
Probably also the next tier of near Ivies too: my parents met at Middlebury, and their connections there were the basis of their social life for decades after.
My basic prejudice is that you can get as good an education at Cal as anywhere, and be among as smart a group of people, but you're going to have to do some of the curation yourself, rather than having the admissions system do it for you. It's possible to attend Cal and be completely impervious to education -- I did that -- but also Ivy too. I was interviewing a Harvard law grad (also undergrad) in, what, the 90s, and made a joke about Millard Fillmore. Had never heard of the guy. Or apparently the Compromise of 1850 etc. Obviously very much not a budding elitist, by definition because he was in the same room as me.
(My older brother was at Stanford the same time I was at Cal, and even if I'd given a shit about formal education, I wouldn't have changed places with him for anything. My little brother went to Reed, and that sounded like fun, although my strategy of avoiding learning any of the material that didn't pretty explicitly call to me probably wouldn't have worked.)
Speaking of Harvard, people have seen this, right?
121, 122: I may have mentioned it offhand once or twice. Anyway, I passed my test.
Fake accent - what are you going to school for?
I would love to do a health policy/health economics degree, but I can't figure out what jobs are available at the end and how to do it without going in to debt. Obviously a really good Ph.D program will be funded, but that requires a strong undergraduate background in a related field.
||
So that ye may find|>
The Mightiest of Babes in Bethlehem-burg,
Take this as a token that I now tell unto you
With soothy words: that He lieth swaddled,
A Child in a crib, though He be King
Over earth and heaven and the children of men,
All-Wielder o'er World."
Herod enthroned on high,
King, speaking slime-words, as mighty he sat
Mad with his men, ever anxious for murder -
Matthew was he hight.
A thane was he to an aethling-born.
There he was to take with his hands tithe and toll
For his lord; loyal he was to his task,
Noble his looks and his bearing. But he left them all -
Gold and silver and gifts so many,
Treasures most dear - and became our Lord's man.
The king's thane chose Christ for his Lord,
A more generous Gift-Giver than ever his master
Had been in this world.
Grimmer judgment awaits them who have goods here on
earth,
Wide worldly treasure. They waste here their pleasure,
Enjoy them enough. These men shall suffer
A harrowing judgment after their journey.
Father of us, who art all Thy folk-bairns,
Thou who art on high in the kingdom of Heaven,
Hallowed Thy name here in every world,
Thy kingdom come in strength and craft,
Thy will be done over all the world;
As here on earth; so there above
On high in the kingdom of Heaven.
Give us each day, good Lord, Thy gracious guidance,
Thy holy help, and absolve us, 0 Warder of Heaven,
From the manifold mischief we do against mankind,
Let not loathsome wights lead us astray,
As is their will and as we are worthy;
But help us against all our evil deeds.
Deal ye right heavily still with
their wrongs,
With their swarthy sins. Let not silver nor gold
Be of such worth unto you, that ye would e'er own
them,
Fair glimmering gold-pieces; for they will give you
no joy,
Be useless to you.
The Wielder Himself doth know and reward the work
Of each earthling,
He was soon ready,
Stepped on the stem; and striding, he went
Forth to the Lord; the flood held him upright,
The man through God's might, until in his mind he began
To dread the deep water, when he saw it driven -
The wave - by the wind: The flood wound around him,
The billows about him.
The Best of All Bairns sought Him another borough,
Which was so thick with the throngs of the Jews,
Settled with south-dwellers. There, I discovered,
He greeted His followers whom in His goodness he had
chosen,
Disciples who gladly stayed for His wise speech. "I
shall ask of you all,
With My words," quoth He, "My followers: What say the
Jews,
That notorious folk, who I am among men?"
So snippets:
Whitehead again:
It [basically the development of imaginary numbers] was receiving its final form about the same time as when the steam engine was being perfected, and will remain a great and powerful weapon for the achievement of the victory of thoughts over things when curious specimens of that machine repose in museums in company with the helmets and breastplates of a slightly earlier epoch.
Fake accent - what are you going to school for?
It's a computer science program, part-time and online. It's not a graduate degree program but I'm considering applying for one, depending on how things go.
150.2 Last I checked, there are jobs in pharma consulting for people with a health policy/health economics degree, using cost-effectiveness analysis to justify/negotiate the price of some new drug, vaccine, whatever.
Oh, that's a real shame. I don't think I ever took any classes with him, although I did with his wife, the poet and translator Rosemarie Waldron, but I attended some readings the Waldron's jointly put on.
If you want to do pharma consulting and your degree is an M.A., people are going to be assuming there was a typo.
The fucking ineptitude of this administration.
https://www.reddit.com/r/foreignpolicy/comments/15pa2ov/usjapan_whaling_spat_threatens_indopacific_trade/?rdt=37127
If you can't speak up for whales during trade negotiations, when can you speak up for them?
I'm very pro-whale at the moment because the whales are ramming yachts.
168: That seems like the fairly standard sort of scrape our foreign relations get into when Democrats are in charge. Good problem to have when that's the main drama. Or more to the point, I'd take it as a tradeoff for our being in Afghanistan.
That isn't the main drama. The drama is that you don't have a trade policy. You have this fake bullshit IPEF policy and you can't even do that without blowing it up over a dead issue.
171 last is bullshit, twice: there was never any tradeoff between your moronic wars and trade (or whale) policy; and Obama had 8 years to get out of Afghanistan and didn't. You can't blame your wars on Republicans.
I don't even know why Biden is fucking with this. The TPP is not a way to win elections in the U.S.
The TPP might be a way to raise campaign funds? I don't know.
Oh yes, I don't attribute us being out of Afghanistan to the Democrats as a whole, I attribute it to Biden's administration specifically.
And if clarity helps, it obviously wasn't a trade-off between the things. I just think the one was a lot worse than this.
173: Totally false!
https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/2021-chicago-council-survey
Landslide majorities for free trade. The chattering classes have just convinced themselves otherwise.
177: Public opinion in American foreign policy was what I failed to write a dissertation on. But I stuck around long enough to learn that a couple of very abstract questions about trade and global affairs are not going to have much to do with how someone views a specific trade pact (with details that can be attacked by American interest groups, such as the whale fuckers).
Trade pacts are second term things.
Probably, the way to sell the TPP is as part of a trade war with China. But the labor unions killed the TPP and they are now more important.
The US is big enough and rich enough that we don't really need a trade policy. Trade is a secondary issue that an administration can either use symbolically in domestic politics or mostly ignore, as it pleases. Actual trade will happen, of course, but we can just muddle through it.
You're just like Britain in that regard.
In any case, wider trade policy aside the whale thing is malpractice. Guaranteed failure, totally counterproductive, over, it can't be repeated enough, a dead issue. Japan is the only ally you have that's pulling its weight and you just insulted it for no gain whatsoever.
136: One point that ajay left out is that Oxford is a collegiate university and did create a large number of new colleges in the last century to help facilitate the expansion that he describes.
Well, "a lot". A few. Only two new undergraduate colleges have been founded in the last century with a total of 446 places; the quadrupling of undergraduate numbers over the same period has happened overwhelmingly by expanding existing colleges. Several new graduate-only colleges have been founded over the same period, but, again, not nearly enough to account for the 12,000 or so new graduate students - most of them as well have been accommodated at existing colleges.
I did not know that Reading University used to be part of Oxford! It's odd, you don't hear much about universities spinning off from other universities, but I suppose it must happen(there was a place in East Anglia somewhere that spun off from Oxford, of course, but that was a while ago).
184 strong disagree, America without NATO and Five Eyes would be an insular and globally weakened America. Trade agreements are a large source of American soft power too though I've got little sympathy for Japan's hunger for whale killing.
187: I think teo is caricaturing the RW position here. I doubt he's daft enough to sincerely believe that!
I saw Gran Turismo instead. I learned that I've been pronouncing "Nissan" wrong.
One part of this is that at this stage of the election cycle, the US voters here are not inclined to be overly critical of the Biden Administration. And I'm pretty certain Moby's analysis of the politics of this in 179 is correct.
You're only saying that because I learned it in Ohio.
177: Regardless of how any trade issue polls, I suspect its electoral impact is negligible in our current political climate, where elections are questions of personal identity first and second, with actual policy positions a distant and fading third.
I mean, the GOP didn't even bother to put together a platform at all in 2020. Just "supporting President Trump's freedom agenda" or something.
When looking at polls, I always remind myself that majorities have pretty much always favored stricter gun laws in the US. The question is the salience of the issue for voters, and free trade tends to be a low-salience issue for those who favor it.
But so what? I predict: Whaling is not going to get in the way of completing the IPEF.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/13/trump-desantis-supporters-spar-iowa-bar-00110992
Even when elections were more policy driven, the problem for free trade is that the benefits are diffuse and relatively small on an individual level, but the costs are pretty obvious and very large to the guy losing a job. That guy is voting on trade for certain, the others probably not.
Japanese whaling "research" is bullshit, and everybody knows it. The link in 168 suggests that Japan and the other Asian countries are the ones who want the deal. It also suggests that the whaling thing is going to get left on the cutting room floor in the final deal -- one supposes that this will end up depending on what concessions are made.
MC, you should definitely *not* tour a sausage factory.
199: Some dark humor from our whale commenter.
I never read the book. I thought Moby was the captain of the whaler.
190: If it doesn't start with "Ni!" then I'm taking back my shrubbery.
The door swung open, and I beheld behind it a giant of a man, or perhaps I should rather say creature.
'Herr Finnemore, welcome to Castle Krupenstein.'
'Why thank you,' said I, blanching somewhat, 'and you, I take it, must be Krupenstein himself.'
'No, no, that is a very common mistake. Krupenstein is actually the name of the inventor. I am Krupenstein's...'
'...monster!'
'...husband.'
'Oh, I do apologise.'
'Gretchen, the Englishman is here for you! He's very rude.'
201: Moby was Ahab's childhood sled.
Speaking of literature and the Holy Grail: I have learned something amazing and edifying that I will now share.
I got curious about the origin of the Frenchman's insult that, sounded out, is something like connigut. I Googled it, assuming that it was some kind of crude anatomical reference, but it was actually the Frenchman's pronunciation of "knight."
Am I the last person to have found this out?
I think teo is caricaturing the RW position here. I doubt he's daft enough to sincerely believe that!
More the median voter than the right-wing per se, but yes, I'm not saying I personally believe that.
207, 208: Second to last, apparently.
208 I take that back, I did get that, I thought you meant that's how "knight" is actually pronounced in French.
In English it used to be pronounced similar to modern German "knecht".
Whatever became of Knecht Ruprecht? I'm never sure who's drifted away and who's still here with a different nom de blog.
I'm pretty sure he's gone. I should try his email if I can find it.
I vaguely remember he moved into one of those "jobs" where you have to be "responsible" about your "internet presence." So either he has an OnlyFans or an important public office. Maybe both.
1. No. I have stories like that for both of my alma maters. It just takes a rich school.
2. Eh. I'd rather have them be mostly irrelevant.
We have talked about this before. (More recent.)
Japan doesn't have an appetite for whale, a tiny special interest group does, and Abe threw them under the bus years ago with, apparently, political impunity. Whaling evidently has effectively no salience to Japanese voters. About the only thing that would raise its salience would be self-righteous posing from outsiders and, oh hey guess what this administration *is* good at.
The thing is that whaling is actually a fairly high-salience issue among the American public. "Save the Whales" was a whole big thing for a long time. It succeeded so you don't hear about it much anymore, but whenever whaling comes up in American discourse the overwhelming reaction is visceral revulsion. It may not be diplomatically convenient or helpful in shaping internal Japanese politics, but harping on this has domestic political value to the administration. (Not a lot, admittedly; many other issues are more salient these days. But it's not nothing.)
"More easily may an elephant, though it be unseemly
great,
Go through a needle's eye, be that eye so narrow -
Slip through more softly, than this soul into Heaven,
The soul of this wealthy man, who hath turned his will
to world-things entirely,
The thoughts of his mind, and mindeth not the great
might of God."
Well did He know
The hate-raging hearts of the people
And the more accurately it describes what in fact happened the more it condemns the administration.
|| Interesting and seems well-sourced (via Bret Devereaux) about what's happening at WVU - basically sounds like a real Parkinson's Law tumour growth process over there. https://wvufacts.wordpress.com
Hijacking this dead thread. Well, hell, it's more relevant than whaling.
Far far from Harvard son #1 is enrolled in Chill U this fall, after a year taking classes at the local community college. I decided to do the all day transfer orientation to see what the university looks like, how it presents itself, to new parents. I'm in it now. For contrast, son #2 graduated a year early from HS and we just forked over a relatively giant chunk of money for him to attend a music and arts boarding school for a post-grad year to work on his violin auditions for the colleges and music schools he wants to apply to.
The Chill U presentations are...kind of depressing. An amazing parade of Interim Deans of Student Flourishing and Associate Deans of Student Success and Directors of Counseling and someone who reminds you that we have a free walk-in food pantry no questions asked. 90 minutes of badly done powerpoint slides with 15+ bullet points each telling where students who fail in any of the 12 ways they're likely to fail should go for backup. I may not be presenting a balanced view (there has been other stuff like "how advising works"), but that's what I'm hearing. Who would have thought the most cheerful and positive and informative presentation would be by the Police Dept.? Not me.
For contrast, the arts academy's contacts have been helpful, personal (let's schedule a 1 to 1 zoom!), and focused on excellence and (actual, not euphemistic) flourishing, at the school and into the future. Part of it, I'm sure, is that if you fork over a enough money you're going to get treated the way rich people expect to be treated (we are not rich). And that's pretty awesome. But also, the extent to which Chill U has shifted resources to assistant deans of student support services is pretty amazing. We have record enrollment this year, we are as flush with money as we ever have been, the university has been growing, and I heard from my chair that across the entire university the budget for new faculty hires is....$150K. Fucking deanlets sucking up millions.
The flourishing will continue until powerpoints improve.
but harping on this has domestic political value to the administration.
As an example, there is an ongoing conflict between Maine lobsterman, who want to harvest as many lobsters as they can as cheaply as possible, and environmentalists who care about the endangered right whale, and the risked posed by stray lobster lines in their breeding area. The Biden Administration can't very well credibly ask the lobterman to maybe accept some moderately inconvenient adaptations to their lobstering equipment if the lobstermen can turn around and say "why don't you care about whales in Japan?"
230 makes a lot of sense.