The Prestige of Elite Credentials

Posted on | March 29, 2014 | 90 Comments

Ace does a riff on a study about the value of degrees:

One way in which these numbers are misleading, or at least incomplete, is that they disguise an important fact: Students going to Caltech for comp science are going to make a lot more money than a student going to Murray State College for Arts whether they went to college or not. The Caltech comp science guy is, look, coming into the classroom a lot smarter than the Murray State Arts grad. Even if they both dropped out of school on the first day of classes, the guy who was at Caltech would make more money that the Murray State student.

It’s nice that Ace makes this comparison between two state schools. One of the problems in most comparisons of this sort is that if you lump together state schools and elite private schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Duke, etc.), you’re comparing apples and oranges. The democratizing trends in education — college isn’t just for rich kids anymore — have been counteracted by an increasing prestige for private school diplomas, which are priced out of the range of all but the rich.

Here’s a simple test of who is “rich”: If you can afford $40,000 a year for your kid’s college tuition, congratulations, you’re rich.

And now it’s time to mention that secretive samizdat that no one is supposed to admit having read, The Bell Curve, which became controversial because of its findings about correlations between intelligence, heredity and race. When it was first published, I read all the denunciations in newspaper columns and magazine articles and actually believed The Bell Curve was crypto-Nazi pseudo-science. Then in 1996, a guy on an Internet discussion group responded to my uninformed criticism of the book by asking me if I’d actually read it and, called out, I felt compelled to remedy my ignorance.

Mirabile dictu, the book was a real eye-opener, and I became resentful of the liberals whose hysterical denunciations had misled me. (Remember, I used to be a Democrat, had enthusiastically voted for Clinton in 1992 and, by 1996, was just coming to understand how media bias had influenced my perceptions.)

The thing is, if you cut The Bell Curve in half, and read only the first part about the influence of intelligence in socio-economic outcomes, you would still have a very important book, and probably quite controversial, but it wouldn’t have the terrifying samizdat quality of A Dangerous Subversive Book You’re Not Supposed to Read. Alas, the scary racial controversy about the book has prevented people from examining the very informative material in the first part of the book.

To what extent is socio-economic status (SES) correlated to intelligence? A far greater extent than I’d ever realized, prior to reading The Bell Curve, and this alone was a revelation worth the price of the book. The correlation certainly is not so great that one can say, “poor = stupid” and “rich = smart,” but omni ceteris parabus, smart people do better in life than do stupid people — which, from a common-sense perspective, should not be a controversial thing to say, but which is a fact that our liberal intelligentsia have striven to obscure for many decades.

Well, to what extent is intelligence a hereditary trait? Again, to a far greater extent than we had hitherto been led to believe. And again, the correlation is not so great that one can assume that the children of MIT professors are destined to be geniuses, no matter what their educational experience, but it’s a correlation strong enough that we may predict, for example, that the offspring of high-school dropouts is unlikely to become an MIT professor.

The democratization of American higher education came in a great rush after World War II, first as a result of the G.I. Bill — which is how my Alabama farmboy father became a university graduate — then as a result of widespread post-war affluence combined with the effects of standardized testing and government aid to education, including Pell Grants and student loans. And the way these changes transformed the structure of American society was truly revolutionary from the standpoint of rewarding intelligence, per se.

In 1939, you might have found one man with an IQ of 130 working as a factory hand with an eighth-grade education, while another man with an IQ of 115 was a Harvard graduate and president of the local bank. The difference in their circumstances was simply an accident of birth — the factory hand’s parents were poor and the bank president’s parents were rich. Fast-forward 50 years, however and, by 1989, the grandson of the high-IQ factory hand was likely to be a successful college graduate, and perhaps far more successful than the grandsons of the bank president. Why? Because the educational system had become more meritocratic — more efficient at identifying bright children and directing them toward higher education, without regard for their family’s financial circumstances — and economic prosperity had made it possible for more kids to complete high school and attend college.

This revolution is now in the rear-view mirror, fading into history. Young people have no idea that the system ever worked any other way than it does now. And the way the system works now is that ambitious suburban middle-class parents are quite desperately pushing their little Special Snowflakes toward the fast-track of “gifted” classes, with the idea that if their precious darling doesn’t get into an elite college, life will not be worth living, either for the child or their parents, who will bear the stigma of having raised a

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Child Who Didn’t Get Accepted at Yale.

David Brooks has called these people “Achievatrons” — see Michelle Malkin’s 2008 post, “David Brooks’ Ivy League Ejaculations” for a populist response — and the unseemly obsession with elite credentials is warping American society, politics and culture.

The negative effects of this kind of elitism are something most people perceive in an instinctive, common-sense way, but it becomes blindingly apparent if you will carefully read the first part of The Bell Curve. Despite all the fashionable chatter about “diversity” in higher education, the student bodies of elite schools are far more homogenous than is true at state universities. Because of standardized testing, there is now a nationwide competition among young brainiacs to be accepted into elite universities and, because tuition at these schools has increased far beyond the rate of inflation, the overwhelming majority of elite university students come from households with incomes in the top 10%.

A couple years ago, for example, a Harvard student analyzed financial aid data and reached “the stunning conclusion that approximately 45.6 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from families with incomes above $200,000, placing them in the top 3.8 percent of American households.” Not only are Harvard students economically isolated from the life experiences of the vast majority of Americans, but they are are socially isolated from everyone except their fellow “Achievatrons.” They have no friends who were not likewise on the academic fast track since elementary school and, whatever sympathy they may have for the untutored masses, they have never been in a situation where they had to respect such people as their social or political equals.

Spare me your insulting liberal condescension, Harvard boy.

If you’re a middle-class parent whose kid makes straight A’s and has a near-perfect SAT score, your child might be able to get enough financial aid to scrape through at Harvard, but why (other than the ambitious craving for an elite credential) would you want to do that to your kid? Why subject your child to the needless humiliation of being the shabby, impoverished student at a Snob Factory full of rich kids? If your child is smart enough to get into an elite school, he can almost certainly get a full scholarship to a state university. Middle-class parents should say to hell with Harvard and, while they’re at it, to hell with Duke, too.

The pathetic spectacle of Miriam Weeks, performing in sex videos as “Belle Knox” to pay tuition at Duke, is a perfect example of where the foolish pursuit of elite credentials leads. That she reportedly turned down a scholarship to a Top 20 school (Vanderbilt, ranked No. 17 nationally) to attend a Top 10 school (Duke is ranked No. 7) gives you a sense of how nonsensical her choices were.

Let the rich have the elite schools to themselves. Refuse to let yourself be brainwashed or peer-pressured into accepting the elite’s self-flattering worldview, wherein their possession of the ornaments of status makes them certifiably Better Than You.

Smart people do well in life even if they never go to college, as Ace helpfully points out, and the prestige of an elite credential is not really worth much, if you have to suck cocks to get it.

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Category: Education

Comments

90 Responses to “The Prestige of Elite Credentials”

ariyadesai01
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:18 am

RT @smitty_one_each: TOM The Prestige of Elite Credentials http://t.co/n6WYQay1nw #TCOT
gntlman
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:24 am

RT @smitty_one_each: TOM The Prestige of Elite Credentials http://t.co/n6WYQay1nw #TCOT
kaf
March 29th, 2014 @ 6:08 am

Caltech is not a public school.
dwduck
March 29th, 2014 @ 6:49 am

True. He’s probably thinking Berkeley — which doesn’t change the underlying dynamic all that much.
wjjhoge
March 29th, 2014 @ 7:00 am

RT @smitty_one_each: TOM The Prestige of Elite Credentials http://t.co/n6WYQay1nw #TCOT
Paul H. Lemmen
March 29th, 2014 @ 7:51 am

Confession: I graduated high school but never attended college. I have an IQ of 165. For many years I had an income in the top 5% from my work in the IT field. I was completely self-taught in IT and I spent many hours a day in study to remain current in advances in technology. I did very well. If I hadn’t become a con-man and used my intelligence and abilities in a criminal manner I would still be doing very well. This illustrates that in addition to intelligence and ability there must be morality to guide any individual.
Wombat_socho
March 29th, 2014 @ 8:04 am

While I was attending ed school, the professors would repeatedly bring up socio-economic status as an argument against standardized testing, arguing that since the rich kids were going to do better, why bother testing everyone? (No, it didn’t make sense to me either.)
richard mcenroe
March 29th, 2014 @ 8:35 am

You miss the point, Stacy. A prestige credential gives you access to much more influential and potentially profitable cocks to suck.
richard mcenroe
March 29th, 2014 @ 8:39 am

Because what they were worried about was the risk of discovering how badly these rich kids were really being educated.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Ivy League types I’ve dealt with is their profound ignorance and almost willful stupidity about anything outside the handcrafted tropes they were trained to reguritate for the approval of their professors and peers. David Mamet compares them to hamsters pushing the lever for a food pellet: repeat the desired behavior, get rewarded.

On the other hand, that is exactly how you create a mandarin class such as infests the Beltway and our universities today.
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 8:57 am

I agree undergrad education in US is unaffordable for most students. Grad schools on the other hand are a different story I think: you are looking at 1.5 to 2.5 years before you can land a job. I think the diff between private and public school credentials/quality of education is less so for graduate degree programs (or at least for some like computer science and engineering.)

I id my masters at UMASS, which is ranked about #90 in the national univ ranking (#40 in public univ only list.), but ranked #25 (same as Duke) in computer science program. I could afford to go to UMASS because even though my undergrad (was not in CS, but Engineering) GPA was just above average, I got a 99 percentile in GRE and therefore an assistantship. There are 17 schools that have a 4.0 rating or above in computer science, out of them majority (9) are publicly funded. And of the 50 or so universities that have a 3.0 or above rating, about 60% are private. [source: USN]
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 9:25 am

Yes, and Caltech is ranked better than UC Berkley in college ratings. (#10 vs #20) Still both are way better than Murray State(#63).

Interestingly though, when it comes to grad school rating for computer science program UC Berkley is ranked #1 while Caltech is #11. (Murray grad school doesn’t have a CS program.)
bet0001970
March 29th, 2014 @ 9:39 am

Now THAT was good.
RS
March 29th, 2014 @ 9:57 am

There is no doubt, that the quality of instruction in many subjects is not significantly different between a state school and an Ivy League edifice. What parents pay for, when they pony up the $40K per year is a ticket to the upper crust. In reality, our educational system is no longer about learning; it has become a guild, determining who succeeds and who doesn’t. The problem even extends to the lowliest of community colleges where students who cannot read on a 5th grade level are borrowing money to get some certificate they think is necessary for success. The whole thing has become a cargo cult in the purest sense of the term. Get a degree and magical flying machines will drop lots of presents.
Cary
March 29th, 2014 @ 10:52 am

The Bell Curve was truly a prescient book that is much under appreciated. Murray draws a lot of its implications out more fully in a more recent book, Coming Apart. He demonstrates how isolated these elites have become from other people. It used to be that even if the bank president’s kid had a high IQ, he would still socially interact and have exposure to more normal IQ people.
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 10:56 am

Where you in any way inspired by the life of Frank Abagnale in doing impersonations and bank check frauds?

You claim an IQ that is far above Abangnale’s but that didn’t seem to help you match his exploits.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
March 29th, 2014 @ 11:14 am

You want a school that gives the best education possible for the lowest dollar amount. State schools near tech centers do that. Debt is bad.
Charles
March 29th, 2014 @ 11:34 am

Some of the snowflakes who go to Ivy League schools are special. Take Mark Zuckerberg who founded Facebok, for example. It was a privilege for him to attend Harvard, but it’s also a privilege for Harvard to have had him attend.

He dropped out, but what he learned there in 2 years, plus the connections he made, and the doors that opened, were a factor in his huge success. He would have been a success without going to Harvard, but…
Evi L. Bloggerlady
March 29th, 2014 @ 11:45 am

Is that true for Bill Gates too?
Are you kidding me
March 29th, 2014 @ 12:00 pm

I went to college, but not without arguing with my hs counselors that I was not college material. I took education classes which taught you the value of working 7 hours on ONE lesson plan and 5 hours on ONE bulletin board. More real life in the classroom would have been more useful. But they have to do what the state says. Sigh.
darleenclick
March 29th, 2014 @ 12:32 pm

My stepson really wanted Harvard or Stanford, but a brilliant white boy just wasn’t the right material.

Happy, though, the best fit for him is that he got a full academic scholarship at University of Portland (private Catholic college) which is turning out wonderfully. (he’s on track for finishing his freshman year with straight A’s, plus his mock trial team went all the way to the semi-finals for Nationals, losing only to Princeton by 2 points)

What with the huge price of college, including the outrageous sums charged for post-grad degrees, it appears less the universities have “education” as their mission, but maximizing their own profits by garnering a permanent share of their graduates future earnings.
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 12:43 pm

Pretty much the same thing, though he was influenced by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a high school friend (a 3 year senior), who himself dropped out of Wash State Univ earlier to work at Honeywell.

Steve Jobs was an exception, in that he dropped out of college because his parents couldn’t afford it, unlike Zuck and Gates. But Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (friend when Jobs was in high school) dropped out of UC Berkely and worked at HP while Jobs joined Atari.
Rosalie
March 29th, 2014 @ 12:58 pm

From Phi Beta Cons: (Maggies Farm)

“If you go back more than 40 years, you find that few occupations were closed to people who did not have college degrees to their names. What changed? In short, I think it was a combination of these factors: the erosion of high-school standards (which used to bring about at least respectable basic competence in young people but began to slide in the ’70s), the subsidization of college, which led to more and more people earning degrees and thus casting doubt on the capabilities of those who did not, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), which turned testing of job applicants into a legal hazard for employers and thus encouraging them to look at a safe alternative means of identifying individuals who might have the right characteristics.”
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:05 pm

Steve Ballmer dropped out of Stanford Business School to join Microsoft while it was still a start up (he later became CEO), but his association with Jobs happened while they were in Harvard.

Zuck, Gates, Paul Allen, Ballmer all went to private high schools before Harvard. Jobs and Wozniak went to Homestead High, CA public school and didn’t attend Ivy league.
Weekend News Links | The Lonely Conservative
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:20 pm

[…] The Other McCain makes the case against middle class families breaking the bank to put their kids through Ivy League colleges. […]
richard mcenroe
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:23 pm

Instapundit’s been all over that.
Art Deco
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:35 pm

He was attending Reed College, a hippy school in Oregon. Conceivably, his mother and father might have afforded one the Cal State campuses. His sister never attended college and by some accounts had wretched jobs into her thirties.
Art Deco
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:41 pm

I suspect if you looked into it, you would find that high schools in northern metropolitan regions were quite rigorous. You get into the South and into the countryside, not so much. James Q Wilson wrote on this question. It was his contention that the changes in academic performance over the period running from 1963 to 1990 were not those of decline in aggregate, but of ‘mediacritization’ whereby the the performance of the most talented students declined while the least improved.

I’ve had occasion to look at entrance exams from ca. 1930 for common and garden public colleges and they do embarrass. Then you recall that only a modest minority had any kind of higher education at all at that time and that most youngsters between the ages of 13 and 18 were not even enrolled in high school much less completing it.
Art Deco
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:45 pm

Miriam Weeks father is an army doctor. He’s part of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie, not the patriciate. For whatever reason, the authorities in that household did not crack-heads and say no to Trinity College at Duke (which is a cesspool, by the way).
Art Deco
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:50 pm

???

Cal tech is a private engineering school with 2,000 enrolled (and, I believe, offers science phD’s as well). It has a student census less than one-tenth the typical UC campus. It is like no other full bore research institution in the country in terms of its dimensions and emphasis. It’s also located in greater Los Angeles, not in the Bay Area. You’re not going to confuse Cal Tech with any place else. You might confuse Stanford with Berkeley. They are nearer in size and in the same town.
Stogie Chomper
March 29th, 2014 @ 1:55 pm

For me, a B.S. degree in Accounting from San Jose State. No student loans. By all means, go to college!
dwduck
March 29th, 2014 @ 2:42 pm

The quoted article specifically names Caltech.

And you might want to tone down your superlatives a bit — Caltech is no MIT.
dwduck
March 29th, 2014 @ 2:42 pm

The quoted article specifically names Caltech.

And you might want to tone down your superlatives a bit — Caltech is no MIT.
Julie Pascal
March 29th, 2014 @ 3:22 pm

Intelligence might be the most important thing… I’d put self-discipline in front of it, though, because you can be the smartest person in the world and if you never finish what you start you’re not going to be a success.

And self-discipline can push someone who is less smart right up past those who are much smarter, when it comes to success.

Add a moral component (because God knows what humans do best to screw up their lives) that helps you to avoid divorce and other financially destructive things, live frugally within your means, and even a not-very-smart person can be quite successful.
Julie Pascal
March 29th, 2014 @ 3:22 pm

Intelligence might be the most important thing… I’d put self-discipline in front of it, though, because you can be the smartest person in the world and if you never finish what you start you’re not going to be a success.

And self-discipline can push someone who is less smart right up past those who are much smarter, when it comes to success.

Add a moral component (because God knows what humans do best to screw up their lives) that helps you to avoid divorce and other financially destructive things, live frugally within your means, and even a not-very-smart person can be quite successful.
When Stephen Colbert Was Funny | Regular Right Guy
March 29th, 2014 @ 3:57 pm

[…] The Prestige of Elite Credentials […]
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:04 pm

Disagree. It mayn’t be MIT but RSM mentioned, “(Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Duke, etc.)”

RSM made two errors: 1) mistaking it for a public school 2) underestimating it’s “eliteness.”

Let’s see the data:

Univ ( World University Rankings,
Academic Ranking of World Universities
—————
Harvard (2,1)
MIT (1, 4)
Stanford (7,2)
Caltech (10, 6)
Princeton (10,7)
Yale (8,11)
Berkely (25, 3)
Duke (23, 31)
—————-
Listed the univ by avg of the two world rankings. Only two out of five univs RSM named are better than Caltech. Even Berkely (if as you say RSM may have mistook for Caltech) beats Duke.

On the USN national college rankings, Caltech is ranked #10 above/with Ivy league elites like Brown (14), Cornell (16), Rice (18), Dartmouth (10).

Its fair to say Caltech is an elite private school.
DaveO
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:10 pm

Another point to consider is the homogenization of the subject matter and method of presenting the subject matter to students. The student at Harvard will be buying top-shelf books containing the Marxist interpretations of fact, Ward Churchill-type creations out of whole cloth, and socially acceptable pseudo-science that the student at Murray State is getting with discount books. The Murray State professor is copying the Harvard professor and using standardized education techniques developed by Bill Ayers and similar revolutionaries.
Kids don’t understand this, and neither do most parents, but the Universities do and use these facts to get larger and larger slices of the government-underwritten guaranteed-income of student loans.
A second point: a school district is considered good based on 1 metric: amount of money spent per student. Few folks look at graduation rates, crime rates and types, and after-graduation entry into the work force. Colleges take advantage of this: more money equals more quality. It’s garbage, but it sells.
DaveO
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:18 pm

Dr. Weeks was deployed when decisions were made. Deployed soldiers are counseled by the Army and chaplains that when they return, they are visitors in their own house, and not full members with decision-making rights. Wives know to call the commander if hubby steps out of line. Family dynamics like most Americans enjoy are negotiated by deployed soldiers and their families. Dr. Weeks could have done something, but the tuition cost is a BS deception thrown out by his daughter to obscure the fact that she wants to be a porn starlet.
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:26 pm

Fun fact:

Only 6 universities find place in top 10 rankings of USN(National), WUR(World) & ARWU(World):

MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago and Caltech.

That’s an elite set by any metric.
Adobe_Walls
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:46 pm

The higher education establishment produces elitists rather than elites. Navy seals are elite warriors, airborne soldiers are elite warriors. Our founding fathers were elite intellectuals and statesmen. The Stains running and ruining this nation, would make Aaron Burr shake his head in disgust and dismay they are not elite and neither are most of their classmates.
GVK
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:54 pm

It’s nice that Ace makes this comparison between two state schools.
One of the problems in most comparisons of this sort is that if you lump
together state schools and elite private schools (Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, Princeton, Duke, etc.), you’re comparing apples and oranges.

From the comments its seems McCain was mistaken and Caltech is actually a private school and avery elite one at that!

Somebody tell go tell Ace, McCain feels they are comparing apples to oranges!
Bob Belvedere
March 29th, 2014 @ 4:58 pm

The one – and only one – good thing to come out of the movement to get everyone to attend a college is that where you go for a degree matters less in the vast majority of hiring decisions than it used to.
Bob Belvedere
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:01 pm

And how you create a Manchurian Candidate like the fictional character known as ‘Barack Hussein Obama’.
dwduck
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:03 pm

Your fondness for magazine rankings is perplexing at best. Do you just need something to link to?
Matt_SE
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:13 pm

I haven’t read Coming Apart, but my understanding is that Murray studied only whites in it. He might think that removing race (relative to the Bell Curve) will make the message more palatable, but that was only one canard of many thrown out by “the elite.” What they actually cannot tolerate is his thesis, not the manner in which it was presented.
Finrod Felagund
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:29 pm

I tend to screw up all these kinds of analyses, since my answers to questions about education change radically depending on how they are phrased: I’m a high school dropout with two college degrees.
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 5:49 pm

If you see Times Higher Education World University Rankings , Caltech is ranked #1 in Overall and #11 by Reputation.
Similarly UC Berkely is ranked #8 and #5 respectively.
Rosalie
March 29th, 2014 @ 6:23 pm

I took the business course in a high school located in a small town in PA. My first job after I graduated was working for three psychiatrists at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens Village, New York. I worked at Creedmoor about a year. From there I went to Johns-Manville in NYC to work for two chemical engineers. So with my measly high school diploma, I was able to get two jobs that would probably require a college degree today.
Rosalie
March 29th, 2014 @ 6:28 pm

Recently, someone was at Harvard asking students where Ottawa was located? They didn’t have a clue.
Anamika
March 29th, 2014 @ 6:34 pm

RSM wrote:

That she reportedly turned down a scholarship
to a Top 20 school (Vanderbilt, ranked No. 17 nationally) to attend a Top 10 school (Duke is ranked No. 7) gives you a sense of how nonsensical her choices were.

Those numbers were from USN National Univ Rankings. Just those numbers, could be misleading as there’s a huge difference in their global rankings — Vanderbilt is nowhere near Duke:

QS: 167 vs 23
Times: 88 vs 17
ARWU: 49 vs 31
Average: 101 vs 24