The Real Education Crisis

Page Six goes where the Ideas Festival dares not tread declining attainment for America's wealthiest children: "In the past, it wasn’t unusual for as many as seven students to be accepted through early admission to the top Ivy League institution, says a guidance counselor there. But for the first time in memory, inside sources say, no Dalton students will be shipping off to Harvard come fall. And some parents—who shell out $31,200 a year for their kids’ private school education—are pissed."

I believe I was actually one of eight members of the Dalton Class of 1999 who wound up in the Harvard Class of 2003. Apparently fairness is to blame for causing the problem:

As a result, it seems private schools are feeling the heat more than their public counterparts. “The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”

Tragic. Kevin Carey has more.

Comments

What, a reduction in conservative affirmative action? Man, what would George W. have done without Daddy's money and connections to get him into Harvard and Yale despite his glowing mediocrity?

I'm sure the Ivies will be hearing howls of outrage from people who are against affirmative action for everybody else, but view it as a right for their kids.

Posted by LFC | July 2, 2008 10:46 AM

This is the sort of post I'd expect from a trust-fund scumbag.

Posted by ResumeMan | July 2, 2008 10:47 AM

Well, my prep school just had its best year for college admissions in a while.

As an Ivy refugee (one year of Dartmouth was one year too much), I must admit I was quite smug when it was revealed that our valedictorian also eschewed Yankee schools and chose to join me and a horde of my classmates at Vanderbilt.

What does this anecdote actually mean, you might be asking. That's a good question.

Posted by Andy | July 2, 2008 10:51 AM

i feel so sorry for you and your classmates.

Posted by erg | July 2, 2008 10:53 AM

i feel so sorry for you and your classmates.

Posted by erg | July 2, 2008 10:56 AM

NYC PUBLIC schools '08, Harvard '12!

My school actually did get a surprisingly high number of students into Ivies for a non-science high public school.

Check out the Living Liberally Blog for reviews alongside rants, and amusements alongside analysis...because that's part of being liberal too.

Posted by Seth Pearce | July 2, 2008 10:59 AM

There are plenty of great colleges out there outside the Ivies. I tell that to all the kids I interview for admission to Brown.

Just think where the world would be today if academic merit were the only admissions criterion.

Posted by swoosh | July 2, 2008 11:01 AM

What does this anecdote actually mean, you might be asking. That's a good question.

The Trustafarian's Creed, in one pithy statement.

No offense intended, but for the well off, finding meaning in life is inversely proportional to the ease and comfort their families provide.

Which is why Commander Codpiece blew up frogs as a child, mocked the condemned as Governor, and destroys everything he touches as preznit. When you can't feel anything as a human, inflicting pain is the last resort. On oneself for the masochist, on others for the sadistic sociopath.

Posted by -ck- | July 2, 2008 11:06 AM

Fu*K Harvard!

Posted by Yale University | July 2, 2008 11:07 AM

NYU...it's a lot more fun and the chicks are hotter.

Posted by Rich | July 2, 2008 11:07 AM

$31 large for high school? Is this a typo? Holy f'in shit. I need to research what it takes to start up a private high school.

/shakes head in disgust

Posted by Doofus | July 2, 2008 11:08 AM

you trust fund scumbag

-Petey

Posted by Zephyrus | July 2, 2008 11:09 AM

Fu*K Harvard!!!

Posted by Yale University | July 2, 2008 11:10 AM

You went to a prep school that cost more than most colleges and then went to Harvard and you can't even proofread your own fucking posts on a regular basis?

WTF?

Posted by calipygian | July 2, 2008 11:10 AM

What does this anecdote actually mean, you might be asking. That's a good question.

The Trustafarian's Creed, in one pithy statement.

No offense intended, but for the well off, finding meaning in life is inversely proportional to the ease and comfort their families provide.

Which is why Commander Codpiece blew up frogs as a child, mocked the condemned as Governor, and destroys everything he touches as preznit. When you can't feel anything as a human, inflicting pain is the last resort. On oneself for the masochist, on others for the sadistic sociopath.

Posted by -ck- | July 2, 2008 11:10 AM

The whole structure of higher education, in particular elite private higher education (Ivies, Duke, Vandy, Stanford, etc.) is going to change dramatically over the next decade or so. For a long time, wealthy legacies kept their "pride of place" in admissions because the schools knew that having a lot of wealthy alums is vital to building those endowments. That model worked as long as tuition rates were in the ballpark of affordability for the upper middle class and--with some help--the middle class. In other words, as long as the schools could maintain at least a somewhat egalitarian veneer.

But now, the cost of their product is simply too high for middle class families, and even many upper-middle class families. I suspect we're going to see tuition caps at most schools. At the Ivies and other comparable places, tuition will be means-tested, and free for students whose families earn less than $75K or thereabouts.

Posted by Claudius | July 2, 2008 11:11 AM

$31 large for high school?

a co-worker is paying $40k for kindergarten for his twins...

Posted by linda | July 2, 2008 11:13 AM

I don't know that it's just a fairness argument.

I don't know anything about Dalton as an institution, so maybe they suck and none of their students deserve to go to Harvard. But if there is a set of elite prep schools who admit high-achieving students, and those students continue their high-achieving ways during their high school years only to be denied Ivy admission because the Ivies don't want to admit "prep school kids" anymore, I don't see how that advances fairness.

It certainly advances diversity, which has a value. And as a private institution, Harvard should have the right to set any admission standards it wants, to aggregate any kind of student body it wants. But I would think "fairness" would be defined as "the highest-achieving applicants get in" and that doesn't seem to be what was done.

The legacy system didn't achieve "fairness" either, if it let in low-performing people with connections.

Posted by Brian | July 2, 2008 11:14 AM

"...even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,”

Love the condescension and amazement-- even THOSE people are getting a look.

Posted by Dude | July 2, 2008 11:15 AM

Already, at some of those schools it's free if you make under 60K and you pay at most 10% of your income if you make under 180K.

Check out the Living Liberally Blog for reviews alongside rants, and amusements alongside analysis...because that's part of being liberal too.

Posted by Seth Pearce | July 2, 2008 11:18 AM

calipygian, you seem to be implying that there ought to be some kind of connection between wealth, intelligence, and proofreading. Why?

Posted by Tom | July 2, 2008 11:21 AM

We pay about $11k/year for pre-school for our two year-old. I can believe that private high schools are $30k+.

Posted by Joe | July 2, 2008 11:23 AM

"$31 large for high school?

a co-worker is paying $40k for kindergarten for his twins..."

I also should have mentioned that what's true for the higher education market will be even more so for the prep school market. Their costs are even more out of reach for most families. In the DC area, many middle and upper middle class families are pulling their kids out of prep schools like St. Albans, Sidwell Friends because they can't keep up with the rate of tuition increases, on average about 10% a year on tuition in the low to mid $20's for grade school. And these are families with two incomes, usually making at least $150K or more per year.

Posted by Claudius | July 2, 2008 11:24 AM

What does this anecdote actually mean, you might be asking. That's a good question.

The Trustafarian's Creed, in one pithy statement.

No offense intended, but for the well off, finding meaning in life is inversely proportional to the ease and comfort their families provide.

Which is why Commander Codpiece blew up frogs as a child, mocked the condemned as Governor, and destroys everything he touches as preznit. When you can't feel anything as a human, inflicting pain is the last resort. On oneself for the masochist, on others for the sadistic sociopath.

Posted by -ck- | July 2, 2008 11:25 AM

Just because no Dalton students are attending Harvard doesn't mean none got in - a couple of friends of mine from high school turned down Harvard to go to Stanford because they couldn't stand the New England cold anymore. Or maybe Dalton's class of 2008 was dumber overall than previous classes.

"a co-worker is paying $40k for kindergarten for his twins...

Posted by linda | July 2, 2008 11:13 AM"

Unless they are living in Kabul, that's just fucking retarded. They better be teaching the kids how to speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Arabic for that price.

Posted by Reality Man | July 2, 2008 11:25 AM

And if one is callipygian, does that make it OK to misspell it?

Posted by Astigmatist | July 2, 2008 11:28 AM

I like Kevin Carey's blog, but is he on a personal mission to make the page layout as ugly as possible? That drab teal is hideous, and there's something stark about it that makes me fear every link is a .pdf of some obscure white paper.

Posted by Nate | July 2, 2008 11:29 AM

Let me put it to you this way.

The toniest British magazine is Country Life, which is essentially the house organ of the British aristocracy.

Each issue of Country Life features a frontpiece full page photo and blurb celebrating some young high society girl.
Few, if any, of these lovelies are Oxbridge.

Typical is its June 11, 2008, celebration of Miss Lavinia Holloway:

Lavinia, aged 24, is an artist. The daughter of Mr. Julian Holloway, of Clapham, SW12, and of Mrs. Emma Holloway, of Pen-y-Lan Hall, Ruabon, Denbighshire, she was educated at Heathfield and did an art foundation course at City & Guilds in Kennington, before graduating with a degree in Fine Arts from Northumbria University last July. Currently working at Queen's College Prep School, Lavinia is pictured here at home in North Wales with one of her latest works, an oil on canvas inspired by her interest in carnival culture.

So far as I can see, her lack of Oxford or Cambridge degree has not impaired Lavinia very much. Likewise, I doubt that lack of Harvard or Princeton degree is apt to impair the lovely daughters of our current crop of billionaires.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | July 2, 2008 11:30 AM

I need to have this story-boarded for me: who is being ironic, who is sincere, who is being sarcastic.

I got the impression that Matt's original post was supposed to be ironic.

For those unclear about the "fairness" we are talking about here: elite universities are not a baseball league, where the only goal is to get the most trophies and the most money. These schools are supposed to (a) provide a superior general education, and (b) educate a leadership elite.

Meeting, living, and studying with people of varied cultures, social classes, and educational background is considered a vital part of an elite education by the people who set up these diversity programs. So is turning out a cadre of leaders with diverse cultural and eductional background.

Posted by Midland | July 2, 2008 11:30 AM

I need to have this story-boarded for me: who is being ironic, who is sincere, who is being sarcastic.

I got the impression that Matt's original post was supposed to be ironic.

For those unclear about the "fairness" we are talking about here: elite universities are not a baseball league, where the only goal is to get the most trophies and the most money. These schools are supposed to (a) provide a superior general education, and (b) educate a leadership elite.

Meeting, living, and studying with people of varied cultures, social classes, and educational background is considered a vital part of an elite education by the people who set up these diversity programs. So is turning out a cadre of leaders with diverse cultural and eductional background.

Posted by Midland | July 2, 2008 11:30 AM

If you want your kids to be accepted somewhere based on their pedigree rather than their qualifications, enter them in a dog show. Sorry, Preston and Muffy: a dumbass in a $30k-a-year private school is still a dumbass. Kudos to Harvard for finally beginning to protect their academic integrity by culling future generations of George W. Bushes out of the herd.

Posted by Dr. Wu | July 2, 2008 11:36 AM

Yes, Matt, do clear up whether you were being cheeky or not?

My money is on no; you weren't. I suspect that uou are actually a trust fund whiner baby

Posted by clevelandbob | July 2, 2008 11:42 AM

All this flap about getting a fancy education...then getting a mindless job
in corporate America that a smart 14 year
could do straight out of high school.

What a wonderful world it would be if
there were no Harvard MBA's.

Posted by jaydee | July 2, 2008 11:42 AM

Yes, Matt, do clear up whether you were being cheeky or not?

My money is on no; you weren't. I suspect that uou are actually a trust fund whiner baby

Posted by clevelandbob | July 2, 2008 11:43 AM

Yes, Matt, do clear up whether you were being cheeky or not?

My money is on no; you weren't. I suspect that you are actually a trust fund whiney baby.

Posted by clevelandbob | July 2, 2008 11:44 AM

Each issue of Country Life features a frontpiece full page photo and blurb celebrating some young high society girl.

ITYM 'gel', with a hard G. And while there are undoubtedly 'gels' at Oxbridge, the education of the dimmer elements of the aristocracy is well provided for at places like St Andrews and Exeter.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | July 2, 2008 11:46 AM

$31K is cheap for a prep school these days. Go to the UK and you're closing in on $50K equivalent at places like Eton, Charterhouse and Winchester. Of course here the preps have to compete with the colleges themselves for scarce tuition dollars, whereas in England, even with NuLabor®'s "top-up fees" they're still only paying state school tuition at Oxford.

Posted by DBX | July 2, 2008 11:56 AM

Surely, these poor, unfortunate souls will find somewhere else to go to college. Surely, their lives are not over. So they can cry me a goddamn river all over their parents' money. If they decided to invest that money in prep school based on the understanding that it guaranteed their child a slot at Harvard, then they were morons anyway--seven or eight students admitted is still not a very big number, and Harvard is not a very big place.

Posted by Jake H. | July 2, 2008 11:57 AM

"fairness"? hahahahaahahahahahahahah

This post and the story behind it made my freaking day!

Just the thought of some blue blood crying about "fairness" makes me split a gut every time I hear it. Stop crying and go to New Orleans and build some houses with your own blue blooded trust fund fitting the freaking bill. Thats fairness!

hahahahaa

Posted by bigduke | July 2, 2008 11:57 AM

Iirc the Yale Endowment posted $5 billion in gains in 2007. The whole school costs about $3 billion to operate. These institutions are basically hedge funds with the universities serving as their PR divisions.

Many recently have stopped charging tuition altogether for students whose families have incomes of 200K or less. So ability to pay is less and less an issue.

I wonder how many undergrads are educated now versus 30 or 40 years ago. Have the places available kept up with population growth? I believe the percentage of foreign students is probably higher now than in the past.

Which leads to a topic that many have been looking at lately. Kind of a take on John Edwards Two Americas. But this is not the rich and the poor. It is about the top 10% and the bottom 90%. And in the top 10% you have the Worried Wealthy. The gap is immense. Your million dollars will not get Buffy into Harvard anymore.

But what do I know. I do OK but I never graduated from anywhere and I still have to go to work every day.

Regards.

Posted by luko | July 2, 2008 11:58 AM

wait -- isn't higher education in america just an expensive fraud?

also, admitting poor people may sound good, but about half of them don't graduate; among those who do, many end up with six figure debts to repay by the time they're officially Educated (or as midland said above, perhaps they join the "leadership elite").

the only part of college that may have been worth 40 large a year was the freedom to do drugs without fear of law enforcement. of course, when kids are on financial aid they're on a much tighter leash as far as disciplinary action goes.

p.s. dude, i didn't know you went to dalton. we used to kick your ass in basketball nearly half the time!

Posted by sleepy | July 2, 2008 11:58 AM

turned down Harvard to go to Stanford because they couldn't stand the New England cold anymore.

Oh. My. God. What kind of simpering milksop weakling thinks New England is cold? Cold???? It never drops below -10C!!! What kind of coddled babies is America raising these days? Go live in Northern Kazakhstan in an unheated apartment for 3 years, then you can complain about cold. Speaking as an employer, I would never hire an individual who complains about New England being cold - that's a sure sign of moral and spiritual weakness.

Posted by vanya | July 2, 2008 12:00 PM

A math professor at Tufts had a summer home near where I grew up and was a friend of my parents. He used to say that kids should go to either the Ivy Leagues or state colleges for undergraduate education. At the Ivies you get priceless networking and name recognition opportunities, while at almost any other school you get the same education and opportunities as at public colleges for twice the price.

I went to the University of Rochester. It's not like I kick myself daily or lament how things went, and I did have fun there and learn a lot and all that stuff, but still, specific friends I made aside, in hindsight I should have listened to him. Half my reasons for choosing UR over the state college have proved unnecessary in the years since graduation, and the other half were already unnecessary before I moved in.

Posted by Cyrus | July 2, 2008 12:00 PM

A tidbit for those of you born last night (which means most of you): in the late eighties there was a lot of hue and cry in national magazines that too many asians were getting into ivy leagues as a result of their high scores in the quantitative part of SAT. The institutions responded by deciding to give more weight to 'verbal' abilities than quantitative reasoning skills.

Come to think of it, the writing part of the new SAT may be a response to similar concerns as well.

The problem is that the damn Indians do well in verbal as well.

Posted by gregor | July 2, 2008 12:05 PM

First, it just can't be possible that Matt was anything other than ironic in this post. Can it?

Second, $25-30K for K-12 private is not that rare. I'm sure there are a handful of private schools in all the major metro areas that charge that much. I used to think that sounded expensive (and I'm not going to pay it for our daughter), but after spending what I'm spending on daycare/preschool now, it no longer seems as impossible or unlikely. $46K for a private college counselor, OTOH, is outrageous.

Finally, Cyrus is dead-on. My undergrad philosophy advisor at Minnesota once read me the riot act when I lamented that I didn't get into Harvard, etc., out of high school. And rightly so, as he had gone to Brooklyn College (and then Stanford). Basically, the very best students at, oh, about the top 200 schools in the U.S. (Wisconsin, UNC, Oberlin, Macalaster, UC-Irvine, and so on) are without question smarter, more driven, and more likely to be successful than, say, the bottom 50% at Harvard. Among my pals from Minnesota, many have gone on to big careers in media, investment banking, etcetera (sometimes after going to Ivy grad schools, it's true) that many Harvard freshman will never attain.

The big difference, of course, is that the bottom 50% at the Ivies will do just fine in life, whereas the bottom 50% at Minnesota or Florida State will be managing Subway restaurants.

Posted by Joel Turnipseed | July 2, 2008 12:22 PM

Bring back the draft with no deferments for anyhone for any reason...

Posted by fred lapides | July 2, 2008 12:25 PM

Cyrus,

You'll probably get better networking and brand recognition at Stanford, MIT and Caltech than you would at Brown. The former 3 aren't Ivies.

Posted by Mo | July 2, 2008 12:26 PM

I was one of about 75 kids in my graduating class of 419 to get accepted to and attend the prestigious Arizona Stata University. My college career was paid for, of course, by scholarships and money from my good Uncle Sam, who apparently expected to be paid back.

The scholastic demands at such an institution are very rigorous and it was only through a real commitment to pot and booze that I was able to keep up with my fellow students and get laid a lot.

Thankfully, I was able to graduate in a little over 4-years and now make a modest income in the low 6-figures working for myself. I can't imagine where I would be if I didn't get to go to my dream school! What if I'd ended up at some second rate school, like Michigan State or Brown?

Posted by Adam | July 2, 2008 12:31 PM

Actually there is a serious problem here. The top seven or eight institutions (HYP, Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Caltech, Columbia) have resources that other places don't have. (Small example: Wanna take Uzbek? You have about six choices in the US. This may be important the next time someone intercepts a critical phone call.) The problem is that kids who want to go to Harvard etc for the money and the connections are crowding out the kids who want to go to Harvard to study Uzbek. (For what it's worth, a significant number of physics majors at Harvard proceed not to physics grad school, but to investment banking. This does not seem to me a judicious use of resources for our country.)

There are now far more qualified kids than there are places. Three years ago, a friend of mine, a Yale alum, had a meeting with other ex-Yalies and the Dean of Admissions, who said, paraphrasing, we could take our first set of 2000 admits, shoot them, take our second set of 2000 admits, shoot them, and take our third set. These would be indistinguishable from the first set. I heard Janet Rapelye, Admissions Dean at Princeton, say the following in May, 2004: For the class of '08, we received 16,000 applications for 2000 offers. Of these, 12,000 were qualified. We wanted 5000 of what we got. We offered admission to 2000. We'd have taken all 5000, but we don't have the room.

So, extrapolate. What is going to happen? First, a lot of people are going to understand that there are Harvard quality kids at an awful lot of schools that aren't Harvard. There will surely be non-Harvard quality kids at Harvard because that's the way the world works. Then, a lot of people who thought their kids were gonna go to Harvard are gonna get pissed, and transfer all their goodwill, money and connections to e.g. Vanderbilt, Wesleyan, Hopkins, and so on. It also sours some kids who watch others with less ability, worse work habits and better connections take places that might have gone to them. Ten years down the road these kids whose brains, talent and hard work should have put them into the seven schools are going to have the career they would have had in any case, but they will be networking not with HYP etc, but with Vanderbilt, Wesleyan, Hopkins etc. All this will dilute the relative importance of the Big Seven. Real Soon Now there's gonna be a Big Twenty or a Big Thirty.

Which is why Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Chicago are desperately trying to increase the size of their undergraduate enrollments. They know what's coming, and they're trying as hard as they can to postpone it. But they are only slowing the locomotive down a little.

Posted by David Derbes | July 2, 2008 12:37 PM

Who was it that said "every third generation of wealth should just be killed" ? They are generally useless.

George W? 3rd generation

Yglesias? probably 3rd

eric in Austin

Posted by ericl | July 2, 2008 12:39 PM

The big difference, of course, is that the bottom 50% at the Ivies will do just fine in life, whereas the bottom 50% at Minnesota or Florida State will be managing Subway restaurants.

Uh, I'm practically a high school dropout and have done significantly better than "Subway manager" by almost every conceivable metric.

Your comment betrays a serious lack of imagination. Yes, Virginia, there is a satisfactory life that doesn't involve pumping money into the corrupt educational-industrial complex and it doesn't necessarily involve managing a fast food restaurant.

Posted by calipygian | July 2, 2008 12:42 PM

Wanna take Uzbek? You have about six choices in the US.
Someone in my graduating class went to Berkeley instead of Harvard because the former offered Hittite and the latter didn't.

Posted by me2i81 | July 2, 2008 12:57 PM

Then again, there's Bill Gates, who if I recall correctly got into Harvard and dropped out after his second year...

Posted by john | July 2, 2008 12:59 PM

Whoever doesn't realize that Matt is being ironic here: your education apparently lacked something in the area of reading comprehension.

Posted by Tom | July 2, 2008 1:08 PM

I alumni interview for Dartmouth. One of the things that they do in their applications (which I support) is to evaluate students in the context of what advantages they have had (provided the student meets the minimum standards to do well at the school). For example, a lot of students you see these days have published academic papers. However, when you dig deeper, they are typically nth author and only got on this paper because their "good" school has an assembly line that feeds student workers into local research lab. A rural student who has had no such advantages or accomplishments, but has fought very hard to get everything they have, is much more likely to get in. In fact, you are at a disadvantage at a "good" school because you have to do so much more to distinguish yourself.

This decision makes sense to me. <flaming generalization>My experience at Dartmouth was that the students from the top prep schools were often pretty lazy. They had all the advantages handed to them in the past, and they were not very proactive in making use of the resources that the school made available to them. The public school students were much more aggressive.</flaming generalization>

There is also the case that all the schools are very competitive right now because of the Echo Boom. Right now we are in the peak years for college applications for this generation. That's why the Ivies have acceptance rates in the teens right now. This will alleviate as this population peak recedes a bit.

Posted by Walker | July 2, 2008 1:09 PM

A lot of people overestimate the importance of the reputation of their undergraduate institution in determining their path in life.

Your college's level of prestige is a more accurate indicator of:

a) Your parents' income.
b) How seriously you took high school.

Posted by Philly | July 2, 2008 1:12 PM

LOLing:
    p.s. dude, i didn't know you went to dalton. we used to kick your ass in basketball nearly half the time!

I guess that means that slightly more than half the time, you had your ass handed right back to you.

Posted by Nik | July 2, 2008 1:14 PM

When I was 18 I was just dying to learn Uzbek and Hittite. Why oh why did I not go to Berkeley. Sob.

Posted by Earl Scheib | July 2, 2008 1:15 PM

Man, what would George W. have done without Daddy's money and connections to get him into Harvard and Yale despite his glowing mediocrity?

Read it again.

"The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them."

George W. would have been fine. It's the merely wealthy that are getting hit. The extremely wealthy are still just fine.

Posted by Jinchi | July 2, 2008 1:15 PM

David Derbes,

Nonsense. W/r/t National Security and Uzbek, anyone who could manage a strong B/weak A average at a typical American high school could sign up for the Marine Corps or Army and be studying Uzbek at DLI for free (hell, get a five-figure bonus and get paid on top of it).

As to the other resources, I sincerely doubt that the engineering programs at the Big Division I schools suffer too much by comparison to those you mentioned, especially at the undergraduate level. Does L'Hopital's rule change when you go to NC State instead of MIT? Is there a different version of Computability and Logic for Big Ten schools as opposed to the one assigned at Stanford?

The biggest benefit to getting into the Ivy's is that you won't have to work quite as hard to get into quite as prestigious gigs. Everything else is up for grabs. Plus: almost every big state school has at least several departments that are better than the respective department at the schools you list. So, there's a lot more slicing and dicing to be made and it's just silly to tell an 18 year-old that they're screwed or even disadvantaged if they don't get into Harvard.

Finally, hyperbole, calipygian, for "won't have nearly the same opportunities."

Posted by Joel Turnipseed | July 2, 2008 1:21 PM

Nonsense. W/r/t National Security and Uzbek, anyone who could manage a strong B/weak A average at a typical American high school could sign up for the Marine Corps or Army and be studying Uzbek at DLI for free (hell, get a five-figure bonus and get paid on top of it).

Pretty ironic this, since although I tout my high school dropout cred, DLI was exactly my ticket. I joined the Navy and ended up studying Russian, Serb and Arabic over 20 years.

So I am proof you don't even have to be a strong B/weak A in a typical American high school. Hell, I failed Spanish in high school and still managed to have a very successful career as a military linguist.

And I don't think you can get Uzbek right out of the gate - I think Uzbek is one of those languages that is almost always a second language, usually after you've taken Arabic or Farsi.

Posted by calipygian | July 2, 2008 1:35 PM

Plus: the woman on the cover of this month's MIT Technology Review got her CSci degree at Minnesota: http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/

Also, since we're linking to NY Mag articles today: this guy? http://nymag.com/news/features/46645/ ... is a graduate of the U of MN Architecture program.

Ski-U-Mah and all that, but just about every other state U could say the same things.

Posted by Joel Turnipseed | July 2, 2008 1:37 PM

RE: preschool tuition. My child attends a pre-school at the local branch campus of our state university (sort of a "lab school" for their early childhood education program). The cost is $4.50/hour, highly subsidized by the program and by the fact that during the school year a lot of the childcare workers for the younger kids are students on federal work study. So for us, having our child in pre-school for 40 hours a week 48 weeks a year (they shut down in August and I have to pay a lot more for less quality care at a local day care for two weeks) is $8,640. In a non-subsidized setting, with a higher quality program (more adults with more training), in a locale with expensive real estate to house the program (NYC, Washington, etc), it doesn't surprise me at all that preschool would cost more than $15,000 year. Preschool teachers need to be paid, and their benefits are not getting any cheaper. Add competition for programs perceived to be better, and you quickly move up to $20,000. Is it worth that? Well if the floor is about $10,000, then an additional $10,000 (which, I'm guessing, also includes early morning and later afternoon care for commuting parents, not available everywhere and worth paying a premium for if you want some sanity when you miss your train or have a late meeting) is probably worth every penny. It's not all about snobbishness--there's a market element to this. It's just expensive to take care of little people.

Posted by kajey | July 2, 2008 1:39 PM

Heh. Americans, the most ignorant people in the developed world, talking about education.

Fiddle some more, people.

Posted by The Rest of the World | July 2, 2008 1:40 PM

From Walker "My experience at Dartmouth was that the students from the top prep schools were often pretty lazy. They had all the advantages handed to them in the past, and they were not very proactive in making use of the resources that the school made available to them. The public school students were much more aggressive."

As a current Dartmouth student, I disagree with this assessment. That being said I tend to clump elite public schools in Westchester and Greater Boston in with the private school elites in my own mind.

The thing I will say having gone seen the whole admissions process recently is that schools look at class in many bizarre ways. Students are denied because they seem too bourgeoise, not poor enough, and not rich enough.
Also, a lot of schools like to brag about how many valedictorians they have, and as a result are more likely to admit valedictorians versus someone who is ranked two or three. This gives a huge advantage to "big fish" students from mediocre school districts over "little fish" students from ruthlessly competitive school districts.

Posted by Robert | July 2, 2008 1:42 PM

The biggest benefit to getting into the Ivy's is that you won't have to work quite as hard to get into quite as prestigious gigs. Everything else is up for grabs.

This is somewhat disingenuous. Disclaimer: I am faculty at an Ivy, so take my comments with the tons of salt this requires. However, I do know what employers and grad schools want from my students.

Yes, the top schools can give you a competitive advantage. And sometimes it is because of the "known quantity factor" (Employer X has had good luck with our graduates in the past, and wishes to continue this). But there are other competitive advantages that are not free -- the students must work to take advantage of them. They include:

(a) Endowments. Large endowments allow a school to provide educational labs and experiences that other schools cannot because of financial constraints. Employers/schools value these experiences for legitimate reasons and so give priority to candidates who have had them.

(b) Research opportunities. Most grant funding today is tied to some form of outreach involving undergraduate students. The students have to work hard, but again, simply having this opportunity is a major benefit. And these opportunities arise most often at schools with significant research funding, which are typically the higher profile schools.

The problem is that these opportunities are not uniformly distributed to everyone at the school. They go to the top few percent of each class. So it is often the case that a student would be better off going to a second tier school where they are top dog (and thus get all the attention), than to go to an Ivy/high profile school and become a commodity student.

Posted by Walker | July 2, 2008 1:44 PM

I would like Mr. Yglesias more if he could write well.

Posted by Righteous Bubba | July 2, 2008 1:44 PM

Matt was likely being ironic and thickheaded at the same time. Matt got in under the wire and has been able to coast with the most. Since he has benefited from previous policies, it is kind of like he's throwing someone else's Purple Hearts into the water, you know?

The class entering Harvard the year I went to college had zero accepted from my entire state.

Posted by Pinko Punko | July 2, 2008 1:57 PM

You don't mean to tell me this post is SERIOUS? 'The real education crisis' -- jeezus... I thought it must be sarcasm... oh mi god.

Posted by drindl | July 2, 2008 2:01 PM

Walker,

If you are a faculty at an Ivy then you surely know that the programs where the kind of resources and funding you're talking about are most important are the very ones in which the big state schools uniformly outrank the Ivy Leagues: Engineering (where Harvard is ranked 33rd in the US).

Posted by Joel Turnipseed | July 2, 2008 2:03 PM

"The class entering Harvard the year I went to college had zero accepted from my entire state."

new jersey?

Posted by sleepy | July 2, 2008 2:03 PM

A lot of critics seem annoyed at Matt's bad grammar and spelling.

Reminds me of a time about 40 years ago when my sister was 7 and had a crush on a smart boy in school. Her main criticism was that he used words he couldn't even spell.

Posted by cube | July 2, 2008 2:07 PM

You have to be really thick to think Yglesias wasn't being ironic in this post. Looks like a lot of the "bottom 50% from Harvard" ended up commenting on this blog.

Posted by Sxp151 | July 2, 2008 2:15 PM

A lot of critics seem annoyed at Matt's bad grammar and spelling.

Reminds me of a time about 40 years ago when my sister was 7 and had a crush on a smart boy in school. Her main criticism was that he used words he couldn't even spell.

A quarter of a million dollars worth of education from 9th grade to senior year of college should allow one to write without a proofreader.

Or at least teach you how to use Microsoft Spell and Grammar check.

Hell, the annoying little Window's paperclip could do that and he didn't have a quarter mil education.

Posted by calipygian | July 2, 2008 2:16 PM

"$31K is cheap for a prep school these days. Go to the UK and you're closing in on $50K"

Isn't Dalton a day school? Add another $10-15K for boarding school.

My memory from college was that prep school students arrived and found the work load to be fabulously easy compared to High School. Students from prestigious suburban Boston and Westchester public high schools complained that they had never had so much work in their lives.

Posted by PSP | July 2, 2008 2:22 PM

At some point it'd be nice for the trust funders to realize that the Ivy schools are overrated. U of South Florida FTW. >:)

Posted by PaulW | July 2, 2008 2:25 PM

I think that the discussion here has been a bit unclear about what Harvard (and other elite schools) have been doing over the last few decades. Long ago, attending an elite private school was explicitly the ticket to a fancy institution: admissions officers would call up Phillips Exeter, receive a long list of admits, and declare their work done.

My impression is that more recently, the reasons for private school dominance have shifted. No longer are elite private schools explicitly favored in the admissions process. (although "legacy" status is still inexplicably given preference...) Instead, students at elite private schools benefit from a culture where so many people are obsessively focused on getting into college. Seeing so many people play the "college game" around them, they'll speed up the mind-deadening process of inflating their resumes and spinning everything as a qualification for college admissions. The private schools put their hefty institutional weight behind the process, even forcing students to participate in sports and activities as a graduation requirement.

In ninth grade, I was busy playing video games and generally being a nerd; at the same time, these kids' parents are already aggressively plotting their college admissions. The result is that a lot of intellectually unengaged and unexceptional kids from elite private schools are admitted to top universities. (though Yglesias is a good exception!)

Posted by Matt Rognlie | July 2, 2008 2:30 PM

$31k tuition for fucking high school and those dumbfucks still couldn't get into Harvard?

Signed,

a student at UC Berkeley

Posted by Natascha | July 2, 2008 2:52 PM

Brown rocks. Happiest students in the Ivy League, and Mens Lacrosse Co-Champions (with Cornell.)

Posted by JDub | July 2, 2008 3:48 PM

"The class entering Harvard the year I went to college had zero accepted from my entire state."

new jersey?

New Jersey might have the best secondary education in the country. Yale alone has alumni clubs in every county that compete to draft the most Elis.

I would assume a state that sends no one to Harvard is either a) very sparsely populated, or b) the year in question was decades ago, when the Ivies were northeastern regional schools.

Posted by Daniel Koffler | July 2, 2008 3:49 PM

Brown rocks. Happiest students in the Ivy League, and Mens Lacrosse Co-Champions (with Cornell.)

Posted by JDub | July 2, 2008 3:50 PM

Dude -- People should always be condescending toward homeschoolers.

They and their parents deserve it. Public schools are important to the health and wellbeing of our nation. These losers can't hack it, so they wall themselves off from the hoi polloi.

But don't think I'm just picking on them -- I have just as much contempt for private school people. Private schoolers and homeschoolers show the worst of our society -- they're out for themselves and could care less about the rest of society.

Posted by JR Bryan, TX | July 2, 2008 3:52 PM

me, i would assume that either a) i was joking, or b) new jersey sucks

Posted by sleepy | July 2, 2008 3:54 PM

"In the past, it wasn’t unusual for as many as seven students to be accepted through early admission to the top Ivy League institution..."

Great, but what does that have to do with Harvard?

Posted by Cynicor | July 2, 2008 7:03 PM

Amazing how many types of dumbassery are on display in this thread.

One thing I find interesting, if not full-on dumbass, is the propensity to talk as if the only thing you should hope to get out of college is the possibility of a better income, and decisions are properly made on that basis alone. I guess that's one of the effects of an economy in which everyone feels at risk all the time, but it's still a pretty impoverished view of the world.

Reminds me of the time a friend who'd just had his dog put to sleep kept complaining about the cost, like that was the real issue there.

Posted by MissLaura | July 2, 2008 7:33 PM

Not just college Miss Laura. It's strange that so many people on this thread can't imagine that parents might want to send their kids to the best possible lower, middle, and high school just for the sake of their personal happiness and education. Dalton and many other high end prep schools are not just facades and they are certainly not test prep factories. They provide fantastic school experiences far beyond the classes that ensure a high SAT score. Children at those places typically like going to school and they are exposed to an amazing range of knowledge not available elsewhere.

Sure, it's unfortunate that it costs a lot of money to provide that kind of education and that more people don't get to experience it, but you can't really blame the schools for that. Most of them make a serious effort to create a diverse student body and offer generous scholarships to low income children. I know Dalton does.

And seriously, if you have the opportunity to ensure your kid has a happy school experience through high school, shouldn't you take it?

And yea, if the so-called elite colleges are consciously taking fewer elite prep school kids in favor of equally qualified kids from more diverse backgrounds, that's great. There are plenty of great colleges and universities out there. The Dalton graduates will not suffer any real harm.

Posted by chuckling | July 2, 2008 10:04 PM

Not just college Miss Laura. It's strange that so many people on this thread can't imagine that parents might want to send their kids to the best possible lower, middle, and high school just for the sake of their personal happiness and education. Dalton and many other high end prep schools are not just facades and they are certainly not test prep factories. They provide fantastic school experiences far beyond the classes that ensure a high SAT score. Children at those places typically like going to school and they are exposed to an amazing range of knowledge not available elsewhere.

Sure, it's unfortunate that it costs a lot of money to provide that kind of education and that more people don't get to experience it, but you can't really blame the schools for that. Most of them make a serious effort to create a diverse student body and offer generous scholarships to low income children. I know Dalton does.

And seriously, if you have the opportunity to ensure your kid has a happy school experience through high school, shouldn't you take it?

And yea, if the so-called elite colleges are consciously taking fewer elite prep school kids in favor of equally qualified kids from more diverse backgrounds, that's great. There are plenty of great colleges and universities out there. The Dalton graduates will not suffer any real harm.

Posted by chuckling | July 2, 2008 10:06 PM

Not just college Miss Laura. It's strange that so many people on this thread can't imagine that parents might want to send their kids to the best possible lower, middle, and high school just for the sake of their personal happiness and education. Dalton and many other high end prep schools are not just facades and they are certainly not test prep factories. They provide fantastic school experiences far beyond the classes that ensure a high SAT score. Children at those places typically like going to school and they are exposed to an amazing range of knowledge not available elsewhere.

Sure, it's unfortunate that it costs a lot of money to provide that kind of education and that more people don't get to experience it, but you can't really blame the schools for that. Most of them make a serious effort to create a diverse student body and offer generous scholarships to low income children. I know Dalton does.

And seriously, if you have the opportunity to ensure your kid has a happy school experience through high school, shouldn't you take it?

And yea, if the so-called elite colleges are consciously taking fewer elite prep school kids in favor of equally qualified kids from more diverse backgrounds, that's great. There are plenty of great colleges and universities out there. The Dalton graduates will not suffer any real harm.

Posted by chuckling | July 2, 2008 10:09 PM

Sorry for the multiple posts. This site is not working well.

Posted by chuckling | July 2, 2008 10:11 PM

I love the way the home schoolers can't recognize sarcasm.

Posted by john stephen lewis | July 2, 2008 10:13 PM

The sad part is that eventually all the talk about the equally qualified public school kids will essentially only include very well off suburban enclave high school students.

What I find most annoying is that winners of the biggest educational lottery around (getting into Harvard or its ilk) in many cases just use the prestige to march into some high profile chunderwad firm that only recruits from those schools, or worse, blow their amazing education on creating a stupid personal blog based on being spectacularly wrong on the biggest question of our time and in turn are rewarded by an actual paying job to do the same, and have hundreds (thousands?) of commenters essentially hate them, and never even acknowledge that such commenters even exist.

Posted by Pinko Punko | July 2, 2008 11:10 PM

The sad part is that eventually all the talk about the equally qualified public school kids will essentially only include very well off suburban enclave high school students.

What I find most annoying is that winners of the biggest educational lottery around (getting into Harvard or its ilk) in many cases just use the prestige to march into some high profile chunderwad firm that only recruits from those schools, or worse, blow their amazing education on creating a stupid personal blog based on being spectacularly wrong on the biggest question of our time and in turn are rewarded by an actual paying job to do the same, and have hundreds (thousands?) of commenters essentially hate them, and never even acknowledge that such commenters even exist.

Posted by Pinko Punko | July 2, 2008 11:37 PM

Jesus H, what is this Typepad or something? Server timeout means comment actually posts. Got it.

Carry on.

Posted by Pinko Punko | July 3, 2008 1:22 AM

I've never seen so many people so happy at others' misfortune before - particulary when its based on a caricature. There are plenty of lazy prep-school kids out there, but there are just as many well-educated, intelligent, and driven students at the same schools.

While diversity may indeed be an admirable trait, it's no more inherently "fair" for a university to select relative poverty as an important criterion in prospective students than relative wealth.

Additionally, the implicit assumption in many of these posts is that acceptance at Harvard will be ultimately more beneficial (in some way) to those children than School X. Leaving aside the question of whether or not that is correct - the evidence is mixed - it seems odd to countenance unfairness in selection criteria yet not the unfairness inherent in outcome. Why should Harvard students do better than non-Harvard students? I am being facetious here simply to make the point that some unfairness is inherent in society as a whole.

Posted by Geoff | July 3, 2008 2:34 AM

Hate to break it to everyone, but all the Ivies still let in plenty of prep school students every single year. Trust me, there is no lack of qualified (and unqualified) prep school students at every Ivy.

Posted by A Yale Student | July 3, 2008 9:04 AM

Both of my parents were assembly line workers with a combined income of less than 25,000 when I went to college. They raised three kids, and sent us all to college.

I worked very hard in HS and got into Stanford, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Then, I graduated from Yale Law School over 10 years ago. I loved both schools and met amazing people in college. However, though my classmates were accomplished, I was surprised to find very, very few people with disadvantaged backgrounds. Almost everyone had parents who were doctors, lawyers, professors, judges. Even the minority students had come from similar backgrounds. I maybe met one or two other students who had blue-collar parents.

So don't let a school's racial diversity fool you. Although I didn't have the same connections and resources growing up, I'm glad the schools recognized my potential and gave me an opportunity to excel. I'm glad to see Harvard's commitment to true diversity.

Posted by Anon | July 3, 2008 9:14 AM

Snark, snark!
Who's there?
Matt.
Hi, Matt.

(I thought that the ability to detect sarcasm was one of the touchstones of a good education.)

The guidance counselors still tell the story about how, not so long along, General Motors and General Electric were being run by men who'd graduated from a college in Boston--UMass.
Talent usually outs, no matter where you went to school, or even if you went to school at all. The rest is mediocrity scrambling for an edge--connections, a sheetskin, charm.
Ask talent why they picked a school and they end up citing a program or a professor. Anything else is finishing school.

Posted by Steve Paradis | July 3, 2008 10:52 AM

Private schoolers and homeschoolers show the worst of our society -- they're out for themselves and could care less about the rest of society.

The worst of our society? Really...?

I assume you would include private colleges and universities in there? Everyone should go to state schools? If not why not?

Posted by fp | July 4, 2008 11:32 PM