This is going to be a rooting-for-injuries post, I know, but reading this made my happy from within a pool of wince:
To get to Yale, you effectively must pass through a fifteen year funnel. No company can match that kind of screening rigor, so why not leverage it? From a company’s point of view, it would be dumb not to. (Also, think about it this way — if you are a high school senior with a choice of any school, and therefore one of the smartest in your class, will you choose Yale or a state school? I parenthesized this because it’s a straw man argument, but do consider that financial barriers to the Ivy League are basically non-existent nowadays.) Yes, you can get qualified candidates from other schools. But your chances of getting a “lemon” candidate from Yale are, I presume, much lower than getting one from another school.
That’s from a Yale student responding to Tom Friedman’s column in which he asserted that
[Employers] increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?
Now, as many of you have probably already guessed, Friedman’s column is business-as-usual for the MOU. It is interesting to Friedman-observers mostly for its wrinkle on the taxi-driver standard. This time, the material for the column comes from Friedman’s daughter’s former Yale (sic!) roommate, the co-founder of what seems to be an out-source skills-vetting operation of the sort businesses used to do for themselves. Slightly fancier identifiers, then, but the same trope: someone Friedman happens to know holds the secret key to explain some huge public issue.
Friedman also manages to avoid grappling with the basic logical problem that flows directly from his claim that “jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job.” In such a circumstances specific skills may well be less significant than a capacity, however demonstrated, to acquire new competences as needed.* I’m not asserting that as truth (I haven’t done the work needed to speak intelligently about hiring and workforce issues), but it’s basic (honest) argumentation to take on the strongest counters to your claim, and not simply assume your way past any inconvenient difficulties.
But, as I said, this is a pox-on-both-sides moment. And I guess I have a personal rooting interest. Harvard — and by extension those identified with or credentialed by the place — has had a bad run lately, what with the troubles within their economics shop (Alesina-Ardegna, Rogoff-Reinhardt); the Kennedy School (Jason Richwine’s Ph.D) general folly (the cheating scandal and the following e-mail search scandal)…and whatever else may be laid on the doings at the Kremlin on the Charles. As some of y’all may have twigged, I’ve got Harvard on my resume — I earned my (one and only) degree there back when we still used our number 2 chisels on our slates, and I feel at least a bit personally angered and embarrassed by that (partial) list of folly and worse.
But at least for this morning, I don’t have to wallow in Harvard’s slop. Instead, I’m enjoying the billowing scent of unexamined entitlement wafting up from New Haven. For which, Mr. Anonymized Yalie Blogger, my thanks.
*Not to mention the dead give-away of the passive voice in that sentence “a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered…” Really? Not saying that it’s not — I haven’t read any studies that may exist nor spoken to hiring executives at the range of places that would allow one to make such an ex-cathedra statement. But again, I’d like to see something more than MOU’s say-so, if you know what I mean. Or to be clear: this is an instance of the failure of high-profile punditry. This is essentially unforgivable intellectual sloth, enough to render the entire column meaningless. But the Times seems unable or unwilling to ask their resident pooh-bahs to defend what they claim up to the level I would expect of anyone I teach past their freshman year.
Image: Limbourg brothers, Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry Folio 3, verso: March (Labors of the Month), between and and circa
Villago Delenda Est
Friedman’s campaign to be named wanker of the century continues.
Chet
Maybe what he’s saying is true in those nonsense fields where the degrees don’t matter except as signaling that you’re not some kind of non-degree-having weirdo, but I can tell you that nobody gives two shits about a degree from Harvard, Yale, or any of your other collar-popping frat-fests in the sciences. You better have a degree from a state research university or else what the hell did you ever learn about your scientific discipline except how to read a textbook?
Actually that’s one of the funny parts of “Science” in movies: “Oh, Dr. Bighair has a physics degree – from Harvard!” Oh, so he has no practical experience in high-energy physics research, you mean. Sounds impressive to writers, I guess, but physicists know that Harvard doesn’t have a nuclear reactor.
schrodinger's cat
I can has hat-tip?
Jerzy Russian
How does one prove one can add value? At least when one goes to Yale, there is some sort of process involved where the student takes exams, etc. There is no such assurance with a home school. I would be suspicious of someone with an on-line degree until I had a chance to personally interview that person and test for the skills I was interested in.
Jerzy Russian
@Chet:
I don’t think that is true, at least in my field of astrophysics.
Higgs Boson's Mate
I’m wondering why that smarter-than-most Yalie used the word “funnel” when the word “winnowing” would have been the correct choice. I did go to one of those state schools though so maybe I’m too ill educated to appreciate real brilliance.
Matt McIrvin
If you want to live in debt peonage for the rest of your life, sure.
(I chose the state school over Princeton, Chicago and Stanford, among others, because it was cheaper. I ended up going to Harvard for graduate school instead, and didn’t have to pay for it, a pretty sweet deal all around.)
Shakezula
I would say this is true provided the applicant isn’t the scion of millionaires. If the immediate family had enough money to pay for a substantial portion of a new building … George Dubya Bush.
There is a certain kind of person who cherishes their Ivy/7 diploma because they have to be best at something and that’s all they gots. If required to measure up against other human beings on any other metric beyond where they went to college, they fail. Don’t expect them to challenge this notion.
And it should be chisels and sandstone slabs, should it not?
KXB
Whatever embarrassment you may feel over some Harvard alumni, I’d rather have them than share my Chicago alumni network with guys like Paul Wolfowitz and Bret Stephens.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Leaving aside some of the Yalie lemons I have known in my own life, I think of George W Bush and must go and lie down.
Cermet
@Jerzy Russian: No company will ever waste time/money testing a no-name school/home school candidate when so many Ivy league students are available and can be had on the cheap compared to times past.
As for the Sciences/engineering the few really tops schools (MIT/Caltech/Stanford et al) guarantee a company someone with outstanding training but not innovation skills.
Matt McIrvin
Well, when I was there, Melissa Franklin had a bunch of undergrads working on experiments at Fermilab. They had to commute back and forth sometimes. Don’t know what they’re up to now that the Tevatron’s shut down. They had a pretty high-powered bunch of theorists too, and still do. Also a lot of students involved in observational programs at the Center for Astrophysics.
Hunter Gathers
The question that most employers want answered these days isn’t ‘Are you qualified?’ It’s ‘Do you think your college degree entitles you to make more money than shift managers at Mcdonald’s?’ If the answer is ‘Yes’, you’re S.O.L. Employers don’t want qualified candidates. They want people who are willing to make minimum wage at a job that requires a degree.
Matt McIrvin
…That said, I think many of the undergrads at Harvard really weren’t getting value for the immense amount of money being paid. There was a certain kind of undergrad there who was very smart and self-driven and prepared to do a lot of graduate-level research as an undergrad, and for them it was great, because they had access to all these top-drawer professors. And there were others who were basically coasting through the same classes they could get anywhere, but with bigger class sizes.
aimai
@Chet: I think that’s kind of a bizarre thing to say–speaking as someone whose father was both a physicist and a molecular biologist at Harvard. Sure–a BA in physics doesn’t matter much but they really aren’t hiring researchers from a purely BA pool anywhere, anytime. Doesn’t matter if your school has a particle accelerator or not. A BA is not the qualifying degree for physics.
Liberal Arts degrees, from any school (and I include basically everything in Liberal Arts except Mechanical Engineering) don’t “add value” to corporations because corporations don’t get value from educated workers. They get value from selling a product that has already been produced (by buying companies that created those products and their workers in takeovers). Or they get value by creating fictitious forms of monetary transfer and leveraging. In that sense the BA degree tells you nothing about how well your new workers is going to act as an amoral shit or not.
Roger Moore
@Chet:
I’m gonna call bullshit on that one. Top private schools have excellent programs in the sciences. Nobody is going to turn up their nose at somebody with a bachelor’s degree in the sciences from Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, and they’ll actively recruit people from places like MIT, Caltech, or Carnegie Mellon.
Southern Beale
What school did George W. Bush attend? Wasn’t it … Yale?
Let us count the ways that dude was a lemon of a president.
Southern Beale
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sorry, just saw your comment. Great minds, etc. etc.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
I would be happy if they burned down the Ivy league and started over. It’s an engine to regenerate the elites.
Roger Moore
@Shakezula:
I think of Mr. Levenson as more of a clay tablet and stylus kind of guy.
liberal
This isn’t really fair. In the aftermath of the housing bubble, the entire field of neoclassical economics is a proven laughingstock. So it’s not like you can claim that one department is the locus of the problem.
sparrow
@Jerzy Russian: first of all, wut? another astrophysicist? We’re pretty rare to both be BJ readers.
To Tom:
NOT true. I grew up poor-to-middle class in a middle-of-nowhere red state. I hadn’t traveled out of the region, had never been on a plane, and the biggest city I’d visited was Kansas City. I mention that because to me, back then, even going to ‘visit Harvard’ was not an option. When I applied to college I got into a top-15 school (e..g, Ivy-quality, more or less), and a slew of honors programs at local state colleges. I turned down free rides to go to the top school. My dad made ~ $80k per year, minus expenses (he was a travelling salesman, so these were not small)… basically net $50k. My EFC (expected family contribution) to my college bill? $12k per year. LAUGH. My dad has my mom and three other kids, you think he’s going to fork over $12k just for one?
I chose, at 17, to take on a mountain of debt because I thought that Ivy education mattered. Did it? I think so, but there certainly was a “financial barrier”, and it required my parents to co-sign all the loans I’m still paying off. I had to work on them for MONTHS to do it after I used up my lifetime savings to pay for my first year of college.
Everything worked out for me, but it also worked out well for my debt-free brother who took a free ride (+ free books, free computer, etc) at a local school.
I think it might be fair to say that there’s no insurmountable financial barrier, if parents want their kid to go to an Ivy. But if they’re not supportive, it would be very difficult unless your parents are below the poverty line or you’re an orphan.
cvstoner
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah. I saw that and immediately wondered what universe this person is inhabiting.
Villago Delenda Est
@Shakezula:
Bingo. Hope you can make lemonade out of the foul fruit of the millionaires.
ruemara
Wow. Just wow. I’m worthless because I haven’t gone to Yale. Hey, well I’m already worthless because IANL, because I am not locally bred, I work for my organization, I’m black, I’m female, I am not a grad student, I’ve had to work my way through college, I can’t afford to move or get that retraining-why the fuck not tell me that I’m also out of the running for fucking moderate success at being stable because I could not join into the 15 year funnel of arriving at Yale. And if I come out simply being a well connected, bigoted jackass with a sheepskin, as opposed to -you know, SMART-that still makes me a better person than the poors and unwashed plebeian scum.
Jerzy Russian
@Cermet:
No institution can promise students with “innovation skills”, whatever those are. That said, I have seen plenty of smart people at top schools like MIT, Harvard, Yale, etc.
Southern Beale
So, the plutocracy has institutionalized its privilege. Wake me up when there’s some actual real news.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both dropped out of Harvard and Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed. So, y’know, not that it matters but if you want to transform the world, Yale ain’t all that.
Cassidy
I have no degree and have a pretty secure job. I have two certifications and a job interview next week.
The point? Nothing. I just wanted to comment where all you people are throwinig your “harumph’s” around. ;)
cvstoner
Most colleges and universities provide a good education, albeit some, obviously, better than others. But what you are paying for at the so-called Ivy League schools is for access; specifically, access to the group of alumni from these colleges that overwhelming inhabit the board rooms and government chambers in this country.
It’s not that you can’t get an equivalent (or better) education at a state school. What you don’t get is instant membership into the Ivy League good ol’ boy’s club, with all its unwritten privileges.
scav
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Indeed, and sometimes the number of idiots wandering around college because it’s the unthinking next step of their life almost seems to negatively co-vary with the rank of the school. The part-timer squeezing classes in between her job(s) is intellectually hungrier than many middle-class-plus nth generation planktonoid attending the requisite familial alma-mater. There’s lot’s the mere possession of a degree doesn’t catch — add that to the things that automated HR skills-screening won’t catch and the shit-work/behaviors companies put up with so long as the temp is a temp (and the increasing use of temps) and the continued viability of companies continues to amaze.
Jerzy Russian
@sparrow:
I suspect there are even more, as I seem to recall someone else posting here during a coffee break at a Kepler Science Conference.
In the long run, for a professional scientist it may not matter so much which undergraduate institution you go to, provided it is not Liberty University or Oral Roberts. The PhD institution matters more in these cases.
Yatsuno
@Roger Moore: Ahh cunieform, we hardly knew ye.
I got into Stanford but balked at the price. I’m glad I went where I went though, state schools are really quite good values these days. Of course now the tuition at Wazzu is about on par with Stanford, which is lovely. Or not.
Cervantes
Confession: I have taught at Middlesex Community College, Boston University, Tufts, and now Brown. Whether you like it or not, it does matter. The typical capability of students rises steadily through that list. Yeah, there’s also a class bias and Daddy often has a lot invested in Brown students but a) that sort of background actually matters to employers in many fields and b) it’s really not the explanation for the majority of the student body. They really are smart, driven, and curious in greater measure.
I’m sure many readers will find this comment intellectually obnoxious or classist or something but, whatever you want to make of it and however you want to explain it, it is a fact. Whether you think selective private universities are a good idea or not, they are in fact selective and they do in fact require a lot of their students. It’s not entirely about merit — we have our share of legacies and blockhead jocks — but they’re truly a minority.
maurinsky
I didn’t go to Yale, but I did socialize with a bunch of Yalies when I was a 19 year old teenage mom, because one of my best friends went there. I also performed in a production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at the Yale Dramat, because the producer said she didn’t care if I wasn’t a Yale student.
I thought that what separated the Yale students I knew from the other people I knew was that they were mostly quite wealthy, and had opportunities that other people I know didn’t have, and were basically privileged, which made them feel entitled. My group of non-Yale friends was smart about very different things, things that aren’t valued as highly in the corporate world.
I am 43 and working on my Bachelor’s degree from a mostly online school, because it has seemed clear to me for many years that the degree is just a series of hoops you have to jump through. Sometimes those hoops are useful, sometimes they aren’t. I figured if anything happened to my current job, I’d be SOL without one, so I’m taking advantage of my low paying public sector job (which I love!) and getting my degree with mostly Pell grants. I should graduate either next fall or the spring of 2015 with a BA in Public Administration, and less than $5K in loans, which is the most I would consider.
And my youngest child, who is in high school, is planning on going to a state school unless my low paying but beloved public sector job will keep her in Pell grants, too!
Cervantes – I think the problem is when you assume all students at an institution like Middlesex are the same, just as it is not correct to assume that all students at Brown are the same. Are there more likely to be more intellectually curious people at the latter? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that the intellectually curious student at the community college should be seen as having less value.
Roger Moore
@Jerzy Russian:
I’d say the PhD adviser matters more than the institution. In my field, I have a pretty good idea of who’s doing what, so I’m going to pay more attention to who they worked for than where they did it.
Citizen_X
@cvstoner:
I believe it’s called The Entitled Asshole one.
catclub
@sparrow: What years? My understanding is that the changes are pretty recent. Like Last two or three years.
$12k/yr out of $45K is often ( but not this time) less than the local university is demanding, since its financial aid pot is smaller than Harvard or Yale’s.
srv
Tom, has someone ever written “If Tom Friedman Got Everything He Wanted For 20 Years, Why Do We Still Have Problems?”
elmo
@Matt McIrvin:
Hi. ::waving:: I see we’ve already met.
Seriously, I’m sitting at my desk in Virginia while half my Harvard classmates are at our 25-year reunion – kind of a big one! – because I couldn’t see my way clear to going all the way up there now, when I got so little out of the place 25 years ago. That was entirely my own fault, not Harvard’s fault, but still. What a waste.
Shakezula
@cvstoner:
You don’t get that even if you do attend. Some of my college mates still jokingly bewail the fact we neglected to kiss the appropriate asses when we had the chance. (Ass kissing and assorted toad eating being the only ways we could have become acceptable.) In my experience what it gets you is people who are impressed and assume you’re a genius (which I dislike because I don’t think I am and know good college doesn’t = genius) or who think you’re an entitled asshole (which sucks for other reasons and also triggers the urge to lay out my Prole Cred – work study, scholarships, loans).
aimai
@Cervantes:
I agree with this–having attended Yale as a Ph.D. and having taught there (briefly). Class background does matter in some ways for some kids. That isn’t to say that all kids who go to an expensive private school are going to be world beaters or even all that bright or even all that teachable. I think we are talking about this at too high a level. What correlates most to a kid’s native intelligence and their promise as active learners, researchers, productive members of society is probably not their parents wealth but their parent’s educational attainments and interest in the things people get educated in.
I taught one of the stupidest people I’ve ever met, bar none, at Yale. Her father owned a kinko’s franchise and had tons of money but from teaching her it was clear that he didn’t value–the family didn’t value–anything that you might learn at a place like Yale. She didn’t know, really, what a book was for or what a class discussion was about. These things didn’t mean any more to her than they would to a dog, less really because a dog, if it were my dog, would like the things I like.
But this isn’t one of those places where there’s some kind of just world thing going on and because it is true that some people go to ivy league schools and just party all the time and try to get a “gentleman’s C” that people who go to state schools are really driven, or intellectually curious, or capable of doing high level work. I mean–of course some are and of course there are lots of great teachers and researchers at state schools. That’s not the issue–the issue is that large numbers of people have been educated so poorly by their families and their schools that they are starting at a lower level–a lower level of academic ability (reading, interpreting, spelling, writing, math) and sometimes a lower level of curiosity and capability. This is one reason that when you struggle to bring kids from a background in which they may be the first to go to school in their family that it is a struggle. Its not that these kids aren’t bright. Its not that they don’t have an enormous capacity to learn–but they may simply not really grasp how to learn or what they are doing in the classroom or in a research paper until its too late.
This is not an elitist view–insofar as “elitism” really means assuming that people get what they deserve. People manifestly don’t get what they deserve in this world, and college educations are just one place that this unfairness takes place.
Mnemosyne
@sparrow:
With state budget cuts, I doubt your brother would be able to get this deal anymore. I know the tuitions at the University of California and Cal State schools have been soaring so much that there have been student protests, and the financial aid that might have made the increase possible has been cut to the bone, too.
RSA
This Yale student seems to be assuming that a candidate’s college is the most important thing about his or her job application. And if the college were the only thing on anyone’s application, then going with a Yale student every time would be the rational thing to do (if any were in the application pool). But of course job applications contain a lot more than one’s college, which makes it a silly thing to focus on to the exclusion of grades, interests, college major, external activities, acquired knowledge and skills, and so forth.
For what it’s worth, my view as a professor at a middle-tier public university is that we’re talking about distributions of students with respect to quality. The mean or median graduating student at an Ivy League school may be better than our mean or median graduate, but it’s actually hard to tell in quantitative terms, and I suspect that if there’s a difference, it’s small. And there’s no predicting the extremes. The best undergrad I ever worked with won top honors from my field’s academic research organization, beating out students from the best universities in the country. I think we may get some top students in our program because they don’t know how smart they are, they don’t think they can afford a better school, they want to stay near home, and so forth–a whole slew of possible reasons that result in quality far outside the Ivies.
sparrow
@catclub: That may be the case, I know my university was trying to improve their aid packages. This was 2001 – 2005 time range.
At the time I felt like I fell into a “lower-middle-class” gap, where poorer students were actually having an easier time, because there wasn’t this expectation that their families would pay, while mine were expected to & couldn’t/weren’t interested (understandably). Presumably if you were rich it was easier, but on the other hand I am glad I didn’t spend four years with my very conservative parents breathing down my neck about paying for college — once they signed the loans they left me alone.
Of course the solution is that college should be 100% free, like it is in Europe. And with better alternatives to college for people who would be better off in trade school or doing more direct career training.
negative 1
Don’t like Friedman but sorry I have to side with him on this one…
“A 15 year funnel” — you mean like public school when you are literally a child? This is evidence? My lord employers are judging my performance in 8th grade now for my prospective chances of being a productive employee? I went into accounting, and we all have to take the CPA no matter where we graduate from. Funny how my crap-tier state school prepared me just fine for the test and the career and boasts better pass/fail rates and overall scores than the two private schools in the state that also offer accountancy degrees (for twice the price). But then again I’m sure that their 12th grade GPAs were far higher than mine.
@Cervantes: yep it’s classist. The question the MOU is asking has to do with future employment, not how much better your students are. The question then ultimately asks how much being a student has to do with being an employee, and that’s a question you can’t answer by saying good students become good college students. Geez I only went to state school for that kind of reading comprehension, too.
…and a memo to Tom Levenson; we get it, you’re so much smarter than us plebes. Here’s something my poor state school brain can’t get, though – why waste your talents posting about private higher ed on what is ostensibly a political website? I get that we’re not single topic all of the time but what beat are you walking, if you pardon the metaphor?
Cassidy
@negative 1:
Is this your first day here? Have you read any of his posts?
sparrow
@maurinsky: I second your opinion on Yalie entitlement… I worked with a Yale undergrad for a summer, teaching underprivileged kids at an inner city school that wanted to go to college (me math, her lit./reading). I was local and paid, she came in on some “yale alumni scholarship”… the kids did NOT like her and halfway through she had a nervous breakdown/tantrum where she yelled at me, saying I was “ruining her summer experience”, as if that was why she had come halfway across the country — to have an “experience” to put on her CV. She was sickeningly entitled. Ugh.
Cervantes
@maurinsky: Absolutely. I had students at Middlesex who could have gone to Brown — I told them so. It’s a difference in the percentage.
Cervantes
@negative 1: It’s a matter of statistical probability, that’s all I’m saying — plenty of state college students or college dropouts would nod doubt do better than some Brown graduates in particular positions. But employers are trying to improve their chances.
Eric U.
@Roger Moore:
one thing I learned from “The Mormon Murders” is that at one time not that long ago, people wrote on lead plates.
slag
HAHA! Yale students say the darndest things!
And I love how privileged kids toss around the word “smart” as if they have the slightest clues as to what it means. On the other hand, they could be using it in the British sense.
Ramalama
I ‘ve a friend who is an American student who earned her BS at MIT. She then went on to grad school at University of Cambridge in the UK. Apparently students at Cambridge (maybe this is true for other universities in the UK) who graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree get their degree upgraded automatically to a Masters after they’ve been in their chosen field for a coupla years.
maurinsky
I should add that I’m pretty happy with my online school, even though I don’t think that online schooling should be the way all college education goes – mine has been around since the 70s and has a very clearly defined goal to help students (almost all students returning or going to college after working for several/many years) get a degree. They won’t even let me take a class that I don’t need to get my degree! Which is good, because I’m easily distracted and interested in too many things.
aimai
@negative 1:
I think you are letting the chip on your shoulder about your “crap tier school” overbalance your reading skills. It ought to be clear to you that certain things are neither that hard to teach, nor that hard to learn, if one applies oneself to it. I’d put Latin, accounting, languages in general, and lots of pretty basic things in that category. So what? I’m pretty sure there were lots of kids who flunked out of your “crap tier” school because they couldn’t hack the course the way you could.
What this has to do with Friedman’s argument I don’t know. He ought to know, better than anyone, that to the extent there is a “funnel” that pushes some kids straight through from birth to Yale it does not, in fact, include flunking out kids who don’t perform. Not only is there no serious attrition rate in private schools (or public ones) but the grades don’t matter until the very end, in highschool. People routinely go through all kinds of grade school experiences and then jettison them at highschool and buckle down and work hard, or fuck up and coast.
The number of kids who can do the work at a top school has increased, the number of schools from which they can choose has increased, the end result is a sorting out according to luck, chance, disaster, family background, geography, financial aid that simply doesn’t mean that the best go to Yale, or that the smartest go to a “crap tier” school but manage to surprise us all.
There’s nothing like going to an Ivy or two to make you realize that all of this stuff, both the Ivy league egotism and the bullshit hysteria from people who didn’t go about how great their experience was elsewhere, are equally absurd.
Walker
@Matt McIrvin:
A student whose family has a household income below 75k will get a full ride at an Ivy these days. That is how extensive the financial aid is right now.
The only students I meet that have financial problems are those with divorced parents and one of them refuses to contribute.
Luthe
In all this blather about Yale and the elite schools, we seem to have forgotten the subtext of the MOU’s piece. To wit: on-the-job training is but a distant memory and if you want a job, kids, you’d better be prepared to work for free.
Unpaid internships are the biggest racket going in the workplace these days. Employers are technically not supposed to use unpaid interns to replace paid employees and interns are supposed to learn skills, but most of the time they ignore the rules and the kids working for them have no idea they’re being exploited. Not to mention the fact that unless you are basically willing to *pay* to work somewhere, you can’t take an unpaid internship. Classism at work!
But of course, experience is all that counts. You know why I have a Master’s degree (that hasn’t gotten me a job yet)? Because all the “entry-level” positions in my field required 1-2 years of experience or a Master’s degree. And since you can’t get your 1-2 year of experience without someone willing to hire you in the first place, the only real choice is to go into a mountain of debt in hopes of landing a job.
Lee
Tom you should like this.
Rijksmuseum here has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost
Walker
@Luthe:
To be above board, unpaid internships require that some educational institution award credit. Hence, this is being enabled (to some degree) by universities.
My department/university takes a very hard line on unpaid internships. It has to satisfy a very narrow description (preventing it from being all purpose labor) to count.
? Martin
@Walker: Yep. The IRS scared the shit out of the big endowment schools a few years back with their observation that some of these institutions were making more off of their endowments than than annual operating costs, yet were still coming to Treasury for financial aid support. “This is starting to not look like a non-profit…” The Ivies got the message and they’ve gotten much more affordable as a result.
Nerdlinger
@Mnemosyne: This. I went to community college before transferring to UCSD just to save some money.
Luthe
@Walker:
Ahahahaha. This presumes a) companies care about being aboveboard, b) kids are smart enough to know about this requirement, and c) there aren’t thousands upon thousands of unpaid interns who have already have BAs. Case in point, my sister, who worked for a PR firm in L.A. for a year and didn’t get a cent. She wasn’t in school at the time.
Roger Moore
@Luthe:
I just heard about a suit over unpaid internships being denied class action status, which means that individuals or small groups are going to have to sue over small enough sums that it’s going to be hard to find lawyers willing to do the work. Gutting the ability to launch class action suits is having the desired effect of shielding corporate wrongdoing.
slag
@? Martin: I’ll tell that to all the kids I know whose parents couldn’t even afford the plane ticket out there.
Of the many challenges inherent in getting to and through college, tuition costs may be the most straightforward to surmount. But that doesn’t erase all the others directly and indirectly attributable to wealth inequality.
ericblair
@negative 1:
No, Friedman’s full of shit and has obviously never been anywhere near a real-world hiring process. The idea that corporations are carefully sorting through resumes, rating each one for their suitability to the position based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, is crap.
Your basic hiring problems are: trying to get some sort of reasonable resume set out of the huge pile of applications inside a simpleminded database guarded by an HR department that has very little understanding of what this candidate is supposed to be able to do; and then hire somebody that doesn’t turn out to be a complete dud who can fake their way through an interview. So the easiest way to do this is to filter out everyone not from a top school, since it’s easy on the HR department and you’re probably not going to get yelled at for hiring someone from a top school even if they end up not being able to tie their shoes properly. And I have no idea what kind of expertise would cause many hiring managers to put their ass on the line and hire somebody who’s homeschooled.
Many companies have favorite schools with big alumni networks and special relationships, so what’s considered a top school is going to vary from company to company as well as from industry to industry. But hiring is an industrial sausage-making process that these elite pundits have never had to confront. It’s not fair and it’s not really very effective but that’s reality.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@liberal: Sadly, as an economist I have to say that comment isn’t too far from the mark. Neoclassical economics is basically economics on a physics model, except instead of incorporating actual forces that exist, but are inconvenient for the current theory, by modifying the theory, they just keep chugging along. It’s basically as if they assumed away the economic equivalent of gravity, so they have an elegant theory that doesn’t work out in the real world, where gravity exists. I will say that not all economics is neoclassical economics. There is some good work being done, but the fact that neoclassical theory, which rests on assumptions that posit nonexistent perfect markets, dominates the discipline is a real problem.
Tom Levenson
@liberal: Not claiming that Harvard is the locus of the problem. I am referring to the fact that two prominent Harvard-led research efforts had major impact on policy debates but were based on research flawed not just by the shared intellectual problems of the discipline but by specific errors/failures of practice. It’s those specifics that make them ornaments of their institution….
Paula
@aimai:
Ferreals, tho.
My experience at a small, relatively unknown women’s college will not provide me the same connections that Ivy Leagues (or the other equivalents) will provide their students. But I had a great experience that has served me well so far (I’m considering going back to school full time for a master’s after 9 years of working full time). And admittedly, I was an underachiever who didn’t like academic competition, so one could say I got my education in an environment that fit me better.
EDIT: (Heh, not that I had some choice to go into the Ivies with my record, mind you.)
I’m definitely jealous of the fancy schools’ libraries, though. Yale’s Special Collections library building is awe-SOME.
Shakezula
Really? Well fuck.
Paula
@Shakezula:
Been this way for several years.
Kudos to Harvard.
That said, the major barrier is still building the kind of record that stands out amongst all the excellent candidates. Research says that students who are better off financially end up ticking those boxes more than students who are not.
Barry
@Jerzy Russian: “How does one prove one can add value? At least when one goes to Yale, there is some sort of process involved where the student takes exams, etc. There is no such assurance with a home school. I would be suspicious of someone with an on-line degree until I had a chance to personally interview that person and test for the skills I was interested in.”
What’s wrong about Friedman’s article (and unfortunately correct about the Yalie’s comment) is that companies generally can pick and choose. They can allow elite schools to do their filtering, and not give a f*ck how it’s done, or who is excluded from the end group. They don’t need to look at third-tier schools for good people, because there’s a labor glut.
Cassidy
@ericblair: Wow. You have a romantic view of the hiring process. I thought they had moved past that to scanning the reume into a program and eliminating those missing key words.
Barry
@liberal: “This isn’t really fair. In the aftermath of the housing bubble, the entire field of neoclassical economics is a proven laughingstock. So it’s not like you can claim that one department is the locus of the problem.”
In the case of R&R, we have a clear case that academic fraud was committed, and the entire Harvard apparatus worked to pretend otherwise.
In the case of Richwine, we have ‘The Bell Curve II’ as a dissertation, granted by Harvard.
In the case of Larry H. Summers, we have massive fraud and criminality, and he’s still good to go at Harvard.
In the case of Gregory Mankiw, we have a wh*re who changed his views once the Bush II administration called.
And this is not counting the Harvard Business School or Law School. If we were to go after Wall St frauds, that’d probably be stop #2 after Wall St itself.
I would agree with the idea that neoclassical economics should be burned to the ground, but Harvard seems to be close to ground zero in that movement. It’s certainly well infested.
Barry
@Cervantes: “It’s a matter of statistical probability, that’s all I’m saying — plenty of state college students or college dropouts would nod doubt do better than some Brown graduates in particular positions. But employers are trying to improve their chances.”
And to do so in the cheapest way possible.
slag
@ericblair:
In Friedman’s defense, being a know-nothing himself, his information is probably coming from the incessant whine of CEOs blaming public school systems for them not being able to find “Americans who can think”. Of course, these CEOs are quick to eschew any personal responsibility for this problem and instead blame “The Government!” for their own inadequacies in this area (among many others).
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Proof that Friedman’s columns are so bad both sides can be wrong. This is just another one of his “the old paradigms don’t apply” columns, sprinkled with a bit of techonological change (the new job skills testing tool) with an “if you don’t succeed it’s your own damn fault for not trying hard enough” sauce on top.
Barry
@Walker: “To be above board, unpaid internships require that some educational institution award credit. Hence, this is being enabled (to some degree) by universities.”
Which, in many cases, means that people *pay* to work for free.
Tom Levenson
@Paula:
That nails it. It’s the subject of another post, but one big change from when I went to school is that the extreme advantage that the big schools possessed by virtue of their libraries has shrunk. So much more knowledge, and a great many of the obscure, only-in-the-stacks-of-Widener books are now available to folks with access to a broadband connection. But Widener (Harvard’s main library) is still a fabulous place in which to work, for a host of reasons. One big one: a bug of at least my research process is to find a reference, go to its place in the stacks and then spend an hour checking out everything around it. I think you can do that, sort of, via the web, but, at least for my middle-aged brain, it ain’t obvious how.
Another feature of a great library system is what it possesses by way of specialized collections, though of course that only matters when you’re delving into the appropriate speciality. It matters to me but not to many that Harvard’s Business School library has a significant trove of economic history documents and early printed matter. And finally, what makes a great library is great librarians, and the big ones have more such people (though Harvard, like everywhere else, has been cutting its personnel as it gets dazzled by online search. It doesn’t quite work that way, but never mind).
You’ll notice I’ve said Harvard and not my home institution of MIT; one of our local perks is that faculty and students at either place get access to the libraries of both, and it happens that for the things I write about Harvard has the richer collection.
The other thing to note, though, is something I think the thread has missed a bit. The flagship public institutions have libraries on the same scale as the best private universities, possibly excepting the handful of outliers like Harvard. UC Berkeley, at least when I was a kid and a faculty brat there, was pridefully known as the largest library west of the MIssisippi and was (available by permission to public high school kids!) a genuinely great resource (and, in its rare books library, the Bancroft, home to the Mark Twain papers and much else).
More generally, the focus on Ivy or bust, both by the offensive Yalie above (and Friedman in many of his incarnations) and at least implied at poinst in the thread, misses the reality of academic possibility noted by others in the thread. For a first cut: Inside the world of so called Research One universities, the top tier is not just the Ivies and a couple of others. The Wikipedia list of universities in the “very high research activity” has roughly a hundred institutions on it, and public outnumbers private by a little better than 2-1. The implication is that there are lots of places that don’t have the barriers to entry of an Ivy (or Duke, or Stanford, or MIT, for that matter) in which it is possible to get all the education one can take. There are also the realities that some have noted that what counts as a top university varies along more axes than one thinks. Local Boston example: if you want to do corporate law in a white shoe firm in Boston, NY or DC — then yup, Harvard law is a huge, perhaps irreplaceable advantage. But if you want to do Boston/Massachusetts focused practices in policy, regulation, real estate and much more, then there’s a long standing power pipeline running from Boston College and Suffolk Law Schools. Similarly — while Stanford carries with it all the advantages you can imagine, Berkeley has deep roots and connections throughout the state and so on.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t all kinds of things that flow from the hierarchies of privilege for which the term “Ivy” is shorthand. But it’s also to say that access to power and the agency achieved through educational accomplishment is not restricted to either the 10 Ivy League schools or the somewhat larger list of elite private institutions that people sort of lump together with the Harvard-Princeton-Yales of the world.
Barry
@ericblair: “But hiring is an industrial sausage-making process that these elite pundits have never had to confront. It’s not fair and it’s not really very effective but that’s reality.”
I doubt that many of these people got their pundit jobs save through personal networks. Krugman might be the only exception (maybe Ezra Klein).
Nerdlinger
@Barry: You forgot Dershowitz.
Nerdlinger
@Barry: Edit. DP, and didn’t realize you only meant the loons in their econ dep.
aimai
One thing people are ignoring, that I think Tom is getting at here in this comment, is that there are many different circles for employment and there is (as someone said upthread) a labor glut and a productivity crush down. By which I mean
1) that “straight out of college BA” degrees aren’t worth much because corporations simply don’t want, or need, to employ new people if they can create profit by either crushing their older workers, outsourcing, or creating new forms of income that are not dependent on the actual labor of real people.
2) A BA degree doesn’t mean any less than it ever did, and it may reflect more work and more intense competition than ever before, but that doesn’t really matter. Employers of BA holders are not actually in need of the skills these kids offer. The labor market is full up–that’s what all that unemployment means. Those jobs literally dissapeared.
3) All this talk about “value added” educations and whether the Ivy education is worth it–which is a different proposition from whether the Ivy degree is worth it when you divide it by cost to the student–misses the point. All hiring is local and runs along lines of contact. Any company that is hiring is going to try to find a way to sift through hundreds of resumes, many of which are not from newly minted BAs, and try to find a way to “score” the best fit, the highest status, and the cheapest new hire who they don’t think will rock the boat, sue them, or need too much in the way of training/health care/vacation time.
4) Everything that Friedman thinks is “so neat” about the daughter’s friend’s company is, basically, just a way of outsourcing hiring. It has nothign to do with a Yale education, or an Ivy Education, or any kind of education. It could as easily be done by trained seals pressing computer keys, and it could as easily be done by scoring applicants on whether they know what herring looks like. At a certain rank probably all candidates are more or less interchangeable. The top student at every college is going to be as good as the top student at every other (with some notable exceptions like Liberty University where they specifically try to screen out intelligence and prevent education).
Remember: one thing that has happened in the last forty years is that as the number of highly educated students has soared so have the number of highly educated and productive faculty. You are very likely to encounter people teaching at nowhere colleges and lawschools who previously might have aimed only for the Ivies themselves. We are actually in a very highly educated society, even if we’ve let the Republicans kill public education and public higher education through years of starvation.
Chet
@ruemara: I don’t know you, or what you do or can do, but I have to say – what I read in your post is an awful lot about all the privileges you don’t have, and nothing at all about your skills and capabilities. I don’t blame you for that – everybody I know in my age cohort completely internalized the “if you just go to a good school and get a good degree and jump through the right hoops, you’ll be rewarded a good job and get to be secure” narrative and never even once stopped to ask themselves “ok, how am I going to generate a work product that is valuable enough for someone to pay for”? Which is, you know, actually how you achieve security.
slag
@Chet:
Wrong question. The question is, “How am I going to generate a work product that is valuable? And how am I going to get people to pay for it?”. Lots of people create (socially/culturally/ecologically/etc) valuable work. Lots of people don’t get adequately compensated for it. That lack of adequate compensation doesn’t make their work any less valuable.
Ben Cisco
There, that’s better.
polyorchnid octopunch
I was educated at a Canadian version of the ivy league; Queen’s University in Kingston. Having met folks from various ivy league style universities, the main thing I can see that these unis are adept at teaching is arrogance. Actually, it seems to me that arrogance is far and away the dominant product of our post-secondary educational system. Judging by the writing skills of the people that are passing through our educational system this last decade or two, they sure as shit aren’t teaching them language or critical thinking or anything actually useful to counter the corporate propaganda that TV watchers bathe in daily.
MBAs seem to be the group of people that get arrogance inculcated in them the most… probably as a consequence of the MBA conceit that an MBA means you can run a business without actually understanding what that particular business does.
Rafer Janders
Oh for fuck’s sake…the real value of Yale or of Harvard (my alma mater) for the individual student is not the education per se, but the alumni network. My friends and classmates are now US Senators and Congressmen and Cabinet secretaries and highly placed administration officials, they run Google and Facebook, they’re partners and MDs at major investment banks and hedge funds and VC firms, they head Hollywood studios or are big stars in Hollywood films, etc. etc.
The value of that network to me in terms of job and social opportunities is incalculable, and there’s simply no way that I could have acquired those friendships via home schooling or a MOOC.
Chet
@slag:
Yeah, I’d say that’s exactly right. Maybe that’s the myth that I bought into – “make something valuable, and someone else will get people to pay you for it.” You’re exactly right that in the new economy, not only is no one going to tell you what you can make that is valuable, nobody is going to do the work of getting you paid for it, either. That’s all on you.
But still, there’s a lot of people who visualized their life as a process of meeting what was expected of them, then being rewarded with a job that offered security – all without even once visualizing what they were actually going to do.
Barry
@Nerdlinger: “Edit. DP, and didn’t realize you only meant the loons in their econ dep.”
Nah, I’d count ‘Kill them all, because there are no civilians’ Derschowitz as a mark against Harvard.
Barry
“[Employers] increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?”
Take your homeschool diploma/online degree/MOOC cert to an employer, and see what they do with it.
Interrobang
@polyorchnid octopunch: Funny, I went to another Canadian Ivy (UWO) and Canada’s answer to MIT (UWaterloo), and that’s totally not my experience. The Western kids tend to be arrogant as hell, yeah, but also generally on the ball, with the notable exception of the jocks and the frat rats. I don’t think I met a single arrogant student, either among the undergrads or my fellow grad students, at W’loo; the place is too hard-driving and unsympathetic for that. I laugh harder at Real Genius now, though.
I’m lucky that I got a job with a company that really values higher education (we just got bought by a Really Big IT Concern). I have lost track of how many Master’s degrees and PhDs my coworkers have, and even my local office here in Whitebreadville, southern Ontario, is a surprisingly multi-ethnic and multilingual group. Any given day just here, I’m liable to hear conversation in English, Polish, Chinese, some or other Indian subcontinent language, and maybe Hebrew.
But I freely admit my experience is not typical, even down to the 10 years or so I spent scraping by prior to actually getting some “real jobs.” The alumni connection is nice, and has almost gotten me jobs a couple times.
And the MOU is still full of shit.
ChrisB
“Friedman’s daughter’s former roommate?”
What is this, Spaceballs?
(And late to the thread, sorry if someone posted Something like this earlier.)
negative 1
@aimai: Who said my experience was great? The linked to article from “My Home is MIT” Levenson was called, quoting here, “Yale Student to Tom Friedman: We Really Are Better Than Other People”.
Friedman’s point seemed to be, to the point that I could suss one out, kind of meritocratic. Specifically, learning to hustle the interview process was proving to be a valuable skill, at least a skill that was (if one could master it, which itself is what is debatable and what seems to be the basis of debate here in the comments) a counterbalance to being born without the natural gifts that get one into the hallowed halls of the select higher learning institutions. Obviously this touched enough of a nerve with Tom Levenson that he felt it his duty to respond just so the rest of us who screwed around in high school know that we will never be as good. Again, by citing an article entitled “We Really Are Better Than Other People”. In case that didn’t get across well enough when he told you he went to Harvard, he responded above that he teaches at MIT. Your point about accounting being easy is a non-sequitur. Sure it’s a cakewalk trade degree, I went to a State school. But if it’s easy shouldn’t the better schools be doing better on the only trade exam than my plebian State U?
negative 1
@Tom Levenson: By the way smart guy you’ve got a typo in the first sentence of your post.
“…but reading this made my happy from within a pool of wince”
should probably read “made me happy from within a pool of wince”
“This isn’t to say that there aren’t all kinds of things that flow from the hierarchies of privilege for which the term “Ivy” is shorthand.” Maybe so, but apparently grammar check isn’t one of them.
Omnes Omnibus
@negative 1: I really do think you missed TL’s point.
Aimai
@negative 1: somebody’s really got his or her frownie face on.
CVS
@Shakezula: Interesting! Knowing that, would you still pay the premium to attend?
Ferny
Having spent time at both Yale and a large public research university, while coming from a background with substantial poverty, there was a big difference. Resources and average faculty expertise was just at a different level at Yale. Yeah, the network helps out, but don’t kid yourself either that the material, speed and the competition isn’t a level above what you’d get at your University of Texas equivalents.
This doesn’t mean I’m a better fit for your company or am more skilled. But to also pretend that these schools are nothing but four years of networking just seems like compensation and pettyness.