Let me be real clear: this message board does NOT need conservatives

Sorry, i misread your post.

We have public universities, too. Most states have a network of institutions of higher learning. We also have a lot of publicly funded agricultural schools. (“Land grant” schools, mostly.) They have different goals, and they tend to be enormous. They also typically admit students based on a formula.

A large fraction of college-educated Americans earned their degree from a state school. There may be a handful of jobs (investment banker?) that are hard to get without having gone to an elite private college, but only a tiny fraction of graduates of private colleges go into those fields. Most go into fields where they will work with colleagues who went to states schools.

And “politician” is not a job that’s enhanced by having a fancy school on your resume. It probably hurts, makes you look “out of touch”.

And yet jackasses like Josh Hawley (Yale) still manage to pull it off. Ted Cruz too (Princeton and Harvard).

Again. Any criticism conservatives offer against Ivy League schools is likely to be in bad faith. That criticism seems to fade away to nothing when their right wing darlings attend such places.

Conservatives love to see liberals getting spun up to defend the ivies. Just like they love getting liberals spun up over any other of a range of “issues” that are of little substance and brought up more as propaganda than anything. There’s no point in trying to convince DemonTree et al that Harvard is alright because (1) she doesn’t really care, and (2) maybe it’s not? Maybe these institutions that continue to defer to those of wealth and privilege (see Hawley and Cruz) do have serious problems that need addressing, and are not worthy of our efforts to preserve their good names?

That’s good, but it seems kind of problematic that it’s the private ones that are most prestigious.

What about journalism? I’ve been hearing that with the demise of local papers, most journalists these days are recruited from elite private colleges. They’ve absorbed their culture and rules even if they don’t come from an elite background (but most do), and this explains why their worldview is so different from that of average people.

You may be confusing cause and effect. Why do you think it is prestigious? Do you think that having graduates who are influential in many fields might help maintain that prestige?

I think that’s extremely unlikely. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. Do you have a cite?

Teach can have multiple meanings. Do you mean educate or train? The state schools have programs intended to train students to be journalists or HR reps. The private schools don’t. Their goal is more broadly to educate students, a goal which is enhanced by admitting a wide variety of students.

(1) Well, there’s certainly no reason she should care.
(2) like any other powerful institution, Harvard had good points and bad points, and both matter because it does have some degree of power. :woman_shrugging:

And another sector that appeared while I was searching: of the 9 Supreme Court justices, 4 went to Harvard and 4 to Yale. Graduates of other institutions just aren’t good enough?

I don’t think we have this distinction in the UK. Students go to university to study some particular subject. But then most of them (including me) get a job that doesn’t use that subject matter - so depending how you look at it, either universities are teaching transferable skills, or for the majority it’s just a hoop you have to jump through to get a good job. (And a particularly time-consuming and expensive one at that.)

So, journalists used to be more diverse, but with more newspapers dying, we’ve lost proportionately more who came from working class backgrounds? That doesn’t sound like “there’s an unfair bias”, more like it’s gotten very hard to be a journalist, and those who have a more privileged background are more likely to have survived. Part of a more privileged background may include having a spouse (or parents, for those getting internships) whose job pays the bills. It might be unfortunate for American journalism, but i doubt it’s due to anything nefarious.

Maybe not. Maybe Harvard and Yale are very good at picking applicants who have what it takes to get to the very top of their field. That is their goal, you know. That’s one of the questions Harvard asks interviewers, fwiw, although they frame it academically, not about law. (They might mention Nobel prizes, i don’t have the text in front of me.) I have never given a candidate that rating, and if i did, i would back it up with a lot of text about why i thought they had that potential. But the elite schools absolutely try to recruit “future leaders”, in academics, law, politics, music, and the arts.

No one is tapped for the supreme court because of their undergraduate degree. They get there by years of successful practice. Do elite schools help budding lawyers get ahead? Is it just who they admit? I dunno, probably some of both.

Honestly, the United States would be much better off if it outlawed unpaid internships. To an outsider, it’s an obviously vile custom with exactly two purposes: to steal wages, and to make sure that poor people have a harder time getting good jobs. I have no idea how they manage to bypass minimum wage laws, anyway.

Is this supposed to be some sort of revelation, that the Ivy League universities are effectively feeder schools for the American plutocracy? Really? Had no idea.

(Internships are another way the plutocracy maintains their hold - can’t have a unpaid job if you have no assets!)

+1

AIUI, journalists used to be able to start out working for local papers and work their way up. Now the only way into the profession is an unpaid (or underpaid?) internship which is only feasible for the rich, and these people are also heavily selected from the most competitive universities. So it’s turned into a club for the elite. Unfortunate for journalism and for the US.

That’s obviously good for the institution. I’m not convinced it’s good for the country.

8/9 certainly makes it seem like the elite schools help them get ahead. Maybe the people picking them don’t want to look at other candidates.

And that story is from 2010. Three more justices have been appointed since then, and only one is an exception to the pattern.

Yup.

The justification is that it’s educational, and hey, you can pay for education with money, why not with labor. But it does lead to a lot of unfortunate outcomes.

But on a macro level, people who start with more resources will always have more opportunities. That’s what resources are good for. But policies that dampen, rather than exacerbate, that fact tend to be better overall.

Yes. And that should include college admissions.

I’ve been drifting away from the board for the past couple of years (partly because of the new software). But I’ve been here for nearly 20 years, and I’ve possibly never disagreed with an OP as much as this one. Whose ignorance are you going to fight if everyone thinks exactly the same thoughts you do?

The board’s motto is fighting ignorance, not fighting the ignorant.

Possibly because she’s a disingenuous gaslighting troll who does nothing but crap all over this message board, and for some reason a bunch of you like to play in her shit. Go figure.

The OP did in the OP :slight_smile: clarify about what type of conservative he was talking about. The anti-intellectual ones that continue to push for ignorance even after being showed the evidence of how wrong they are, those guys are not needed here.

Of course, leave it to the OP in other posts to forget about his own conditional, but nevertheless, you are a bit wrong about what the OP did say in the first post.

I emphatically do disagree. In my experience, a student who can develop from a B-/B student into an A student with years of tutoring can also develop from a mediocre to high-level SAT scorer with years of tutoring.

The thing is, of course, that most students don’t have “years” to work on their SAT scores. Because most students don’t really pay much attention to SATs until their junior (third) year of high school, and they need to submit SAT scores on college applications no later than the early part of their senior (fourth and final) year of high school.

Any student who’s dedicated enough to start “long term tutoring” to improve their SAT scores years in advance probably doesn’t have to worry about mediocre scores anyway.

You don’t think tutoring aimed at improving grades would also improve SAT scores, then? And if dedicated tutoring is required, and this is such an unlikely scenario, how do you know it’s possible?

Do you think every B- student could get an A with tutoring?

Yes, I do. I thought that was pretty clearly implied in my statement “In my experience, a student who can develop from a B-/B student into an A student with years of tutoring can also develop from a mediocre to high-level SAT scorer with years of tutoring.”

I don’t think that “years of tutoring” needs to be specifically SAT-targeted in order to improve SAT scores. My point is that most students simply don’t accumulate “years” between their initial and final SAT scores in any case.

For most people, speed of improvement and size of improvement—whether on standardized test scores, overall grades, athletic performance, whatever—are inversely correlated. You can get a bit better quite quickly, or you can get a lot better over a substantial period of time. But unless you’re really exceptional, you’re not going to get lots better in little time.

What do we mean by “could”? Depending on the tutoring, and on the student’s motivation, I think it’s theoretically possible that at least almost every B- student “could” develop into an A student.

But a lot of B- students are B- students primarily because they don’t care as much about schoolwork or aren’t as interested in it as their higher-scoring classmates. Subjecting them to years of tutoring isn’t necessarily going to make them care about schoolwork more. So in that sense, no, I think that probably a large subset of students “could not” develop into A students, simply because that’s never going to be where their motivation is aimed.

@Ann_Hedonia is right. DT is a gaslighting troll. Take nothing they say with any seriousness whatsoever.