It turns out that students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges. Elite higher education gives them social capital they didn’t already have.

In other words, the real reason for forcing Hispanic and black students into Harvard et al is to let them mingle with other students who will drag them along in their success wake. Except, no. Most of the names Steve mentioned contributed to their firms’ success.

Do the Hispanics and blacks that have been dragged along have the same track record. What about the super high achieving non-Hispanic white kid that doesn’t get in? Isn’t he allowed to make good friends?

The problem with this analysis is that is concerns itself with only whether black and Hispanic students get an advantage created by whites. I am more interested in the advantages to society as a whole created by having the greatest possible aggregate contribution regardless of racial/ethnic points.

Don’t forget narrative shapers Douthat (2002), Salam (2001), Yglesias (2003).

How much of it is also wanting to have a trophy kid. I mean if you are some big shot private equity guy, it must be embarrassing for people find out your kid is going to community college.

Harvard connections are highly valuable if you want to open a Volvo dealership in Westchester County, NY.

Paul Allen attended the University of Washington where he dropped out after 2 years. He knew Bill Gates from his private high school. They hung out when Bill was at Harvard and Allen was working at Honeywell in Boston.

Well, Government Sachs only hires Harvard alums….

Puhleeze, no one marries their college friends any more. That was a greatest generation and older baby boomer thing because early family formation was possible then.

The younger baby boomers born after 1955 married later and now college grads don’t marry till around 30.

It’s 2019, not 1919 when most women college grads were married within a year if not a week after graduation.

I suspect they’re just measuring the fact that, for an ethnic minority, getting into an Ivy guarantees you’ll be an affirmative action for whatever you do next. A good and stable salary goes along with that.

It’s obvious that the kids admitted (on merit) to exclusive schools are already destined to succeed.

But it’s equally obvious that getting a prestigious credential and networking with other people who share these same advantages are two huge additional benefits.

So Harvard, et al., basically just pile privilege on top of privilege. They are privilege accelerants.

This post is a bit LA and NYC centric. There are plenty of others parts of the country with colleges that produce people who connect with one another and go on to become very affluent.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates we’re fast friends from Lakeside High school. They relocated to Seattle because the Vietnam war ended and Boeing laid every body off thus destroying the middle class base of the area.

King’s County, Seattle, Tacoma and other cities offered massive tax exemptions and subsidies to any and all businesses that would relocate to Seattle area. Those businesses, including Microsoft Amazon and others still get the tax exemptions and subsidies by the way. Bezos and wife selected Seattle after researching which local governments offered the best subsidies and tax exemptions.

Gates’ mother did the rich lady charity and community thing. She was on the boards of United way united appeal and another big charity. She knew the west coast regional Vice President of IBM from those boards plus executives of various banks Paul
Allen’s family was just as wealthy and connected as the Gates’ in Seattle.

The local government tax exemptions subsidies very generous bank loans and help from the IBM VP who went to work for
Microsoft in marketing and management plus generations of local connections with wealth and business made Microsoft, not 2 Lakeside grads going to Harvard

Lakeside school local business connections and rich lady community activities had a lot more to do with Microsoft success than Harvard

I suspect that the vast majority of alumni of elite colleges gained nothing from their four years of proximity to other elite-college students.

For brown nosing your way into the inner circle of Law, Media, Politics….. a lot.

For making it in music, film, or other Arts. Can’t hurt.

For making a decent and Moral life for yourself, finding a superior spouse, and contributing to the making of a better America…..definitely a huge negative.

I don’t usually make personal arguments, bet let me make one here. I was a National Merit Scholar at University of Chicago, and dropped out after one year. Drifted for three years, then finished my Degree work at UT Austin. Here is the difference between the two schools: I have met a nicer class of people playing prison chess clubs than what I encountered at U of Chicago. Half the people I went to UT with I would give the shirt off my back without thinking about it. Objectively the Faculty of both schools were a mixed bag of good and bad, but I can’t think of 5 professors I ever encountered I would care to share a beer with.

BTW Steve, listing a group of Elite College Grads whose main achievements are crushing our Constitutional Rights, spying for the National Security State, engaging in gigantic conspiracies of restraint of trade, and coarsening and degrading our Culture (such as it ever was) to the lowest common denominator of stupidity and bad taste, that isn’t really an argument for the Elite colleges now, is it?

The reality is that the Ivy league and similar level schools are great – if you are utterly amoral, power hungry, wealth driven, completely sexually degenerate, and prideful enough to be openly contemptuous of your “inferiors”; otherwise, I would recommend staying away. And if you have an ounce of religious faith of any sort, you might want to rethink college altogether.

No chance Olivia goes to USC and decides on her own to pursue a little vibrancy?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2568763/Kate-Rothschild-heiress-rap-star-lover-photo-thats-alarmed-friends.html

University of Michigan (“the Harvard of the Mid-West”) just had an active shooter false alarm. Normies can’t say it out loud but everybody’s waiting to see how Muslims repay Christchurch.
https://postimg.cc/CBhFNBFS

https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159

We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero.

I don’t understand this.

When they control (apples-to-apples) for SAT, the students in each SAT band get a big advantage from going to an elite university.

But when they additionally (?) apples-for-apples on the average SAT of the universities that the students “applied to” (does that mean, for each student, the single university attended?) the advantage of the elite school evaporated?

Controlling for the average SAT score of the university attended should not change anything, right, since the number would be the same for all students there, white, Jewish, and black?

What universities did they consider, anyway?

https://www.nber.org/papers/w17159.pdf

Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, Duke University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Kenyon College, Miami University of Ohio, Morehouse College, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, Penn State University, Princeton University, Smith College, Stanford University, Swarthmore College, Tufts University, Tulane University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, Washington University, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, Williams College, Xavier University, and Yale University

I’d certainly admit her into my elite university, ifyaknowwhatimean.

OT – HIV infected homosexual sentenced to life imprisonment for deliberately infecting other homosexuals:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6812747/The-Man-Used-HIV-Weapon-Daryll-Rowes-victims-speak.html

I think you mean Chris Hughes not Chris Hedges.

In the days when America was great and not fully owned and controlled by oligarchs you had Presidents like: Warren H. Harding (Ohio Central College), William McKinley (Allegheny College), Harry S. Truman (Spalding’s Commercial College),…

listing a group of Elite College Grads whose main achievements are crushing our Constitutional Rights,…

Great explanation for why we have the public policies we see today. Our elites are self-centered, self-important, self-satisfied, conceited narcissists – astonishingly stupid, and too vain to know that the even though the nest they have fouled it is big, it is their own nest. Unfortunately, their shortcomings deny us our patrimony.

And if you have an ounce of religious faith of any sort, you might want to rethink college altogether.

True.

A little off topic.

The most important thing in education is that there is just the right number of white kids around. Not too many because that is racist. And not too few because that is segregation.

Now, when the numbers of white children are basically falling through the floor, white parents are hoarding the remaining few white students. No mention of maybe creating an environment where whites might actually want to have children.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-parents-are-enabling-school-segregation-if-it-doesn-t-ncna978446?cid=referral_taboolafeed

Douthat (to his credit) had a good couple of tweets about that. I posted them downrange. Basically, it’s about upholding the aristocracy – ‘my kids really are smart, Damn it!. It’s basically for the parents at the entry level, ‘my son/daughter is at x/y/z school,’ it makes them look smart because despite the hoopla, Everyone Knows where the apple falls from the tree.

I am usually a fan of a good Sailerian explanation but this time Stevo is giving way too credit to the parents.

It’s pretty simple: they’re spoiled rotten Laguna Beach kids who know their Dad is worth $100m or so and have been blessed with their mother’s looks. Life’s a margarita at the rooftop bar overlooking Main Beach. Study? What? Me worry?

Mossimo and Lori don’t have any sort of forward thinking inkling about college and their daughters’ love lives (they’re vacationing in all right spots anyway) other than ASU doesn’t have a good academic reputation and USC, especially in SoCal, does.

End of story. They just want a brand name attached to their kids. Nothing more complex than that.

“– A sizable fraction of The Simpsons writers who revolutionized TV comedy in the 1990s were Harvard friends.”

Worked with Dan Greaney, exec. producer of the Simpsons, at the big Jew law firm in NYC. He was Harvard undergrad, law school, Rhodes Scholar, worked at USA Today. Great guy! So one day, as he’s in his 2nd or 3rd year as an associate, working his ass off and sucking up to partners, he gets a call from his old Harvard pal, Conan O’Brien. Dan, he says, I got this offer to take over the Tonight Show, want to take over my gig at Fox. Dan thinks for a moment … should I continue to work my ass off an kiss ass to possibly make partner, or should I tell them to fuck off and go to Hollywood and make millions? Guess what?

Also, just read a NY Post article that says grads in STEM fields don’t do much better graduating from an Ivy or a prestigious U. Social sciences and the liberal arts are a different matter entirely. Being a former reporter, I don’t trust them to do even basic math right, but this sounds more or less right to me.

*By the way. Knew a guy who went to harvard, got an econ degree, apparently did well in pharma sales, but now is in the pig farming biz. He’s a smart guy, but also a mexican. Not that they are mutually exclusive, but it was no secret he (a year ahead of he in HS) go in because of the surname.

Anecdotes aside, the evidence seems pretty clear: nearly all the research on this question says you’re unlikely to get any return on the extra money and time spent aiming at elite universities. Banking on getting the next Gates as a roommate seems obviously -EV.

On the other hand, you’d think connections alone would certainly be worthwhile. How is it that they aren’t? Are most lucrative fields meritocratic enough that being the best gets you in with the big boys regardless?

How much of a bump is there for smart kids from middle class families at the “Little Ivies”? I’ve got one at one of those schools, and I want to know if we’ll get our money’s worth.

https://www.newsweek.com/americas-25-new-elite-ivies-108771

I’stevey. The Yale coach who took bribes is black.

https://theothermccain.com/2019/03/16/god-and-womens-soccer-at-yale/

If the Yale-lies are so woke, why aren’t they paying him enough so that he doesn’t have to take bribes? Ridiculous. I hope he lands on his feet after this.

*Acknowledgement. It doesn’t mean whites can’t be scumsuckers, too.

It isn’t Harvard alums who vote in cuck pols that allow this to continue. It’s cuckpublicans and Kansans (but I repeat myself) and the like that vote for cucks.

Just think. A chimp like that having access to all of that chedda! Pookie dun hit da jackpot!

That’s true, but often even if they don’t marry until their 30s, they are marrying someone who became part of their social group much earlier, like in college.

The reality is that the Ivy league and similar level schools are great – if you are utterly amoral, power hungry, wealth driven, completely sexually degenerate, and prideful enough to be openly contemptuous of your “inferiors”; otherwise, I would recommend staying away. And if you have an ounce of religious faith of any sort, you might want to rethink college altogether.

You could go to one of the less nutty but still traditionally religious schools or majoring in STEM where the propaganda isn’t as fierce. I’m inclined to think Hillsdale would be okay.

I know most of you iSteve commenters are in MENSA but aren’t there exclusive/expensive colleges where the less intellectually gifted wealthy scions go to socialize with their social equals while developing expertise in fundraising and weekend trips to exotic locales where they get engaged?

It doesn’t make sense to me either. I also find that it is a pattern in a lot of sociology-type academic papers: just when you get to the explanation of the crucial component that makes the whole model tick, the authors suddenly lapse into vague or barely parsable word convolutions. It makes one … suspicious.

Harvard University alumnus Greg Daniels is the most notable of the Simpsons’ writers. The Office writer/actor/producer BJ Novak’s Wikipedia contains a funny anecdote about Daniels just “deciding to give Novak a shot.” He’s funny, no doubt, but I bet Harvard helped. Nearly every good Simpsons episode had a Yale dig. A recent, rather unfortunate, iteration took aim at “SJWs” at Yale.

Or maybe Harvard admissions used to somehow select for people and it’s just a coincidence they dominate comedy. Or maybe smart people are funny.

I’m pretty sure there’s one or more Yale jokes in “Two Bad Neighbors” (featuring Harry Shearer’s decent George Bush) but this clip doesn’t contain Any.

Steve, on the marriage thing, you’re thinking way too old school. Nowadays, young people in college aren’t even close to thinking about marriage at graduation. And the odds that a Hollywood actress would be thinking that way about her college-age children is way too old school as well.

Nobody sends or goes to school anymore to major in an MRS. That idea died its last death in the 90s, and it was barely hanging on then.

The parents are competitive for it in the same way they want their kids in the best prep schools and best girl scout troops—-prestige and moving on to the next step. Most high status jobs (stockbroker, New York white shoe lawyer, Simpsons writer) are closed to all but the Ivies and the big name tech schools. Anyone else starts at the bottom and has to crawl up.

Wasn’t it your friend, the former writer at Married…with Children, who went to a no-name school, and was complaining that after the Harvard mafia made The Simpsons, suddenly comedy writing became closed to anyone who hadn’t worked on The Lampoon?

On a side note, its fascinating that these very famous actresses didn’t think their kids were a shoe in at these schools. Were the grades/personal lives of their kids that bad? Seriously, Lori Loughlin or Felicity Huffman or William Macy or any other name could just offer to show up and do a pro bono semester or two as a theater coach, and do some meet-and-greet with alumni, and sign autographs at the admissions’ office, and I’m sure most of the admissions officers would swoon.

And yes, Lori, is far less of a name than Felicity or Macy, but she’s still Aunt Becky and still does TV movies on The Hallmark Channel and still looks good and can move product.

Going to an “elite” college, even majoring in an absurdity like women’s studies, is like an Imperial title in the days of the late Empire. Barbarians wanted those titles. It’s a sign of decay.

Harvard is new Howard, or something….blah,blah,blah….

Who cares?

bored identity strongly believes that if you are melanin deficient, places such as Berkeley could offer a viable solution for all your future problems:

It seems neither of Olivia jade’d parents went to college? I can see that they wouldn’t want their daughter to meet a spouse at Arizona state, a public university, but did they not understand that poorly ranked and expensive private colleges are generally packed with rich kids? This girl would probably have found the right social set at some place like trinity university, an expensive and relatively non selective Connecticut college, where in a merit based world, she would have mingled with the ceo of pimco’s son, who also cheated to get into a better college.

And when I was applying to colleges coming from the northeast, seemed like the middling wealthy students prized Pepperdine. The stereotype here at least is that Pepperdine is a Malibu school filled with international rich kids. Is that not the case anymore? I would think Pepperdine would have the best photo ops if your kids just wants to be an influencer.

…whether black and Hispanic students get an advantage created by whites

There’s a working assumption in the AA business that Whites and affected Asians will land on their feet and create another opportunity if you take things away from them. They are seen as geese that lay golden eggs: it’s okay to take their eggs, because they can just lay some more. The various needy types can’t lay any golden eggs.

I’m not buying those stats. I dated a headhunter, and I know for a fact that if your resume included graduating from Harvard or Yale, that resume will be placed at the top of the heap for importsnt corporate positions, regardless of race. Unless it’s a Japanese company, like Mitsui, which still prefers not having blacks beyond lower management positions. When it comes to African Americans, the Japanese ain’t fans.

In any case, if you reason like a successful headhunter, of course you’re going to favor Ivy League educations because it allows you to cover your ass if the hirling goes wrong.

Client: That candidate you vetted for us turned out to be a total fuckup! We dumped him! It’s gonna cost us! What the fuck was your criteria?

Headhunter: Hey, fuck me! The guy graduated from Harvard! What the fuck else can I say?

Client: What the fuck’s wrong with Harvard these days, anyway?

Headhunter: I know, right?

VS.

Client: “That candidate you sent me turned out to be a total fuckup! What the fuck was your criteria?

Headhunter: Hey, fuck me! The guy graduated from… Arizona State… oh.

Client: “Oh” is right, motherfucker! Quit sending me shit, you asshole!!

The problem is not so much students chasing an elite uni, as students chasing something between State U and the Ivy League. If you can’t get into an Ivy League (or equivalent) school, just go to your State U. The in-between shit is for morons. Do not go into debt for an in-between school, kids.

AFAIK, going to your state flagship university is a good start for a good life anywhere, with the possible exception of NYC/LA.

The really bad play here seems to be piling up debt for something short of Ivy League/MIT/etc. Fuck that. It seems to be a very small set that requires an Ivy League/etc degree, and pretty much nobody that requires something short of Ivy League/etc, but more than State U.

Paul Allen attended Washington State University. And he was the technical brains behind Microsoft. So what does that tell us?Perhaps, this: “Give me enough Harvard alumni network leverage, and I can lift the world.”

OT, but a pretty good article on everyone’s favorite propositional American, Max Boot:

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/04/giving-the-boot

Once upon a time the Supreme Court picks were made on the basis of geographical diversity. Different regions wanted their own guys on their. This was especially true in the antebellum and post-bellum Civil War days for the South, but as the West grew in importance it, too, clamored for more “diversity” geographically speaking. And back then, you went to school at your local university unless you were a legacy somewhere back East. So you got a lot more lesser-name law schools guys on the Supreme Court.

Not to mention John Marshall studied law for only six weeks.

Wouldn’t happen in California; it’s not even a felony there anymore!

21Her friends are alarmed because they’re racist Jews.

Ignore your racist (((friends))), Jew girls. That’s just envy talking (Jewish guys are low-T). Jews (mean IQ 108) mating with Blacks (mean IQ 85) is the future of American racial amity; Jewish and Black IQ average out very close to the to the White mean (in stark contrast to the products of White/Black intermarriage (mean IQ 92)). In other words, Jewish/Black intermarriage (and NOT Black/White intermarriage) is the key to racial healing, racial equality, racial reconciliation.

Jews, marry blacks! It’s the only way to Tikkun Olam.

P.S., Jews, oppose White/Black intermarriage! The resulting mean IQ of 92 only perpetuates the sordid American history of racism, bigotry, and discrimination! Tikkun Olam, Jews! Put your money where your mouth is!

Conversely, say she snagged the richest frat boy at Arizona St, whose dad owns the biggest supermarket chain in Arizona or whatever. Her mom is an actress in Los Angeles and probably would prefer her daughter not make a life for herself in Arizona.

Of course, getting married to the future supermarket king of Arizona, living in really nice house in a nice neighborhood and raising say four healthy normal kids would probably be a *much better* life for her than her future Insta-attention-whore life in LA. But it’s not that life–unfortunately–that her parents want for her.

(My thought when I saw this was “Why not Pepperdine?” A school where she isn’t–or is less–out of place academically and has lots of well to do Christian kids and is actually in a nice neighborhood instead of crappy one.)

Actually the internets has the answer.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfgate.com/education/amp/Where-the-rich-go-to-college-in-California-10884100.php

The percentage of students that come from the top 1% of income earners is high at USC, but almost the same at loyala Marymount, which is much easier to get into and usc is less than Santa Clara university and pitzer (though that’s not that easy to get into).

Seems like the whole scheme to get into usc wasn’t all that well thought through. USC doesn’t even carry the brand value of something like Yale. I get avoiding Arizona state, but seems like this girl could have gotten her fix of partying rich kids at a lot of easier to get into California schools.

It’s funny how USC is considered a “top-tier” school. I always thought of it as a jock factory, though probably fun to attend, for the reason pictured above. Must be a regional thing, like how in Wisconsin UW is considered incredibly selective.

Okay, but in the case of this 19-year-old girl who is definitely a full-grown woman

Uhhh, yeah. Her mother’s no slouch, mind you, but she’s significantly better-looking. I guess dad is a pretty fella?

The marriage of of Ben Goldsmith and Kate Rothschild

OMIGAWD! WHAT A COHENCIDENCE!!! >1% of da woild population, but still found each udda and fell in love!

Life is full of dese lil’ cohencidences…

Jewish racism? What’s that, goy?

He actually attended Washington State.

White parents are enabling school segregation…

The usual crap.

Focus on the money, but with no mention of Asians that do as well or better in poorer districts.

Just more lecturing of Whites to give even more away.

(My thought when I saw this was “Why not Pepperdine?” A school where she isn’t–or is less–out of place academically and has lots of well to do Christian kids and is actually in a nice neighborhood instead of crappy one.)

If you check out her YouTube page, and Instagram, you’ll note that she’s a clueless little shithead on wheels. Sending her to Pepperdine would solicit her being ostracized, then dropping out. There’s plenty of little shitheads just like her, or want to be like her, at USC for her to hang with, and it’s close by so her parents can helicopter her through it.

We’re looking at some supremely shitty parents here, trying to micro-manage the little monsters they created.

In my opinion, Married with a Children trumped the Simpsons, which basically tells the same tired joke in a thousand parallel universes: dumb ignorant fat bald racist sexist Homer has easy life due to his white privilege. On the other hand, Al Bundy was a working class antihero whose life is the very opposite of privileged and prescient for most whites living in post Bush America. Also, Bundy’s fat woman and lazy wife jokes were always fresh and still seem wonderfully transgressive whereas the Simpson’s humor hasn’t really aged all that well.

I thought Pepperdine too

Reading the LA Times articles on the admissions scandals, they are hilariously tiptoeing around what seems tho be a major cause of USC’s centrality in the case: blacks in charge, in the form of incompetent affirmative action hire Lynn Swann as USC athletic director. This is apparently not the first problem during his 18-month tenure: two other staff had previously been arrested by the FBI. Yet Swann was “blindsided” by the most current scandal!

Spunky Swann, however, hopes to stick around for 10 years, because he heard somewhere that anything less would look fishy on his resume when trying to get a corporate CEO job.

By the way, the most recent arrestee is a lesbian woman. Is there affirmative action for them also?

It mattered a great deal for me in the way of motivation: I first went to a “safe” school because I wasn’t admitted to the “best” school were I wanted to be. Classes there were easy and I was obviously appreciably above most of the class. As a result, I got lazy, started slacking and had very little motivation to improve on my own.

So I dropped out, got great test scores and did everything necessary to be admitted to that “elite” college. Got in to find a completely different environment: many classmates were clearly smarter than I was and most classes were very tough. I hated to feel inferior though and striven to keep up academically. Over time, it worked. Ended up graduating in the top 10% of the class with classmates treating me as intellectually equal.

Couldn’t have done it without pride and envy, I suppose 🙂

[Boot] has learned to “think for [him]self,” he confesses of his recent turn of mind, “and that is not an easy thing to do.” His readers of years past should demand a refund, since they presumably turned to him for independent thought and judgment.

LOL!

Do the Hispanics and blacks that have been dragged along have the same track record.

Though AOC didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, BU is a very good school with plenty of successful alumni and a great network for decent well-paying jobs. Yet she ended up as a bartender in Manhattan after “winning” 2nd place in the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in microbiology at Yorktown High School (an excellent public high school) and then graduating from BU with an economics degree in 2011. More than a few qualified people lost their opportunities since AOC was an AA product her whole life and she still expects special treatment ad infinitum.

She only became a Congresswoman after answering an ad for a minority screening video test. There’s no there, there.

The article is hilarious – https://qz.com/1481551/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-won-a-2007-isef-science-fair-prize-for-her-microbiology-research/

Harvard connections are highly valuable if you want to open a Volvo dealership in Westchester County, NY.

Kurt Vonnegut ran a Saab dealership on Cape Cod. Back in the two-stroke days.
i wonder about his connections.

Dale and Krueger’s paper is the income equivalent of Raj Chetty’s “Intergenerational Opportunity” paper. Hard to take seriously.

They use taxable income as their metric for earnings. They mention in a footnote on Page 9 that “Income received from capital gains is excluded.” Of course, there is no mention of carried interest either. The highest payout field for Ivy League grads is finance, so they are dramatically underestimating earnings.

The other highest payout field is Silicon Valley tech, which is more meritocratic. The bulk of pay for top-tier jobs is in stock options and equity, often a multiple of gross income. To exclude these things discredits their results. For perspective, base salary may be $130k, which is what you see on Glassdoor. The equity package maybe another $200k.

People should not kid themselves. Hold constant for intelligence, ambition and career choice. Exclude bottom tail of humanities and social science slackers. The Harvard grad is making at least 30% more than his UMass counterpart.

Rick Caruso’s yacht! In 2016 there was a maelstrom of outrage and competitive sanctimony when video surfaced of Brentwood School students singing along with a rap song on Rick Caruso’s $100,000,000 yacht, Invictus.

LA Weekly:

The dozen or so mostly white students in Hawaiian shirts and leis are depicted in the video happily singing the chorus of “Dump Dump” by A$AP Ferg

“I f*cked your b*tch, n*gga, I f*cked your b*tch
She s*cked my d*ck, n*gga, she sucked my d*ck”

Not long after the yacht-ocaust Brentwood was rocked by a “sorta-hot teacher getting it on with a student” -ocaust.

The teachers life is ruined and the “kid” is now playing D1 football at…Stanford.

I think the ASU dig may have had a personal angle to it – Lori Loughlin’s ex-husband, Michael R. Burns, Vice Chairman of Lionsgate, is an ASU grad. What about Chapman University in Orange? They’ve been on a major expansion spree, including a big film school, the last decade or so. I hear celeb kids go there, including a Spielberg kid.

Friends of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard who became billionaires include Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

A black Jamaican-American Harvard student was one of the first 20 users of Facebook. She probably met Zuckerberg through her Jewish boyfriend. Before marrying, she earned her law degree at Harvard and her boyfriend received his degree from NYU. They both practiced in Manhattan.

Her sister, on the other hand, went to Duke with the intention of becoming a pediatric dentist. I guess Duke isn’t as generous as Harvard is with As, because she wound up working for AT&T.

A sizable fraction of The Simpsons writers who revolutionized TV comedy in the 1990s were Harvard friends.

Jeffrey Stepakoff wrote the book Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson’s Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing. While he was studying for an MFA at Carnegie Mellon, Stepakoff looked through the alumni directory and found Steven Bochco’s name. (Bochco, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1966, created Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser, and NYPD Blue.) Stepakoff wrote Bochco and told him that he wanted to become a Hollywood writer. Bochco wrote back with the name and number of a contact person. The day after Stepakoff graduated from Carnegie Mellon he drove to California and at the time of the book’s printing, had written for 14 different television shows.

Do the Hispanics and blacks that have been dragged along have the same track record. What about the super high achieving non-Hispanic white kid that doesn’t get in?

The Hispanics and blacks at elite colleges are in no way representative of their peers struggling at regional state colleges.

Eric Garcetti, the Hispanic-Jewish mayor of L0s Angeles, attended Columbia, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and studied for a PhD at the London School of Economics. Eric is the son of former Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti. Bette Midler’s husband, Martin Von Haselberg, was born in Argentina to a Jewish mother and German father. Their Hispanic daughter Sophie graduated from Yale.

Eric Holder is the son and grandson of immigrants from Barbados. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and recieved his bachelor’s and law degree from Columbia.

Susan Rice’s mother was Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe, national vice-president of the College Board (the SAT company) from 1973 until 1981, a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under Clinton, and an economic studies expert at the Brookings Institution. Rice’s father was a governor of the Federal Reserve System and a professor at Cornell. Rice graduated from Stanford and attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where she earned a master’s and a doctorate.

Wow. The same credentials and stupidity as the Clintons. Academic success and political insight seem inversely proportional.

Olivia Jade’s father dropped out of USC (when it was a safety school). It was primarily his idea that his daughters attend USC. They reluctantly went along.

I believe that Andre Iguodala, Nicole Ritchie, and Kourtney Kardashian were all at the University of Arizona at the same time. Olivia Jade would have fit in just fine. By the way, Jimmy Kimmel dropped out of Arizona State.

At least three of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s four Irish children attended USC. Arnold’s Hispanic son went to Pepperdine.

The article cited sounds like it might be politically-motivated research designed to justify affirmative action. It is possible to use sample selection methods, errors-in-variables biases, and other tricks to get the conclusion you want, if the researchers are not careful and objective and start with a political motivation. Then the MSM goes into high gear to widely publicize the research results supporting affirmative action, and critical analysis is lost. Research papers supporting affirmative action are in very high demand by the MSM and in relatively low supply since usually the objective findings go against it. I have not read this particular paper and so cannot state a strong opinion, but I would not rely on it without a careful, critical read. There are reams of poor-quality, politically biased research papers supporting affirmative action which on careful reading turn out to be garbage research. Not sure about this one, but would suggest care in relying upon it.

Not unless their college was in a big city and they and the spouse stayed in the city for grad school as well and got jobs in the same city.

Who stays in Ithaca Ny, Hanover New Hampshire San Lois Obispo? Who but Chinese and Indians happy to live 20 in a 1,500 sq ft house stays near Palo Alto or Berkeley ca?

The other thing is that prestige colleges don’t like to accept their own undergrads into grad school. The rational is that they want to be national rather than local schools. So undergrad couples who go on to grad schools can be separated by 1 or 2 thousand miles and break up.

Successful people move around nowadays. Grow up in one suburb, under grad somewhere else, grad school in another area, first job in another town.

“NO MA’AM” could not be written into a sitcom today.

I forget credentials are a proxy for intelligence and good judgment around here. Yet this is the crux of the matter wrt the decline of western civilization. The universities are indoctrinating away in the guise of providing instruction. Writing papers and taking tests simply reinforces the brainwashing. I’m appalled at how many people will fit into the system unquestioningly. Overvaluing complexity contributes to the madness. Professors aren’t gods. Their theories change and can become obsolete like fads. The process of being a college student shouldn’t be more important than the content of the education.

She’d always grumble about the Harvard Mafia that came to town with The Simpsons.

Doesn’t the Harvard-Hollywood connection go way back to at least the 1970s, when there was basically a direct pipeline from the National Lampoon to SNL.

I think it boils down to ‘everything is not enough.’ These kids had rich parents, so if they just wanted a sheepskin, could have gone anywhere. But apparently, (at least in the case of Loughlins (sp?)) it wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t that Aunt Becky was corrupt, it was that she was clumsy about it. And her daughter (at least one of them) has several social influencer contracts with makeup and whatnot companies. Why did she need to be in school to begin with.

It’s been covered here in the comments before, but the whole thing is ridiculous. Most of these kids never had an academic bone in their body. I could see it, if say, my kid was really good in latin and, say Yale, had the best classics program, but other than that?

Who am I kidding? It pays off. Contacts count. Especially if you start rich and have a massive jumping off point.

I agree Al Bundy was the epitome of what working class life has become. Only thing is that it would be impossible to own a 3 bedroom house on 40 hours a week at minimum wage which is what mall clerks make.

Al was the best. One episode I liked was when Peg went to women’s career day at the high school. Of course the girls were being brainwashed about the wonderful careers they could have. But lazy Peg showed them they could have a good life without a wonderful career.

His Oprah jokes were the greatest

SNL is in New York, not Los Angeles. The line was from the Harvard humor magazine, The Lampoon. The writers and some actors had proved themselves at The Lampoon.

Indeed. The Simpsons got the credit for not doing dic* jokes, but Married With Children could be quite good. The ref was before my time but I recognized it through reruns. Al took a job as a security guard and his nemesis (Bubba, football player, I think) sabotaged him, so he had to take the walk like Chuck Conners did in ‘Branded.’

Even back then most people didn’t get the reference, but I always respected the show for that, and many others they did.

You’re right about the ‘really bad play’ insofar as expensive, mediocre schools aren’t remotely worth the money, but that’s where wealthy, mediocre students are supposed to go. Hence they are good places for movie stars’ kids, as noted above. Just not–as you say–places for which one should take on serious debt.

The only thing I’d add is that you should widen your criteria for what you consider the top schools beyond the Ivy League. I’d go as far as the top 20 or even 25 schools, examples being Chicago, Stanford, Hopkins, Rice, Duke, MIT, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore and so on.

And, happily enough for their students, virtually all of the top schools are able to be very generous with financial assistance.

Hypnotoad666 wrote:

But it’s equally obvious that getting a prestigious credential and networking with other people who share these same advantages are two huge additional benefits.

So Harvard, et al., basically just pile privilege on top of privilege. They are privilege accelerants.

One of my brothers got a BA from Stanford; the other from Harvard. Neither got “huge additional lbenefits.” In fact, income-wise, both did about as well (I think not quite as well) as moderately smart high-school grads circa 1950. (My dad and a lot his friends were those moderately smart high-school grads circa 1950, so I know this from personal observation as well as statistics.)

As far as I can tell, most lowly middle-class kids who attend the HYPS don’t really network much with the high-flyers. Social life seems to be stratified by SES. (I was in grad school at Stanford when one of my brothers was an undergrad, so I have some close-to-first-hand info on social life at Stanford.)

So, no, I don’t think your “privilege accelerant” theory is true for most students at the HYPS.

But, more important than what I think is the data: and the data does seem pretty clearly to show what Sailer describes — AA admittees get helped, high flyers are already high-flyers,, and the regular Americans might as well go to some University of California campus.

I subscribed to National Lampoon for years. Loved it.

Yep, [Noah Berlatsky] is clearly angry that white people haven’t had enough kids to go around, such that every school in the country can have enough in order to raise academic standards and give the other students kids to beat up.

“Desegregation can still prompt angry, violent, white backlash. Today…affluent white districts will sue and prosecute poor people of color who try to access the resources in better districts.”

Yep, happens all the time! And they managed to come up with a grand total of one example, of a supposedly homeless parent gaming the system.

“When I wrote an article earlier this year arguing that white parents need to do more to promote desegregation, my social media mentions filled up with outraged protests, many of them openly anti-Semitic.”

Twitter trolls are so mean! (His example? Rod Dreher.) Meanwhile, I note in passing that every single phenomenon he lays at the doorstep of White Racism is much more readily explained by economic inequality. For some reason he doesn’t seem to want to go there so much. He ends by saying how wonderful it is for his own kid to attend a ‘majority-minority’ school–the very thing he says is worse than death for minority kids.

So…the obvious solution is for every kid in America to attend a school in which s/he is in the minority. We don’t want any majorities, ever again. They make us feel threatened, right Noah?

Some of those schools are very good indeed, but others are average.
It doesn’t look like a very rigorous selection, rather clickbait.

Oh that’s nothing. Start ’em young I say.

This is all like reading Jerry Pournelle’s Iron law of Bureaucracy again, just applied to the whole of Society.

It’s another reason why things are falling apart. Depressing.

I dated a headhunter, and I know for a fact that if your resume included graduating from Harvard or Yale, that resume will be placed at the top of the heap

Right–this topic really does seem to bring out the ‘privileged information’ posts.

Spend time in NY or DC… Harvard and Yale grads are a dime a dozen.

South Texas Guy wrote:

It’s been covered here in the comments before, but the whole thing is ridiculous. Most of these kids never had an academic bone in their body. I could see it, if say, my kid was really good in latin and, say Yale, had the best classics program, but other than that?

Yeah. Where did Thomas Edison go to college? John D. Rockefeller? Michael Faraday? Andrew Carnegie?

By the late nineteenth century, it had become obvioous that a college education was largely irrelevant to the rising world of business and technology. One of the most amazing marketing scams in history is that colleges managed to turn this around, and, by the mid-twentieth century (after WW II) convince most people that a college education was the key to success in modern technical, industrial society.

Even today, most people believe that kids need more schooling because of all our modern technology. And, people believe this even though everyone knows that middle-school kids are better at grasping the latest tech gadgets than people over thirty with Ph.D.s (I speak from personal experience!).

As P. T. Barnum said, there is indeed a sucker born every minute.

Svigor, I have now re-read your post and see that you were explicit in saying “or MIT etc” (more than once!), so please accept my apology for being over-hasty with my previous response!

Are you sure this isn’t an exercise for your continuing education creative writing class?

Silicon Valley is a squalid sweatshop unfit for Whites to live in unless they can afford a minimum 4 million dollar house. And that’s a basic house on a small lot.

90 hour work weeks, endless discrimination against Whites by Chinese and Indians, public schools often majority Hispanic with affirmative action racist Hispanic administrators. SV is not a good place for Whites anymore and hasn’t been for a long time

It’s 2019, not 1970 when life was wonderful in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley was White.

Stock bonuses were never given to the low level programmers, ever. Those big stock bonuses were always for the upper levels mostly managers

Stock bonuses are good. That’s how so many Microsoft people became millionaires a few years after joining Microsoft. Microsoft gave them the stock

Stock options? Who can afford to buy stock at even an employee discount trying to live on $12ok in SV?

Better buy a house in Gilroy and pack it full of Chinese cubicle coolies.

Hold constant for intelligence, ambition and career choice. Exclude bottom tail of humanities and social science slackers.

Yes indeed, and that’s just the beginning. More than one female Harvard Law grad has found being an associate at a competitive firm way too grueling and dropped out to be a ‘writer’ and/or full-time mommy. Her husband’s income permits that, but what does it do to the averages, ten years out?

I suspect a lot of similar stories about Silicon Valley successes could be told about people who lived down the dorm hall at Stanford from somebody who dragged you in his wake to a fortune.

But these cases are kind of rare, so probably wouldn’t show up in a typical statistical study.

Rare? Seriously? Sure, it’s not always a fortune, but literally every step in my career, who I know has been a major factor. Same with most people I worked with.

Having your “who you know” crowd be the Ivy League elite from the get-go is priceless.

You don’t want to be that sad sack who cold submits his resume to HR on the company website.

Swarthmore? Isn’t it like Oberlin a SJW crusader school specializing in intersectional studies and semesters in Africa pretending to teach Africans how to dig latrines and build huts.

How do college students who never even washed the car or loaded the dishwasher manage to teach Africans how to build huts and dig latrined anyway?

The real reason for high school and college and more college is to end teen labor and keep young adults out of the shrinking job market.

I don’t know for sure but it was printed by Harvard press and post marked Cambridge. I always thought it was done by the undergrads who wrote for The regular Lampoon

It was wonderful. There was a satire of Glamour a young women’s fashion magazine. Glamour had a page of fashion do’s and don’ts. Lampoon’s dos and don’ts were hysterical.

Another was about strange mutant fish that evolved in Lake Eirie to go ashore and hunt humans .

The ASU connection you made makes sense. Lori divorced and quickly remarried the next year.

No child of Steven Spielberg’s has attended Chapman University. In 2003 there was a rumor on a forum that Steven Spielberg’s son Max (mother Amy Irving) was at Chapman, but Max’s LinkedIn page says that he attended Pomona College (2003-2007 BA, Media Studies).

The schools that the Spielberg children have attended are Pomona, Brown (2 – including stepdaughter), Yale, and I believe an art institute. Two kids didn’t go to college.

https://www.filmschool.org/threads/spielbergs-son.14420/

Chico state is nice. Best thing is the affirmative action people have never heard of it except for local Hispanics

State college or elite university, most of this is about parents wanting status and bragging rights when they meet up with their peers. So you have the wealthy whites and Chinese, other Asians too, doing whatever they can to get their children into elite colleges. Notice the Asians lawsuit against Harvard. Also has to with getting their children good contacts (networking) and marriage partners while at Uni or even afterwards.

And, people believe this even though everyone knows that middle-school kids are better at grasping the latest tech gadgets than people over thirty with Ph.D.s (I speak from personal experience!).

Hahah no. What a tired trope. I wonder what that “personal experience” is. It doesn’t reflect well on you.

Middle-schools kids can USE the gadgetry. They “grasp” as much about the technology as a gorilla in front a Kubrick’s Monolith.

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/

If you teach IT or Computing, this is a phrase that you’ll have heard a million times, a billion times, epsilon zero times, aleph one times. Okay I exaggerate, but you’ll have heard it a lot. There are variants of the phrase, all espousing today’s children’s technical ability. My favourite is from parents: ‘Oh, Johnny will be a natural for A-Level Computing. He’s always on his computer at home.’ The parents seem to have some vague concept that spending hours each evening on Facebook and YouTube will impart, by some sort of cybernetic osmosis, a knowledge of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Haskell.

Normally when someone spouts this rubbish I just nod and smile. This time I simply couldn’t let it pass. ‘Not really, most kids can’t use computers.’ (and neither can you – I didn’t add.)

She looked surprised by my rejection of what is generally considered a truism. After all, aren’t all teenagers digital natives? They have laptops and tablets and games consoles and smart phones, surely they must be the most technologically knowledgeable demographic on the planet. The bell went, and I really did have a lesson to teach, so I didn’t have time to explain to her my theories on why it is that kids can’t use computers. Maybe she’ll read my blog.

The truth is, kids can’t use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There’s a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are, of course, exceptions amongst the staff and students. There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones, replace a motherboard, and reinstall an operating system. There are usually a couple of tech-savvy teachers outside the age range I’ve stated, often from the Maths and Science departments who are only ever defeated by their school laptops because they don’t have administrator privileges, but these individuals are rare.

USC should have begged Loughlin to send your daughters there and not the other way around. Think of it from the other students’ perspectives: who wouldn’t want to go to school with the beautiful daughters of a TV star and a successful fashion designer?

As for that clip of the one daughter saying she wasn’t interested in school, the school should have pitched her a major in fashion or communications where she would have a chance to do what interests her and not work too hard.

who wouldn’t want to go to school with the beautiful daughters of a TV star and a successful fashion designer?

Presumably USC has enough of those?

Eric Garcetti is only about 1/8 Hispanic. Russian Jewish mother Italian hispanic father. He discovered his Hispanic roots when he got into city wide politics. When he was on the city council the gays voted for him because they thought he was gay. I always thought he was gay till he ran for mayor and displayed wife and blonde daughters too young to bleach their hair.

When he was exploring running for president he suddenly became Hispanic

His father never pretended to be Hispanic. His father was the district attorney who made the decision to move the OJ Simpson trial from the district courthouse where the crime was committed to the blackest court district in the entire county and to come up with a 70 percent black jury in an 11 percent black county.

Only 11 percent blacks in the county and they cause most of the problems

Humbolt state is nice too if you love fog and hate the sun Largest employer in the county is the local Indian tribe. Commercial fishing is still around but governmental regulations make it hard to make a profit. While the coast guard and their spy planes are making it difficult for American fishermen to make a living, the huge Japanese factory ships are just 4 miles out vacuuming up our fish

Humboldt state has a water and irrigation engineer program very useful

Yes, maybe, but the recruiters in top investment banks and law firms generally don’t look outside the Ivies, and an Ivy degree opens many doors for even the dullest, so it behooves those who can’t get in by extraordinary talent, legacy, or affirmative action to cheat their way in. Besides, it is good training for the government and executives roles many will land.

I knew a Yalie in NYC who had a mediocre IT job and often complained that she deserved better because she went to Yale; however, she got in as a legacy, and was’t very good at networking. This social capital thingy is a major selling point, but it has limits.

Don’t remember if I read it here or somewhere else, but there was a study that looked at success of people who attended UPenn and people who got into UPenn but instead attended Penn State.

The gist of it was that the people who were admitted to Penn but went to Penn State were just as successful as the Penn cohort.

The main idea here being that elite universities don’t make people successful, but elite universities are very good at selecting people who will become successful. A smart, aggressive, socially savvy young person is going places no matter if they attend Harvard or State U.

Look at Bill Gates’ example. If he hadn’t attended Harvard he prolly would have still started MSFT.

There’s no doubt that a prestegious university on your resume opens doors, though. It’s a signal factor. But it’s one of many success variables, and probably not even in the top half.

USC like every other college in the country doesn’t want White Americans.

A cute 19 year old woman from a rich family doesn’t need to go to college : she needs to snag a rich husband and raise a family as soon as possible!
What were her parents thinking?

“Of course, there is no mention of carried interest either. The highest payout field for Ivy League grads is finance, so they are dramatically underestimating earnings.”

I was still getting carried interest on deals done a decade earlier, and I was also stuffed with the bank’s stock and options instead of all-cash at bonus time, so it is indeed difficult for academics to accurately piece together the compensation of many of those in finance if they don’t count capital gains.

Best thing about Loyola is that it’s in a very safe neighborhood unlike USC in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country.

If only black and Hispanic students benefit from attending an Ivy, I don’t know how in good conscience they can admit anyone else.

It wasn’t Harvard. It was wealthy old Seattle families plus massive tax exemptions and subsidies plus lots of Churchill college Cambridge University early programmers, excuse me , designers and architects.

Once word spread that Microsoft passed out a million or more in stock bonuses, not stock options to every employee, Microsoft had the cream of the cream. Now it’s just a job, not a sure road to wealth as in the early days.

Those applicants are White. Colleges don’t want Whites.

It was in the 1950s and before that people got engaged in college.

The headhunter you dated used language like that?

The last place that Lori Loughlin wanted her daughters going to was ASU due to the MM factor. ASU has always been a partying school. The daughters might meet up with Mexicans (students) and maybe get pregnant via one. The other M is meth.The state of Arizona has a reputation for high use of meth.
The two daughters look squeaky clean to me. That Lori Loughlin figured it was too risky to send them to far off ASU where they would be difficult to monitor. Photos can be deceptive but this family seems solidly together and always smiling, like they are on top of the world. So you want to send the girls to a top university.
Articles describe Lori Loughlin as a “competitive mom”. Husband was probably an innocent bystander, just caught in the crossfire. (SRV)

Right Los Angeles liberals are always weeping and wailing that there are only 9 percent Whites in the public school
System and that there aren’t enough to spread around.

A week after the article about the lack of Whites in the schools there will be another article rejoicing that the percentage of Whites in the city and state is going down, down, down

What they never ever mention is that most of the Whites in the public schools are Armenia Persian Russian Israeli and don’t take s**t from the blacks and Hispanics

OJ Simpson is a USC grad.

USC should have begged Loughlin to send your daughters there and not the other way around. Think of it from the other students’ perspectives: who wouldn’t want to go to school with the beautiful daughters of a TV star and a successful fashion designer?

Lovely family all ways around. The father a self made man. Mother only wanted the best for her lovely airhead daughters. Too bad they got caught while other families doing the same are cruising by unnoticed.

As in that black Yale soccer coach. He was the first athletic coach snared. After being bribed by Rick Singer, this coach decided to go 100% entrepreneurial and solicited a $400,000 bribe all on his own. Gotta cut the YT middleman out of this sweet deal. A few years later his wealthy target was being investigated for securities fraud or similar, to mitigate he squealed on soccer coach to the FBI. It seems wealthy guy did not agree to bribe this soccer coach

Yale soccer coach is where this admissions scandal started to unravel.

Married w Children was the one note joke show. Hated It. In fact, the Simpson’s mocked the lack of originality by showing Al flush the toilet and the studio audience erupt in laughter.

Married with a children was trash. I’m embarrassed for all that liked it.

Were Garcetti, Holder, and Rice any good at what they did? Or any better than the average person?

I suspect not.

There are ongoing Yale jokes in the show, most springing from the antics of Montgomery Burns (Yale, 1914).

Wasn’t Mr. Allen going to WSU a little like a Hollywood star’s kid going to ASU? (I think a rich kid would be less of a fish out of water in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix, than in Pullman WA which is very close to the Idaho border.) Why wouldn’t he have at the very least gone to UW in Seattle which is a Public Ivy?

And add to this mix the sterilization/suppressed fertility of our highest achieving women from the college/career model, and we would do well to rethink the whole thing.

Five of the first six Presidents were from William & Mary (3) or Harvard (2). Washington was homeschooled. It became more democratic for a while after the Civil War, then around the turn of the century we started getting a lot of Ivy Leaguers, plus Coolidge (Amherst), Hoover (Stanford), Eisenhower (USMA), Nixon (Duke Law), and Carter (USNA) vs. non-elite exceptions Harding and Truman mentioned above, LBJ (Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College) and Reagan (Eureka College.)

Why are the only examples of successful graduates from Harvard? Is Princeton producing any successful graduates? The dirty secret of elite schools is their purpose is getting you a job as an elite bureaucrat.

I have no idea why Paul Allen selected his college.

Does Trump’s Wharton MBA qualify as Ivy League?

Controlling for the average SAT score of the university attended should not change anything…

From what I gather from the paper, traits such as ambition and creativity explain differential earnings between same SAT score people, not the school attended.

For example, a 1400 scorer, A, at a selective school will make more than a 1400 scorer, B, at a lower tier school; but A has traits not captured by an SAT score, and those traits would make him an equivalent earner had he gone to the lower tier school.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you go to Harvard or Florida State, Stanford or Mississippi State. They’re all accredited by the states within which they are based, so in the end you get out (of your education) what you put into it. We already know that Bill Gates was a Harvard dropout. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College and Harry Truman never even went to college. Mario Cuomo (St. John’s U./Queens NY)–not Bill Clinton (Georgetown)– might well have succeeded Bush Sr. as POTUS had he not dropped out in ’92.

“Education” doesn’t necessarily equate with “intelligence.” If one has an abundance of the latter and–just as important–boundless ambition, that individual will succeed.

IMO The Family Guy went on to surpass them all.

…but literally every step in my career, who I know has been a major factor

Was merit/ability a larger factor?

Do you think you stepped over someone of more ability because of your network?

So the distribution of economic returns is not normal but log-normal, or something along those lines.

Or it’s a power distribution (is that log-normal? IDK).

Call a mathematician or a probabilist .

The sociology for describing this is sometimes called “The lottery of personal connections.” If the lottery tickets are cheap or free and have high potential upside, get lots of them.

What does “doing well” really mean? Does it just mean making a lot of money? Some of us, including I think Steve Sailer, chose a job because, at least relative to other career options, it is enjoyable. As for why I am in education? My answer is June, July, and August. So many people I worked with at office jobs in my old career track talked a lot about how they wanted to retire. My feeling from corporate office work was that my life was slipping away. Teachers make less money than corporate climber types, but at least we get our time off during our life primes so that we can enjoy life.

She’s got a nice little fem-stache working there too.

My son went to a state school. He was taking an humanities elective course. They were doing a study of the movie Fight Club. I had seen it on cable TV and said, OK, that passes for a famous work these days what were the discussions like?

He said they hadn’t discussed it – they were watching the movie – in class. Three one hour class periods at $600 a credit hour to watch something I saw on FX one night.

I knew I was being scammed.

NYU has a very high percentage of Asians. I don’t know what that means in terms of developing contacts and networks for non-Asian graduates.

Netflix (or one of the streaming services) has a movie called “A Futile and Stupid Gesture” about the founding of the ‘Poon. Its main character is the late Doug Kenney. It detailes the Harvard backgrounds of many of the Poonsters.. I found the film amusing.

In college we would eagerly await each new issue of the magazine- some very funny stuff- just to name a few things at Random- “Anti-Dutch Hate Literature”, “Bernie X”, and of course P.J. O’Rourke’s “Foreigners around the World”!

Hollywood is often used (as here) to refer to the movie and television making industry, rather than to the zip code in California with the big sign on a hill.

At which point our betters decided that there had better not be any more failed haberdashers so here we are.

The Director of Research and Development tells his newly-hired Phd’s, “I don’t care if you come from Harvard or Idaho State. That’s all in the past. From this point on you have to produce. We are a corporation. We must make a profit. To do so we must manufacture products that will sell in a competitive market. If you don’t come up with something that will sell, we will go bankrupt and you won’t get paid. Now get to work.”

Paraphrased, but true.

Here’s Novak in the Harvard Lampoon on what sorts of gag gifts to get different kinds of people: https://www.harvardlampoon.com/piece/gag-gifts/
For the man who hates gag gifts, a jar of jellybeans labeled “sex pills.” For the diabetic in your life, a jar of sex pills labeled “jellybeans.” Good stuff. I wasn’t totally aware that the National magazine grew out of a student publication.

A big part of the reason it’s much more difficult for rich white kids to get into the Ivies these days is because the Ivies are stuffed full of really, REALLY rich kids from all around the world. Last stats I can find in ten seconds of searching is that Harvard is over 23% foreign, with that number rising very quickly (6.8% a year). “China is the largest contributor to this growth, with an estimated total of 1,326 students.”

So thanks to rampant multiculturalism, there are 1,326 spots no longer available for nice American kids, white or otherwise, and that’s just thanks to China. You’d think these rich whites would connect the dots and oppose this kind of thing, but no. They cheerlead it endlessly.

BTW, “Harvard University costs approximately USD 69,600 for international students to attend.”

I wonder if ANY of them get scholarships?

Asian attendance at elite U.S. colleges is a disaster, and quite a serious national security issue. Trump should cancel ALL student visas ASAP.

So she was majoring in chemical engineering before the scandal broke? You know, just to be more convincing.

I wonder if part of the problem for today’s rich-but-dumb scions is that their traditional collegiate dumping grounds have yielded to meritocratic pressures to maintain their prestige. USC used to have the reputation as a fine place for the well connected dummy, but it’s become a lot harder to get admitted to than years ago. The rich-but-dumb aren’t any smarter than they were years ago, but now they can’t make the grade. This is true in spades of course for the idiocracy in Hollywood, who never got there by smarts.

Hollywood is like the drummers of the elite.

That article is 13 years old.

I went to UNC in the ‘80s. I got in as a legacy from out of state. I didn’t have good grades but good SATs. I kinda slacked my way though and I’m not particularly well off but earn a living.

But I know a bunch of guys from my era, most from just one fraternity, that became quite successful in various fields.

One guy became CEO of Open Table. Another CEO of Match.com and then Ancestry. One guy on Board of Atlanta Fed and CEO of Habitat for Humanity. Also member of Council on Foreign Relations. There’s actually 2. The other worked at NY Fed and then Chief Risk Officer at UBS. The director of the movie Ant Man. The show runner for Third Rock from the Sun. Writers for King of the Hill and Silicon Valley (not Judge). Those latter 2 weren’t frat boys.

And a Tri Delt who became CFO of Citibank.

A guy who was Executive Producer of Survivor.

All mid-80s UNC. Just the ones I know about. Aside from the basketball players like Kenny Smith.

A big network of successful people. Plenty more investment bankers, doctors and lawyers. Foundations and boards. A bishop.

For whatever reason not much rubbed off on me (actually, probably laziness and a lack of ambition), but it’s a great place to go to university. Idyllic.

LOL! Thanks for that – at least there is a silver lining as he ends up with a lingerie model and can still make hundreds of millions a year.

She ends with an “aspiring rap star.”I guess it’s nice to have inherited so much money one can make such a foolish decision.

She’s basically an idiot with a drug problem, while her ex was working his butt off to maintain both of their family fortunes.

The Harvard Lampoon produced a hilarious spoof of Tolkien in 1968.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings

If you maintain connections with successful people at any college, life may be easier for you. But the bottom line is that there are a helluva lot more successful ppl at places like Harvard. The principal thing I find screamingly funny at places like Harvard is that its black alumni NEVER end up doing anything great in their chosen field. Look at the Obamas.

IMO the Intel ISEF has fallen somewhat into disrepute since becoming a competition among the children of Indian and Chinese immigrant dad’s running research labs. The occasional minority winner like AOC pops up, but they almost always have an eager beaver PhD sponsor trying to prove his SJW bonafides. This probably explains AOC’s early honors in a field she couldn’t be bothered pursuing in college.

Perhaps unknown to most unz.com readers is that Ron Unz himself won 1st place in the original Westinghouse STS in 1979. I think his topic had something to do with black holes, and I doubt his economically struggling single mother without a physics degree gave him much help on it.

That’s a terrbile attitude. We need to think in terms about what’s good for whites, not think “regardless” of race. What you’re advocating is the same colorblind garbage that got us into this mess to begin with.

Not true outside of Cal/NYC metro.

Probably 75 % of upper middle class people marry someone they first came into contact with in college. Even if they marry in their mid to late 20s they met them in college.

The University of Southern California is hard to get into.

Fifteen years ago, I was at USC for an event, and a student there told me that the average SAT scores for admitted USC students had recently passed those admitted to UCLA.

According to Google, that is still the case.

Pepperdine is an Evangelical Christian school with a student body that takes religion seriously. They are from affluent families where the dads are typically conservative corporate executives. The kinds classless trash who are involved in this scandal would not fit in there at all. They would be rejected and ostracized by the social scene which puts priority on old school WASP discretion and modesty.

https://vine.co/v/MzbMgqdTthh

While I believe this is true, it also seems to me that there’s relatively little distinction drawn in the vast middle laying between Harvard et al and University of Phoenix. In the long run, that is to say, there’s little difference in career opportunities between graduates of a state directional bush college and a respectable but sub-elite state flagship or liberal arts college. Like most things in American life, the small gradations in status obsessed over by the public serve little purpose but to distract them from the reality of quite sharply bifurcated life outcomes between haves and have nots.

It’s true that the Yale soccer coach was black but most of the bribed coaches were lily white so it’s hard to point to his blackness as being particularly significant. He is just about the only black involved in this scandal AFAIK. The relevant color here is green as in $. White collar crime (and this can be considered a type of that) is mainly a white thang, at least in comparison to violent crime where blacks are clearly the champs, because it requires a lot of brains (as well as a willingness to break the law) to run a complex fraud. What Rick Singer did required considerable intellectual talent and he supposedly made $25 million out of it, so what the coaches got was peanuts in comparison.

Generally speaking schools are interested in kids who are famous actors or celebs or the children of same – it may be that the Loughlin kids just didn’t rate high enough. Being a YouTube star is a kind of new thing and not the same as being a movie or TV star. I also don’t know what their grades and SAT’s were like – being a celeb is a plus factor but there are limits. The girls seemed to be particularly uninterested in school and I can’t imagine that they were good. Not clear to me why they were going to college in the 1st place since they already had careers that didn’t require it, except that it’s expected nowadays that everyone attend. Apparently the parents were non-college and wanted their kids to attend.

This is my perception as well. I got away with an expensive non-ivy education thanks to familial support, but it was still a wasteful decision I wouldn’t repeat.

Soon, we should see universities named and operated in part by corporations; think Nike University or Apple U. Maybe Alabama should just rename itself NFL Prep, which would boast superior pre-med, pre-law, marketing and pharmacy programs, along with athletics. Google, Samsung, BMW, Monsanto, the list of top-tier corporations that could parlay their brands into secondary education campus is endless, attracting the dollars of not only parents looking to brag of their child’s acceptance to say, Goldman Sachs U, but also leverage the required diversity and indoctrination to grab that sweet government cash.

In Philly there used to be a Korean SAT cram school called “Yale Academy” until Yale sued them. They used to have a giant billboard on top of the local H-Mart (Korean supermarket) with the slogan “With Much Pain Comes Much Gain.” It’s sort of a variation on “No Pain, No Gain” except that they promised to inflict a LOT of pain on their students – apparently a selling feature to Korean tiger moms.

Do the Hispanics and blacks that have been dragged along have the same track record.

Who is Eduardo Luiz Saverin?

I am pretty sure Brazilians count as Latino for affirmative action purpose.

Married With Children was hilarious.

I’m proud to say I’ve never watched a single episode of The Simpsons.

The Yale soccer coach is an example of corruption, something we see a lot in black local politicians and judges. At USC, where most of this admissions scam played out, the black athletic director, Lynn Swann, is an example off the other problem you get with “blacks in charge”: incompetence coupled with high self-esteem. Swann had no previous management experience and comes off as kind of stupid but personable. USC should have given him an experienced white deputy director to shadow him and babysit him. As it is, the FBI have arrested one of his staff every six months of his tenure on average.

U of Utah always has a bunch of California brats who didn’t get in to an elite school. They major in skiing.

Both lucky to ” know” the winklevoss perhaps ? No idea.

Moskowitz was out of Facebook within 4 years and not regarded as technical. ( learned to help with the nascent site by reading a, “code for dummies” book. )

From the decidedly unelite central Florida city of Ocala. ( Horse country types aside. )

This was a right place right time scenario exemplified. Reinforcing the necessity for breaking apart the scam of undergrad admissions that focuses increasingly on ethnic networking crypsis and cooption as the founder of this site, Mr. Unz develops in his excellent essay. Reinforced by the farce of this week.

Im hoping Mr Unz will have some comments and make an effort to have his essay reviewed again in this context ?

March 16, 2019 – Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon

“Academics and I.Q. are way overweighted

Solomon, who is six months into his tenure as CEO of Goldman, also explained that success isn’t about intelligence, but rather how you relate to others.

“The other thing I’d point to that’s so important is there is a real emphasis when people are interviewing around academics and I.Q. I think it’s way overweighted,” Solomon told the students. “There should be equal emphasis on E.Q. and how you interact with people, how you relate to people, and how you connect with people.

“And even in a world where more and more machines and technology are disrupting the way we do business and the way we all connect, a lot of the value is still created through human interaction and the ability to motivate people or get people to move in a direction with you. All of those are things in my experience here that had a meaningful impact on me and helped me along the way.””

It’s kind of an open secret that the most impressive sounding science fair projects are the result of being paired with a good research mentor. Basically, you tag along at the lab and be a good research assistant, and learn how to present “your” project. (This is just as true for blatantly well-off kids, but if you graduate from Harvard Medical School, your high school science fair project is just going to be a footnote in your life story, unless it was really amazing.)

(The exception, I suspect, are the really snarky clever science fair projects that occasionally make it through, though who knows…)

Yale’s black soccer coach ruined it for everyone by turning into a freelancer. He went out on his own soliciting bribes. One thing leads to another.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/14/report-college-admissions-scandal-discovered-with-parents-tip-of-yale-coachs-bribe-offer/

U. of Chicago is a lot more popular as an undergrad college than it used to be.

Yes, but the decision to attend Chicago shouldn’t be taken lightly. It is the liberal arts version of Cal Tech, without the nice weather and beautiful scenery of Pasadena. Surviving Chicago turns you into an intellectual hard ass for life.

NYU has a very high percentage of Asians. I don’t know what that means in terms of developing contacts and networks for non-Asian graduates.

NYU tuition: $51,828
No way are these Chinese and Asians paying full freight and NYC plus suburbs are full of poor working class Asians who have smart children. NYU endowment is only half billion and I will bet it is being spent down on Asian scholarships.

I think there has been a lot of fetishizing media and film studies in highschools during the past five or ten years. Believe it is a YouTube induced phenomenon. Our school calls their department “new media”. USC seems to have the most prestigious program. One of my son’s friends got in. Admittedly, she was quite talented, but it was a huge deal amongst her peers in our Northshore Chicago school district.

Proof that Lori Loughlin’s (incredibly hot) daughter isn’t qualified to attend USC: she moves into her USCdorm room/apartment and immediately puts up her initials, “OJ.” Is she that oblivious that she is unaware of one of USC’s most famous alum?

The thing is, it should not matter that much. Moderation, my friends.

There is a place for elites of whatever kind, but that should not be the end-all and be-all of your civilization. It is only that if you let it be — and right now you are letting it be.

Be brave. Do as I did. Not to toot my own horn, but I rejected Yale and the whole paradigm that you all appear to hold dear. We will live in a stratified world, very unlike what our ancestors intended, if YOU continue to place an over-emphasis on prestige colleges.

The first man on another world rejected MIT to to go to Purdue. That is all you need to know.

As an Arizona State Graduate, I’ve become inured to all the hate for ASU from Californians. For Californians, attending ASU seems to be the byword for failure.

I graduated with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from ASU in the early 80’s. At graduation I had multiple job offers. 4 years out of college I was making 6 figures and continued 6 figures until my retirement last year.

I started at Mesa Community College then transferred to ASU. As I recall, in those days, tuition was $15.00 per credit hour at MCC and something like $25.00 per credit at ASU. I don’t believe I ever paid more then a few hundred dollars for a semester’s tuition.

Of course, like most Universities, now ASU tuition is exorbitant.

I would never have been admitted to an Ivy league school but I wonder now if that wasn’t fortunate. Engineering is a tough discipline. To get through you need extraordinary discipline and focus. Even in the early 80s, I knew that a liberal arts education would yield poor career prospects. I made my way through engineering school because I didn’t feel I had any other choice.

Had I attended Ivy league, I might have been seduced by the prestige and networking possibilities to abandon STEM and take some gut major in humanities.

The girls seemed to be particularly uninterested in school and I can’t imagine that they were good. Not clear to me why they were going to college in the 1st place since they already had careers that didn’t require it, except that it’s expected nowadays that everyone attend.

A few years ago one of my college friends, who ran a business in a choice part of town, was beaten to within an inch of his life by a couple of ghetto thugs. When I learned the name of the chief suspect I navigated my way to his Facebook page, which of course was completely public (these people have no idea how to set privacy controls). I discovered an anthropologist’s treasure trove. What I witnessed on his page – the “dialogue” between him and his friends – was barely above the level of screeches and grunts. It was clearly some form of language, but in the earliest stages of its evolution. Give it another 50,000 years or so it and it may evolve into intelligible speech.

That little story is to remind you of how Facebook didn’t develop, and how it did. Facebook famously got its start by first only being accessible to Harvard students (and perhaps alum). Then Zuck opened it up to students at other elite schools. Only after that did he open it up to people further down the social scale, to the point where your Great-Aunt Ruby and your dad’s cousin Toby, who has been collecting bogus disability and welfare checks for 40 years and hasn’t done an honest day’s work since high school, now all-too-frequently comment on your posts. And all the way down to animals like the guy who beat the shit out of my friend. If Facebook had started out with Great-Aunt Ruby and the ghetto thugs Mark Zuckerberg would not be a billionaire today, unless it were as a rap industry mogul.

Which is all just a long-winded way for me to tell you why Loughlin’s hot daughter wanted to attend USC: because “social media influencers” don’t just want any audience – they want an elite audience. The audience that matters won’t pay as much attention to a 19 y.o. who isn’t in college, or isn’t at a semi-elite college. If she weren’t in college they wouldn’t feel her life was anything like theirs. Second, they would just look down on her. But a “social media influencer” who attends USC? Even girls at Harvard have a lot of friends at places like USC. Her they can pay attention to.

So that’s why it matters. It helps her build her brand, whatever that’s worth. Besides, I hear the cock carousel at USC is much nicer than the one at ASU.

OT: ‘Puzzling number of men tied to Ferguson protests have died.’

https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article228054699.html

What I remember reading is the the black guy who snitched to the police about Brown was murdered by Brown’s friends during the protests. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the snitch’s family and friends are getting revenge, or that young black men in ghettos have a higher death rate than average because they’re always surrounded by violent criminals and/or committing crimes themselves.

As far as I can tell, most lowly middle-class kids who attend the HYPS don’t really network much with the high-flyers. Social life seems to be stratified by SES.

This is an excellent point which has not been mentioned enough here One example at my college was that the international students tended to have strong social networks among themselves. Which makes sense after realizing some of them were almost royalty (literal or economic) in their home countries.

There are exceptions, and a sufficiently skilled schmoozer tends to be good at that, but the notion that going to Harvard automatically catapults you into the highest social tier is unrealistic (even if it does provide a boost). Though it does often give you stories to tell about people like that which can fool some people.

Nonetheless, those high SES Stanford folks you mention need to hire someone to do the work. And the best known quantities tend to be the better students in their classes at Stanford.

Also worth mentioning that some social activities foster more cross-SES interaction than others. For example, athletics (especially somewhat obscure sports, say fencing) can be a good opportunity for that.

P.S. One other point I think is being under-emphasized in this thread. The best college choice depends very much on the student. Some thrive with intense competition, but would fail to work hard in a less competitive environment. Others would be unable to handle top notch competition from the outset but can perform quite well given a chance to develop their abilities over time in a less competitive (and possibly more supportive) environment. As with so many things, YMMV.

If Olivia jade really wanted to be a celeb, it ultimately wouldn’t matter where she went because she already had connections to celebs. But what if she wasn’t unrelentingly ambitious?

I get that her parents wanted to keep her away from the hoi polloi. Imagine what some Arizona frat boy who was the moderately well off heir to a chain of car dealerships would have done to keep that girl in his life. Maybe she would have fallen for him. Maybe she would have reconnected with him years after graduating. Maybe she would have met someone through friends of people like this after graduation. That wasn’t up to snuff for the parents.

So they needed to keep her among those of her own kind. But given that usc isn’t any longer the safety school for rich kids, it doesn’t seem like the right place regardless. Here is a list of where the 1 percenters go. Not all are hard to get into:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html

Los Angeles finance executive who tipped off feds to college bribery scheme as it’s revealed he was seeking leniency in securities fraud case

He claimed Yale soccer coach Rudy Meredith (out freelancing) offered to help get his daughter into the school as a recruit in exchange for $450,000
Meredith resigned in November 2018 and has agreed to plead guilty to charges including wire fraud

The original tip that led to the uncovering of the college bribery scandal involving actor Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman stemmed from an unrelated securities fraud probe into a financier, it has emerged.

Morrie Tobin, a Los Angeles resident who prosecutors said engaged in ‘pump-and-dump’ stock market schemes, was the first to reveal the bribery scheme to investigators, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

Tobin, who pleaded guilty on February 27 to conspiracy and securities fraud charges, told authorities a Yale University women’s soccer coach (who was cutting out Rick Singer) had sought a bribe in exchange for helping his daughter get into the Ivy League school, the person said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6818537/PICTURED-Los-Angeles-finance-executive-tipped-feds-college-bribery-scheme.html

That’s an interesting question (why did Paul Allen attend WSU?). I did not see any convincing answers in a quick web search, so some quick speculation and hopefully someone more informed will elaborate.

It was a different time. The college arms race was less intense. Though I do find it even stranger given he was friends with Bill Gates who went to Harvard. Perhaps he had a connection with WSU? Or it was in state and just the “right” (close, but not too close, say) distance from his home? Also, was the UW/WSU prestige balance different then? In Oregon the UO/OSU balance tends to tilt to the latter for engineering, but the former overall.

Anyone have a better answer?

I’m surprised to learn how tough admission is to USC. Thirty-five years ago, I don’t think it was that difficult to get into California Universities. As an Arizona resident, I ruled out Cal colleges to avoid paying out of state tuition.

Relative to Pepperdine, USC is a much better school academically (based on test scores and rankings at least), has outstanding athletic programs, and is not a religious school but instead known as a party school (at least for the rich kids, plenty of striver grinds too). But there’s no arguing with Pepperdine’s location.

For some of the older people here that may not realize it, USC’s academic reputation is significantly higher now than it was 30 years ago.

A lot of colleges have gotten harder to get into

Presumably due to heavy competition from Asian students – both the genuinely talented and the Tiger Mom offspring.

Collective action problem.

If Facebook had started out with Great-Aunt Ruby and the ghetto thugs Mark Zuckerberg would not be a billionaire today, unless it were as a rap industry mogul.

That would be Myspace.com

That’s an interesting question (why did Paul Allen attend WSU?)…It was a different time. The college arms race was less intense. Though I do find it even stranger given he was friends with Bill Gates who went to Harvard. Perhaps he had a connection with WSU? Or it was in state and just the “right” (close, but not too close, say) distance from his home? Also, was the UW/WSU prestige balance different then? In Oregon the UO/OSU balance tends to tilt to the latter for engineering, but the former overall. Anyone have a better answer?

Perhaps the better question isn’t why he went to Washington State, but how he wound up at Lakeside School, which today has an annual tuition of ~$33,000.

Allen’s mother was a schoolteacher. His father was a library administrator at the University of Washington. They lived in a middle class neighborhood. So the family was probably smart, perhaps of an intellectual bent, but apparently not particularly well-off, and not necessarily comprised of hard-driving geniuses. Allen’s only sister (who I guess is his heiress, since he didn’t have children of his own) went to Whitman College, which isn’t exactly Harvard, either.

So how did he and his sister wind up at Lakeside School? Provincial private schools (and Seattle at the time was very provincial) can be quite good, but back then they were far easier for someone of Allen’s background to get into than they probably are today.

Aside from that, Washington State, despite being a “state university,” appears to be no slouch in terms of research. No sure where it ranked when Allen attended, but today it’s research budget puts in the top 50 among US universities.

It’s part of the concentration of wealth and has played an important role in wealth disparity trends that Charles Murray writes about. American scions typically snagged each other (and some women went looking for British title holders). But in the next tier down, well-off men used to marry below their social class. It kept the American society middle class better balanced and allowed for social mobility.

I’m not sure when this trend died out – maybe around the late sixties. Now the ´uppermost’ middle class is self-segregating so much that it reinforces the destruction of the middle class.

Well the answer is pretty simple. According to his obit in the NY Times, he scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT (Gates 1590). He attended WSU because he wanted to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/obituaries/paul-allen-dead.html

Doesn’t these examples support the connections hypothesis?

I don’t usually make personal arguments, bet let me make one here. I was a National Merit Scholar at University of Chicago,

You are aware, of course, that Chicago – along with Reed College and Cal Tech – are exceptional, as regards American colleges, in one very important matter: they all have exceedingly rigorous grading, a standard that can make grown men and women weep. Affects the general ambience in a great way.

Yep, the guys that say IQ + SAT’s trump all have never looked at the tax code. It’s highly regressive against middle income professionals’ ability to accumulate wealth.

Tax-wise, you can break out professionals into three groups:
1) Few benefits at smaller regional companies. Typically a minimal healthcare plan. Good state school kids often spend their careers here.
2) Good benefits at F500 company. Top state school kids and average Ivy kids end up here.
3) Good Benefits in Tax Advantaged Industry or Senior Leadership. These are overwhelmingly elite college alumni.

Upon graduation, their W2’s may be identical (like their SAT’s and GPA’s), but their total compensation from tax-advantaged fringe benefits is different, maybe a differential of 20%. Over time, as more compensation ends up in equity and compounds with time, the wealth differential becomes huge.

The 50 year olds in (1) are wondering about job security and eyeballing their index funds. The 50 year-olds in (3) get senior exec perks, while often paying a lower tax rate than when they were fresh out of college.

Married with Children and The Simpsons were worthy rivals.

I suppose, but the Simpson’s was overproduced cold-blooded comedy engineering while Married with Children had great at lib moments. I give the South Park crew credit for being as funny as the Simpson’s on a much smaller budget and capable of addressing current events almost in real time. The Simpson’s episodes had to be cued up months in advance to get the ugly animation work done on the cheap in Korea.

State universities (including the unofficial ones like Georgia Tech) tend to be relatively strong on the research side because state legislature Rs like STEM.

I suspect her dad’s reticence about ASU has something to do with the fact it consistently (and notoriously) ranks in Playboy’s Top 10 Party Schools in the nation, so the chances of her marrying the heir to an AZ supermarket chain are probably somewhat less than her being impregnated by one after a night of Whippets (although, in fairness, a bit of *research* on past year’s list shows SoCal well represented too, so…)

The insidious message of the Simpson’s was that middle class white people don’t deserve their safe, stable, prosperous lives in suburbia. Married with Children showed white people what liberals think they deserve.

Wasn’t Mr. Allen going to WSU a little like a Hollywood star’s kid going to ASU? (I think a rich kid would be less of a fish out of water in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix, than in Pullman WA which is very close to the Idaho border.) Why wouldn’t he have at the very least gone to UW in Seattle which is a Public Ivy?

My optometrist went to Lakeside Academy in Seattle, was accepted to Yale, but went to WSU instead.
He had a wild youth and wanted to go to a party school.
Later his Dad sat him down, told him it was time to grow up, and offered him a spot in his Optometry practice.
He took his Dad’s offer and has had a long successful career. He’s very professional and a fun guy to talk with.

Also, was the UW/WSU prestige balance different then?

UW is and always has been much more prestigious than WSU. Allen purportedly had 1600 SATs so he could have attended UW (or pretty much anywhere in those days) so I don’t know why he chose WSU. Possibly to get away from home since UW is in Seattle. He also took a job in Boston – sounds like he was not eager to be near mom and dad.

After 2 years he dropped out and went to work as a programmer for Honeywell – my guess is that he was such a coding genius that college was superfluous for him – he probably could have taught the professors more than they could teach him.

Whitman is the most prestigious private college in the state of Washington, so it has considerable cachet in that corner of the country.

There are many “locally prestigious” colleges that are highly regarded in their region, but any significant boost received by attending one those places may depend on staying in the same region after graduation.

WSU isn’t, at at least wasn’t, a bad school. Maybe Allen just wanted to get away from home and/or get a change in climate. Pullman is drier than Seattle.

Asians are just one part of it. The population has grown but not the # of seats at top schools. Nowadays they get a lot of international applicants (mostly Asians (Chinese) too) and usually enroll maybe 10% of the class from overseas (international students pay full list price – no financial aid) . They are setting aside up to 15% of seats for blacks and more for other minorities. So the # of seats available to an “unhooked” candidate has actually shrunk while the population has grown. The reason why Singer’s clients looked for “side doors” (legal and illegal) is that the # of people who can go thru the front door keeps getting smaller and your odds getting worse – maybe only 1/2 the seats are sold out the “front door”. And for schools that have early decision/early action, maybe 1/2 of those get sold in the 1st round, so only 1/4 of the total # of seats are on sale at the box office (so your 1 in 20 chance of scoring a ticket is more like 1 in 80 – might as well buy a lottery ticket as pay the application fee). That more Asians than whites are now high scorers on the SAT (despite being a much smaller % of the population) only compounds the problem. The fact that parents were willing to pay a “scalper” half a million $ for a ticket shows how scarce these seats really are. Of course, if you don’t want to see Hamilton, there are plenty of seats available for Jersey Boys. The problem is that everyone wants Hamilton tickets – you can’t brag to your friends about seeing Jersey Boys even if it is entertaining.

Married with Children was vulgar, crass, and tasteless.

It was great!

At least for the first few years. I though it kinda jumped the shark, when Al just became a mugging, grimacing cartoon. The rest of the cast remained pretty funny though.

The real answer doesn’t seem to be public but even back then WSU would have been a quirky choice for someone with 1600 SATs and who had attended a private prep school. Those were more innocent times but not THAT innocent and his buddy Bill had enough sense to apply to Harvard. My guess is that Allen was, as many geniuses are, a “quirky” guy and chose it for quirky reasons that made sense to him, which are probably not the kind of reasons that would make sense to ordinary mortals. I doubt that you could find an explanation that would make sense objectively because objectively it didn’t make any sense. Even Allen realized it and dropped out after 2 years – not only would he would have been a bad intellectual match for his classmates who were mostly headed for careers as high school teachers and such, he probably was a bad intellectual match for his professors.

Which brings up the puzzling question of why Paul Allen never married or had children. He was straight, and while not particularly social he wasn’t a Tesla-style pathologically introverted lunatic. He also had conventional masculine interests, as seen by his sports team ownership, and women like men who are interested in conventional man stuff.

It wasn’t a bad school but it wasn’t a great school either. My guess is that Allen was the only guy on campus with a (pre-recentering) 1600 SAT which would have correlated with an IQ in the 160+ range. And since he was ceilinged out, we don’t know how much higher than 1600 he would have scored.

Trump doesn’t have an MBA – he attended Wharton undergrad as a transfer student. But yes, Penn is part of the Ivy League, though in those days it was less prestigious than it is now and Wharton undergrad even less. Nowadays it is a conduit to Wall St. and consulting but in those days it was a place for sons looking to go into dad’s business (Trump) and accounting majors.

B36, this aplies also to the parents who leverage their kids into travel sports and send them to sports camps in the belief that their child will land an athletic scholarship. Mom and dad then get to wear the college sweatshirt and tell everyone that their offspring plays for Whatever State. See this all the time, big difference between the sweatshirt that says Cornell or the one that says Cornell Lacrosse.

There is a sad moment during Paul Allen’s interview on 60 Minutes when he described his hope of getting married and having a family.

At minute 10:00 here:

I don’t think it changes things here substantially.

In 2011, CBO reported that the top 1% earned 36% of their income from capital gains; the next 4% had ten percent from cap gains.

The key thing in the study was the use of “unobserved” student ability to compare performance between schools. I’m not quite on board with this, but it is interesting.

I suppose one conclusion is that if you want to be in the top 1% of earners, it makes sense to pursue a selective school. But if you see yourself existing in the top 80% of earners, pursuing a selective school does not help.

Puhlease, it’s a cartoon. You are reading too much into this. Not everything is about hatred for white people. Hell, Groening is not even Jewish. The characters are all named for his actual family – maybe he hates all their guts but I doubt it.

LP, Georgetown grads do well, including a recent president.

My niece (from northern California) went to Whitman after the York School in the Carmel valley. She is now doing a doctorate in philosophy somewhere back in California. She got an 800 in the language side of the new SAT and, because she has a Latino surname, was offered places by Harvard and Yale and Stanford and no doubt Princeton too (where her cousins on her Latino father’s side both went). She refused them all for the imagined benefits of a small college.
Some cousins who are from Oregon all went to Whitman and all have had their already secure positions in the Northwest made even more so. Two married MIT graduates, one with his doctorate from there after a BA at Whitman, where he won something called the Wall Street Journal Economics Prize. The third married a Wellesley grad. They have a son and a daughter who both, although neither went to Whitman, are well on the way to stellar careers in (Left Democratic) politics in Washington state (although I suspect that both have the other Washington in their sights too).
I doubt that either are natural leftists, but they know that that way lies power and its rewards.
So for them the family connection to Whitman will have been very useful; for my niece back in California, rather less.

I can definitely see grad school impacting long term earnings on average but grad schools are still easier to get into than undergrad programs because the smart kids have specialized by then. Some apply to med school, some to law school etc. they are not all in competition for the same top 25 schools anymore.

I do wonder if where you go to undergrad matters if one accounts for where people go to grad school. McKinsey only recruits at a dozen or so schools but you can get to McKinsey as an mba or an undergrad.

If I look at the kids I went to school with, most did not bother to apply to non state schools. Back then they assumed (wrongly) that they couldn’t afford it. After state school, some went on to get top 14 law degrees or Harvard mbas and so on. As far as I can tell, there is no difference in the wealth of those who went to ivy leagues for undergrad and those that went to top grad schools. The Ivy League undergrads I knew also got ivy leave grad degrees and it appears the grad degree is what is determining their earnings anyways. Did the undergrad degree help them get the grad degree? Maybe?

I take the point that extraordinary opportunities are more likely to come from a top school such as entrepreneurs who need investors, but probably 99% of the time it doesn’t matter where you go for undergrad as long as you can get to the prestigious school by grad school.

That’s a terrbile attitude. We need to think in terms about what’s good for whites, not think “regardless” of race.

I’m not whitey white white. Too much Levantine heritage to be included.

I look down upon mediocre whites whose only defense is “I’m whitey white white and you’re not,” to which my response is, “Yet, you need my help to figure out things I could do in the 3rd grade.”

When whitey white white ancestors were running around in animal skins, worshipping oak trees, and painting themselves blue, my ancestors were[1] creating useful things such as civilization, textiles, mathematics and laws. ’tis true, the preponderance of advances made since 1700 have been made by northern Europeans. I think that has something to do with milder winters and the ink not freezing (north) versus drought and famine (south). Climate change. Go figure.

And thus, I am 100% meritocracy, and in favor of standardized testing to see who gets to be admitted to the contest to see who gets to be enrolled.

Wasn’t it a hoot that Felicity Huffman’s daughter got a 400 point boost on her SAT? Or do you think that because she is whitey white white it’s permissible to use any advantage?

Do you want a world that is superior.not because the brainiacs.faux have inflated SAT scores, or do you want a world where the brainiacs are authentic?

To date, I have encountered quite a few competent descendents of sub-Saharan African ‘immigrants’ but none that were brainiacs. Have met many Levantine, Indian (dot), Chinese, Indonesian, and Northern European brainiacs. Prefer them all to make-up mannequins who, as my age and perception increase, look less and less human.

What you’re advocating is the same colorblind garbage that got us into this mess to begin with.

True colorblind garbage did not get us into this mess, or haven’t you been keeping up. True colorblind garbage led to disparate outcomes, and thus Affirmative Action was needed to skew the results. AA is racist.

[1] The good side. The other side was running around in animal skins, etc.

Who cares what college you get into, if your country is being overrun?

“San Antonio, Texas has had to absorb most of these released border crossers and illegal aliens, with about 37,500 being dropped off in the city. Another 24,000 were dropped off in El Paso, Texas, while 14,500 were released in Phoenix, Arizona and 8,500 were released in San Diego, California.

“At this rate, DHS is releasing more than 42,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into the country about every month. Should this current Catch and Release rate remain throughout the calendar year, by the end of 2019 DHS will have released more than half a million border crossers and illegal aliens into the U.S.

“The overwhelming majority of illegal aliens — of which there are already 11 million to 22 million living in the U.S. — are never deported.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/17/dhs-releases-84-5k-border-crossers-illegal-aliens-u-s-two-months/

Another cousin of mine (look, I’ve lived out of the USA since 1979 so all I know of the place these days is what family connections tell me), from Santa Monica, went to the University of Washington because her uncle taught there. There she met and married the son of another professor whose mother was the heiress of one of the biggest fortunes in Los Angeles. He was at the Lakeside School, but choose to go to Occidental College, and later got a doctorate from Cornell.

My point is one that has been already made on this thread: that the effortlessly well-off, like the effortlessly brilliant, go where they want to go, and are unbothered by the opinions of those outside their own magic circle.

Also, while I am sure the average Harvard mba has an easier time getting a McKinsey interview than the average UCLA mba, McKinsey and Goldman type companies are actually pretty good at selecting candidates outside of their target schools. It doesn’t surprise me that they would get that you were worth talking to. It’s been my experience that they somehow know who to talk to from 2nd tier schools and less just by looking resumes and cover letters.

Once you are looking at people who have the intelligence and work ethic to get into an ivy, but don’t go for some reason even though afterward they have the same level of professional ambitions, that Harvard bump is going to look pretty negligible statistically.

Boot always depicts himself as the golly-gee naif—“I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be from principles or conviction”

“I had not realized” summarizes Boot. He is a guy who, at his most basic, really doesn’t know very much about anything. He comes across a less intelligent, less self-aware, and much worse at writing version of Victor Davis Hansen. He’s like a 12-year old that is just learning to be aware of the news. In times past, parents would pat that kid on the head and encourage him to keep learning. They wouldn’t encourage him to write books yet.

The Boots of this world used to be rare if non-existent because in times past, people had enough shame to not try to make a career out of writing your opinion when they were profoundly ignorant. At the same time, magazines and newspapers had editors and other management types that wouldn’t hire someone like Boot. Some adult would have said “why would anyone care what he has to say about anything?”

The fact this dolt can make a living as a writer says a lot about the media business today.

Sorry for the 2nd comment on this (ok not really sorry).

“for me, conservatism means prudent and incremental policy­making based on empirical study.”

says Boot, in the same book in which he also advocates “nation-building”.

From that you can only conclude there is something seriously wrong with him, be it low IQ or some form of mental illness or some other flaw.

This is a great observation.

That means the very selective schools will double down on admitting losers.

I though it kinda jumped the shark, when Al just became a mugging, grimacing cartoon.

I felt the Jefferson character weakened the show. The writers missed a chance to have Marcy Darcy become a lesbian after Steve’s departure and acquire a fat live-in girl friend with a German Shepherd.

I have a friend (went to Tulane) who casually dropped in Tulane with Stanford. As in “when you’re talking about your top private schools, your Stanfords, Dukes, Northwesterns, Chicagos, Tulanes”…

Umm hold on a second. One of these things is not like the others.

Another friend then replied “if my kid announces he plans on going to Tulane, I’m going to tell him that instead I’ve signed him up for a nice, nurturing school in South Carolina. Its called Parris Island. The meal plan is included. As a bonus, you’ll gets lots of exercise.”

The best -looking coeds in the USA are at ASU. These little Cali twerkers wanted to avoid competition like that. Should have gone to a Big Ten school.

There’s no Affirmative Action for looks yet, is there?

Years ago, the UC system wasn’t as elite, excepting Cal Berkeley, but back then the CSU system, the state colleges, were generally pretty good schools. Since then, there has been a pretty steep decline in most CSU schools, becoming essentially very crowded 5-year community colleges, with a majority of students taking remedial courses their first few semesters before trying to get into heavily impacted or on-line classes to get the degree. Those with ambition and ability eschew the CSU and aim for the now rather competitive UC system*, where USC is somehow among the elite UC schools.

What I find curious is that, among LA people, attending UCLA marks you as an unfortunate, and of CSU-Northridge it’s best not to speak.

* The San Joaquin valley UC schools are not included in this assessment.

Puhlease, it’s a cartoon. You are reading too much into this.

Yes, I’m reading way too much into a cartoon created by a brain trust of 30 Harvard graduates.

All quite logical but not quite responsive.

Why are the only examples of successful graduates from Harvard?

It’s called cherry picking.

I’m waiting for the the woke progressives to outlaw private K-12 schools.

effortlessly well-off, like the effortlessly brilliant

The effortlessly brilliant leave us things like bubble chambers whereas the effortlessly well-off leave us nothing but debt bubbles.

If’ college ranking is as important in the USA as in France, the institution you get in is like acquiring nobility if it’s in top 30. As Us News tell USCalifornia is 22-24 nationally, I guess the entry ticket is in-valuable. Only people who have it don’t understand how much worth it has.

I was in grad school at NYU when NYU made the choice to become a sought after school.

Back in the 1970s, it wasn’t much of a school. The main campus for liberal arts and sciences, both undergrad and grad school was in the Bronx, and the Washington Square campus was where the law school and business school and film school were, as well as the dregs of their liberal arts and science classes.

In the 70s, rents in the Village were cheap.

NYU almost went bankrupt. They sold their Bronx campus to CUNY, and it is now Bronx Community College. They moved the entire operation down to the Village. The people I knew who went to NYU for undergrad and then grad school from that era were generally working class New Yorkers of all races.

In the 1980s, the Village was prime real estate again. Also, it was becoming much harder to get into the primo colleges.

NYU started to market itself as a place for rich New Yorkers who were smart and couldn’t get into the Ivies.

They did 3 things to raise their cachet:

1. They hired former Congressman John Brademas as President of NYU. He was an extremely good fundraiser, especially among Greco-Americans. He set off the raise $1 billion, which was a lot of money in the 1980s.

2. They raised their tuition to make the school seem like a top notch school. They realized rich people would think a school that charged the same range of tuition as Columbia must be good. They honestly said that

3. They gave exorbitant scholarships to the genius level middle class NYC kids. I knew a few of them, often child prodigies who were quite young when they started NYU. They would get full ride tuition, free trips to Europe, etc. One of these kids, Bala Ambati, graduated college just before his 14th birthday and is the only person in the world to ever graduate med school before turning 18.

Within a few years, there were still some working class and middle class New Yorkers, but also more and more rich New Yorkers and then rich Asians. One time a Korean friend of mine pointed out one of the top young tv stars from Korea in her dorm. The guy had the reputation at NYU of being a conceited jerk.

I agree with this. I think that the tests arent made for people of that level of intelligence.

The richest man in the world went to Princeton.

https://princetoninfo.com/princeton-connection-helps-amazons-jeff-bezos-reach-the-sky/

[336]

“the average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.”

Ambitious students prosper at elite schools. But indifferent students who excel on standardized tests do not. For example, Lori Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade, literally tweeted video “I don’t how much of school I’m gonna attend, but … I really want the experience of gamedays’ partying.” That girl would normally apply to Arizona State and less selective party schools. She would not benefit from good classes.

El Dato wrote to me:

Middle-schools kids can USE the gadgetry. They “grasp” as much about the technology as a gorilla in front a Kubrick’s Monolith.

Of course. And that is precisely my point.

The education needed by the vast majority of people in our “high-tech” society is about the same as that of a gorilla. I.e., none at all.

Our “high-tech” society is “high-tech” in the sense that people like me invent very complex technology that can be used by morons, true morons.

I am co-inventor on more than half-a-dozen cool high-tech patents. Unless you are an expert in Galois-field techniques for error-correction coding, you will not even understand those patents, but I can assure you tha there is a decent chance you have used devices embodying some of my work.

By the way, I learned all this through a combination of being self-taught and learning on the job after getting my Ph.D. Not a single whiff of my knowledge that led to the patents came from any class I ever took.

So, even for me, the schooling was irrelevant.

But, do you now understand my point? The fact hat we live in a high-tech society is no reason at all that the vast majority of people need more education. On the contrary, they can rely on people like me to create high-tech-for-dummies so that they no longer need to understand things but can just push the right buttons and navigate to the right menus.

Kinda like the Jetsons. Rather depressing in a way.

The most important thing in education is that there is just the right number of white kids around. Not too many because that is racist. And not too few because that is segregation.

Now, when the numbers of white children are basically falling through the floor, white parents are hoarding the remaining few white students. No mention of maybe creating an environment where whites might actually want to have children.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-parents-are-enabling-school-segregation-if-it-doesn-t-ncna978446?cid=referral_taboolafeed

This is the world we live in now–constant harranging from the slimy Noah Berlatsky’s of the world … how dare you evil racist bastards even think about going off and leave other people alone?

There is something very, very vile in this ideology of Jewish minoritarianism. You don’t have the right to your own schools or country clubs, neighborhoods or nations. Whatever you build you *must* let other people in. You must not leave! (I.e. you are a slave.)

We hate you … but we want you around.

Shawn Returns wrote:

What does “doing well” really mean? Does it just mean making a lot of money? Some of us, including I think Steve Sailer, chose a job because, at least relative to other career options, it is enjoyable.

True enough.

But that applies whether you go to Harvard or Chico State. Probably washes out in the stats — i.e., some Harvard grads and some Chico State grads go for the money, some go for a good lifestyle.

In the case of my two brothers, the Harvard grad chose to be a “starving artist,” and seems to be happy with that life. But did he need to go to Harvard to be a starving artist?

My brother who got his BA from Stanford had a bunch of lousy sales jobs. When he got out of high school, he already had the knowledge needed to carry out these jobs. (Objectively, the real requirement was a driver’s license!) Why couldn’t someone smart enough to get into Stanford do better? He was smart, but low energy and lacking in ambition. Unfortunately, I don’t think this was a “lifestyle choice”: he did not seem to enjoy these lousy jobs. Sad.

One thing this “scandal” points out is that conservatives\nationalists should offer a program to shut down this whole “Yale or Jail” college treadmill.

It’s a terrible system with a bunch of bad effects:
— suppressed middle class fertility from (cost of children)
— middle class debt
— crappier adolescence for kids (and family life for their families)
— leftist indoctrination of your kids
— delay in starting adult life
— college debt
— debt further delaying adult life, marriage and fertility

As i’ve written in a few comments before the solution would be a system of certification exams that people could take to demonstrate competence at every from basic literacy and numeracy on through to specific subject matter. And then to establish their meaningfulness, have local and national governments use them, rather than “college degree” in hiring.

This would have a huge number of saluatory effects:
— depressurize middle class family life–including family size choice
— allow kids to relax and enjoy their youth–studying, but also having important maturing experiences
— giving kids annoyed\bored by HS but nontheless not idiots a method of demonstrating competence, so when it kicks in self-motivation
— enabling on-line learning possibilities to flourish (even though a lot is out there it is basically orthogonal to the system; we still educate on a Fordist model)
— cutting govenment expenditure on education
— cutting off a huge amount of leftist indoctrination (and female sluttification)
— cutting out a huge number of leftist sinecures in academia and making those people get real jobs, which will improve–in the net–their attitudes, behavior and politics
— cutting down on student debt
— faster adulthood\earning because of faster\lower-debt path
— higher middle class\white fertility because of faster path to white collar employment with less debt

Just a huge “virtuous circle” of conservatism if we can radically reign in the college beast and allow kids–all people–to demonstrate their competence faster\cheaper outside this bloated, parasitic system.

res wrote to me:

Nonetheless, those high SES Stanford folks you mention need to hire someone to do the work. And the best known quantities tend to be the better students in their classes at Stanford.

Well, you might suppose that, but the stats seem not to back that up. Indeed, if I were hiring, I would tend to look kindly on someone from my alma mater, Caltech (he must be smart of ‘Tech admitted him!).

In practice, though, the people I have interviewed when we were hiring came from all over the place and I recommended the best candidate: over the years, the one candidate I have most strongly recommended came from Cal State LA — turned out to be the right choice.

res also wrote:

One other point I think is being under-emphasized in this thread. The best college choice depends very much on the student. Some thrive with intense competition, but would fail to work hard in a less competitive environment.

True. But one thing most people may not be aware of is that the HYPS nowadays brag about holding yoour hand and trying to make sure you make it through no matter what (when we were college-hunting, they were quite explicit about that). I.e., they are not that competitive, once you get in of course.

I suspect that the roughest competition nowadays, outside of MIT and Caltech,, are within the “Public Ivies.”

“Stop, we have too many beautiful daughters of rich, famous, and successful parents!”

Just want to say thanks for all your (recent) enlightening posts. Thanks for taking the time.

There’s a pretty good LA to ASU pipeline that you’re discounting here, Steve. You can walk down Mill Street or Old Town Scottsdale and run into celeb’s kids pretty regularly.

I graduated from a top college, and had trouble finding a decent job. Part of it is how good the career services are at a particular college. My college is really well known among grad schools, but had almost no career services.

One of my kids was accepted at BU. Not her first choice. There was another school, perhaps not quite as prestigious, which had a vastly better career services section than BU, so she went to this other school which was probably the third most prestigious of the schools that accepted her, but had one of the top career placement services of any school in the country. I won’t say which school, because they take so few people from my state it would give away my identity.

There are two factors — one is BU may not have had really good career services, the other being a good looking and outgoing barmaid can make far more money in tips than the average 20 something college grad.

One mistake people on both the left and the right make is underestimating their rivals. Many folks on the left assume Trump is an idiot, without seeing he has phenomenal branding, marketing and persuasive skills. That is why he is President. They underestimate Trump just as they underestimated Bush II.

Many folks on the right underestimated Obama, not realizing he had once-in-a-generation political skills and charisma. Now many on the right underestimate AOC. Other than Trump, nobody is as much a master manipulator of modern media than AOC.

Remember Sun Tzu.

The reason there are so many international students is that they pay full freight.

Did Bezos drag anybody along in his wake? I never hear about anybody else at Amazon other than Bezos.

They/Jeff/whoever fired Roy Price after he got mau maued by the #metoo faction for minor transgressions. The Amazon original content went downhill so I stopped Amazon prime. They put some woman in his place. IOW what Amazon offers for Prime Video at $120 per year became feminized and I am out.

Roy Price Quits Amazon Studios After Sexual Harassment …
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/business/media/roy-price-amazon…
Oct 17, 2017 · Amazon’s original-programming division was already considering a change in strategy before the accusation against its top executive. Sections. SEARCH. Skip to content …

Larry Kudlow went to Princeton, so did talk show host John Bachelor.

The April Fools Day episode with him was a classic though.

Well, you might suppose that, but the stats seem not to back that up.

And in support, you offer (for the hundredth time) your personal anecdotes. Yes, we get that you don’t think you learned anything in college, and that you believe that no one else did, either, at least not if they attended a good school. We get that you believe the old canards about how “getting in is the hardest part” and “the only value is the connections you make” and “I hired a Harvard grad one time and he didn’t have no common sense, just book larnin!”

These are hoary Hollywood clichés popularized by thousands of movies and television shows. They’re eagerly lapped up by the vast majority of people who desperately want to believe they haven’t missed out on anything by not challenging themselves. They are not accurate.

Mind, I’m not trying to convince you. You’ll go on posting countless thousands of words in support of these tired old stereotypes. I’m sure you have your reasons.

Right? Said no college, or nightclub, ever. They are pretty, though:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6819767/Lori-Loughlin-jokes-money-spent-daughters-education-YouTube-video.html

Cant happen, the test would have disparate impact. That’s the education monopoly ace in the hole. No one else can test people or applicants and act in any way on the results.

I know several 50+ OSU grads. To a man, they say there is no way I could have gotten in under the current standards.

The Chinese use birth tourism (pregnant Chinese women coming to California to have their babies). That advantages the children later when applying to the University of California system.

Is mentioning that politically incorrect?

P.J. O’Rourke, editor-in-chief at National Lampoon and non-Ivy League graduate, eventually grew up. When he did he was wrong about pretty much everything in the world. However, Parliament of Whores was and still is brilliant.

I loved reading “The Appleton’s” in National Lampoon every month and would race my bike a few miles to a 7-11 (pre-Indian ownership days) to buy a copy when I knew it had been delivered. Yes, I used to call 7-11 when I was a 12 year old boy.

Swarthmore (“The Kremlin on the Crum [Creek]”-Spiro Agnew) has its SJW side, but it also has an engineering program and a highly regarded econ department. And Latin and Greek.

Chico state is nice.

Now, that’s a cool name.

Bezos was dragged in someone else’s wake?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Witherspoon

And for US tourists in Scotland, the very fine stained glass window for Witherspoon (Declaration of Independence signatory) in the Abbey Church of Paisley is worth a visit.

California looks to be on the verge of regulating home schooling in a way that amounts to harassment. The excuse is that there was a case where a kid was abused. Few progressives homeschool, so there won’t be much opposition.

You also went to college with some of the hottest women on the planet.

I’ve always dreamed of bailing on my boring finance career, getting a Phd in something that would be of interest to 6 foot blondes, and becoming a professor at ASU.