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Why do few elite colleges respond to increasing demand by expanding the size of freshmen classes? Back in 2013, I tracked the remarkable stability of number of undergraduates enrolled at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT over recent decades, a time during which their number of applicants, domestic and foreign, skyrocketed. I concluded:
Perhaps the defining activity of American life since the 1960s has been elites conspiring to become more elite. While it’s fun to point out the hypocrisy of the most successful, it’s also worth noting that maybe they are on to something in their desire for quality over quantity in people.
My alma mater, Rice U., isn’t in the HYPSM stratosphere, but its the leading private college in Texas. And, like a lot of things in Texas, it’s been growing.
Undergraduate enrollment was only about 2,700 when I graduated in 1980. Then, it was the smallest college in the country to play big time football: e.g., Rice hosted Heisman Trophy winners Earl Campbell and Billy Sims. The Division I football team comprised approaching 3% of the student body, which made it harder to hide the football team in the overall student body than at, say, Texas. This meant that Rice, an academically rigorous STEM-oriented college, had to both have higher academic standards for football players (making recruiting harder) and more concerns about them diluting the quality of the student body.
Enlarging the student body better hides jocks and big donors’ dumb kids in the bottom 25% of the SAT score range, below what the USNWR reports.
Undergrads at Rice now number over 4,000, and the Board recently announced plans to expand to 4800 undergrads by 2025, which would be 80% more than when I graduated in 1980. Rice will also expand its number of grad students, for a total campus of 9000, compared to 3500-4000 in my day.
I wonder what distinguishes the private colleges that choose to grow from those that don’t?
One guess is acreage. Rice has an ample 300 acre campus in a nice part of Houston. (In contrast, UCLA has 45,000 students, grad and undergrad, on 420 acres.)
Much of Rice’s acreage was devoted when I was there to the huge football stadium’s giant parking lot. And that lot lot only fills up when Texas or Texas A&M plays Rice. In pro-growth Texas, it’s not hard to get the permits to put up more buildings on campus.
In contrast, Harvard’s 209 acre main campus in Cambridge seems a little cramped already, relative to the fame and wealth of the school. And new construction projects on the other side of the Charles River on a 48 acre site in Boston’s Allston neighborhood have been running up Big Dig-type costs during Harvard’s 21 year travail to get it built.
Maybe it’s a general regional attitude about growth. Massachusetts has been much more elitist and restrictive since the late 1960s, while Texas remains go-go expansive.
My guess is that Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT keep their eye on Harvard. If Harvard announced it was adding 50% more students, then YPSM would too. But Harvard probably figures: Why bother, we’re #1 as it is and if our four biggest rivals also expanded, that would cause us some dilution issues?
In contrast, Rice can do what it wants without automatically setting off a nationwide trend.
Still, Rice growing 80% in 45 years is not a breakneck rate of expansion.
Commenter Engineer adds:
Rice is interesting, I’d like to see internal strategic growth plan. I was on the campus last year; available space is mostly built out now. They are across the street from the largest medical center in the world – not growing that way. From a REIT disclosure a few years ago, Rice owns much/most of the [adjacent] Village shopping center out to Kirby. I would speculate they have been buying the houses to the north for decades as they come on the market.
I was talking recently with an alum about how long the stadium would survive, given the more limited interest in football among younger alums and the tertiary conference where Rice now plays. I give the program and the stadium 10-15 years; it’s demise will free up more space on campus.
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*clutches pearls, hyperventilates, searches for fainting couch*
PS: Yale did add two new undergraduate colleges in the past decade, though its primary focus has been renaming colleges after POCs you’ve never heard of.
The explanation is simple.
Most people who deserve to be at the Ivies and Stanford cannot get in. Those who do get in are admitted on a more or less random basis.
This makes them very, very appreciative that they were admitted. The schools like that.
It also causes the students to think that they are much smarter than they really are. This can be a real problem if they end up in a field like engineering in which reality has a nasty tendency to bite back.
But in law, politics, even medicine, who you know tends to count for more than what you know. The connections you made at the HYPS can more than compensate for the fact that you are not as smart as you think you are. (For anyone who thinks that medicine is like engineering: nope, I have a close family member who is a pathologist. The pathologists get to see the other docs’ screw-ups. The docs’ reputations, even among the other physicians, has very little to do with reality. Too much randomness in the data.)
When we were college-hunting a few years back with our kids, I was impressed with how not-so-smart the students we met at the HYPS were. MIT was different — again, hard to fake engineering. And my own alma mater, Caltech, well…. even weirder than it was when I was there. But the kids did not seem quite as bright.
Not really. The Ivies aren't looking for intelligence, they are looking for the kids who are most likely to have cultural, political and economic influence in future generations. This is why Yale still wants to attract future Kavanaughs and Mnuchins and Harvard still wants Kushners. It is also why they want loud annoying leftist activist types.
Yes, networking is most of the game - and Ivies want people who are good at networking and can take advantage of networking. This is why prowess at sports plays a much larger role in getting into an Ivy than it should if you were looking for "smart kids".
What Ivies really don't care about are quiet genius engineer types who don't socialize well. This is also why Ivies don't want a lot of high IQ East Asian males.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @meretricious, @Anonymous, @Marty T
I suspect that the current value of an Ivy to an attendee is exactly the opposite of networking, rather it Is that it makes you distinctive and desired as an applicant to positions where you don’t personally know anyone. I think this comes in tandem with the broader and larger applicant set towards ivies. These schools now have wide and general appeal while in the 80s they had 30% acceptance rates as far fewer were even interested. Since everyone now desires the cache and value of harvard, the Harvard applicant gets jobs at the state department or private equity fund even if he knows no one there personally.
The football players will be the only boys on campus by the time the feminist party is finished.
Or you could call it CHYMPS
As Thomas Sowell liked to point out, the more applicants your school rejects, the higher its score on the USN&WR rankings.
Harvard has really botched the Allston campus build. There is a lot of in-fighting about who gets stuck over there. The gripe is that some of the graduate schools don’t want to be exiled from the historic Harvard square/campus & transplanted over there.
MIT and SYPH, because MIT will never be mixed up with STDs.
I went looking for the historical growth of Purdue’s West Lafayette campus. I could not find it– but I did find that Purdue has all of the old yearbooks online! I am thinking that it was a bit shy of 30,000 total students, when I transferred in, forty-five years ago. This autumn, it is just under 50,000 students, with a little over 10,000 freshman! I think that in the 1960s, the entire student body was still under 10,000!?!
All over the UK there are former polytechnics and teacher training colleges now boasting the "university" title. For example, the small cathedral city of Chichester, UK, whose entire population is smaller than the size of my old place's enrollment, has a university which was formerly Bishop Otter Teacher Training College (and was female only until 1957).
University education has expanded insanely driven by credentialism - it's sold to kids at school with "the graduate premium" as bait, when
a) the premium has halved since the huge expansion of universities
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/22-10-2019/return-to-degree-research
b) the "graduate premium" is confounded by things like intelligence and background. Bright people tend to earn more whether they've been to university or not.
We managed perfectly well for a long time without graduate teachers and graduate nurses. When Mrs Thatcher started this baleful trend in 1981, graduates were less than 20% of primary teachers and only just over 50% of secondary teachers.
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/wp1983/index.html
But The Powers That Be love universities, because the one thing they do a great job of is political indoctrination. That's why on the rare occasions a brave student, almost inevitably male, raises his voice in opposition, he must be unpersoned and driven out. A UK graduate today may not know many things, and may be burdened by unrepayable student debt,but they know One Big Thing - Racism Is Wrong, where the definition of racism has expanded even faster than the universities. These days judging people by the content of their character but not their skin colour is big-time Racist. Disparate Impact!
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/graduates-continue-to-benefit-with-higher-earningsGuardian on one of the new universities, Lincoln
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/sep/30/how-lincoln-university-regenerated-the-east-midlands-cityIt's all about the good restaurants! The fact that the uni is funded by debt, only half of which will ever be repaid, is as nothing compared with the benefits of destroying a "provincial backwater".
I would say that a lot of the character of a place can be lost in a big expansion. I never considered any big schools. Being able to walk wherever you want on campus and get where you want to go fairly quickly is a big plus in my mind. That to me was the big reason to live in the dorms. I never considered going off campus and when I had to for my two semesters of graduate school, I was very lucky to find a place that was only a few blocks away.
I would say a lot of the reason the elite schools don’t change much is their alumni. When you realize how good you have it, I think that leads to a natural conservatism, all the woke talk notwithstanding. Note how wokesters with money and privilege make sure their own family and friends continue to keep and add to what they have.
Most people who deserve to be at the Ivies and Stanford cannot get in
Not really. The Ivies aren’t looking for intelligence, they are looking for the kids who are most likely to have cultural, political and economic influence in future generations. This is why Yale still wants to attract future Kavanaughs and Mnuchins and Harvard still wants Kushners. It is also why they want loud annoying leftist activist types.
Yes, networking is most of the game – and Ivies want people who are good at networking and can take advantage of networking. This is why prowess at sports plays a much larger role in getting into an Ivy than it should if you were looking for “smart kids”.
What Ivies really don’t care about are quiet genius engineer types who don’t socialize well. This is also why Ivies don’t want a lot of high IQ East Asian males.
One of my brothers graduated from Stanford. The other from Harvard.
Loser #1 and Loser #2.
I did grad school at Stanford, and I knew a lot of undergrads. Not a one has set the world on fire.
On the other hand, AOC went to BU.
You can argue that the HYPS are just not very good at finding what they are looking for.
Or perhaps 10 % of their admittees are the precious metals and the rest are just there for filler.Replies: @ginger bread man, @anon, @2BR, @Houston 1992
A century ago, Harvard's student body was dominated by Northern WASP Protestant young men of upper middle/upper class background. The Harvard student body supported Alf Landon over FDR. The student body is no longer like that and it is now overwhelmingly liberal and leftist. This is not merely because Harvard was reacting to what it imagined was the future elite, but because it was actively shaping the future elite. Today, Harvard aggressively promotes liberals and blacks because it wants to promote liberals and blacks as future elites.
I once saw the SAT scores for Rice athletes. Football averaged like 300 points lower than the student body. It's probably similar at Duke, Stanford, etc. The issue with football is you need large numbers and at least some blacks. So I figure Rice has jock courses for their hired guns who get destroyed every Saturday.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Students per acre is a clever metric by which to measure the potential expansion of a college campus. Here in Northern New Jersey, the issue for our state colleges isn’t the space per se but the surrounding infrastructure, as the local colleges have expanded programs, but there are only so many roads in and out of campus. Since these schools tend to have a great percentage of commuters, traffic and parking are a nightmare.
Rice Stadium was once so well regarded that Super Bowl VIII was played there rather than at the Astrodome.
As for their conference, they did upgrade from the WAC to CUSA, but CUSA isn’t what it used to be. When the old SWC folded, three of the schools were left out in the cold: Rice, TCU, and SMU. TCU ended up rebounding the best, being part of the Big XII. SMU has rebounded somewhat by getting invited to the old Big East. Only Rice is stuck in a bottom-feeder conference. This is not to say that they will get rid of their stadium anytime soon, however.
Rice hasn’t hosted Texas on campus since 1997. All of their meetings hosted by Rice since then have been played at the Houston Texans’ stadium. Rice hasn’t hosted Texas A&M at all since the SWC disbanded. Their last game was in 1995 on a Thursday night and drew 39,500 for a 17-10 loss to the number 17 Aggies.
I’d guess endowment size plays a role as well. I live near a very good but not great university (well within top 100, but not top 10) that has expanded by over 50% in the past decade. The argument was more tuition dollars were useful to better amortize the school’s physical plant. The school doesn’t have a vast endowment; if the endowment were 10 times larger, I doubt tuition revenue would have been viewed as that important.
The Krispies did manage to win a national championship a few years back. It was in baseball and the team was very good, but “disturbingly lacking in diversity” by today’s standards. And they all had high IQs as well. Plus none was arrested for anything during their time at Rice. Such a shame…
With no music department, the Fighting Owl Band is a hoot to watch. AKA The Mob.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2010/12/05/sports/Y-VECSEY1/Y-VECSEY1-articleLarge.jpg?year=2010&h=330&w=600&s=fbfd2eb5590a2462be32fe7ec6329ebb0bd32283812614548ac0c639568571e7&k=ZQJBKqZ0VN&tw=1BTW, Hannah, Steve, and any other Ricers here-- these cute jars of gelatin ("jelly") snacks are imported by Gemini Foods in City of Industry. Available at your local Asian supermarket, or avoid the pandan-monium and order online.https://gliok.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/%E7%8C%AB%E5%A4%B4%E9%B9%B03.jpg
Careful looking through old yearbooks! Times have changed.
https://m.worldstarhiphop.com/web/video.php?v=wshhWQA7YzdnWI1rIpS2
WSJ has been trying to quantify returns on investment in college ed for a while now by measuring things like student debt load and average earnings after graduation. One article a while back showed that in hard fields like engineering, it didn’t matter if you went to a prestige school, but if you majored in social sciences, the prestige of your institution was everything. It became a pareto distribution. Go to the prestige school or get crushed.
Not really. The Ivies aren't looking for intelligence, they are looking for the kids who are most likely to have cultural, political and economic influence in future generations. This is why Yale still wants to attract future Kavanaughs and Mnuchins and Harvard still wants Kushners. It is also why they want loud annoying leftist activist types.
Yes, networking is most of the game - and Ivies want people who are good at networking and can take advantage of networking. This is why prowess at sports plays a much larger role in getting into an Ivy than it should if you were looking for "smart kids".
What Ivies really don't care about are quiet genius engineer types who don't socialize well. This is also why Ivies don't want a lot of high IQ East Asian males.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @meretricious, @Anonymous, @Marty T
Peter Akuleyev wrote to me:
Well… Let’s be completely honest here.
One of my brothers graduated from Stanford. The other from Harvard.
Loser #1 and Loser #2.
I did grad school at Stanford, and I knew a lot of undergrads. Not a one has set the world on fire.
On the other hand, AOC went to BU.
You can argue that the HYPS are just not very good at finding what they are looking for.
Or perhaps 10 % of their admittees are the precious metals and the rest are just there for filler.
Around 30-40% of the class were highly accomplished in a very specific area, although not necessarily academically rigorous. People who in high school were national debate champions, founders of non profit organizations, world class rowers, musicians who had played with the NY philharmonic, and other highly accomplished individuals. They were of course intelligent, but they were mostly admitted to Princeton for their accomplishments and work ethic rather than brains alone.
Then there were another 30-40% who were reasonably intelligent, but got in for reasons of elite privilege. Private schools like Dalton and Exeter send around 30 kids a year to Princeton. Current and former governors, senators, Supreme Court justices, diplomats, all expect their kids to attend an Ivy, and they usually get admitted if they’re reasonably intelligent. These people are for the most part intelligent and many of them overlap with the above group.
The last 10-15% are people who lacked academic qualifications, and got in solely because they were an athlete, an affirmative action pick, or paid their way in. The truth is most athletes at Princeton held their own in academics and many of them even majored in Engineering or the hard sciences. That’s because Princeton doesn’t offer athletic scholarships, only need based scholarships. Ferdinand Marcos’ daughter reportedly attended Princeton in the 80s under a pseudonym, but was eventually found out. She was unable to complete her degree. Michael Bloomberg Sent his daughter to Princeton and donated a $20 million building in honor of her graduation. These people tend to resent the university after they graduate because in truth it was really hard and they couldn’t keep up.
Another point to note is that Princeton has roughly 10% of the undergrads coming in from abroad. Around half come from China, Korea and India, while the other half are from the rest of the world’s countries.
My (public, as are nearly all UK unis except Buckingham) alma mater has tripled its undergraduate numbers since the 1970s.
All over the UK there are former polytechnics and teacher training colleges now boasting the “university” title. For example, the small cathedral city of Chichester, UK, whose entire population is smaller than the size of my old place’s enrollment, has a university which was formerly Bishop Otter Teacher Training College (and was female only until 1957).
University education has expanded insanely driven by credentialism – it’s sold to kids at school with “the graduate premium” as bait, when
a) the premium has halved since the huge expansion of universities
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/22-10-2019/return-to-degree-research
b) the “graduate premium” is confounded by things like intelligence and background. Bright people tend to earn more whether they’ve been to university or not.
We managed perfectly well for a long time without graduate teachers and graduate nurses. When Mrs Thatcher started this baleful trend in 1981, graduates were less than 20% of primary teachers and only just over 50% of secondary teachers.
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/wp1983/index.html
But The Powers That Be love universities, because the one thing they do a great job of is political indoctrination. That’s why on the rare occasions a brave student, almost inevitably male, raises his voice in opposition, he must be unpersoned and driven out. A UK graduate today may not know many things, and may be burdened by unrepayable student debt,but they know One Big Thing – Racism Is Wrong, where the definition of racism has expanded even faster than the universities. These days judging people by the content of their character but not their skin colour is big-time Racist. Disparate Impact!
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/graduates-continue-to-benefit-with-higher-earnings
Guardian on one of the new universities, Lincoln
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/sep/30/how-lincoln-university-regenerated-the-east-midlands-city
It’s all about the good restaurants! The fact that the uni is funded by debt, only half of which will ever be repaid, is as nothing compared with the benefits of destroying a “provincial backwater”.
My father graduated from Purdue in 1956. It certainly would have been much different with a fifth the number of students that it has now. Going to college was actually somewhat uncommon then. Most of my father’s high school friends never went to college. Now it seems like almost everyone goes. Not only would the campuses be much larger but they would be letting in more students of average intelligence so classes would be less intellectually rigorous in order for the students to be able to pass them. It seems like it would be harder to dumb down the science or engineering courses at a place like Purdue so I wonder if the increase in students there comes disproportionately from increases in enrollment in the social sciences or humanities.
Tyler Cowan speculated that Harvard doesn’t want to dilute its faculty quality. But I find it hard to believe that Harvard had the top 2,400 professors in the country and that the best professor anywhere else is level 2,401 or below. I think Stanford, Berkeley, Call Tech, and UCLA attract faculty partly on the basis of climate.
Didn’t Rice commission McKinsey some time ago to study their sports program? They could move to D-1AA (or FCS in football), which might make them more competitive. They could possibly fit into the Patriot League, in terms of size and academics though not geography, and get to be a 16 seed in the NCAA tournament every couple of decades.
Or D-2, where they could still take athletics semi-seriously and offer scholarships, but very few D-2 schools have Rice’s academic profile. They really belong in D-3, with the likes of Washington U., U. of Chicago, Emory, etc., where sports seem to be a gentlemanly pastime.
But I guess athletics are important on campus? Did Rice students enjoy being the whipping boys of the likes of Texas and A&M? Even in C-USA they are not really competitive except in baseball.
Nothwithstanding all of the justified disdain here for big-time college athletics, there is no doubt that they increase a university’s profile, which can have direct (financial) and indirect benefits to academics.
Small towns with high school stadiums, not just a field with bleachers along the sidelines, that are larger than the high school building.
Went to my husband’s HBS reunion a couple of years’ ago. Gatherings held in big new flashy buildings over there, but it did have an unfinished look. The best thing about the Allston side of the Charles is that there is actually PARKING! Best part of the reunion was an event at the Fogg Art Museum — some real treasures of American painting on display;-)
Elite universities are still run by the faculty, to maximize their comfort and sense of “collegiality”. There’s no benefit to having more colleagues, after a point.
“Most people who deserve to be at the Ivies and Stanford cannot get in. Those who do get in are admitted on a more or less random basis.”
I recall listening to a Tyler Cowen interview where he was asked about expanding enrollment at schools such as Harvard. Cowen suggested that these schools could significantly expand enrollment without diluting the talent of the student body too much. The real problem of talent dilution would occur among faculty after the hiring binge required to maintain small class sizes. That is what these schools may be most concerned with, faculty prestige.
Steve,
Why did a Southern California kid such as yourself end up going to Texas for college?
I was looking at pictures of Rice University, and I can’t help but wonder does the US have to most beautiful universities in the world?
Has anyone here seen the new USC village in person? Looks amazing.
Both UC and Georgia Tech have been constructing all kinds of buildings without expanding acreage. The surrounding neighborhoods have gone from the bottom to the top of the SES ranks in the meantime.
Probably their administration. Just, the best scientists working there are, we all know, from all over the world. Inside and outside of the US.
Sorry to be a bore here, but have a gander at capsule biographies of Fortune 500 CEOs. The Ivies and schools adjacent are present, but so are miscellaneous private universities, state universities, &c. Outside of (1) Ivy League universities themselves and (2) the federal appellate judiciary and perhaps (3) big casino banking operations like Goldman Sachs, I don’t think you’re going to find an important realm of human endeavour for which the Ivies are actually filters. (You see quite a mess of elite degrees among presidential candidates, but the vast bulk are from Harvard or Yale, not elite institutions in general).
1. Princeton
2. Harvard
3. Harvard
4. Penn / Columbia
5. University of Chicago
6. Harvard / Stanford
7. Penn / Stanford
8. Stanford
9. Stanford
10. Walmart Heir
(https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/). Note that not all graduatedReplies: @smetana
Not really. The Ivies aren't looking for intelligence, they are looking for the kids who are most likely to have cultural, political and economic influence in future generations. This is why Yale still wants to attract future Kavanaughs and Mnuchins and Harvard still wants Kushners. It is also why they want loud annoying leftist activist types.
Yes, networking is most of the game - and Ivies want people who are good at networking and can take advantage of networking. This is why prowess at sports plays a much larger role in getting into an Ivy than it should if you were looking for "smart kids".
What Ivies really don't care about are quiet genius engineer types who don't socialize well. This is also why Ivies don't want a lot of high IQ East Asian males.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @meretricious, @Anonymous, @Marty T
engineers, by definition, are not geniuses
if you find debates about the Ivies interesting, that’s a sure sign you’ll develop Alzheimer’s
You may recall that frank ryan, who had a doctors degree in math ftom Rice, led the Cleveland Browns to their last NFL championship in 1964.
Other, less prestigious private schools are growing in Texas. Both TCU and Baylor have almost doubled their enrollment over the last 20 years. More students means more revenue and more alums. Both schools used athletic success to drive enrollment. Tuition has grown greatly, along with the increased enrollment.
My wife teaches at Kenyon College, and they always seem to end up with more students than they were trying to get. This year, they had so many extra that they had to set up a study-abroad program for freshmen, even though that is usually done in one’s junior year. They just didn’t have dorm space for all of them.
As a STEM college, what has been the change in Rice’s male female split and the international student population. Both of these impact the ability to support sports teams.
White males are getting crushed by these trends as the entire environment has changed. Some traditional sports are vanishing at varsity and club level. Title admin IX is expanding despite males become minority. The environment has become hostile. Looks like a death spiral.
Having graduated from the NJ based Ivy, I can tell you that they are aware of the problem you mentioned – that a small undergraduate student body restricts access to “underserved populations”. Princeton is one of the only universities I am aware of that has made strides to increase the size of the student body in recent years.
Princeton houses it’s undergrads in six residential colleges, which are analogous to the four houses in Hogwarts.
The most recent college to be constructed was Whitman college, named for Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, in the early 2000s.
They are currently constructing two more residential colleges for the purposes of increasing the size of the undergrad population to expand access to “underserved” communities. Also, to reduce the housing squeeze they feel every year.
So far, the donors
https://facilities.princeton.edu/projects/residential-colleges-7-and-8
I have a nephew who played football at Rice, for four years. He ended up with both undergraduate and graduate degrees, all paid for via Rice football “labor.” Nice deal; parlay that medical red shirt year! The current President, David Leebron (SCOTUS CJ John Robert’s law school roommate) is leaving soon, and has “mused” about ending NCAA Div. I football. The next guy will do it, for sure.
What do you mean they were admitted randomly. Don’t they filter for AP tests, SAT scores and teacher recommendations?
They are quite open about this: it is called "holistic admissions." My own kids had higher test scores than the median for admittees for the HYPS, and one of my kids had great "extra-curriculars." Neither got in. (They were both "wait-listed" by Caltech, which was probably the right decision: they could have hacked 'Tech, but they would have been miserable.)
As far as anyone can tell (and the admissions officers basically confirm this), it is more or less that a key admissions officer says, "Hey, I like this kid!" and fights to get the kid in.Replies: @JimB
As for their conference, they did upgrade from the WAC to CUSA, but CUSA isn't what it used to be. When the old SWC folded, three of the schools were left out in the cold: Rice, TCU, and SMU. TCU ended up rebounding the best, being part of the Big XII. SMU has rebounded somewhat by getting invited to the old Big East. Only Rice is stuck in a bottom-feeder conference. This is not to say that they will get rid of their stadium anytime soon, however.Rice hasn't hosted Texas on campus since 1997. All of their meetings hosted by Rice since then have been played at the Houston Texans' stadium. Rice hasn't hosted Texas A&M at all since the SWC disbanded. Their last game was in 1995 on a Thursday night and drew 39,500 for a 17-10 loss to the number 17 Aggies.Replies: @Barnard
The American Athletic Conference where SMU landed is getting raided by the Big XII as they are losing Oklahoma and Texas. Houston, the other former SWC school that landed in the AAC is moving to the Big XII, along with Cincinnati and Central Florida. Once they leave it is a bottom feeder league.
To summarize one of the comments at MR, it’s the goal for the elite campus types to go from a beautiful suburban neighborhood to a beautiful prep school, to a beautiful college, back to a beautiful suburban neighborhood.
All those places sort of look the same to my outsider’s eye, like what I see in architecture and decorating magazines (as much as those mags still exist). Martha Stewart and Ina Garten come to mind. Ivy really is important to these people. It’s why the arid Southwest could never hold one of these campi.
Here are the educational backgrounds of the 10 richest people in America :
1. Princeton
2. Harvard
3. Harvard
4. Penn / Columbia
5. University of Chicago
6. Harvard / Stanford
7. Penn / Stanford
8. Stanford
9. Stanford
10. Walmart Heir
(https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/). Note that not all graduated
4. University of Nebraska
5. University of Illinois
7. University of Pretoria
8. University of Michigan
9. University of MarylandReplies: @Recently Based
I think I’ve made the observation here that the size of the student body at Harvard has remained static since the 1960s, while the U.S. population more or less doubled. Over this time Harvard and the rest began increasing the numbers of foreign students as a proportion of the student body, while pursuing other diversity initiatives. So if you extrapolate that the pool of applicants with legacy status has greatly expanded due to past diversity initiatives, the seats in any given incoming class which are open to very bright applicants who don’t tick diversity or legacy boxes are vanishingly small if any exist at all. Recall that around 2000, when Presidential candidate Al Gore was defending affirmative action with the slogan “mend it, don’t end it” (has it been mended?), the first of all four of his children who were to gain admission to Harvard as the grandchildren of a U.S. Senator and children of a U.S. Senator, U.S. Vice President, and alumnus.
Of course it’s a conspiracy theory but the sum of these trends sure does seem to exclude the legacy population of the United States (with the exception of coastal WASP types who are now firmly within the UMC) from the glide path into the ruling class.
Harvard and its peer institutions aren’t going to bother, because no one in power is going to make them bother about being government subsidized playgrounds for the children of already wealthy international elites. These institutions can always coopt any criticism or reform by admitting the children of the critics and reformers into the club, at which point the incentive to make it less exclusive is greatly diminished.
The US population has grown tremendously since 1965, but I am not so sure the Ivy-capable population grew.
Whites had fewer kids, so that lowered the number of very smart kids. Most of the population growth has been Hispanic, and to a good first cut, none of them are smart enough for the Ivy League. The non-white caucasoid population has also grown. There are a lot of bright Indian kids, but the Egyptians and Pakistanis et al are pretty thick. I know we tend to get third-world elites, but barring population stratification, the elite of a country with an average IQ of 90? The Eastern European Jews they ain’t.
There are more Asians, and if IQ were the sole criteria, what, like 20% are bright enough for the Ivies? But Asians don’t have many kids. The overbreeding their niche award goes to Hispanics, who have something like four kids per family, compared to the Asians’ one. I am sure that one day the intelligent upper class, at least intelligent compared to the heavily Indio masses will be all, “my brown brothers! We have arrived to lead you” in the US, but right now, they are still drinking and socializing (upper-class Latinos are amazingly social) in their homelands.
I’m sure Steve could do a Moneyball estimate on the numbers of very smart 18 year-olds in 1970 and today. Idiocracy even within populations is a thing. Coupled with demographic change, I would not be at all surprised if there were more bright teens in 1970.
But the population now is so much bigger than 1970 — unfortunately — that there are probably more highly intelligent people, albeit a lower percentage of the population. Of course I’m just guessing here too.
Moreover, there are many Hispanics in the USA and elsewhere who are sufficiently intelligent to succeed at an elite university with vigorous academic standards, albeit not at the same rate as nonHispanic whites and several of our biggest Asian immigrant groups. Many of the Hispanics are predominantly white European (from Mexico, not so much from El Salvador and Guatemala). And enough of those who are mostly-non-white Hispanics are quite intelligent as well — it’s a huge group we’re talking about.
One of my brothers graduated from Stanford. The other from Harvard.
Loser #1 and Loser #2.
I did grad school at Stanford, and I knew a lot of undergrads. Not a one has set the world on fire.
On the other hand, AOC went to BU.
You can argue that the HYPS are just not very good at finding what they are looking for.
Or perhaps 10 % of their admittees are the precious metals and the rest are just there for filler.Replies: @ginger bread man, @anon, @2BR, @Houston 1992
My undergrad experience validated that to me at a prestigious Ivy in the country’s most hated state. Around 5-10% of the undergrad student body we’re geniuses. Einstein or Fuller level geniuses. These are the 15 year old headline makers who discovered new Ways of sequencing DNA in their free time. They tended to have low social-emotional intelligence, but that gave them an edge because they focussed all their time on their specialty and weren’t partying all the time. Publishing papers and doing independent research takes a lot of time. No discernible pattern for who these people were, some were children of immigrants, others were “legacy” Americans.
Around 30-40% of the class were highly accomplished in a very specific area, although not necessarily academically rigorous. People who in high school were national debate champions, founders of non profit organizations, world class rowers, musicians who had played with the NY philharmonic, and other highly accomplished individuals. They were of course intelligent, but they were mostly admitted to Princeton for their accomplishments and work ethic rather than brains alone.
Then there were another 30-40% who were reasonably intelligent, but got in for reasons of elite privilege. Private schools like Dalton and Exeter send around 30 kids a year to Princeton. Current and former governors, senators, Supreme Court justices, diplomats, all expect their kids to attend an Ivy, and they usually get admitted if they’re reasonably intelligent. These people are for the most part intelligent and many of them overlap with the above group.
The last 10-15% are people who lacked academic qualifications, and got in solely because they were an athlete, an affirmative action pick, or paid their way in. The truth is most athletes at Princeton held their own in academics and many of them even majored in Engineering or the hard sciences. That’s because Princeton doesn’t offer athletic scholarships, only need based scholarships. Ferdinand Marcos’ daughter reportedly attended Princeton in the 80s under a pseudonym, but was eventually found out. She was unable to complete her degree. Michael Bloomberg Sent his daughter to Princeton and donated a \$20 million building in honor of her graduation. These people tend to resent the university after they graduate because in truth it was really hard and they couldn’t keep up.
Another point to note is that Princeton has roughly 10% of the undergrads coming in from abroad. Around half come from China, Korea and India, while the other half are from the rest of the world’s countries.
Journalism.
Economics of survival.
Enroll as many high tuition-paying (i.e. debtor) STEM undergraduates (and liberal arts graduate students) as facilities can hold and who meet the criteria. (1,000, Bio 101 kids in a cavernous lecture hall or online are a real profit center.) Then, flunk out 80% of them before the third year or, better yet, sell them on liberal arts programs for a few extra years (most had already accumulated a bunch of elective units anyhow).
As mills for our future Criminal Elite, Ivies increasing their student populations would be debasing the coin of the realm. They can afford to increase the number of minorities, deserving or not, far more than they can “afford” upping numbers to take advantage of demand.
Stanford has become more popular over the past couple decades, but I don’t know if I’d put it up there in prestige with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, etc. It’s rise in popularity recently is largely due to its association with industry and professional schools i.e. Silicon Valley, law/biz school. Its academic departments generally aren’t as prestigious as those of MIT, Berkeley, HYP, etc.
Is the networking aspect of ivies still that valuable? It was definitely the value of ivies throughout most of the 20th century, but now I have my doubts.
I suspect that the current value of an Ivy to an attendee is exactly the opposite of networking, rather it Is that it makes you distinctive and desired as an applicant to positions where you don’t personally know anyone. I think this comes in tandem with the broader and larger applicant set towards ivies. These schools now have wide and general appeal while in the 80s they had 30% acceptance rates as far fewer were even interested.
Since everyone now desires the cache and value of harvard, the Harvard applicant gets jobs at the state department or private equity fund even if he knows no one there personally.
Not really. The Ivies aren't looking for intelligence, they are looking for the kids who are most likely to have cultural, political and economic influence in future generations. This is why Yale still wants to attract future Kavanaughs and Mnuchins and Harvard still wants Kushners. It is also why they want loud annoying leftist activist types.
Yes, networking is most of the game - and Ivies want people who are good at networking and can take advantage of networking. This is why prowess at sports plays a much larger role in getting into an Ivy than it should if you were looking for "smart kids".
What Ivies really don't care about are quiet genius engineer types who don't socialize well. This is also why Ivies don't want a lot of high IQ East Asian males.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @meretricious, @Anonymous, @Marty T
It plays both an active and passive role. It looks for kids it believes will be elite, but it also serves as a gatekeeper and shapes the makeup of the future elite.
A century ago, Harvard’s student body was dominated by Northern WASP Protestant young men of upper middle/upper class background. The Harvard student body supported Alf Landon over FDR. The student body is no longer like that and it is now overwhelmingly liberal and leftist. This is not merely because Harvard was reacting to what it imagined was the future elite, but because it was actively shaping the future elite. Today, Harvard aggressively promotes liberals and blacks because it wants to promote liberals and blacks as future elites.
Rice has suffered quite a bit under its current president. When he first arrived from the East, he made the remarkably idiotic comment that he didn’t know anything about the place before he took the job. It has been downhill ever since, and yet he’s still there.
Rice should have followed the HYPSM model. Its endowment-to-student ratio used to be enormous. It had a pleasant, uncrowded campus.
One thing Rice could not control was the growth of the Texas Medical Center (a collection of hospitals) across the street. It grew upward, and its towering buildings now loom over the university.
First-becoming-Second World problems 😉
Whites had fewer kids, so that lowered the number of very smart kids. Most of the population growth has been Hispanic, and to a good first cut, none of them are smart enough for the Ivy League. The non-white caucasoid population has also grown. There are a lot of bright Indian kids, but the Egyptians and Pakistanis et al are pretty thick. I know we tend to get third-world elites, but barring population stratification, the elite of a country with an average IQ of 90? The Eastern European Jews they ain’t.
There are more Asians, and if IQ were the sole criteria, what, like 20% are bright enough for the Ivies? But Asians don’t have many kids. The overbreeding their niche award goes to Hispanics, who have something like four kids per family, compared to the Asians’ one. I am sure that one day the intelligent upper class, at least intelligent compared to the heavily Indio masses will be all, “my brown brothers! We have arrived to lead you” in the US, but right now, they are still drinking and socializing (upper-class Latinos are amazingly social) in their homelands.
I’m sure Steve could do a Moneyball estimate on the numbers of very smart 18 year-olds in 1970 and today. Idiocracy even within populations is a thing. Coupled with demographic change, I would not be at all surprised if there were more bright teens in 1970.Replies: @RadicalCenter
Thank you for the well-thought-out comment. Agree with some of what you surmise, too.
But the population now is so much bigger than 1970 — unfortunately — that there are probably more highly intelligent people, albeit a lower percentage of the population. Of course I’m just guessing here too.
Moreover, there are many Hispanics in the USA and elsewhere who are sufficiently intelligent to succeed at an elite university with vigorous academic standards, albeit not at the same rate as nonHispanic whites and several of our biggest Asian immigrant groups. Many of the Hispanics are predominantly white European (from Mexico, not so much from El Salvador and Guatemala). And enough of those who are mostly-non-white Hispanics are quite intelligent as well — it’s a huge group we’re talking about.
Rice has become one of those obligatory near elite colleges that top kids who apply to 15-20 schools all apply to in recent years, along with USC, Vanderbilt, Duke, Northwestern, UChicago, BU, NYU, Emory, Georgetown and Washington U.
Yale expanded their incoming freshman class size by 15% in 2017, 2018 and 2019. They also added a branch campus in Singapore, but recently announced termination of that program. Prior to the expansion they admitted around 1,300 students. For the class of 2025 they enrolled nearly 1800.
Of the top 5, Stanford probably has the most room to grow. At 8,180 acres, their campus is the second largest in the nation, housing a total of 17,000 students incl. 7,000 undergrads. When they first surpassed Harvard as the school with the lowest admission rate back in 2013, they tried to expand their class size by first adding the number of dorm rooms(Palo Alto is too expensive for off campus housing). But Santa Clara county gave them so much grieve they ended up withdrawing their expansion application two years ago. So their incoming freshman class is stuck at 1,700. They also cancelled a second campus in NYC back in 2011, giving that honor to Cornell.
The rest of the top 5 are a lot more compact by comparison. Harvard has 209 acres for ~21,000 students. Yale has 1,015 acres for 12,000 students. Princeton has 600 acres for 8,400 students. MIT has 166 acres for 11,520 students. So their corresponding density is:
Harvard: 100 students per acre
Yale: 11.8 students per acre
Princeton: 14 students per acre
Stanford: 2 students per acre
MIT: 69 students per acre
But all look plenty roomy compared to Columbia: 31,500 students on 36 acres, or 875 students per acre.
The most important “fix” for higher education is to allow people to work around it, or skip it.
There simply isn’t any requirement with our current technology for every student to plop down in university classes. Is your typical Harvard professor–if you get one–a better lecturer than the folks recruited to do one of the Teaching Company’s “The Great Courses”?
The fix is to have a system of competency and subject knowledge exams, and for the feds–and states–to hire only from them. Once you the kid from Harvard is simply putting up a score next to the kid from Ohio State or Cal State Fullerton or your local community college or someone self-taught with books and on-line courses … everything gets better.
The rewards here are immense:
— huge monetary savings (i.e. direct economic efficiency)
— middle class parents unburdened by college costs free to have more children (fertility suppressor removed)
— young adults unburdened by student debt will do faster family formation (fertility suppressor removed)
— higher ed sector downsized; fewer sinecures for minoritarian parasites
— young people less exposed to minoritarian indoctrination
— a visible path for high school students to adulthood, on their own self-motivated program; pointlessness and annoyance of high school reduced
— better family “quality of life” with “college” obsession reduced/eliminated
— tax savings
It’s win, win, win, win, win …
"young people less exposed to minoritarian indoctrination" - trouble is, the indoctrination is a feature as far as our overlords are concerned.
A flaw with your examination system: blacks cannot get sympathy passes that result in colleagues pretending they are just as smart and capable.
Any exam system would be captured by the same people who captured the existing educational system. It would barely be a fight. They are most of the professoriat. Maybe you’d get patriotic red-blooded exams for a year, but the next year the exams would be critical theory and excoriating lower-class whites for their racism.
I honestly don’t see the blank slate/import aliens drown white people logjam breaking before America is well and truly dead. To the extent that it’s even still alive. Over the next three years, Biden can have upwards of nine million new non-whites. The problem gets worse every year. Texas goes blue, and... the Republicans reform into what, exactly? Half the US population under 18 is not American. They are inoculated against being taught “American values” because culture is downstream of biology. Even if that were not the case, our America is just racism and hypocrisy from their pov. Though if we’re so racist? What are they doing here?
Also, Harvard grads are not looking for employment with state governments at all. In the federal government, they are mostly looking at the State Department.
That can have unintended consequences. If you see the SAT (and GRE/GMAT) scores, Asians are heavily overrepresented. That too, next to the top 2% of the potential scorers (most of the top 2% will likely prefer private sector ). What will happen if the government starts looking like UC Berkeley/UC Irvine demographics?
The enrolled student population at University of California-Berkeley, both undergraduate and graduate, is 30.2% Asian, 26.8% White, 14.1% Hispanic or Latino, 5.36% Two or More Races, 2.13% Black or African American, 0.153% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.148% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders.
Students enrolled at University of California-Berkeley in full-time Undergraduate programs are most commonly Asian Female (18.7%), followed by Asian Male (17.4%) and White Female (12.8%). Students enrolled in full-time Graduate programs are most commonly White Male (17.5%), followed by White Female (17.4%) and Asian Female (7.67%).
UC Irvine:
Race/Ethnicity Number
Asian 12,191
Hispanic 8,607
International 6,925
White 5,961
Multi-Ethnic 1,579
Black or African American 781
Unknown 757
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 79
Continuing along that thought, I have a feeling that the overall quality in our national leadership class (President, Cabinet, Congress) has notably gone down post 2000. Bill Clinton, warts and all, was an intelligent man. Everybody after him, appear to me as very ordinary. Is this just a personal illusion of me growing older or is there a general feeling that we are witnessing ideocracy in real?
One of my brothers graduated from Stanford. The other from Harvard.
Loser #1 and Loser #2.
I did grad school at Stanford, and I knew a lot of undergrads. Not a one has set the world on fire.
On the other hand, AOC went to BU.
You can argue that the HYPS are just not very good at finding what they are looking for.
Or perhaps 10 % of their admittees are the precious metals and the rest are just there for filler.Replies: @ginger bread man, @anon, @2BR, @Houston 1992
Although many of the biggest names in business like Google, Netflix, TSMC, Nvidia, Micron Technology, Cisco Systems, Zoom, Nike, Pixar etc. were founded by their grad students, Stanford undergrads can hold their own. So far they have founded or co-founded companies from Hewlett-Packard to LinkedIn, Yahoo, Intuit, Paypal, Pandora, Instagram, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Doordash, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, Trader Joe’s, Capital One, Gap, Expedia, Zillow, Redfin, and more. They also make up nearly half of the twelve partners at Sequoia Capital, the largest venture capital firm in SV.
I graduated from UCSB in 2005 at age 20 and noticed the graduating class this year was about 15 percent larger. It’s still one of the UC schools where the majority of graduates are White, and if you include the so-called White Hispanics, it’s still overall majority White. There are still very few blacks and not that many foreign students. And the campus and surroundings are quite safe. It doesn’t have much room to expand so I suppose that is a big reason the student body hasn’t gotten larger. Isla Vista still has a college town vibe after all these years, which is nice.
I did grad work at Berkeley and didn’t care for the atmosphere or student life there at all compared to Santa Barbara. Students at SB seemed much happier and had a more positive attitude. Of course, the location is very beautiful and much to be preferred if you like outdoor activities. And the climate is delightful.
One of my brothers graduated from Stanford. The other from Harvard.
Loser #1 and Loser #2.
I did grad school at Stanford, and I knew a lot of undergrads. Not a one has set the world on fire.
On the other hand, AOC went to BU.
You can argue that the HYPS are just not very good at finding what they are looking for.
Or perhaps 10 % of their admittees are the precious metals and the rest are just there for filler.Replies: @ginger bread man, @anon, @2BR, @Houston 1992
Yes. But they get some greats certainly! You have Sec. Blinken, Harvard and Columbia. For sure a “Great”. We have Jake Sullivan, Yale, Yale. Another “Great ”! After all he is the National Security Advisor. We have Chuck Schumer, Harvard, Harvard, EVEN GREATER! Our Ivy League greatness astounds me, with its over production of greatness.
There simply isn't any requirement with our current technology for every student to plop down in university classes. Is your typical Harvard professor--if you get one--a better lecturer than the folks recruited to do one of the Teaching Company's "The Great Courses"?
The fix is to have a system of competency and subject knowledge exams, and for the feds--and states--to hire only from them. Once you the kid from Harvard is simply putting up a score next to the kid from Ohio State or Cal State Fullerton or your local community college or someone self-taught with books and on-line courses ... everything gets better.
The rewards here are immense:
-- huge monetary savings (i.e. direct economic efficiency)
-- middle class parents unburdened by college costs free to have more children (fertility suppressor removed)
-- young adults unburdened by student debt will do faster family formation (fertility suppressor removed)
-- higher ed sector downsized; fewer sinecures for minoritarian parasites
-- young people less exposed to minoritarian indoctrination
-- a visible path for high school students to adulthood, on their own self-motivated program; pointlessness and annoyance of high school reduced
-- better family "quality of life" with "college" obsession reduced/eliminated
-- tax savings
It's win, win, win, win, win ...Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Rob, @epebble
The UK Civil Service used to recruit for higher grades by competitive examination – my uncle sat for it at 17, came third on the list and went from a poverty-stricken working class household to a middle-class life in the Home Counties.
“young people less exposed to minoritarian indoctrination” – trouble is, the indoctrination is a feature as far as our overlords are concerned.
There simply isn't any requirement with our current technology for every student to plop down in university classes. Is your typical Harvard professor--if you get one--a better lecturer than the folks recruited to do one of the Teaching Company's "The Great Courses"?
The fix is to have a system of competency and subject knowledge exams, and for the feds--and states--to hire only from them. Once you the kid from Harvard is simply putting up a score next to the kid from Ohio State or Cal State Fullerton or your local community college or someone self-taught with books and on-line courses ... everything gets better.
The rewards here are immense:
-- huge monetary savings (i.e. direct economic efficiency)
-- middle class parents unburdened by college costs free to have more children (fertility suppressor removed)
-- young adults unburdened by student debt will do faster family formation (fertility suppressor removed)
-- higher ed sector downsized; fewer sinecures for minoritarian parasites
-- young people less exposed to minoritarian indoctrination
-- a visible path for high school students to adulthood, on their own self-motivated program; pointlessness and annoyance of high school reduced
-- better family "quality of life" with "college" obsession reduced/eliminated
-- tax savings
It's win, win, win, win, win ...Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Rob, @epebble
But Harvard teaches something to its students that is far more important than coursework. Harvard teaches people how to be upper class. Largely due to the Jewish presence in academia, the modern American upper class is dedicated to destroying America, but Harvard is a finishing school. Maybe they teach other stuff, too. I wouldn’t know. I went to Reed College.
A flaw with your examination system: blacks cannot get sympathy passes that result in colleagues pretending they are just as smart and capable.
Any exam system would be captured by the same people who captured the existing educational system. It would barely be a fight. They are most of the professoriat. Maybe you’d get patriotic red-blooded exams for a year, but the next year the exams would be critical theory and excoriating lower-class whites for their racism.
I honestly don’t see the blank slate/import aliens drown white people logjam breaking before America is well and truly dead. To the extent that it’s even still alive. Over the next three years, Biden can have upwards of nine million new non-whites. The problem gets worse every year. Texas goes blue, and… the Republicans reform into what, exactly? Half the US population under 18 is not American. They are inoculated against being taught “American values” because culture is downstream of biology. Even if that were not the case, our America is just racism and hypocrisy from their pov. Though if we’re so racist? What are they doing here?
Also, Harvard grads are not looking for employment with state governments at all. In the federal government, they are mostly looking at the State Department.
Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell and Columbia are hurt Steve, very hurt.
I graduated from the Jesuit college in Buffalo. It is landlocked, across the street from an expressway and a historic cemetery. I suppose that they could have a secondary campus like SUNY at Buffalo, but that would be expensive. I think the college will fade away in a decade…sad. Berkeley is adding thousands of students but they don’t have housing in place for them, so how does that work?
Here’s a list, seven years old, of the “most desirable” school in each state. Only about a dozen are private, almost half in the Northeast– Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, NYU, Northeastern(!) In the South there is Duke, Vanderbilt, and Tulane, in the Midwest, Northwestern and Marquette.
West of the Mississippi? Tulane (on a technicality), Washington (by nine miles), and BYU.
The Most Desirable College In Each State [MAP]
Minnesota and Wisconsin are interesting. Private colleges are spread around more in the former; in the latter, 21 of the 23 are east of the meridian passing through Madison. That’s half the state by land, 3/4 by population. The “soda” counties. In the “pop” counties, only LaCrosse and Ashland have private schools. There are bus routes in St Paul with as many. There is nothing between Lawrence and Ripon in the east and the Minnesota border at the St Croix. Plenty of state schools, though. (UW-Stout was once private, ages ago.)
OT but relevant to college – Tony Blair’s eldest son Euan is allegedly three times more wealthy than his dad.
https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/how-euan-blair-tony-blair-son-multiverse-160-million-pounds-b957838.html
I wonder if they test them? A lot better for the firms to have pre-tested “diverse” applicants. He’s seen a market gap for acceptably diverse candidates and is attempting to supply them.
Do the British A levels or whatever they’re called take the place of AP tests and SAT, folding merit and effort into one set of measurements, or is there a meritocratic gatekeeper that does not measure test prep and tiger momming so much, like the SAT before Coleman destroyed it?
Are European companies generally allowed to IQ test? If they are, I could see American companies that want well-verified psychometric measures of their employees flying the high flyers to Europe and then testing them in a Euro division. I know programming interviews are a thing, but the meritocracy is not what it used to be, what with the gutted SAT that more than a couple guys a year receive a “perfect” score, the universities gutting what meritocracy they had to get Kushner Kash from rich dumbs, and the ever-present headwind of demographic decline. Not to mention, in a healthy society (at least without significant work from home) men will be doing the heavy thinking, and guys’ potentials can be better gauged at 22 than 18.
I’m surprised no enterprising company has set up some sort of a “partnership” with a graduate school where people take the GRE and apply to the school, and if the company likes the applicants' scores, they get an offer. Just seems like smart companies should try to work their way around the de facto ban on IQ tests.Replies: @epebble
Our good friends in the Libertarian movement are supposed be obsessed with efficiency ...what could be less efficient than having ppl spend 4-10 years of their most productive years in third level, when they could starting adding to our sacred GDP?
How many ppl left PhD programs during WW2 , eg Francis Crick , and started contributing to the war effort without their PhD credential? And when he wanted to quit the Death Sciences and join the Life Sciences , did his PhD credential deficit help him or hurt him? Where , oh where is the artillery support from the libertarians?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Is_Painless
‘…Still, Rice growing 80% in 45 years is not a breakneck rate of expansion.’
…particularly considering US population has grown by some similar amount in that interval — and presumably, Texas still more so.
Looked at in that way, Rice has merely stayed the same size, relatively. Harvard et al have shrunk.
The University of Chicago.
In 1980, undergraduate enrollment was 2,755; in 2020 it was 7,011.
https://registrar.uchicago.edu/data-reporting/historical-enrollment/
There simply isn't any requirement with our current technology for every student to plop down in university classes. Is your typical Harvard professor--if you get one--a better lecturer than the folks recruited to do one of the Teaching Company's "The Great Courses"?
The fix is to have a system of competency and subject knowledge exams, and for the feds--and states--to hire only from them. Once you the kid from Harvard is simply putting up a score next to the kid from Ohio State or Cal State Fullerton or your local community college or someone self-taught with books and on-line courses ... everything gets better.
The rewards here are immense:
-- huge monetary savings (i.e. direct economic efficiency)
-- middle class parents unburdened by college costs free to have more children (fertility suppressor removed)
-- young adults unburdened by student debt will do faster family formation (fertility suppressor removed)
-- higher ed sector downsized; fewer sinecures for minoritarian parasites
-- young people less exposed to minoritarian indoctrination
-- a visible path for high school students to adulthood, on their own self-motivated program; pointlessness and annoyance of high school reduced
-- better family "quality of life" with "college" obsession reduced/eliminated
-- tax savings
It's win, win, win, win, win ...Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Rob, @epebble
have a system of competency and subject knowledge exams,
That can have unintended consequences. If you see the SAT (and GRE/GMAT) scores, Asians are heavily overrepresented. That too, next to the top 2% of the potential scorers (most of the top 2% will likely prefer private sector ). What will happen if the government starts looking like UC Berkeley/UC Irvine demographics?
The enrolled student population at University of California-Berkeley, both undergraduate and graduate, is 30.2% Asian, 26.8% White, 14.1% Hispanic or Latino, 5.36% Two or More Races, 2.13% Black or African American, 0.153% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.148% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders.
Students enrolled at University of California-Berkeley in full-time Undergraduate programs are most commonly Asian Female (18.7%), followed by Asian Male (17.4%) and White Female (12.8%). Students enrolled in full-time Graduate programs are most commonly White Male (17.5%), followed by White Female (17.4%) and Asian Female (7.67%).
UC Irvine:
Race/Ethnicity Number
Asian 12,191
Hispanic 8,607
International 6,925
White 5,961
Multi-Ethnic 1,579
Black or African American 781
Unknown 757
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 79
https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/how-euan-blair-tony-blair-son-multiverse-160-million-pounds-b957838.htmlI wonder if they test them? A lot better for the firms to have pre-tested "diverse" applicants. He's seen a market gap for acceptably diverse candidates and is attempting to supply them.Replies: @Rob, @Houston 1992, @SaneClownPosse, @Reg Cæsar
How are the unstoppable force of companies wanting smart people and the immovable object of minorities being dumb interacting in Blighty? Do the Brits have laws/court decisions practically prohibiting IQ testing, or do businesses have the freedom of association we had to sacrifice on the altar of diversity?
Do the British A levels or whatever they’re called take the place of AP tests and SAT, folding merit and effort into one set of measurements, or is there a meritocratic gatekeeper that does not measure test prep and tiger momming so much, like the SAT before Coleman destroyed it?
Are European companies generally allowed to IQ test? If they are, I could see American companies that want well-verified psychometric measures of their employees flying the high flyers to Europe and then testing them in a Euro division. I know programming interviews are a thing, but the meritocracy is not what it used to be, what with the gutted SAT that more than a couple guys a year receive a “perfect” score, the universities gutting what meritocracy they had to get Kushner Kash from rich dumbs, and the ever-present headwind of demographic decline. Not to mention, in a healthy society (at least without significant work from home) men will be doing the heavy thinking, and guys’ potentials can be better gauged at 22 than 18.
I’m surprised no enterprising company has set up some sort of a “partnership” with a graduate school where people take the GRE and apply to the school, and if the company likes the applicants’ scores, they get an offer. Just seems like smart companies should try to work their way around the de facto ban on IQ tests.
The interesting thing about Allston is that Harvard went in there over 20 years ago buying land with shell companies because if the locals knew it was Harvard they would have inflated the prices. I can’t blame Harvard, but it caused a lot of lasting animosities when this was found out.
Scarcely an original idea. When Walt Disney decided that some Orlando ranch land would make an ideal site for his new theme park, a decision he made just an hour or so before the news broke about shots fired at JFK's motorcade, he set up a bunch of shell companies to approach the ranchers about buying land.
One of my brothers graduated from Stanford. The other from Harvard.
Loser #1 and Loser #2.
I did grad school at Stanford, and I knew a lot of undergrads. Not a one has set the world on fire.
On the other hand, AOC went to BU.
You can argue that the HYPS are just not very good at finding what they are looking for.
Or perhaps 10 % of their admittees are the precious metals and the rest are just there for filler.Replies: @ginger bread man, @anon, @2BR, @Houston 1992
if they get the right 10%, then that keep the hedge fund rolling along…. keeping out the Deplorable element who perhaps cannot be co-opted and who might display “poor judgment”, be overly curious off syllabus, and who might infect others with curiosity bugs are also the gate-keeper’s function.
Princeton is growing, and has been growing for years. At this moment they’re building two new undergraduate residential colleges, increasing the total from 5 in the early 2000s to 8.
One of the two would have been Princeton’s first to be named after Jewish donors. But they welched on the deal and now the name is up for grabs.
The construction site had a recent noose sighting.
In re the stadium, yeah, just about every high school in Texas has a football stadium of the size Rice needs. Just have to find the district with the right cachet to enter into a private/public partnership with.
So, what is Houston’s answer to Highland Park, I wonder …?
https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/how-euan-blair-tony-blair-son-multiverse-160-million-pounds-b957838.htmlI wonder if they test them? A lot better for the firms to have pre-tested "diverse" applicants. He's seen a market gap for acceptably diverse candidates and is attempting to supply them.Replies: @Rob, @Houston 1992, @SaneClownPosse, @Reg Cæsar
what happened to the Peter Thiel bypass college programs? did the HYPS succeed in killing it , or suppressing it as ” NOT THE DONE THING?”
Our good friends in the Libertarian movement are supposed be obsessed with efficiency …what could be less efficient than having ppl spend 4-10 years of their most productive years in third level, when they could starting adding to our sacred GDP?
How many ppl left PhD programs during WW2 , eg Francis Crick , and started contributing to the war effort without their PhD credential? And when he wanted to quit the Death Sciences and join the Life Sciences , did his PhD credential deficit help him or hurt him? Where , oh where is the artillery support from the libertarians?
Think the Femen will allow macho jocks on campus?
To support increased student numbers when it went co-ed, Dartmouth expanded in both space and time.
The D-Plan welcomes undergraduates to campus in summer too (a smart move for a cold place). Students choose which 12 quarters out of 16 to spend on-campus.
So, what is Houston's answer to Highland Park, I wonder ...?Replies: @Steve Sailer
River Oaks.
I assume what he means is that there are plenty of kids with 1400+ SAT scores, a bevy of AP credits, glowing teacher recommendations, and a slate of extracurriculars. How is the admissions office supposed to choose when everyone is qualified? My impression is that the elite school application process is all about volume these days. A kid sends in 15 common apps and hopes a couple of schools bite.
Or D-2, where they could still take athletics semi-seriously and offer scholarships, but very few D-2 schools have Rice's academic profile. They really belong in D-3, with the likes of Washington U., U. of Chicago, Emory, etc., where sports seem to be a gentlemanly pastime.
But I guess athletics are important on campus? Did Rice students enjoy being the whipping boys of the likes of Texas and A&M? Even in C-USA they are not really competitive except in baseball.
Nothwithstanding all of the justified disdain here for big-time college athletics, there is no doubt that they increase a university's profile, which can have direct (financial) and indirect benefits to academics.Replies: @SaneClownPosse
Texas is insane about football.
Small towns with high school stadiums, not just a field with bleachers along the sidelines, that are larger than the high school building.
Do the British A levels or whatever they’re called take the place of AP tests and SAT, folding merit and effort into one set of measurements, or is there a meritocratic gatekeeper that does not measure test prep and tiger momming so much, like the SAT before Coleman destroyed it?
Are European companies generally allowed to IQ test? If they are, I could see American companies that want well-verified psychometric measures of their employees flying the high flyers to Europe and then testing them in a Euro division. I know programming interviews are a thing, but the meritocracy is not what it used to be, what with the gutted SAT that more than a couple guys a year receive a “perfect” score, the universities gutting what meritocracy they had to get Kushner Kash from rich dumbs, and the ever-present headwind of demographic decline. Not to mention, in a healthy society (at least without significant work from home) men will be doing the heavy thinking, and guys’ potentials can be better gauged at 22 than 18.
I’m surprised no enterprising company has set up some sort of a “partnership” with a graduate school where people take the GRE and apply to the school, and if the company likes the applicants' scores, they get an offer. Just seems like smart companies should try to work their way around the de facto ban on IQ tests.Replies: @epebble
Why do they need to do anything indirect? Is there a prohibition in asking an applicant to send SAT or GRE scores as part of application and deciding to pick the best scorers? Many employers including public i.e. government, have tests (military, post office …). Why not outsource this testing to College Board/ETS?
My small, private, once all male college was 2:1 male/female when I was there 40 years ago. It was more difficult for women to get in, and there was agitation for sex-blind admissions. Instead, they added ~400 female students to get to 1:1 20 years ago. They’ve had a “believe all women” female prez (former Rice prof) the last decade and are plenty woke, if the alumni mag is anything to go by.
Selective colleges need to charge more to apply, so they’re more likely to get the students they accept. It must be difficult to get the actual enrollment number close to what they want. But they like to tout their low acceptance %.
Norman Cantor was interviewed on just that question about 20 years ago. He said that for all their elaborate procedures in evaluating candidates for tenure and promotion, ‘their history department is no better than 10 others’. For decades they employed John Kenneth Galbraith, even though the bibliography of scholarly literature appearing under his byline is quite brief. (Thomas Sowell has said that in his time there, Gailbraith’s first lecture of the term would actually be met with applause. Then attendance would bump downhill incrementally throughout the semester as students grew frustrated with the slim content of those lectures).
https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/how-euan-blair-tony-blair-son-multiverse-160-million-pounds-b957838.htmlI wonder if they test them? A lot better for the firms to have pre-tested "diverse" applicants. He's seen a market gap for acceptably diverse candidates and is attempting to supply them.Replies: @Rob, @Houston 1992, @SaneClownPosse, @Reg Cæsar
A lesson in how to make under the table payoffs to Papa Blair.
I graduated from there as well! (Different century but we still had a football team when I was there.) They appear to be enrolling more undergrads now than when I attended, and I believe they reduced the tuition to near what it was around 15 years ago (about \$35K), which is remarkable for a private college. But yes, it is stuck in a dumpy section of Buffalo and has the almost-negative distinction of being a “regional best-value,” like Genessee Beer. It would be sad to see it go.
With no music department, the Fighting Owl Band is a hoot to watch. AKA The Mob.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Penskefile
What about this Owl, claimed not by Rice but Temple?
BTW, Hannah, Steve, and any other Ricers here– these cute jars of gelatin (“jelly”) snacks are imported by Gemini Foods in City of Industry. Available at your local Asian supermarket, or avoid the pandan-monium and order online.
https://www.standard.co.uk/insider/how-euan-blair-tony-blair-son-multiverse-160-million-pounds-b957838.htmlI wonder if they test them? A lot better for the firms to have pre-tested "diverse" applicants. He's seen a market gap for acceptably diverse candidates and is attempting to supply them.Replies: @Rob, @Houston 1992, @SaneClownPosse, @Reg Cæsar
Ninth-grader Mike Altman made many times what his dad did from M*A*S*H. Syndication pays!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Is_Painless
Careful looking through old yearbooks! Times have changed.
Well, such spectacles as seen on WSHH are common in university classes where students vigorously debate, for example, the merits of certain cavalier poets. Not a fan of Ben Jonson (the old guy from Westminster) but prefer a rapper? Throw a chair or two and some wild punches!
With no music department, the Fighting Owl Band is a hoot to watch. AKA The Mob.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Penskefile
No Music “department”? They have this: https://music.rice.edu/
And the MOB is the Marching Owl Band. I think you have them confused with the Aggies
Minnesota and Wisconsin are interesting. Private colleges are spread around more in the former; in the latter, 21 of the 23 are east of the meridian passing through Madison. That's half the state by land, 3/4 by population. The "soda" counties. In the "pop" counties, only LaCrosse and Ashland have private schools. There are bus routes in St Paul with as many. There is nothing between Lawrence and Ripon in the east and the Minnesota border at the St Croix. Plenty of state schools, though. (UW-Stout was once private, ages ago.)https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fa/fa/8c/fafa8c8ba532a2b1fba0672f9b81fb87--location-map-ivy-league.jpghttps://sites.google.com/a/depere.k12.wi.us/dphs-counselors/_/rsrc/1414532151924/wisconsin-college-applications-1/WI%20Private%20Map.jpg?height=400&width=379Replies: @Eric Liddell, @Hibernian
Tulane is on the East bank of the Mississippi River. The river does have such an extreme curve that you head in an eastern direction to reach the “West bank” but that doesn’t apply to the Tulane campus.
The interesting thing about Allston is that Harvard went in there over 20 years ago buying land with shell companies because if the locals knew it was Harvard they would have inflated the prices.
Scarcely an original idea. When Walt Disney decided that some Orlando ranch land would make an ideal site for his new theme park, a decision he made just an hour or so before the news broke about shots fired at JFK’s motorcade, he set up a bunch of shell companies to approach the ranchers about buying land.
That’s interesting. Back in 1976 (when I was in the market) UofC admitted fully 50% of their applicants; they couldn’t have had today’s undergraduate population even if they wanted to.
1. Princeton
2. Harvard
3. Harvard
4. Penn / Columbia
5. University of Chicago
6. Harvard / Stanford
7. Penn / Stanford
8. Stanford
9. Stanford
10. Walmart Heir
(https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/). Note that not all graduatedReplies: @smetana
Let’s not cherry-pick. Several of these attended humbler schools in addition to the ones listed:
4. University of Nebraska
5. University of Illinois
7. University of Pretoria
8. University of Michigan
9. University of Maryland
But it's also the case that for example: (i) 8&9 (the founders of Google) met at Stanford, developed the PageRank algorithm there, and were able to access VC funding after one meeting because of who they met there; (ii) 5 (Ellison) got his big break after transferring to UChicago: and (iii) 7 (Musk) attended Pretoria for about six months to avoid military service in South Africa while trying to move to Canada for the purpose of immigrating to the US, where he immediately enrolled at Wharton. In all of these cases, elite universities were key access points to their ultimate opportunities.
It's definitely the case that lots of people make lots of money and do lots of other worthwhile things after attending all kinds of colleges, or no college at all. But there are about 3,000 colleges in the US and the graduates of something like 10 - 20 of them account for an enormously disproportionate share of the wealthiest and most powerful people in America. I don't like this fact, but it is true.
Forbes magazine says Harvard is #8, and UC Berkeley is #1. Yale has dropped out of the top 10. So the conventional wisdom about which university has the biggest impact on the economy and society seems to be in flux. Berkeley’s strategy of training four times the number of top scholars while maintaing Ivy League standards seems to have boosted their prestige. And they plan to continue growing in size. Moreover, only 18% of Harvard students get STEM degrees while 39% of Berkeley grads do. At this time, average salaries for graduates are about the same for both schools.
ginger bread man asked me:
I meant of course that it is random among the very large number of applicants who meet absolute minimal standards.
They are quite open about this: it is called “holistic admissions.” My own kids had higher test scores than the median for admittees for the HYPS, and one of my kids had great “extra-curriculars.” Neither got in. (They were both “wait-listed” by Caltech, which was probably the right decision: they could have hacked ‘Tech, but they would have been miserable.)
As far as anyone can tell (and the admissions officers basically confirm this), it is more or less that a key admissions officer says, “Hey, I like this kid!” and fights to get the kid in.
They are quite open about this: it is called "holistic admissions." My own kids had higher test scores than the median for admittees for the HYPS, and one of my kids had great "extra-curriculars." Neither got in. (They were both "wait-listed" by Caltech, which was probably the right decision: they could have hacked 'Tech, but they would have been miserable.)
As far as anyone can tell (and the admissions officers basically confirm this), it is more or less that a key admissions officer says, "Hey, I like this kid!" and fights to get the kid in.Replies: @JimB
You didn’t mention whether you had sons or daughters. I assume you are white. I know for a fact that at some \$40K/yr private high schools, white male students with top 0.1% test scores and great “extra-curriculars” were told by guidance counselors to apply to 15-20 elite colleges. Even then, some didn’t get in anywhere, including Rice, and ended up either taking a gap year or enrolling as a sophomore at a state school.
Sure! It’s the betas they hate.
4. University of Nebraska
5. University of Illinois
7. University of Pretoria
8. University of Michigan
9. University of MarylandReplies: @Recently Based
Absolutely true.
But it’s also the case that for example: (i) 8&9 (the founders of Google) met at Stanford, developed the PageRank algorithm there, and were able to access VC funding after one meeting because of who they met there; (ii) 5 (Ellison) got his big break after transferring to UChicago: and (iii) 7 (Musk) attended Pretoria for about six months to avoid military service in South Africa while trying to move to Canada for the purpose of immigrating to the US, where he immediately enrolled at Wharton. In all of these cases, elite universities were key access points to their ultimate opportunities.
It’s definitely the case that lots of people make lots of money and do lots of other worthwhile things after attending all kinds of colleges, or no college at all. But there are about 3,000 colleges in the US and the graduates of something like 10 – 20 of them account for an enormously disproportionate share of the wealthiest and most powerful people in America. I don’t like this fact, but it is true.
A combination of factors have made elite colleges increasingly irrelevant:
1) As the US population grew by 100m since 1980, and these elite colleges maintained the same number of admits, their share of graduates have dwindled considerably among the total college grad pool, making them less and less impactful.
2) As they increasingly turn away highly capable students, more of this cohort are going on to their local state U, making those colleges increasingly competitive in churning out high quality graduates, and employers are noticing and recruiting more and more from the State Us.
3) As their costs continue to escalate, they have become the schools for the 1% who in turn subsidize the bottom 25%. Only the very rich and the very poor who get an almost free ride can afford these schools. The upper middle class(95th-99th percentile) are increasingly turning away from these schools because a family making \$300k a year just can’t afford to spend \$80k a year on tuition for one child, esp. when the parents are near retirement age by the time they make that kind of \$ and often live in expensive metro areas.
4) As the number of affirmative action admits continue to increase in the name of “equity”, these schools are damaging their reputation as the schools for the “best and brightest” but are increasingly seen as schools for the mediocre who only got in based on wealth, connection, athletic ability or oppressed status.
5) These elite schools are increasingly seen as left wing indoctrination centers and are increasingly shunned by conservatives.
Elite colleges hold more sway in the NE because they are older and more established and there are a lot of them, and also because the states are much smaller so people don’t have to travel far to go to a school out of state. But outside the NE, in the Midwest, South, Southeast, Southwest and West, State U’s are often the main destination of top high school grads, most of whom still prefer to stay close to home.
Parents who continue to send their kids to far away expensive elite colleges often overestimate the importance of these schools and underestimate the importance of their local state Us. When it comes to employment and doing business, your local state U can tap into a vast pool of local connections and alumni loyalty that often can’t be replicated by far away colleges, however elite. That is true even of law schools and business schools. Local businesses still tend to hire locally, and even national firms tend to hire locally for their local offices. This pandemic will only further accelerate this trend as remote work becomes the norm. Staying local is the new trend, and it will come at the expense of these elite colleges and the expensive coastal cities their grads often flock to. Elite colleges’ elite days are numbered.
Why did a Southern California kid such as yourself end up going to Texas for college?
I was looking at pictures of Rice University, and I can't help but wonder does the US have to most beautiful universities in the world?
Has anyone here seen the new USC village in person? Looks amazing.Replies: @Wency
Moving away to go to private school is very normal and logical. Private schools will often discriminate against local kids. E.g. I went across the country to go to a fairly prestigious private school, was one of only a handful of kids from my state at that college, and as a result I got big scholarship money. Because prestigious schools need to be able to say they have students from all 50 states and they will hand out bigger scholarships for students from farther away.
What I find odd is when people cross state lines to go to a mediocre public school. They end up paying more for an inferior education. I have to think this is always the wrong decision, but some kids are sold on the unique characteristics of this school or that school and their parents indulge them.
The reason schools don’t expand is that the alumni are a key category the administration needs to appease, and alumni benefit from the quality of the brand improving.
If all of a school’s alumni suddenly died and schools were run solely for the benefit of the administration, then administrations would expand enrollment like crazy (in a way that involved the least possible amount of construction) because their goal would be to maximize current tuition revenue in order to justify higher salaries for themselves, and they could basically cash out the value of a brand that had been built up over the centuries.
Of course a school with a moderately elite but smallish brand might benefit from a certain amount of careful expansion because you can gain more national notoriety if people have actually heard of your school from bumping elbows with alums. You might be able to attract more applications by getting bigger.
Well said. Duke and Northwestern get more publicity than Rice from being bigger. Caltech was smaller than Rice but super elite. Being small and moderately elite like Rice was in 1980 is a way to not get much publicity.
Not really. The Ivies aren't looking for intelligence, they are looking for the kids who are most likely to have cultural, political and economic influence in future generations. This is why Yale still wants to attract future Kavanaughs and Mnuchins and Harvard still wants Kushners. It is also why they want loud annoying leftist activist types.
Yes, networking is most of the game - and Ivies want people who are good at networking and can take advantage of networking. This is why prowess at sports plays a much larger role in getting into an Ivy than it should if you were looking for "smart kids".
What Ivies really don't care about are quiet genius engineer types who don't socialize well. This is also why Ivies don't want a lot of high IQ East Asian males.Replies: @PhysicistDave, @meretricious, @Anonymous, @Marty T
I actually think Ivies should have that right to bring in black activists and rich white laxers rather than Asian math geeks…but on the other hand Harvard is 95 pct Democrat leaning now. So screw them and sue them.
I once saw the SAT scores for Rice athletes. Football averaged like 300 points lower than the student body. It’s probably similar at Duke, Stanford, etc. The issue with football is you need large numbers and at least some blacks. So I figure Rice has jock courses for their hired guns who get destroyed every Saturday.
I for one think smart conservative kids should forget about Ivies, except maybe Dartmouth. Go to Florida, Texas A&M, Iowa, Clemson etc. where you might be able to have an actual impact. Much hotter women too.
Minnesota and Wisconsin are interesting. Private colleges are spread around more in the former; in the latter, 21 of the 23 are east of the meridian passing through Madison. That's half the state by land, 3/4 by population. The "soda" counties. In the "pop" counties, only LaCrosse and Ashland have private schools. There are bus routes in St Paul with as many. There is nothing between Lawrence and Ripon in the east and the Minnesota border at the St Croix. Plenty of state schools, though. (UW-Stout was once private, ages ago.)https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fa/fa/8c/fafa8c8ba532a2b1fba0672f9b81fb87--location-map-ivy-league.jpghttps://sites.google.com/a/depere.k12.wi.us/dphs-counselors/_/rsrc/1414532151924/wisconsin-college-applications-1/WI%20Private%20Map.jpg?height=400&width=379Replies: @Eric Liddell, @Hibernian
Tulane and all the other Universities in New Orleans are on the same side of the Mississippi as Chicago and NYC. Downtown, the French Quarter, and the bulk of the land area and population are also on that side. The neighborhood of Algiers is on the other side.
NOLA has a similar "sac":NEW ORLEANS FIREARM-FREE ZONES
So was my home of 22 years in St Paul. We were east, west, and north of the Mississippi, all at once. Those on the “West Side”, south of downtown, are east, west, and south of it. Even though they were farther north than we were.
NOLA has a similar “sac”:
NEW ORLEANS FIREARM-FREE ZONES
I once saw the SAT scores for Rice athletes. Football averaged like 300 points lower than the student body. It's probably similar at Duke, Stanford, etc. The issue with football is you need large numbers and at least some blacks. So I figure Rice has jock courses for their hired guns who get destroyed every Saturday.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I took Intro to Music with the football team. They called it “Clapping for Credit.”