Asymmetrical Information

A lot of research in the last 20 years has shown that emotional factors are better predictors of individual success than intellectual factors. A person who is ambitious and focused on long-term goals can out perform people with substantially higher IQ's.

I saw this effect often in the computer industry where people with startling high IQs but poor emotional lives never really moved up while people with much inferior technical skills ended up running the companies.

If the goal of an institution is to produce highly visible successes then selecting individuals based on their emotional characteristics is definitely the way to go.

My mother, a retired public school teacher, has always insisted that's the real advantage to private schools: that they can be selective about their students.

I could have told you all that without the help of a study.

However, I think the study is also inherently flawed. Wasn't Hunter Elementary was an all-girl school until at least the 1970s. I wonder how many of the graduates who entered the workforce in the '50s and '60s were given the opportunities to excel? I still remember hearing an interesting story about how both female supreme court justices couldn't get jobs as attorneys when they first graduated law school. They were both offered jobs as legal secretaries. Now they did excel, but perhaps other women who couldn't easily find opportunities just gave up.

Wasn't Hunter Elementary was an all-girl school until at least the 1970s.

Nope. Hunter High was a girls' school until the '70s, but the Elementary School has been coed since before the studied cohort -- possibly since it was founded, but I'm not sure.

I can't believe what a bunch of obvious crap this is. Exactly how do Harvard, Yale, etc. go about determining "the degree of personal inner force an individual has" or collecting "a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?" Why, they mail out application forms, and occasionally conduct interviews. And then they let in anyone who isn't an idiot and who has a parent or rich uncle who went to Harvard or Yale. What Bender is doing is putting his school in the best possible light, comparing the bookish (read: geeky and maladjusted) U of C-type Ivy League reject school student bodies with his anointed students with "a reasonably good level of mental ability."

Look, gang. I have nothing against the Ivies, even though I attended one (successfully, thank you). But - hopefully not sounding Marxist - the Ivy League schools are in part an institutionalized effort by the ruling elites to perpetuate themselves, to provide a buffer against generational slippage. And it works. I agree that they select the successful - wealthy kids have advantages beyond money. They grow up expecting success and existing in a milleu in which they can't help but see examples of positive, successful behavior (this all dovetails with the "Poor really are different" post above). This indeed probably results in more superstars than the accumulation of brainiacs, but it is incorrect to assert that that is or was somehow the plan of Harvard, Yale, etc. all along.

Although not a graduate of any Ivy I am married to someone who has Degrees from two of them. They all make concerted efforts to have complex Alumni relations so that they can place their best students with companies and firms that will allow them to excel.

I do, however disagree with you regarding recruitment at Ivies. My Husband is active in recruitment at his underraduate institution and I can attest to the fact that a great deal of serious consideration goes into picking the freshman class. It isn't just a numbers game.

Well, at risk of sounding cynical, Mike W., how much better a determinant can you have that someone will eventually own a company can you have than that of the only child of someone who owns a company?

If we're bringing the French grandes ecoles into the discussion, wouldn't one of them be a better comparator for Harvard, than an elementary school???

Jane, you ignorant slut!

..I might argue that business school nonetheless raises it's graduates' earning powere..

English grammar and composition might help as well...

where's my fruitcake, BTW?

love you to death,

jim`

I've seen various studies that show the increased earnings power of Ivy grads 5, 10, and 20 years after graduation compared to various state university grads, but I agree that the studies are flawed. That is, the Ivy selection process biases the samples, so that it is hard if not impossible to measure the value of the education itself.

What I would like to see is an income study of four populations:
1) Ivy grads
2) Ivy dropouts, who never got a degree
3) State grads who had been accepted to an Ivy but opted for a state university instead
4) State dropouts who had also been accepted to an Ivy but opted to attend a state university instead

I think you'd have a hard time finding a large enough sample of categories 3 and 4 to make for a reasonable survey, but if you could, it would make for less biased samples. Even just with the Ivy dropouts (catetory 2), you could get a better measure for the value of the education vs. the bias of the Ivy selection.

“Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”
~~~~~~~~~~~

When Harvard accepts a few classes with SAT scores that average in the 550-600 level I'll believe its admissions office is serious about this.

I wonder if this couldn't be explainable by extremely competitive schools selecting so hard for academic credentials that the variation *in the people they accept* loses its predictive value.

The quintessential case for this is NFL linemen. At a given spot on the line, if you were to find some way of ranking a left tackle's value to the team, you might find that blocking techniques, agility, work ethic, etc. are more important than sheer physical size. But that's at least partly because when you look at NFL tackles, you're already looking at a group that has had all the players who are too small to play the position weeded out. Instead of looking at the full variation of size in the population as a whole, you're looking at a sub-population where most of the size information has already been used to weed out the shrimps. If you looked at the population as a whole, you'd pretty quickly determine that size is the single most important charachteristic for playing left tackle in the NFL.

Likewise, if you restrict yourself to considering applicants who have demonstrated that they can handle an Ivy League course load, I wouldn't be surprised if academics weren't the best predictor of future success *for that population.*

Dan-
Fwiw I'm in cat 3. 4 years at State U was less than one year at the Ivy. And I work with a guy with a B.S. from Harvard and we make the exact same amount, with equivalent tasks and responsibilites; the main difference is I graduated debt free and he just finished paying his down his last year (We both graduated about ten years ago). However, I do believe that if we were both to leave our present employment, the Harvard grad would have a lot more choices than I do, despite nearly identical work experiences and degrees. Its all about the branding.

then they let in anyone who isn't an idiot and who has a parent or rich uncle who went to Harvard or Yale.

The Mark Twain act is cute and entertaining, but it doesn't really advance the discussion.

Brittain33-

When I applied to Princeton a million years ago, they explained that they rate each student from 1 to 4 on both academics and "other." IIRC, they explained that a 3/2 had about a 15% chance of getting in, while a legacy 3/2 had a 100% chance. Now, it could have been a 2/3 or a 2/4 - it's been a long time, and I clearly was exaggerating on how unintelligent one could get away with being. But this sort of thing is both typical and often-reported. And you need to get over yourself.

A lot of research in the last 20 years has shown that emotional factors are better predictors of individual success than intellectual factors.

A *lot* of research? Find me even one citation that backs this claim. For the limited discussion here, it's actually true, simply because we are dealing with a tremendous restriction of range: for people above a certain (quite high) level of intellectual ability, say the top 2% of the population, other factors loom larger in determining success. But for the population as a whole, intellect is still the single best determinant of success.

I find the comparison to Hunter idiotic.

Isn't the relevant comparison, the U of C? And also MIT and Caltech which are both more intellectually meritocratic than HYP? If the standard is success in politics [cf. Bush, Gore, Kerry], HYP wins. But if one wants to talk superstars in science and technology, or even literature and the arts -- correcting for class size, I doubt that Chicago (between its geniuses in Physics and Econ and its writers like Bellow) underperforms the Ivies. And I don't need to remind people that in a world of computers and high tech, that success in science correlates with both bookish genius and financial success and that MIT/Caltech would probably blow away Harvard on a student/adjusted basis. [Only comparing undergrad to undergrad]. People forget that many of Harvard's best grads went to Harvard's professional schools, not Harvard College. Moreover, the international reputation of the top US schools is precisely in things like producing the most Nobel laureates NOT world leaders. [The French schools do a more consistent job of getting a political elite out of ENA/ENS than the US does from the Ivies.]

Doing a back of the envelope calculation for Caltech gives 7 undergrad alums winning the Nobel Prize out of less than 10,000 alums in the 20th c.

That's nearly 1 in a 1000. Let's see HYP top that.

Having graduated from an Ivy in the last ten years I can say that there was definitely an emphasis (and drive) among the student body to plan for great things. When I would explain the school to friends from other schools I would say that even the slackers had ambition.
That being said, for the most part, even the guys thought of as 'dumbasses' at school were often quite inteligent. The Ivies can choose their students based upon ambition because they know they will still be getting students with above average inteligence.
A major benefit of the education I got their did not come from classrooms, but from exposure to the other students. This is a reward that I continue to reap. I feel energized everytime I see friends from school, just from hearing what they are up to.

I do agree, however, the toplevel b-schools are for signalling and networking.

Mike W.: Do you feel you got nothing from your Ivy connection?

Among my best friends with Ivy degrees, I come from the least humble background, and I hail from a very rural area. While my father is a self-made man, he comes from a very poor upbringing. So, while there are plenty of 'elites' at such schools, it is hardly the 1930's anymore, they do offer an entre into an interesting world for some of us hicks, immigrants, and other bourgois rifraf.

Mike, of course mediocre legacies get into the Ivies all the time. They still only take a small number of the slots. Maybe more than they should, but whatever, not enough to drive out all the other qualified applicants.

I went to Harvard, and in my experience, kids with my background--overachieving suburbanite, non-legacy, from good public schools in the suburban northeast--were more common than the legacies from all over the country, prep school or otherwise. We set the tone, even if we don't know many people when we get there and don't get invites to the best parties that first month.

We set the tone

Ok, that's probably a bit too optimistic.

ElamBend, I agree emphatically with what you wrote about the drive and ambition of Ivy students. I alluded to that in my first post. I think the opportunities that Ivy students had prior to entering college, and the expectations they had for their futures were very important. I remember discussing this sort of thing with a fellow TA in our teaching days, comparing state-school kids with Ivy kids. We both felt that there were large groups of kids at State U who were there because they figured that's what they were supposed to do, and many of them wandered around and eventually got some 'default' major like Business or ---ology (social science of choice). The equivalent kids at Yale, of which there were plenty, were just as intellectually passionless, and many had a hard time with the material (let's not get into grade inflation, ok?) but they were thinking pre-med, or law school, or maybe history and then working at a bank somewhere. And likely the vast majority of them succeeded. Partly via connections, but partly because they simply had expectations all along of doing so, and worked toward that, and yes, received reinforcement both from their university and their fellow students there. I know this is getting long, and off-topic, and belongs as much in the comments to the "poor are different" post, but that is an exceedingly diffcult thing to notice unless you have a middle-class (not upper-middle) or lower-class background.

Also, I do not feel that anything I wrote painted the Ivy league schools as glorified finishing schools for the well-heeled. The kids aren't all legacies - no kidding. But I taught there for years and never, except for a couple local scholarship kids, met one kid who came from 'below' an upper-middle-class background, while there were many at MIT and the U of C, two schools where I happened to know people. I'm sure there are exceptions galore, but please, guys. Getting back to the initial point, which was . . . oh yeah, Bender's high-minded selection process, my point was that it's largely post-hoc bullshit, and I haven't read anything to indicate that's not the case. I think nn blew up much of Gladwell's argument anyway. Harvard gets the kids it gets partly because the stereotypical science nerd prefers MIT and the overachieving socially adept kid prefers Harvard, and partly because they take legacies, and partly because they're looking to continually recreate the Harvard environment, for all of the reasons discussed earlier. The superstar crap is just that.

One wonders if there's a difference in this supposed "leadership over academics" bias between ivys undergrad and ivys grad/professional.

Also, one wonders whether this is still the case. Wouldn't the increasingly competitive market for college rankings (u.s. news and world report, etc.) which base huge chunks on median gpas/test scores, drive schools that seek "leadership" to more academic standards?

I will not consider MBAs when hiring. For what that's worth.

That's fine for you sammler, but for the vast corporate track out there, the MBA is a needed signaling device needed to move upward. If it were really a matter of knowledge, then a CFA would be the course to go.
That being said, businesses that could really use an MBA (think non-national, not sexy) get passed over by applicants.

Mike W.: Assuming you taught at Yale, I'm curious, when and what? If you like send to my email.

"If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered)."

Christ, Harvard has it's head up its ass. It's hard to think of a more influential university than the University of Chicago.

Just on my own personal observations, I've found that there number of bullshit artists trading on their Harvard MBA network is alarmingly high. I have met some impressive Harvard MBAs who were smart and hardworking, but also about the same number who were unprincipled hacks.

Perhaps Universities should just admit the people likely to endow them most in future. For that reason I have recommended to an admissions tutor at Cambridge (England) that however he chooses among well-qualified male candidates, among the well-qualified women he should choose the prettiest.

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