[lunaru]

The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard. We as a whole are much more educated now and the idea that legacy institutions should serve as gatekeepers of education or validation thereof based on reputation alone seems outdated. These schools should be judged by the rigor and quality of their curriculum rather than the reputations of their past. And I say this as someone who graduated from one of these top schools.

[eigenvalue]

Funny, I constantly think how much more educated the educated people were in the past than today. The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s. I would argue that the vast majority of graduating college students are almost entirely unable to write a half decent essay. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that more people get to go to college, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the average person is so highly educated!

[blululu]

I’m not sure why this is getting downvoted. Every time I read through a scientific journal from the 60’s or 70’s I am pleasantly surprised by the fact that the qualitative and quantitative reasoning is clearer and more sophisticated than what I see in many contemporary publications. The OP is perhaps justified that we should fixate less in the US news rankings, but the sense of decay seems justified. Imposter syndrome is frequently brought up to reassure people but in a lot of cases I see that people are actually frauds and we mask this over with endless positive affirmations. It is genuinely upsetting to see mediocre researchers get tenure when there is such a glut of talent that is simply passed over.

[peteradio]

Probably because they weren't blasting out a paper every 2 weeks and could invest much more time on frankly more fertile ground.

[blululu]

That would make sense. There are probably a lot of reasons for this trend. The OP's point about fixating on US News ranking seems related to your suggestion. Whatever the cause may be it seems clear to me that a lot of our best scientific minds are increasingly excluded and marginalized by the modern academy.

[SkyMarshal]

> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.

Sounds like you're just making this up. Have any studies on this or something not anecdotal?

[bradleyjg]

IQ talk is funny like that. It’s intended to give a science-y sounding veneer to whatever argument is being made but because actual studies are a lot of work, people just throw around numbers with nothing more than “common sense.”

Given that it’s all “common sense” people ought to skip the veneer and just say “more intelligent”, “less intelligent”, “much more intelligent”, and so on. That’s more honest rhetoric.

[HyperSane]

IQ is a real thing, finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.

[bradleyjg]

I don’t claim it isn’t real. What I claim is that people like to throw around random made up facts involving IQ to make their arguments seem science-y and that they ought not to.

[kelseyfrog]

I'll go on the record to say that IQ is as real as any other social construct like money, God, or nationality. Depending on your predilection that can range from worthless to "party of the fabric of reality itself."

[dragonwriter]

> finding a linear negative relationship between lead levels in children and IQ was the smoking gun to prove that lead was harmful.

Lead toxicity was identified more than 2000 years before the first IQ test, and was rather extensively studied during the Renaissance. The combination of blood lead and IQ tests was important in quantifying the existence and impacts of particular kinds and levels of environmental exposure that had been assumed to be forms of levels that would not be hazardous, but it was not important to identifying lead as a toxin.

[HyperSane]

I guess I should have said "proving leaded gasoline and paint" was harmful.

[cabalamat]

If you live in a society where most people go to university, and average IQ is 100 (by definition it was when it was normed) then you're going to get people with <100 IQs going to university, and some of them will graduate.

[zamadatix]

We're not in such a society though. Ignoring master's, bachelor's, and decent grades to just focus on a lower bar of "people with associate's degrees regardless of grades" we're still shy of 50%, even if we restrict to younger age groups like 25-30 years old.

[eigenvalue]

Here is a chart I found in a minute of searching: https://imgur.com/a/MenAVtj

[ineedasername]

That image lacks an obvious source or any explanation for methods of how the data was gathered and I can find no record of a study or context that corresponds to this image.

What I can find is a wikimedia entry with the image but no attribution except the "US Census" and no actual link to any publication put out by the Census Bureau. The archive link goes to a page that does not actually contain this graphic, or the data necessary to generate it, making it a bit suspect to begin with.

The census also don't systematically collect IQ scores or themselves administer IQ tests, making the details, data, and methodology of any study they produce paramount to interpreting this barebones graph. The title of the graph itself is borderline ridiculous, awkwardly stated at best and downright deceptive:

IQ tests are not a requirement for graduating college, and taking them at all is relatively uncommon these days.

As it stands, this image is worthless without context, and that context is oddly elusive except for an anonymous wikimedia post that did not cite the source with any specificity required to authenticate it.

[bombastry]

This image is even more worthless than it seems. The post on Wikimedia is an original work. Its description states: "As the percentage of graduates increases the minimum IQ to include at least that percentage of graduates inherently decreases. Since 2000 the intelligence required to be a college graduate has been less than the intelligence required to graduate from high school in 1940, based on a standard distribution."

It seems the author took the the percentage of the population that graduated high school/college each year and then found the corresponding percentile on an IQ bell curve and used those as the y-values. This methodology only makes sense if you assume that high school/college graduates are exactly the highest IQ population and that everyone who does not graduate isn't intelligent enough to do so. This chart also almost certainly doesn't normalize IQ over time, even though IQ is constantly redefined so that 100 is average while raw intelligence scores have increased over time [1].

What this chart actually shows is the highest possible IQ of the graduate with the lowest IQ in a given year, a statistic that seems to have dubious value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[ineedasername]

You’re right it is worse. It looks like they assumed college-going students would approximate the standard distribution of scores for the population as a whole, which… no. An awful assumption for an activity where academic ability is a primary gatekeeper at the same time that they’re attempting to apply a metric of IQ essentially as a proxy for academic ability/knowledge/whatever. (“Whatever” because the entire concept of intelligence is filled with varying definitions)

[mobilefriendly]

Most of the Ivies were much more academically rigorous in the past. There were no ideological, unrigorous majors like Sociology or Gender Studies. Graduates were expected to read both Greek and Latin.

[cabalamat]

In the 19th century you could get a degree in Divinity, which is clearly ideological and unrigorous.

[eigenvalue]

Those divinity students at a good school in the 1800s were incredibly smart and erudite. Even if you think theology is wrong or silly, it doesn’t mean the people were silly.

[cabalamat]

Whether it is wrong and silly is irrelevant; my claim is that it is "ideological and unrigorous".

I'm sure lots of them were smart and erudite.

[mplanchard]

Weirdly, I don’t think society and the role of gender in it are worthless topics of study, and I don’t think intellectual rigor should be measured primarily by knowledge of the languages that form the roots of the non-Germanic portion of English.

[ghaff]

While I'm equally skeptical of certain modern majors, I'm not convinced that just because the "educated Western man" (and, yes, we're mostly talking men) of the 19th century were expected to be well-versed in certain subjects doesn't mean there aren't better options for many today.

[pclmulqdq]

Almost all of those men went on to marry women who were also very well-educated on the classics. Education was about social class much more than gender.

The fact that we only hear about "great educated men" in the history books has more to do with a bias in society than with who actually got educated.

[ghaff]

From what I see, that was mostly a Victorian era thing. Not sure about earlier--though there were certainly tutors for the upper class. Certainly, in general, women weren't learning classical languages in universities until female colleges became fairly common in the US and Britain.

[pclmulqdq]

Before the Victorian Era, nothing about womens' lives was well documented, so you can't exactly infer an absence of education from the absence of evidence.

What we know is that the very wealthy often had private tutors for their daughters, and that some women also learned a lot from their parents. Records exist that describe the tutelage of aristocratic and royal women, and it's not hard to extrapolate that those professional tutors probably needed other clients (from the less-well-off aristocracy and merchants) to both "climb the ladder" and fill the gaps between aristocrats' daughters.

An interesting tidbit in this regard is that we actually do know that the women in the (middle class) Bach family were as musically-educated as the men, since they ended up as leading sopranos in opera houses. Some people theorize that the Bach women were the ones teaching their sons music, not the men.

Universities definitely aren't the only places to get educated, and they were a men's club for a shockingly long time. Women were getting higher education in more private settings.

[hardwaregeek]

Or perhaps, since IQ is relative to general population, the average person is a lot smarter due to better nutrition, less lead exposure, and access to information?

[scythe]

>The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s.

IQ is in practice affected by education (to a small extent and mostly in early childhood), but the whole point of it as a concept was to avoid measuring education. So I don't think it follows that higher IQ = more educated.

[Vecr]

That's not what he's saying, he's saying collage is too hard to graduate and get good grades with an IQ less that a bit over 100 now, and that number was more like 115 in the past.

[groestl]

Education does not equal intelligence though. I know educated people who are not half as intelligent as my uncle, who really is not that educated.

[Retric]

Plenty of dumb people graduated collage in the 1950’s. The difference is we still value most of their skills while giving them a free pass for all the modern skills they don’t have. Take all that time you spent learning computers and apply it to other stuff and you would be more capable of that stuff.

So yes people on average where better at say mental math back then, but plenty of people still sucked at math etc.

[ghaff]

Of course, people did study engineering in 50s even though it mostly wasn't related to computers. (For that matter, I have an engineering degree from the late 70s and I barely touched--or mostly had access to--computers.)

[Retric]

Definitely, and many programs were highly selective, extremely rigorous, and had very high dropout rates. Some colleges just had vastly less demanding degrees and a reputation for wild parties, excessive drinking, etc.

I am mostly referring to the idea people have become less capable because fewer people know how to say repair their cars. Ignoring the fact cars just don’t break down as much and are also vastly more complicated today. So, basic car repair is both more difficult and less necessary.

[ghaff]

Car repair is just pretty far down the list of things it's important for most people to be able to do. I have a general notion of how cars work but there's relatively little I could do on my own. (And, of course, it's increasingly difficult for even indie garages to do a lot of things.)

I do wonder if selective schools have over-rotated in the theoretical direction though that's a debate with a very long history. I'm reading a bio of "Doc" Draper, for whom Draper Labs--which designed the Apollo Guidance Computer--is named. And I was just commenting to a friend literally last night that I bet a lot of the very hands-on engineers who tinkered as much as they did theory like Draper and Doc Edgerton (inventor the strobe) and others would probably never have gotten faculty appointments as prestigious universities today.

Personally, the courses where I did hands-on work are some of the ones I remember best.

[Rimintil]

> The minimum IQ required to graduate college (and even some masters degrees) with decent grades can’t be much more than 100 at this point, but was certainly more like 115 or even 120 in the 1950s

Where's your data to back this up?

[lapcat]

Harvard is private social club, a glorified country club posing as a school. The entire purpose of the institution is to perpetuate the disparity of wealth and power in society. The selectivity and exclusiveness is essential, the raison d'être of Harvard. This is the only thing we need to understand about it.

[koolba]

More importantly while there’s nothing wrong with operating a private social club, doing it with public tax dollars and claiming it’s anything but a private social club is ridiculous.

[HyperSane]

And one that rich people can just buy there children access to. Jared Kushner's dad donated $2 million to get his son into Harvard.

[dehrmann]

This made the scandal where celebrities were photoshopping photos of their kids doing prep school sports a little awkward. The rarely reported detail was that they were paying $200k bribes because they weren't actually rich enough to make $2M bribes directly to the schools.

[pclmulqdq]

The price has gone up a lot since then. I hear it's now over $10 million for a seat, possibly as high as $50 million.

[hnburnsy]

And they like to keep the club exclusive...

>In the 16 years since, although the number of applicants to the College has more than doubled, the size of Harvard’s undergraduate population has remained relatively constant. This year, the College admitted 2,037 students to the Class of 2020; in comparison, 2,035 students were admitted to the Class of 2004.

IMO when your non taxable endowment gets large but your undergrad population stays the same maybe part of the endowment should become taxable.

[mauvehaus]

You realize they're in the middle of Cambridge, MA, right? It's not like there's a bunch of empty land around the campus to just make the school bigger.

Acquiring non-Harvard land in Allston met with some backlash owing to how they went about it (sneakily, to avoid getting put over a barrel on price).

Building up rather than out would require knocking down buildings that range from historic to merely very old.

Suggesting that Harvard should just take more students as the number of applicants grows sort of ignores the constraints they operate under.

Non-affiliated former Boston resident.

[hnburnsy]

Don't many universities have branches elsewhere? Would students choose not to go to Harvard if the campus was in say New Jersey? Would the quality of education be inferior outside of Cambridge?

I've heard some schools even have online offerings, crazy.

[cabalamat]

They could very easily set up a new campus a few miles away.

Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.

[mauvehaus]

Like Harvard? Which was founded in 1636. It's no Oxford, but the buildings are historic in the context of the USA, which is the context that matters for purposes of this discussion.

And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare. Traffic sucks, and public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0].

Getting between the new science center in Allston and Harvard Square is about a 20 minute walk (hustling). Driving might shave 10 minutes off of that. Or it could add that much and more, depending on the time of day.

Harvard's med school is in Longwood, which presumably only works because the med students live off campus anyway and don't have to get to the main campus on a regular basis.

[0] See https://universalhub.com for examples. You're unlikely to have to look back more than a week.

[cabalamat]

> And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare.

Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.

[inglor_cz]

"public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0]."

In a world where NIMBYs weren't the most important people on the scene, building a tram (streetcar) line between those two campuses would be a working solution. High capacity, intervals can be adjusted to the needs of the school, no traffic jams on the track.

And Harvard sits on an enormous warchest, it could cover the costs handily.

But pushing such a construction project in contemporary atmosphere would take longer than landing on the Moon.

[hnburnsy]

Also IMO stop taking Pell Grants, Federal aid, and pay taxes on their endowments and these schools can admit whoever they please.

[moomoo11]

Those schools are also where most of cutting edge research happens. And that’s why the folks who go there have such strong networks and an in-crowd mentality.

I am trying my hand at networking and I find that I get ghosted like 80% of the time when people I talk to from these backgrounds find out I’m not as qualified on paper.

[sounds]

To discriminate, whether by race or by alma mater, is innate; even if it is illegal it will still happen. Meritocracy is hard, and wounded when we characterize a flaw in a meritocracy as if that were judgment day.

Should we all abandon Harvard now? Nah, this battle is everywhere.

[credit_guy]

> The real joke is that we as a society still give weight to institutions like Harvard.

Indeed. I don't understand the fascination with Harvard when you can go to MIT.

[ghaff]

I generally agree :-) Though many of the same dynamics apply to MIT even if some of the specifics differ. MIT isn't admitting students purely on the basis of test scores.

I knew a long ago admissions director at MIT. At least at the time, they basically had an x-y chart with quantitative on one axis and qualitative on the other. There was a quantitative lower-bound cutoff but, beyond that, the two factors could balance each other out. (e.g. decent but not not fantastic SATs could be balanced out by really eye-catching qualitative factors and vice versa.)

[dehrmann]

At least MIT says that if you can't do well on the SAT, you're not going to pass your calc final.

[bradleyjg]

Keep this comment top of mind when you next are involved in hiring.

[golemotron]

It remains a Schelling Point. That's what keeps many institutions going.

[Overtonwindow]

In game theory, a focal point (or Schelling point) is a solution that people tend to choose by default in the absence of communication.

[stainablesteel]

i'd rather they get judged by the students they output rather than using only an input, ie curriculum

this better allows for competition to flourish imo

[throwaway1777]

I thought the theory was people are dumber than ever thanks to smartphones, social media, decreased attention spans, etc. I would take a bet that the average person is not even close to as smart as the average Harvard grad.

[Shatnerz]

Something like 35% of the US has graduated university[1]. I suppose the average university graduate is smarter than the average person regardless of the school they attended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

[uejfiweun]

It's not going away, because school choice continues to be a valuable signal of how capable someone is, and graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society.

[dmreedy]

I would posit you might be conflating "capability" and "impact" in a manner that elides the many distinctions.

[uejfiweun]

You're right, I definitely could have worded this one better in hindsight. I guess the downvotes are my lesson.

[paxys]

At some point it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The smartest people in the world want the Harvard brand. They graduate and do great things. Their success gets attributed back to Harvard. So how does one measure what specifically the university is bringing to the table?

[gregw2]

You look at who got accepted to Harvard but didn’t go.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society.

you offer no data to differentiate between this being caused by their abilities, or their greater access to the networks that place people in high impact positions.

[giantg2]

"and graduates of "top" schools continue to have disproportionately higher impacts on society."

Source? There are many individuals who went to state schools or didn't go to college at all that have turned into billionaires, Nobel prize winners, etc.

Not to mention there's no evidence that the people who went to an elite school would have less of an impact if elite schools didn't exist.

[boeingUH60]

A higher number of those billionaires, Nobel prize winners, and political leaders in the US went to elite schools like Harvard and Yale.

They undoubtedly have higher impacts on society, not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities that are not available to average person…for all our talks about meritocracy, humans still pay more attention to signaling, branding, and marketing…and the elite schools know how to milk that for money and power.

[giantg2]

"A higher number of those billionaires, Nobel prize winners, and political leaders in the US went to elite schools like Harvard and Yale."

Again, any numbers on that?

"not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities"

Or did they go to an elite school because they already came from money, which is the true source of those opportunities.

[listenallyall]

> any numbers on that?

Current US Supreme Court:

  Alito - Yale 
  Coney Barrett - Notre Dame
  Brown Jackson - Harvard
  Gorsuch - Harvard
  Kavanaugh - Yale
  Kagan - Harvard
  Roberts - Harvard
  Sotomayor - Yale
  Thomas - Yale

Noticing anything?

[giantg2]

That's 9 people in one profession. A profession that specifically has restrictions on who can be a lawyer and judge. I can name people who didn't graduate from college, or graduated from non-ivy schools too. Considering technology is extremely influential in shaping out lives, you'll probably find it interesting how many of these people never even graduated from college.

https://www.developgoodhabits.com/successful-people-college/

I'm looking for actual stats.

[uejfiweun]

It's common sense, it's just a numbers game. Harvard has like 8000 undergrads or whatever, while your typical state school has ~60000. All I'm saying is that if you take a random student from both these populations, the Harvard student is statistically more likely to be some uber-successful wunderkind. In no way am I trying to say that people from non-elite schools are inherently less capable.