For a lot of these schools, the honest thing to do would just be to sell a couple hundred class rings a year. There'd still be the applications, interviews, monstrous fees, and recommendations from alumni, but if you get into the college, you get a ring, and then maybe a stack of pamphlets to study and some finishing school-style classes to take a few times a semester. Just to make sure that people how to understand how to act their status. The ring is why you're going to the trouble. The ring is what matters. You show it to guy in the lobby when you visit a firm as a job applicant, you get to take the special elevator upstairs.
As for going to class—all inductees have to do, really, is pick some other school somewhere and get a decent grade-point average. It could be wherever—state school, correspondence course, who cares. What's important is that they're wearing the ring that says HARVARD. That says PRESTIGE. That says IN-GROUP and UNDERWRITTEN.
What I'm saying is that the quality and extent of ivy-league education is—or at looks this way from my point of view—increasingly irrelevant to elite reproduction at this point. As you say, it's a social club. It's where the annual crops of People Who Matter are cultivated and get to intermingle before they're fast-tracked into the fields of their choice, and mysteriously, a vanishingly small number of them come from humble origins.
An absolute banger! I like Kang’s work too- one thing I heard him say- I think on a podcast - that a certain type of Asian-American WANTS to go to a place with plenty of white legacies who take the place of more deserving Asians because how else will they meet said legacies and build the relationships that govern getting jobs where “fit” can be just as- if not more- important than merit and ability.
Really insightful post. Thanks for sharing, Chris.
And I wish this aspect of the issue would gain greater exposure: “Only 4.5% of [the Harvard] student body comes from low-income backgrounds.”
Louder for those in the back Chris! Nothing but fax here.
For a lot of these schools, the honest thing to do would just be to sell a couple hundred class rings a year. There'd still be the applications, interviews, monstrous fees, and recommendations from alumni, but if you get into the college, you get a ring, and then maybe a stack of pamphlets to study and some finishing school-style classes to take a few times a semester. Just to make sure that people how to understand how to act their status. The ring is why you're going to the trouble. The ring is what matters. You show it to guy in the lobby when you visit a firm as a job applicant, you get to take the special elevator upstairs.
As for going to class—all inductees have to do, really, is pick some other school somewhere and get a decent grade-point average. It could be wherever—state school, correspondence course, who cares. What's important is that they're wearing the ring that says HARVARD. That says PRESTIGE. That says IN-GROUP and UNDERWRITTEN.
What I'm saying is that the quality and extent of ivy-league education is—or at looks this way from my point of view—increasingly irrelevant to elite reproduction at this point. As you say, it's a social club. It's where the annual crops of People Who Matter are cultivated and get to intermingle before they're fast-tracked into the fields of their choice, and mysteriously, a vanishingly small number of them come from humble origins.
An absolute banger! I like Kang’s work too- one thing I heard him say- I think on a podcast - that a certain type of Asian-American WANTS to go to a place with plenty of white legacies who take the place of more deserving Asians because how else will they meet said legacies and build the relationships that govern getting jobs where “fit” can be just as- if not more- important than merit and ability.
Add TTS cuh
100 years or so ago, the Ivies were having the same types of conversations about Jews, just not mediated by the courts.