Astral Codex Ten

Ivy League

10 min read

Ivy League

Article

Ivy League is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 18, 2021 and December 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""ultra-bright Ivy League grads who want a taste of the real world""; “her family has millions of dollars and all went to Ivy League schools”; “About 15% of Ivy League students are Jewish”. It most often appears alongside Harvard, America, New York.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: February 18, 2021
  • Last seen: December 10, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The Cult Of Smart
February 18, 2021 · Original source
DeBoer will have none of it. He thinks they're cooking the books by kicking out lower-performing students in a way public schools can't do, leaving them with a student body heavily-selected for intelligence. Any remaining advantage is due to "teacher tourism", where ultra-bright Ivy League grads who want a "taste of the real world" go to teach at private schools for a year or two before going into their permanent career as consultants or something. This would work - many studies show that smarter teachers make students learn more (though this specifically means high-IQ teachers; making teachers get more credentials has no effect). But it doesn't scale (there are only so many Ivy League grads willing to accept low salaries for a year or two in order to have a fun time teaching children), and it only works in places like New York (Ivy League grads would not go to North Dakota no matter how fun a time they were promised).
There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.
Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration
June 14, 2021 · Original source
This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history; family lore usually focuses on how our ancestors were the poorest of the poor. My great-great-grandfather was a chicken farmer in Poland. He first emigrated to Germany, but felt like the German Jews were too stuck up and contemptuous of poor Polish Jews like himself, so he booked passage to America. I asked my Jewish housemate, whose family has millions of dollars and all went to Ivy League schools; she says her emigrant ancestors were "a Kosher butcher in Minsk and some guy who floated logs down the Dneiper River".
About 15% of Ivy League students are Jewish (it used to be more). About 30% of top computer scientists are Jewish. But only about 5% of people in America's largest cities are Jewish. Even if only people from the top ten largest cities could go to college or become computer scientists, Jews would still be 3-6x overrepresented.
Inline links: 15% of Ivy League students, 30% of top computer scientists, 5% of people
Secrets Of The Great Families
November 09, 2021 · Original source
We can formalize this objection using IQ, which is nice and quantifiable. Suppose Erasmus Darwin had a genius-level IQ of 150. And suppose that he tried very hard to marry a bright woman, and his screening mechanism was as successful as the Ivies or Oxbridge when they screen for bright people - in that case his wife would have the same IQ as an average Ivy Leaguer, maybe 130ish. We would predict their average child to have an IQ of 124. Why is the average lower than either parent? Regression to the mean - IQ is probably a combination of genes and random factors, and if your IQ is very high it means you probably have a combination of good genes and good random dice rolls, and even though you can pass on the good genes your kids will probably only get average dice rolls.
But 124 isn’t even as high as the average Ivy Leaguer. If that IQ 124 kid marries another IQ 130 spouse, things deteriorate less quickly - I think the regression process has selected for his 24 IQ point advantage over average being entirely genetic, so it’s not going to regress further. But his spouse’s IQ can still regress further, so they’ll probably end up with a kid who has an IQ somewhere in the high 110s or low 120s - for comparison, not much higher than the average Ashkenazi Jew. Maintaining a super-high-IQ family over several generations is really hard!
Inline links: the average Ashkenazi Jew
Not only do politicians have higher IQs than the general population, but the higher you go in politics (from nominated, to city council, to mayor, to member of Parliament), the higher your IQ! Members of Parliament average 6.7 on this test, which I think equals IQ 115 - not as high as Ivy Leaguers, but still well above average. So the same intellectual skills that made Henri a great mathematician could have helped Raymond become Prime Minister.
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
The heart of the WASP aristocracy was the Ivy League. I don’t think there are good statistics, but until the early 1900s many (most?) Ivy League students were WASP aristocrats from a few well-known families. Around 1920 the Jews started doing really well on standardized tests, and the Ivies suspended standardized tests in favor of “holistic admissions” to keep them out and preserve the WASPishness of the elite. All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy.
In 1952, most freshmen at Harvard were products of . . . the prep schools of New England (Andover and Exeter alone contributed 10% of the class), the East side of Manhattan, the Main Line of Philadelphia, Shaker Heights in Ohio, the Gold Coast of Chicago, Grosse Pointe of Detroit, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and so on. Two-thirds of all applicants were admitted. Applicants whose fathers had gone to Harvard had a 90% admission rate. The average verbal SAT score for the incoming men was 583, good but not stratospheric. The average score across the Ivy League was closer to 500 at the time.
The Rise And Fall Of Culture Wars: I previously attributed secular changes in American culture to something like the barberpole theory of fashion: being right-wing was fashionable in the early 20th century. Then it became the symbol of a stodgy uncool establishment. By the 1960s, being a progressive hippie was fashionable. Today, being a progressive hippie seems like the symbol of a stodgy uncool establishment. And right on track, rebellious young people are becoming “alt-right”, a group with some suspicious similarities to the hippies (distrust authority, believe conspiracy theories, freak out over processed food, adopt paganism and weird spirituality, etc). So I was wondering if the right and left poles might just flip, over and over, in a long-term secular cycle. Brooks says that’s not what happened at all, and the 1950s-to-60s flip was a one-time event caused by a change in Ivy League admissions. If true, tragic news for today’s “Dimes Square” set.
Inline links: The Rise And Fall Of Culture Wars, the barberpole theory of fashion
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
The meritocratic phase of the Ivies lasted only a few years, from 1960 to sometime around 1967 when full-tuition academic scholarships were eliminated at all Ivy League schools, using the justification that they were ruining football. This was a major blow to their selectivity; before then, there had been /many/ full-tuition scholarships at most of the ivy leagues.
1. Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions 3. Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good 4. Other Interesting Comments 5. Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate
Inline links: Comments Doubting The Book’s Thesis, Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions, Comments About Whether A Hereditary Aristocracy Might In Fact Be Good, Other Interesting Comments, Tangents That I Find Tedious, But Other People Apparently Really Want To Debate
SuperbOwl has an even more extensive gripe about the “monocausal explanation” aspect. 2. Comments From People Who Seem To Know A Lot About Ivy League Admissions Erusian writes:
Inline links: an even more extensive gripe about the “monocausal explanation” aspect, writes
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
That one campaign was kind of silly. But aside from that example, I don’t usually hear people talk about AAPIs outside a purely legal context. All my Asian (eg Chinese, Japanese, etc) friends self-identify as Asian. When Everything Everywhere All At Once came out, people said it was a movie about the “Asian” experience. The top Ivy League colleges have an Asian Student Association (Harvard), an Asian American Students Alliance (Yale), or an Asian American Students Association (Princeton), with Pacific Islanders nowhere to be seen. With all due respect, Hanania really doesn’t have much here beyond the #StopAAPIHate thing - which seemed like a weird astroturf campaign in other ways and probably shouldn’t be taken as actual grassroots racial categorization.
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
Putting this in as nice and polite a way as I can: I suspect I am on the low-end for IQ (perfectly high midwit-ish 117) of the average ACX reader, but interestingly wife (135+ish, based off ACT score, STEM PhD from Ivy League uni) is closer to modal for this site. So I get to have the fun experience of interacting with someone a full StDev smarter than me, and one thing I often experience is that smart people tend to underestimate how much harder it is for someone with that difference in raw intellectual capacity to do things they can ("No, love of my life, I am not interested in making a Python model to figure out which healthcare option is the best for us."). This was especially heightened when we were foster parents for awhile, and one of our placement was...whatever the appropriate term is nowadays for someone with a 63 IQ (which we were probably the first people in his family to find out about, since I was told I was the first person to ever show up for one of his school's IEP meetings); living with top and bottom 1% intellectual functioning was a very illustrative experience!