andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-578 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Steve Hsu has posted a series of reflections here , here , and here on the dominance of graduates of HYPS (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (in that order, I believe)) in various Master-of-the-Universe-type jobs at “elite law firms, consultancies, and I-banks, hedge/venture funds, startups, and technology companies.” Hsu writes: In the real world, people believe in folk notions of brainpower or IQ. (“Quick on the uptake”, “Picks things up really fast”, “A sponge” …) They count on elite educational institutions to do their g-filtering for them. . . . Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5!” — I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT — the traditional top dogs in academ
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1 (“Quick on the uptake”, “Picks things up really fast”, “A sponge” …) They count on elite educational institutions to do their g-filtering for them. [sent-3, score-0.309]
2 A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e. [sent-8, score-0.606]
3 (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5! [sent-11, score-0.388]
4 Getting in to a top college is not the same as graduating from said college–and I assume you have to have somewhat reasonable grades (or some countervailing advantage). [sent-26, score-0.389]
5 So, yes, the people doing the corporate hiring are using the educational institutions to do their “g-filtering,” but it’s not all happening at the admissions stage. [sent-27, score-0.394]
6 Hsu quotes researcher Lauren Rivera as writing, “it was not the content of an elite education that employers valued but rather the perceived rigor of these institutions’ admissions processes”–but I don’t know if I believe that! [sent-28, score-0.303]
7 As Hsu points out (but maybe doesn’t emphasize enough), the selection processes at these top firms don’t seem to make a lot of sense even on their own terms. [sent-30, score-0.535]
8 ” The reasoning seems to be: The job isn’t so hard so the recruiters can hire whoever they want if such people pass a moderately stringent IQ threshold, thus they can pick the HYPS graduates who they like. [sent-32, score-0.437]
9 And, when it comes to faculty hiring, I think Don Rubin put it best when he said that academic hiring committees all to often act as if they’re giving out an award rather than trying to hire someone to do a job. [sent-38, score-0.216]
10 Either place I would’ve taken hard classes and learned a lot, but one advantage of MIT was that we had no sense–no sense at all–that we could make big bucks. [sent-42, score-0.24]
11 We had no sense of making moderately big bucks as lawyers, no sense of making big bucks working on Wall Street, and no sense of making really big bucks by starting a business. [sent-43, score-1.319]
12 We really had no sense that a physicist degree from MIT degree with good grades was a hot ticket. [sent-47, score-0.319]
13 My senior year I applied to some grad schools (in physics and in statistics) and to some jobs. [sent-50, score-0.33]
14 I got into all the grad schools and got zero job interviews. [sent-51, score-0.368]
15 The kind of places that were interviewing MIT physics grads (which is how I thought of applying for these jobs in the first place). [sent-57, score-0.305]
16 And after all, what could a company like that do with a kid with perfect physics grades from MIT? [sent-58, score-0.287]
17 If I’d gone to college 10 or 20 years later, I might have felt that as a top MIT grad, I had the opportunity–even the obligation, in a way–to become some sort of big-money big shot. [sent-63, score-0.368]
18 Hsu says that “much of (good) social science seems like little more than documenting what is obvious to any moderately perceptive person with the relevant life experience. [sent-67, score-0.496]
19 A simpler response to Hsu is that it’s common for “moderately perceptive persons with the relevant life experience” to disagree with each other. [sent-71, score-0.296]
20 In my own field of voting and elections, even someone as renowned as Michael Barone (who is more than moderately perceptive and has much more life experience than I do) can still get things embarrassingly wrong . [sent-72, score-0.436]
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Introduction: Steve Hsu has posted a series of reflections here , here , and here on the dominance of graduates of HYPS (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (in that order, I believe)) in various Master-of-the-Universe-type jobs at “elite law firms, consultancies, and I-banks, hedge/venture funds, startups, and technology companies.” Hsu writes: In the real world, people believe in folk notions of brainpower or IQ. (“Quick on the uptake”, “Picks things up really fast”, “A sponge” …) They count on elite educational institutions to do their g-filtering for them. . . . Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5!” — I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT — the traditional top dogs in academ
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Introduction: I was reading this article by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker and noticed something suspicious. Levy was writing about an event in 1979 and then continued: One year later, Ronald Reagan won the Presidency, with overwhelming support from evangelicals. The evangelical vote has been a serious consideration in every election since. From Chapter 6 of Red State, Blue State : According to the National Election Study, Reagan did quite a bit worse than Carter among evangelical Protestants than among voters as a whole–no surprise, really, given that Reagan was not particularly religious and Cater was an evangelical himself. It was 1992, not 1980, when evangelicals really started to vote Republican. What’s it all about? I wouldn’t really blame Ariel Levy for this mistake; a glance at her website reveals a lot of experience as a writer and culture reporter but not much on statistics or politics. That’s fine by me: there’s a reason I subscribe to the New Yorker and not
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