The result of Yeung’s research is a website called PolarisList. Looking over the data for Princeton’s classes of 2015 through 2018 is bracing. The list of sending schools is dominated by highly selective magnet schools, public schools in wealthy areas, and famous prep schools: the Lawrenceville School, Exeter, Delbarton, Andover, Deerfield Academy. Among the top 25 feeders to Princeton, only three are public schools where 15 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
Read the whole article.
Long ago, when I proposed a voucher system, I wanted a graduated system that gave more money to parents of limited means and/or children with special needs. In addition, I proposed a “luxury tax” on parents sending students to very-high-tuition K-12 schools.
Longer ago, when I arrived as a freshman a Swarthmore College, I came from a wealthy public school, but I felt out of place among the prep school graduates, including my roommate. They pronounced it “Swathmore,” which I never did. Once classes started, I realized that they were not ahead of me in terms of intellectual background. They were ahead of me socially, and in hindsight my friends, even though I had different groups each year, were pretty much all from something other than the elite prep schools.
Why does everything have to be a marginal tax/benefit withdrawal? Literally everything.
Giving more money to parents of limited means implies giving less money to parents of means. So either the people of limited means are getting the amount they need and other parents aren’t, or people of limited means are getting more than they need in which case why are you even doing that if you believe in the Null Hypothesis.
We have a COVID stimulus, professionals don’t qualify.
Proposed child allowance also might cut us out. We get less dependent care tax credits.
My company requires high cost share as your base pay increases. Obamacare subsidies work the same way.
Forgive student debt? I paid off my loans. Was that a mistake? Was I a sucker to do that?
Why not just pass a law that says no individual should earn more than 75k. That’s what it feels like sometimes. We already have 100% marginal tax rates on people trying to climb into the lower middle class. Why not recreate them for anyone trying earn their way out of hand to mouth middle class existence.
Go ahead, tell me how you “don’t need it”. I don’t care. Every dollar my family keeps makes us more financially secure, opens up opportunities for our children, makes it easier to survive on one income, gives us career flexibility, helps us retire earlier, and gives us the option to withdraw our kids from public schools if they continue to act crazy or simply shut down entirely. I didn’t sign up to work till I die to subsidize others.
If you want to give out a benefit, just give it out equally to everyone. I’m tired of this means tested social engineering bullshit.
P.S. My high school had a hard quota on how many people the top Ivy’s would admit and so practically the entire class ended up going to Cornell because they would accept an unlimited number of people from our school. Everyone knew about this and still wanted to go because going to school with other smart people is more enjoyable and better for you than being the valedictorian are mediocre school.
I have to agree with you, and, of course, this sort of means-testing/high taxation is worse here in Canada.
People are penalized for sending their kids to high-quality schools (or for buying expensive houses), but I can spend a fortune on exotic travel, sports cars, or booze, or nights out, etc. If I choose to devote my savings to my child’s future welfare, that is my personal choice, one that others could attempt as well, but usually don’t.
The coming wealth taxes are along the same lines.
Read John Cochrane’s latest blog post regarding income inequality and how it is NOT getting worse when one looks at after-tax income.
And how are you penalized if you buy a house instead of a luxury trip?
One penalty in many provinces is the Property Transfer Tax. A home sold at median sale price in Vancouver BC will incur transfer tax of about $30,000 CAD (~$24,000 USD)
Forgive student debt? I paid off my loans. Was that a mistake? Was I a sucker to do that?
Yes. The far smarter approach is to keep the wolf at bay until the whole system collapses under its own weight.
So you went to Cornell? Hardly chopped liver.
Sorry about ur stimulus. I guess adjusted family income > $160,000 has its disadvantages. But I assume your mom and dad got theirs? Plus if you get the child thing…Thanks Joe!
We got ours. This time. Helps when you can decide when to take income and when not to. Fwiw I was one of those “give it to everyone” guys. But Manchin and the 50 Republicans said “nyet!”
I do feel for wage earners. Almost all the tax that’s collected comes from people who can’t get out of reporting wages. And the employer portion of fica. I was one for many years so I get it.
Some time ago, I owned a small business where we had a young guy who we hired while still in technical high school for an apprenticeship. It was a blue collar work environment, and he was obviously very, very smart and the other workers respected him.
After some years, we wanted him to step into more responsibility. He declined, not because of a lack of ability or confidence, but because he was socialized to find taking responsibility for managing others to be unacceptable.
A lot of what we consider success is a socialized willingness to accept the dynamics of imposing on others, and accepting similar impositions from others to get ahead. The willingness to take, and sometimes live with unpleasant arrangements. That give and take is a choice many people reject.
Class often isn’t about refinement or talent. Sometimes it’s the opposite. The point isn’t all those advantages those kids get. Its their parents training them to take those advantages, and make those deals. That’s the advatage, not the stuff.
This is an outstanding comment, and I see a lot of myself in the description of your employee.
+1 Tho both getting offers of advantages & deals and learning to take those offers are both advantages.
The willingness to take, and sometimes live with unpleasant arrangements.
I, too, was not fully happy being a manager – rather preferred being the consultant/ advisor/ specialist type, including external. Being a “boss” is really Not the same.
Recently I read, while looking for business FIT picks, that one young CEO found it extremely valuable to go out among a group of young CEOs – able to discuss their similar problems, tho different particulars. Hiring, Firing, and Evaluating are tough jobs; and those who do it well create far better businesses.
Why is Arnold uncomfortable with difference? Whence the desire to level? Variation in cognitive repertoires among individuals and group averages is a fact of life. Why fight it?
1. You learn a lot about people who just spouting BS hypocrisy as signals when you see how they respond to proposals that would solve the problems they pretend to care about, but which they actually don’t. Libertarian intellectuals do this a lot, “If X is really the problem, how about counter-X?” Crickets. X is not really the problem. That conspicuously but falsely complaining about X is a point-scorer in the political status game, is the real problem. Making these proposals and watching the reaction help to prove the point. This is half of Robin Hanson’s entire career.
2. The Red Queen Race of clamoring for scarce signals of prestige is a zero sum game and a classic Social Failure Mode, akin to a Market Failure Mode. Sumptuary Laws were, in part, an attempt to stop these rat races from spiraling out of control so as to avoid people bidding up the price in a Ricardian fashion to the very edge of affordability, crowding out everything else. Only a sovereign “unmoved mover” can reliably intervene in such a process to resolve the coordination failure akin to a tragedy of the commons, when everyone is pursuing what is in their rational, individual interests, but in a collectively irrational and harmful manner.
Example?
There has been a lot of this kind of sniping by libertarians at conservatives around a lot of the non-economic, social issues conservatives have complained about. One example I think were the debates over civil unions and then gay marriage, and a lot of libertarians would retort, well, what about divorce?
Sorry, but I don’t see how this is an example of ignoring a proposal to solve a problem of interest (i.e., being more interested in complaining about something than in actually solving it).
If black really do die too high in America, what about mandatory swimming classes?
Annual drowning deaths: 2000, mainly pre-pubescents.
Annual police homicide: 250.
Thus we learn BLM is about the fact that cops vote red, while the unemployed vote blue.
Black deaths really are too high in America, of course, but murder is one of the leading causes. BLM is almost perfectly designed to make the problem worse instead of better. (As per usual.)
See also: nuclear power vs. atmospheric carbon. We learn e.g. Greenpeace is a Saudi lobby group.
I think it is deeply problematic for universities like Harvard and Princeton to enjoy huge tax breaks, and then take students mainly from a few elite prep schools.
I am saddened to see tests like the SAT falling into disrepute. These tests allow poor kids to show they are as smart as anybody, and are great equalizers. Sure, rich kids can hire a tutor, but poor kids can study for the SAT, too.
Actually, a lot of those schools have caps on how many individuals they will take from any one school. There were literally X slots that could get into Harvard from my high school, and it’s similar at the prep schools.
Here is the Harvard class of 2019:
Before coming to Harvard, 63 percent of respondents attended public school, most of them non-charter, while 35 percent attended private school—26 percent non-denominational and 10 percent parochial.
—
The primary issue is that top talent is descendent from top talent. And top talent may not send their kids to Exeter, but it isn’t sending the to bad public schools (from the data, decent suburban schools seem good enough).
I read that article last weekend. The author takes a strange angle in wanting to lower the education for wealthy, with no real benefit for the others. She complains about them taking advanced courses that allow them to excel in college, for instance. The fret about public schools not having a high concentration of Ivy League students is so strange: of course they don’t; they have to serve whoever happens to live nearby. If private schools disbanded, you’re barely changing the concentration in public schools.
If I had written that article, my angle would’ve been: How do you keep parents and children in line when they are paying college tuition for grade school? Imagine trying to kick a kid out for egregious behavior in 12th grade after the parents paid $40K per year for about a decade. Parents trashing other kids for college admissions is a concrete example from the article.
In New England, natives tends to drop the “R”
So, famously, “pak the ca in Havad Yad”
Sounds like there were New Englanders at your college who dropped the “r” from the college name.
It seems there are several factors that contribute to our dystopian education situation:
– The Burkean anti-republican revanchist yearning for institutional aristocracy to lord power over the “swinish multitude” of “petty lawyers, constables, Jew brokers, keepers of hotels, taverns, and brothels, pert apprentices, clerks, shop boys, hairdressers, fiddlers, and dancers” that they live in mortal dread might arise themselves to some small measure of political autonomy. Those are quotes from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, so remember that when you see Politico describing Ben Sasse as a “Burkean conservative.” Democratic reform has no greater enemy than these Jacobite lordlings who fancy elitist education credentials as some sort of meritocratic marker.
– The conformist identitarian progressive movement that feeds on a manichaean division of the world into good us, bad them. All the erstwhile elites with their Ivy credentials flooding out to “raise awareness” and spread Uncle Joe’s gospel of “antiracist” apartheid are just the latest manifestation of a hate-based elitist tradition that traces its histiry through one long undifferentiated stream of elitist bigotry back from Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorable through Obama’s ” bitter clingers,” Bill Clinton’s Waco and Ruby Ridge massacres of non conformist women and children,; Jimmy Carter’s anti-Semitism (“There are constant and vehement political and media debates in Israel concerning its policies in the West Bank but because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the U.S., Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media, and most American citizens are unaware of circumstances in the occupied territories.”); Johnson’s Mai Lai massacre; Kennedy’s surveillance of MLK; Truman nuking Nagasaki before the damage from Hiroshima was realized; Roosevelt’s internment camps and redlining; the white supremacy, eugenics, and segregation espoused by Wilson; Jackson’s genocide, and even further back to Adams and Hamilton clamoring for a monarchy in the USA. An odious tradition of sticking it to the masses, justified in part by education credentials. The civic shutdowns just another iteration.
– The biological imperative of assortative mating driving like to mate with like to maintain institutional dominance and maintain the club.
– Tax code rent seeking.
– Unrestrained power of public school teachers’ unions maintaining the mediocre status quo.
Chile’s example offers the best solution.
Angelo Codevilla explains what is happening very nicely and one can easily intuit the role of elite education separatism from this:
“Today, the oligarchy that controls American society’s commanding heights leaves those who are neither its members nor its clients little choice but to marshal their forces for their own exodus. The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-exodus-angelo-codevilla-oligarchy
The writer’s logic is self-defeating in multiple ways. “A $50,000/year school can never be anything but a luxury for the super-rich”, huh? I’ll bet the taxpayers are already paying more than that for the worse education public school children now get. This snob’s real problem is that the parents control the process, and that the market gives them the ability to get what they want.
Listen to the partisans of “critical race theory” and you’ll hear it expressed other ways. Parents who help children with their homework are “too white” and should be banned or punished. Those who would opt-out of CRT being taught are “racist.” And so forth.
The way I would optimize outcomes for kids is to abolish the public school system entirely, and replace compulsory education with a simple requirement that students be able to pass standardized exams appropriate for their ages every 3 or 4 years. Parents whose kids don’t pass would risk having them taken away and placed in foster care. But how that pass is achieved would be between each parent and his child.
Even including capital costs, most ordinary students cost less than $10,000 a year. Special needs students often cost several times that (if someone has a full time aide, that adds 30 or 40 thousand dollars a year right there), which really brings up the average.
And it can never be said too many times, “Whether public or private, traditional or charter, good students make good schools and bad students make bad schools.” A school with wonderful facilities and great teachers will fail if the students are bad. A school with mediocre facilities and average teachers will be successful if the students are good.
A school with wonderful facilities and great teachers will fail if the students are bad.
From a 1995 article on the Kansas City experiment:
In 1985, after finding that the city and the state had maintained a racially segregated system, Federal District Judge Russell Clark ordered an ambitious overhaul of Kansas City schools, largely at state expense, to overcome the effects of that disgraceful policy. …
Some $1.5 billion in special outlays, over and above the normal budget, has been devoted to the task of reconstructing the Kansas City schools–more than $40,000 per student. Annual spending per pupil, excluding capital costs, is twice as high as in nearby suburbs. All the high schools and middle schools, as well as half the elementary schools, have been turned into magnet schools. Each year since 1987, the district has gotten an AAA rating, the highest the state awards.
Rotted buildings have been replaced with state-of-the-art facilities. The district boasts greenhouses, laboratories, a 25-acre farm, a planetarium, schools that offer “total immersion” in foreign languages, lavish athletic arenas, radio and TV studios, computers in every classroom–everything you could ask for.
As Judge Clark put it, he has “allowed the district planners to dream” and “provided the mechanism for those dreams to be realized.” An appeals court judge found that students in Kansas City “have in place a system that offers more educational opportunity than anywhere in America.”
The goal was twofold: attracting white students from both the city and its suburbs and improving the performance of minority students. The exodus of whites has apparently been stopped, if not reversed. But the benefit to student performance has not materialized. From the evidence, you wouldn’t know anything had changed.
The dropout rate, depending on how it’s measured, has remained the same or risen since 1985. About 60 percent of the kids who start high school in Kansas City never finish. Daily attendance rates have fallen, while they have been stable in the rest of Missouri.
Student performance on standardized tests has shown “no measurable improvement,” says Tim Jones, director of desegregation services for the state Board of Education. Children in kindergarten score, on average, well above the national norm. But by 4th grade, they are below the national norm, and the gap widens as they pass through middle school and high school. The longer they stay, the worse they do.
Compared to students in the rest of the state, Kansas City pupils are worse off today than when Judge Clark began underwriting the school district’s dreams. At the outset, he expressed confidence that student achievement in Kansas City would match the national average “within four to five years.” That was eight years ago.
A study by the Harvard Project on School Desegregation found that all the outlays had produced no better than modest results. “They had as much money as any school district will ever get,” says Gary Orfield, an education professor who directs the project– and who testified for the students who filed the lawsuit that led to the overhaul. “It didn’t do very much.”
The elite snobs and their virtue signaling are almost perfectly captured by Caitlin:
The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities; she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one.
The wrong side of savage inequality. They care about it, but they’re never on the wrong side of it.
Arnold’s experiences of the preppies not being ahead intellectually seem strongly contradicted by the article’s discussion of AP / college style courses that the prep schools offer. In IQ – SAT – college grades/question answers, I’d guess part of what he means is that, despite the best prep money can buy, the IQ 120 preppie seldom really is a better thinker than the higher IQ/SAT 130 gov’t school top students.
But ahead socially also means that the still smarter than avgerage preppie who works at networking and “fitting in” with the elite, despite not great intellectual prowess, still becomes quite successful and gets fine job offers.
For K-12, per-student vouchers to allow more parents to have more input into the schools is still far more likely to be a benefit than a problem. For all schools who want to teach kids, more than be in the nominally non-profit business of education.
For colleges to keep their non-profit status, there should be income levels of students such that: No more than X% of the students can come from household family incomes of X% ranking from the top. For the following 6 levels:
No more than 1% of students from richest 1%,
2% students from richest 2%,
5% students from richest 5%,
10% students from richest 10%,
20% students from the richest 20%,
50% students from the richest 50%.
Tax exempt status should only be given to those schools where 50% or more of the students come from the bottom 50%.
This will spread the rich kid money far more evenly, and the “top schools” will be at top more because of getting lots of top students from the bottom half.
+1 The U.S. needs to better develop the human capital of *all* its citizens.
Part of the problem is that universities don’t really select for academic ability. Harvard could recruit a class of future college professors, but they would never do this. What universities select for is leadership and future earning potential. Nothing makes a university happier than to see alumni doing well financially and writing big fat checks to their alma mater.
That would be amazing as political theater, but the sad truth is that there just aren’t a lot of smart kids from poor families. Yes, there are some immigrant children whose parents come from countries where there isn’t much chance for smart, poor people to get ahead. But most of those families in the lower 50% of income are there because the parents are in the lower 50% of intelligence.
-1 There are tons of smart kids from poor families.
I’m not even sure school selects for intelligence. I think it selects more for meekly following instructions.
1) Take out recent immigrants and almost all kids in the lowest income decile will be below the median in intelligence. In the highest decile, almost all the kids will be above the median. As an absolute number, there are probably “tons of smart kids from poor families”, though much depends on how you define smart and poor. What is beyond dispute is that the proportion of smart kids declines a lot as you go down the income scale.
2) Schools select for both intelligence and “following instructions” (a combination of Bryan Caplan’s “conscientiousness” and “conformity”). It is certainly true that some schools will graduate young people who have learned little and haven’t gained much in the way of skills. But that is generally because those people are not very bright and we can’t accept the fact that lots of people can’t honestly complete a college prep curriculum.
My magnet school was 90%+ immigrants whose parents were obviously intelligent but hadn’t been in a first world country long enough to get rich yet.
Of the remainder there was usually some personal story of why obviously more intelligent then average parents didn’t have the means for private school (my best friend had a disabled sibling that cost the family a lot of money, etc).
I actually can’t think of a single person in our school that came from an ordinary poor family, despite the fact that the school was free and anyone in the county who could pass the entrance exam had a pretty good shot. Some middle class families that private school would be a big stretch financially, but that’s it.
“I wanted a graduated system that gave more money to parents of limited means and/or children with special needs.”
Amazingly, Robert Reich made that exact same proposal in the WSJ editorial pages circa 2001.
Robert Reich wasn’t always as bad as he is now. Even Krugman was reasonable in the 1990s.