Chasing after elite jobs seem like something of mug's game to someone who wasn't born into them. Entrance into the upper echelons of American society isn't impossible, but the odds are sure as hell stacked against you.
It's illustrative to consider an example: working and middle class Asians. It's almost a truism at this point that, while they're good at getting good educations and jobs, they almost inevitably end up hitting a wall ("the bamboo ceiling"). And it's almost as if it's by design. Society told Asian kids that they have to study and get good grades to get ahead, so they did. Too well! So the rules changed, and then they had to have extracurriculars. And they did that too! Piano, Academic Decathlon, tutoring, tennis, violin... they aimed for what were seemingly all the good extracurriculars and excelled in them. But then certain gate keepers were like, "whoah, way too many Asians are getting in. Gotta change the rules again!" And so that kid with a perfect GPA, great test scores, even some research experience, and on top of that does pretty well in both cross country and piano (albeit not nationally ranked) gets kicked to the curb because he's too "cookie cutter." The new criteria are "extracurriculars, but make sure to do something that makes you stand out and be super unique!"
So now that's the new publicly-stated resume to optimize for. The right activity to do, as it turns out, is "do whatever only the already-elite have the resources to do." Elite gatekeepers have a set of signifiers for entrance into the upper class for one and one reason only: to keep out riff-raff like you. Any entry criteria that would change the cultural and literal complexion of the upper class too much is, ipso facto, a bad criteria for entry.
And consider the best case scenario: you do get in. But even then, you're still an outsider. Hell, you didn't even go to Andover or Exeter! And you didn't even travel internationally for the first time until you went to college? Back to the fields with you, peasant!
For most people, aiming for professional, middle-class jobs seems the most realistic goal to aim for. Ain't a bad lifestyle at all, if you can accept it's silly to try to win a game that's designed to make you lose.
Right - this seems to advocate a sort of cargo cult around membership of the upper class. If you go to the right schools, dress the right way, participate in the right activities, that must be how you get an 'elite job', because upper class kids do all that and they get those jobs. It's literally as naive as thinking that building model planes and control towers on your island will bring real planes in to land.
That may be true, to some degree, but _not_ going to school makes it even less likely to get good jobs (not sure "elite" jobs is what everyone should be after).
It's not like blue collar graduates/bosses who started businesses are going to decide, you know what, I'll give all my key jobs to those guys and gals who didn't bother going to school. I'm going to go ahead and hire all those underachievers I used to know back in highschool.
Yes, but test scores are not necessarily an objective measure of how good an employee is going to be, unless their job is going to be to take tests. They're a proxy.
Suppose student A has talent 100, and student B has talent 90. Student A puts in a normal level of effort, and scores 100. Student B dedicates all of his time to studying, goes to cram school, etc., and also scores 100. Now they look the same, but A's higher talent of 100 is still going to give them an edge on the job. If you're trying to figure out the candidate's talent, what do you do? You have to look beyond test scores.
Basically, at some point putting too much effort into it is a way of gaming the system, since you're optimizing a proxy instead of what people are really looking for; and changing or expanding the proxy actually makes selection more accurate.
I'm getting downvoted, so let me explain. The test can not distinguish between him and student B and anyone above student Bs level. If you raised the ceiling this would solve the problem.
Though you should note, SAT prep has a negligible effect on scores. Intelligence, sadly, is mostly the result of genetics and non-shared environment, with an emphases on genetics. Our inability to admit this would be hilarious if its results weren't so tragic.
Raising the ceiling would also help with the Ivy-league's insane penchant for passing on some of the most able students. Scott Aaronson had perfect SAT scores at 15 - this was back when the SAT was much harder. In his words:
I admit that my views on this matter might be colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all unique) experience, of getting rejected from almost every “top” college in the United States, and then, ten years later, getting recruited for faculty jobs by the very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager [...] I was a narrow, linear, A-to-B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence: the exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way.
With a higher ceiling, sufficiently high scores are impressive enough on their own. I don't care about those institutions, it's Princeton and Harvard's loss. And Cornell's gain! But it's an insane way to do admissions and it has a real cost on kids. I have nightmares about promising programmers and mathematicians being forced to practice piano instead of doing what they love.
That's totally true: supposing there even is some objective value of merit, any given proxy metric for it will be subject to gaming.
My point would be that there will inevitably be proxy metrics for entry into the elite, and they will tend to be flawed in a way that advantages current spawn of the elite. Once a sufficient mass of people possessing "true" merit knows to chase after those proxies, they will change again to maintain the current composition of the upper class.
Or we could raise the ceiling on the SAT so only one kid on average gets a perfect score each year. And then filter students into institutions purely based on SATs. Studying for IQ tests has steeply diminishing returns. This would likely prevent these horrible signalling equilibrium where we burn our brightests' childhoods, forcing them to learn antiquated hobbies they don't enjoy. Test scores should be the only factor. Admissions could be replaced with a Python script. What ever you think about IQ tests, I promise you ad hoc admissions and unblinded admission procedures are drastically less meritocratic.
Not to say the above isn't true, but just want to mention that all of the above and more are standard for Asians getting jobs with Asian companies in Asia.
If you want to get at the top of Keiretsu, Chaebol, etcc., you'll have not only a degree from a prestigious local school but a degree form _some_ north American or UK higher Ed institution.
So, Asians in America are brought up by parents who grew up in Asia instilling education above all else and that has certainly fit nicely into the ivy leave pipeline (or if you were in France the sciences Po or grandes ecoles).
That's to say, their culture of stressing education is reinforced by the American labor market.
If you were to meet any Asian exchange students in North America, you'd notice not only did they all go to cram schools after normal classes but also took music classes and English classes -all of which are expected prerequisites for jobs back home.
And, to get a lowly government job, you typically need to go to a cram school and prepare for the ministry of examination exam which is necessary to qualify for a gov't job.
So, elite kids just happen to do everything that they do out de novo, never having been told to do them by their parents?
Given the same resources and information, a large number of kids of all classes would do the same type of things that elite gatekeepers like to see from elite applicants.
The difference is resources. You guide your kid to grow, experiment, etc. If you're a pool family, no safety net, no connections, that's going to be a disaster.
Yep. For the most part the elite will find a way to remain the elite, generation after generation after generation, unless there's a revolution. That won't change until human nature changes. Consequently, the rest of us with three choices.
(1) Start planning a real revolution, with all that entails. Good luck with that.
(2) Compete to be one of the very few who get invited to join the elite. Marrying in's the most reliable method, but that option's only available to half the population (approximately). Other than that, settle in for a brutal fight.
(3) Settle for being one of the nouveau riche. You might even be as rich as the elite in dollar terms, but you still won't really be part of the club and neither will your children. More likely you'll be in the economic tier just below the elite, which is a perfectly wonderful place to be.
Note that "change the game through legislation" and "whine about it" aren't on the list. Sorry. This is about the real world, and I'm trying to give practical advice.
I think your conclusion is right for most people, but you're a bit too cynical. The system isn't rigged purposefully. It is just that the people who decide who gets the elite jobs all act a certain way and had similar backgrounds. Naturally they like people like themselves and so the jobs go to those people. Even then, there are lots of qualified people from those backgrounds who don't get those jobs. Everyone is competing for a purely positional advantage (i.e. in order to move up, someone else must move down) and the 1% is already large enough to replenish its own ranks.
Yes. The idea the wealthy got together and formed a big conspiracy to shut everyone else out is a bit on the paranoid side. It's not that you can't get a prestigious job without the right kind of background, it's that you don't have an advantage other people have. And, as you say, there aren't enough top jobs to go around.
But we don't have to look at top jobs to see this dynamic at play. Good looking people of both sexes get better jobs than the rest of us, as do people with more energy.
Everyone who wasn't born into the small elite is affected by the system, including me. It's not a competition to see who suffers the most.
Edit: also, the elite themselves are punished by the way things work. The number of truly elite jobs is small and the competition is very strong. For every kid whose parents bought his/her way through the system there were a number of others whose parents tried, but failed, to do the same thing.
>For most people, aiming for professional, middle-class jobs seems the most realistic goal to aim for. Ain't a bad lifestyle at all, if you can accept it's silly to try to win a game that's designed to make you lose.
Except that seems like one is still playing the same game that enables the status quo, like you state in your example, is where most people end up anyways… who then will still worry if their large mega corp will be the next to lay off the next 40k workers…
I don't even know what elite jobs this article is talking about. High paying professional jobs are open to anyone. Lawyer, doctor, and I guess maybe now programmer. What are the elite jobs not open to us normal people?
I'd identify it as high finance, big consultancies, and upper management for large corps. Of those you listed, only a small subset of attorneys might qualify, and they're just as closely bound to class as any of the real elite jobs.
Doctors, lawyers, and programmers count solidly in the middle class, and I agree they're relatively accessible.
If you're going to count finance & consultancies, you might as well count big tech, too. It is entirely unreasonable how many silicon valley non-programmers (and a few programmers) have gotten here via both of those channels.
Moreover, I have directly heard from more than a handful of people out here that they only went to business school because they had no idea what they wanted to do when they left their investment bank / consulting firm, so it seemed the best idea at the time.
Honestly, I think upper management for large corps is far more rarified air than the others. There is not only an extremely restricted population, but a lot of these leaders are selected via a revolving door. The average CxO only spends something like 3yrs at any given company, then gets hired by a different one -- rinse and repeat. You can consider only two pipelines for this role: 1) folks who successfully managed and grew smaller companies and are hired into those roles from outside, or 2) folks who spent a whole career at the company.
> open to anyone. Lawyer, doctor, and I guess maybe now programmer.
The elite (or the highest paying, most prestigious) of those jobs are open to those who know the right people. The basics of those jobs are open to anyone who has the money to go to school for them.
The path to the elite of anything is 'who you know.'
The book's Amazon blurb defines elite jobs as "top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms" which are "the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs."
It's illustrative to consider an example: working and middle class Asians. It's almost a truism at this point that, while they're good at getting good educations and jobs, they almost inevitably end up hitting a wall ("the bamboo ceiling"). And it's almost as if it's by design. Society told Asian kids that they have to study and get good grades to get ahead, so they did. Too well! So the rules changed, and then they had to have extracurriculars. And they did that too! Piano, Academic Decathlon, tutoring, tennis, violin... they aimed for what were seemingly all the good extracurriculars and excelled in them. But then certain gate keepers were like, "whoah, way too many Asians are getting in. Gotta change the rules again!" And so that kid with a perfect GPA, great test scores, even some research experience, and on top of that does pretty well in both cross country and piano (albeit not nationally ranked) gets kicked to the curb because he's too "cookie cutter." The new criteria are "extracurriculars, but make sure to do something that makes you stand out and be super unique!"
So now that's the new publicly-stated resume to optimize for. The right activity to do, as it turns out, is "do whatever only the already-elite have the resources to do." Elite gatekeepers have a set of signifiers for entrance into the upper class for one and one reason only: to keep out riff-raff like you. Any entry criteria that would change the cultural and literal complexion of the upper class too much is, ipso facto, a bad criteria for entry.
And consider the best case scenario: you do get in. But even then, you're still an outsider. Hell, you didn't even go to Andover or Exeter! And you didn't even travel internationally for the first time until you went to college? Back to the fields with you, peasant!
For most people, aiming for professional, middle-class jobs seems the most realistic goal to aim for. Ain't a bad lifestyle at all, if you can accept it's silly to try to win a game that's designed to make you lose.