37 Comments

This is 100% right. The high school I attended has deemphasized getting into these super-elite schools because they have decided to educate everyone as an individual and not a resume, and as a rule the students go somewhere more prestigious than SUNY-Purchase. (I am not sure how many of the commentariat know what, not to mention where, Truman State is, but a few students have gone there.) Also when I was mistakenly interested in law school in the 1990s the schools on the level of Georgetown would print a list of all the schools that their students had gone to, and they were not all elite schools by a long shot.

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I think everything you say is true here but someone needs to do something about the effect that Harvard, Stanford, Yale etc. really does have on power in America. Scalia gave an interview years ago where he just kind of mocks someone from American University law school for wanting to get a clerkship.

While state schools aren't a death sentence they are pretty thoroughly removed from having access to power. Harvard and Yale really are the nobility, and like there are other things we could do about this but it seems like we're just going to try to transform affirmative action into something just like it but hidden and opaque for the time being. Most schools are for middle class success and are just fine for that but the cabinet secretary or federal judge who regulates your success, the venture capitalist who finances it etc. will all have gone to a few dozen schools everyone in the world knows by name.

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Andrew do you happen to have memory of where this interview was that Scalia gave? I would understand if not. Thanks

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White women have been the number one benefactor of affirmative action. Why has it taken so long to gut it? 🤣🤣🤣

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No cognitive dissonance. As an individual with an individual voice, I see myself being effective in a limited number of places. I am aware of the police patrols in Brazil.

We should not be attacking each other. We should support whatever effort is being done.

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I completely understand edu-industrials as Glenn and John are being in this episode and overall, heavily inoculated, ingrained, steeped in this issue professionally and also immensely scarred professionally. I find them dear; I hear them. But they are too close and uninteresting to listen to that they have survived and thrived despite it. On this and more and more topics recently.

The financial bias (manhattan institute?) is too much to take given the content. They seem incapable of stepping back, to observe and calculate the objective truths involved, or at least question their own certaintudes, which is anguish to listen to given my respect.

And to judge so harshly, it seems impossible to share my own, personal and heavily steeped bias. I am an outsider to the edu-industrial paradigm (hs dropout). I have been trod upon by Glen and John -alikes for decades. And it stings. The stinging has been softened by doing “alright” nonetheless. However it is clear, they lack profound understanding of my truth. Not their duty to do so, just what is.

Bottom line: no one should pay, borrow or beg for a 4 year degree - ANY INSTITUTION - that incurs more than a couple years of average middle-aged today’s earners salaries’ Once it exceeds that it all goes out of whack. And if your path to happiness requires 10x that amount (for any degree) to be successful or if my tax burden is involved to make that happen, I am between unsympathetic to hostile.

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Who is intended audience? Black parents realize the value of institutions like HBCUs and state institutions. HBCU applications are surging. Sherilyn. Ifill, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Phylicia Rashad, and Nikole Hannah Jones are at Howard. Howard has a middle school of science and mathematics. Perhaps Fryer should visit Howard, rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel.

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Impact on reducing the 75% black-out of wedlock birthrate and 45% prison inmates being black?

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HBCUs produce

27% of all Black American STEM graduates

40% of all Black American engineers

50% of all Black American lawyers

50% of all Black American public school teachers

80% of all Black American judges

I don’t know the out of wedlock birth rates of HBCU graduates

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Thanks for good facts. Missing: how many HBCUs? (Both % and absolute). How many Blacks entered college, graduated, failed to graduate for the HBCUs and non? Tho it’s the Glenn stack, not R Redd.

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Of these HBCU graduates, who owns factories or manufacturing plants?

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Janice Bryant Howroyd

Janice Bryant Howroyd is recognized as the first African-American woman in the United States to own and operate a billion-dollar business. With a few hundred bucks in her own savings and a $900 loan from her mother, Howroyd became an entrepreneur in 1978. That year, she founded a staffing agency called ActOne in the office of a rug shop with a single fax machine. She built it into a powerful, $2.8 billion company with 17,000 clients in 19 countries, according to Fox Business.

Howroyd is also a graduate of North Carolina A&T University. The fourth of 11 children, she won a full scholarship to study there and eventually went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate.

Lonnie Johnson

You know Lonnie Johnson as the man who invented the Super Soaker, the No. 1 bestselling water toy of all time. But he’s much more than just some basement inventor who got lucky tinkering with a water gun and a pump.

Johnson earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Tuskegee University, as well as a master’s in nuclear engineering and an honorary Ph.D. An Air Force veteran, Johnson was acting chief of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. He later worked on the Galileo Jupiter mission, the Mars Observer project and the Saturn Cassini project as a senior systems engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A prolific entrepreneur, Johnson founded two advanced energy and battery companies, Excellatron Solid State and Johnson Battery Technologies, Inc. Johnson holds more than 100 patents, including for the Super Soaker, which did more than $200 million in sales and was the bestselling toy in America

These 2 popped into my head

I wanted to avoid connections to entertainment or sports

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Your response is appreciated- thanks for introducing me to these leaders.

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The black overclass (preachers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, academia, billionaires, etc.) today for the most part have been very ineffective in improving black group wealth and self-empowerment. Also, very ineffective as a catalyst to deal with the worsening black pathologies across the country. "Fish fry" James Clyburn and other similar meritorious manumission negroes are just making themselves comfortable for death.

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We come from an educational system that taught Latin rather than Mdw Ntr. The results are not surprising.

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Blacks need to take control of their education. HBCUs and other schools depend on the dominant white society for funding with stipulations.

My wife and I were involved in a charity organization raising money to assist first-year black medical school students at a particular medical school in Southern California. We didn't accept money from other racial groups with stipulations.

The CEO secretly violated an agreement by providing money to rich Nigerian exchange students. We quit the organization, after doing most of the work of bringing in the money. Blacks tend to look out for everyone except themselves.

The Southern border needs to be shut down. In life, there are tradeoffs to better achieve the common good. Lol!

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I sit on the board of an organization that deals with youth in high risk situations. The children just need to be told that they are valued. Being angry at parents who make bad decisions does not help the children. I also have connections to groups that focus on developing math skills for Black children. I don’t expect to see a major change in my lifetime, but you plant seeds. That is why I remain hopeful.

I note that the reason that there is a push to dumb down teaching Black history is that they don’t want the history of whites to be common knowledge. Rosa Parks was just a lady who was asked to move her seat, full stop. The Tulsa race massacre just happened out of the clear blue sky. White people will support teaching the nonsense.

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FYI, my first cousin Dr. Harold Martin is the Chancellor at North Carolina A&T. A&T produces most of the black engineers in the country. Nevertheless, blacks as a whole are a permanent underclass. Only 2% own businesses. Social integration negatively impacted black-owned businesses. There are no real black communities apart from black neighborhoods. Social integration and more access to interracial sex aren't true economic improvements for blacks. Plus, whites all over the world, for the most part, are desperately protecting themselves from genetic annihilation.

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Commentary here focuses enough on the plight of the poor Negro. There are pockets that exist that allow Black excellence. You realize the situation and adapt. We will have to teach our children their history and that Blacks dis not begin life as slaves to Europeans.

There are movements in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, and African that realize a common connection. I am hopeful about the future. European civilization may be at the biggest risk. We have the white on white violence in Ukraine. We have Russians fighting Russians in Russia. We see Europe more dependent on non-Europeans to get things done. Been to London lately?

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I've traveled extensively throughout the world (all continents) ---blacks are at the bottom. Have you visited South American countries where Hispanic racism is worst than white racism in the United States? Argentina eliminated most melanated people, and Brazil has death squads dealing with its blacks speaking out. The Hispanics (proximate to whites) in the U.S., for the most part, see you as inferior and want to replace you. I readily communicate with them. I've visited a number of Arab/Muslim countries, and they for the most part see blacks as inferior and as subordinates/slaves to achieve their cause.

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I did not include South America. I do note things like Barbados speaking about about the ravages of British rule.

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Went to a state school and rose to the top of my organization. Elite schools may think they offer a better education, and maybe they do in specific fields but not in most. Getting through any college is what you make of it. Graduating simply proves your matured, have an ability to think and a work ethic. Post graduation is 80% work ethic or more. And , who wants to be part of the “elite” anyway? The real problem is in the pipeline of kids coming out of high school with a decent education. Until this gets fixed or more states allow charter schools and school choice, many kids will be I’ll prepared for college and will drop out as they do now. That helps no one.

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I think there is a chicken and egg problem with this argument. The top universities were elitist before they were practitioners of affirmative action and now that the era of affirmative action is past, the top universities will continue to be elitist. Harvard is buying up huge chunks of Cambridge and Boston, which it can do in part because of favorable tax treatment, and it has a massive and growing endowment. But Harvard's incoming class sizes have remained flat as the US population has grown, making it even more selective and less productive (in graduates as a percentage of the population) than ever before. I doubt Harvard would even want to try to educate more people because that would puts its elite status at risk.

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The relative importance of an Ivy League education for a successful professional life is WILDLY overstated. The most recent Fortune 500 Report showed this - of Fortune 100 CEOs, only 11.8% have an Ivy League undergraduate degree, and 9.8% have an Ivy League MBA. An IL degree might help with landing the first post-college job, but after that, so many other factors become more important.

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I mean. that's a heck of a multiple if the google I found that .4 percent of college students attend an Ivy is correct.

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Yes, but those are people who actually work for a living and create the wealth that generates the taxes and jobs that allow Washington to keep experimenting with the rest of us. How many Ivy Leaguers are at the highest echelons of government? I would bet it's a higher number. It's an elite feedback loop.

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Interesting point... probably a much higher IL representation.

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I have an idea. We send all current Harvard professors to teach at UMass springfield and vice versa. Equality for professors !

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One of the most important things in life is to properly define success. Success is not about being admitted to Harvard, Boston University, Brandeis or anyplace else. Success is about gaining wisdom - knowledge, experience and understanding - from wherever the learning comes from. Then translating that wisdom into a life well led.

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Another great way this could play out is that, if elite institutions lose their totemic status, the students who otherwise might have gotten into Ivies under racial preferences instead go (in addition to places like SUNYs or Cal States) to colleges that actually emphasize *teaching*, which is so often secondary or tertiary compared to research and publishing output. There are lots of fantastic colleges that don’t have the brand of an Amherst or Williams or Reed. It might even then put pressure back on those elite institutions, or research or large state universities in general, to really prioritize teaching, although perhaps that’s too naïve a hope.

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I love it when the people "of color" (or non-"color") in my classes (or life) would have the confidence to say "I don't speak for all <X> people. This is what I think." The confidence that his/her individual perspective is important in itself. ;-)

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