Gilles Saint-Paul is Professeur à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is a
graduate of Ecole Polytechnique in Engineering and received his PhD
from MIT in Economics. Gilles and Steve discuss the French elite
education system, the Yellow Vest movement, French politics and
populism, and Saint-Paul's paper on marriage markets and hypergamy.
0:00 Introduction
1:43 Gilles Saint-Paul's background and education
6:31 French and American elite education - Les Grandes Ecoles
Rob Henderson grew up in foster homes in California, joined the Air Force at 17, attended Yale on the G.I. Bill, and is currently a Gates Fellow at Cambridge University (UK). He is an acute observer of American society and has coined the term Luxury Beliefs to describe ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.
Steve and Rob discuss:
00:00 Early life and foster experience
20:21 Rob’s experience in the Air Force
31:26 Transitioning from the Air Force to Yale and then Cambridge
44:04 Dating and socializing as an older student
50:06 Reflections on the Yale Halloween email controversy
1:01:10 Personal incentives and careerists in higher education
1:09:45 Luxury beliefs and how they show up in elite institutions
1:31:08 Age and moral judgments
1:42:50 Rob on resisting legacy academia and his future
The guest for this episode is a recent graduate of Harvard College, now pursuing a STEM PhD at another elite university. We have withheld his identity so that he can speak candidly.
Steve and his guest discuss:
0:00 Anonymous student’s academic background and admission to Harvard
21:37 Intellectual curiosity at Harvard
29:36 Academic rigor at Harvard and the difference between classes in STEM and the humanities
46:47 Access to tenured professors at Harvard
50:08 The benefits of the Harvard connection and wider pool of opportunities
58:46 Competing with off-scale students
1:00:48 Ideological climate on campus, wokeism, and controversial public speakers
1:23:11 Dating at Harvard
1:26:52 Z-scores and other metrics to add to the admissions process
Typology used for all applicants, at least as late as 1988:
1. S First-rate scholar in Harvard departmental terms.
2. D Candidate's primary strength is his academic strength, but it doesn't look strong enough to quality as an S (above).
3. A All-Amercan‚ healthy, uncomplicated athletic strengths and style, perhaps some extracurricular participation, but not combined with top academic credentials.
4. W Mr. School‚ significant extracurricular and perhaps (but not necessarily) athletic participation plus excellent academic record.
5. X Cross-country style‚ steady man who plugs and plugs and plugs, won't quit when most others would. Gets results largely through stamina and consistent effort.
6. P PBH [Phillips Brooks House] style: in activities and personal concerns.
7. C Creative in music, art, writing.
8. B Boondocker‚ unsophisticated rural background.
9. T Taconic, culturally depressed background, low income.
10. K Krunch‚ main strength is athletic, prospective varsity athlete. [ Sometimes also "H Horse" :-) ]
11. L Lineage‚ candidate probably couldn't be admitted without the extra plus of being a Harvard son, a faculty son, or a local boy with ties to the university community.
12. O Other‚ use when none of the above are applicable.
This short story has it all -- genetic genealogy, ultra high net worth physics quant banker, stripper, cop, marriage, family, New Yorker writer. It's fiction, but based on real characters and stories.
There is an audio version, read by the author, at the link.
Satellites by Rebecca Curtis (The New Yorker July 5, 2021)
My husband and Tony were anxiety-ridden workaholics who’d focussed, from a young age, on earning cash. Tony wanted enough for a good life; Conor, enough to feel safe. They were fifty-six years old, though Conor looked forty-five and Tony thirty-five. They were meticulous, but owing to oversights they’d each had five kids by four women. They were two nerds from New Hampshire.
...
His ancestors, he told me, had founded America. He’d started working at age twelve, as a farmhand, and eventually acquired a Ph.D. in quantum physics from Harvard, then served for decades as the “head quant” at a world-renowned investment bank. But he wasn’t smart enough to be skeptical when go-go dancers said, Don’t worry, I’m on the pill.
...
After high school, Tony turned down a scholarship to the University of New Hampshire. He wanted to work. He did active duty in the Marines for eight years, then served in the Air National Guard for twenty while working as a cop. Now he collected his police pension and, for fun, drove a delivery truck.
...
Conor smiled. By the way, he said, had Tony ever done 23andMe or Ancestry.com?
Tony squinted. Ancestry. Sinead bought them kits for his birthday. Why?
Conor peered up at Jupiter, approaching Saturn for the great conjunction, and the murky dimmer stars. I studied shuttered restaurants. A few bars had created outdoor dining rooms and were busy; the 7-Eleven was dark, but the ever-glowing “Fortune Teller!” sign on the adjacent cottage was lit.
No reason, Conor said. Had Tony, he asked, opted into his family DNA tree, to see his matches who’d already done Ancestry? Or elected to receive text alerts whenever some new supposed relative signed on?
Tony walked swiftly. Nah, he said. He’d done Ancestry to make Sinead happy. He shrugged. She’d made their accounts, he said. She probably opted him in; he wasn’t sure.
When we got home, Tony’s phone had twenty missed calls.
...
Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway 1927. "Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: the casualties of war, the often uneasy relationship between men and women, ..."
In “Satellites,” your story in the Fiction Issue, a woman and her husband, a retired banker, host the husband’s friend at their Jersey-shore mansion. The woman is a frustrated writer, and, to inspire her, her husband, Conor, asks the friend, Tony, a retired police officer, to tell her cop stories. How would you describe the woman’s views of these two men?
The narrator is awed by how smart Tony and her husband are, and by how hard they work. She’s impressed that they’ve read so much and educated themselves about so many diverse topics while performing demanding and often unpleasant jobs, and by the fact that they’re two of the most generous, kind people she knows. She appreciates that they’ve maintained lifelong friendships, something that she wishes she’d done herself. She doesn’t agree with all their political ideas. Earlier in her life, she believed that, one, bankers cared about money but not about art, literature, world hunger, etc.; and, two, that anyone who supported Trumpish policies (or who voted for anyone like Trump) must be an ignorant jerk. Meeting her husband (and Tony) punctured those beliefs.
The narrator views herself as the proverbial grasshopper: someone—possibly frivolous, vapid, and solipsistic—who wants to enjoy her life, sing, dance, make “art,” while working various hip-but-not-very-remunerative jobs to pay rent, never truly planning for winter. Tony and Conor are ants: anxious, alert to the dangers the world can pose, doing difficult (and sneered-upon) jobs diligently so they’ll be protected when scarcity comes. The narrator aspires to be more ant-like while remaining a grasshopper.
Tony and Conor are, in some ways, obsessed with genetics and lineage—they discuss Ancestry.com and bloodlines—but their own families (they each have five children by four women) are somewhat of a disappointment, or even an afterthought, to them. Can you say a little about that tension?
Conor and Tony suffer because—in several cases—they don’t have the ability to see their children. In the case of divorce, a time-sharing agreement may be in place, but, if the mother has principal custody and won’t permit the father’s visits, what can the father do? Possession sometimes is nine-tenths of the law. Hiring lawyers and going to court to try to force a mother who won’t honor custody agreements to do so requires copious energy, oodles of spare time, and a small fortune. Conor and Tony care deeply about their children, but they’ve lost control—in some cases, of seeing their kids, and, in others, of influencing them. They may feel powerless.
1. Asian Americans (not foreign students from Asia, but individuals of Asian heritage who are US citizens or permanent residents) have been discriminated against in admission to elite institutions of higher education for over 30 years.
To put it bluntly, Asian Americans must, on average, outperform all other groups in order to have an equal chance of admission to universities like Harvard or Yale. If one were to replace Asian Americans with Jews in the previous sentence, it would describe the situation in the early 20th century. Looking back, we are rightfully ashamed and outraged at the conduct of elite universities during this period. Future Americans, and observers all over the world, will eventually have the same reaction to how Asian Americans are treated today by these same institutions.
2. Asian American success, e.g., as measured using metrics such as income, wealth, or education, is problematic for simplistic narratives that emphasize race and "white supremacy" over a more realistic and multifaceted analysis of American society.
3. Efforts to guarantee equal outcomes, as opposed to equal opportunities, are anti-meritocratic and corrosive to social cohesion, undermine basic notions of fairness, and handicap the United States in scientific and technological competition with other nations.
The Table of Contents, reproduced below, gives an idea of the important topics covered. Xu had an insider's view of the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard trial, now awaiting appeal to the Supreme Court. He also describes the successful effort by a grass roots coalition of Asian Americans to defeat CA Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial preferences in the public sector (including college admissions) which were prohibited by Proposition 209 in 1996.
Over the years I have had many conversations on this topic with well-meaning (but often poorly informed) parents of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I cannot help but ask these people
Are you OK with discrimination against your child? What did they do to deserve it?
Are you going to let virtue-signaling administrators at the university devalue the hard work and hard-won accomplishments of your son or daughter? Are you going to do anything about it?
and I cannot help but think
If you won't do anything about it, then f*ck you. Your kids deserve better parents.
Kenny calls it a Fight for Meritocracy. That's what it is -- a fight. Don't forget that Meritocracy is just a fancy word for fairness. It's a fight for your kid, and all kids, to be treated fairly.
I highly recommend the book. These issues are of special concern to Asian Americans, but should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what is really happening in American education today.
Yesterday I had cause to look something up related to macroscopic superposition states ("Schrodinger cat states") in Serge Haroche's book Exploring the Quantum. Curiosity led me to Haroche's 2012 Nobel Lecture and autobiography, which I found fascinating.
One wonders how long an elitist, highly meritocratic and undeniably productive system like the French Grandes Ecoles can continue to function in the current political climate. Quel dommage.
... I was fascinated by astronomy and by calculus, the notion of derivatives and simple differential equations which describe so directly and so well the laws of dynamics obeyed by moving bodies. This was the time of the first artificial satellites, the sputniks which orbited the earth and launched the American-Soviet race to the moon.
I marveled at the fact that I was able, with the elementary calculus I knew, to compute the escape velocity of rockets, the periods of satellites on their orbits and the gravitational field at the surface of all the planets … I understood then that nature obeys mathematical laws, a fact that did not cease to astonish me. I knew, from that time on, that I wanted to be a scientist. For that, I embarked in the strenuous and demanding “classes préparatoires” of the famed Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, one of the preparatory schools which train the best French students for the contest examinations leading to the “Grandes Ecoles.” They are the engineering and academic schools, which since the French Revolution, have formed the scientific elite of France. These were two years of intensive study where I learned a lot of math and of classical physics. I eventually was admitted in 1963 to the Ecole Polytechnique (ranking first in the national examination, to the great pride of my parents) and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). I chose to enter the latter because, at that time, it offered a much better opportunity to embark in a scientist career.
The years as a student at ENS (1963–1967) have left me wonderful memories, contrasting sharply with the strenuous training of the preparatory school. Here, in the middle of the Latin Quarter, I was free to organize my time as I wished, to meet and discuss with students working in all kinds of fields in science or humanities and to enjoy all the distractions and cultural activities Paris has to offer. And I was paid for that, since the “Normaliens” as the ENS students are called, are considered civil servants and receive a generous stipend! These were my formative years as a scientist. Coming so to speak from the physics of the 19th century which was taught in the classes préparatoires, I was immediately thrown into modern physics and the quantum world by the classes of exceptional teachers. Alfred Kastler gave us a lyrical description of the dance of atomic kinetic moments, and gave atoms and photons a near poetic existence. Jean Brossel brought us back to Earth by describing the great experiments thanks to which quantum concepts were established, instilling in us the austere passion for precision. And Claude Cohen-Tannoudji revealed the theory’s formalism to us with extraordinary depth and clarity. I still remember three books I read avidly at the time: Quantum Mechanics by Albert Messiah, where I truly understood the depth and beauty of the quantum theory; Principlesof Nuclear Magnetism by Anatole Abragam, who introduced me to the subtle world of atomic magnetic moments; and Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, which was a revelation.
The excerpt below is from a recent interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Anthony Kronman was Dean of Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004 (Yale JD and PhD in Philosophy). These are elite establishment credentials. Yet the observations he makes rather matter of factly below are not to be found in the national media coverage nor in the public remarks of university administrators.
The focus of the Chronicle interview is Kronman's recent book The Assault on American Excellence, which does not, as far as I know, address Asian American university admissions. In case you are wondering, Kronman is an anti-Trump lifelong democrat.
Chronicle: What are your thoughts about the Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case?
... The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard that with some modest adjustment in its admissions practices it might be able to absorb a judgment against it and get on with life more or less as usual. The vagueness of the category on which Harvard was relying to make sure that it kept its Asian undergraduates at the level that it wished, the so-called personality score, is such a floppy nothing of an empty basket — that’s not gonna do anymore.
There is something profoundly disturbing about Harvard using these flaccid categories to achieve something like a quota. The court papers show how the system was invented to keep the number of Jews down in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It’s all pretty bad, and part of the badness is that colleges have been both compelled and allowed to do what they’re doing under the rubric of "diversity," which conceals from view the actual operation of the whole system, and what they are in fact aiming to achieve. It’s substituting one vocabulary for another in a way that creates a climate of dishonesty. What goes on in the admissions office is increasingly mysterious, and what happens once students are admitted — that is something to which little attention is paid by educators themselves.
[ Italics mine ]
Kronman is presumably aware that other Ivy schools like Yale are little different from Harvard when it comes to undergraduate admissions.
"When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants ..."
The article below illuminates several mysteries concerning the French development of thermonuclear weapons. Why did it take so long? Did the French really need help from the British? Who had the crucial idea of radiation compression?
The original inventors were Ulam and Teller. In the USSR it was Sakharov. The PRC inventor was Yu Min (see Note Added at bottom).
Without men such as these, how long would it have taken to develop breakthrough technologies that defined the modern age?
Nonproliferation Review 15:2 353, DOI 10.1080/10736700802117361
Based on the first-person account of coauthor Pierre Billaud, a prominent French participant, this article describes for the first time in such detail the history of the development of the French hydrogen bomb in the 1960s and the organization of military nuclear research in France. ...
On November 1, 1952, the United States conducted its first thermonuclear test, ‘‘Ivy Mike,’’ seven years and three and a half months after its Trinity test. It took the Soviet Union four years (August 29, 1949 -- August 12, 1953) and the United Kingdom four years and seven months (October 3, 1952 -- May 15, 1957) to achieve thermonuclear capacity. And in the following decade, China did it, with its sixth test, in fewer than three years (October 16, 1964 -- June 17, 1967). Yet after Gerboise Bleue it took France eight and a half years to reach the same landmark, detonating its first thermonuclear device on August 24, 1968. Why such a long delay, especially since the French were pioneers in nuclear research?
1965: What We Knew About the Technical Aspects
From 1955 to 1960, as we prepared for the first French atomic test, we were also pondering thermonuclear weapons. But the prospect of hydrogen weapons seemed so far into the future that we did not work seriously on it. ... Li6D was commonly considered the best fuel for thermonuclear weapons, but we did not have any idea about how to burn it. All the problems with the thermonuclear bomb can be summarized by this question: how to discover the process that will allow the Li6D to undergo a fusion reaction?
... Compared to our American colleagues in 1948, French scientists had many advantages: we knew that hydrogen bombs existed and worked and that they used Li6D, and we understood the reactions at work. We also had powerful computers, of U.S. origin, which were not available in the late 1940s. And we knew, more or less, the dimensions and weights of the nuclear weapons deployed at NATO bases in Europe and their yields. ...
De Gaulle: It’s taking forever! ... I want the first experiment to take place before I leave! Do you hear me? It’s of capital importance. Of the five nuclear powers, are we going to be the only one which hasn’t made it to the thermonuclear level? Are we going to let the Chinese get ahead of us? If we do not succeed while I am still here, we shall never make it! My successors, from whatever side, will not dare to go against the protests of the Anglo-Saxons, the communists, the old spinsters and the Church. And we shall not open the gate. But if a first explosion happens, my successors will not dare to stop halfway into the development of these weapons.
... In January 1967, I published a voluminous report wherein I presented and developed my idea from late 1965, left idle since, explaining why the current studies were going in the wrong direction and producing a ridiculously low thermonuclear efficiency. I proposed a scheme with two consecutive steps: a cold Li6D compression increasing the density, from the normal value of 0.8 g/cm3, by a factor of at least 20, followed by a sufficient temperature increase (the ignition). In this report, I also gave orders of magnitude of the energies involved in each step... [[ One can make the (flawed) analogy of Billaud to Ulam (multi-stage insight, but no mechanism for compression), and Carayol to Teller (proposed the right mechanism for compression, although in Teller's case he may have learned of it from von Neumann and Fuchs!!!). ]]
In early April 1967, Carayol had the idea that the x-rays emitted from the fission explosion could transport the fission energy to the thermonuclear fuel chamber to induce the necessary compression. He published a brief paper wherein he presented, and justified mathematically, his architectural idea. This was the key to the solution for an efficient thermonuclear explosive device, consistent with the current data about U.S. hydrogen weapons. Carayol had rediscovered the radiative coupling concept first introduced by Americans Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller in January 1951.
Michel Carayol, the Genuine Father of the French H-Bomb
Michel Carayol was born in 1934 and died in 2003. His father was an industrialist and his mother a teacher. He entered Ecole Polytechnique in 1954, graduated in 1956, and joined the Armament. In 1962, he was part of the DEFA assigned to CEA-DAM at Limeil. In 1967, Carayol was part of the advanced studies branch.
... Soon after, in April 1967, Carayol wrote a brief report describing his proposal for a cylindrico-spherical case in dense metal, containing a fission device on one side and a thermonuclear sphere on the other. The report showed that the photons radiated by the primary *still very hot* in the X-ray frequency range, swept into the chamber rapidly enough to surround completely the thermonuclear sphere before the metal case would be vaporized. Carayol had discovered independently a scheme equivalent to the concept developed by Ulam and Teller in the 50s.
But Carayol's insight was ignored! It was British assistance that alerted project leadership to the value of Carayol's ideas. It is not enough for some isolated genius to make a breakthrough -- the people in charge have to understand its value.
... During the first months of 1967, Viard had told me, ‘‘A British physicist is showing some interest in what we do.’’ At several embassy parties, a first-rate British atomic scientist, Sir William Cook, former director during the 1950s of thermonuclear research at Aldermaston, the British center for atomic military applications, had approached the military attache´ at the French Embassy in London, Andre´ Thoulouze, an Air Force colonel, and had hinted to our nuclear research program. Thoulouze had previously been in charge of an air force base and knew Rene´ David, who would later work at the DAM. For this reason, instead of contacting the French main intelligence services, Thoulouze directly contacted our information bureau at CEA, the BRIS, where David was working at the time. In analyzing the fallout from the French tests, the Americans, the British, and the Soviets knew that we had not made any real progress on the thermonuclear path. In 1966 and 1967 we had tested some combination of fission with light elements. Cook told Thoulouze that we had to look for something simpler.
Two weeks after the Valduc seminar, on September 19, and while the work resulting from the Valduc decisions had not yet concretely gotten under way, Thoulouze came from London bearing information from this qualified source. Jacques Robert immediately convened a meeting, in the DAM’s headquarters in Paris, to debrief this information. Only three other people attended the meeting: Viard, Bonnet (DAM’s deputy), and Henri Coleau (head of the BRIS). The information, very brief and of a purely technical nature, did not consist of outlines or precise calculations. Nevertheless, it allowed Bonnet to declare immediately that the Carayol design, proposed unsuccessfully as early as April 1967, could be labeled as correct.23 Had this outline not already been in existence, we would have had a difficult time understanding the information and might have suspected an attempt to mislead us. In fact, this was a reciprocal validation: Carayol’s sketch authenticated the seriousness of the source, while the latter confirmed the value of Carayol’s ideas. Without realizing it, as very few were aware of Carayol’s discovery (and surely not Cook), he had given us a big tip and unexpected assistance, as this information also freed us from the ministerial harassment to which we had been constantly subjected. From that moment, things moved briskly.
Physicist Michel Carayol laid out what would be the fundamental idea of radiation implosion in an April 1967 paper, but neither he nor his colleagues were immediately convinced that it was the solution, and the search continued.
In late September 1967, Carayol’s ideas were validated by an unlikely source, William Cook, who had overseen the British thermonuclear program in the mid-1950s. Cook, no doubt at his government’s behest, verbally passed on the crucial information to the French embassy’s military attaché in London. Presumably, the British provided this information for political reasons. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was lobbying for the entry of the United Kingdom into the Common Market (European Economic Community), which was being blocked by de Gaulle.
Note Added: Perhaps someone can translate part of this paper, which gives some details about the Chinese thermonuclear step, credit to Yu Min. Did they invent a mechanism different from Ulam-Teller? I can't tell from this paper, but I suspect the initial Chinese design used U-T. There are claims that Yu Min later developed, in the pursuit of miniaturization and improved safety, a qualitatively different design.
Yu Min was a student of Peng Huanwu (also a key figure in the bomb effort), who was a student of Max Born. Yu Min only recently passed, in early 2019!
In a high corner office, overlooking Cambridge and the Harvard campus.
How big a role is deep learning playing right now in building genomic predictors?
So far, not a big one. Other ML methods perform roughly on par with DL. The additive component of variance is largest, and we have compressed sensing theorems showing near-optimal performance for capturing it. There are nonlinear effects, and eventually DL will likely be useful for learning multi-loci features. But at the moment everything is limited by statistical power, and nonlinear features are even harder to detect than additive ones. ...
The bottom line is that with enough statistical power predictors will capture the expected heritability for most traits. Are people in your field ready for this?
Some are, but for others it will be very difficult.
Conference on AI and Genomics / Precision Medicine (Boston).
I enjoyed your talk. I work for [leading AgBio company], but my PhD is in Applied Math. We've been computing Net Merit for bulls using SNPs for a long time. The human genetics people have been lagging...
Caught up now, though. And first derivative (sample size growth rate) is much larger...
Yes. It's funny because sperm is priced by Net Merit and when we or USDA revise models some farmers or breeders get very angry because the value of their bull can change a lot!
A Harvard Square restaurant.
I last saw Roman at the Fellows spring dinner, many years ago. I was back from Yale to see friends. He was drinking, with serious intent. He told me about working with Wilson at Cornell. He also told me an old story about Jeffrey and the Higgs mechanism. Jeffrey almost had it, soon after his work on the Goldstone boson. But Sidney talked him out of it -- something to the effect of "if you can only make sense of it in unitary gauge, it must be an artifact" ... Afterwards, at MIT they would say When push comes to shove, Sidney is wrong. ...
Genomics is in the details now. Lots of work to be done, but conceptually it's clear what to do. I wouldn't say that about AGI. There are still important conceptual breakthroughs that need to be made.
The Dunster House courtyard, overlooking the Charles.
We used to live here, can you let us in to look around?
I remember it all -- the long meals, the tutors, the students, the concerts in the library. Yo Yo Ma and Owen playing together.
A special time, at least for us. But long vanished except in memory.
Wheeler used to say that the past only exists as memory records.
Not very covariant! Why not a single four-manifold that exists all at once?
The Ritz-Carlton.
Flying private is like crack. Once you do it, you can't go back...
It's not like that. They never give you a number. They just tell you that the field house is undergoing a renovation and there's a naming opportunity. Then your kid is on the right list. They've been doing this for a hundred years...
Card had to do the analysis that way. Harvard was paying him...
I went to the session on VC for newbies. Now I realize "valuation" is just BS... Now you see how it really works...
Then Bobby says "What's an LP? I wanna be an LP because you gotta keep them happy."
Let me guess, you want a dataset with a million genomes and FICO scores?
I've helped US companies come to China for 20+ years. At first it was rough. Now if I'm back in the states for a while and return, Shenzhen seems like the Future. The dynamism is here.
To most of Eurasia it just looks like two competing hegemons. Both systems have their pluses and minuses, but it's not an existential problem...
Sure, Huawei is a big threat because they won't put in backdoors for the NSA. Who was tapping Merkel's cellphone? It was us...
Humans are just smart enough to create an AGI, but perhaps not smart enough to create a safe one.
Maybe we should make humans smarter first, so there is a better chance that our successors will look fondly on us. Genetically engineered super-geniuses might have a better chance at implementing Asimov's Laws of Robotics.
This is my third post discussing the Students For Fair Admissions lawsuit against Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants. Earlier posts here and here discussed, among other things, the tendency of the Admissions Office to assign low personal ratings to A-A applicants. A-As received, on average, the lowest such ratings among all ethnic groups from the Admissions Office. In contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually met the candidates) gave A-A applicants scores comparable to white applicants, and higher than other ethnic groups.
Mark Hansen, the (now former) OIR employee, remembers far more. He remembers working with others in OIR on the project. He remembers gathering data, conducting the regression analysis, collaborating with colleagues, coordinating with the Admissions Office, and discussing the results of OIR’s investigation with Fitzsimmons and others on multiple occasions. Hansen expressed no concerns with the quality and thoroughness of OIR’s statistical work. Moreover, he has a clear understanding of the implications of OIR’s findings. Hansen testified that the reports show that Asian Americans “are disadvantaged in the admissions process at Harvard.” And when asked: “Do you have any explanation other than intentional discrimination for your conclusions regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process?” Hansen responded: “I don’t.”
The figures below show several OIR models which try to fit the observed admit rates for various groups. The only model that comes close (Model 4) is one which assigns outright penalties to A-A applicants (using "demographic" -- i.e., explicitly racial -- factors). IIUC, this is *after* the low Personal Rating scores from the Admissions Office have already been accounted for!
In the decades leading up to the data discovery forced by the SFFA lawsuit, we heard many claims that legacy / recruited athlete status, or leadership characteristics, or extracurriculars, were the reasons for A-As having such a low acceptance rate (despite their strong academic records). The OIR analysis shows that these effects, while perhaps real, are only part of the story. In Model 4, pure racial bias reduces the A-A percentage of the entering class from 26% (after accounting for all the factors listed above) to the actual 18-19%!
Harvard's Office of Institutional Research (OIR) produced a series of internal reports on discrimination against Asian-American applicants, beginning in 2013. I believe this was in response to Ron Unz's late 2012 article The Myth of American Meritocracy. These reports were shared with, among others, William Fitzsimmons (Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid) and Rakesh Khurana (Dean of Harvard College). Faced with an internal investigation showing systemic discrimination against Asian-American applicants, Harvard killed the study and quietly buried the reports. The Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) supporting memo for Summary Judgment contains excerpts from depositions of these and other Harvard leaders concerning the internal reports. (Starting p.15 -- SAD!)
The second report included the figure below. Differences are in SDs, Asian = Asian-American (International applicants are distinct category), and Legacy and Recruited Athlete candidates have been excluded for this calculation.
As discussed in the previous post: When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are given the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants ...
From the SFFA (Students For Fair Admissions) supporting memo for summary judgement:
OIR found that Asian-American admit rates were lower than white admit rates every year over a ten-year period even though, as the first of these two charts shows, white applicants materially outperformed Asian-American applicants only in the personal rating. Indeed, OIR found that the white applicants were admitted at a higher rate than their Asian-American counterparts at every level of academic-index level. But it is even worse than that. As the second chart shows, being Asian American actually decreases the chances of admissions. Like Professor Arcidiacono, OIR found that preferences for African American and Hispanic applicants could not explain the disproportionately negative effect Harvard’s admission system has on Asian Americans.
On David Card's obfuscatory analysis: the claim is that within the pool of "unhooked" applicants (excluding recruited athletes, legacies, children of major donors, etc.), Asian-Americans are discriminated against. Card's analysis obscures this point.
The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.
Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.
This is an email from an alumni interviewer:
[M]y feelings towards Harvard have been slowly changing over the years. I’ve been interviewing for the college for almost 10 years now, and in those ten years, none of the Asian American students I’ve interviewed has been accepted (or even wait-listed). I’m 0 for about 20. This is the case despite the fact that their resumes are unbelievable and often superior to those of the non-Asian students I’ve interviewed who are admitted. I’ve also attended interviewer meetings where Asian candidates are summarily dismissed as “typical” or “not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing” while white or other minority candidates with similar resumes are lauded.
Mark Hansen, the (now former) OIR employee, remembers far more. He remembers working with others in OIR on the project. He remembers gathering data, conducting the regression analysis, collaborating with colleagues, coordinating with the Admissions Office, and discussing the results of OIR’s investigation with Fitzsimmons and others on multiple occasions. Hansen expressed no concerns with the quality and thoroughness of OIR’s statistical work. Moreover, he has a clear understanding of the implications of OIR’s findings. Hansen testified that the reports show that Asian Americans “are disadvantaged in the admissions process at Harvard.” And when asked: “Do you have any explanation other than intentional discrimination for your conclusions regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process?” Hansen responded: “I don’t.”
A very sad tweet:
Here's an exchange in the Harvard lawsuit in which a a teacher at Stuyvesant started to cry when she was shown data that showed her Asian students were *half* as likely to be admitted to Harvard as her white students in 2014 pic.twitter.com/EfjBeBFgfy
The novella Gulf predates almost all of Heinlein's novels. Online version. The book Friday (1982) is a loose sequel.
Wikipedia: Gulf is a novella by Robert A. Heinlein, originally published as a serial in the November and December 1949 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and later collected in Assignment in Eternity. It concerns a secret society of geniuses who act to protect humanity. ...
The story postulates that humans of superior intelligence could, if they banded together and kept themselves genetically separate, create a new species. In the process they would develop into a hidden and benevolent "ruling" class.
Do you still believe in Santa Claus?
He stopped and brooded. “I confess to that same affection for democracy, Joe. But it’s like yearning for the Santa Claus you believed in as a child. For a hundred and fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely. The issues were such as to be settled without disaster by the votes of common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system mechanics. They aren’t up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of nuclear physics; they can’t learn what they must know.”
Gilead brushed it aside. “It’s up to us to brief them. Their hearts are all right; tell them the score—they’ll come down with the right answers.”
“No, Joe. We’ve tried it; it does not work. As you say, most of them are good, the way a dog can be noble and good. ... Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.
“No, Joe. The gulf between us and them is narrow, but it is very deep. We cannot close it.”
Nature covers some work by Jonathan Wai and myself. See here for a broader ranking of US schools, which includes Nobel, Turing, Fields awards and National Academies membership.
Undergraduates from small, elite institutions have the best chance of winning a Nobel prize.
There are many ways to rank universities, but one that’s rarely considered is how many of their graduates make extraordinary contributions to society. A new analysis does just that, ranking institutions by the proportion of their undergraduates that go on to win a Nobel prize. [ Note: includes Literature, Economics, Peace, as well as science prizes. ]
Two schools dominate the rankings: École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. These small, elite institutions each admit fewer than 250 undergraduate students per year, yet their per capita production of Nobelists outstrips some larger world-class universities by factors of hundreds.
“This is a way to identify colleges that have a history of producing major impact,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and a co-author of the unpublished study. “It gives us a new way of thinking about and evaluating what makes an undergraduate institution great.”
Wai and Stephen Hsu, a physicist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, examined the 81 institutions worldwide with at least three alumni who have received Nobel prizes in chemistry, physiology or medicine, physics and economics between 1901 and 2015. To meaningfully compare schools, which have widely varying alumni populations, the team divided the number of Nobel laureates at a school by its estimated number of undergraduate alumni.
Top Nobel-producing undergraduate institutions
Rank School Country Nobelists per capita (UG alumni)
1 École Normale Supérieure France 0.00135
2 Caltech US 0.00067
3 Harvard University US 0.00032
4 Swarthmore College US 0.00027
5 Cambridge University UK 0.00025
6 École Polytechnique France 0.00025
7 MIT US 0.00025
8 Columbia University US 0.00021
9 Amherst College US 0.00019
10 University of Chicago US 0.00017
Small but mighty
Many of the top Nobel-producing schools are private, and have significant financial resources. Among the more surprising high performers were several very small US liberal-arts colleges, such as Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (ranked at number 4) and Amherst College in Massachusetts (number 9).
“What these smaller schools are doing might serve as important undergraduate models to follow in terms of selection and training,” says Wai, who adds that, although admission to one of the colleges on the list is no guarantee of important achievements later in life, the probability is much higher for these select matriculates.
To gauge trends over time, Wai cut the sample of 870 laureates into 20-year bands. US universities, which now make up almost half of the top 50 list, began to dominate after the Second World War. Whereas French representation in the Nobel ranks has declined over time, top-ranked ENS has remained steady in its output.
Hsu and Wai had previously performed two similar, but broader, analyses of the rate at which US universities produce winners of the Nobel prize, Fields Medal (in mathematics) or Turing Award (in computer science), as well as members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. These studies produced rankings of US institutions that are similar to the new, global Nobel rankings.
Lessons learned
Santo Fortunato, a theoretical physicist at Indiana University Bloomington who has researched trends in Nobel prizewinners, deems the analyses “quite interesting”, but cautions that the methodology cannot produce a highly accurate or predictive ranking. “There is a high margin of error due to the low numbers of prominent scholars,” says Fortunato. [ See here for a broader ranking of US schools, which includes Nobel, Turing, Fields awards and National Academies membership. ]
Wai and Hsu agree that there are statistical uncertainties in their rankings, owing to the small number of prizes awarded each year. The two are confident that the ENS and Caltech lead the pack, but statistical fluctuations could change the order of schools placed from third to ninth, Hsu says.
The researchers say that their findings suggest that more attention should be paid to the role that undergraduate institutions have in their graduates’ outstanding accomplishments. They also argue that quantifiable achievements are a better gauge of the quality of universities than factors such as reputation, graduation rate, faculty and financial resources and alumni donations.
Says Wai, “Our findings identify colleges that excel at producing impact.”
Regarding statistical fluctuations, if one takes the data as an estimator of a school-related probability for each graduate to win a Nobel, then at 95 percent confidence level ENS and Caltech are the top two schools, but fluctuations could (for example) change the order among #3 (Harvard) through #9 (Amherst). In other words, we can't be >95 percent confident that Harvard grads have a higher probability than Amherst grads, although the central value of the estimated probability is higher for Harvard.
Regarding ENS and their elitist method of selecting students, see below. Two years of preparation for the entrance exam! Also: Les Grandes Ecoles Chinoises and The Normaliens.
Wikipedia: The school, like its sister grandes écoles the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d'Administration, is very small in size: its core of students, who are called normaliens, are selected via either a highly competitive exam called a concours (Baccalauréat + 2 years) ... Preparation for the "concours" takes place in preparatory classes which last two years ... Most students come from the prépas at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the Lycée Henri-IV, and a few other elite establishments in France. Two hundred normaliens are thus recruited every year ...
Lycee Henri-IV is in the Latin Quarter on the left bank, one of my favorite parts of Paris. The book shops and cafes are filled with serious looking young students. Vive la France! :-)
Beyond some trivialities, the discussants make no progress toward the question that fascinates all of them: what is Michel Houellebecq really thinking? But they cannot conceive it because their conditioning is so strong that the thoughts cannot enter their minds. (Note that, in its favor, the panel includes Soumission translator Lorin Stein.)
Much better, and shorter, this video of Houellebecq on Tocqueville, Democracy, and Nietzsche.
Tocqueville (Democracy in America, chapter 6): ... It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. ...
Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger, but these crises will be rare and brief. ... I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.1
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? ...
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. ...
From Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks. This part of Bourdieu's oeuvre is, of course, required reading for all academics. By academics, I don't just mean humanists and social scientists. Even those in the hardest of sciences and technology would benefit from considering the political / symbolic economy of their field. Why, exactly, did most positions in top theoretical physics groups go to string theorists over a 20+ year period? See String Theory Quotes , String Theory and All That , Voting and Weighing.
The Economy of Symbolic Exchange
If a university were to offer a course of study on the marketplace of ideas, the writer who would be at the heart of the curriculum would be Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu is a French sociologist who is influential among his colleagues but almost entirely unread outside academia because of his atrocious prose style. Bourdieu’s aim is to develop an economy of symbolic exchanges, to delineate the rules and patterns of the cultural and intellectual marketplace. His basic thesis is that all intellectual and cultural players enter the marketplace with certain forms of capital. They may have academic capital (the right degrees), cultural capital (knowledge of a field or art form, a feel for the proper etiquette), linguistic capital (the ability to use language), political capital (the approved positions or affiliations), or symbolic capital (a famous fellowship or award). Intellectuals spend their careers trying to augment their capital and convert one form of capital into another. One intellectual might try to convert knowledge into a lucrative job; another might convert symbolic capital into invitations to exclusive conferences at tony locales; a third might seek to use linguistic ability to destroy the reputations of colleagues so as to become famous or at least controversial.
Ultimately, Bourdieu writes, intellectuals compete to gain a monopoly over the power to consecrate. Certain people and institutions at the top of each specialty have the power to confer prestige and honor on favored individuals, subjects, and styles of discourse. Those who hold this consecration of power influence taste, favor certain methodologies, and define the boundary of their discipline. To be chief consecrator is the intellectual’s dream.
Bourdieu doesn’t just look at the position an intellectual may hold at a given moment; he looks at the trajectory of a career, the successive attitudes, positions, and strategies a thinker adopts while rising or competing in the marketplace. A young intellectual may enter the world armed only with personal convictions. He or she will be confronted, Bourdieu says, with a diverse “field.” There will be daring radical magazines over on one side, staid establishment journals on another, dull but worthy publishing houses here, vanguard but underfunded houses over there. The intellectual will be confronted with rivalries between schools and between established figures. The complex relationships between these and other players in the field will be the tricky and shifting environment in which the intellectual will try to make his or her name. Bourdieu is quite rigorous about the interplay of these forces, drawing elaborate charts of the various fields of French intellectual life, indicating the power and prestige levels of each institution. He identifies which institutions have consecration power over which sections of the field.
Young intellectuals will have to know how to invest their capital to derive maximum “profit,” and they will have to devise strategies for ascent—whom to kiss up to and whom to criticize and climb over. Bourdieu’s books detail a dazzling array of strategies intellectuals use to get ahead. Bourdieu is not saying that the symbolic field can be understood strictly by economic principles. Often, he says, the “loser wins” rule applies. Those who most vociferously and publicly renounce material success win prestige and honor that can be converted into lucre. Nor does Bourdieu even claim that all of the strategies are self-conscious. He says that each intellectual possesses a “habitus,” or personality and disposition, that leads him or her in certain directions and toward certain fields. Moreover, the intellectual will be influenced, often unwillingly or unknowingly, by the gravitational pull of the rivalries and controversies of the field. Jobs will open up, grants will appear, furies will rage. In some ways the field dominates and the intellectuals are blown about within it.
Bourdieu hasn’t quite established himself as the Adam Smith of the symbolic economy. And it probably wouldn’t be very useful for a young intellectual to read him in hopes of picking up career tips, as a sort of Machiavellian Guide for Nobel Prize Wannabes. Rather, Bourdieu is most useful because he puts into prose some of the concepts that most other intellectuals have observed but have not systematized. Intellectual life is a mixture of careerism and altruism (like most other professions). Today the Bobo intellectual reconciles the quest for knowledge with the quest for the summer house.
Steve: We are living through a very bad time in particle theory. Without significant experimental guidance all we are left with is speculation and social dynamics driving the field. I hope things will get better when LHC data starts coming in - at least, most of the models currrently under consideration will be ruled out (although, of course, not string theory :-)
I will probably write a post at some point about how scientific fields which run through fallow experimental periods longer than 20 years (the length of a person's academic career) are in danger of falling into the traps which beset the humanities and social sciences. These were all discussed by Bourdieu long ago.
This Quartz article describes Jonathan Wai's research on the rate at which different universities produce alumni who make great contributions to science, technology, medicine, and mathematics. I think the most striking result is the range of outcomes: the top school outperforms good state flagships (R1 universities) by as much as a thousand times. In my opinion the main causative factor is simply filtering by cognitive ability and other personality traits like drive. Psychometrics works!
Quartz: Few individuals will be remembered in history for discovering a new law of nature, revolutionizing a new technology or captivating the world with their ideas. But perhaps these contributions say more about the impact of a university or college than test scores and future earnings. Which universities are most likely to produce individuals with lasting effect on our world?
The US News college rankings emphasize subjective reputation, student retention, selectivity, graduation rate, faculty and financial resources and alumni giving. Recently, other rankings have proliferated, including some based on objective long-term metrics such as individual earning potential. Yet, we know of no evaluations of colleges based on lasting contributions to society. Of course, such contributions are difficult to judge. In the analysis below, we focus primarily on STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine/mathematics) contributions, which are arguably the least subjective to evaluate, and increasingly more valued in today’s workforce.
We examined six groups of exceptional achievers divided into two tiers, looking only at winners who attended college in the US. Our goal is to create a ranking among US colleges, but of course one could broaden the analysis if desired. The first level included all winners of the Nobel Prize (physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, literature, and peace), Fields Medal (mathematics) and the Turing Award (computer science). The second level included individuals elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE) or Institute of Medicine (IOM). The National Academies are representative of the top few thousand individuals in all of STEM.
We then traced each of these individuals back to their undergraduate days, creating two lists to examine whether the same or different schools rose to the top. We wanted to compare results across these two lists to see if findings in the first tier of achievement replicated in the second tier of achievement and to increase sample size to avoid the problem of statistical flukes.
Simply counting up the number of awards likely favors larger schools and alumni populations. We corrected for this by computing a per capita rate of production, dividing the number of winners from a given university by an estimate of the relative size of the alumni population. Specifically, we used the total number of graduates over the period 1966-2013 (an alternative method of estimating base population over 100 to 150 years led to very similar lists). This allowed us to objectively compare newer and smaller schools with older and larger schools.
In order to reduce statistical noise, we eliminated schools with only one or two winners of the Nobel, Fields or Turing prize. This resulted in only 25 schools remaining, which are shown below ...
The vast majority of schools have never produced a winner. #114 Ohio State and #115 Penn State, which have highly ranked research programs in many disciplines, have each produced one winner. Despite being top tier research universities, their per capita rate of production is over 400 times lower than that of the highest ranked school, Caltech. Of course, our ranking doesn’t capture all the ways individuals can impact the world. However, achievements in the Nobel categories, plus math and computer science, are of great importance and have helped shaped the modern world.
As a replication check with a larger sample, we move to the second category of achievement: National Academy of Science, Engineering, or Medicine membership. The National Academies originated in an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Lifetime membership is conferred through a rigorous election process and is considered one of the highest honors a researcher can receive.
The results are strikingly similar across the two lists. If we had included schools with two winners in the Nobel/Fields/Turing list, Haverford, Oberlin, Rice, and Johns Hopkins would have been in the top 25 on both. For comparison, very good research universities such as #394 Arizona State, #396 Florida State and #411 University of Georgia are outperformed by the top school (Caltech) by 600 to 900 times. To give a sense of the full range: the per capita rate of production of top school to bottom school was about 449 to one for the Nobel/Fields/Turing list and 1788 to one for the National Academies list. These lists include only schools that produced at least one winner—the majority of colleges have produced zero.
What causes these drastically different odds ratios across a wide variety of leading schools? The top schools on our lists tend to be private, with significant financial resources. However, the top public university, UC Berkeley, is ranked highly on both lists: #13 on the Nobel/Fields/Turing and #31 on the National Academies. Perhaps surprisingly, many elite liberal arts colleges, even those not focused on STEM education, such as Swarthmore and Amherst, rose to the top. One could argue that the playing field here is fairly even: accomplished students at Ohio State, Penn State, Arizona State, Florida State and University of Georgia, which lag the leaders by factors of hundreds or almost a thousand, are likely to end up at the same highly ranked graduate programs as individuals who attended top schools on our list. It seems reasonable to conclude that large differences in concentration or density of highly able students are at least partly responsible for these differences in outcome.
Sports fans are unlikely to be surprised by our results. Among all college athletes only a few will win professional or world championships. Some collegiate programs undoubtedly produce champions at a rate far in excess of others. It would be uncontroversial to attribute this differential rate of production both to differences in ability of recruited athletes as well as the impact of coaching and preparation during college. Just as Harvard has a far higher percentage of students scoring 1600 on the SAT than most schools and provides advanced courses suited to those individuals, Alabama may have more freshman defensive ends who can run the forty yard dash in under 4.6 seconds, and the coaches who can prepare them for the NFL.
One intriguing result is the strong correlation (r ~ 0.5) between our ranking (over all universities) and the average SAT score of each student population, which suggests that cognitive ability, as measured by standardized tests, likely has something to do with great contributions later in life. By selecting heavily on measurable characteristics such as cognitive ability, an institution obtains a student body with a much higher likelihood of achievement. The identification of ability here is probably not primarily due to “holistic review” by admissions committees: Caltech is famously numbers-driven in its selection (it has the highest SAT/ACT scores), and outperforms the other top schools by a sizeable margin. While admission to one of the colleges on the lists above is no guarantee of important achievements later in life, the probability is much higher for these select matriculants.
We cannot say whether outstanding achievement should be attributed to the personal traits of the individual which unlocked the door to admission, the education and experiences obtained at the school, or benefits from alumni networks and reputation. These are questions worthy of continued investigation. Our findings identify schools that excel at producing impact, and our method introduces a new way of thinking about and evaluating what makes a college or university great. Perhaps college rankings should be less subjective and more focused on objective real world achievements of graduates.
For analogous results in college football, see here, here and here. Four and Five star recruits almost always end up at the powerhouse programs, and they are 100x to 1000x more likely to make it as pros than lightly recruited athletes who are nevertheless offered college scholarships.
