Inequality in Education
The gap between rich and poor children starts at 18 months. "The number of words a child hears before the age of five helps determine their future," said an article of The Economist. "[It] would force me to wake up early one Saturday morning in February, put on my parka and wool hat, and walk half a mile in the predawn darkness to register our son, then just 17 months old, for nursery school," said another article of The Atlantic. "I arrived to find myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk." Registration was still two hours off. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside. The price tag for an elite nursery? Twenty, thirty, fifty thousand dollars a year. Who can afford it?
Children from higher incomes families arrive at school with more knowledge and vocabulary. As the years go by, children of higher incomes parents continue to acquire more knowledge and vocabulary outside school, making it easier for them to gain even more knowledge. "Because, like Velcro, knowledge sticks best to other, related knowledge," demonstrates Natalie Wexler in her book, ‘The Knowledge Gap.’
Meanwhile, their less fortunate peers fall further and further behind. This snowballing has been dubbed 'the Matthew effect,' after the passage in the Gospel according to Matthew about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Every year that the Matthew effect is allowed to continue, it becomes harder to reverse.
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Then comes high school. In the now-notorious Varsity Blues scandal, the desire from wealthy parents to get their children into elite Universities led them to lie on applications and obtain fake SAT scores. Why? Because they know that elite education, from nursery to Ivy League, it's almost a sure thing to stay rich."Opportunity today does not seem to be open to all, or even open to most," writes Paul Tough in his book 'The Years That Matter Most. How College Makes or Breaks Us.' "Instead," he goes on, "through our system of higher education, we seem to have reconstructed, in the guise of openness and equality, an old and established aristocracy, one in which money begets money, wealthy families remain wealthy for generations, and young people like Shannen, born without privilege and power, stay stuck at the bottom."
Oh, Shannen. The book opens with the moving story of Shannen Torres, a Bronx girl, a streetwise Dominicana, black sweatpants, big black high-top sneakers, a black backward Nike baseball cap into which she'd stuffed her long, thick dark hair.
In the first semester of her freshman year, Shannen's name appeared at the very top of the list from a high school of almost fifteen hundred students and stayed at the top ever since. But remaining number one took an enormous effort. Each night, Shannen stayed up until her homework was done perfectly, sometimes till four or five in the morning. In three and a half years, she had not missed a single day of high school. She studied so relentlessly that she had lost eleven pounds off her already small frame. She got used to sleeping three hours a night, and she drank so much coffee she became immune to its effects.
As graduation approached, her academic average was 97.7 percent. Shannen had applied to two Ivy League colleges, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. Rejected. Data shown in the book are precise. Of all the colleges in the Ivy League, Princeton has the highest percentage of students from the top income quintile, 72 percent, and Penn has the second-highest, 71 percent. And those colleges educate a smaller proportion of poor students, just 3 percent of Penn's student body comes from the bottom quintile, while at Princeton poor students are even more of an endangered species, with only 2 percent. "That's one student in every forty-five," writes Paul Tough.
Yes, there's a happy end to Shannen's story. She was accepted at Stanford. "The next fall, Shannen would go off to Stanford and study science and business and politics and take advantage of the many amazing opportunities that went along with the experience of being an undergraduate at an institution of unparalleled privilege and power. She might even get rich, like so many of her classmates."
But others? Elite schools say they're looking for academic excellence and diversity. But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.
A recent study of Harvard’s admissions practices left Tyler Cowen, Professor of economics at George Mason University, with the queasy feeling that America’s top schools are bastions of self-replicating privilege. He writes, "The inescapable conclusion from all this is that Harvard is not, in fact, obsessed with admitting the best people. Instead, wealth and family connections play an outsized role in determining who gets a chance at attending Harvard and therefore attaining additional wealth and family connections.”
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More? Okay. Most tycoons give big to one or two universities as their children approach college age. Wall Street billionaire David Shaw gave to seven, I’ve read in an article published by ProPublica. Starting in 2011, when the oldest of their three children was about two years away from applying to college, he donated $1 million annually to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, and at least $500,000 each to Columbia and Brown. He has also contributed $200,000 annually to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2013. The pattern persisted through 2017, the total donations across seven years and seven elite schools being $37.3 million. “At minimum, experts in higher-education fundraising say, Shaw’s strategy improved their children’s chances of getting into at least one of the country’s top universities. At best, it would allow them to choose whichever blue-chip school they preferred, making selecting a college as easy as ordering from a takeout menu,” wrote the authors of the article, ‘The Hedge Fund Billionaire’s Guide to Buying Your Kids a Better Shot at Not Just One Elite College, but Lots of Them.’ Now, $37 million, is your annual wage for how many years? Five hundred? A thousand years? I know, it’s one of the most gut-wrenching arithmetic, so you better don’t. We’re all being had.
Or take Eton, for instance. It has produced nineteen Prime Ministers, Boris Johnson being the twentieth. For hundreds of years, Eton has transformed the sons of the ruling class into bureaucrats and political leaders. A handful of private school-educated elites hold many of Britain's top jobs, said a recent study. The Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission found 39% of people in high-ranking positions in politics, the judiciary, media, and business had been privately educated, compared with 7% of the general population.
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Of course, inequality in education doesn't stop here. Bloomberg asked more than 10,000 MBA graduates from the class of 2018 how much they borrowed to pay for school. Nearly half the students at some of the top-ranked business schools had debt outstanding of at least $100,000.
Or take ‘The Golden Passport.’ With ‘The Firm,’ the book we’ve talked about it in a previous episode, financial journalist Duff McDonald pulled back the curtain on consulting giant McKinsey. In ‘The Golden Passport,’ he reveals the inner works of a singular nexus of power, ambition, and influence: Harvard Business School.
He writes, “A Harvard degree guarantees respect. But a Harvard MBA near-guarantees entrance into Western capitalism’s most powerful realm — the corner office. And because the School shapes the way its powerful graduates think, its influence extends well beyond their own lives. It affects the organizations they command, the economy they dominate, and society itself. Decisions and priorities at HBS touch every single one of us.”
However, if you do not have time to plough through Duff McDonald’s 600 plus pages of ‘The Golden Passport,’ here’s a spoiler: he criticizes the avoidance of focusing in the gray areas of business ethics, like misleading accounting, deceptive sales tactics, insufficient corporate disclosure. Yes, he affirms that the HBS has made a huge difference in the world. But he also strongly suggests HBS has failed to develop a strong moral compass in their students. Closing the chapter on ethics with a Theodore Roosevelt quote, “To educate a person in mind but not morals is to educate a menace to society.”
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Or, for instance, take programs like Young Successors Program, primarily a "Summer Camp for the Ultra-Wealthy Teaches Kids How to Stay Rich," as depicted by Suzanne Woolley in another Bloomberg story. Not far from Wall Street, Swiss banking giant UBS Group AG has organized its annual three-day workshop for people who were born loaded. It is not the only program of that matter, of course, Citi Private Bank, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse organizing similar programs. These programs offer financial theory and strategy, devotes days to entrepreneurship and innovation, and also to estate planning and impact philanthropy. "Invitees to the June UBS confab had at least one thing in common, a family account with the bank well into, or above, the eight-digit mark," wrote Suzanne Woolley.
Or, ask yourself, can you afford Montessori education for your kids? The two founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both attended Montessori school as children, and now credit that early education to some of their success as adults. Teachers as 'guides,' no year groups, no assessments, and students work in partnership with mentors to decide what to study. As a parent, you may think there must be something worthy in this, and you may want to dig deeper, but first check the tuition price against how much you make. It saves time.
And here's a good one. Maybe you want to send your daughter to a Swiss Finishing School! Yep. Unaccredited, expensive, and, typically, family-run, Swiss finishing schools took the place of men's university education for many wealthy Western European women with matrimonial ambitions. Of course, you haven't heard of these schools. Like banking strategies, their devotion to privacy borders on the neurotic. Besides, I guess, it's out of your league.
The women, many of whom had attended MBA programs, were there not to learn how to make money but to acquire the gestures of having inherited it. Anachronistic? "The archetype of woman as family ambassador is as relevant as ever," writes Alice Gregory for The New Yorker. "During my time at [Swiss Finishing School], Ivanka Trump's name was never mentioned, but, in the students' preemptive smiles and refusal to talk politics, it was impossible not to feel her presence.”
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Always be knowledgeable. Train your brain to literally get smarter and highly employable. Read.
On Work, Welfare, and the Elephant Sitting On Your Head
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