College admissions insanity is substantially explained by this fact: The number of elite entry level jobs (e.g. McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Google, The Economist) is flat, demand for them has exploded, and hiring managers and people teams have no cap on the # of hires they can make from target schools
SE Gyges
at some point in looking at university admissions scandals it becomes inescapable that elite colleges are, functionally, granting admission to an aristocracy, which makes this sort of thing much, much more legible the lesser noble houses are upset that their children are not being elevated
Jul 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Opinion | Michael Bloomberg: Why I’m Giving $1.8 Billion for College Financial Aid (Published 2018)
Let’s eliminate money problems from the admissions equation for qualified students.
“We only hire the best”
How many times have you heard a company claim that they only hire the best? The top of the top. The crème de la crème. Most of them, by sheer necessity of math, are delusional. There just aren’t th…
Liquidity Affects Job Choice: Evidence from Teach for America*
Abstract Can access to a few hundred dollars of liquidity affect the career choice of a recent college graduate? In a three-year field experiment with Teach For America (TFA), a prestigious teacher placement program, we randomly increase the financial packages offered to nearly 7,300 potential teachers who requested support for the transition into teaching. The first two years of the experiment reveal that although most applicants do not respond to a marginal $600 of grants or loans, those in the worst financial position respond by joining TFA at higher rates. We continue the experiment into the third year and self-replicate our results. For the highest-need applicants, an extra $600 in loans, $600 in grants, and $1,200 in grants increase the likelihood of joining TFA by 12.2, 11.4, and 17.1 percentage points (or 20.0%, 18.7%, and 28.1%), respectively. Additional grant and loan dollars are equally effective, suggesting a liquidity mechanism. A follow-up survey bolsters the liquidity story and also shows that those drawn into teaching would have otherwise worked in private-sector firms.
Why Meritocracy Doesn't Work: The Math Behind the Myth
Even a 1% hiring bias compounds dramatically across hierarchies and growth. Here's the math proving why meritocracy fails and diversity initiatives matter.
Top economists and Jerome Powell agree that Gen Z's hiring nightmare is real—and it's not about AI eating entry-level jobs | Fortune
"The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," UBS' Paul Donovan wrote in a UBS note asking, "the kids are alright?"
Palantir’s billionaire CEO says only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers — ‘or you’re neurodivergent’ | Fortune
Billionaire Alex Karp tells Gen Z to skip elite college degrees, as one-fifth of Fortune 500 companies recruit more neurodivergent talent by 2027.
Charlie Kirk had a message for the over 2 million unemployed Gen Z NEET men: You don’t need college to make your dreams happen
From dropout to multimillion-dollar nonprofit leader, Kirk claimed college was overrated—and many Gen Zers share his skepticism.
Recent Grads Say AI Is Making It Impossible to Find a Job
Recent college graduates are entering a job market fraught with austerity, and gatekept by the very technology degrading their prospects.
Why Good Managers Are So Rare
Gallup data shows they have a combination of hard-to-teach traits.
How Bad Are Things?
One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…
Arvind Narayanan on Twitter / X
This week I had the honor of speaking to Princeton’s entire incoming undergraduate class to address their AI anxieties. I had three messages for them — good news, bad news, and a note of optimism. Here’s a condensed version.The good newsWe have enough evidence now to conclude…— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) August 27, 2026
What is Math Academy? - Ivy Scholars
In this article, we’ll cover what Math Academy is, how it works, and how you can take advantage of what they offer.
Why we should bulldoze the business school
The long read: There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years
Why the super rich are inevitable
Why some mathematicians argue the economy is designed to create a few super rich people – unless we stop it.
Grading is a Scam (and Motivation is a Myth) | A Professor Explains
"A department generating high credit-hour production across the university but with few declared majors is not an inefficient department. It is a department whose students are not being counted in the metric being used against it."
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
An excellent analysis of the war on Black studies that also includes a deeply perceptive critique of the neoliberal logic of valuing disciplines based on # of undergrad majors: chronicle.com/article/the-erasure-of-black-…
