Students at Yale are, for the most part, all strikingly similar – same socioeconomic class, same interests, same pursuits, same life goals, even the same style of dress.
Can I ask on what basis you’re drawing this conclusion? I agree with the bulk of what you said about overuse of negative selection, but I challenge the idea that it’s producing cookie-cutter student bodies at elite universities. Having attended Yale as an undergrad, your claim strikes me as incorrect, as the Yale student body seemed to me more diverse on all five of those categories than any other (non-online) community I’ve been a part of—certainly more so than my high school, my law school, or my current professional environment. That’s just my anecdotal experience, so I’m open to the idea that I’m mistaken if you have some more formal analysis to back this up. But this statement jumped out at me as questionable, so I wanted to see where you were getting it from.
A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to.
As for hard facts and statistics, I imagine Charles Murray’s recent book or Hayes’s new book Twilight of the Elites (both of which I have heard good things about) might provide some.
Can I ask on what basis you’re drawing this conclusion? I agree with the bulk of what you said about overuse of negative selection, but I challenge the idea that it’s producing cookie-cutter student bodies at elite universities. Having attended Yale as an undergrad, your claim strikes me as incorrect, as the Yale student body seemed to me more diverse on all five of those categories than any other (non-online) community I’ve been a part of—certainly more so than my high school, my law school, or my current professional environment. That’s just my anecdotal experience, so I’m open to the idea that I’m mistaken if you have some more formal analysis to back this up. But this statement jumped out at me as questionable, so I wanted to see where you were getting it from.
He also attended Yale...
I’m reminded of a quip from a former Yale professor:
As for hard facts and statistics, I imagine Charles Murray’s recent book or Hayes’s new book Twilight of the Elites (both of which I have heard good things about) might provide some.