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How to fix the Ivy Leagues: require every student to have held a non-intern job earning no more than 2x minimum wage for their locale for no less than six months.
The silver spoon people from what I have observed are sometimes more humble or nicer than the pulled-myself-up people. People have it reversed for some reason, maybe due to pop culture. The silver spoon people know they are already at a big advantage starting out in life, so they understand that luck plays a huge role. A McDonald's stint will not change this. The pulled-myself-up people already had stints in bad jobs. It's quite common for people who start at the lower rungs and then move to the top to become detached, not those who start at the top.
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A better way to fix the Ivies would be to ban legacy admissions.
But really, that would just eliminate the Ivies, as the whole point of them is for the children of uber-elites to network with other children of uber-elites (and a few token minorities so the brochures don’t look too white) in the company of experts who can connect them to major industries. They’re not looking for smart people, specifically, they’re looking for high-IQ go-getters who are so type A that their type A-ness is literally more pronounced than their IQ. They’re not looking for nerds, they’re looking for chads. That’s why they cling insistently to “holistic admissions”, because it’s important to them that their admits aren’t just smart, but gifted in many other ways.
I would much rather we separate the finishing schools for elite children from our institutions of knowledge, but things are they way they are for the simple reason that knowledge isn’t power; power is knowledge. Everything is kayfabe and the humanities are word games, which is why the only fields who have major institutions that are looking for nerds lay in STEM, where “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
or even better, companies should stop requiring degrees for everything unless the job necessitates it , like being a doctor
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Wealthy parents will gladly have their kid work at McDonald’s for 6 months to go to Harvard, that wouldn’t stop anyone.
McDonald's would build a restaurant near Harvard in a wealthy area and the manager (probably an elite who would usually not actually be present at the restaurant -- some middle class schlub would be hired as assistant manager to actually run things) would in practice only require well-connected prospective Harvard student employees to show up on a single day in their 6 month shift and excuse all other absences. It would just become another node in the elite influence and favor trading network. You would need a powerful sovereign of some sort to actually impose this on the rich and well-connected.
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I don’t think the idea is to stop anyone, but rather have them do non abstract work like flipping burgers and learn the culture and average intelligence of the public and fast food coworkers rather than remain in their high IQ bubble
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