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May 22, 2007

The Harvard of the World

David Brooks gets this analogy right:

Harvard is tough to get into. To be admitted to a school like that, students spend years earning good grades, doing community service and working hard to demonstrate their skills. The system has its excesses, but over all it’s good for Harvard and it’s good for the students beginning their climb to opportunity.

The United States is the Harvard of the world. Millions long to get in. Yet has this country set up an admissions system that encourages hard work, responsibility and competition? No. Under our current immigration system, most people get into the U.S. through criminality, nepotism or luck. The current system does almost nothing to encourage good behavior or maximize the nation’s supply of human capital.

Our immigration system is unaccountably weird, relying, as it does, on family ties and lotteries. Just about all the discussion over the immigration bill has focused on the guest worker and citizenship programs, but the conversion to a points-based immigration system wherein applicants are judged across metrics of talent and economic potential is huge. Expect that system to expand in the House bill, where Silicon Valley Democrat Zoe Lofgren runs the relevant committee, and will undoubtedly jack up the allowance for high-skills visas.

May 22, 2007 | Permalink

Comments

Let's be honest about this. Most immigrants in the last decade just walked into "Harvard" through a side door and sat down. No hard work, no community service, no preparation.
When the admission policies are changed, they will still just walk in the side door because it's easier, faster and they have reason to believe that the dean will do nothing to stop them. They haven't for 30 years.
The lesson here is that it won't matter what is changed until enforcement happens. The Senators promise that now they will start. *These* laws will be enforced. Nobody will believe them. I don't and trust me, the Mexicans don't.

Posted by: Fred Jones | May 22, 2007 8:49:44 AM

Not a good analogy. Many get into Harvard via family name and connections. No hard work, no community service. They waltz in as legacies and, once in, have a lifetime of further connections. It's not criminal--except to all those whose hard work, grades, and community services are beggared in the process. Immigration needs to be addressed through enforcement: strengthen INS, hire sufficient investigators, and hold employers accountable. Follow the money and stop demonizing immigrants.

Posted by: Judy | May 22, 2007 9:21:10 AM

Aren't the Democrats naturally opposed to H1-B visas?

Posted by: Jason | May 22, 2007 9:24:21 AM

If Ezra thinks Harvard is a good model, then he is indeed as clueless about class issues as I've said. He couldn't make it any more clear if he wanted to. Harvard is the place where they train little rich snobs into complete fucking assholes. Harvard is the place where they turn potential left-wing political operatives into anti-union, or-business DLC types. Harvard, and the elitist power-retaining private education system it epitomizes, should represent this immigration Bill.

Like Harvard, this bill is all about screwing over the weak in our society. Sure, it may help a few people, but it also ensures that any upward flow in our society is strictly controlled by people who already have power. It's all about making sure the wealthy, and their children, never have to face competition from normal Americans. Just like this immigration bill.

Posted by: soullite | May 22, 2007 9:24:59 AM

Aren't the Democrats naturally opposed to H1-B visas?

No. Look at the makeup of the Congressional delegations in high-tech/bio-tech-heavy states like northern California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey to figure out why.

Both parties have "big business" constituencies. For the Republican party, this is concentrated among old-time industries such as retail, construction, and energy. For Democrats, it's concentrated among bio-tech, high-tech. The latter rely far more on H-1B visas and gain more benefits from them.

Posted by: Constantine | May 22, 2007 9:43:37 AM

Question: Didn't Bush go to Harvard?

Posted by: jimmmm | May 22, 2007 9:56:58 AM

soullite, I've been known to mock Harvard in my spare time, but it doesn't deserve the hate you have for it.

Look, the admissions process is essentially random unless one is a legacy, sports star, or have some rare talent the committee wants that year, and there's no clear "merit" scale. Grade inflation is rampant (outside some science classes, grades are generally either B+/A-/A), and the compus life/culture is slow, owing to over-control by the administration and lack of student initiative. Rich snobs come out rich snobs. Nothing shocking about that. But there are a lot of really smart people who go on to become successful writers, scientists, and professionals.

By way of example, The American Prospect is quite Harvard-heavy in its choice of writers, and they are generally good guys. Harvard might not make you a better person, but I wouldn't claim that it turns one into a bad person.

Posted by: Constantine | May 22, 2007 9:59:08 AM

Harvard - Great graduates because they only take the best candidates. How much of their success is due to quality education and how much of it is due to the quality raw materials?

Posted by: Fred Jones | May 22, 2007 10:13:21 AM

Fred: only about 1/4 of the immigrants who come into this country come illegally, so your use of most is silly, as is the idea that they didn't work hard. That being said, I think basically everyone here thinks that sanctions on corporations who hire illegals should be higher and more heavily enforced.

Soullite: I'll outsource my criticism of your comment to constantine, except to say that Ezra didn't, I don't think, defend the current immigration bill by comparing it to Harvard, as you claim.

Jimmmm: Yale, I think.

Posted by: Sam L. | May 22, 2007 10:14:38 AM

Good point, Fred (never thought I'd string together those words.)

But again, they took Bush...

Posted by: jimmmm | May 22, 2007 10:15:23 AM

Fred, to a degree, both play a role. The great candidates are well-placed to take advantage of the undergraduate research and the professional connections and internships that Harvard gives you the opportunity to take advantage of. On one hand, a less-qualified candidate at Harvard won't necesarily be able to take full advantage of those opportunities, while a great student who didn't go to harvard, but maybe went to a small local college close to his home, wouldn't have had the opportunity to thrive and become as professionally successful in his chosen field without the opportunities placed in front of him as an undergrad. Nobody claims, for example, that Ramanujan would have been just as successful had he never left his village outside of Madras.

Bush went to business school at Harvard. Business school is its own creature. I'd hesitate to make comments about any university just based on students from the b-school.

Posted by: Constantine | May 22, 2007 10:26:10 AM

It's a terrible analogy. I want to live in the same country that my family does. I don't particularly want to go to the same school that my family does. School admission and immigration cannot be sensibly compared.

Posted by: Consumatopia | May 22, 2007 10:35:22 AM

Consumatopia, outside of immediate family and parents who need care from their adult children, there's no reason that family-reunification of extended family should take priority over merit-based immigration. One thing I don't understand is why almost all immigrants aren't selected under a point system or the method of filling H-1B positions where people with specific talents are sought after.

Posted by: Constantine | May 22, 2007 10:44:01 AM

Bush was both a dessert topping and a floor wax: Yale undergrad and Harvard B-school. As for those Texas roots, HS was Andover.

Doubtless I am missing something, but the points based system seems weird to me: how do you earn points to be a laborer or bus boy? In my mind's eye I can see some young Unix jockey being told 'Sorry sir, your kernal expertise only scores you enough points to be... a sheet rocker in Houston.'

Posted by: Nat | May 22, 2007 11:18:04 AM

There is nothing special in giving admission to intelligent students and make them as a good engineer's or Manager's whatever it may be,that is what Harvard doing now..Likewise If people get enough in their country then what for they expect visa from US,So we cannot compare Harvard admission with immigration..Yes there is some bad holes in immigration bill,we have to correct those.But,no need for complete change.
AA Breakdown Cover

Posted by: sakthi | May 22, 2007 11:41:15 AM

Elite college admission and immigration preferences do share some attributes: both are FUBAR and skewed toward who your family are, who you know, and how much you and your family will 'contribute'.

But there is not much to learn about one that will help figure out what to do with the other. To start with, the elite colleges are private institutions with huge endowments that allow them to attend to their own priorities, and immigration is a national priorities issue for public policy.

I'm quite happy to keep Congress and the President out of the college admissions, thank you very much.

As for immigration, it is not clear that even a 'sensible compromise' (whatever that is) will survive the raw emotions of the several sides. Immigration is just the public, legal face of deep divisions and insecurity within the public that clearly think we are on the wrong track as a society, but for wildly different reasons that don't appear to reflect very well even the traditional stances of liberal/conservative or Republican/Democrat polarization. On this issue, the US is more like the Balkans than anything else.

Sometimes analogies obscure more than they reveal or enlighten.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR | May 22, 2007 12:03:26 PM

there's no reason that family-reunification of extended family should take priority over merit-based immigration.
And it does not. Wait times for family-based green cards can be up to ten times as long as the waits for employment-based green cards. I work at an immigration law firm. I've filed employment-based green card applications, only to have the applicants decide halfway through that they didn't really want to live here anyway. And yet US Citizens who want to bring in their spouses wait months for approval, months for the visa interview, only to have the visa denied because they didn't meet an evidentiary standard that depends entirely on the consular officer's whims.
I don't know who released this talking point, but there is NOT a bias for family-based applicants (especially extended family) in our current system. As for the evident dislike most people have for the Diversity Visa Lottery, that's 50,000 per year, approximately one tenth of admitted LPRs, and as someone who supports the 'huddled masses yearning to breathe free' theory of immigration, I see no problem in admitting the occasional high school graduate from the third world instead of an advanced-degree-holder from Eastern Europe or South Asia.

Posted by: Urs | May 22, 2007 1:23:48 PM

Give me your sprightly, your rich,
Your best and brightest yearning to earn big,
The creme de la creme of your teeming shores
Send these lucky and privileged souls to me,
I stand and judge besides the half-closed door!

-The New "New Collossus"

Posted by: Dan S. | May 22, 2007 1:38:38 PM

I, knowing how small the diversity lottery is, don't have a problem with it. Complaining about the diversity lottery is like an Iraq-war supporter claiming to be a deficit hawk because he doesn't like earmarks.

Posted by: Constantine | May 22, 2007 1:51:29 PM

Brooks is, as usual, full of shit.

First of all, a guy who's spent the last several years effectively shilling for an empty suit like the Idiot Prince is in NO position to whine about "nepotism". In any case, the "nepotism" he's complaining about consists of things like uniting parents with their children, in accordance with our professed devotion to strong families. Does little Davey really think it'd be wiser to preferentially attract, say, unattached males?

I guess that by "luck", Brooks means the Green Card lotteries. But these were designed for the admirable purpose of avoiding the shameful racist quotas that used to guide our immigration policies. The Green Card lottery winners I've known have worked exceedingly hard to make it here -- much harder than I, and I'm certain little Davey, have ever had to. If he didn't thrive on made-up statistics, and generally live with his head so far up his own ass, Brooks might stop to reflect that the U.S. is not the destination of choice that it once was. It's becoming maybe more like a Big Ten school than Harvard, to use his lame analogy. Those Harvard-bound wizards whom he's so interested in have lots of other options.

Once again I'm grateful that the NYT decided to sequester Brooks, and the other fuckwits (Krugman excepted) on its op-ed page, behind their own border wall.

Posted by: sglover | May 22, 2007 1:56:58 PM

Dan S.-

Excellent. I should just start posting that the next time anyone starts waxing poetic about the 'merit-based' system.

Posted by: Urs | May 22, 2007 2:12:31 PM

Dan S. - hee!

And... okay, I never thought I'd be doing this, but: I'm gonna defend my future alma mater. Never thought I'd be doing it because frankly I kind of hate Harvard, so much so I'm taking a year off next year to detox from the culture, figure out my priorities, and consider transfer options. But: among me and my three freshman roommates, not one of us wasn't on financial aid. Not one of us counted as anything close to rich. And, thouhg I won't speak for myself, I know from spending a year with them that all three of them are, in fact, very hardworking, very bright, and very intellectually curious.

Now, there are a lot of overprivileged douchebags at Harvard. A lot of them. But it's not JUST a training ground for the sons and daughters of the elite. I mean, if it were, I can't imagine there would have been a nine day hunger strike in support of rights for security guards.

That said, to say that Harvard graduates do better (which, according to some studies I can recall, is not actually true) because they are more talented is ludicrous. If it were true, it would have a lot to do with connections. But like I said, I vaguely recall hearing somewhere it's not true.

Posted by: Isabel | May 22, 2007 2:39:58 PM

The thing that doesn't make much sense about the Harvard analogy is that most of the hard work takes place before admission to the university. Grade inflation and connection culture (a sort of cronyism of its own) ensure that Harvard students don't have to work that hard after admission. What's the line? "Harvard is world's greatest storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much and the seniors take away so little."

So is Brooks proposing some system to encourage those lazy third worlders to get off their duffs and start working so they can cruise to a gentleman's B+ over here?

Posted by: AJ | May 22, 2007 3:56:37 PM

Ah, but Isabel, if you and your roommates wind up in the elite (and odds are, you will) then how is it not a training ground for just that?

As others said, Brooks' analogy is nonsense. We are not Harvard; the Harvard he describes, really, is not Harvard, and we have not ever been highly selective about our immigrant pool (David Brooks being, well, just one of what, millions of examples). Offering ourselves as the Neiman Marcus - or perhaps Bergdorf Goodman - of countries to emigrate to is silly. Our immigrants come from every class and come for a variety of reasons - some economic (jobs), some political (asylum), some social (marriages, family). Our immigration policy simply has to acknowledge these realities. That's what we're struggling with. Harvard is not. Bad analogy. Bad Brooks. As usual.

Posted by: weboy | May 22, 2007 4:24:54 PM

I am somewhat struck by the liberal ability to rail against instituions that certainly aren't equally available to all, especially minorities, and with the other face defend private universities.
It reminds me of Democratic politicians who talk a good game on public education but send *their* children to elite private institutions.

Posted by: Fred Jones | May 22, 2007 4:41:18 PM

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