Do you need an elite education to serve the public?

Interesting comment from “Jim Beam”:

Teach for America, which prides itself on "equalizing education", hires mostly Ivy League grads because a lot of ivy leaguers are applying for positions.

There are actually only a very small number of public service positions that are fun and interesting. Thus you need the most prestigious possible credentials to get hired into such a position.

The janitor at the public school who cleans the bathrooms is performing a public service, but that’s not the kind of public service that rich kids are interested in.

Comments

[adel]

Teach for America, which prides itself on "equalizing education", hires mostly Ivy League grads because a lot of ivy leaguers are applying for positions.

Not exactly. I've worked as a screener for them in the past and I can tell you that:

a) They will hire anyone who is qualified to teach science or math, regardless of where they went to school as long as they meet the minimum GPA requirement & can speak/write English well enough.

b)Many applicants are English, non-quantitative social science, liberal arts grads. As a result, there is more competition for slots among liberal arts people and they have a higher bar to clear than science/math grads. So a Harvard English major has a better chance than an English major who attended State U or (especially) Never-Heard-Of-It College, the assumption being that Harvard has a more rigorous program, assures a certain basic level of competence, & that a Harvard 3.5 GPA is more impressive than a 4.0 at a less competitive school.

And having read through countless application, I have to say that this is absolutely true - among people who major in less difficult major, their university is one of the best predictors of the quality of their application, reading/writing ability, etc.

[Half Sigma]

adel writes:

[Teach for America] will hire anyone who is qualified to teach science or math, regardless of where they went to school as long as they meet the minimum GPA requirement & can speak/write English well enough.

I guess you can add science and math to the list of things that rich kids don't find fun and interesting.

[Peter]

I guess you can add science and math to the list of things that rich kids don't find fun and interesting.

Rich kids with family connections and country-club networks to rely upon have less need to study math and science.

On a separate note, I find it amusing that otherwise intelligent people have no shame at all in admitting that they can't do math or science (or computers), indeed almost taking delight in their technophobia, when they would not even think of admitting, for example, an inability to write coherently.

[adel]

Well, as that sage Barbie so eloquently expressed, "Math is hard". Although, some of the difficulty TFA has in recruiting science/math majors, especially from the Ivies, is that they can easily find higher paying jobs (that will also give them the experience they need for grad school), because unlike the liberal arts people, they are in demand elsewhere.

Top-notch students in quantitative/hard science majors have some of the highest rates of turning down the program once they've been accepted.