DominiConnor
Quant Headhunter
- Joined
- 9/6/06
- Messages
- 1,051
- Points
- 93
Andy is right to highlight the issue of family support.
A fact that seems invariant across cultures, countries or most segments of humanity that you care to pick is that the educational level of the mother is the best predictor of educational outcome for the child.
Note that I say "predictor" not "cause". It's obviously partly a cause, but also there are the sort of people who have educated women and the sort of people who do not, and that correlates with outcomes.
This neatly helps explainswhy America does so well, in spite of a dysfunctional education system, since although there are marked differences between male and female education it is not so great as many other country.
Another important predictor is having a desk in the child's bedroom. Again this is both cause and correlation.
As BBW says money opens doors, but there's more to it than that. Recently I had reason to ask the head of a well known MFE if he might consider admitting a student under non-standard circumstances because stuff had happened in his life.
I could do this because I'm on first name terms with a bunch of people like that, not all of course, but enough to be useful.
The MFE head would have been horrified and incredibly offended if I'd offered him money, almost certainly enough to kill the relationship, so it's not enough to be rich, you have to know the right people to offer it to, as well as the way it is offered. Of course in this case I was trying to help someone who'd been out of luck not my kids, or the kids of a friend, but contacts and knowing the system can help a lot.
In the LSE case, they knew the system: a "donation" to the LSE, plus a contract to train Libyan civil servants went down well.
The UK press has been justifiably vicious over this, but there is a vast grey area.
My own school, part of the same university took a lot of students from shit countries.
I found this out when I enquired why the largest student housing had alternate male and female floors, which cause a problem since a good % were double rooms and few people wanted to share with someone of their own sex.
Turned out the school had to do this else girls from shit countries (mostly Moslem) wouldn't be allowed to come.
Obviously, any civilised person would want to undermine the culture in such countries, so the decision was made to pretend that there was a degree of separation, so the girls could experience life in a place where they weren't seen as possessions of the nearest male with impotence issues.
But on paper it looked like we were pandering to religious nutters.
The LSE faced a similar dilemma, Libya is a Moslem country so it's government is an enemy of it's people, indeed in almost all cases the government is the most important enemy of the people who live in Moslem states. There is a case to be made that by bringing civil servants from Libya to a civilised country, they might absorb western values. Of course by training their civil servants one is also making civil servants of a moslem country more efficient at their designated work of stealing from, torturing and murdering the citizens of their state. Not an easy call to make, especially now that Libya will probably try to form some sort of democracy. I doubt they will succeed, partly because almost no Libyans have any idea how to do it, or even what "democracy" means. If we teach them, maybe they might not screw up.
A fact that seems invariant across cultures, countries or most segments of humanity that you care to pick is that the educational level of the mother is the best predictor of educational outcome for the child.
Note that I say "predictor" not "cause". It's obviously partly a cause, but also there are the sort of people who have educated women and the sort of people who do not, and that correlates with outcomes.
This neatly helps explainswhy America does so well, in spite of a dysfunctional education system, since although there are marked differences between male and female education it is not so great as many other country.
Another important predictor is having a desk in the child's bedroom. Again this is both cause and correlation.
As BBW says money opens doors, but there's more to it than that. Recently I had reason to ask the head of a well known MFE if he might consider admitting a student under non-standard circumstances because stuff had happened in his life.
I could do this because I'm on first name terms with a bunch of people like that, not all of course, but enough to be useful.
The MFE head would have been horrified and incredibly offended if I'd offered him money, almost certainly enough to kill the relationship, so it's not enough to be rich, you have to know the right people to offer it to, as well as the way it is offered. Of course in this case I was trying to help someone who'd been out of luck not my kids, or the kids of a friend, but contacts and knowing the system can help a lot.
In the LSE case, they knew the system: a "donation" to the LSE, plus a contract to train Libyan civil servants went down well.
The UK press has been justifiably vicious over this, but there is a vast grey area.
My own school, part of the same university took a lot of students from shit countries.
I found this out when I enquired why the largest student housing had alternate male and female floors, which cause a problem since a good % were double rooms and few people wanted to share with someone of their own sex.
Turned out the school had to do this else girls from shit countries (mostly Moslem) wouldn't be allowed to come.
Obviously, any civilised person would want to undermine the culture in such countries, so the decision was made to pretend that there was a degree of separation, so the girls could experience life in a place where they weren't seen as possessions of the nearest male with impotence issues.
But on paper it looked like we were pandering to religious nutters.
The LSE faced a similar dilemma, Libya is a Moslem country so it's government is an enemy of it's people, indeed in almost all cases the government is the most important enemy of the people who live in Moslem states. There is a case to be made that by bringing civil servants from Libya to a civilised country, they might absorb western values. Of course by training their civil servants one is also making civil servants of a moslem country more efficient at their designated work of stealing from, torturing and murdering the citizens of their state. Not an easy call to make, especially now that Libya will probably try to form some sort of democracy. I doubt they will succeed, partly because almost no Libyans have any idea how to do it, or even what "democracy" means. If we teach them, maybe they might not screw up.
