Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

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In the US, about 40% of students who enter college do not graduate [0]. This has many surprising implications.

- Graduating from college, any college, does mean something because many of the people who try can't hack it.

- Big state schools seem to be "of the people" while elite private schools are, well, elite. But they are not so different. Elite private schools have low admission rates but also near-zero dropout rates. Big public schools have high admission rates but also dropout rates in the 40-60% range. They just apply their filters at different parts of the funnel.

- The way to a more educated population is probably not to expand college access. Already, far more people access college than can complete it. More interesting questions are about how we best serve the people at risk of dropping out. The answer might be to make state schools more selective, not less, so that we aren't wasting people's time (and money!) with programs they'll never complete.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

You can still learn a lot even if you don't graduate.

Sure, but the possession of a real university degree pretty much guarantees you can at least read, write & reason. Most Americans without a University degree can read, write & reason, of course, often better than a University grad, but the University degree proves you can do it at least minimally. It used to be that a grade 8 certificate would provide that guarantee, then it used to be that a grade 12 certificate would do it too.

There are far cheaper ways of proving somebody can read, write & reason but for some reason employers seem to be stuck on that University diploma. I guess it's easy for them.

At the company where I work there is a written test of language/logic/math that applicants for jobs have to take. This has had the effect that almost nobody at this company is stupid or incompetent. They are also easy to work with - I would guess partly because social ability is correlated to intelligence.

I suspect this test is the single biggest reason for the success of the company.

Is this something your company came up with itself? Is it available publicly?

I think the test was provided by some company. There was nothing magical about it though - part of it looked mostly like an IQ test, and there were math questions and short reading comprehension tasks. It was fairly easy and the biggest difficulty I thought was the short amount of time we had to complete it.

I suspect any reasonable test in that general direction would do the job. I don't think they use it to specifically hire the people who achieve the very best scores, but rather to not hire the ones who perform poorly.

They are usually called "Psychotechnical tests", and their use is standard in many industries. Though judging for some people I've seen passing them, I'd say that most of them are borderline useless, or not really used.

In the US, about 40% of students who enter college do not graduate

That has nothing to do with the topic at hand though. Or are you saying that colleges have zero influence on their students' education, and the only thing that determines if a student fails or succeeds is whether they really met the course requirements at enrollment time?

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