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Our Superficial Scholars

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36 pointskijinbear38 comments

The article rings true to me. In college I met a lot of eager kids who worked hard and were good at... being students. They executed assignments diligently and knew how to get straight A's.

However, many of these kids lacked basic critical thinking skills. They didn't read the news or have much of an idea of what was happening in the world around them. They largely did what they were told and didn't have the guts to question professors.

I'll share an anecdote:

At the very first meeting of a statistics course, we were informed that our assigned professor was sick and a new professor would have to fill in. A kid sitting next to me said, "I already looked him up - he gives 60% A's. The last guy gave 65% A's." I asked the kid if the new professor was a good instructor. He gave me a dumbfounded look and repeated, "He gives 60% A's."

I believe a different question should be asked.

Instead of: "Do universities fail to educate students on the underlying importance of the problems they are training to solve?"

We should question: "Is our system of education more than just a game?"

My thesis is basically thus: While the issue presented in the article reflects accurately on many students, the root is not grounded in university education, but in our system of education as a whole.

HNer adrianparsons notes (1) that many of his former classmates were excellent at being students, but their interest was not in their learning, but rather in passing the classes. Where, then, did this way of thinking originate? Not in universities, as the author suggests, but much earlier. Students are trained from a young age to participate in the game that is schooling; you are foisted into generic classes and made to take surface-level standardized tests (measuring nothing but the rote memorization seemly criticized by the author). Very rarely are you taught by a Professor in elementary, middle, or high school. Rather, "education professionals" prepare you for what is to come later. Just as often as not these teachers are uninterested in your learning (2), simply seeking a paycheck. Both teacher and pupil are playing the same game, one in which neither benefits from going above and beyond. Is it any small wonder that students enter college as excellent students, but poor learned citizens?

The article is far too narrow; The problem, much more broad. It's not the universities failing students, but the institutions that placed them there. We're not going to college intellectually and socially curious, only to have that squashed out of us; We're going to college expecting more of the same.

(1) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2133712

(2) This is not to say that great primary education teachers do not exist. I was lucky to have been influenced by a number of excellent teachers at a young age, though in hindsight I find that they were far and few between.

*Disclaimer: I am a first-year student at American University, and clearly hold a grudge to a system that, I believe, has wasted so much of my time.

When I was on staff at the US Naval academy, I had the interesting experience of interacting with the bottom 2% and top 2%. There's a line in the US Code that says we have to identify midshipmen who lack the aptitude for commissioned service. Like porn, it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

So the job also was in charge of identifying the best of the best and we had all sorts of metrics to assess the whole spectrum of midshipmen.

Anyway, so I got to work with a lot of the Rhodes, Fitzgerald, etc scholars. And I was doing my med school pre-reqs, so I sat next to several of them in class. During the summers they'd intern for me. I've had a bizare number of academic elite as my direct reports. Then, in med school, I interviewed applicants who had made it to the interview process, who are from the same end of the gene pool.

Before all of this exposure, interviewing the best of the best, I had been a division officer on a Navy frigate, and then an air craft carrier. Those jobs had some real leadership responsibility. Literally, "go this way, not that way", "do this, not that", "Yes, I said don't shoot" leadership. So, that added a different flavor to the experience of interviewing these kids. Frankly, my reaction was about like the author's: dismay. Despair. Disbelief.

Conversely, I knew a few of the Rhodes kids when I was a midshipman too. We weren't surprised when they got the nod.

Now, what I was surprised about was how they got the applications. At least at Canoe U. They'd set up a booth. In the Poli Sci hall. Which was further from the dorm than all the science and engineering halls. Basically, if you weren't a Poli Sci major (and there were plenty), some one had to, still has to, advise you to stop by.

I thought that was an interesting twist in the dynamic.

I think what the author is looking for and what most top tier students are shooting for are two different things. She's looking for someone who is good at, what my uncle called, dinner conversation. Any dinner topic my uncle could talk for hours on. He had a reasonably well thought out position on anything one was likely to ask at the dinner table.

But most people who excel in college are exceling at going deep on something. Being the world's foremost expert at something. Dinner conversation ability is probably largely unrelated to this. In fact it might be inversely related as I could imagine that many who want to go deep, view the dinner conversation as pointless -- people's minds are made up before they come to the dinner table, and don't change.

If they're really looking for people who can answer those questions, don't look for traditional scholars, look at debaters.

"But most people who excel in college are exceling at going deep on something. "

I disagree. Undergraduate education is not about becoming the "world's expert at something". That's for grad school and a doctorate. Undergraduate education should be well-rounded with a broad exposure to many different areas. Then, if the student chooses s/he can specialize and become the "world's expert" at something they came across as an undergrad.

For most undergrads, you're right (and note, I'm not saying that this is how undergrad should or shouldn't be). But the ones that are typically celebrated are those that are doing graduate/professor level research (or public service) as undergrads, and exceling. It's the Barton Reids and Wendy Kopps of the world. Those are the people that college professors heap praise on and recommend for prestigious fellowships.

Someone who is all-around good, but doesn't go deep, is likely to go unrecognized at the Rhodes-level. You must excel at something for your department or professor to take notice.

There's an old saying about Harvard... Harvard doesn't want well-rounded students. It wants a well-rounded student body. That is it doesn't want a bunch of good students. It wants the best math student, the best physics student, the best chess player, the best violinist, the programming prodigy, etc...

My point is that we've created a system where this is the metric. And when this is, you can't be surprised that when you try to take the cream of the crop, using this metric you may not get the results you expect.

Like I said, if she picked members of the top debate teams I think she'd be very impressed that they have answers for all those questions.

Oddly enough I've always thought that one of the big problems with the US university system is that it's too broad.

When I went to university in Australia I studied four subjects in my first year (Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Computer Science), two subjects (Physics and Chemistry) in my second year, two subjects in my third year, and only physics in my fourth year. On the other hand, I get the impression that the average American university student wastes at least a third of his time doing random-ass subjects with no real relevance to his major, right?

In my opinion, "broad education" is what you should be getting in high school.

I get the impression that the average American university student wastes at least a third of his time doing random-ass subjects with no real relevance to his major, right?

Not necessarily, if you are majoring in science or engineering. That sounds like my brother's physics degree at a big state university. As a math major at a liberal arts college, by 3rd and 4th year I was mostly taking math courses. I did have to take a number of liberal arts electives, but I've probably made more use out of Spanish and even History of Minneapolis and St. Paul than I have out of any of my higher math courses...

There's a lot of variety in American higher education. The curricula for the same major could be very different based on where you go to college. A physics major at Oberlin would probably be required to take more electives in "random ass subjects" compared to a physics major at Caltech.

I disagree. My undergraduate degree was in biology, but I earned it from a liberal arts college. What did that mean? It meant that I took an awful lot of biology classes, but I was also forced[1] to take a lot of classes outside of the science building. The college's degree requirements specified that you had to take a certain number of credits from such-and-such department, a certain number from so-and-so, and so on, no matter what your major happened to be. As a science major, it was sometimes very challenging to fit all the requirements in, but I'm really glad I did. Having a broad base of knowledge outside one's speciality is extremely liberating personally, and it can be professionally empowering, as well.

It's easy, as a scientist, to lose perspective about what we do- both in terms of "why are we doing this at all" to "why do we do this in this specific way." A good liberal arts education helps you a) recognize situations in which those sorts of questions are relevant, and b) can help you develop a useful set intellectual tools for answering those questions. Also, a lot of the biology I learned is already obsolete, ten years later; while learning it was certainly worthwhile, it is of relatively little practical value to me today (and not just because I didn't end up going into biology).

Also, having to take some humanities classes helped me become a better writer, and also helped me learn how to effectively discuss my work and why it is important. Those have proved to be extremely useful skills in life, both in academia as well as in the "real world".

Now, I would also argue that, had I been a humanities major of some sort, taking some hard-core science classes would have been quite beneficial- it would have taught me about a different way to engage with and think about reality, which can only be beneficial to one's ability to think about literature, or music, or whatever.

Oh, BTW- in addition to biology classes, I took a fair number of CS classes (almost enough for a minor), and I feel like my programming abilities over the years have definitely benefited from a liberal arts background. Furthermore, when I was doing hiring at my pre-grad-school job, I found that the best candidates weren't necessarily the ones with impeccable CS credentials. Often, the ones that worked out best in the end were often the ones that had broader academic horizons. They tended to have an easier time dealing with ambiguous situations and instructions, and were better able to "dive in" and "JFDI" when confronted with new and unfamiliar codebases, technologies, or projects. That's not to say that CS classes weren't important, or anything like that- just that there's a synergistic effect between good CS and the humanities.

[1]: "Forced" isn't quite the right word, here, since getting a broad education was the whole reason I chose a liberal arts school. "Required," maybe?

I dunno. Personally I found that I could never enjoy things like literature and history until they stopped being educational requirements.

If you want to see more students who are broadly informed, create an incentive. Don't expect people to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a broad university education that will land them a mediocre, 9-to-5 $10 an hour job.

My experience of seeing people selected for the Rhodes scholarship in Australia was that there were two major criteria for selection:

1. You attend Sydney University.

2. You live in a residential college at Sydney University.

Folks outside those circles found it much harder to be selected. To be sure, those who were selected were exceptional scholars, sportspersons and active in University life. But such exceptional people exist all over Australia, not just in one subset of one prestigious, well-connected university.

There is, perhaps, a larger question...There appears to be a large mismatch between public perception of the weight of certain academic badges, and the actual substance of the badge.

In your example, the Rhodes selection committee selects only people from a particular elite slice of Australian society, yet it may have nothing at all to do with their actual intellectual qualifications, "such exceptional people exist all over Australia".

Yet the public perception is that a Rhodes scholar is somebody who is not only extremely bright, but the top of the tippy top of bright people. They are the medium from which light itself emanates.

You can find this kind of mismatch elsewhere when it comes to similar comparisons of actual intelligence, vs. perceived intelligence a particular badge bestows on a person. "I graduated from Harvard" "I went to Oxford", "The best school is Seoul University" etc. Appears to have only slightly more substance to a person's intelligence and worth than the brand of socks they are wearing. Yet the public will grant significant weight to these things.

Articles like this work to slowly peck away at this often faulty public perception. It's not that Rhodes Scholars, or graduates of top schools aren't smart -- just that similarly smart people exist elsewhere. It's only a matter of time before "Rhodes Scholar" means only slightly more than "Dean's List" in terms of perception.

I'm afraid more and more that badges that should signify significant intellectual achievement are becoming more and more worthless. In order to improve the value of these badges, it behooves the selection committees to cast a wider net and find people from many other places who fit their requirements...doing the hard word of actually finding people than the lazy work of fishing in only well known ponds.

Here's where I contradict myself.

Rhodes Scholarships are valuable because they are very rare. According to Wikipedia, the USA got 32 places in 2006, Australia got 9.

But given that in a given year, tens of thousands of Australian students could apply in the first instance (having good scores, plays a sport, involved in some other activity). At a statistical level, the distinction between the top 100, the top 50, and the top 10, is going to be nigh on invisible.

So in a sense it is just as reasonable to select students from the University of Sydney (prestigious) as from the University of Western Sydney (considered to be a dump).

It's just that Sydney University happens to be wired into the Sydney establishment, especially through its residential colleges. And the Sydney establishment is the dominant fraction of the Australian establishment. And the Australian establishment provides the selection committee for the Rhodes scholarships.

Being at Sydney means that you have an opportunity to meet some of the selectors, and to get to know them, in advance. That's more or less how our Rhodes Scholar opposition leader, Tony Abbott, got a leg up.

So in a sense it is just as reasonable to select students from the University of Sydney (prestigious) as from the University of Western Sydney (considered to be a dump).

But there's also self-selection factors.

1. The best students are far more likely to go to Sydney than UWS, because as you mentioned, UWS is a bit of a dump. Of course in fairness UNSW is pretty good, but...

2. The sort of people who are interested in Rhodes Scholarships are exactly the sort of people who are likely to choose Sydney over UNSW. Why? Because Rhodes Scholars are the sort of people who think Oxford is the awesomest place on Earth, and Sydney is basically Oxford Lite.

(Declaration of bias: I went to Sydney.)

Sure, you might select Sydney over UWS. But students from other Group of 8 universities are pretty bright self-selectors too. Where are the equal number of Rhodes scholars from the Universities of Queensland, Melbourne, Western Australia, New South Wales and Adelaide, the ANU, and Monash?

(I went to Sydney too, for 2 years, before depression wrecked my life. Spent 1 year at St Andrews college.)

Melbourne I'd expect, the others not so much due to the self-selection factors I mentioned ("If you like Oxford's original 11th century gothic architecture you'll love our 19th century copies of Oxford's 11th century gothic architecture!). If there's significantly more from Sydney than Melbourne then, yes, I'd say something is screwy.

I got curious and decided to test my assertion.

Taking this list as an input: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_Rhodes_scho...

70 entries in total. I excluded 4 entries where the original university is unknown, and 3 where the person did not attend university in Australia, leaving a sample of 63 scholars.

Of the remainders:

Sydney: 13

Melbourne: 17

Adelaide: 15

Queensland: 5

UWA: 8

Tasmania: 5

While this is not a representative sample (it depends on Wikipedian "notability"), it may suggest that I am full of shite.

Well congrats, it takes a special kind of effort to go to that much trouble to disprove yourself.

I'm interested in the complete lack of UNSW and Monash. I think it supports my idea that if you're the kind of person who really wants a Rhodes Scholarship so you can go to Oxford then you're the kind of person who'll choose the ivy-covered alternative over the just-as-good 20th century one.

Well it's more embarrassing when someone does it to you. And I have a suitably fragile and inflated ego, which is why I picked Sydney out of the offers I received way back in the day.

Great check! Not being an Australian, are the top 3 schools here the top 3 schools in Australia? (No UNSW?)

The Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide are generally considered to be the most prestigious institutions in their states. They're sometimes called the "sandstone universities", because they self-consciously mimicked the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge[1].

UNSW started as a technical college, I believe. Much more practical, not the sort of place where gentlemen went to study. Given that the Rhodes sample I chose covers about 100 years, UNSW would be underrepresented versus its current standing within Australia (neck-and-neck with Sydney).

[1] My own alma mater, UWA, has a tuscan feel that most closely resembles Stanford.

The story I've heard is that you also need to have left-wing politics (of the moderate rather than nutbar variety). Though in fairness I note that Tony Abbott was also a Rhodes Scholar, so the story may have been exaggerated.

Maybe if you're from WA -- Hawke and Beazley, for example.

Hmm, that's kind of strange. There's so many important socio-political dilemmas for young people to grapple with these days, why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict? Shouldn't young people be forgiven for holding the unequivocal yet naive belief that we shouldn't kill each other, or even threaten to? I mean, if they're equivocating on nukes when they're a fresh-faced 22, what will they be equivocating on when they're a grizzled 55 and at the reins of some real power?

get's to bottom of article, reads that author represented NM in the house...back up to the byline...

Fucking Heather Wilson. Should have known...

We must have read different articles. The one I read didn't fault the students, first of all. She merely pointed out that they had been prepared with a narrow focus and weren't demonstrating interest in or thinking about larger frame issues.

If you've considered the issue of the use of nuclear weapons and have either the opinion that it's never justified, or that it is in certain situations, that's one thing. But then when discussing the issue you wouldn't really be equivocating, would you? Equivocation and the problems the author reported in candidates were evidence the students simply hadn't thought about important questions related to the their fields of interest. And yes, I think that's a cause for concern if the trend is increasing.

The author's complaints always focused on students who didn't seem to have an opinion about the ramifications of their own areas of interest.

For instance, the student who was asked about nuclear weapons was "a student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university"; surely someone so involved in the issue should be able to comment on the probably outcome of their stated goal.

Likewise, "a young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year" should probably be able to discuss why it's worth doing what they'll be doing (i.e. potentially killing people for America).

I can't comment on the answers to these questions, or how accurate the author's recounting of their responses was (perhaps they were just idealistic, not ignorant of the arguments)... but I think if you're applying for a Rhodes Scholarship you should be able to discuss the consequences of your beliefs and actions.

Here's what the article said: A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral.

Since when does thought equal equivocation? Thoughtless action is irresponsible no matter what motivates it. The author also faulted a student who signed up to kill for the government without wondering whether there was anything worth killing for.

The only thing I disagree with in the article is the one-sided concentration on the students who are just eager to do what they're told. What about the ones who are more thoughtful? Who are they, where do they come from, and why are they different from their Ritalin-addled robot achiever peers?

The problem is anyone actually considering whether they should do what they are told has probably at some point wondered whether they should be good students, and at the Rhodes Scholar level of competition it doesn't take very many semesters of not-straight-As to not be in the running anymore. Selecting for straight-As and the ideal academic is, to be fair, selecting for exactly the kind of person the author decries.

I'm not saying no straight-A student is a thinker, just that at some point a thinker has probably found some reason to end up not getting straight-As for a semester. Maybe not even a good reason. Just a reason.

To get a Rhodes scholarship, you don't just have to do well academically, you also need to be an enthusiastic sportsman and participate in a bunch of extracurricular activities -- i.e. be an obsessive CV-builder. And indeed, since the actual cash value of a Rhodes scholarship isn't all that large, the main reason to want one is to get another shiny achievement for your already-extensive CV to impress even more people.

The kind of students who are competitive for Rhodes scholarships are thus exactly the sort of students who do things in order to build up their CVs rather than because they are particularly passionate about them.

A Rhodes scholarship selection committee member complaining that kids nowadays are thoughtless hardworking achievement drones is like a football coach complaining that students nowadays spend too much time in the gym. It may or may not be true in general, but it's obviously true of the subset you're interacting with.

It's also a reinforcing spiral. Getting into a Model UN conference at high school, improves your chances of joining the state debate team, which improves your chances of getting into an honours society, which improves your chances of going to that Future Leaders seminar, which ...

I called it "The CV circuit". The only way to win was to get onto it first. I think Americans have worked this out more completely than we have (in New York they send toddlers to prep school to get them into the best kindergartens).

She offers no evidence that the student hasn't thought long and hard about nuclear weapons. I wonder if she reached that conclusion because he disagrees with her. As if saying "If he supports Global Zero then he couldn't have considered these things."

I assume this is based on a real student whom she interviewed, and that he was unable to satisfactorily justify his belief system when challenged on it.

This kind of thing doesn't surprise me -- the students with the most strongly held political opinions are often those who have thought about the issues the least.

That's because when we talk about "strongly held beliefs" we're talking about an emotional and not rational attachment to the idea. Emotionally-held ideas are not examined as they are tied up in self-image.

She isn't trying to make a case against those specific students. They might not even exist exactly as she described them. She merely used three examples to illustrate her argument, and she included one vaguely "conservative" example (the student willing to kill for the government) to balance two "liberal" examples. That's pretty good for a former Republican officeholder writing in the Washington Post. There is only the faintest whiff of partisanship here; don't let it distract you from her argument.

> "If he supports Global Zero then he couldn't have considered these things."

Millions of pounds of Soviet armor rolling across the Eurasian steppe and into Germany.

"why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict?"

From the article:

"A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral."

http://www.globalzero.org/en/about-campaign : "Global Zero members believe that the only way to eliminate the nuclear threat — including proliferation and nuclear terrorism — is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, secure all nuclear materials and eliminate all nuclear weapons: global zero."

This is not a criticism of a random student. This is someone who has devoted significant effort to a political campaign that they appear to have not actually thought about.

This is not particularly unusual. Find some partisan for a cause, and ask them for just a moment to suspend snark and judgment and just recite the dominant arguments of the other side, and a couple of key bits of evidence for the other side. I haven't tried this, but I rather suspect few partisans could pass this test. (But how can you have a good opinion if you don't even know the arguments the other side has?)

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