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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

> Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.

> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.

This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.

At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.

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You may not have meant it this way, but "College should be for academically gifted high school graduates" is not what I would have in mind for who should attend college. I think college should be for those who want to learn.

For example, I had very poor grades in high school (would not have been described as academically gifted) and used state funds to go to undergrad to study science. Ended up just being a late bloomer, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry and went on to get a PhD in theoretical chemistry. Higher education shouldn't be restricted to just students who appear gifted, but should be available to anyone who wants to put in the work.

I agree that college should not be a requirement for good entry-level jobs, however, I don't think that college admission in general (there will always be elite private institutions) should be heavily restricted based on my personal experience.

Edit due to sibling comment: I did poorly on the math placement test for college as well and had to take remedial math courses. I ended up minoring in math and taking some graduate level courses in numerical analysis during undergrad. So the idea that colleges shouldn't have remedial classes is ridiculous.

Just to extend your point, some of my stats:

3.0 high school GPA 3.0 undergraduate GPA

Now in year 3 of a PhD program. I wasn't even considered academically gifted in undergrad! Yet I think I am a pretty good researcher.

I finished at near the bottom of my undergrad. Got a PhD and a job that uses those skills, which puts me in the top 10% of graduates in my field.

So yeah, study and research are very different.

What the hell are you all getting PhDs in where it is a doable path if you are near the bottom of your undergrad?

I've explored a PhD in CS, and reading what people write I've gotten the impression that it is extremely difficult to get into programs.

It can be doable if you deliberately select jobs that can demonstrate research aptitude as a way of getting into a PhD program. In my case, it’s also awfully helpful if you have an employer willing to foot the bill, as it means you won’t have to scrap and compete for limited funding positions.

Well, I did by dint of being incredibly lazy throughout my undergrad, but clearly smart (engaging with the material, but not doing enough work).

I was pretty lazy in my UG, and (for the first time in my life) competing against people just as smart as me. So I did pretty badly.

I did demonstrate strong research aptitude in my project, as well as a bunch of other classes. I kinda skipped a bunch of stuff in second year, and second year was 33% of the final grade, so I did pretty crap.

To be fair, I came to the department with a proposal, found my own supervisors and got my own funding (through a government scholarship), so I didn't really cost them much.

Sorry late reply, but I am in accounting.

If there's some way to figure out "those who are willing and able to learn" better than "those who excelled in high school," then fine, use that.

But it's clear to me that the current system is not for "those who want to learn". College is just what you do after high school because an undergraduate degree is a requirement for some bizarre reason.

No, montecarl, higher education should only be for kids who get the most obedience points in child jail.

Please ignore the vast gulf of quality between child jails, if they were gifted students they would have risen to the top anyway.

Exactly. As I said in another reply, remediating a poor K-12 education is not the point of going to college.

>This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new

I’d argue the idea of college being vocational is not very new. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was, in part, a way for training people to better integrate into a more industrialized economy.

“to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/304

>This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.

I had a low GPA in high school and a high one in college.

It's not a challenge intellectually, it's a challenge to your work ethic and discipline as well as (very important) social skills, none of which I had in high school.

So, what you're saying is false. Because when you say academically gifted, I picture fast learners or creative minds, not the hardest of the hard workers.

I didn't mention anything about increasing socioeconomic prospects of students.

The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?

It's not contradictory at all.

> If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?

I did not equate "academically gifted high school graduates" with "good people". You did! What an insane idea. It's very clear to me that most jobs do not require a 4 year degree. The fact that we only give good entry-level positions (that aren't manual labor) to college graduates is an absurdity.

College should be for the most promising, academically interested students. Students who have a good shot at a career in academia. Employers won't be able to only hire from that pool because it will be a very small pool.

Why would an employer hire someone for their "good" job that wasn't a "good" student? No matter what criteria you use to define a good job, all things being equal the better students would go to college and therefore employers are incentivized to only select those who went to college to begin with.

Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.

> Why would an employer hire someone for their "good" job that wasn't a "good" student? No matter what criteria you use to define a good job, all things being equal the better students would go to college and therefore employers are incentivized to only select those who went to college to begin with.

The number of good jobs is not a function of the number of college grads. If there are fewer college grads, employers will have to broaden the search. Let high school graduates apply to entry level positions that aren't manual labor.

> Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.

I'm saying that people who are going to college to get a degree so they can get an entry level job should not be in college. They should just be able to apply to those jobs out of high school.

The people left over, the people who actually want to go to college for the sake of knowledge, will be academically talented (or at least interested).

> The number of good jobs is not a function of the number of college grads. If there are fewer college grads, employers will have to broaden the search. Let high school graduates apply to entry level positions that aren't manual labor.

Again most if not all good jobs require skills - skills that must be taught. What is this hypothetical "good job" that requires no training? You're seriously not living in reality, this is 2021, not 1950.

No matter what, if the people with more skills are going to college, employers will make college a requirement, even if a college education is not strictly necessary to do the job. This isn't some hypothetical, it's already happened.

No one is forced to go to college, they do so because the opportunities are there and employers want college educated employees. Conversely, employers need not hire exclusively college graduates, but it turns out that people who don't go to college generally do not perform (of course there are exceptions).

> I'm saying that people who are going to college to get a degree so they can get an entry level job should not be in college. They should just be able to apply to those jobs out of high school.

They already can, they will just likely be rejected.

Academia isn't financially self sustaining. Rich parents pay for the prestige of sending their children to certain schools. If college is only for future academics, they'll quickly run out of money.

The general pursuit of academic science could be funded by other means. but it will be hard to match the amount of revenue generated from wealthy parents and alumni

Colleges are obscenely bloated mini-empires. They have grown their own legal systems and police forces. They should have far, far less money.

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