How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.
i dont know what trauma you went through at iowa state university's calc 3 hazing but I personally pulled the patrician move and graduated with a degree in history, only to get a job programming straight away anyway.
leetcode, system design, and book knowledge questions about java will forever be more manageable than a compilers class or multivariable calculus, for purposes of making enough money to live a middle class life without burning out
Universities like to keep their graduation rates high to ensure competition at the front of the pipeline. Also, by keeping admission so competitive you basically ensure that whoever does end up getting in has the capacity to do well at any program (though statistics are still gamed - for example it is almost impossible to "drop out" of MIT - you are just placed on indefinite leave if you express that desire. That way their graduation rate very high since the people on indefinite leave don't factor into it).
A lot of folks I went to college with did nothing but party, drink, hang out. Education didn't matter to them at all. They were going to get a job at their family's firm, company, etc anyway. Didn't matter what their grades were.
Professors know who they can't fail.
The people marking the exams did not know whose exams they were marking.
It's possible that corrupt professors worked around this, but there was never any scandals related to this policy.
As for the Zuckerberg example, I think it's a prime example because a social network website is comparatively cheap to create, but the key question is to get people to sign up. By launching first for top colleges, people who want to stay in touch with their "successful" mates would want access as well. Someone without access to a top tier institution's social life would not have been able to pull it off.
What I was trying to point it is that these students used these supposedly impressive accomplishments in the college applications when really they didn't do much at all.
That's where the in-person interview comes in. It's a lot harder to fake one's way through that.
It increasingly feels like the world’s reward systems have been captured by and saturated with these charming phonies who only know how to game the system. Put all your skill points into charisma and people will just hand you money and opportunities. I’ve spent my whole career perpetually a couple of rungs down the totem pole from these well-pedigreed charmers, and hear them talk their smooth, but ultimately empty talk over and over.
Whether it’s college applications or job applications, the longer I go at it, the more convinced I am that the ability to “seem like the right kind of successful sort of person” gives you the best results. Better than track record, better than demonstrable skills, better than potential and willingness to do hard work.
The Gervais principle is a thing. The charismatic CEO is helped by the 90% mediocre employees, who like the system. The 10% productive employees are exploited and shouted down.
All that the 10% can do is change jobs or start a company.
"I'm reasonably sure that my fake voice, with its low notes and artificial confidence, made me appear more capable than I was, and that wasn't difficult because I was largely incompetent at every corporate job I held. Despite my obvious lack of ability, nearly every boss I had—and there were many—identified me as a future corporate executive."
Slightly confused, I asked if they'd just had an election. Nope. Turns out they called their members "president" which looked great on their resumes.
I was impressed they gamed it so simply.
There's probably edge cases, like for some startup founders or supreme court justices, but for the more "advantaged" than average children, it largely doesn't seem to matter in aggregate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimatin...)
See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope.
While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy.
Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.
Companies produce more things when the price goes up. This works amazingly well for consumer goods.
However, companies have been banned from doing so in the housing market. What follows is a shortage, the driver of all inflations. However, this only reflects rents, not necessarily the prices of homes because they are primarily driven by the availability of cheap credit whose monthly payments may stay the same despite a more expensive house.
From what I can tell rent inflation itself went up by 3%+ every year since 2000. One problem with rents is that the only way they can employ people is via construction and since that isn't happening it will not translate into increased wages, which will cause wages to lag behind as most people are employed in an industry whose maximum wage increases are effectively bounded by CPI+productivity growth, not rent inflation+productivity growth, rents outpacing wages is only natural.
Education is one way to increase productivity growth, but another way would be to simply reduce the productivity growth needed to have a normal life, by building more housing.
rent inflation - CPI = education shortfall
or
rent inflation - CPI = construction shortfall
it's a choice and a lot of people are picking 1. because it's other people that have to get educated to pay for the shortfall, not the ones owning the land.
I don't see tech say getting worse than it was a decade ago in terms of school bias. If anything it is better thanks to hacker rank, triplebyte, etc.
You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.
Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class.
So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners.
My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.
I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats.
The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck.
What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening.
So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.
Or, alternatively, seek other options? Maybe try to avoid the race somehow. Since most will be losers, it's probably best to consider alternatives anyway and ask if the prize is even worth winning.
Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life.
Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling?
The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability).
Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?
So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.
He did something. Bad code is better than no code.
> Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know.
Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".
Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK.
This is only going to get worse. The ruthless competition to get into elite colleges is both a cause, and a product of, economic inequality. The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, and that investment banks recruit mostly from a handful of targets.
If prospective law students were confident they could earn 90% as much, or 100% as much, as graduates from T-10 law schools, if they attended lower ranked schools, there wouldn't be so much competition to get into the same handful of elite schools.
This winner take all economy is stupid, and it's making us sick in pursuit of success. People should act in their best personal interests, and this competition is the result. We can't blame parents for wanting the best outcomes for their children. But everyone deserves a bit of blame, some more than others, for helping make American society so unequal.
I have little doubt nepotism also plays its part, but the fundamental underpinning is ranked - elitism that was tested.
I've worked with many Oxbridge graduates and met, presented to ENS students and they were super smart.
Usually, before accessing those schools, you have to study for 2 years in a preparatory program called a Classe Préparatoire. Point is, the best can be quite expensive.
The most egregious thing though is that during school holidays in France, some private organisms (in Paris) offer 1 or 2-week cramming programs for €10-15k a pop where you get tutored by the very people that write the entrance exams to the most prestigious schools.
Wealth is a key.
Wealth definitely helps in the sense it gives you a better environment to support you during your studies. About it helping you being tutored by fancy private organisms, this is true but I think it applies more to the "lower" part of the Grandes Écoles & co pyramid. You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent.
About the set of high schools/classes préparatoires funneling a large part of candidates to top schools, that is definitely true. But again it requires a lot of work, you are not going to move through Henri IV or whatever to ENS only because your parents have money. But receiving a good education from birth and having family and friends who knows how the system work, because they moved through it themselves, helps a lot.
But wealth helps because these places are usually in large cities (and mostly in Paris), which are expensive to live in. And to get there you have to come from good/prestigious high schools and have good grades, which again living in a wealthy family helps a lot.
Entry into Grandes Ecoles is usually a function of three things: knowledge, preparedness, and, indeed, talent. But that last variable has a much lesser effect that what people tend to assume.
What's interesting is what they put the emphasis on. Polytechnique is probably the most theoretical math heavy engineering program I've ever seen.
It's probably better exemplified by an anecdote from someone who did a double diploma from Polytechnique Paris and Montreal. He got flak in Paris for solving a problem using a numerical approximation, because there was a way to get to an exact answer. And in Montreal he was asked by a professor if he could "borrow his micrometer CNC machine" since he gave an answer that was way too precise for the material whatever he was working on was going to be made of.
Branding is powerful, and it’s easy to fall into the trap in thinking that the smartest person from UCL isn’t as smart as the dumbest person from Cambridge. Being in America, I’ve seen lots of people just throw out resumes just because they’ve never heard of their school, or they didn’t go to a prestigious school.
The first question the director asked was "where did she go to school?". Fortunately for her, she went to Oxford, so it was OK. I also remember the US recruiters telling us that there was a list of acceptable schools and we should stick to it.
Fortunately (for me, at least) we tended to ignore that crap in Europe. The funniest part was that my manager moved over to the US, and hired ten really really good people by just looking for qualified candidates who didn't go to one of the acceptable schools. I'm pretty sure all those people are the core of a very good team now.
It's very deniable. This simply cannot be the explanation.
Trump is an elite. He inherited vast amounts of money and vastly underperformed with them. He went to an Ivy, Wharton at UPenn. Sure, he sounds like an idiot, but it's undeniable that he is part of the political, educational, and business elite. The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd.
Yet if you cast your gaze upon history, you'll find that many social movements are indeed led against members of a political class by members of that very same political class. Many leaders of communist revolutions, for example, come from wealthy families and not the oppressed proletariat that they claim to represent.
Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
> Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
That's just untrue.
Trump loves to play up how he is a business person. He loves to play up his successes. He loves to point out how much money he has. He loves to point at all of his houses. He loves to point out how many rich people he knows. He loves to point out how below him other people are. He loves to point out how he moves in those elite circles!
Have you watched a Trump rally? It's in large part about how awesome and elite he is. As long as people follow this simple story of the Trump movement being anti-elite, they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do.
The movement is not anti-elite, literally, no one gives a damn that Cruz or Hawley have fancy degrees. It's anti-fact. Trump supporters don't like reality as it is and Trump came out directly to sell them a totally different version of reality that they like a lot more (slavery wasn't all that bad, white people are being oppressed, global warming isn't happening, you never need to switch jobs, etc.). It has nothing to do with elites, it's a basic denial of reality, just as fundamental as flat earth.
>> he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites > That's just untrue.
It is true - Trump never was a New York A-lister or B-lister. He could move in business circles, but not social ones.
> they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do.
His supporters wanted a wall, and he started construction on it.
Harris is supposed to be the immigration czar, yet she's afraid to be photographed near the border, because there's no wall.
The CCP engaged in trade violations, and he addressed that with tariffs.
Sounds like the right conclusions to me, even obvious.
> Trump supporters don't like reality as it is
His supporters like that he was willing to be their voice against the establishment in competing globally in the job market against illegal aliens, instead of being dismissed by the left as "deplorables."
> you never need to switch jobs
For most people, especially as they get older, there is no option for switching jobs - either you get on long-term disability or you're homeless. This one phrase proves how out of touch you are with reality.
Sometimes people don't appreciate what they have until it's gone.
The Democratic party and White House staff are infested with CCP lobbyists, including Biden's family and his Chief of Staff. Since the CCP has been in a cold war with the US since the 1950s, I hope it turns out well, but Trump/Pompeo had a clear strategy, and Biden doesn't.
As an illustration of what the CCP wants, consider rare earths or 5G. China has world-wide monopolies on those - but their goal is world-wide monopolies on everything, regardless of dumping rules.
Trump was the best and most productive US President in the past 75 years. Shame on the left for two baseless impeachments that prevented our leader from even accomplishing more.
You should know what you're talking about before posting screeds on HN. But then I could say the same thing about most of the left - it would be nice to have paradise on earth, but Marxism doesn't get you there.
With Trump the appeal wasn’t because he wasn’t elite, it was because he was perceived as an “out group” of the elite.
Whenever he trashed the existing institutions that just further reinforced it.
While both are reasonable things to discuss, you did not actually negate the comment you were responding to.
Name a policy that helped his supporters. His policies either helped elites or hurt the other side, but did not help his base. Virtually the only thing he ever did for his own base was to give out COVID relief support.
Caging children at the border? All about hurting the other side that cares about immigrants.
Lowering corporate taxes? Help for elites, particularly for those with huge fortunes overseas. Workers saw virtually nothing from the tax cuts.
Stopping California from imposing stricter emissions standards? Help for elites.
Abortion? His side isn't having them anyway, it's all about hurting others.
Stopping student loan forgiveness? Either helping elites or hurting the other side. Maybe both.
Revoking the EPA's jurisdiction over waterways so that there is more pollution? Helping elites and hurting his side. Republican states are far more polluted than Democrat ones.
The trade war that particularly hurt farmers?
We could keep going like this. Virtually all of Trump's policies were designed to help elites, hurt the left, but not to help right.
The clearest way to put it, is the way his own supporters put it "He is hurting the wrong people." That's what Trump sells. It's a world divorced from reality where anyone who doesn't agree is an enemy.
Trump is not anti-elite. His supporters are not anti-elite. They love elites.
But first, your entire argument against the grandparent comment is "Trump is rich and had some policies that benefitted some rich people" as equaling that his base is in love with the very concept of political and business elitism?
Do you not see how completely nonsensically disingenuous and logically fallacious of an argument that is?
Are you actually interested in having an intellectual discussion on the topic or do you want to rant like you are on Twitter, Reddit, or some cable media show?
Feel free to head over to one of those if that is your intentions.
The primary reason why Trump was elected was because he was the only candidate brave enough to attack both the Bush and Clinton dynastic era policies (on live Television, btw). IIRC, he did replace NAFTA. A lot of Americans actually are interested in the idea of a strong focus on American job availability.
Regardless of a subjective judgement on whether Trump mad e progress on this or not, those were the policies he publicly promoted.
He also has done other public things like Twitter rants against companies that are moving factories to Mexico, etc.
So, his base is entirely aware of all of these things and that is exactly what GP commenter was referring too. And that is exactly what you failed to negate with all of your flamebaiting ranting.
Maybe besides the point, but nordic countries do have significant populist movements. In Finland (which I know best) populist Finns Party[1] is the largest party according to polls at the moment. We had our trump/brexit moment in 2011 when they took landslide victory against what the experts and ”elites” expected.
In the end that's what's causing revolutions, i.e. members of the educated middle-class being left out and not getting on the financial bandwagon. Imo it all started with the French Revolution, some people say that it was a bourgeois vs nobles thing but many bourgeois were doing quite all right (think the banker Necker [1]), it was the small bourgeois (and lawyer) from out-of-Paris like Robespierre that was feeling left out.
The same thing happened between the two world wars in Europe. In my parts of the continent (Eastern Europe) there were too many college graduates chasing too few State jobs (the only ones available to college graduates at the time), plus Jewish students crowding them out in domains that were lucrative even if not working for the State (think Law and Medicine). The solution some of those people thought of? Joining the right-wing movement that was advocating for "cleansing the State" and doing very bad things to those Jewish students that were competing for the same jobs.
University elitism and general egalitarianism are easily separable. Germany quite deliberately got rid of its elite universities after 1968, leveling former pinnacles of research excellence like Göttingen, Heidelberg and Tübingen so that which university you go to now has basically no social cachet. Every US Supreme Court justice went to Harvard or Yale. The website for the German Supreme Court mostly doesn’t list where they got their degrees, so little do people care. Germany is not an egalitarian society. It is class and title obsessed. Sweden may have an egalitarian affect but it likewise has large and enduring fortunes. The wealth inequality is there even if income inequality is more modest.
TBF, this might be a more accurate representation of what the education pyramid was always supposed to be.
The biggest problem that I see in the west was the rise of the belief that anyone can simply go through a curriculum and now be upper middle class too.
It's ruining potential, drive, competition, etc. It's super quasi-Marxist as well. Anytime someone proposes a simple solution that will somehow magically guarantee your life to be better is selling snake oil.
> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements
Perhaps not as strong, but I am not sure this is actually true. There are growing populist movements in France and Spain for sure. And you could be correct in establishing a pattern between slower economies, higher-inequality and unrest.
> This winner take all economy is stupid
Yes i.e. crony capitalism.
> this competition is the result
Of course, everyone doing the exact same thing and expecting to be the exception to the rule is not actually competition.
Why are you not asking the more critical questions like: why is there yet no competition to Universities themselves?
The author does not seem to understand that these are not mutually exclusive. You can receive a fantastic, genuinely excellent education that is also a competitive advantage. Indeed, they go hand in hand - I’d argue it’s harder to give an excellent education that’s somehow not advantageous.
This article is a rant against elite education because it enables elite opportunities. But perhaps there is something to be said for the students of such schools too, that employers are more likely to give them elite opportunities.
There are too many confounding variables to determine the true cause of this “problem”, if it (a merit-based system enabling social mobility) is problematic at all. There are things we can improve, but overall, the emphasis on education is a step in the right direction for humanity.
The current system encourages high levels of academic performance, which is precisely what our species needs to advance. There must be some sort of incentive.
For the record, I don't know how the average Yale graduate is "advancing our species" more than the average UMBC or UNC Wilmington graduate.
A handful have programs for people who have been outside of academic for some years, and allows them to earn the same undergrad degree.
However the same gpa and test score requirements are all in place and you’re still being judged by who you were at 17/18. I suppose the main difference is instead of looking at involvement in things like sports, student organizations, volunteering, etc. it’s looking at work experience or membership in professional organizations.
But at that point why not just have the apply as a normal undergrad?
That person [ who chooses to basically blow off the readings and learning and brags about how it does not affect his grade ] is an idiot. The purpose of going here is not to spend $60k a year of your parents money and learn nothing.
I am willing to agree. Each individual student has a choice. Some choose to learn. Some choose to waste their parent's sacrifice ( because they had to use their resources to get that offspring in ).
Given that he teaches at Yale, he probably understands more than any of us in this comment thread.
(Also, consider that the freedom you gained from what is a pretty good career choice might afford you the free time to discover other things which bring you joy.)
Einstein didn't "get started in his spare time" - thoughts about the universe consumed him as a person, to the point where him being "absent minded" was because he was visualizing the universe; his love letters even contained frequent discussions of science. His brain was preserved after his death, and there's been actual work done by multiple groups, with indications he was structurally different than a normal brain.
Einstein did NOT just get started "in his spare time". At all.
You can basically take 101 intro course of any field from great universities. And if you want to go deeper, the advances courses on a university's page usually have syllabus, with recommended readings etc.
But then I remember the reason I love this profession - it allows us to gain deep insights into other fields that we wouldnt normally come into contact with. To build abstract models of real world systems, you have to understand them and understanding is the best form of learning. We naturally become experts in many diverse fields simply by modelling them.
Recently I was made redundant from a long term job and was very hesitant about applying for the cool hip roles that I knew were around, instead I timidly replied to a few linkedin recruiter emails. I was promptly offered jobs working for one of the big banks, online ordering for one of the supermarket chains, and a local government role.
After due consideration, I turned them down and started applying to projects in areas where my skills are needed but I have something to learn as well. Im not interested in retail banking or building another checkout widget for a generic online shopper.
I know way more about the inner workings of anaesthesiology, police procedures, virology, locksmithing, fintech, electoral processes, hotel chains, cruise lines and many other fields that I would never have given two thoughts about.
Software is a craft, and to deliver your products you have to be invited into the customers private space. I find that fascinating and very fulfilling.
Yes, I will come out in debt, yes I could make more money doing what I do now in the time it would take now, but I don’t particularly care.
From the schools I’m familiar with, there is a minimum number of credits you need to fulfill at that uni. That’s unavoidable.
Sometimes you can test out of courses; other times you can skip pre-reqs by getting the instructor’s permission to enroll.
I’ve finished my last 60 credits (well 4 credits remain this summer term) of a statistics degree at a Canadian uni by attending midterms and finals. I only attended 4 credits worth of classes because 1/3rd of the grade in one 3 credit class was due to in class participation. The 1 credit class was 2/3rds in class participation. The rest, I didn’t go to a single lecture.
I did that part-time while working full-time.
Obviously there are some (many) disadvantages, but I took courses with profs that stuck close to a textbook for the course and I took courses without lab components. 1 course is a humanities course this summer and the remaining courses were stats, math, or comp sci.
I’m not a hacker, so maybe it’s not hackable in the sense you mean.
Most of my initial research was into online programs. I was very surprised by the limited number of good programs offered by “legitimate” schools. These often charged prices that were simply too much even if I continued working full time. Part of this was many still charged out of state tuition rates for online programs (note I cannot even get in state tuition in my state of legal residence right now). Any sort of decent aid was out of the question for reasons that could their own thread. complete undergrad while I’m still in my 20s at least.
However I found a few programs that seemed to have a good quality and were affordable. The problem of course, could I be admitted. As someone who was not school minded when they were younger, I’m definitely not the type of material colleges would usually be interested in admitting. 2 year transfer programs are normally the answer for people like me, but at the time I was not aware of any online AA programs, and while community colleges do offer some evening courses, it could have easily increased the time-cost significantly as I can obviously only take one or two of those a semester and not all classes are offering in that time slot either. Instead, I gambled to see if I could “hack” undergrad admissions by utilizing my time in the industry as replacements for some other criteria. This did not pan out. In fact, of the programs I applied for, only one asked for a copy of my resume, while every one of them was extremely interested in my high school disciplinary record.
Most recently, I did some research and it seemed like I found some AA programs that are fully online in my state. They would guarantee me admission into a 4 year university, which I decided I would be ok to quit working to finish. Then a few days ago I got the acceptance into one of those AA programs only to get suspicious when I looked for certain courses which were certainly not online. As it comes, it seems a number of schools are very vague in whether the AA can be complete “fully online” some including hybrid courses in that definition. I’m not defeated yet as there are other schools which may offer truly online, asynchronous programs. This is important as I cannot get the loans at the moment to quit working and go back full time (in a few years that will likely change, which is why I was fine dropping work to finish the last two years)
TLDR: I’ve been hunting for ways to complete the degree I’m interested in non traditionally (a hack), but every time I’ve found one, it turns out to be too good to be true.
I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually. I’ll try an analogy—-it feels like college is social media and students are aspiring influencers, all jockeying to find the right aesthetic and be that perfect shining light with all the followers but it turns out they’re all optimizing to the same local max and end up as copies of copies of copies. In the end all their resumes look the same. A bit drab, sweeping, and cynical, admittedly, but that’s what I think.
Anyway, my theory is that with ubiquitous high speed Internet, remote work being more widely acceptable, and continued suburbanization, future generations will look less favorably at taking on a huge debt burden to attend in-person college and something _like_ highly niche online trade/vocational schools or guilds will become popular and widely acceptable as a substitute for a four year degree in certain positions.
I can absolutely identify with this. I've seen way too many class mates get way higher grades than me without even really knowing any of the concepts they're supposed to be showcasing. Meanwhile all I ever had was conflict with teachers.
My theory is that school is simply aimed to produce docile bodies that will do what is asked of them. The whole learning bit is just smoke and mirrors to fool you into thinking that it's useful.
Clips from a well-known 1960s documentary with context from one of the filmers (Sixteen at Webster Groves): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQxUkZ4Anc
Probably not because we live in a crony capitalist society now. It's well established at this point and not likely to change anytime very soon.
College began as a purely elitist cultural institution for the rich. Like all other technologies it was only adopted by the masses once the rich became more bored with it.
The only pre-middle-class-era attendees of University were the highly-religious attending theological schooling and the highly-genius (ala Newton).
In our crony capitalist society college represents a simple and profitable hamster-wheel class separator. The same percentage as has always been will be granted upward mobility while an increasing percentage will remain in place.
Until you convince average intelligence people that college will not grant them wealth, status, or success then they will flock in greater numbers to it like a lottery. They will willingly indebt themselves for a mere chance at a better life.
It's absolutely horrific and disgusting what our society has become. If only we could convince people to focus on strengthening the middle class and having a degree of contentment in life then we could get past the crab in a bucket mentalities that the University system breeds.
Peter Thiel was very accurate with his remarks about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb28ZSvuKEw
I think you are right but I think that also is going to be part and parcel of traditional colleges changing. You absolutely cannot replace the role of college community nor tenured professors working with you in person. It, in my experience, doesn't translate to online. You need these people for mentorship and to offer constructive and informed criticism of your work. We as humans need the socialization so we don't turn into cranks.
HN and SV despise schooling sometimes, but we as a society don't progress without it being dominant in some form or fashion.
Funnily enough, that scene ends with some dude yelling "fascist!" and walking out. I never knew how uncannily accurate of a parody that stuff was until I started posting on HN.
This has been an on going prediction since, and likely before, television became a thing.
Universities are worthwhile because you're surrounded by other driven students. The social aspect is at least as important as the quality of educational instruction, and remote learning isn't going to replace that any time soon. It isn't even a good replacement for in-person instruction, but at least it's starting to become a workable alternative.
> future generations will look less favorably at taking on a huge debt burden to attend in-person college
I agree here, but it will likely mean that student pick less expensive universities or some other in-person alternative (e.g., in the states, community college for two years -> two years at a state university).
Eidolon was an online Classics magazine that recently closed up shop. In their version of a 'fail essay', the head editor says the following about formal Classics education:
"I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment."
The rest of the essay is quite good and you should read it all. But the thesis is the same: Fixing higher education is insurmountable.
I want to note the author/editor, because I feel many of the people that read the essay may not have. Her name is Donna Zuckerberg. If that name rings a bell, it should. She is the sister of good ol' Mark Zuckerberg. One of the richest people in the history of mankind. That a woman of such extraordinary and astronomical privilege is saying that things are insurmountable (with experience in fighting against it) should lend even more credence to her words.
https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...
The thing that WGU lacks is breadth of majors. I could see such a system replacing[1] traditional universities in the next couple of decades, but it has to expand to cover more majors, and it needs more than one school doing it. But if it happens, the way it's going to happen is by managers and recruiters realizing that it's better because it's provable.
[1] Well, such a system could replace traditional universities as a source of knowledge. It can't replace them as a source of contacts or a source of elite prestige. Traditional universities will probably survive on students who want those things.
And there it is.
This same phenomenon is also exactly the "leetcode phenomenon" that we see in the SE field, btw.
You could call it an Eastern culture thing, but your summation captures the why more accurately.
> being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle.
I imagine that up until the 80s and possibly even 90s this was an upper middle class guarantee.
> the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great
I have never seen it expressed this way but this is spot on. The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.
And therefore shouldn't require the cost of a degree and the time of a degree. A lower-middle-class lifestyle wouldn't be nearly so bad if you had four more working years and no debt at the start...
EDIT: Cheers for the answers. I am going to do some research on tuition increases at state universities, as well as the historical numbers on student borrowing. Any pointers to where I can find such data already compiled would be appreciated.
Second, funding has been cut for public universities significantly. A lot of public universities charge tuition that is far more than it was 50-60 years ago. Ironically the expensive private schools are where you want to go for low cost college. They can afford to give full rides to a large portion of their population. Hence the competition.
People have gotten better at playing the game. It's like how chess ELO keeps going up. If you did SAT prep, was a nationally ranked fencer/golfer/tennis player, did volunteer work, founded a tech club and had a 95 average in the 80's, you'd have your pick of colleges. Much in the same way your average GM would kill if they were playing back in the 80's. These days you'd still do okay but you'd be competing against a larger pool of people who also did all of these things.
The less athletic smarter ones get sent the work.
And because of the culture of university endowments/donations, US elite universities massively chase the 0.1% unlike in other parts of the world.
The “trades” argument has always felt rather disingenuous to me. Sure you can maybe make money in many trades in a state with a strong union culture or if you own your own business (at which point I argue that the “business” aspect is bigger than the “trade”) one, but in most places I’ve lived, you’re making low 5 figures, maybe upper 5 figures if you have decades of work experience.
In addition, college is much, much more expensive as a whole, thus saddling these kids with debt that they foolishly take on because everyone kind of tells them they should go in debt for the prestige and opportunity. Last I read, the average student leaves school with $30,000 in student loans.
The key thing is there's nothing for these grads to do except compete with one another for a share of increasingly limited spots.
It's new in the sense that it's really the first time that Americans will have to acknowledge that one of the tool that was supposed to be the champion of social mobility (education) is no longer working well. And, that America will probably resemble the very thing it loathed: a sort of immobile society where your prospects will be increasingly determined by your parents position in society. Basically a lot like Britain, except with the veneer of American Exceptionalism.
Still it seems like there would be some incentive for a top performer to target colleges in the 2nd rung. That being, you could basically write your own ticket. Want to work on some interesting part of the law or join some specific project? At an elite school you will be fighting to get that. At one level down you can probably walk into whatever you want.
Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.
Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.
Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).
Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
If you go to community college, work hard, and get decent grades you are more-or-less guaranteed a transfer spot at a good state school.
It's actually pretty easy to transfer from a California community college right into UCSD, UCLA, UCR, etc., and these are all excellent, affordable schools. Nowhere in that process do you have to take the SAT or the ACT. You just take college classes, and get college grades that show how you perform in college. You prove yourself by actually doing the thing the standardized test is supposed to evaluate.
I would propose that we look at tests not as the solution, but as another layer of bullshit hoops people have to jump through. Just get people bootstrapped into the damn thing at low-cost, and see how they perform. Evaluate them based on that. Being an SAT savant doesn't mean someone will actually be able to do anything meaningful in the real world.
Sure, that path may not guarantee you a spot at MIT, but if you come from a variety of backgrounds and have some humility about the whole thing you're going to be just fine and you will have more than enough control to steer your destiny in whatever direction your interests lead you.
Anecdotal, but all of my friends who make over $100k went to state schools for undergrad and grad school, and not going to Yale didn't seem to pose too much of an obstacle to them leading happy, productive, and fulfilling lives.
Standardized tests are terrible. Predicting the outcomes of standardized tests is very simple, it's a function of your parents income. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and... With a 0.95 R^2.
Simply put, standardized tests would make sure that only rich people go to good schools.
> Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (
No. That's not what happened. This is the history according to the National Educational Association: https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...
In the beginning, US colleges did not use standardized tests. A well-known racist who was against the "intermingling of races" created standardized tests to exclude races he did not like. And for the most part, it worked beautifully, except that too many Jews were getting in, so they added other criteria on top. The idea of standardized tests exists because of racism. It was recognized by its inventor to be a tool for racism and classism.
> Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions
Yeah, how's that going? Notice who gets into Oxford and Cambridge? It's not really the lower classes. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/... Only 20% of Cambridge students are eligible for a grant that takes 50% more than the median income to get. https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/16287 That means that they overwhelmingly come from families with very high income.
That's not the R^2 of your SAT based on income; that's the R^2 of average scores within an income bucket. Predictability based on income is far, far lower with other factors more significant (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs5v3pv).
> The idea of standardized tests exists because of racism. It was recognized by its inventor to be a tool for racism and classism.
Huh? Prior to tests, schools were even more classist. Standardized tests have also been used in all sorts of societies historically explicitly to break class lines. i.e. the Chinese Imperial Examinations (created over 2,000 years ago) intentionally were created so that candidates were not just merely young aristocrats recommended by other aristocrats (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination).
And yes, the institution of holistic review (ironically, not relying as much on tests) was absolutely driven by anti-semitism. See https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/21/holistic-admiss....
Of course, neither the history of testing or holistic admissions says anything about the actual value of them today.
You write that as if you disagree with my comment, but then you go on to agree with it. Scores are highly predictable from income and factors like race. Yes. That's what makes standardized tests not just worthless, it makes them classist and racist.
> Huh? Prior to tests, schools were even more classist.
This is why tests were introduced, schools were claiming to admit people based on skill. But then the "wrong" people showed up with skills. So they introduced tests. You should read the history of testing that I linked to before, it explains this very nicely.
> Standardized tests have also been used in all sorts of societies historically explicitly to break class lines. i.e. the Chinese Imperial Examinations (created over 2,000 years ago) intentionally were created so that candidates were not just merely young aristocrats recommended by other aristocrats (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination).
You should totally read a book on this. I suggest "Civil examinations and meritocracy in late imperial China" by Elman. The examinations were extremely onerous and required pretty deep pockets. The exams were a way to choose among elites. Just like standardized tests today!
> Of course, neither the history of testing or holistic admissions says anything about the actual value of them today.
The fact that scores are basically a proxy for income+race does say something about their actual value today. Zero. Let's stop building on the infrastructure of racism and oppression that those who came before up put up.
What do you mean by these terms? I'd argue that they only are if the results, conditional on future college performance, are biased by class or race. Are they? The article you linked doesn't say.
> The exams were a way to choose among elites. Just like standardized tests today!
What percent of students scoring over a 1500 on the SAT are from the top 1% of household earners? I doubt it is not a minority. There's obviously an income correlation, but it's far better than simply taking rich kids.
How do you propose selecting students?
By racist and classist? That an identical child, who happens to be born poor or who happens to be born with a darker skin color, will have fewer opportunities and worse life outcomes.
That's literally what a racist society is. Where your skin color plays a large role in your fate.
> How do you propose selecting students?
Simple. We start with the society we want. One that is not racist and not classist. In other words, your skin color and the income of your parents should not play an overwhelming role in your life outcomes.
We tell universities that if they want any federal funding they must admit classes that accurately reflect US demographics. 1% of the incoming class is from the top 1% of earners. Same for socioeconomic status. Colleges can do whatever they want, if they don't like the deal, that's fine, but they get no federal funding and they get no federally-backed student loans.
You start with the outcomes you believe are just. And you set up incentives to get that outcome. That's literally what we do everywhere else. We tell car manufacturers that they need to make cars that have fewer emissions, we don't tell them how. They figure it out. Universities will figure out how to make this happen, they're full of smart people.
Yes, your appearance does have an impact on life outcomes, that much is true. But standardized tests are not to blame. In fact, standardized tests are the solution, because the test doesn't know what you look like.
> 1% of the incoming class is from the top 1% of earners.
If the 1% of earners are in the 1% because of being smart and because of being hard working, and the children inherit these traits, why punish the children for that?
Yes, that's troublesome, but it is inherently impossible to solve this. Less poor parents generally educate their children better (or at least keep their children in better environments), so this is difficult if not impossible to correct. I ensure my preschooler does her reading lessons every night - poorer parents (on average) don't. How are you supposed to correct for this?
> or who happens to be born with a darker skin color
Huh? Are you in tech? If anything, the "darker" kids were performing better at the schools I attended growing up (in the Bay Area).
> We tell universities that if they want any federal funding they must admit classes that accurately reflect US demographics. 1% of the incoming class is from the top 1% of earners. Same for socioeconomic status.
Well, demographics is a bit arbitrary, so the only way to do this across whatever you are trying to measure is to run a US-wide lottery for every school.
This would functionally kill the concept of universities as tracked systems and I imagine it would be strictly better for all of the top schools to simply forgo federal funding to preserve their very purpose.
How about your look, height, voice and so on?
Saying that "standarized test" is racist is some joke?
What's your alternative then?
>The fact that scores are basically a proxy for income+race does say something about their actual value today. Zero. Let's stop building on the infrastructure of racism and oppression that those who came before up put up.
Skew the odds then?
A lot of people do that, but it requires putting effort which in majority of the cases is what people lack - determination, desire and other.
A joke? It's deadly serious. Standardized tests help entrench racist ideas and keep the poor out of good opportunities.
> What's your alternative then?
Simple. If universities want government funding they must admit classes that accurately represent the socioeconomic conditions of the wider population. 1% of the class can be in the top 1% of the income bracket. If a university doesn't like this, that's fine, they can go their own way. They get 0 federal dollars and no federal backing for student loans that go there.
Let colleges figure this out. They're smart. You need to solve problems at the output level, what society you want. And we can all agree that the society we want is one where your skin color doesn't determine your fate.
That's insane. They are in the top 1% because of being smarter and because of hard work (especially in the US, where they are more likely to have made their wealth on their own than inherited it). Their children are likely to inherit some of these traits. Limiting the number of smart & hard working kids in universities will lead to a dumber nation.
That is literally what racism is! White people mostly make up the top 1%, so we should give them more opportunities because they're in the top 1% because you think they're genetically superior? What you wrote is exactly how all of this insanity of scientific and rational racism started in the 1800s. How we ended up with standardized tests, IQ tests, phrenology, and eventually with Hitler and Stalin exterminating inferior people.
If you adopt your view, then you end up with a strictly racist and classist society. People at the top get their kids into the best schools because they have money and connections, those schools provide the best education and the best social connections, and the cycle continues forever.
No. The children of people in the top 1% are not predestined to be genetically superior. They are not some sort of ruling race. They are just people who happened to have been born to rich people.
No, it is the opposite of racism. Racism is when some people are treated differently just because of their race. When you do well because you're smarter and work harder, regardless of race, then that's the opposite of racism.
> White people mostly make up the top 1%, so we should give them more opportunities because they're in the top 1% because you think they're genetically superior?
You are putting words in my mouth.
> The children of people in the top 1% are not predestined to be genetically superior.
Your argument is with Charles Darwin, not me!
If the goal is to help people in lower socio-economic brackets, then the best way to do that is to make college free, not eliminate standardized tests. I see too many deserving students accepted into good colleges decide that they can't go because they can't afford it.
No.. when you say that the children of people in the top 1% who are overwhelmingly of one race should be given disproportionate opportunities because of some genetic factor, that is racism. It is literally saying "people of this race should be given more stuff"
> You are putting words in my mouth.
I am not. I repeated what you said. You said that the children of the 1% are somehow genetically superior. I pointed out that the 1% is overwhelmingly white. And I wrote down your beliefs. That white people are genetically superior.
That is the simple logical consequence of your beliefs. And it a chain of reasoning we have already followed right into slavery and concentration camps as a species. One that we should not follow again.
> Your argument is with Charles Darwin, not me!
Look back on that chain of inferences and think to yourself where you went wrong, how did your thoughts, that you consider innocent, lead to an extremely racist conclusion.
There are only two outcomes possible. Either you look at your chain of reasoning and its simple plain outcome "white people are genetically superior" which you seem to believe in, and you feel ok with that. In which case this is just plain racism. Or you look at it and realize that no there is something deeply wrong here. And you will find that the idea that your parents are wealthy somehow meaning that their children are genetically superior is bankrupt.
Your choice. Racism or changing your thought process.
All I am saying is that if people who are in the top 1% got there because of being smarter and being willing to work hard, then to the extend these traits are heritable you should expect their children to have these traits as well. Such kids can be expected to do well in school. Should they be given disproportionate opportunities? Absolutely not. But if they do well in school do not assume that's because they have been given disproportionate opportunities!
> I pointed out that the 1% is overwhelmingly white. And I wrote down your beliefs. That white people are genetically superior.
Nonsense. I am not white, and I do not believe white people are genetically superior. I am Asian.
You act as if parents just paid some money and people could score anything they want on standarized tests.
It requires shitton of effort to score top 1%.
I knew people who if could, then would buy themselves $top_score easily, but on standarized tests they didnt/barely passed.
With Internet access I think you can overcome shitton, at least when it comes to english, math and similar like physics, computer science
Unless you're literally taking about poorest of the poorest who cannot even access internet.
>Simple. If universities want government funding they must admit classes that accurately represent the socioeconomic conditions of the wider population. 1% of the class can be in the top 1% of the income bracket. If a university doesn't like this, that's fine, they can go their own way. They get 0 federal dollars and no federal backing for student loans that go there.
I don't see it working in practice.
Even when there are standarized tests there is significant gap between top and bottom students, with your approach the gap will be even wider, thus it will decrease quality of classes unless you change system even more
and I guess that's what you want to do - change system even more.
So, how would you pick students?
let's say that 500 students that sit at top 50% income applied, how will you decide which will be accepted?
Also
What will happen to those top performing students that will not be accepted due to them being at top $$$?
Rejecting them in long run will cause your whole nation
Is there some aspect of standardized tests that makes the test easier for rich white kids while making it harder for others? If so the solution is to fix the test, not eliminate the test.
It should be expected that in a nation that prides itself as the land of opportunity, there will be some correlation between wealth and the genes you were born with. Hard work is important, but it is not the only determinant. Being born smart is a factor too, right? Smarter parents beget smarter kids. If so there will be some correlation between wealth of parents and how well the kids do in tests. Blaming that on some kind of bias in standardized tests is insane.
Rich white kids are less likely to have, for one of many examples, been deliberately exposed to toxic levels of lead by action of their state government.
There are a myriad of other unequally-distributed social and environmental impacts on cognitive function and academic ability, and evaluations of standardized testing tend to control for very few of them.
Standardized testing reveals uncorrected racial and economic injustice, it isn’t the source of it. Blaming standardized testing is a way of avoiding addressing the problems it reveals.
I do agree that this is advantage, but nowadays there's internet and you can have cheap as fuck access to very good materials
Been there, did that.
Turns out discrimination doesn't apply to Asians, as far as universities go.
Correlation is not causation. See Skirt Length Theory https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/skirtlengththeory.asp
SAT may not "capture education", but some tests certainly do. The key is to have free-form questions as in college, such as proofs, derivations, and word problems. I'm sure there will be false positives, but what system doesn't? I was checking out those college-entrance exams by Japanese universities. If a kid can excel those questions, the kid for sure gets real education and is smarter than most of her peers, statistically speaking. And I don't agree that everyone can game the system by cramming. It's like few people could get into USAMO by cramming. A well-designed test is like USAMO, but easier.
I did not, I dropped out for a variety of reasons.
But entering the workforce things changed.
I thrived, I easily solved problems, and enjoyed what I thought of as "real work".
Many of my friends did not. They seemed to thrive in the comfort of a syllabus, clear and defined paths to positive reinforcement, and status... but work isn't generally like that.
You're not told what to do, exactly how and to reproduce it, you need to find that out yourself, and you will fail, maybe often...
I had similar experiences with interns who when given an assignment and told they were to do their best and see what resources they could put together.... seemed lost without a specific set of step by step instructions...
Everyone did fine in the end, but the differences were striking to me.
Amusingly I think I'd love to go back to school now, I'd think much differently of it now than I did at the time.
Maybe they went to the wrong school?
I once did an analysis of the stress produced when the gear box ran full speed into the stops. My colleague looked it over, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" They weren't in the book, I derived them from principles. I.e. I wasn't trained to plug values into formulas, but how to get the formulas needed.
This is a meaningless statistic unless we know the base rate of people with college degrees in 1960 and 2010.
Look up the citations for this claim. It all seems like complete nonsense to me. AFAI can tell, they just pulled numbers out of thin air.
This seems to be the crux of the article. If only people would study humanities instead of science & engineering. Science & engineering isn't a real education.
I disagree.
I derive great pleasure from the engineering & science education I received in college. I haven't the slightest interest in French Literature, etc., and don't feel at all deprived for not being educated in it.
The article is an examination of American cultural beliefs about meritocracy, our systems of meritocracy, and relevant societal effects.
In my opinion this quote is more representative of the “crux” of this particular piece, “A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated.”
But I actually think that there’s quite a bit here and in Markovits’s other work. If you have a chance to take a break from your compiler work, I recommend a lecture he does called “The Meritocracy Trap” and perhaps also his conversation with Glenn Loury.
"A scientist would fearlessly peer into the Gates of Hell if he thought it would advance his knowledge."
I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.
And besides, I don't see much elitism in S&E professions based on the college. Employers don't care if you hail from MIT or UW if you can get s*t done.
I am currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics and studied computer science and mathematics in college, so I certainly don’t intend to disparage science majors, but I have a vague sense that attitudes about engineering degrees are different nowadays.
Out of interest I recently sat in on a graduate class which was supposed to be about complexity theory. On the first day the professor, who is an expert in the field, essentially told us “Complexity theory is trivial, you have a problem and you reduce it to another problem with an algorithm. Now, let me tell you what you have to do to get a software job at Amazon... You have to submit a paper every other semester to such and such conference etc...”
Whereas I wanted to read through the Knuth books, and learn compiler theory, and learn category theory and algebraic geometry etc..., but the climate didn’t seem to support that; outside of a small group of friends I found (and the math graduate students). The climate felt like what this guy’s YouTube channel projects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=27C-TuJceeI
My friends at a different major public technical university bragged about attending career fairs and studying for coding interviews. It just feels almost devoid of what I imagined the academic spirit to be.
I remember once a young lady trying to pick me up. She got around eventually asking me what I did for a living, and I said programming. Her interest evaporated the moment as that word left my mouth. (Her face and posture fell and she turned away.)
"Almost Live" relentlessly mocked engineers as being nerds and unable to get dates.
This all underwent a titanic shift once tech people suddenly started being billionaires and media darlings.
If we were all identical droids, authors like this would be most satisfied. That would completely eliminate inequality. And would ensure 100% (or 0%) social mobility, depending on how you look at it.
Too bad we aren't identical droids.
After 8 years of school there were exams (written and spoken) where person would be selected to go to 2 more years of school (equivalent of hi school) or if he performs poorly on exam, he can go to professional school for associated degree.
The person who goes to 2 more years of hi school, take exam again, and receive diploma.
Then the person can apply to any university, but to get there it was require to take another 4-5 exams, (entry exams) based on selected study subject. For example, if person decided to go to math/physics, it was required to pass 4 exams (2 for math, written and spoken) and 2 for physics. Based on result, (average score from all entry exams) the person either accepted or not.
If he not accepted, he can repeat it next year or go for associated degree or some lower school.
It was very nice system, where everybody have a shot based on brain and knowledge, no matter from what school person was.
Another example of the corruption of the Russian system which I have heard (quite likely apocryphal) follows: a female student is taking an oral exam in front of her <whatever subject> teacher. (These exams are or can be one on one.) The teacher indicates that the student should unzip her dress or she will receive a low score. She is extremely uncomfortable but attempts to comply. The zipper gets stuck. She says “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t go any lower.” The teacher replies with “Then I can’t go higher than a 3!” (Exams in Russia are out of 5.)
You can complain about the SAT all you want (and I won’t defend it) but it doesn’t have that particular disadvantage.
Macron just announced the closure of the 'Grand Ecole' of Administration for this reason.
Basically, France (and Europe inc. UK) traded their Nobility for a more meritocratic system, i.e. Elite Schools, but the notion that 'all the power goes to kids from those schools' is a little ridiculous as well. (Edit: all the power does go to kids from those schools, that is ridiculous, I'm not saying the 'idea that this exists' is ridiculous).
And FYI even if the Soviet System was a little more flat ... in the current Western systems (with deep problems) there are scholarships aplenty for top students. It's just hard for young kids to internalize the importance of a good education. In high school, I really had no idea how important it would be.
Elite schools are worthwhile however, I wish early education were not so competitive, and, we didn't focus quite so much on the name brand of a school.
Using standardized tests from 14-21 to select leadership feels very meritocratic, but it's also very crude. Also there is the ugly notion that maybe the best way to lead a nation is not purely meritocratic.
American Ivy League, despite their follies, produce a ton of very high calibre people. So does the 2cnd tier and below that, it's possible to get a very decent education but less guarantees of exceptional outcomes.
Some industries are full of Ivy League grads but many are not.
Also, throughout that time and even now the US produces amazing scientists and also has the means for them to 'do stuff'.
FYI I'm not American, I understand these things are far from perfect. I'm mostly harking back to the notion of 'standardized test and ABC school as elite' is probably not so good. America is open enough that even though some industries are chock-a-block Ivy League, many are not.
It's really not.
"As of November 2020, of the 55 prime ministers to date, 28 were educated at the University of Oxford (including 13 at Christ Church), and 14 at the University of Cambridge (including six at Trinity College)."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_t...
Probably my bad.
ENA will be closed, a new school with a different name (ESP) serving the same function and doing exactly the same as before will be opened in 2022.
I don't mean to derail, but what is a "spoken" math exam like? It sounds like my nightmare and I graduated with a STEM degree in a competitive program.
There were printed tickets that contains different question (typically 3) from all math coursed tough in school.
A person randomly picks the ticket (that were present, and questions unknow before you pick it) and was given time to answer the questions. After that he sit face to face with person who take the exam (typically if was the professor form university) and explain him your answer, while examiner can ask you additional questions related to your answer, etc. Based on your answer he grades you. In this system you cannot cheat the exam, since examiner will quickly realize if your answer were from cheat or you knew the subject.
It's basically like a coding whiteboard interview, but instead of being asked to invert a binary tree, you're asked a math question (proof of something, etc)
Written, are just like that, written tests, usually not multiple choice, (that is an american invention), but you have to show the work you did to get the result of the problem.
They can be easy or brutal, it very depends on how hard is the teach doing the 'interrogation' on you....
I think the system is great. The main downside is that one-on-one tests just don't scale. But other than that, I wish they would be more common in undergraduate studies in the US.
You stand in front of a few adults as a middle schooler. You have a chalkboard and chalk. They ask you to prove that n^2+1 is never divisible by 3. You do so with aplomb.
Decades later you ask an American middle schooler to do the same. He covers a ream of paper with attempts to find the right answer, and stares at you in confusion. You wonder if escaping the Soviet Union was worth dealing with lazy fools who can't already do calculus at 13.
What's sad actually about that is it was far more meritocratic than the current system in the US. Now it's just an extension of high school that honestly has become just as easy as most high school classes depending on where you go.
Meritocracy isn't exactly egalitarianism.
When you consider where the people who graduate from top-10 schools live, this is neither surprising nor impressive. Most of these law grads live in NYC/Chicago/DC/SF/LA or a handful of other expensive cities. They make good money — starting salaries are around $200k — but they also pay tons in rent, mortgages, private school bills, etc.
Compare this with a graduate of a 50-something ranked law school. This person probably lives in a city or town that where the cost of living is half of NYC/SF. They likely also work fewer hours than their top-10 counterparts. If they are making 2/3 of what a top-10 law grad is making, they're getting the better deal by far.
Source: former Palo Alto lawyer
I think the real reason people willingly take on that Big City grind is to have a shot at making partner at a top firm (which would mean they make 10x more than their midwest prairie dweller counterparts).
Including this cohort in the comparison would have made the not-shocking 50% gap even less impressive.
Am I the only one whose parser is throwing a syntax error for this sentence? "People already admitted to top-5 law schools don't choose to go non-top-10 schools instead"?
Again as with healthcare, all you have to do is look at who got all the money from the cost of education hikes - where did it all go - over the past two decades. We know where it went, we know who got that money. There is nobody willing to do anything about it, the latest proposals are to just throw more money at the disaster (which will send the cost of education even higher), more de facto welfare handouts for an already well-off class of white collar parasites.
> It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf.
By price fixing? You'd have a stronger point college is a racket because you need it to get a good job, and there aren't viable alternatives, though that implies more collusion between employers and colleges than there actually is.
> We know where it went, we know who got that money.
Again, this isn't obvious. Part of the increase in the price of college is because room, board, and amenities have gotten better, and easy access to student loans have accommodated this. This isn't a "handout," though.
Healthcare is somewhat similar in that the fee-for-service model led to higher costs, but it came about in a very natural way, and it's more about patient expectations and liability than handouts.
> There is nobody willing to do anything about it
Purdue hasn't raised tuition in 10 years. That's something.
Can you recommend a source on this? My first guess is construction companies and football coaches.
It is a little off topic but it is most discouraging to see a writer in the Atlantic make a mistake like that. Especially a professor...
An economy is not a society.
Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure.
> These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights.
These days, they are more the people re-writing history to fit a narrative, against any hard evidence.
If anything, the kind of people I'm talking about are the least political information workers you'll find. And honestly, there's a chance that the decimation of paying positions in their fields is contributing to the problem of badly research clickbait books. When you have to making yourself into an internet phenomena to sell your self published book rather than take a salary job at a local institution, your incentives are all aligned to do something sensational.
Edit: Just out of curiosity because I so often bump into complaints of this variety, what in your opinion is good history? Which historians or academic periods have produced "good history"? What techniques set those periods apart from today's historians?
I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you.
https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-people-who-point-out-gram...
I'm not commenting on the relative value of the endeavors, just pointing out that there are opportunity costs associated with choosing a humanities degree over a STEM degree in our current environment.
Well you don’t need a CS degree to contribute to your town’s tech sector, but it sure helps.
Also, in order to write clearly you need a lot of years reading and writing practice. You can get that on your own but a humanities degree is going to get most people there faster.
Amateur historians are good to have around but you don't want to run the entire front line of primary source history gathering off them.
Why don't they put it on Wikipedia so us unwashed rubes can consume it? Seems like your local historian is slacking or...stuck in the past
A front line historian distills tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages into a lengthy dissertation or book. That document is likely too dense to be of much interest to you or I. But another historian writing popular history books might reference it and also use some of its citations to quickly find interesting primary sources.
In this way, a 500 page popular history book may be distilled from a hundred other 500 page books which themselves are distilled from thousands of pages of primary source material. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an archive. So it's not really the appropriate place to house anything but the most distilled of these products. Essentially, all the other material is not relevant. But it's necessary to produce the relevant stuff.
As an example, you can read the wikipedia on Lord Nelson. You'll find most of his major life events listed there. But if you buy even the lightest biography on the man you'll find much more. Why? Are the people curating Lord Nelson's page lazy for not including those details? Of course not. The Lord Nelson page is probably obnoxiously over edited. But there is probably more of a fight about what not to include than what to include. Because the article seeks to be a relevant encyclopedia entry not an exhaustive resource.
My town's coal mine history may warrant a brief mention on wikipedia but not much more than that. However, if someone were to start composing a book on say labor organizing in Western Washington state, they might be interest to consult our archive and the distilled work our historian has done. More importantly, if a historian invented an interesting mode of statistical analysis, having that raw data already partially curated could move them a long way forward. This happens pretty often. A historian comes up with a novel way to count some interesting historical phenomena and they can only do it because some enterprising local historians whiled away hours collecting specific relevant information.
Intesting discoveries about historical economies come from counting of mills and bridges and other mundane activities. The path travelled by important historical figures come from historians stitching together news items and diary entries gathered by a local obsessive historian. And so on.
But there is a real mismatch in college, in that what most people want is an education that helps them get a good job, but colleges are unfortunately not optimized for that.
If there were another institution, that was as prestigious as college, but focused much more on providing students what they actually want (IE education for the purpose of getting a job), then I think that most people would choose that instead.
Unfortunately, modern day attempts to focus on job train, such as bootcamps and trade schools, are generally less rigorous, even if they are focused more on providing students what they want.
It's the hustle culture of capitalism applied to every facet of life. If you're not productive every single moment, you're falling behind and your self worth deserves to decline because of it. We've eliminated any "slack" from our jobs, from our lives, from our relationships in pursuit of ever more efficiency. We procrastinate because we feel guilty about not being maximally productive 100% of the time, there's no room for honest slack, we have to self-flagellate. We can't enjoy our time off because we know that work is piling up in our absence, having slack staff to compensate would be a waste. Our time with friends has to be scheduled and planned so it doesn't get in the way of our productivity, there's no room for slack in our social activities. We do all of these things because if we fall behind our job might be on the chopping block when the shareholders decide to squeeze fractions of a percent out of the share price. If we lose our jobs we lose medical care, food, shelter, and more.
We could fix all of these things if we chose to make our society that way, but we find it preferable for one man's divorce to have global implications for dozens of organizations and charities, all the people who work for him, and all the people who depend his whims for aid.
The problem with a change that alters this however, is that you may be tampering with the bread of alot of powerful people.
There alot of incentives for the powerful to keep things the way they are.
My theory is that on a macro level, the world keeps getting more competitive because we keep on churning out babies and expect their living standards to be just as good as they always were. I am not blaming anyone for that, but obviously supporting 7.6bn people (2019) at a given living standard is much harder than supporting 6.1bn people (2000) and there's no sign of stopping. As the western population ages and the period of retirement becomes longer, this becomes even harder because they need more support than someone of working age. Humanity as a whole keeps pulling miracles out of hats to make us even more efficient in the resources we consume but of course it is going to get harder and harder to do so.
Actually, there's every sign of stopping. Look at population growth rates from the 1970s to now: in general, the wealthier you make a population, the less kids they have.
Some of the problem we're seeing with costs is coming from the opposite of a decrease in footprint but from an increase. A small apartment seems cheaper and compared to a modern house it is. But a modern small apartment has many more requirements than even a mansion from 1890. The safety, environmental and equipment demands of a modern home of any kind are much greater.
On the other hand there has been a concerted effort to hold wages flat for the people at the bottom half of the income ladder. These two things taken together largely account for the perceived decline in quality of life for most people.
The key question is: what will power this sort of growth in the future? What sort of innovation will there be?
Malthus underrated the prospects of new technologies. The risk today is that we are overrating how impactful new technologies will be. This is the crux of the issue.
The thing growth gives you is the ability to increase the average person's standard of living without increasing their portion of the pie.
In other words, growth is how you can make people's lives better without redistribution. I think it's no coincidence that we've seen this period of slower growth in developed economies (aside from the 90s) at the same time we've seen stagnation in the standard of living. And also we see an increased interest in redistribution as an answer.
Birth rates in nearly all the high income nations are below replacement. Most of the middle and low income countries are on the same path, with central Africa being a notable exception.
Before his dead Hans Rosling did some great talks about this sort of thing. I'd suggest watching at least one of them on youtube or such.
You're saying it like his talks got worse after him passing away, lol.