Hacker News Reader

Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Definitely for the best. Standardized testing was pretty much the only reason I and many other working class folks I know could get into good schools -- I was never going to do a million side activities, and my summers were spent working, not building my academic resume.

Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into productive and happy human beings. This change is significant but affects less than one percent of the population each year..

View on HN

>Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college, even prestigious ones, at all given how unnecessary they are for making people into productive and happy human beings. This change is significant but affects less than one percent of the population each year..

I'm ambivalent because I sympathize with both sides of the equation. One one hand, I have the hindsight now that I didn't at 18 to realize that the world didn't end because I couldn't get into Harvey Mudd. And in many ways it turned out 100x better; instead of staying in LA-ish areas, I explored a whole new area I never would have considered otherwise, still got a great education for a small fraction of what Mudd woulda cost me, and was exposed to a completely different flavor of computer science that helped me decide my career.

But on the other hand, college really does open a ton of doors that for many non-upper class people would never open otherwise. While I was still in tech and had many choices, I imagine people at MIT or Mudd would be fighting off recruitment at top companies with a stick, with many opportunities coming from certain companies who only recruit at such universities. It can accelerate your career on the order of 5-10 years if you stick it out. And you'd likely be unparalleled in resources and opportunities if your focus is on research. If your goal is as lofty as being the next household name or to pivot into creating your own business, there are oodles more oppurtunities there.

I wouldn't trade the education I got for an MIT one, but I can understand why 18YO me (and many others) do feel that way.

Yes, prestigious schools open a huge number of doors. But more importantly, they teach elite mannerisms, standards and beliefs, and prejudices. If you are not a true genius (true geniuses can always make their way, but they are rare, even at MIT et al), this knowledge is invaluable and irreplaceable.

I’ll give you an example from my own career. I went to MIT/Berkeley, SB/PhD. But I practically washed out of grad school, not due to lack of ability, but because I hated it. What I did like was making things and explaining things, and had a successful career in the more business aspects of science where successful scientists were the customers and decision makers. I understood, in a fundamental way, how these people thought and what they expected. This was invaluable, and was conveyed, in an irreplaceablely concentrated way, by my being a 30th percentile student in a 95th percentile university.

yes, true geniuses are a rare breed and a university gets more benefit from admitting a true genius than vice versa (Did harvard get more out of bill gates or bill gates out of harvard? I would argue Harvard got way more out of that exchange). But for the plethora of above average, hard workers going to a top school is still a pretty good deal.

What defines true genius?

1) Bachelor’s level by 15-16. 2) Doctorate or equivalent by 20-21. 3) Decent communication and social skills. This is a significant flameout point. 4) Creativity and absolute refusal to work on directed projects by others, except voluntarily for some higher good. 5) Tremendous persistence. 6) Cheerfulness, related to 3) above, increases the degree of genius-ness.

What have I left out?

genius is not defined by accomplishments, believe it or not. geniuses may or may not achieve the things we hope or expect they will. genius is seeing reality, intuition, knowing things even though you maybe didn't even read the book. genius is generative, not always performative. it takes many forms.

Not to demand too much rigour for a casual discussion forum, but what you left out were the reasons to believe that was the list and not some other list of different things.

If that's what it takes to be a "genius" - what a joke.

someone like Srinivasa Ramanujan. True genius needs to be found, identified and nurtured. If they are born in a poor household, there would not be as big an opportunity to identify them, and society would be poorer for it.

Therefore, society should look to try and identify them, and spend resources to get them to flourish.

I likewise had a similar experience on the other side of the Atlantic with British universities. The goal for top achievers was always Oxford, Cambridge, or Imperial. I ended up significantly under-achieving on the grades my mock exams and teachers predicted, and went to a less prestigious institution, which used to be a Polytechnic. However, this gave me such an appreciation for the North of England that I would have never experienced otherwise, and a group of friends a league different from the ones I grew up with in the South, that I wouldn't trade for the world. It probably worked out well too because I got a relatively pain-free 1st grade (4.0 GPA) when I know full well that with my ability and work ethic I would have got a low 2.1 or 2.2 at where I planned to go.

All the same, finding a decent job after was a slog, and required me to go back to do a postgraduate degree at a Russel group (Ivy League equivalent) university to get a seat at the table with any major tech company. I'd like to earn more, but finance firms and most unicorn start-ups demand Oxbridge so I'll probably consider an MSc or MPhil at one of the two some time in the future, but that'll be 7 years of schooling for £80k, when I could have done it in 4 years for half that cost. All in all, it's what would have been a retirement at 40 to one at 50, which while not the end of the world is a little frustrating.

> Of course the real tragedy is that we fixate so much on college

This is what gets me. The whole concept of college, and especially selective, high profile colleges such as Harvard, MIT, etc., seems antiquated and almost entirely manufactured at this point. It's artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand. I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees. Sure, they throw the unwashed a few bones and let them take home some degrees. But what do you actually get for your effort and money? I can't believe the competitiveness is justified by an actual difference in the quality of the experience or the person that results from it.

No no no. The thesis topics are in graduate schools are more cutting edge, and the opportunity to interact with real science as an undergraduate are invaluable. I would tend to agree that excelling at a second tier university with a comprehensive program is an acceptable start. It generally gets you to a higher level.

Competitiveness is about speed. Anyone can look something up. It’s about knowing things right off the bat, knowing what’s an unreasonable answer, estimating things, knowing what’s important. That takes years of education and practice.

In the US, we have probably had 750,000 excess deaths in the last two years because politicians do not have an intuition about probability and statistics. This was generally true in the West, but NOT in China and Asia in general, where the leaders were more numerate.

Wow, I didn't realize I was advocating for excess deaths. Thanks for clarifying that for the folks at home.

Maybe my point is more anecdotal than I realize. After all, I've never had a colleague from MIT who exhibiting any meaningful difference in characteristics that mattered. But at the same time, I resent being an unwitting participant in upholding MIT's legacy by being passed over for opportunities by people who are more credentialed and more well connected than me but otherwise the same in every way that counts. Maybe I belong on a different planet. I wonder sometimes. It seems my destiny has already been decided on this one.

It's a trade-off. I'd rather live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime. Even authoritarians are correct at least twice a day.

> live in a democracy and take my chances with Covid-19 than live under an authoritarian regime.

that's a straw man false dichotomy. It's not mutually exclusive. Just because trump and his administration handled it poorly, doesn't mean it can't be handled well under a democracy. Look at new zealand and australia - they handled it fairly well.

I think it's an appropriate reply to someone specifically holding up China's COVID response as an example of the right answer.

Both democracies and authoritarian regimes can be found among governments that have had laissez-faire policies and both can be found among those that have had strict lockdowns. You can probably find the world's full range of policy responses to COVID-19 within the United States.

Well, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc relaxed on the vaccination distribution and got hammered.

Also, authoritarians sometimes get the actions right even if they don't understand the science or the math.

And do you remember the great "fogging disinfectant trucks" in China. Completely ineffective show that may have fooled the masses but would have failed to destroy any viral agents.

We did lockdowns and mask mandates and rapidly created and distributed a vaccine. I don't think the US response was perfect, but I find it unlikely that politicians' numeracy would reduce the death toll by a further 80% when we've already picked the low-hanging fruit.

Are there specific shortcomings that you think would account for that gap?

What does this have to do with the parent comment?

This argument is trying to show that elite colleges are more than

> artificially crafted scarcity designed to create a market and brand.

In that they produce good research results.

Chinese leaders were the ones that let COVID leak out of the lab and censored the doctors that tried to warn the population.

Could you share some sources for that assertion?

The second half is well sourced.

Maybe it's just that my search skills are subpar, but I can't seem to find any relevant works on Google Scholar. Would you mind taking the time to share some of these sources?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...

Why would you search Google Scholar for the claim "Chinese authorities censored doctors trying to warn the population [about COVID]"?

In general, it's not a good look to go around asking for sources for facts that are very well known.

Thanks for the link, I actually haven't seen that. Here's an interesting preprint tackling this issue as well: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/rw4es

I'm also curious as to why you thought that this was "very well known," however. Could you elaborate on how you determine which set of facts can be selected to be well known, and which set cannot?

Socrates stumbles upon Hacker News

> I feel the true, primary function of these institutions is to give the rich and powerful a means to identify each other and their respective pedigrees.

That has been true for a long time. And before then, the primary function of those institutions was training ministers.

Joking aside, there's lots of evidence (assembled in a book like The Cult of Smart [1]) that the effects of education are saturated in developed countries. In other words, you won't get an appreciably better education at a prestigious school than you will at an unprestigious school. The biggest educational difference arises from the composition of the student body, not the actual instruction.

So many young people are working themselves raw in high school and college to be prestigious when it doesn't have much of an effect on outcomes. Couple that with an antiquated curriculum and the modern college experience is so much wheel spinning.

[1] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200389/thecultofsmart

The VP of Global Operations where I work who has his undergrad in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard and MBA from Dartmouth will tell you, all those schools bought him over a public institutions was a network for after he graduated.

The scarcity isn't artificial, I don't think. There are limits on how many people a given faculty can teach, beyond which teaching becomes much less effective. People with reject letters are probably not significantly less deserving, but there's no fair non-competitive means to decide who gets a go, IMO. The competition could certainly be fairer, as with most things.

If your main point is that less prestigious schools can potentially deliver on education just as well, and the main difference becomes the marketability of the degree and superficial status, well... I agree.

Also foreigners—a lot of these side activities and volunteer opportunities depend on having social capital and connections.

Same thing with essays. I’ve observed that working class Americans are reticent to talk about diversity and adversity in the way college admissions officers expect, and recall having a similar experience. My wife’s parents grew up so poor in rural America that “store bought meat” was a phrase they used when she was growing up. Meanwhile, my family left Bangladesh when I was 5 under political circumstances where one day my mom’s brother (a military officer) showed up to our house in uniform and my dad thought that he was coming to detain us (it was a social call). But she would have been embarrassed to write about how her father grew up poor or that she faced any adversity, and I would have been embarrassed to write about how I was a foreigner instead of a middle class kid from Virginia.

Kind of the same. I was too poor to participate in extracurriculars. I was lucky to have clothes on my back and food on the table and electricity to do my homework and run my hacked together computer. I still graduated valedictorian. No sports, no music, nothing. I was on the chess team as a senior because we moved closer to the school, and I was able to walk to school in only 15 minutes which was huge for me. I was already a senior at that point, and it felt silly to start joining extracurriculars at that point. I had more time than some of the rich kids who were in everything in addition to keeping their grades top-notch. Between my great SAT scores and being valedictorian, I was able to go to great university that I might not have been able to attend otherwise.

I live in slovenia, and the system is pretty much unchanged from the socialist times.... standardized testing + grades are used to get entry into colleges (and previously high schools). No resumes, no diversity/affirmative actions, clubs, volounteering etc... just grades+results.

That sounds nice.

Those other things are great, but have little value in terms of academic success. I think that for people who do poorly in academics but well in those other areas should have other avenues of advancing themselves rather than being forced through the college funnel.

It could be nice if access to education is equitable.

In chile we also have grades + standardized test + ranking (your position versus your cohort). But the top universities are filled with the top alumni from expensive private schools because they are usually 1. given inflated grades 2. trained to perform well on standardized tests (in their own schools, theyre rich so they can afford this).

If you look at OECD statistics with regards to quality of education you will see that not everyone in the USA really gets a good primary (and secondary) education and there are gaps. This tends to not be the case in most of Europe... So are standardized exams good for admissions in the USA? Not sure. But obviously replacing it with curriculum might even be worse. So what's really the answer?

At least here in the US, test prep isn't actually effective at increasing test scores. The SATs were introduced in order to allow kids of lesser economic backgrounds to get access to prestigious colleges without having to go to expensive preparatory schools. And they have been largely successful in that regard.

The problem in the US is that, for political reasons, colleges have been trying to get away from standardized tests.

School grades and ranking should never be used for admission. Just standardised testing is good enough. It brings everyone to the level field.

I don’t know the situation in Chile but surely even the poor can buy books that tells you how to do standardised tests right?

The lower performing areas in the US tend to have one of two problems:

1) Very high percentage of immigrants and / or English as a second language learners. These students have multiple disadvantages.

2) A local culture that dismisses education. Two personal anecdotes: One poor rural white 6 year old boy swore at and otherwise rejected his teachers authority. She was a friend of mine and mentioned many kids are like that there because the parents are passing on their own behaviors. Other anecdote, a black friend who grew up in an dense inner city said he was locked at school by his peers for "acting white" when he tried to get decent grades.

Number 2 is obviously more prevalent, likely due to most jobs not actually needing a college diploma and not caring about your grades in some areas, and the persistent crime culture in others (gangs in the cities, meth in the country).

Well yeah, but you still want the best performers in college (and later too), and things like these should be solved "back then" (eg. extra language classes... fixing culture is hard, but again, if your peers make you a worse student, you're still a worse student, even though you blame your peers).

Giving some groups a push, especially on racial grounds (where you group together bill gates' kids with bobby from a trailer park in bumfuck alabama on one side, and Will smiths kids vs some random kid from philadelphia fighting on a basketball court) is really bad... both for people who should be accepted on merit, but don't, because they're in the wrong group, and also for their later careers (do you really want a doctor, who only got accepted to college because of affirmative action?). Government paying for books for the poor, programmes for gifted students, actually "leaving bad students behind" (and having special schools for them, like we had), etc. would help more.

Same here in Bulgaria. The only extracurriculars that influence university admissions are subject olympiads. Students who reach the national finals are exempted from the corresponding tests (max grade assumed).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com