Why talent sorting in Germany is flawed
simongrimm.com
simongrimm.com
>> I’m uncertain how big the problem of bad talent allocation in Germany really is. However, given that it reduces the likelihood of careers with an outsized positive impact, the damage could be severe.
Stopped reading after that.. Kind of sounds like someone who didn't get how the German academic system works, that being suitable for "med school" (there is no such a thing in Germany, as there is in the US, over here you simply start medical studies from semester one onwards) doesn't mean you are suitable for engineering (assuming the author is German, I understand engineering as one of those domains that actually have engineering in the name which excludes "software engineering") which again has nothing to do with software developments, start ups and big IPOs. Which again has nothing to do with improving the world or society. IMHO, every single med student helping out with health care in Africa is doing more good than the majority of software developers at, say, Meta or Amazon.
As of leadership and planning, I hope yours is better that ours. We f..g learned Gantt charts, but zero of Agile or modern project and product management, and equally zero about finance of tech startups (funding rounds etc.).
- you're mostly only doing the slightly? easier math courses
- zero physics and the signal processing stuff I'd rate "kinda basic"
- you're not allowed to call yourself an "engineer" unless your university has built your program that way, in former times it would be "Diplom-Informatiker" vs "Diplom-Ingenieur" (I am the former).
Also any code of ethics is usually completely absent, or maybe they actually did change that for some unis now.
Also another caveat, they mostly got rid of the old "Diploma" systems and for the last 8-12 years most people graduate as BSc and MSc, so whenever the topic comes to it I'll say "it's about equivalent to a MSc in CS" because it was supposed to be 9-10 semesters in total, with some sort of cut in the middle, that did not directly correlate to a BSc, but was a 2y part.
The whole premise sounds like an invention to me.
Moreover, there are clearly prestigious technical universities even in Germany, although the author is correct that they aren't quite as prestigious as American ones.
RWTH Aachen and TU München are the two standouts. And then there are specialized champions: Tübingen for bioinformatics, I think. Definitely Saarbrücken for Computational Linguistics.
There may be fewer extreme outliers within the university system but that doesn't mean the system as a whole is egalitarian. Also it's not clear if its a bad thing if universities aren't retaining "elites" if a signficant part of research in Germany isn't happening at universities themselves. If that is a problem, the problem isn't that "elite academics" aren't properly supported, it's that the institutions to support them have been moved out of the universities into a more privatized market, but that sounds like a different conversation.
Kids here are sorted into career paths at age 10 by sending them to Gymnasium, Realschule, or Hauptschule. To even attend higher education you need to have an Abitur, which means going to a Gymnasium or putting in extra years of study after your Realschule.
The argument is that this division allows every kid to learn at a level appropriate to them, but the reality is that an overworked teacher of 20+ kids is supposed to accurately assess everyone's level and then give a recommendation for one of the schools.
My impression is that a lot more weight is put on formal qualifications here than in the US, so in practice this choice sorts you into your future social status for most kids.
My N=1 annecdote is a friend of mine who recently finished his PhD at TUM, the teacher wanted to send him to a Hauptschule. If his parents hadn't intervened his life would probably be very different right now. Annecdotaly I know a couple of engineers who went to Realschule and then had to work hard to get an Abitur before going to Uni. Who knows how many smart people were discouraged from pursuing higher education because it would mean two more years of high school just to even start.
The system seem arbitrary at best to me, and at its worst is just reinforcing class status through generations. Parents with university degrees will fight to have their kids go to Gymnasium, or the teacher might send them because they know they come from an Akademikerfamilie, and the others better hope their teacher likes them.
Similar, but extended family in my case: was to be sent to a special-needs school (which doesn't even lead to the opportunity to get vocational training), parents fought (hiring a lawyer, and including psychological examinations), child grew up to finish two masters degrees and one PhD.
I have the highest respect of everyone who actually goes from a Hauptschule to a university degree, this is probably the hardest way to get higher education imaginably around here.
The understanding was that if you wanted to go to university, you needed to go to Gymnasium because it was the only way to get an Abitur (basically, a high school diploma) within the school system. Realschule was for those who didn't quite make the cut but they could still switch to Gymnasium later. Hauptschule was the drain strainer, it would effectively brand you as a failure and you'd be lucky if you are even considered for a crafts job if anything.
Of course it's important to keep in mind that this decision is made for ten year olds. They have their entire life ahead of them and some do defeat the odds but the struggle of those barely making it to Gymnasium to stay there (especially if their parents can't afford private tutoring) is real and in order to catch up from Realschule you basically need to put in twice the effort because you need to compensate for the parts of the curriculum you missed out on in addition to learning the new stuff. If you end up in Hauptschule, being able to switch to Realschule is usually the best you can hope for in order to dodge the stigma. And of course Lord help you if you have any kind of special needs or neurodivergence unless you luck into going to the rare "integrated" school that doesn't carry the "special education" stigma.
Basically the three tier system doesn't exist to match different support needs, it exists to lower expectations based on what you can achieve without your support needs being met. Hauptschule simply won't teach you the full curriculum you'd get at a Realschule or Gymnasium and hopefully that's enough for you to achieve good grades. The German school system is only "egalitarian" in the sense that it doesn't boost those who can't pass the bar but instead lowers it for them until graduation and then sends them to compete with the rest on an "equal playing field" but with none of the prep.
he should add a point III - if it turns out students don't actually go into Medical school because they want to "prove themselves"
Side note: All the doctors I met so far, ranging from GPs all the way to surgeons and oncologists, would have made for less than stellar engineers. My oncologist maybe, but being a good oncologist is probably saving more lives than being an electrical or mechanical engineer.
But those are outliers, aren’t they? I’ve dated a med student, and been flatmates with others, the only times I’ve heard of people waiting was if they were doing a gap year or something, 1.5 years for NC improvements being pretty much the maximum and already rare.
Talented students still can be and are pursuing STEM degrees but a lot of research these days often doesn't entirely happen directly in the universities themselves but in organizations like the Fraunhofer institutes (also Max-Planck, Helmholtz, Leibniz and DFG), which neatly toe the line between being a quasi public institution and being a for-profit commercial entity.
Ironically, a huge shift in German universities happening around the time of the EU replacing local degrees like the German "Magister Artium" with more "standardized" ones like BA/MA was an attempt to push the concept of "elite universities" via special funding programmes supporting university faculties that were already prospering to replicate the exact US model (while also introducing tuition fees for public universities, before having to roll them back due to public outrage).
Also on a complete tangent, the graph the article uses clearly shows a sharp decline during the Nazi regime followed by Germany plateuing until the 1990s or so and then having another smaller decline until flatlining again.
The article blames the sharp decline in the 1930s and 1940s on "explicit talk of nurturing an elite" being a problem in the Nazi era, which is a ridiculous conflation of modern and past anti-semitism (the Nazis' scapegoat was "international bankers", not "the elites") but also completely misunderstands Nazi ideology, which heavily embraced elitism and "excellence" but was kneecapped by its obsession with avoiding "Jewish" or "degenerate" science. This honestly reads like it's written by someone whose only understanding of Nazism comes from some ahistorical "actually the Nazis were left-wing because they had 'socialist' in their name and used leftist talking points to gain broader support" memes.
The other drop in the 1990s is also interesting. The author claims Germany's "problems" are the result of a democratization of universities and egalitarianism but the obvious thing that changed in the 1990s is that "Germany" expanded to include what was previously East Germany, which regardless of any merits of Eastern Bloc academia in the previous decades at this point was economically destitute and underwent a rapid privatization followed by massive "brain drain" as those who could afford to moved westward.
[0]: This is also where you're more likely to find "fraternities" which are a much more niche phenomenon and more specifically tied to conservatism than in the US. "Burschenschaften" typically have strict gender roles and historically were more strongly tied to German aristocracy. Though some practices (like fencing duels which would often result in facial scars carried with pride) have fallen out of use, they still often value "tradition" to the point of embracing "völkisch" nationalism, which has a large overlap with white nationalism in the US.
[1]: This is less true with younger generations but traditionally Germans would put a lot of stock into both aristrocratic honorifics and academic titles. Academic titles are still protected by law in Germany (i.e. it's a felony to use the title "Dr." or "Doktor" unless you have a doctorate from an institution Germany recognizes) though and people will still treat aristocratic names as if they were titles although aristocratic titles were officially rolled into family names. To explain this for English-speaking readers: imagine you were a "Lord" and your name was "Adam Smith", then your name would have become "Adam Lord Smith" and you would be correctly addressed as "Mr Lord Smith" but some people would still call you "Lord Smith" out of respect -- German laws are actually considerate enough to allow women to use the female equivalent of the title in their family name despite it officially just being part of the name so the daughter of Mr Lord Smith could still be Ms Lady Smith.
If you build a society of elitist institutions, you will get elites. Not only that: if isolated, they will think of themselves as better than most, exceptional in fact. With exceptionality come the exceptions one carves out for oneself and a dismissive view of the common rabble.
Of course talented individuals should be fostered. But presenting a US-style university approach as laudable and somehow missing is irresponsible and short-sighted.
As another commenter wrote, Germany’s education system has plenty of issues but that’s not one of it.
You get elitists. Not necessarily elites. Subtle difference.
Most doctors I know got into the profession because they wanted to cure people. They don't care that this is not optimal from a theoretical point of view, and they most certainly didn't do it to "prove themselves". And once you start with a wrong thesis, all bets are off.
If the author really wants to solve the health sector problems in Germany he should instead try to figure out why I need to book an appointments months before I get sick. Unfortunately fixing bureaucracy is not as sexy as creating Euro Harvard.
It is stunning that Europe has failed to participate in the tech boom of the last few decades. Even with the social safety nets to protect against failure. I suspect they have a tax code that punishes high-risk high-reward gambits and that a side effect is the lack of extreme successes. If there are no extreme successes, then medicine is the field most guaranteed to win people moderate and respectable success. The average doctor is more respectable than the average engineer, the outlier engineer is far more important than the outlier surgeons. It isn't close, they were basically raiding top scientists and engineers in WWII out of Germany for example because they could reliably do things of civilisational significance.
This is a key problem with equalising the playing fields. Society is dragged forward by outlier successes. Punish them, and progress stops. This is why the big slow trend of people organising against inequality is so concerning.
That's why Europe has thousands of "small" companies whose revenue might "only" be a billion dollars or so, but they are sustainable companies who generally have accrued a competitive global advantage through years, and decades of R&D. The end result of this is that Europe - certainly Western Europe, and increasingly Central and Eastern Europe - has one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Sure, the VCs and investors who only want to make money without producing anything of value themselves don't like this model, but fuck 'em.
I have a feeling that with the current energy crisis this might not age very well.
Electricity should be fine as well, Germany keeps three nuclear plants online long enough for the French fleet to be back, in exchange for gas from France. And you don't exchange electricity for gas if electricity itself is a limited factor.
That's been quite a while already.
> US elites are relizing that the EU as a living destination is becoming more attractive than US
It's hardly more attractive for elites. It's already been quite a while: some people moving from the US to EU for a comfortable life while others moving from EU to the US for self-realization, studying in top universities and working for top companies. Pretty precarious situation long term. At least our politics (at least in Germany and westwards) seems more stable though.
i meant to say something different. namely there is a growing push in the us for a european style social safety net which is a concern for the us elites
Also, looking at deals with Qatar (failed AFAIK), Azerbaijan, and the latest developments about Hamburg harbour, I think we still have many exciting strategic mistakes ahead.
In my view much lower level of financialization is a big culprit. The stock market is nowhere near what the US stock market is. This limits what kind of exits startups can have as well as how much they make out of it. So there is no perpetual engine of successful entrepreneurs financing the next generation. There is barely any investment capital available. Certainly not the kind that would allow years of un-profitability.
Another huge factor is language and cultural barriers. While the US states are very different, they are nothing compared to the difference between Spain, France, Italy, Germany and others.
This is a big one. Why would someone earning €60k as a regular engineer take all of the responsibility of leading a team for only €10k/year more? Anyone actually qualified for that position knows it's not worth the additional money, and anyone that would accept that promotion is only in it for the title and is likely unqualified. Not to mentioned that you only see half of the additional €10k after tax (in Germany).
Once you’ve failed in a business venture, you’re burned for years before any investor will talk seriously or any bank will touch you. Tax authorities and chamber of commerce will also make your life quite difficult when you do.
I personally know several people who needed to incorporate a new company under their wive’s name after a bankruptcy, to even be able to start a new (successful) business.
It's much more profitable to continue in an employed Position. Or to marry someone with a low income.
> This is why the big slow trend of people organising against inequality is so concerning.
I think you mistake the goal. It isn't to prevent some engineer from making some money from an invention. There is however a very perverse reward for purely financial instruments, which make the rich richer, and conversely, the poor poorer. That's one thing that should definitely be halted and reversed.
Historically: WW2 was quite the equalizer, and it didn't lead to stagnation. Currently, OTOH, inequality is much higher, and the most rewarded job is getting people addicted to dividing content with the goal of pushing more ads.
I hope you don't want to re-trigger WWII. The survivors would probably have rather have not been equalized.
> I think you mistake the goal. It isn't to prevent some engineer from making some money from an invention.
I know exactly what the goal is, people are talking about it all the time. I think the goal is foolish. It will, best case scenario, have no impact. Worse case scenario, it'll make people worse off. My neighbours' relative wealth has exactly no impact on my material or psychic comfort. Pretending it is the problem plays well to human emotions and distracts people from the real issue, which is median living standards.
It does, though. First, people get unhappy when others have it better. Greed, jealousy, envy, you're not going to cure it. Second, the accumulated wealth of all those neighbours has a significant impact on the economy.
Which is a powerful argument that their instincts are leading them away from the real problem, which is median living standards. Policy motivated in the first instance by greed, jealousy and envy often has bad outcomes! Policy should be motivated by reason, principles and evidence.
> has a significant impact on the economy
The ideal state of the world is that there are 8 billion people, we identify the one that is best at growing rice and put them in charge of growing all the rice in the world. If there is a limit to how much rice they can grow effectively, we give them control of as much rice growing as possible and then repeat with the 2nd best rice grower.
"Outsized influence" is a feature. We want unusually competent people to have unusually wide influence. You'll need a more sophisticated argument to claim that it is bad.
We couldn't even manage to have a sensible legal framework for free wifi. People say legislation is slow, but in cases were rights holders feared their decline, the law mowed down any innovation before it could happen.
I don't necessarily agree with the outlier story, but everyone needs at least some capital and options to start a venture. And you don't do that as a side project while needing to earn your keep. You can live comfortable as an engineer too and many just don't want to start a business anymore.
Also, there is a significant penalty for Europe and that is language. English as a base language is a major advantage for almost all kinds of software products. It would be smarter to primarily target that market instead of the domestic one.
That said, I don't see only benefits and the tripple down effect of star companies of the US. I also believe that success isn't reliant on these superstars. They have to see that they aren't fading as quickly as they have risen. And there are also successful ventures in Europe. You just often don't know their name as a consumer.
To add onto your complexity: socioeconomic movement in Europe is higher. Anecdotally, tax breaks are high for individuals who've 'made it'. Kids, housing etc. Social dynamics (strong coupling age and assumed experience) adds to this, too.
>Even with the social safety nets to protect against failure.
These social safety nets also require payment. Look at what individuals are paid for, multiply by 1.5x for each employee you think you'll need for your still growing startup. You're not getting paid 100k a year early, saving isn't easy, good luck paying a full FTE for someone else without any instances around to give you VC money.
The safety nets also breed a risk-averse mentality.
Europe’s growth issues come primarily from mindset, liquidity, and mindset again.
There is practically no risk appetite.
Venture Capital? Private Equity? Its a joke.
The banks themselves have such small capital positions that its mind boggling.
Such nearly perfect and stable combinations of regulatory playgrounds to arbitrage, but nobody is there for it. If you are a foreigner with capital already, have fun! Knock yourself out! If you need to acquire and grow capital? You’re in the wrong continent.
And the solutions themselves are very recent. The monetary union was very important for having contracts and credit in the same currency. Things we take for granted in other economic unions. But thats only 20 years old. The attitudes just haven’t shifted and there isn’t a human infrastructure to help the attitudes shift. The software developers that would shift it are making 25,000 - 80,000 / yr and so they will never accumulate capital fast enough to shift it themselves.
When it comes to growth possibilities, Its a very steep bell curve from 1st place to 2nd place. Various markets in the US represent the US as a whole and thats 1st place, and 2nd place, whatever that even is, is very far behind in financial infrastructure, liquidity and risk tolerance. These concepts are not separable.
This. Going to med school in Germany is the standard way of keeping your upper middle class social status if you are not super talented but willing to work hard.
Until relatively recently, to open a GmbH (limited company), you needed to have 25k in assets (cash or similar) in the company upfront. Which stifled a lot of small things.
There's now a mini-gmbh structure that you can set up and later upgrade to a full one, but its infuriatingly complex IMO.
The UK has much simpler company rules, but Brexit, and way back when in the pre web days the UK government basically destroyed the UK's high tech industries by forcing various mergers and buyouts to happen (ICI, various computing firms, etc), which has had long lasting impacts on the field there.
As for why people go into medicine: medicine has a lot of social capital associated with it, and you need extremely high grades to get into med school, so its prestigious.
Its also almost guaranteed employment with a relatively high level of income, so a lot of parents push smart kids into becoming a doctor.
Doctor, lawyer, accountant and engineer (bridges, not code) are jobs that are seen as "high value".
>Oxford graduates with a language degree can join DeepMind right after university.
Distortions from everyone chasing name brands seem quite problematic to society
Might be worth understanding how the current system supports that before trying to fix it.
As for salaries: the salaries in tech in Germany aren't particularly competitive compared to Ireland, America, the UK, etc.
As for healthcare: its not free (its mandatory insurance), and the quality/speed of care is often worse than the NHS in my experience, however, I will grant them that they have some fantastic experts available at hospitals like the Charité in Berlin.
In many countries there's this centralised testing system where kids take an exam the same day and are placed in schools by preference and that score. So you make a list of schools you want and the school quotas are filled by that preference list with the higher scored candidate gets the place.
The result? A school ranking created by high-schoolers and their parents because the "best" students go to the school with the most applicants with highest scores.
The problem here is that it creates almost automatic placement for students by score. So if you are really good at math and sciences you score highly but you can't go study physics because the physics departments usually have low minimum scores due to their weak employability and medical schools have very high score due to almost guaranteed employability and high status and compensation. This means, kids scoring well all go to the same schools together with all the other scoring well irrelevant of their interest or aspirations. The thinking goes, if you scored well enough to study medicine you will waste your score if you study something like architecture or chemistry and they are forced to pick something from their score range.
Edit: school system in Germany also decides after 4th grade if a person may study later. I don’t think, that 10 year old children are capable to decide if they want go to university or end up with underpaid apprenticeship with dead end job later.
Also if you get a lower degree you could as an adult go back to a special school and get you high-school degree to study. Both of my parents did this and became teacher and doctor. Yes it may be harder but it is still possible.
I totally agree that these 1-2 year contracts are a problem. They also exist for teachers. Some of them get fired during holidays to save some money and then are re-hired afterwards.. it is disgraceful.
But I agree that the situation is suboptimal. Ideally, there should be more available slots. If we had too many physicians, we could pay them less and the demand would drop.
Second, it's a bit circular. The people with the 1.0 finals get into medicine, because that's what they needed to have to get in there. People often know what they want to study early enough and adjust their efforts accordingly. Especially when it comes to the decimals. It's not like there's a non-goal-oriented drive to just Be The Best You Can, and after your graduation you're then passed on the German Sorting Hat that puts you into the university best suited to you.
Easily confirmed by talking to any German doctor ;)
As a final semi-anecdote, there's something slightly unusual going on in psychotherapy. Same top "GPA" needed, then another set of top grades in your bachelor to proceed to your master (the "funnel" is narrower than warranted by drop-outs), and after years and years of that, a lot of the psychotherapists end up working part time, as it's one of the fields where it's easy enough to do that. "Overachievers" investing a lot for a better work-life balance.
Never heard of this weird claim and also in my experience no one here gives a damn at what university you studied, usually it's a simple checkbox "finished degree?" and only if you are fresh out of university, not 10 years later.
I'm also not talking about CS here, there I had most of my offers without ever being asked if I had a degree.
1. "German academia doesn’t have world-class universities"
https://ommer-lab.com/ just built Stable Diffusion. Lead author of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine paper is from https://tron-mainz.de/ . Fraunhofer with MP3 / MPEG-H, H265..
2. Paper Count != Quality
One of the main points of the article appears to be to compare "Havard Medical School" against "Germany as a whole" solely based on the number of papers published. But that might also just mean that the US has more junk papers. Or different financial incentives for PhD students. They should have compared something like (number x impact). Or maybe look at conference attendance.
3. Patriotism != Nobel Price
Their nobel price diagram is probably just due to different levels of patriotism. Not many people in Germany would proudly proclaim "I'm a German!" in their nobel price biography (due to history). For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... states that the US has 4x the number of Nobel laureates compared to Germany, which seems just fine considering that the US also has 4x the number of citizens.
After misunderstanding the problem, the author then offers a flawed fix: the highest-IQ students from Germany should move to the US
> Fraunhofer
Aha, but those aren't universities, they're institutes. That doesn't invalidate your point but it throws off the statistics the author uses. The author's mistake (if it wasn't intentional) is that they're comparing apples to apples when in this case the honest comparison would be apples to oranges (or rather fruit salads with each other) because in Germany institutes like Fraunhofer are where a lot of the publicly funded research happens that he argues should be happening at universities like in the US.
Like for instance: is it true that people with perfect grades go into medicine so as to not "waste" their score?
You know, maybe it is!
But don't you agree then, that this is kind of fucked up? Don't they have, like, actual interests? Or actual goals, besides winning in status games? Not even getting rich?
And also. Economically speaking, Germany seems to be doing really, really well, despite "only" having their Heidelbergs, their Aachens, their Jenas, their Humboldts, their Colognes etc. Not having it all concentrated in elite-generating hubs seems to be working out quite well for them. And for us in the rest of the world too, considering where the first mRNA vaccine got developed, or considering where we get much of the high precision industrial equipment necessary to make virtually everything impressive that has been made the last decade.
Why the hell should Germany have Ivy envy?
This is largely true in many places - also, often the choice is heavily influenced by parents. Having an offspring be a doctor offers some prestige.
Its the same almost everywhere. To keep the standard of teaching high, class sizes must be small enough, there must be sufficient supervision, etc.
I think this setup is way more egalitarian than what the US has going on with its historic graduates and donor families admission setup. It's not a wrong thing in itself to mix intelligent people with rich people, intelligent people need investors for their ideas and rich people need smart people to manage their money and companies. Such a mixing process is I think really good for creating a successful economy. But then call it how it is. It's also a bit of a lie for old money in the US to use their influence and prestige to get their kids into top institutions and then have them later label themselves selfmade millionaires.
I prefer the German system, and am not really happy about the federal excellence initiative that tries to "Americanize" the system by creating a divide among universities. The current system is way more in the spirit of "the children of California shall be our children" than what the american elite institutions do.
Those people are, in my personal impression, neither STEM interested or intellegent, you can't just map grade to skill. There are highly intelligent people going into medicine, but I doubt they would do diffrently if they get an "Ivy league" equivalent offer. Most of the medicine students aren't top-notch.