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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

As long as college is an acceptable, and legal signal to use in the hiring process nothing will ever change. It's prisoner's dilemma. The "better" schools will always incentivize more and more pathological behavior in order to get a competitive advantage.

I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications. If there is indeed an advantage of going to a better school than this will manifest itself in the actual interview process. If there is not, then it will be quickly realized that it doesn't make any sense to jump through these hoops to go to the better schools and thus the problem solved.

It's unlikely to happen as most legislators in the USA went to the very same schools that one is attempting to gain admittance to - a clear conflict of interest.

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> I propose that similar to age and gender, college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications.

That's never going to work for specialized jobs. If you need a chemical engineer, than you need a chemical engineer.

But I think this is a very good idea for all of those jobs that just say "4 year degree required" without any specialty. Honestly, I don't understand how such postings aren't already illegal under structural discrimination.

Note: I said college name, not degree. You can and certainly should be able to say that you attained a Bachelor's of Science in Chemistry.

Whether college is required at all is also an interesting discussion.

It's a lot easier to lie about a degree if nobody knows where you got it. That seems like a fatal flaw to your plan.

Zero Knowledge Proofs

You get a degree. You can prove that you got the degree from an accredited university, if that university is providing some cryptographic form of that degree, without revealing the name of that university.

This only works if multiple universities sign on to a ZKP scheme, because (obviously) if only a single university did this you would know which university it was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof#

Not all degrees are the same. Not everyone needs to be Ivy League. But especially with the current waive of partisan fuckery in higher education, I want to make sure I’m not getting a dud. If that information is literally banned, you’re going to emphasise hiring through informal channels, i.e. the well connected.

From our experience there's no difference between Ivies and good State schools.

Especially with affirmative action, it's way harder for a White or Asian male to get a spot at some universities.

> From our experience there's no difference between Ivies and good State schools

Sorry if I was unclear, I agree. My point was there is a difference between good state schools and random schools. The latter aren't bad. They just take vetting, as there's a greater you-get-what-you-put-in dynamic at play.

School name doesn't help avoid a dud. Test for ability and performance.

> School name doesn't help avoid a dud. Test for ability and performance.

Not always easy to do.

That's part of the reason why school name matters a lot more for MBAs than software developers.

It's probably law degrees where schools (and clerkships) probably have the most sway--especially for big city law firms. For MBAs, schools probably carry out-sized weight for new grads in some specific areas like management consulting and investment banking.

> For MBAs, schools probably carry out-sized weight for new grads in some specific areas like management consulting and investment banking

I've seen a huge variance in MBA-graduate quality between schools, to the point that if you're not graduating from one of the top schools I question the value of not only the degree but the candidate for failing to see that. As for undergraduates, the value the top schools deliver is consistency more than quality--you're unlikely to be horribly embarrassed by the Stanford or Georgia Tech grade in a way you are one out of ASU.

> Test for ability and performance

Nobody has time for that. Not comprehensively, except for very senior hires or limited-scope roles.

Treat it like a drug test. Extend an offer contingent on degree verification.

Plenty of jobs check your credentials before hiring already. It's not a significant burden.

Engineering degrees are governed by ABET. It's trivial for schools to email their list of graduates to ABET. Other fields have similar certifications and/or degree-independent licensing exams like CPA and actuary.

Most legitimate CS programs like Stanford or CMU CS are not ABET accredited.

That's already true of all criteria in your application. It would be handled during the background check.

This. We really don't need some complicated ZKP scheme. 10 minutes of an HR person's time is enough.

I think this is already happening, to some extent. Back in the day, all the smart folks would flock to a handful of top universities. But now, things are changing. The reliance on SAT and merit is decreasing, and universities are focusing more on DEI when admitting students. This means that the cream of the crop won't be concentrated in just a few elite schools anymore. As a result, companies will start looking beyond the usual suspects and consider a broader range of candidates when hiring.

This is stupid. We can just demand, or even mandate, that colleges not suck so hard. They've basically turned into hedge funds at this point, we have quite a bit of leverage as a society and we don't have to let all this stuff happen.

I'm exhausted by the current narrative that says we can't demand excellence from public institutions.

Like why not. Why can't universities, the police, the department of homeless services, or the guys who regulate airplane safety not be competently run and effective at improving society? Why can't we improve them?

We can't improve all of these institutions because they are either directly run or mostly financed by governments, and governments are driven by politics.

Billion dollar endowments are not run or financed by the government.

About 30% of them are

Fine. 30% is a big walkback from the original framing. Clearly the topics in this thread are more of a "university" thing than "private vs public" thing.

I meant 30% of the money, since we inexplicably let people write it off on their taxes when they bribe elitist colleges to let their various family members in.

Seems to me that everything completely went to shit when we turned over activities that governments have traditionally done to private sector grifters.

That's not what we did. Governments certainly hire private sector grifters as contractors; but those contractors still rely on the coercive power of the government to force people to comply with whatever rules they are operating under. So the grifters are still government actors in the sense that matters: people can't choose to just ignore them or not deal with them, as would be the case with a true private sector company.

By what criteria do they suck? Regardless, it doesn’t seem relevant to what I’m suggesting. Even if colleges were perfect there were still be disparities if only due to the student demographics and the problem in the OP would still exist.

They hoard tens of billions of dollars tax free and use that money to fund private equity firms who buy and destroy American jobs, while becoming an increasingly bloated service firm for the richest American families, and are almost complexly divorced at this point from their original public purpose of academic progress and educating the next generation.

this seems completely irrelevant to the article, and still has nothing to do with school quality. what you're saying could be true and still be an academic powerhouse.

I was responding to this:

> college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications

By saying maybe we could, instead, try to improve the reputations of our best colleges so the signal would be valid.

the point is that even if the signal was valid, the college admissions ploy described in the OP would still be true. fundamentally the signal should be in the actual quality of a specific candidate, not some approximate proxy for the school name.

Why would it be true? Colleges could, in fact, not reward the bullshit resume padding of wealthy families. They could also fire literally half the admin staff, which is approaching an astonishing 1:1 ratio of staff to students at a lot of these prestigious colleges.

They don't reward this bullshit resume padding because they are confused they do it because they want to.

The incentives for college administrators are basically all financial at this point, it's about tuition and donors. Like I said, academic culture has been overtaken by the culture of financialization.

Consider this thought experiment - what would you do if you wanted to publicly say you did "need blind" admissions where you really promise not to look at the actual financial status of applicants at all, but you actually wanted to avoid admitting too many people who weren't going to pay full price?

If those were the incentives you were facing, then you'd try to come up with signals to use as a proxy for just asking applicants if they are rich.

Can we see what's going on here now?

sorry but you're going on a really off-topic rant.

The topic of this thread is a bullshit rich person “college admissions ploy” so pretty sure my comment is dead center on point.

Public institutions are great. They have classes for the gamut of abilities and majors. What's not great is privilege->credential laundering through grade-inflated "elite" private schools, where the education is irrelevant to the scheme.

no - there is a "Bell curve" at least.. many colleges post-covid are in freefall in the USA.

Problem is, that'll just shift competition somewhere else. This has already happened in Tech to some extent, where the interview process has gone exponential in just the last few years.

We need to aim closer to the root, at the economic concentrations in society that all this competition is about trying to access.

In a world of independent artisans, we wouldn't need to worry so much about all this status and hierarchy and gatekeeping.

But there are a handful of FAANGs that reign unnaturally like giant totalitarian states. It's like we have Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, when we're supposed to have The Netherlands, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, and so on. Instead it's like some Tsar expanding over the whole of Eurasia. And you need to get into the bastard's court.

Well, the obvious answer has to do with the fact that a shared money system allows money to be concentrated regionally which in turn means that people have to follow the money to where it is being concentrated.

The most prominent example is Greece being drained of Euros and of its young workers who have no choice but to go to work in Germany. Then the Germans complain about immigration without realising that they encourage this with their economic policy. They think these things are two separate problems that require separate solutions, when in reality they are the same problem.

>This has already happened in Tech to some extent, where the interview process has gone exponential in just the last few years.

What does that mean?

Mostly rhetoric, but it gestured towards some mathematical/modeling intuition.

I was picturing a graph with time on the x axis, difficulty on the y, and a fairly constant value until recently, at which point things began to increase rapidly. I had in mind instability and explosion, a mania like for tulips, and self-destructive involution, like a society locked in competition with itself to pass the Emperor's exams.

Why an exponential? I know that, in contrast, finance people speak of things going "parabolic". But there may be reason for literal exponentials, for dx/dt = x. It's not that difficulty begets difficulty, but that difficulty arises from economic concentration and concentration of opportunities, and economic concentration begets economic concentration.

The shift is good. It is more meritocratic imo.

I do see your point. But I feel we only need to look at, say, passing the exams to get into IIT, or at the South Korean school system, to see where this leads. At some point it's just too much, and it doesn't matter how fairly the Hunger Games are administered.

Let me put it another way: It's extremely destructive to a society if too much effort is channeled into zero-sum competition within that society.

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