I Want No One Else to Succeed
kottke.org
kottke.org
Imagine there are two schools, one gives all students a 95% in all their classes, one grades normally. Which school do you interview people from? When a teacher gives out free A's (or when students cheat), it's not a victimless change, it degrades a shared resource (the credibility of the school).
The loan forgiveness thing is not a free action, it is a handout of money to a specific demographic (college graduates), and in particular one that is much more affluent than the people who need government subsidies the most.The government handing out money is not a free action!
Do you think the students in that poll had really thought about the credibility of their university when voting? Also, how realistic is it that one professor giving everyone an A in a single course would damage the credibility of the entire university?
> and in particular one that is much more affluent than the people who need government subsidies the most.The government handing out money is not a free action!
If that were the case, the people protesting student Lian forgiveness should be at tge forefront of demanding increased coverage for Medicare and better social security systems in general - and should demand higher taxes for the classes of people that are even more affluent than the students. The opposite seems to be the case though: The people who oppose student loan forgiveness also oppose other social security laws and demand lower taxes even for rich people.
That's fair, and I'm not sure of course. I guess a more interesting question would be what if there was another option based on what I described. I do know that this is a conversation that we explicitly had in my department many times. It's was an open secret that cheating was rampant, and a degree from that CS department isn't very prestigious. Those two things aren't unrelated.
To your point about a single class giving all A's not damaging it, you're right of course. My point is that this is a classic tragedy of the commons. One plane flight, extra datacenter etc. isn't moving the needle on climate change, but all put together it does.
> If that were the case, the people protesting student Lian forgiveness should be at tge forefront of demanding increased coverage for Medicare and better social security systems in general
I agree, but my response is simple: I don't think either major party in the US has a principled stance on economic issues. There is wild fluctuation in behavior on an issue-to-issue basis. The fact that most students/political parties/people in the universe don't have a coherent set of princples shouldn't stop us from trying to have them!
Good grief, how does the author think this essay reflects well on himself?
It’s not that I don’t want other people to succeed it’s that I don’t want you to make my accomplishments meaningless.
https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-public-schools-equity...
People have different levels of talent, interest and motivation. In a physics course there might be 50 students, one of which will go on to get a physics PhD, you would think that person gets an "A" but somebody who gets a "C" will do something else. As an "A" student I would not feel bad if no "F"s were given out and the lowest grade was a "C", but if I can't earn an "A" while somebody else gets a "C", that eliminates a way that a person of modest means who faces some challenges can distinguish themselves and finds better opportunities -- some people who are in subaltern groups like to fantasize that in "holistic evaluation" people will realize how nice they really are but actually people will default to thinking people like themselves are nice so if you are the wrong race or gender or queer or whatever you start out in the penalty box meanwhile rich kids have so many ways to put a finger on the scale that poor kids don't even know exist. [1]
Grades, standardized tests and such can be flawed but they provide some people from modest backgrounds a chance to shine and for some rich kids to prove that they can't test their way out of a paper bag. [2]
As for student loans, what can I say? Maybe if I went to school a decade later or took a different academic path it would be different, but I went to a modest undergraduate school and got out without loans. Maybe it's not so easy today. A person who made different decisions from somebody else could well feel resentful that somebody else got $40,000 and that they didn't. I don't have strong feelings against student loan forgiveness but I can understand why somebody would.
This article contributes to the "talking past each other" phenomenon and dehumanizing discourse that is par for the course on the left side of the web, taking an anecdote that is already pretty weak and twisting it into an insult towards people they disagree with. [3] They might get some likes on Bluesky and think they really "stuck it to the man" but at best people will vote the same in 2028.
[1] Hate to bring it up because my Uni just won the NCAA lacrosse tournament and I think it's great to have a men's and women's sport to use our stadium in the spring, but some people say that "lacrosse is racist/classist" because if you go to a poor or average high school you probably don't get to play lacrosse. You certainly don't see as many black lacrosse players as you see in basketball and football. There is a huge amount of focus on inequities involving standardized testing because standardized testing is visible, but you might not even know my school has a lacrosse team or think that it matters. And I know there are 100 things like lacrosse at my school that I don't know about but that admissions coaches for rich kids know inside out.
[2] I often wonder if Steven Jay Gould was funded by Harvard Alumni who wanted to make the world safe for the bottom 10% of legacy admissions
[3] feeling resentful that somebody else got $40,000 when they didn't isn't the same as wanting them to fail. Neither is thinking "$40,000 is a lot of money and maybe there is something better we can do with it"
I honestly never understood that argument in the right's opposition to student loan forgiveness. It's always framed as giving some random segment of the population free money, but that's not what's happening. People made an investment, because the entire society, including the government told them at that time that this would be the right thing to do. Now it turns out, the investment wasn't just bad, the debt is also uncancellable and they will have little chance to repay it. Which means there is a high chance it will permanently reduce their chances in life and quality of life if it is not forgiven.
If you really believe student loans are unjust than the right policy is forgive them and stop making them or make some fundamental change that makes them more just (e.g. make them dischargable in bankruptcy like other loans)
Forgiveness without reform adds fuel to the fire. Part of what keeps debt under control is that borrowers and lenders are exposed to risk: if borrowers believe that each Democratic administration is a spin of the slot machine that might forgive their loans they might be more reckless about getting them. Instead of good policy we get clientelism.