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I went to a theatre conservatory in NYC and was constantly assaulted by the drumbeat of "50% attrition rate!" and "If you don't need to be here as much as you need to breath, drop out now" and on and on.

So when, in my 3rd semester review with my technique instructor, he asked me why I came to the school, I was frustrated enough to tell him the truth.

"I couldn't get in to college."

He very nearly spat his water in surprise. This broke the ice and we had one of the most encouraging, pleasant conversations I had while at that school. He told me I was good at this, and I told him that I enjoyed it. We both agreed that even though I wasn't as crazed as the rest of the students and staff, there was no good reason not to take my shot.

So, I stayed at the school and started auditioning not long after. I landed my first off-broadway gig a couple months later, then a film, then I co-founded a theatre company that turned a profit on our first off-off-broadway show. While I am living a different life now, I am so thankful for that small moment of encouragement in the midst of all the angst I was exposed to every day. I genuinely believe that short meeting with my instructor inspired the early risks I took, and it certainly kept me going when I wanted to walk away.

Thanks for writing your counter-point. Reminded me of an important time in my life.

Just an up-vote didn't seem sufficient. To both you and the writer of that first response; cheers for sharing.

Amazing what a diverse audience ends up at HN, and how much you can learn by reading comments to an article.

Appreciated.

The fact that not all students will make it is not the point of the article.

It's designed to address the underlying sense of entitlement students at the World's best universities can have. As these places can be so hard to get into, successful applicants can adopt a defensive "I'm here because I'm the cleverest and deserve it" mentality. For somewhere like Stanford, having a lot of (daddy's) money is, for most students, also a pre-requisite to attending. The Author is exactly right, being born into a family with money does not mean you deserve to be there, even if you did work really hard during grade school and college. The Freshman's are enormously lucky to have been given the chance to study at Stanford and it is up to them to earn their place, retrospectively. Society will be the judge based on their future work.

The message is not so much "don't get comfortable because 50% will be gone by the end of the year" but rather more of "Welcome to Stanford. Understand that you are here though very little of your own merit. You have the opportunity to change that if you work hard and focus on the bigger picture of society and not just furthering your own wealth".

Boy. This is not at all the truth. Anecdotally, what I've discovered from a year at MIT is that the norm is feeling like you don't belong (e.g. here is some previous discussion about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890267).

Saying "understand that you are here through very little of your own merit" is a recipe for causing already overly stressed students to do something rash, like jumping out of a building: http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ (this list isn't even up to date).

Motivating people to work hard to feel like they've earned their place is a completely different thing than reinforcing the doubts and insecurities almost all of them have anyway.

The pressure at this place (and it's the same at any top-tier place) has been almost too much for me to handle sometimes, and that's without foolish words from foolish people designed to increase it.

The pressure at this place (and it's the same at any top-tier place) has been almost too much for me to handle sometimes, and that's without foolish words from foolish people designed to increase it.

MIT alum here. I know what you mean; the pressure can be tough. But also, they've got a lot of resources on campus to help.

I'm going to be on campus tomorrow and Thursday if you're interested in meeting up and talking about the stress. My email address is in my profile.

MIT is different. That said, I agree "through very little of your own merit" isn't fair at all; "through means other than your merit" seems a little more plausible.

Alum of the other T. Tech schools are different than Stanford/Harvard?etc.

Maybe a more useful rephrasing is that your presence at the institution is a blessing, a gift, given whether you currently deserve it or not. Enjoy the gift and grow into it.

Yes I agree going to MIT may feel like more pressure but perhaps (forgive me if I'm wrong, I obviously don't know your personal background) you, and your like minded friends, were from more modest means (i.e; not millionaires) and attending MIT was a real sense of achievement.

However, for some students attending Harvard, Stanford, Oxford or Cambridge can be an expectation and a realistic one at that if they have been given every opportunity to increase their chances of entry thanks to their parents influence and wealth. I understood the Author to be addressing these students. Perhaps they're a minority, but looking at the ranks of politicians and World leaders (from wealthy families I might add) coming from these institutions, it looks like more than just coincidence to me.

It's designed to address the underlying sense of entitlement students

But who is going to address the underlying sense of entitlement of the guy delivering the "go fuck yourself" speech? Spiteful turtles all the way down?

Honestly, I wish more people would start setting reasonable expectations for students. While I will agree that walking on stage and saying "Look to your left, look to your right. One of you will not be here in a year" is not the right approach to take, someone needs to be realistic.

I'm 20, all of my friends are students. I live right next to the university in my city. I know, meet, or merely converse with lots of students, and one thing that kills me is this pervasiveness of expectation that after 4 years (and for some, more than that) of sliding by, they will walk away with a degree and a nice cushy job, regardless of the degree or the effort put forth.

By no means do they all think this, but I find the number who do a bit alarming. The number of CS students I've met that think they'll land a nice cushy developer job just like mine when they couldn't implement a linked list if their lives depended on it is almost farcical. Then again, with the amount of new developer jobs I see in the area, maybe they will. But what of the students going for a degree in something like Religious Studies where employers aren't exactly tripping over themselves to find folks with such a degree and no real work experience to speak of?

Given the costs associated with a bachelors degree in the US at an in-state university, more people need to start drilling realism into the students' heads. These students cannot afford to waste 4 years and something like 10.000 USD per year, not including living expenses. People need to be more realistic and they need to start doing it sooner than the freshman introductory speech because you are right, they won't listen at that point. It's too little too late.

Credentialism is about obtaining a title of nobility, a class distinction, not education or even job training.

To suggest otherwise is a core affront to their entire cultural outlook. What, you say that once the King creates me as a Baron, I'm not going to automatically be issued a Barony to rule? How dare you claim otherwise?

To some extent aided and abetted by some HR staffers who also buy into the credentialism / title of nobility outlook on life.

Although its annoyingly self perpetuating and popular, it can be a pretty toxic poison in a business setting.

Agreed. College is wasted on the young. When I was there, I had no idea what an absolute privilege it was to have an environment completely geared towards your own personal enrichment for 4 years - and I had a better attitude than 95 percent of the kids there. I wish someone could have tried to get that through to me: how much tougher learning is when you've got a wife kids, 50hr job, etc...

"Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got / Till it's gone"

Most college students comes directly from High School. To them (or at least to me at the time) it was a "natural" continuation. We have been in school for over a decade. That's all we've known was to sit in a class room, jot down some notes, and then take some test.

I totally agree, fast forward 10 years, and you realize how much of a privilege it is to do that. I'm doing very well for myself, but most folks aren't. And its because life takes over. You have kids, relationships, bills to worry about. It take an act of Congress to be able to have 30 mins to yourself a day.

Sometimes I joke around and say "Let the kids work first then have them go to school". I would love to see such a program that did that. Perhaps, when I have kids and they grow up, I'll have my kids work for a couple of years, then send them to college. I'm betting that they would appreciate it.

Sometimes you need that break to realize what you want in life.

I am strongly thinking about encouraging my kids to take a break before college if I think it could be beneficial to them. If they're rocking it in high school and eager to dive into four more years, then maybe I won't bother, but that seems _highly_ unlikely.

Maybe they'll be great students and just need a break, in which case I might suggest a backpacking trip and/or internship. Or maybe they'll be unmotivated students barely scraping by in which case I might send them into The Real World to earn money towards their education (and find out why an education is important).

I've thought a _lot_ about why I didn't do very well in college (beyond the obvious procrastination), and what might have helped, and filing those thoughts away for my own kids.

The only problem is that kids want to be with their friends, and if their friends aren't taking a year off then it might be hard to convince them to break away from the pack.

I was "rocking it" in secondary education, to the point that I was opted into a engineering-oriented college track despite declining to take the aptitude test. When I looked back on the time I spent working on my Computer Science degree I regret not taking time off. Even more so now that I've been working for a while (and re-entering eduction on my own terms).

But I went straight into college after high school because a) I was "college bound" and that's what college bound kids did, and b) I would not be eligible for my scholarship if I took time off. I was pretty broke at the time so I needed the scholarship (and couldn't afford a backpacking trip anyways).

I did fine in college but not as good as I could/should have. Like you, I thought a _lot_ about why and in particular I thought about why some people were doing better than me. This is what stood out to me:

When the professors introduced a new data structure these classmates would talk about how they wish they knew about it for a previous project or how it got them thinking about a different way to build something they were working on. The people who were doing better than me had a reason to learn.

I was just learning what the professors told me to learn. If they talked about a new data structure I learned about a new data structure. If they talked about when to use a data structure I learned when to use the data structure.

I was "gifted", "college bound", and all sorts of other labels that presumably light the path to success. But I didn't understand my "gift" and I figure most my early educators didn't either, because they just kept encouraging me to keep doing what I was doing. Which was basically nothing.

Moral of the story is don't let your kids' success blind you to the fact that they really need opportunities to explore themselves and their world. Whether they are "rocking it" or not, you should encourage them to seek these opportunities and help them get to them as much as possible.

"I would love to see such a program that did that."

I did that. Takes forever. Its called join the .mil in the reserves (ideally while not in an eternal war on multiple fronts, may not work so well in 2013), then get an associates degree basically for free with the GI bill, then get a "real" entry level job with tuition reimbursement, then night school the bachelors, etc. Just keep on upgrading till you're sick of it or lifestyle incompatibility.

It helps to have actual experience in computers / electronics / RF before you take the classes. How weird it must be to first use an oscilloscope in a classroom, or first run a compiler as a school assignment, or first solder something after you're old enough to drink. I never got to experience that, which must be stressful / interesting.

I second the .mil route, circuitous though it may be.

One of my best friends went that route, and when we attended college they were really squared away. As much petty bullshit as professors and graders throw at you, it'll be a drop in a bucket compared with whatever you survived in the service.

> Sometimes I joke around and say "Let the kids work first then have them go to school". I would love to see such a program that did that.

Not quite a 1:1 mapping, but the co-op program at the University of Waterloo has students alternate 4-month paid work terms with 4-month school terms over the course of five years.

College is wasted on the young.

While I did learn a lot in school, I definitely agree with this sentiment. I'd get a hell of a lot more out of it if I were going now -- ten plus years later -- than I did when I was fresh out of high school.

Of course, it gets a whole lot harder once certain parts of "Real Life" kick in and the ease of dropping everything to spend all of your time learning dissolves in a cloud of uncertainty.

Poland here. It's exactly the same as you described - if there is someone speaking at the beginning of the year it's mostly in the tone of "We have accepted 300 students for this course this year. Less than 100 makes it to the second year and usually less than 20 finish it. That means you have to work really hard to stay here and you can fail at any moment". This is what is usually said. Does it help? Of course not. Would it be any better if the speech was more cheerful? I believe so - most students are going to experience a reality crash within a first 2 weeks anyway,so a glimmer of hope at the beginning would not hurt.

Molecular and Cellular Biology major here, and it was the same story with my program. 500 students in two intro bio classes became 250 students my second semester and 150 students my third. Eventually, less than 50 students received their diploma across every cell bio major (MCB, Immunology, Microbiology, etc.)

Reading the comments on here I wonder if it's a "tradition" among STEM majors. I honestly thought the pressure, stress, and competition in my program was universal across all fields until I met my current girlfriend. The very idea of a 90% attrition rate or classes that practically required three hours of sleep a night was completely foreign to her. Even the very culture within our programs were radically different. I was subjected to a lot of "Most of you won't get your MDs or PhDs", whereas she had a much more encouraging rather than discouraging environment.

My parents (in their 70s now) have the same sort of stories about US universities from their experience -- the one that stuck with me was "Look to your left. Look to your right. One of the three of you will not make it to graduation." But it definitely wasn't the case when I went to school circa 1990.

Oh? Early 90s EE curricula my experience was more like 50 students came to the first "ohms law" type class and by the time we were talking about rectifier topologies (half-wave, full-wave, bridge, etc) we were down to like 10. I honestly don't know what happened to the other 40 or so.

Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start.

(edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)

"...most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff..."

Isn't that what you'd expect? If the 'easy' stuff was too hard why bother continuing once you know you're out of your depth.

Ah but difficulty increases, I think diffeqs was much worse than 2nd semester of calc. Or circuit analysis class was much worse than 2nd month of "ohms law" class. But the dropping out stopped after the first month of the filter classes. I'd expect it to smoothly decline as difficulty smoothly increases.

I think it's a lack of confidence or guts if you'd rather. There's a short window to fill in another class in your schedule so if a person thinks they'll drop later, may as well drop now.

This is the exact reason I dropped Calc this semester. My math background already sucks and I fucked up early and fell behind fast. Makes more sense to not fail and learn on my own before trying again.

Get back into that shit next semester, no excuses.

You're a freshman, I take it? If you start giving up on shit as "too hard" now, everything's going to be too hard in the future. Learning only gets harder when you get older. If you need to enroll in a more remedial class first, fine, but don't waste your and your parents' money by avoiding classes that are "too hard" for four years of college. You are what you repeatedly do.

Not a freshman but a transfer student. I'm absolutely taking it again as soon as possible. In the meantime I'm going to keep attending the lectures for no credit and learn on my own through Khan Academy. I'm actually confident I can complete the course fine, but I was distracted with other things when the course started and missed some important grades. Thanks for the advice.

I meant more in the straightforward sense that no one explicitly told us that.

I don't think we came anywhere close to a 1/3rd dropout rate in the classes I took, but then I was LS&A rather than Engineering.

Go Blue? (Maybe there are multiple LS&A's.)

Hell, probably multiple "Go Blues" as well. But yes. "Hail" and all that. :)

In USA I studied math and cs, I got this similar speech. I think it depend on school and area of concentration in USA.

But university education is largely free in Germany right? So the messages seem to be:

Germany: if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP

U.S.: we don't care too much if you drop out later, as long as you pay your enormous tuition in a timely manner.

That makes sense to me...

Yes, university is largely free in Germany.

if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP

This is your interpretation. Thing is, it doesn't do more than leave people with a bad feeling. My point is: Whatever you say in a welcome-speech doesn't affect the choices of freshmen in the slightest. People will drop out, that's for sure. But not because some smartass Dean or professor holds a self-righteous speech, but because some students find that university (or that particular subject) isn't for them. They'll find out by EXPERIENCE and not by a stupid speech.

Your first post (and this one) were eye-opening for me, and I wanted to thank you for offering a dose of reality from the other side of the pond.

For years, I've heard musings among Americans that suggest motivational speeches do more harm than good to those present. I've often wondered how true that is, because the other side of the coin seems just as detrimental--if not more so--to young, impressionable minds. More importantly, though, I think you're absolutely right: It's experience that's the real teacher, not some bloviating figurehead whose speech will be forgotten before the end of the day. If someone's not cut out for it, no amount of (de)motivation will help. Sink or swim.

Cheers, my friend.

Surely the most sense would be to do whatever gets the best education for the people who have come in as students, to then create the best researchers and maximise the amount of new shit they can find out about. Screw reasoning about who paid for that student, whether it is their parents, themselves or a state or a charity, universities have a purpose and it is not necessarily best served by making a group of largely inexperienced people stressed out and depressed.

Also, the people who are arrogant self-entitled little sods are not going to listen to the negative speech anyway, they will naturally assume it is directed at the other people and think that their parents connections are all the guarantee of finishing with a good grade that they need, and depending on where they are and what they are studying, they may well be right.

The people who are more likely to take something like that to heart is the nervous rather than the untalented or arrogant.

A lot of American universities are more like what you describe that what is described in the OP. I remember my first day of CS class the prof said something like look to your left look to your right by the end of the year statistically speaking one of you won't be in this major any more.

They didn't say that to discourage people or to imply that they had some failure quota but to let people know that they couldn't expect to just show up and slide though any more like a lot of kids do in high school.

I would take a different interpretation in that for those who are failing, no need to take a long walk off a short pier or test their gliding skills off the roof of the dorm, its OK, no need to do something drastic if whats happening (failing) is occasionally a perfectly normal and expected part of life. Someone seems to do that about every semester, its always a downer for everyone else.

Well what do you expect if you dont specialise in the last two years? The Uk's A level system has some advantage in that you have mostly decided what to study at Uni by 16.

You seem to be missing that, despite telling the truth (or what I feel to be the truth anyway) in a brutal way, the speech manages to be quite motivational. It is to me anyway.

I think it is no mistake if one of the most highly regarded commencement speech is that of David Foster Wallace (aka "The Truth With A Whole Lot Of Rhetorical Bullshit Pared Away"): http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

Also, I have received the "50% attrition" comments (I'm from Belgium). In our computer science class, it was more like 70% attrition. But consider that a big difference is that in our countries, getting in a university is not "achievement". You can litteraly just walk in there and if you can't afford the 1K euros a year it costs, the government will pay for you. This is a good thing -- but it needs no one will tell you that you deserve anything. Neither should it be the case in the US because most of the time, access to these universities are conditioned by factors that are largely out of the student direct control.

Like they say about academia: The politics are so intense because the stakes are so low.

This is an apples to oranges comparison. The article centers on (the author's idea of) the messaging that greater American society would like to impart on the archetypal Stanford student, who is upper-class, American, young, inexperienced, entitled, sheltered, and likely the recipient of perks that helped their admission. A message from greater German society to any specific German student archetype would obviously differ.

Even the comparison with MIT is arguably invalid, as elite tech university admissions are more objective and less discretionary, making the archetypal student less likely both to have an entitled mentality and to have received perks that helped their admission. Perhaps the author wouldn't have objected to the word "deserve" at an MIT convocation, nor at one in Germany.

That's a constant with life advice: it's useless not because it's wrong, but because you won't believe it's right until you've experienced it.

To be honest the dean at your girlfriends university and at Stanford should switch places. That would be the perfect solution for all. Im a european living in america, i'm sorry its not the greatest country in the world even if i know most europeans believe so.

Its so fun, the first post always takes the direct opposite standpoint of the link.