As a current student, I see this first-hand. I go to a school that is moderately prestigious, but not well known for CS. Far too many of my classmates are obsessed with the same hamster wheel of optimizing grades, superficial extracurriculars and rec letter chasing. This isn't surprising; it's what got them into this school in the first place. Unfortunately for them it's also quite useless in tech. Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go?
This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.
Years ago, I was advising the "entrepreneur club" at a major university and I met with one of the students. He introduced himself as "president" and we chatted and talked out their Vision. A week later, I met with him and another member who introduced herself as "president"
Slightly confused, I asked if they'd just had an election. Nope. Turns out they called their members "president" which looked great on their resumes.
> Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go?
You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.
Not only that, the recall is high, even if the precision is low at these top universities.
Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class.
So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners.
My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.
> Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits).
I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats.
The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck.
What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening.
So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.
Indeed. As many seek out this opportunity and as they all ramp up their efforts, the participants of the tournament will all look similar in skill and aptitude. Thus, the determining factors will increasingly become luck-based. Everyone that wishes to participate should be made aware that they are signing up for a stress-inducing rat race, and that they better double their effort because, at each step, their competitors get more and more capable.
Or, alternatively, seek other options? Maybe try to avoid the race somehow. Since most will be losers, it's probably best to consider alternatives anyway and ask if the prize is even worth winning.
You're not wrong. I am being rather blithe. However I'd point out that I'm not saying all masters students have no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades. I'm saying that a sigificant number of budding CS majors with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades get masters. There's a difference of A -> B versus B -> A.
i agree, it seems like a pretty insecure thing to say. he is currently an undergrad so he probably doesn't really realize masters programs can actually help someone's career.
The kid who returned user's passed hash -- he could have simply learned more about better programming practices no? You make it sound like it's a crime and he's inherently flawed. But all of us did dumb mistakes in school/college in our early programming days, and then most of us learned not to do them.
Yeah that was maybe not the best example. Although I did explain it to him a couple times and he still didn't get it. He also didn't do his share of work but of course took credit for the accomplishments of the group in his college applications.
What I was trying to point it is that these students used these supposedly impressive accomplishments in the college applications when really they didn't do much at all.
Working with these people in college was rather frustrating at times. I always did good work, started working on projects early and often. Because I knew programming a solution is sort of an unknown until you really dive in to it. Many students got better grades than they deserved because I was in their group. They were great people, just horrible team mates.
The in person interview has little to no bearing on your application. It can provide a minor positive boost but no negative value. Besides, the interviewers I had were all nice enough people but definitely possible to trick or BS.
So, the technical interviewer says “no hire.” But the VP (who went to the candidate’s alma mater) says yes. And the Director who knows the candidate’s uncle from the country club says yes. And the candidate really laid it on thick for the hiring manager who has the final say. What did the tech nerd say, again?
It increasingly feels like the world’s reward systems have been captured by and saturated with these charming phonies who only know how to game the system. Put all your skill points into charisma and people will just hand you money and opportunities. I’ve spent my whole career perpetually a couple of rungs down the totem pole from these well-pedigreed charmers, and hear them talk their smooth, but ultimately empty talk over and over.
Whether it’s college applications or job applications, the longer I go at it, the more convinced I am that the ability to “seem like the right kind of successful sort of person” gives you the best results. Better than track record, better than demonstrable skills, better than potential and willingness to do hard work.
Scott Adams talks about this in one of his books (How To Fail At Everything). Generally, one's dress, tone, vocabulary choice, and grammar are indications of status that others read. The good news is once one is aware of it, one can fake that.
"I'm reasonably sure that my fake voice, with its low notes
and artificial confidence, made me appear more capable than I was, and that wasn't difficult because I was largely incompetent at every corporate job I held. Despite my obvious lack of ability, nearly every boss I had—and there were many—identified me as a future corporate executive."
I feel palpable despair about this. For me it has tended to imply that the work itself is not valuable, for otherwise the incentive system would be corrected quickly.
What would be the corrective factor? The charismatic oligarchy has inserted itself between the productive people and the money.
The Gervais principle is a thing. The charismatic CEO is helped by the 90% mediocre employees, who like the system. The 10% productive employees are exploited and shouted down.
All that the 10% can do is change jobs or start a company.
I guess I long to work on teams where the outcome and the actual activity of working on the project are the primary motivators for the people involved, and not the associated status or credit gain. So when I said it seems to imply the work is not valuable, I meant in the view of the people working.
Oh lemme clarify. I thought you were talking about college interviews. If we're talking about job interviews then certainly they can cut through someone's BS.
> This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT.
He did something. Bad code is better than no code.
> Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know.
Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".
When i was in hs, we started a new robotics club, in our first year we went to nationals, we had a kid who literally did nothing for the club but wanted some kind of title in the club (i didn't understand why at that time because i came from a type of household where my parents never cared enough to even see my report card), he was in no way exceptional except his parents pushed him to work hard so that he got good grades. I bet he wrote a college essay about his passion for robotics and how he had helped build this successful robotics teams that did fairly well at nationals. He went to Harvard. In high school, for every person i saw who valued learning for its own sake, i saw about 10 people who were obsessed with grades/ec's because their parents told them that going to prestigious university x was their only hope for a future (I don't necessarily blame the kids when it is mainly the parents driving the show). I think this kind of attitude towards college and education is pernicious because i believe a society which moves towards an excessive superficial emphasis on brand names (not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable lifestyles/professions) moves away from individuality into a collective type of society and i strongly believe revolutionary creativity which could advance society always come from individuals.
Maybe that kid who made the wrong website put more emphasis on things that places like MIT prioritize instead of reading about "useless" subjects like learning how to create secure websites? The issue is comparability. You can compare by SAT scores and grades far better than by a metric like "built a secure website". If places like MIT prioritized such things more, they'd become even more unfair. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather work with you on a team than with someone who cares only about their personal success above the team's success, and can't listen to input as to why their approach was wrong.
As for the Zuckerberg example, I think it's a prime example because a social network website is comparatively cheap to create, but the key question is to get people to sign up. By launching first for top colleges, people who want to stay in touch with their "successful" mates would want access as well. Someone without access to a top tier institution's social life would not have been able to pull it off.
> People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true.
There's probably edge cases, like for some startup founders or supreme court justices, but for the more "advantaged" than average children, it largely doesn't seem to matter in aggregate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimatin...)
The economic pie is shrinking. Elites are spending more and more of their money sending their kids to the best prep schools and resume padding to ensure they don't slip through the growing cracks in the developed world (i.e. inequality that is well accepted at this point).
See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope.
While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy.
Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.
The economic pie isn't shrinking, it's not being allowed to grow.
Companies produce more things when the price goes up. This works amazingly well for consumer goods.
However, companies have been banned from doing so in the housing market. What follows is a shortage, the driver of all inflations. However, this only reflects rents, not necessarily the prices of homes because they are primarily driven by the availability of cheap credit whose monthly payments may stay the same despite a more expensive house.
From what I can tell rent inflation itself went up by 3%+ every year since 2000. One problem with rents is that the only way they can employ people is via construction and since that isn't happening it will not translate into increased wages, which will cause wages to lag behind as most people are employed in an industry whose maximum wage increases are effectively bounded by CPI+productivity growth, not rent inflation+productivity growth, rents outpacing wages is only natural.
Education is one way to increase productivity growth, but another way would be to simply reduce the productivity growth needed to have a normal life, by building more housing.
rent inflation - CPI = education shortfall
or
rent inflation - CPI = construction shortfall
it's a choice and a lot of people are picking 1. because it's other people that have to get educated to pay for the shortfall, not the ones owning the land.
This study is based on data from the college students of the early 1990s, and previous works in the field use data from 1980's college students. I think your claim might have been true 2 decades ago, but now? I highly doubt it....
It’s way better than this, to be honest. It’s okay and safe to be more optimistic. These organizations are not perfect but I personally have seen for myself that they do tend to support the best and brightest, and they are actively expanding free offerings rapidly to do this for anyone with internet. It’s becoming more accessible each year to get that quality education in tech and science and business in general, in a condensed quality format.
Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life.
Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling?
The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability).
Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?
Yes! I wish more people realized all of this is unnecessary. Sit down to your keyboard and start typing! You will fail, that's correct - learn from that failure, don't take it personally and never stop!
So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.
If I owned a company I would refuse to hire graduates from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. It's much more likely that you were good at lying than at studying if you went there, and I don't have time to teach the basics.
I'll accept the premise that it's possible to fake your way into a school like that. I think it would be much harder to fake your way to a diploma though. Am I wrong?
So getting in to Stanford is harder than graduating with a STEM degree? Doens't say much about the vaunted reputation of that school. I went to a midwest state university. Getting in was easy. Completing my CS degree took a lot of work. I cannot imagine any way I could have bullshitted my way through that.
Google the concept of the gentleman's B. if you show up, most teachers will take pity and not fail you even if you are subpar on your tests.
i dont know what trauma you went through at iowa state university's calc 3 hazing but I personally pulled the patrician move and graduated with a degree in history, only to get a job programming straight away anyway.
leetcode, system design, and book knowledge questions about java will forever be more manageable than a compilers class or multivariable calculus, for purposes of making enough money to live a middle class life without burning out
Yes, this is the case for most of the top universities (and likely med school, law school, you name it).
Universities like to keep their graduation rates high to ensure competition at the front of the pipeline. Also, by keeping admission so competitive you basically ensure that whoever does end up getting in has the capacity to do well at any program (though statistics are still gamed - for example it is almost impossible to "drop out" of MIT - you are just placed on indefinite leave if you express that desire. That way their graduation rate very high since the people on indefinite leave don't factor into it).
Yes. You think Harvard is going to fail the son of a senator or legacy donor?
A lot of folks I went to college with did nothing but party, drink, hang out. Education didn't matter to them at all. They were going to get a job at their family's firm, company, etc anyway. Didn't matter what their grades were.
In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sharp social stratifications and popular resentment among working people that "elites" (defined overwhelmingly as people with significant economic capital, political influence, and elite pedigrees) are detached from the reality on the ground. Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites.
Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK.
This is only going to get worse. The ruthless competition to get into elite colleges is both a cause, and a product of, economic inequality. The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, and that investment banks recruit mostly from a handful of targets.
If prospective law students were confident they could earn 90% as much, or 100% as much, as graduates from T-10 law schools, if they attended lower ranked schools, there wouldn't be so much competition to get into the same handful of elite schools.
This winner take all economy is stupid, and it's making us sick in pursuit of success. People should act in their best personal interests, and this competition is the result. We can't blame parents for wanting the best outcomes for their children. But everyone deserves a bit of blame, some more than others, for helping make American society so unequal.
> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK.
Maybe besides the point, but nordic countries do have significant populist movements. In Finland (which I know best) populist Finns Party[1] is the largest party according to polls at the moment. We had our trump/brexit moment in 2011 when they took landslide victory against what the experts and ”elites” expected.
True. Landslide is a wrong word here. I meant It had similar Nobody saw it coming -narrative attached to it. Also hard to compare vote result percentages between multiparty and two options votes.
> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK.
University elitism and general egalitarianism are easily separable. Germany quite deliberately got rid of its elite universities after 1968, leveling former pinnacles of research excellence like Göttingen, Heidelberg and Tübingen so that which university you go to now has basically no social cachet. Every US Supreme Court justice went to Harvard or Yale. The website for the German Supreme Court mostly doesn’t list where they got their degrees, so little do people care. Germany is not an egalitarian society. It is class and title obsessed. Sweden may have an egalitarian affect but it likewise has large and enduring fortunes. The wealth inequality is there even if income inequality is more modest.
I am not an Oxbridge or ENS graduate but I felt compelled to point out both had a competitive entry exam. I am unsure Oxbridge still does. The ecole normale system presupposes a national baccalaureate with ranking. The French took this seriously for decades. It was wafer thin egalitarianism because poor smart kids had a path in.
I have little doubt nepotism also plays its part, but the fundamental underpinning is ranked - elitism that was tested.
I've worked with many Oxbridge graduates and met, presented to ENS students and they were super smart.
I don’t think the issue is that Oxbridge students aren’t on average, smart. It’s more that the implicit assumption of smart people can only come from Oxbridge.
Branding is powerful, and it’s easy to fall into the trap in thinking that the smartest person from UCL isn’t as smart as the dumbest person from Cambridge. Being in America, I’ve seen lots of people just throw out resumes just because they’ve never heard of their school, or they didn’t go to a prestigious school.
Yeah, I've seen that. When I worked for a FAANG, we were doing the final set of interviews for a (very very good) candidate.
The first question the director asked was "where did she go to school?". Fortunately for her, she went to Oxford, so it was OK. I also remember the US recruiters telling us that there was a list of acceptable schools and we should stick to it.
Fortunately (for me, at least) we tended to ignore that crap in Europe. The funniest part was that my manager moved over to the US, and hired ten really really good people by just looking for qualified candidates who didn't go to one of the acceptable schools. I'm pretty sure all those people are the core of a very good team now.
As a Canadian in America I don’t know a lot of US schools. It’s pretty funny to see how offended people can be when I haven’t heard of like, Williams, or Vassar.
for ENS and polytechnique, I remember reading that a very large number of the accepted candidates for such schools came from a handful of rich kids high schools and can be traced back to a handful of rich kids Kindergartens. (I can't find the article)
Usually, before accessing those schools, you have to study for 2 years in a preparatory program called a Classe Préparatoire. Point is, the best can be quite expensive.
The most egregious thing though is that during school holidays in France, some private organisms (in Paris) offer 1 or 2-week cramming programs for €10-15k a pop where you get tutored by the very people that write the entrance exams to the most prestigious schools.
TL;DR: wealth helps a lot, but not in the "parents paid the diploma" direct way. More because good social status helps putting people in the right track. Hard work is still required IMHO (at least for the engineering track, I do not know about the business schools variant).
Wealth definitely helps in the sense it gives you a better environment to support you during your studies. About it helping you being tutored by fancy private organisms, this is true but I think it applies more to the "lower" part of the Grandes Écoles & co pyramid. You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent.
About the set of high schools/classes préparatoires funneling a large part of candidates to top schools, that is definitely true. But again it requires a lot of work, you are not going to move through Henri IV or whatever to ENS only because your parents have money. But receiving a good education from birth and having family and friends who knows how the system work, because they moved through it themselves, helps a lot.
But wealth helps because these places are usually in large cities (and mostly in Paris), which are expensive to live in. And to get there you have to come from good/prestigious high schools and have good grades, which again living in a wealthy family helps a lot.
Wealth has a compounding effect.If your parents have the means to provide you tutoring lessons and a private education at top institutions from an early age, this has a stronger influence that mere talent. Talent is just not a good term to use here, it obfuscates that actual talent is rare compared to the much more common state of being "well taught and prepared," which is very much correlated to wealth and geography. Who gets to go to Top Schools in France? An majority of sons and daughters of Parisians. And I wouldn't imply top talents mostly occur in Paris.
Entry into Grandes Ecoles is usually a function of three things: knowledge, preparedness, and, indeed, talent. But that last variable has a much lesser effect that what people tend to assume.
> You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent.
What's interesting is what they put the emphasis on. Polytechnique is probably the most theoretical math heavy engineering program I've ever seen.
It's probably better exemplified by an anecdote from someone who did a double diploma from Polytechnique Paris and Montreal. He got flak in Paris for solving a problem using a numerical approximation, because there was a way to get to an exact answer. And in Montreal he was asked by a professor if he could "borrow his micrometer CNC machine" since he gave an answer that was way too precise for the material whatever he was working on was going to be made of.
As a canadian, are we really that much more equal than the USA? Sure, maybe we have less of the extremes on both sides (Less billionairs, and i suspect less hopelessly poor, although i don't know the number on that), but we still have rich people and poor people, a good uni still gives you a major step up.
By college exclusivity yes, you are substantially more equal. Your good universities expand, theirs stay about the same size and become even more exclusive. No one goes Ooooh! if they hear someone went to McGill or Waterloo, excellent as they are. They’re just universities.
> The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100,
In the end that's what's causing revolutions, i.e. members of the educated middle-class being left out and not getting on the financial bandwagon. Imo it all started with the French Revolution, some people say that it was a bourgeois vs nobles thing but many bourgeois were doing quite all right (think the banker Necker [1]), it was the small bourgeois (and lawyer) from out-of-Paris like Robespierre that was feeling left out.
The same thing happened between the two world wars in Europe. In my parts of the continent (Eastern Europe) there were too many college graduates chasing too few State jobs (the only ones available to college graduates at the time), plus Jewish students crowding them out in domains that were lucrative even if not working for the State (think Law and Medicine). The solution some of those people thought of? Joining the right-wing movement that was advocating for "cleansing the State" and doing very bad things to those Jewish students that were competing for the same jobs.
TBF, this might be a more accurate representation of what the education pyramid was always supposed to be.
The biggest problem that I see in the west was the rise of the belief that anyone can simply go through a curriculum and now be upper middle class too.
It's ruining potential, drive, competition, etc. It's super quasi-Marxist as well. Anytime someone proposes a simple solution that will somehow magically guarantee your life to be better is selling snake oil.
> Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements
Perhaps not as strong, but I am not sure this is actually true. There are growing populist movements in France and Spain for sure. And you could be correct in establishing a pattern between slower economies, higher-inequality and unrest.
> This winner take all economy is stupid
Yes i.e. crony capitalism.
> this competition is the result
Of course, everyone doing the exact same thing and expecting to be the exception to the rule is not actually competition.
Why are you not asking the more critical questions like: why is there yet no competition to Universities themselves?
> Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites
It's very deniable. This simply cannot be the explanation.
Trump is an elite. He inherited vast amounts of money and vastly underperformed with them. He went to an Ivy, Wharton at UPenn. Sure, he sounds like an idiot, but it's undeniable that he is part of the political, educational, and business elite. The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd.
The people who voted for him don’t see him as an elite in the same way as other elites. They view him as someone who attained his status by operating outside of their corrupt system; this is what they believe, I’m not saying it’s true.
Name a policy that helped his supporters. His policies either helped elites or hurt the other side, but did not help his base. Virtually the only thing he ever did for his own base was to give out COVID relief support.
Caging children at the border? All about hurting the other side that cares about immigrants.
Lowering corporate taxes? Help for elites, particularly for those with huge fortunes overseas. Workers saw virtually nothing from the tax cuts.
Stopping California from imposing stricter emissions standards? Help for elites.
Abortion? His side isn't having them anyway, it's all about hurting others.
Stopping student loan forgiveness? Either helping elites or hurting the other side. Maybe both.
Revoking the EPA's jurisdiction over waterways so that there is more pollution? Helping elites and hurting his side. Republican states are far more polluted than Democrat ones.
The trade war that particularly hurt farmers?
We could keep going like this. Virtually all of Trump's policies were designed to help elites, hurt the left, but not to help right.
The clearest way to put it, is the way his own supporters put it "He is hurting the wrong people." That's what Trump sells. It's a world divorced from reality where anyone who doesn't agree is an enemy.
Trump is not anti-elite. His supporters are not anti-elite. They love elites.
You have completely missed the point despite your temper-tantrum rage ranting. Maybe grow up a little?
But first, your entire argument against the grandparent comment is "Trump is rich and had some policies that benefitted some rich people" as equaling that his base is in love with the very concept of political and business elitism?
Do you not see how completely nonsensically disingenuous and logically fallacious of an argument that is?
Are you actually interested in having an intellectual discussion on the topic or do you want to rant like you are on Twitter, Reddit, or some cable media show?
Feel free to head over to one of those if that is your intentions.
The primary reason why Trump was elected was because he was the only candidate brave enough to attack both the Bush and Clinton dynastic era policies (on live Television, btw). IIRC, he did replace NAFTA. A lot of Americans actually are interested in the idea of a strong focus on American job availability.
Regardless of a subjective judgement on whether Trump mad e progress on this or not, those were the policies he publicly promoted.
He also has done other public things like Twitter rants against companies that are moving factories to Mexico, etc.
So, his base is entirely aware of all of these things and that is exactly what GP commenter was referring too. And that is exactly what you failed to negate with all of your flamebaiting ranting.
> The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd.
Yet if you cast your gaze upon history, you'll find that many social movements are indeed led against members of a political class by members of that very same political class. Many leaders of communist revolutions, for example, come from wealthy families and not the oppressed proletariat that they claim to represent.
Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
Trump supporters idolize elites almost exclusively. From Trump, to CEOs, to Giuliani, to Tucker Carlson, to Bill Barr, to Bill O'Reilly, to Ted Cruz, to Josh Hawley. This is not a movement that happens to have a single elite as the head, it is a movement by elites.
> Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
That's just untrue.
Trump loves to play up how he is a business person. He loves to play up his successes. He loves to point out how much money he has. He loves to point at all of his houses. He loves to point out how many rich people he knows. He loves to point out how below him other people are. He loves to point out how he moves in those elite circles!
Have you watched a Trump rally? It's in large part about how awesome and elite he is. As long as people follow this simple story of the Trump movement being anti-elite, they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do.
The movement is not anti-elite, literally, no one gives a damn that Cruz or Hawley have fancy degrees. It's anti-fact. Trump supporters don't like reality as it is and Trump came out directly to sell them a totally different version of reality that they like a lot more (slavery wasn't all that bad, white people are being oppressed, global warming isn't happening, you never need to switch jobs, etc.). It has nothing to do with elites, it's a basic denial of reality, just as fundamental as flat earth.
The above un-informed screed is amusing, since it illustrates how the left thinks they know what they're talking about and what's best for others, when they have no clue.
>> he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites
> That's just untrue.
It is true - Trump never was a New York A-lister or B-lister. He could move in business circles, but not social ones.
> they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do.
His supporters wanted a wall, and he started construction on it.
Harris is supposed to be the immigration czar, yet she's afraid to be photographed near the border, because there's no wall.
The CCP engaged in trade violations, and he addressed that with tariffs.
Sounds like the right conclusions to me, even obvious.
> Trump supporters don't like reality as it is
His supporters like that he was willing to be their voice against the establishment in competing globally in the job market against illegal aliens, instead of being dismissed by the left as "deplorables."
> you never need to switch jobs
For most people, especially as they get older, there is no option for switching jobs - either you get on long-term disability or you're homeless. This one phrase proves how out of touch you are with reality.
Sometimes people don't appreciate what they have until it's gone.
The Democratic party and White House staff are infested with CCP lobbyists, including Biden's family and his Chief of Staff. Since the CCP has been in a cold war with the US since the 1950s, I hope it turns out well, but Trump/Pompeo had a clear strategy, and Biden doesn't.
As an illustration of what the CCP wants, consider rare earths or 5G. China has world-wide monopolies on those - but their goal is world-wide monopolies on everything, regardless of dumping rules.
Trump was the best and most productive US President in the past 75 years. Shame on the left for two baseless impeachments that prevented our leader from even accomplishing more.
You should know what you're talking about before posting screeds on HN. But then I could say the same thing about most of the left - it would be nice to have paradise on earth, but Marxism doesn't get you there.
Trump is an elite but paints himself as an everyman here to "drain the swamp". Being elite and a populist are not mutually exclusive if you can fool the public.
In complex legal issues involving lots of money, clients have a strong incentive to hire the very best lawyers. Even if a lawyer charges >$1000 per hour that's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall stakes. Thus top law firms play it safe and recruit from only top schools instead of taking a risk on lower tier candidates. So a winner-take-all outcome is completely rational and expected.
> the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence.
The author does not seem to understand that these are not mutually exclusive. You can receive a fantastic, genuinely excellent education that is also a competitive advantage. Indeed, they go hand in hand - I’d argue it’s harder to give an excellent education that’s somehow not advantageous.
This article is a rant against elite education because it enables elite opportunities. But perhaps there is something to be said for the students of such schools too, that employers are more likely to give them elite opportunities.
There are too many confounding variables to determine the true cause of this “problem”, if it (a merit-based system enabling social mobility) is problematic at all. There are things we can improve, but overall, the emphasis on education is a step in the right direction for humanity.
What about the rest of us? Should we just be just be shunted to the second, third, and fourth rungs of society because we didn’t have the right extracurriculars or only got a 1450 instead of a 1550? 99% of Americans have never attended and likely could not gain admittance to the top 20 schools, to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan the rest of us should not be crucified on a cross of Ivy.
So funny thing. I was doing some research into the “non traditional” programs at the top schools.
A handful have programs for people who have been outside of academic for some years, and allows them to earn the same undergrad degree.
However the same gpa and test score requirements are all in place and you’re still being judged by who you were at 17/18. I suppose the main difference is instead of looking at involvement in things like sports, student organizations, volunteering, etc. it’s looking at work experience or membership in professional organizations.
But at that point why not just have the apply as a normal undergrad?
It's extremely depressing. I really don't feel like I have much hope knowing I'll never be able to achieve anything because of who I was when I was in high school - it's even worse because I knew what I wanted in high school (Siemens, high school research, etc), but had no idea how to accomplish it.
You are not being “crucified” in any sense of the word. I guarantee you that there are still incredible opportunities available for second, third, etc place.
The current system encourages high levels of academic performance, which is precisely what our species needs to advance. There must be some sort of incentive.
It's abundantly clear that there aren't incredible opportunities on the second, third, fourth rung of society, speaking as someone that "lost" all of the meritocracy games. We get the message from everyone that we clearly do not matter.
For the record, I don't know how the average Yale graduate is "advancing our species" more than the average UMBC or UNC Wilmington graduate.
Are the second, third and fourth rungs so horrible? The bottom of the ladder is pretty bad, but people going to uni are unlikely to be on the bottom. As far as computer science goes, you can be a total fuck up and still easily live an upper middle class life.
The problem I personally felt was that the criteria used to filter out the people "not worthy of the degree" felt very detached from the idea of knowledge. The facts and methods required for minimal passing criteria felt very arbitrary and unless you were one of the people learning 100% of the subject it felt a lot like a system which needed to be gamed to get a good/passing grade. As soon as you need explicit and exact filters for grades and passing the learning resolves less around ideas and concepts and more about facts and techniques which is not what at least to me science and engineering is about.
I am going to paraphrase certain philosophy professor on one of those elite institutions.
That person [ who chooses to basically blow off the readings and learning and brags about how it does not affect his grade ] is an idiot. The purpose of going here is not to spend $60k a year of your parents money and learn nothing.
I am willing to agree. Each individual student has a choice. Some choose to learn. Some choose to waste their parent's sacrifice ( because they had to use their resources to get that offspring in ).
Something that keeps me up at night is my fear that I only studied computer science and became a programmer because of economic and status reasons. I do feel incredibly lucky to have the job and freedom I do, but it drains me. And now I feel it's such a specialized education and I didn't explore enough to know anything else, and so I have no idea if I would have liked something completely different.
You may not be in school any more, but you can still study whatever you want. I went the other direction: studied humanities in school, taught myself programming once I was working as a professional because I found it intriguing, and now I do this for a living. You have a whole lifetime. If you want to learn something, you can do it. Even Einstein got started in his spare time.
Hold on a second. While I totally support self-directed learning, "Even Einstein got started in his spare time" seems to suggest that he learned physics recreationally. My apologies if you did not intend this, but just to clarify, this is definitely not the case. He earned a PhD from the University of Zurich, which is about the most traditional path in theoretical physics education possible!
Einstein was 12 when he started learning calculus; the myth that he was bad at math as a child is just that (a myth).
Einstein didn't "get started in his spare time" - thoughts about the universe consumed him as a person, to the point where him being "absent minded" was because he was visualizing the universe; his love letters even contained frequent discussions of science. His brain was preserved after his death, and there's been actual work done by multiple groups, with indications he was structurally different than a normal brain.
Einstein did NOT just get started "in his spare time". At all.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say anything suggestive of that old myth that he was bad at math. My point was exactly what you were saying: he was thinking about and studying these things under his own direction at first.
I went the opposite, initially wanted humanities (history) but went into CS/Math for money. I ended up quitting after two years and just taking an associates (started at a community college,) but I wish I’d have stuck with humanities. I already knew programming from doing web design as a kid and trying to start a dozen companies so I didn’t learn much and I passed all my classes with flying colors despite hardly ever showing up and never paying attention. Not because I’m a genius but because I already knew CS 1&2 + data structures and I did Kham Academy up to Calc 2 as I was just interested in it personally (this I think aids your point that you don’t need school) but the one history class I took really had me. It’s the only place where I could talk about all the history I read and listen to where people knew some stuff to debate. Only time get to discuss history outside of Reddit these days is with “WW2 history buffs” which is like the Saturday morning cartoons of history.
For instance, I started re learning guitar and sax after almost a decade of playing neither. And unlike being a loser kid in band, as an adult, I fully recognize they're cool skills many people actually appreciate which makes it extra rewarding to practice in my free time.
MOOCs are really great for appeasing your FOMO in that area and giving you a more well-rounded education!
You can basically take 101 intro course of any field from great universities. And if you want to go deeper, the advances courses on a university's page usually have syllabus, with recommended readings etc.
I've been a developer since the 90s and I still occasionally experience that dread.
But then I remember the reason I love this profession - it allows us to gain deep insights into other fields that we wouldnt normally come into contact with. To build abstract models of real world systems, you have to understand them and understanding is the best form of learning. We naturally become experts in many diverse fields simply by modelling them.
Recently I was made redundant from a long term job and was very hesitant about applying for the cool hip roles that I knew were around, instead I timidly replied to a few linkedin recruiter emails. I was promptly offered jobs working for one of the big banks, online ordering for one of the supermarket chains, and a local government role.
After due consideration, I turned them down and started applying to projects in areas where my skills are needed but I have something to learn as well. Im not interested in retail banking or building another checkout widget for a generic online shopper.
I know way more about the inner workings of anaesthesiology, police procedures, virology, locksmithing, fintech, electoral processes, hotel chains, cruise lines and many other fields that I would never have given two thoughts about.
Software is a craft, and to deliver your products you have to be invited into the customers private space. I find that fascinating and very fulfilling.
Since this feels like it's responding to the common wisdom
/advice to "follow your passions" (and the fear that comes from missing out on this), I recommend reading Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You" for an alternative mindset which may provide an antidote to that class of worry.
(Also, consider that the freedom you gained from what is a pretty good career choice might afford you the free time to discover other things which bring you joy.)
I’m in the process of trying going back right now (for a non-CS STEM field). It’s going to be contrived and expensive as the education system really doesn’t seem to care for non traditional students (and much to my dismay is not as hackable as I had hoped).
Yes, I will come out in debt, yes I could make more money doing what I do now in the time it would take now, but I don’t particularly care.
From the schools I’m familiar with, there is a minimum number of credits you need to fulfill at that uni. That’s unavoidable.
Sometimes you can test out of courses; other times you can skip pre-reqs by getting the instructor’s permission to enroll.
I’ve finished my last 60 credits (well 4 credits remain this summer term) of a statistics degree at a Canadian uni by attending midterms and finals. I only attended 4 credits worth of classes because 1/3rd of the grade in one 3 credit class was due to in class participation. The 1 credit class was 2/3rds in class participation. The rest, I didn’t go to a single lecture.
I did that part-time while working full-time.
Obviously there are some (many) disadvantages, but I took courses with profs that stuck close to a textbook for the course and I took courses without lab components. 1 course is a humanities course this summer and the remaining courses were stats, math, or comp sci.
I’m not a hacker, so maybe it’s not hackable in the sense you mean.
I guess the “hackable” part is more or less according to my self imposed constraints along with the unbreakable bureaucracy of the admissions/aid process. Note many of these would not be an issue if I were interested in completing an undergrad degree in decade or so, but I would like to
Most of my initial research was into online programs. I was very surprised by the limited number of good programs offered by “legitimate” schools. These often charged prices that were simply too much even if I continued working full time. Part of this was many still charged out of state tuition rates for online programs (note I cannot even get in state tuition in my state of legal residence right now). Any sort of decent aid was out of the question for reasons that could their own thread. complete undergrad while I’m still in my 20s at least.
However I found a few programs that seemed to have a good quality and were affordable. The problem of course, could I be admitted. As someone who was not school minded when they were younger, I’m definitely not the type of material colleges would usually be interested in admitting. 2 year transfer programs are normally the answer for people like me, but at the time I was not aware of any online AA programs, and while community colleges do offer some evening courses, it could have easily increased the time-cost significantly as I can obviously only take one or two of those a semester and not all classes are offering in that time slot either. Instead, I gambled to see if I could “hack” undergrad admissions by utilizing my time in the industry as replacements for some other criteria. This did not pan out. In fact, of the programs I applied for, only one asked for a copy of my resume, while every one of them was extremely interested in my high school disciplinary record.
Most recently, I did some research and it seemed like I found some AA programs that are fully online in my state. They would guarantee me admission into a 4 year university, which I decided I would be ok to quit working to finish. Then a few days ago I got the acceptance into one of those AA programs only to get suspicious when I looked for certain courses which were certainly not online. As it comes, it seems a number of schools are very vague in whether the AA can be complete “fully online” some including hybrid courses in that definition. I’m not defeated yet as there are other schools which may offer truly online, asynchronous programs. This is important as I cannot get the loans at the moment to quit working and go back full time (in a few years that will likely change, which is why I was fine dropping work to finish the last two years)
TLDR: I’ve been hunting for ways to complete the degree I’m interested in non traditionally (a hack), but every time I’ve found one, it turns out to be too good to be true.
I have a (perhaps unpopular) pet theory that college as we know it going to cease to exist sometime in the next several decades. In its current direction it feels like it’s becoming more about gaming the system. Those who do the “best” are really just the best at looking like the best.
I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually. I’ll try an analogy—-it feels like college is social media and students are aspiring influencers, all jockeying to find the right aesthetic and be that perfect shining light with all the followers but it turns out they’re all optimizing to the same local max and end up as copies of copies of copies. In the end all their resumes look the same. A bit drab, sweeping, and cynical, admittedly, but that’s what I think.
Anyway, my theory is that with ubiquitous high speed Internet, remote work being more widely acceptable, and continued suburbanization, future generations will look less favorably at taking on a huge debt burden to attend in-person college and something _like_ highly niche online trade/vocational schools or guilds will become popular and widely acceptable as a substitute for a four year degree in certain positions.
>I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually.
I can absolutely identify with this. I've seen way too many class mates get way higher grades than me without even really knowing any of the concepts they're supposed to be showcasing. Meanwhile all I ever had was conflict with teachers.
My theory is that school is simply aimed to produce docile bodies that will do what is asked of them. The whole learning bit is just smoke and mirrors to fool you into thinking that it's useful.
> I have a (perhaps unpopular) pet theory that college as we know it going to cease to exist sometime in the next several decades.
This has been an on going prediction since, and likely before, television became a thing.
Universities are worthwhile because you're surrounded by other driven students. The social aspect is at least as important as the quality of educational instruction, and remote learning isn't going to replace that any time soon. It isn't even a good replacement for in-person instruction, but at least it's starting to become a workable alternative.
> future generations will look less favorably at taking on a huge debt burden to attend in-person college
I agree here, but it will likely mean that student pick less expensive universities or some other in-person alternative (e.g., in the states, community college for two years -> two years at a state university).
> college as we know it going to cease to exist sometime in the next several decades
Probably not because we live in a crony capitalist society now. It's well established at this point and not likely to change anytime very soon.
College began as a purely elitist cultural institution for the rich. Like all other technologies it was only adopted by the masses once the rich became more bored with it.
The only pre-middle-class-era attendees of University were the highly-religious attending theological schooling and the highly-genius (ala Newton).
In our crony capitalist society college represents a simple and profitable hamster-wheel class separator. The same percentage as has always been will be granted upward mobility while an increasing percentage will remain in place.
Until you convince average intelligence people that college will not grant them wealth, status, or success then they will flock in greater numbers to it like a lottery. They will willingly indebt themselves for a mere chance at a better life.
It's absolutely horrific and disgusting what our society has become. If only we could convince people to focus on strengthening the middle class and having a degree of contentment in life then we could get past the crab in a bucket mentalities that the University system breeds.
It's not unpopular at all. Watch Silicon Valley. The very first skit is Peter Gregory talking about why school is bad...this is the opposite message of Adam Sandler in Mr. Deeds.
I think you are right but I think that also is going to be part and parcel of traditional colleges changing. You absolutely cannot replace the role of college community nor tenured professors working with you in person. It, in my experience, doesn't translate to online. You need these people for mentorship and to offer constructive and informed criticism of your work. We as humans need the socialization so we don't turn into cranks.
HN and SV despise schooling sometimes, but we as a society don't progress without it being dominant in some form or fashion.
Funnily enough, that scene ends with some dude yelling "fascist!" and walking out. I never knew how uncannily accurate of a parody that stuff was until I started posting on HN.
Western Governors University has this really interesting test-based approach. If you pass the tests, you pass the class - however long that takes. You can get a degree just by passing tests, with out ever watching a lecture, even online. That doesn't get you the prestige of a "name" college, it doesn't get you the network of people, but it documents that you provably know your stuff. If I were a hiring manager, I could see regarding that as a plus over a traditional university.
The thing that WGU lacks is breadth of majors. I could see such a system replacing[1] traditional universities in the next couple of decades, but it has to expand to cover more majors, and it needs more than one school doing it. But if it happens, the way it's going to happen is by managers and recruiters realizing that it's better because it's provable.
[1] Well, such a system could replace traditional universities as a source of knowledge. It can't replace them as a source of contacts or a source of elite prestige. Traditional universities will probably survive on students who want those things.
In the Humanities, your theory is widely accepted.
Eidolon was an online Classics magazine that recently closed up shop. In their version of a 'fail essay', the head editor says the following about formal Classics education:
"I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment."
The rest of the essay is quite good and you should read it all. But the thesis is the same: Fixing higher education is insurmountable.
I want to note the author/editor, because I feel many of the people that read the essay may not have. Her name is Donna Zuckerberg. If that name rings a bell, it should. She is the sister of good ol' Mark Zuckerberg. One of the richest people in the history of mankind. That a woman of such extraordinary and astronomical privilege is saying that things are insurmountable (with experience in fighting against it) should lend even more credence to her words.
This kind of acacdemic rat race is very common in developing countries like India and China where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs.
For a long time, the US colleges avoided this competition mainly because the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great and being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. However now with the exorbitant college costs and the reduced career choices for non STEM majors means that American students have to become competitive right from the time they enter high school.
> where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs
And there it is.
This same phenomenon is also exactly the "leetcode phenomenon" that we see in the SE field, btw.
You could call it an Eastern culture thing, but your summation captures the why more accurately.
> being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle.
I imagine that up until the 80s and possibly even 90s this was an upper middle class guarantee.
> the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great
I have never seen it expressed this way but this is spot on. The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.
> The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.
And therefore shouldn't require the cost of a degree and the time of a degree. A lower-middle-class lifestyle wouldn't be nearly so bad if you had four more working years and no debt at the start...
Maybe someone on HN can answer this for me. Why are these articles about the American system written as if they are new developments. Nothing in this article sounds any different from how things were 50 years ago, and probably earlier. I am guessing that 1. more kids are going to college today than 50 years ago (that should be a good thing) and competing for spots at top schools (thus more competition) and 2. the American economy has not expanded to make use of this increased number of college graduates. I have no idea if that is true, though. Articles like these make it sound like the author is reporting on some great, newly discovered unfairness. But things have been this way in America for over at least half a century. The only obvious difference between then and now is perhaps that there's more people competing.
EDIT: Cheers for the answers. I am going to do some research on tuition increases at state universities, as well as the historical numbers on student borrowing. Any pointers to where I can find such data already compiled would be appreciated.
A few things have changed. College is no longer a tool of social mobility. It is table stakes to keep your current status. If you do not go to college, you are unlikely to stay within the middle class. People may cite plumbers but they don't make a fortune and the physical toll is quite serious.
Second, funding has been cut for public universities significantly. A lot of public universities charge tuition that is far more than it was 50-60 years ago. Ironically the expensive private schools are where you want to go for low cost college. They can afford to give full rides to a large portion of their population. Hence the competition.
People have gotten better at playing the game. It's like how chess ELO keeps going up. If you did SAT prep, was a nationally ranked fencer/golfer/tennis player, did volunteer work, founded a tech club and had a 95 average in the 80's, you'd have your pick of colleges. Much in the same way your average GM would kill if they were playing back in the 80's. These days you'd still do okay but you'd be competing against a larger pool of people who also did all of these things.
....... Does being a good golfer really matter for this in the US? I don't like pulling the "haha Americans weird" card but I'm glad my education does not depend on my golf game here in Europe.
Being a top golfer/fencer/rower/tennis player does not just serve as a signal of dedication and grit (otherwise being in the piano guild or running a 3hr marathon or being lead guitarist in a band would help just as much), but also as a proxy of parents being in the 0.1% of wealth - both because these are upper class pursuits and because they are generally expensive to train and find elite private lessons for.
And because of the culture of university endowments/donations, US elite universities massively chase the 0.1% unlike in other parts of the world.
> People may cite plumbers but they don't make a fortune and the physical toll is quite serious
The “trades” argument has always felt rather disingenuous to me. Sure you can maybe make money in many trades in a state with a strong union culture or if you own your own business (at which point I argue that the “business” aspect is bigger than the “trade”) one, but in most places I’ve lived, you’re making low 5 figures, maybe upper 5 figures if you have decades of work experience.
These are new developments. Like the sibling comment mentioned, state funding dried up after the turn of the millennium.
In addition, college is much, much more expensive as a whole, thus saddling these kids with debt that they foolishly take on because everyone kind of tells them they should go in debt for the prestige and opportunity. Last I read, the average student leaves school with $30,000 in student loans.
Class structures existed for centuries in America (despite being branded a classless society), but the difference now is that, because economic growth has been stagnant for 5 decades and running now (as you allude to), the middle classes have little hope of cracking into the sectors where the growth is occurring (like in high finance).
The key thing is there's nothing for these grads to do except compete with one another for a share of increasingly limited spots.
It's new in the sense that it's really the first time that Americans will have to acknowledge that one of the tool that was supposed to be the champion of social mobility (education) is no longer working well. And, that America will probably resemble the very thing it loathed: a sort of immobile society where your prospects will be increasingly determined by your parents position in society. Basically a lot like Britain, except with the veneer of American Exceptionalism.
There are certain topics that get reliable readers, despite having been true for the last 100 years or so. You can publish them on a slow news day. Stories like "the plight of the small farmer", "child care is awfully expensive", and so forth.
That's viewing things from the author's point of view, while I was suggesting the publisher's motive for wanting an article with this sort of theme. Ultimately the publisher is maximizing readership, and thus revenue.
Fascinating. I've been reading a bit of legal history about the U.S. and it's honestly a bit disturbing how long it's been like this at the top courts and political positions. It feels like there must be something distoetionary going on to ensure so many people from elite colleges end up with power.
Still it seems like there would be some incentive for a top performer to target colleges in the 2nd rung. That being, you could basically write your own ticket. Want to work on some interesting part of the law or join some specific project? At an elite school you will be fighting to get that. At one level down you can probably walk into whatever you want.
College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions.
Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.
Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.
Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).
Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
That really depends on what you mean by 'destiny.'
If you go to community college, work hard, and get decent grades you are more-or-less guaranteed a transfer spot at a good state school.
It's actually pretty easy to transfer from a California community college right into UCSD, UCLA, UCR, etc., and these are all excellent, affordable schools. Nowhere in that process do you have to take the SAT or the ACT. You just take college classes, and get college grades that show how you perform in college. You prove yourself by actually doing the thing the standardized test is supposed to evaluate.
I would propose that we look at tests not as the solution, but as another layer of bullshit hoops people have to jump through. Just get people bootstrapped into the damn thing at low-cost, and see how they perform. Evaluate them based on that. Being an SAT savant doesn't mean someone will actually be able to do anything meaningful in the real world.
Sure, that path may not guarantee you a spot at MIT, but if you come from a variety of backgrounds and have some humility about the whole thing you're going to be just fine and you will have more than enough control to steer your destiny in whatever direction your interests lead you.
Anecdotal, but all of my friends who make over $100k went to state schools for undergrad and grad school, and not going to Yale didn't seem to pose too much of an obstacle to them leading happy, productive, and fulfilling lives.
> Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives
Simply put, standardized tests would make sure that only rich people go to good schools.
> Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (
In the beginning, US colleges did not use standardized tests. A well-known racist who was against the "intermingling of races" created standardized tests to exclude races he did not like. And for the most part, it worked beautifully, except that too many Jews were getting in, so they added other criteria on top. The idea of standardized tests exists because of racism. It was recognized by its inventor to be a tool for racism and classism.
> Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions
That's not the R^2 of your SAT based on income; that's the R^2 of average scores within an income bucket. Predictability based on income is far, far lower with other factors more significant (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs5v3pv).
> The idea of standardized tests exists because of racism. It was recognized by its inventor to be a tool for racism and classism.
Huh? Prior to tests, schools were even more classist. Standardized tests have also been used in all sorts of societies historically explicitly to break class lines. i.e. the Chinese Imperial Examinations (created over 2,000 years ago) intentionally were created so that candidates were not just merely young aristocrats recommended by other aristocrats (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination).
> That's not the R^2 of your SAT based on income; that's the R^2 of average scores within an income bucket. Predictability based on income is far, far lower - in fact, in California at least, both student ethnicity and parental education is more predictive as far as background factors go (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs5v3pv).
You write that as if you disagree with my comment, but then you go on to agree with it. Scores are highly predictable from income and factors like race. Yes. That's what makes standardized tests not just worthless, it makes them classist and racist.
> Huh? Prior to tests, schools were even more classist.
This is why tests were introduced, schools were claiming to admit people based on skill. But then the "wrong" people showed up with skills. So they introduced tests. You should read the history of testing that I linked to before, it explains this very nicely.
> Standardized tests have also been used in all sorts of societies historically explicitly to break class lines. i.e. the Chinese Imperial Examinations (created over 2,000 years ago) intentionally were created so that candidates were not just merely young aristocrats recommended by other aristocrats (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination).
You should totally read a book on this. I suggest "Civil examinations and meritocracy in late imperial China" by Elman. The examinations were extremely onerous and required pretty deep pockets. The exams were a way to choose among elites. Just like standardized tests today!
> Of course, neither the history of testing or holistic admissions says anything about the actual value of them today.
The fact that scores are basically a proxy for income+race does say something about their actual value today. Zero. Let's stop building on the infrastructure of racism and oppression that those who came before up put up.
> Scores are highly predictable from income and factors like race. Yes. That's what makes standardized tests not just worthless, it makes them classist and racist.
Is there some aspect of standardized tests that makes the test easier for rich white kids while making it harder for others? If so the solution is to fix the test, not eliminate the test.
It should be expected that in a nation that prides itself as the land of opportunity, there will be some correlation between wealth and the genes you were born with. Hard work is important, but it is not the only determinant. Being born smart is a factor too, right? Smarter parents beget smarter kids. If so there will be some correlation between wealth of parents and how well the kids do in tests. Blaming that on some kind of bias in standardized tests is insane.
> Is there some aspect of standardized tests that makes the test easier for rich white kids while making it harder for others?
Rich white kids are less likely to have, for one of many examples, been deliberately exposed to toxic levels of lead by action of their state government.
There are a myriad of other unequally-distributed social and environmental impacts on cognitive function and academic ability, and evaluations of standardized testing tend to control for very few of them.
Standardized testing reveals uncorrected racial and economic injustice, it isn’t the source of it. Blaming standardized testing is a way of avoiding addressing the problems it reveals.
>Scores are highly predictable from income and factors like race. Yes. That's what makes standardized tests not just worthless, it makes them classist and racist.
Saying that "standarized test" is racist is some joke?
What's your alternative then?
>The fact that scores are basically a proxy for income+race does say something about their actual value today. Zero. Let's stop building on the infrastructure of racism and oppression that those who came before up put up.
Skew the odds then?
A lot of people do that, but it requires putting effort which in majority of the cases is what people lack - determination, desire and other.
> Saying that "standarized test" is racist is some joke?
A joke? It's deadly serious. Standardized tests help entrench racist ideas and keep the poor out of good opportunities.
> What's your alternative then?
Simple. If universities want government funding they must admit classes that accurately represent the socioeconomic conditions of the wider population. 1% of the class can be in the top 1% of the income bracket. If a university doesn't like this, that's fine, they can go their own way. They get 0 federal dollars and no federal backing for student loans that go there.
Let colleges figure this out. They're smart. You need to solve problems at the output level, what society you want. And we can all agree that the society we want is one where your skin color doesn't determine your fate.
>A joke? It's deadly serious. Standardized tests help entrench racist ideas and keep the poor out of good opportunities.
With Internet access I think you can overcome shitton, at least when it comes to english, math and similar like physics, computer science
Unless you're literally taking about poorest of the poorest who cannot even access internet.
>Simple. If universities want government funding they must admit classes that accurately represent the socioeconomic conditions of the wider population. 1% of the class can be in the top 1% of the income bracket. If a university doesn't like this, that's fine, they can go their own way. They get 0 federal dollars and no federal backing for student loans that go there.
I don't see it working in practice.
Even when there are standarized tests there is significant gap between top and bottom students, with your approach the gap will be even wider, thus it will decrease quality of classes unless you change system even more
and I guess that's what you want to do - change system even more.
So, how would you pick students?
let's say that 500 students that sit at top 50% income applied, how will you decide which will be accepted?
Also
What will happen to those top performing students that will not be accepted due to them being at top $$$?
Rejecting them in long run will cause your whole nation
> If universities want government funding they must admit classes that accurately represent the socioeconomic conditions of the wider population. 1% of the class can be in the top 1% of the income bracket.
That's insane. They are in the top 1% because of being smarter and because of hard work (especially in the US, where they are more likely to have made their wealth on their own than inherited it). Their children are likely to inherit some of these traits. Limiting the number of smart & hard working kids in universities will lead to a dumber nation.
> They are in the top 1% because of being smarter and because of hard work (especially in the US, where they are more likely to have made their wealth on their own than inherited it). Their children are likely to inherit some of these traits.
That is literally what racism is! White people mostly make up the top 1%, so we should give them more opportunities because they're in the top 1% because you think they're genetically superior? What you wrote is exactly how all of this insanity of scientific and rational racism started in the 1800s. How we ended up with standardized tests, IQ tests, phrenology, and eventually with Hitler and Stalin exterminating inferior people.
If you adopt your view, then you end up with a strictly racist and classist society. People at the top get their kids into the best schools because they have money and connections, those schools provide the best education and the best social connections, and the cycle continues forever.
No. The children of people in the top 1% are not predestined to be genetically superior. They are not some sort of ruling race. They are just people who happened to have been born to rich people.
No, it is the opposite of racism. Racism is when some people are treated differently just because of their race. When you do well because you're smarter and work harder, regardless of race, then that's the opposite of racism.
> White people mostly make up the top 1%, so we should give them more opportunities because they're in the top 1% because you think they're genetically superior?
You are putting words in my mouth.
> The children of people in the top 1% are not predestined to be genetically superior.
Your argument is with Charles Darwin, not me!
If the goal is to help people in lower socio-economic brackets, then the best way to do that is to make college free, not eliminate standardized tests. I see too many deserving students accepted into good colleges decide that they can't go because they can't afford it.
> No, it is the opposite of racism. Racism is when some people are treated differently just because of their race. When you do well because you're smarter and work harder, regardless of race, then that's the opposite of racism.
No.. when you say that the children of people in the top 1% who are overwhelmingly of one race should be given disproportionate opportunities because of some genetic factor, that is racism. It is literally saying "people of this race should be given more stuff"
> You are putting words in my mouth.
I am not. I repeated what you said. You said that the children of the 1% are somehow genetically superior. I pointed out that the 1% is overwhelmingly white. And I wrote down your beliefs. That white people are genetically superior.
That is the simple logical consequence of your beliefs. And it a chain of reasoning we have already followed right into slavery and concentration camps as a species. One that we should not follow again.
> Your argument is with Charles Darwin, not me!
Look back on that chain of inferences and think to yourself where you went wrong, how did your thoughts, that you consider innocent, lead to an extremely racist conclusion.
There are only two outcomes possible. Either you look at your chain of reasoning and its simple plain outcome "white people are genetically superior" which you seem to believe in, and you feel ok with that. In which case this is just plain racism. Or you look at it and realize that no there is something deeply wrong here. And you will find that the idea that your parents are wealthy somehow meaning that their children are genetically superior is bankrupt.
Your choice. Racism or changing your thought process.
> No.. when you say that the children of people in the top 1% who are overwhelmingly of one race should be given disproportionate opportunities because of some genetic factor, that is racism.
All I am saying is that if people who are in the top 1% got there because of being smarter and being willing to work hard, then to the extend these traits are heritable you should expect their children to have these traits as well. Such kids can be expected to do well in school. Should they be given disproportionate opportunities? Absolutely not. But if they do well in school do not assume that's because they have been given disproportionate opportunities!
> I pointed out that the 1% is overwhelmingly white. And I wrote down your beliefs. That white people are genetically superior.
Nonsense. I am not white, and I do not believe white people are genetically superior. I am Asian.
> All I am saying is that if people who are in the top 1% got there because of being smarter and being willing to work hard, then to the extend these traits are heritable you should expect their children to have these traits as well.
And that is literally racism.
The idea that the groups that are in power are there for a generic reason. It's precisely what people in the 1800s said. It's literally what fuels Nazis and the KKK.
All you are saying is something blatantly racist. I have no idea what else you want to me say to you?
If you want to sit here and defend racism then I'm out. But I hope you can live with yourself every morning that you can read Mein Kampf and recognize yourself.
>No. The children of people in the top 1% are not predestined to be genetically superior. They are not some sort of ruling race. They are just people who happened to have been born to rich people.
You act as if parents just paid some money and people could score anything they want on standarized tests.
It requires shitton of effort to score top 1%.
I knew people who if could, then would buy themselves $top_score easily, but on standarized tests they didnt/barely passed.
What do you mean by these terms? I'd argue that they only are if the results, conditional on future college performance, are biased by class or race. Are they? The article you linked doesn't say.
> The exams were a way to choose among elites. Just like standardized tests today!
What percent of students scoring over a 1500 on the SAT are from the top 1% of household earners? I doubt it is not a minority. There's obviously an income correlation, but it's far better than simply taking rich kids.
By racist and classist? That an identical child, who happens to be born poor or who happens to be born with a darker skin color, will have fewer opportunities and worse life outcomes.
That's literally what a racist society is. Where your skin color plays a large role in your fate.
> How do you propose selecting students?
Simple. We start with the society we want. One that is not racist and not classist. In other words, your skin color and the income of your parents should not play an overwhelming role in your life outcomes.
We tell universities that if they want any federal funding they must admit classes that accurately reflect US demographics. 1% of the incoming class is from the top 1% of earners. Same for socioeconomic status. Colleges can do whatever they want, if they don't like the deal, that's fine, but they get no federal funding and they get no federally-backed student loans.
You start with the outcomes you believe are just. And you set up incentives to get that outcome. That's literally what we do everywhere else. We tell car manufacturers that they need to make cars that have fewer emissions, we don't tell them how. They figure it out. Universities will figure out how to make this happen, they're full of smart people.
Yes, that's troublesome, but it is inherently impossible to solve this. Less poor parents generally educate their children better (or at least keep their children in better environments), so this is difficult if not impossible to correct. I ensure my preschooler does her reading lessons every night - poorer parents (on average) don't. How are you supposed to correct for this?
> or who happens to be born with a darker skin color
Huh? Are you in tech? If anything, the "darker" kids were performing better at the schools I attended growing up (in the Bay Area).
> We tell universities that if they want any federal funding they must admit classes that accurately reflect US demographics. 1% of the incoming class is from the top 1% of earners. Same for socioeconomic status.
Well, demographics is a bit arbitrary, so the only way to do this across whatever you are trying to measure is to run a US-wide lottery for every school.
This would functionally kill the concept of universities as tracked systems and I imagine it would be strictly better for all of the top schools to simply forgo federal funding to preserve their very purpose.
> That an identical child, who happens to be born poor or who happens to be born with a darker skin color, will have fewer opportunities and worse life outcomes.
Yes, your appearance does have an impact on life outcomes, that much is true. But standardized tests are not to blame. In fact, standardized tests are the solution, because the test doesn't know what you look like.
> 1% of the incoming class is from the top 1% of earners.
If the 1% of earners are in the 1% because of being smart and because of being hard working, and the children inherit these traits, why punish the children for that?
>Simple. We start with the society we want. One that is not racist and not classist. In other words, your skin color and the income of your parents should not play an overwhelming role in your life outcomes.
Should mbti types be represented in university equally 1/16, or proportionally to their demographics in the usa ?
What about in engineering ? Should mbti types be equally represented in all professions?
and should the us let immigrants in that match the current us demographic or the global demographic ? If global demographic, then eventually the us will be similar to the global demographic. If not, what point in time should the us demographic be frozen ?
What about remote workers, should they have the us demographic or the global demographic?
Well standardised tests seem to do badly at that, seeing that they're deliberately tweaking cutoffs to hinder certain groups. And reducing its wishes to exclude them.
Turns out discrimination doesn't apply to Asians, as far as universities go.
> Skeptics challenge test scores and rankings on their own terms. Most commonly, critics say that the SAT is culturally or racially biased and fails to predict college grades or future career success. The deeper issue is not that scores and rankings are bad at calibrating what they try to measure. Test scores and rankings are bad at capturing education:
SAT may not "capture education", but some tests certainly do. The key is to have free-form questions as in college, such as proofs, derivations, and word problems. I'm sure there will be false positives, but what system doesn't? I was checking out those college-entrance exams by Japanese universities. If a kid can excel those questions, the kid for sure gets real education and is smarter than most of her peers, statistically speaking. And I don't agree that everyone can game the system by cramming. It's like few people could get into USAMO by cramming. A well-designed test is like USAMO, but easier.
This obsession (disease) with brands seems to be accelerating in the USA, not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable professions, acceptable companies to work for (FAANG?), acceptable startup startup accelerators, perhaps it is an inevitability of a winner take all society. How can the richest country in the history of earth produce a mindset of scarcity in it's people, i think this is a failure of the economic/political system that needs to be corrected. I originally come from a country where they decide a persons future based on a test they take before they are 18, let me tell you that this society has not produced anything noteworthy in thousands of years. When you create conditions in a society where everyone must fit a mold, you essentially erase a large part of happiness and creativity that exists in a people.
I had some very smart and capable friends who exceled at school.
I did not, I dropped out for a variety of reasons.
But entering the workforce things changed.
I thrived, I easily solved problems, and enjoyed what I thought of as "real work".
Many of my friends did not. They seemed to thrive in the comfort of a syllabus, clear and defined paths to positive reinforcement, and status... but work isn't generally like that.
You're not told what to do, exactly how and to reproduce it, you need to find that out yourself, and you will fail, maybe often...
I had similar experiences with interns who when given an assignment and told they were to do their best and see what resources they could put together.... seemed lost without a specific set of step by step instructions...
Everyone did fine in the end, but the differences were striking to me.
Amusingly I think I'd love to go back to school now, I'd think much differently of it now than I did at the time.
I once did an analysis of the stress produced when the gear box ran full speed into the stops. My colleague looked it over, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" They weren't in the book, I derived them from principles. I.e. I wasn't trained to plug values into formulas, but how to get the formulas needed.
cont.
> Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give.
Look up the citations for this claim. It all seems like complete nonsense to me. AFAI can tell, they just pulled numbers out of thin air.
> The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking.
This seems to be the crux of the article. If only people would study humanities instead of science & engineering. Science & engineering isn't a real education.
I disagree.
I derive great pleasure from the engineering & science education I received in college. I haven't the slightest interest in French Literature, etc., and don't feel at all deprived for not being educated in it.
Respectfully, this is not the crux of the article.
The article is an examination of American cultural beliefs about meritocracy, our systems of meritocracy, and relevant societal effects.
In my opinion this quote is more representative of the “crux” of this particular piece,
“A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated.”
But I actually think that there’s quite a bit here and in Markovits’s other work. If you have a chance to take a break from your compiler work, I recommend a lecture he does called “The Meritocracy Trap” and perhaps also his conversation with Glenn Loury.
I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from):
"A scientist would fearlessly peer into the Gates of Hell if he thought it would advance his knowledge."
I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.
And besides, I don't see much elitism in S&E professions based on the college. Employers don't care if you hail from MIT or UW if you can get s*t done.
“I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college.”
I am currently pursuing a PhD in mathematics and studied computer science and mathematics in college, so I certainly don’t intend to disparage science majors, but I have a vague sense that attitudes about engineering degrees are different nowadays.
Out of interest I recently sat in on a graduate class which was supposed to be about complexity theory. On the first day the professor, who is an expert in the field, essentially told us “Complexity theory is trivial, you have a problem and you reduce it to another problem with an algorithm. Now, let me tell you what you have to do to get a software job at Amazon... You have to submit a paper every other semester to such and such conference etc...”
Whereas I wanted to read through the Knuth books, and learn compiler theory, and learn category theory and algebraic geometry etc..., but the climate didn’t seem to support that; outside of a small group of friends I found (and the math graduate students). The climate felt like what this guy’s YouTube channel projects: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=27C-TuJceeI
My friends at a different major public technical university bragged about attending career fairs and studying for coding interviews. It just feels almost devoid of what I imagined the academic spirit to be.
I know what you mean. It seems that STEM these days is loaded up with people who are in it only for the money. Back when I went to college, there was no such thing as billionaire engineers and scientists. STEM people were "nerds" and did not have nearly the status that doctors and lawyers did. People who went into STEM went into it with full knowledge that it was a low status profession. There were jokes about moms being bitterly disappointed that their progeny wanted to be nerds rather than doctors or lawyers.
I remember once a young lady trying to pick me up. She got around eventually asking me what I did for a living, and I said programming. Her interest evaporated the moment as that word left my mouth. (Her face and posture fell and she turned away.)
"Almost Live" relentlessly mocked engineers as being nerds and unable to get dates.
This all underwent a titanic shift once tech people suddenly started being billionaires and media darlings.
College is a mix of virtue signaling, a proof of analytical and other abilities, a learning environment. Employers want smart and capable people, best colleges produce the smartest and often most capable people. Roughly speaking there's a good match.
If we were all identical droids, authors like this would be most satisfied. That would completely eliminate inequality. And would ensure 100% (or 0%) social mobility, depending on how you look at it.
After 8 years of school there were exams (written and spoken) where person would be selected to go to 2 more years of school (equivalent of hi school) or if he performs poorly on exam, he can go to professional school for associated degree.
The person who goes to 2 more years of hi school, take exam again, and receive diploma.
Then the person can apply to any university, but to get there it was require to take another 4-5 exams, (entry exams) based on selected study subject. For example, if person decided to go to math/physics, it was required to pass 4 exams (2 for math, written and spoken) and 2 for physics.
Based on result, (average score from all entry exams) the person either accepted or not.
If he not accepted, he can repeat it next year or go for associated degree or some lower school.
It was very nice system, where everybody have a shot based on brain and knowledge, no matter from what school person was.
Another example of the corruption of the Russian system which I have heard (quite likely apocryphal) follows: a female student is taking an oral exam in front of her <whatever subject> teacher. (These exams are or can be one on one.) The teacher indicates that the student should unzip her dress or she will receive a low score. She is extremely uncomfortable but attempts to comply. The zipper gets stuck. She says “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t go any lower.” The teacher replies with “Then I can’t go higher than a 3!” (Exams in Russia are out of 5.)
You can complain about the SAT all you want (and I won’t defend it) but it doesn’t have that particular disadvantage.
But how do you get to bribe school officials so your kid, who obviously is entitled to go to MIT, gets in? You're telling me they have to actually work!?
What's sad actually about that is it was far more meritocratic than the current system in the US. Now it's just an extension of high school that honestly has become just as easy as most high school classes depending on where you go.
China also has an education system that’s supposed to be based on exam results, yet funny how the scions of high-level officials and billionaires usually end up at the most elite schools. Of course, it’s possible that they all got there on pure merit...
It’s usually just nepotism. I know a retired principal of an elite high school, and he’s full of stories of the shenanigans surrounding admissions. He would get calls from governors and mayors offering favors and applying pressure. He told me that half the buildings on the school campus were built as a result of accepting the children of high officials and rich businesspeople. In fact he once showed me a picture of the ornate gate of the school and said, “I call it the chicken gate, because it was the admission ticket of a kid whose family owned a chain of famous chicken restaurants.”
It's a little bit of a desperate attempt at meritocracy however. Affluent parents will still be able to generate systems where their kids get better scores. And 'better scores on exams' might be a very crude predictor of future skills, it's not remotely all encompassing. So 'selecting' for your elite on the basis of a few exams at age 18 is probably a bad idea.
Macron just announced the closure of the 'Grand Ecole' of Administration for this reason.
Basically, France (and Europe inc. UK) traded their Nobility for a more meritocratic system, i.e. Elite Schools, but the notion that 'all the power goes to kids from those schools' is a little ridiculous as well. (Edit: all the power does go to kids from those schools, that is ridiculous, I'm not saying the 'idea that this exists' is ridiculous).
And FYI even if the Soviet System was a little more flat ... in the current Western systems (with deep problems) there are scholarships aplenty for top students. It's just hard for young kids to internalize the importance of a good education. In high school, I really had no idea how important it would be.
Elite schools are worthwhile however, I wish early education were not so competitive, and, we didn't focus quite so much on the name brand of a school.
Elite schools are worthwhile if it isn't in it for the money like most (all?) elite schools in the US. In that regard the Soviet system were far superior.
No, the Soviet System was a complete failure from top to bottom, producing some great scientists is nice but a side show.
Using standardized tests from 14-21 to select leadership feels very meritocratic, but it's also very crude. Also there is the ugly notion that maybe the best way to lead a nation is not purely meritocratic.
American Ivy League, despite their follies, produce a ton of very high calibre people. So does the 2cnd tier and below that, it's possible to get a very decent education but less guarantees of exceptional outcomes.
Some industries are full of Ivy League grads but many are not.
Well, I agree that Soviet Union was failure from top to bottom (non-market economy and dictatorship can get you just so far). But with this said, it was possible to get excellent education in Soviet Union, and (with a lot of hard work) it was available to anyone.
Yes, if all you do is produce some good scientists, win a few gold medals, and your people starve in oppression and poverty, that is a pretty big failure.
Also, throughout that time and even now the US produces amazing scientists and also has the means for them to 'do stuff'.
FYI I'm not American, I understand these things are far from perfect. I'm mostly harking back to the notion of 'standardized test and ABC school as elite' is probably not so good. America is open enough that even though some industries are chock-a-block Ivy League, many are not.
I'm not saying that the soviet union was a paradise, far from it, just that its weird for someone to describe creating good scientists as a "failure" when talking about educational systems. That's not to say that it might not have other flaws, i just struggle to see how creating scientists itself is a flaw.
> the notion that 'all the power goes to kids from those schools' is a little ridiculous as well.
It's really not.
"As of November 2020, of the 55 prime ministers to date, 28 were educated at the University of Oxford (including 13 at Christ Church), and 14 at the University of Cambridge (including six at Trinity College)."
My implication was that 'all the power goes to this group, which is ridiculous' - not 'the idea that people have that all the power is concentrated there is a bad idea'.
> For example, if person decided to go to math/physics, it was required to pass 4 exams (2 for math, written and spoken) and 2 for physics.
I don't mean to derail, but what is a "spoken" math exam like? It sounds like my nightmare and I graduated with a STEM degree in a competitive program.
There were printed tickets that contains different question (typically 3) from all math coursed tough in school.
A person randomly picks the ticket (that were present, and questions unknow before you pick it) and was given time to answer the questions.
After that he sit face to face with person who take the exam (typically if was the professor form university) and explain him your answer, while examiner can ask you additional questions related to your answer, etc. Based on your answer he grades you.
In this system you cannot cheat the exam, since examiner will quickly realize if your answer were from cheat or you knew the subject.
Going by the experience of the Russian chemist that mentored me as a kid...
You stand in front of a few adults as a middle schooler. You have a chalkboard and chalk. They ask you to prove that n^2+1 is never divisible by 3. You do so with aplomb.
Decades later you ask an American middle schooler to do the same. He covers a ream of paper with attempts to find the right answer, and stares at you in confusion. You wonder if escaping the Soviet Union was worth dealing with lazy fools who can't already do calculus at 13.
I took oral math exams in Germany 15 years back when studying there for a year. In many ways I actually preferred it to written. A nice thing about oral exams is that it allows the professor to quite effectively determine your skills very quickly. If you're stuck at small parts, they can give you a hint. If you then just start rolling, you clearly knew the subject matter. Or if you don't understand an area very well, the professor can switch to another area. Maybe you happen to know other parts of the course very well, but the first thing the professor asks is in one of your weak areas. The professor can also drill down into specific subjects you understand well and give you more and more difficult and detailed questions that you've maybe never even thought about at all and help you through them.
I think the system is great. The main downside is that one-on-one tests just don't scale. But other than that, I wish they would be more common in undergraduate studies in the US.
Not familiar with old Russian system but there are oral exams for math in France when you apply to "École d'ingénieurs" (engineering school), and it still exists today:
It's basically like a coding whiteboard interview, but instead of being asked to invert a binary tree, you're asked a math question (proof of something, etc)
Like coding interviews in whiteboards for programmers... questions about math/physics/etc... and you have to answer them, and then write in the blackboard your solution. You get graded by solution + the way you explained things.
Written, are just like that, written tests, usually not multiple choice, (that is an american invention), but you have to show the work you did to get the result of the problem.
They can be easy or brutal, it very depends on how hard is the teach doing the 'interrogation' on you....
> In law, graduates of top-10 schools make on average half more than graduates of schools ranked 21 to 100
When you consider where the people who graduate from top-10 schools live, this is neither surprising nor impressive. Most of these law grads live in NYC/Chicago/DC/SF/LA or a handful of other expensive cities. They make good money — starting salaries are around $200k — but they also pay tons in rent, mortgages, private school bills, etc.
Compare this with a graduate of a 50-something ranked law school. This person probably lives in a city or town that where the cost of living is half of NYC/SF. They likely also work fewer hours than their top-10 counterparts. If they are making 2/3 of what a top-10 law grad is making, they're getting the better deal by far.
That's a weird wording: Half more would mean 50% more (so not double, but 1.5x)?
I think the real reason people willingly take on that Big City grind is to have a shot at making partner at a top firm (which would mean they make 10x more than their midwest prairie dweller counterparts).
Yes, it is very weird wording. It is also strange that the comparison omits graduates of schools ranked 11-20. Those schools are not as prestigious as the top-10, but their graduates (like me) go on to practice in the same expensive cities so their salaries are in the same order of magnitude.
Including this cohort in the comparison would have made the not-shocking 50% gap even less impressive.
> In law, for example, of the roughly 2,000 people admitted to the top-five law schools each year, no more than a smattering choose to enroll in a law school ranked outside the top 10.
Am I the only one whose parser is throwing a syntax error for this sentence? "People already admitted to top-5 law schools don't choose to go non-top-10 schools instead"?
The problem here is that you can't imagine students being admitted to top schools not wanting to go to other schools. That was his whole point, top schools are seen as such a superior choice that some people can't even imagine students choosing to go to lesser schools.
Is college still a thing? I sort of thought that it would at least start to die in the permanent-pandemic era. Right now even the elites look a lot like University of Phoenix Online, and I don’t think they’re ever going back to any meaningful physical experience. It sounds a lot more like a very expensive honorarium.
Divorced from learning? Let's say that it has been an open marriage for quite a while now. I leave it to the interested to look up Henry Adams's remarks on his student days at Harvard.
At least in the US, the university system has become another enormous mid upper-class handout scheme, much like healthcare. It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf.
Again as with healthcare, all you have to do is look at who got all the money from the cost of education hikes - where did it all go - over the past two decades. We know where it went, we know who got that money. There is nobody willing to do anything about it, the latest proposals are to just throw more money at the disaster (which will send the cost of education even higher), more de facto welfare handouts for an already well-off class of white collar parasites.
For both healthcare and college, a handout to whom?
> It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf.
By price fixing? You'd have a stronger point college is a racket because you need it to get a good job, and there aren't viable alternatives, though that implies more collusion between employers and colleges than there actually is.
> We know where it went, we know who got that money.
Again, this isn't obvious. Part of the increase in the price of college is because room, board, and amenities have gotten better, and easy access to student loans have accommodated this. This isn't a "handout," though.
Healthcare is somewhat similar in that the fee-for-service model led to higher costs, but it came about in a very natural way, and it's more about patient expectations and liability than handouts.
> There is nobody willing to do anything about it
Purdue hasn't raised tuition in 10 years. That's something.
The Jane Austen quote that starts this article is completely misread: she was being ironic. Her point was, why would a single man in possession of a fortune want a wife?
It is a little off topic but it is most discouraging to see a writer in the Atlantic make a mistake like that. Especially a professor...
This has become so culturally ingrained that people will casually shame a person for studying an Arts or Humanities degree. "Have fun working at McDonalds you idiot!"
I am very troubled by this. Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Local history, news and art you won't find on the internet. You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that. These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. As we squeeze these people down we lose our own selves. We need a generous public commitment to these things because they will probably never pay for themselves.
You don't need a humanities degree to document your local coal mine's history or contribute to your local art culture. You do need a STEM degree if you are going to serve your local community as e.g. a doctor or an engineer.
I'm not commenting on the relative value of the endeavors, just pointing out that there are opportunity costs associated with choosing a humanities degree over a STEM degree in our current environment.
I think you significantly underestimate the skills required when constructing history from primary sources. Unleashing someone on an archive without some library science education is very likely to result in a disorganized mess of documents. You need formal organization skills, some knowledge of document forensics and an understanding of standard document practices from the time you are studying.
Also, in order to write clearly you need a lot of years reading and writing practice. You can get that on your own but a humanities degree is going to get most people there faster.
Amateur historians are good to have around but you don't want to run the entire front line of primary source history gathering off them.
I'm not sure if you know this but as vast as wikipedia is, its content probably accounts for far less than 1% of the historical content that is out there.
A front line historian distills tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages into a lengthy dissertation or book. That document is likely too dense to be of much interest to you or I. But another historian writing popular history books might reference it and also use some of its citations to quickly find interesting primary sources.
In this way, a 500 page popular history book may be distilled from a hundred other 500 page books which themselves are distilled from thousands of pages of primary source material. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an archive. So it's not really the appropriate place to house anything but the most distilled of these products. Essentially, all the other material is not relevant. But it's necessary to produce the relevant stuff.
As an example, you can read the wikipedia on Lord Nelson. You'll find most of his major life events listed there. But if you buy even the lightest biography on the man you'll find much more. Why? Are the people curating Lord Nelson's page lazy for not including those details? Of course not. The Lord Nelson page is probably obnoxiously over edited. But there is probably more of a fight about what not to include than what to include. Because the article seeks to be a relevant encyclopedia entry not an exhaustive resource.
My town's coal mine history may warrant a brief mention on wikipedia but not much more than that. However, if someone were to start composing a book on say labor organizing in Western Washington state, they might be interest to consult our archive and the distilled work our historian has done. More importantly, if a historian invented an interesting mode of statistical analysis, having that raw data already partially curated could move them a long way forward. This happens pretty often. A historian comes up with a novel way to count some interesting historical phenomena and they can only do it because some enterprising local historians whiled away hours collecting specific relevant information.
Intesting discoveries about historical economies come from counting of mills and bridges and other mundane activities. The path travelled by important historical figures come from historians stitching together news items and diary entries gathered by a local obsessive historian. And so on.
Yeah, the lone lady that works at my local town's historical society: mapping death certificates to grave stones, reading old articles from our town paper and studying census records is a real revisionist.
If anything, the kind of people I'm talking about are the least political information workers you'll find. And honestly, there's a chance that the decimation of paying positions in their fields is contributing to the problem of badly research clickbait books. When you have to making yourself into an internet phenomena to sell your self published book rather than take a salary job at a local institution, your incentives are all aligned to do something sensational.
Edit: Just out of curiosity because I so often bump into complaints of this variety, what in your opinion is good history? Which historians or academic periods have produced "good history"? What techniques set those periods apart from today's historians?
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're looking for thoughtful, curious conversation here, not denunciatory rhetoric. I'm sure there are many interesting things you could share about your experiences. Please do that, rather than fulminating, when posting here.
No they aren't. They hold worthless knowledge that literally anybody capable of reading and writing can do. They aren't some sort of priestly class that are only allowed to read and edit Wikipedia pages. They just wasted time getting a degree in something that people only do for fun to satisfy they're curiosity. There is absolutely no skill in being able to read and write about something if everyone else is capable of reading and writing.
Even in a pre internet era those people are few and far between compared to the general population. On top of that, societies still go on without them. We don't need "seers" anymore for society. This isn't a primitive form of society.
People shouldn't be shamed for their choices, sure.
But there is a real mismatch in college, in that what most people want is an education that helps them get a good job, but colleges are unfortunately not optimized for that.
If there were another institution, that was as prestigious as college, but focused much more on providing students what they actually want (IE education for the purpose of getting a job), then I think that most people would choose that instead.
Unfortunately, modern day attempts to focus on job train, such as bootcamps and trade schools, are generally less rigorous, even if they are focused more on providing students what they want.
I do have an engineering degree, have worked as an engineer, and am still in at least a quasi-technical role. I also only semi-joke that the time I spent on student newspapers and the like undergrad has probably been more useful to me than a lot of the engineering courses I took for much of my career.
So 4,500 hours of college spent on stem and 500 hour spent on humanities makes you more prepared for the world than a 5,000:0 ratio. That is plausible. But extrapolating that a 0:5,000 ratio of a humanities degree (or even 500:4,500) is equally helpful or even better is very problematic.
(You do need writing skills to be a good engineer, but the "engineer" bit is hard to do without.)
>Busyness has become a badge of honor as elites boast of their workloads: A 2015 advertisement for The Wall Street Journal stated, “People who don’t have time make time to read The Wall Street Journal.”
It's the hustle culture of capitalism applied to every facet of life. If you're not productive every single moment, you're falling behind and your self worth deserves to decline because of it. We've eliminated any "slack" from our jobs, from our lives, from our relationships in pursuit of ever more efficiency. We procrastinate because we feel guilty about not being maximally productive 100% of the time, there's no room for honest slack, we have to self-flagellate. We can't enjoy our time off because we know that work is piling up in our absence, having slack staff to compensate would be a waste. Our time with friends has to be scheduled and planned so it doesn't get in the way of our productivity, there's no room for slack in our social activities. We do all of these things because if we fall behind our job might be on the chopping block when the shareholders decide to squeeze fractions of a percent out of the share price. If we lose our jobs we lose medical care, food, shelter, and more.
We could fix all of these things if we chose to make our society that way, but we find it preferable for one man's divorce to have global implications for dozens of organizations and charities, all the people who work for him, and all the people who depend his whims for aid.
There are a lot more of us than there are of them. The problem is that many people have been tricked into believing they are on the same side as the capital class.
A lot of invention and innovation in the past few decades is focused around doing more with less - e.g IKEA furniture made out of wood shavings vs. real wood years ago, apartments made more efficient and compact vs. big houses years ago, more biking and public transit vs. enough roads to fit everyone years ago.
My theory is that on a macro level, the world keeps getting more competitive because we keep on churning out babies and expect their living standards to be just as good as they always were. I am not blaming anyone for that, but obviously supporting 7.6bn people (2019) at a given living standard is much harder than supporting 6.1bn people (2000) and there's no sign of stopping. As the western population ages and the period of retirement becomes longer, this becomes even harder because they need more support than someone of working age. Humanity as a whole keeps pulling miracles out of hats to make us even more efficient in the resources we consume but of course it is going to get harder and harder to do so.
Economically speaking it is not necessarily a fact that more people will drive the living standard lower. That is basically a disproved 19th century theory. In fact, more people makes a healthy economy richer overall. Because in a healthy economy, each added person contributes more than their economic cost. This creates net wealth for the society.
Some of the problem we're seeing with costs is coming from the opposite of a decrease in footprint but from an increase. A small apartment seems cheaper and compared to a modern house it is. But a modern small apartment has many more requirements than even a mansion from 1890. The safety, environmental and equipment demands of a modern home of any kind are much greater.
On the other hand there has been a concerted effort to hold wages flat for the people at the bottom half of the income ladder. These two things taken together largely account for the perceived decline in quality of life for most people.
The key thing about the theory was that it was disproven when the industrial revolution took off. Incredible amounts of innovation and production in 2 centuries that did more for humanity's living standards than the previous millennium.
The key question is: what will power this sort of growth in the future? What sort of innovation will there be?
Malthus underrated the prospects of new technologies. The risk today is that we are overrating how impactful new technologies will be. This is the crux of the issue.
We don't explicitly need growth though. Average productivity is still what it is (very high) even without growth.
The thing growth gives you is the ability to increase the average person's standard of living without increasing their portion of the pie.
In other words, growth is how you can make people's lives better without redistribution. I think it's no coincidence that we've seen this period of slower growth in developed economies (aside from the 90s) at the same time we've seen stagnation in the standard of living. And also we see an increased interest in redistribution as an answer.
Actually, there's every sign of stopping. Look at population growth rates from the 1970s to now: in general, the wealthier you make a population, the less kids they have.
Exactly. The world population is expected to peak in the coming decades and then start declining slowly thereafter (presenting its own set of challenges).
The data very clearly shows the opposite: economic development and rising income levels are very strongly associated with decreasing number of children per mother.
Birth rates in nearly all the high income nations are below replacement. Most of the middle and low income countries are on the same path, with central Africa being a notable exception.
Before his dead Hans Rosling did some great talks about this sort of thing. I'd suggest watching at least one of them on youtube or such.
This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.
People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.