4 ms·

Every elite higher ed institute gets more qualified candidates than they are willing to accept. I don't see why open curriculum and testing/credentials are not

Every elite higher ed institute gets more qualified candidates than they are willing to accept. I don't see why open curriculum and testing/credentials are not a thing. Of course Comcast is going to try to setup barriers to entry to protect itself from competition. That's why we have institutions such as the FTC. But Non-profits or government-funded educational organizations doing the same is just evil, in my opinion. If I can self-study for even the MCAT and earn an elite score, should I not be allowed to take the required lab credits and then be eligible for great med school programs? Why should things like donations, private schools... Or conversely bad schools, having an abusive childhood, have any say in qualifying or disqualifying me? Is that not evil that it does? In a broader sense, shouldn't the goal be to extend a Stanford education opportunity to as many as possible? Not to limit it for reasons of maintaining prestige?

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Of course that should be the goal. But of course that isn't the goal - the goal is maintaining privilege and prestige, and enforcing economic segregation. There is no sense in which any of this is about genuine meritocracy, or is likely to be about meritocracy any time soon - because genuine meritocracy would be incredibly threatening politically, culturally, and financially.
- geezerjay 7y ago
  > But of course that isn't the goal - the goal is maintaining privilege and prestige, and enforcing economic segregation. I disagree. The "enforcing economic segregation" baseless assertion makes no sense at all. Those who invest so much time and effort and even money into a chance of enrolling in one of these institutions are, quite obviously, not motivated to oppressed the masses. They in fact share the same motivation as everyone in the world: increase the chances that their offspring has a good,successful life. > There is no sense in which any of this is about genuine meritocracy, or is likely to be about meritocracy any time soon This is another baseless assertion that makes no sense at all. Meritocracy is the core reason why enrolling in these institutions is such a competitive activity, and also why there is so much criticism targetting these back-door enrollments. Those who were admitted want their efforts and personal investment to mean something, and those who aspire to be admitted want to have a fair shot at it.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    Getting straight A's in high school is just about doing your homework. The SAT is I guess better, but still. I mean come on, the verbal section is just vocab memorization in the form of analogies. Extracurriculars, private schools, math tutors, legacy admissions... This all mostly comes from parents. If they want education and competition they'd open up their program to everyone. Instead, the competition is at the barrier to entry into the program.
    - SeanAppleby 7y ago
      I'd recommend reading Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. He argues that getting a high quality education is a good investment on average, but mostly not because it actually makes you better at anything, rather explicitly because it acts as a socioeconomic filter and subsequent signal. Evidence for this: - In college you learn things roughly linearly, taking in roughly the same amount of information each semester. There is a large effect on average income if you get a degree. If you go for seven semesters and then leave without a degree, there's no significant effect on earnings over having never gone at all. Surely you must have learned something while you were there, and if that information was valuable, it should have affected your earnings somehow. - If you test people on the information they learned in school they don't test much better on it than people that never took it, indicating both that they don't use it and don't have that skill anymore, despite still cashing in on the degree somehow in the way of earnings. - In scenarios where an education system has all at once added or subtracted a year from a degree program for everyone, the subsequent effect on degree holders was an order of magnitude smaller on the percent change in earnings of the degree receivers than it was on the percent change on time learning. (~2% change in earnings / 25% change in time in school) Basically, it seems that the labor market has to filter down resumes per application to a high-demand job somehow, and that we have very few actual high quality signals to do so, so we lean on signals for academic pedigree. This results in people with academic pedigree being disproportionately successful, which reinforces the impression that academic pedigree is a signal for someone who will be successful, and is further reinforced by biases towards hiring people like them. It might actually be that scaling our existing education system isn't very useful, and would just force the labor market to pick another, maybe even less meritocratic, signal to filter candidates on. If that's true, we might be better off targeting the problem of finding better signals for the labor market to filter on. It definitely has an ideological bent, but if you get past that the arguments are actually pretty compelling, and at least to me (as someone who works with the education system) look like the strongest arguments for the role education plays in our economic system.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Of course that should be the goal. But of course that isn't the goal - the goal is maintaining privilege and prestige, and enforcing economic segregation. There is no sense in which any of this is about genuine meritocracy, or is likely to be about meritocracy any time soon - because genuine meritocracy would be incredibly threatening politically, culturally, and financially.

geezerjay 7y ago
> But of course that isn't the goal - the goal is maintaining privilege and prestige, and enforcing economic segregation. I disagree. The "enforcing economic segregation" baseless assertion makes no sense at all. Those who invest so much time and effort and even money into a chance of enrolling in one of these institutions are, quite obviously, not motivated to oppressed the masses. They in fact share the same motivation as everyone in the world: increase the chances that their offspring has a good,successful life. > There is no sense in which any of this is about genuine meritocracy, or is likely to be about meritocracy any time soon This is another baseless assertion that makes no sense at all. Meritocracy is the core reason why enrolling in these institutions is such a competitive activity, and also why there is so much criticism targetting these back-door enrollments. Those who were admitted want their efforts and personal investment to mean something, and those who aspire to be admitted want to have a fair shot at it.
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Getting straight A's in high school is just about doing your homework. The SAT is I guess better, but still. I mean come on, the verbal section is just vocab memorization in the form of analogies. Extracurriculars, private schools, math tutors, legacy admissions... This all mostly comes from parents. If they want education and competition they'd open up their program to everyone. Instead, the competition is at the barrier to entry into the program.
  - SeanAppleby 7y ago
    I'd recommend reading Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. He argues that getting a high quality education is a good investment on average, but mostly not because it actually makes you better at anything, rather explicitly because it acts as a socioeconomic filter and subsequent signal. Evidence for this: - In college you learn things roughly linearly, taking in roughly the same amount of information each semester. There is a large effect on average income if you get a degree. If you go for seven semesters and then leave without a degree, there's no significant effect on earnings over having never gone at all. Surely you must have learned something while you were there, and if that information was valuable, it should have affected your earnings somehow. - If you test people on the information they learned in school they don't test much better on it than people that never took it, indicating both that they don't use it and don't have that skill anymore, despite still cashing in on the degree somehow in the way of earnings. - In scenarios where an education system has all at once added or subtracted a year from a degree program for everyone, the subsequent effect on degree holders was an order of magnitude smaller on the percent change in earnings of the degree receivers than it was on the percent change on time learning. (~2% change in earnings / 25% change in time in school) Basically, it seems that the labor market has to filter down resumes per application to a high-demand job somehow, and that we have very few actual high quality signals to do so, so we lean on signals for academic pedigree. This results in people with academic pedigree being disproportionately successful, which reinforces the impression that academic pedigree is a signal for someone who will be successful, and is further reinforced by biases towards hiring people like them. It might actually be that scaling our existing education system isn't very useful, and would just force the labor market to pick another, maybe even less meritocratic, signal to filter candidates on. If that's true, we might be better off targeting the problem of finding better signals for the labor market to filter on. It definitely has an ideological bent, but if you get past that the arguments are actually pretty compelling, and at least to me (as someone who works with the education system) look like the strongest arguments for the role education plays in our economic system.