17 ms·

College, Calculus, and the Problem with the SAT

74 points by kaboro 7y ago

jeffdavis 7y ago
This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school. Everyone needs to go. Everyone needs a degree to "get a job". It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives. If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time. If you want to heavily specialize, research, or otherwise go deeper; then go to university. Our policies should encourage following these practices. To start off, we need to fight grade inflation in high school so that it's a real signal for employers. Moving the problem of certification to college will just move the grade inflation problem there, not solve it. Then employers will want to see more credentials from a masters program or something. Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower performers just end up with more debt.
- mrlala 7y ago
  >If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. No advantage? Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty. Even if they don't directly use that specialty it in their future career, it's still useful. >The lower performers just end up with more debt. Hmm if only there was a way to solve something like that....
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    >Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty No, there is a large set of people who go to college to get the paper they need, and do not end up with any more broad of an education at all, or no more broad, possibly less, than work experience would have given them.
  - peterlk 7y ago
    This is only true in theory, not in practice. For example see the "education" that many student athletes obtain. As demand for college increases, and subsidies from the government continue, the incentive for colleges to offer a good education decreases. Going to college does not ensure broad knowledge or a quality education.
    - jschwartzi 7y ago
      Student athletes are such a narrow subset of the overall population of a college, that using them as an example doesn't really make any kind of case about whether subsidies help or hurt. Going to college doesn't ensure broad knowledge or a quality education, but it sure is a prerequisite to those things in this day and age. And we should try to give that opportunity to as many smart, motivated people as we can find in our country, irrespective of their ability to pay. The alternative is a return to deep class stratification. There's no guarantee that anyone will receive a quality education even at a quality school. Demanding that as a prerequisite to subsidies is like demanding that farmers not lose crops as a prerequisite to subsidizing corn.
  - TrackerFF 7y ago
    The intellectual gain is there, but sadly it is wasted on job tasks which are nor intellectually challenging, or even require the knowledge learned during college - EVEN if your education and job is in the same field. For example, a lot of regular/consumer banking jobs today require a college degree, but did not 15-20 years ago. The job has not changed; The people that work there still mainly help people with savings accounts, mortgages, loans, etc. But since there are so many applicants for these positions, you now need a Bachelors degree in Economics, Business Administration, or similar. I've seen job ads for bank greeters and receptionists that required a bachelors.
    - hellisothers 7y ago
      Man that is crazy but I guess it makes sense if the employer can be picky. It does go to show that college has become a signaling mechanism in addition to or instead of credentialing.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    > Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty. No. People inclined towards that kind of thing would go to college anyway. Compelling others to also go to college won't have those positive results unless the high school already failed them, in which case college is just a "sorry four years of your life were wasted, let's have a do-over". But it seems like the better answer is to fix broken high schools.
- mymythisisthis 7y ago
  We need to move to a 4 day work week, with 1 day of adult education. This way people get a chance to keep building their skills. Employers don't care about the worker; use them for 60hrs a week, fire them when no longer needed, pay minimum wage.
  - AndrasL 7y ago
    I think something like this would be a huge improvement on the current system. I could also see 3 month alternations between school and work - so that the learning is more closely tied to the real world. (Even if many of the classes, e.g., philosophy, sociology, may not be directly applicable.)
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    I think the idea is a good one in some ways. But I can also imagine some bad outcomes, like dragging things out a long time, and being responsible to two masters.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  "It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives. If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time." Some guy on the internet said 12 years is enough to get a good job so I guess its true? A number other than 12, the product of history and chance, must be a sinister plan to uh extend childhood indefinitely by some cabal for some mysterious reason. (Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to).
  - peterlk 7y ago
    I don't think that your response is in good faith. Not everyone wants to spend a third of their life in school. And I have proof that it is not necessary in all cases by the existence of at least one counterexample: I have a friend who did not receive a college degree. He is now a professional fabricator, and a better mechanical engineer than most of the mechanical engineers I went to school with
    - vincent-toups 7y ago
      I wasn't saying _everyone_ needs to have a greater than 12 year education. I was pointing out that 12 years is an arbitrary number to place so much faith in. It was formalized in an entirely different historical moment.
  - ocschwar 7y ago
    > (Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to). If they want to, sure. Hurrah for education-for-its-own-sake.
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    If 20+ years of school is what you want, go for it. But a lot of people want to move on sooner, and so we should use the first 12 years of education efficiently. High schools don't get to just pass the buck onto the college system for all the kids that they failed to educate. And students who don't use their HS opportunities well shouldn't have the excuse that they will just get a HS do-over in college (at taxpayer expense).
- gumby 7y ago
  > This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school. Everyone needs to go. You point out a shift never discussed: 40 years ago you could graduate and be prepared for middle class life and as a member of civic society (home ec, how to vote, etc) — for free! It was assumed that it was in everybody’s interest for everyone to have a reasonable baseline. Now the baseline preparation isn’t free, so a significant section (majority) of adults aren’t getting adequate preparation. Is that really what we want?
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    Maybe we should bring the baseline in high schools up? Maybe people should leave high school more prepared? Otherwise, you'll just be saying the same thing about the same students after college: they're unprepared. No. Time box your time to get prepared, and do it. Also, there is no such thing as free. Every year costs a year of your life, possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children.
    - willismichael 7y ago
      possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children You can have children while attending college. I did it, and I know plenty of other people that did it and it didn't ruin their life.
      - jeffdavis 7y ago
        True, but it's not for everyone and not without its own costs and complications. That's why I said "possibly". The main point is that nothing is really free, it's costing time, opportunities, etc.
      - sethammons 7y ago
        I had my first kid when I was fifteen. I'm doing alright, but I would not recommend it! Later is better. My former boss had his first kid at 40. He would not recommend it as earlier is better. The sweet spot is probably mid twenties for starting.
    - 7y ago
- linuxftw 7y ago
  There is a dogmatic belief that 'higher education' some some panacea around these parts. I personally think all grades across all levels of education should be pass/fail. This would give everyone a fair chance at competing, and job interviews would be based on your portfolio of work (or internships, etc), rather than HR gate-keeping of GPAs. Oh, you had to work in school so you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us? We need to start at the grass-level and remove Bachelors degrees as a credentialing requirement for as many positions as we can. Why should one have a Bachelors degree to become a CPA? Why can't you just attend a CPA trade school, or self-study? It's gate-keeping by the academic class.
  - hellisothers 7y ago
    I agree on trade schools, I imagine there is some sort of NIMBY like feelings from the existing establishment of CPA (or other groups) that wouldn’t want to see this happen. They’re used to working with “a certain type of person” and that type of person went to college. It’s like a nice neighborhood blocking public transit
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    > you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us? I get the cosmic justice sentiment behind this, but if there is somebody else who didn’t get any C’s, and that’s all they know about the two of you, how is it unreasonable for them to just pick the higher-on-paper achiever? If everybody had a 2.0 GPA, then employers would have to pick from somebody with a 2.0 GPA, but that’s not the case.
    - DanBC 7y ago
      Why bother with interviews if we can just pick those with highest scores from school?
      - commandlinefan 7y ago
        > Why bother with interviews Every time I participate in one I wonder the same thing.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Just a few nit-picks with what you're saying. >If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. One issue here is "advancement", "innovation", or whatever else you would like to label it as. Schools can't know when a student starts 7th or 8th grade, what technologies will be in use 10 or 20 years later. So schools have to teach general subjects that confer a broad foundation for later trainers to build on. That's just schools doing what makes sense. They can't teach tools and techniques that have a very good chance of not having been invented yet. The fact that employers are expecting employees to be able to use tools and techniques that are becoming more complex and requiring a bit more abstract thought to use with any sort of facility is exactly the reason employers are asking for college grads. They know there is no way anyone in high school could have been trained on a lot of those tools. Finally, none of this movement towards universal undergrad precludes high performers from going further in their educational pursuits. So in short, I do see the whole movement towards universal undergrads. I understand it from the perspective of employers. But I also see where people who maybe got undergrads before everyone had to have them might feel a bit hoodwinked. It's like they were told, "this is the advanced training." And now are learning, "No, that was just the normal training. You have to do more if you want to advance."
- smileysteve 7y ago
  > It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives. I agree with this; Somewhere where high schools started "college prep" curriculums, students forgot that they were working towards a job. A high school diploma means something; it signals you're trained in core subjects more than ~40% of peers who didn't graduate with one. You should have more job prospects that being a server or cashier as you have a formal education in professional writing and even complex math. I assume this was lost in the transition to "college prep" curriculum; where trade classes and apprenticeships in high school clearly show you are some degree of about to be an adult and able to enter the workforce in a trade.
- MarkMc 7y ago
  > If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time. The 'Everyone needs to get a degree' mentality is really just part of a long term trend: 100 years ago 6 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'. 50 years ago 10 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'. 25 years ago 12 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'. In another 25 years, 12 years of schooling will not be enough to get some generic 'good job'. > If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. A degree isn't just a way to give someone an advantage in a zero-sum game - it actually changes the way people think and makes them proficient at different types of work.
  - not_a_cop75 7y ago
    100 years ago, the industrial revolution was the only type of automation that existed. 50 years ago a computer was still potentially someone that did a math calculation. 25 years ago personal computers were just barely a thing. If you can understand how a computer works, and build one and write programs for it in 12 years, then you probably don't have need of any further need of education.
    - tudelo 7y ago
      You think that if somene know how a computer works, can build one, and write some basic programs that they have no further need of education?
      - helpPeople 7y ago
        If you can do this, you can make 60k per year. And this is low skill imo. We don't have people who are highly educated in useful things despite 16+ years of school.
        tudelo 7y ago
        We do have people who are highly educated doing useful things. This is so incredibly obvious that I am not sure what the purpose of your statement is.
- rexgallorum2 7y ago
  I would seriously rethink whether we need to subject young people to compulsory education at all. Mass education is a sacred cow that just doesn't want to die.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    A brief glance at history would seem to say otherwise. Uneducated masses are easy to control. It 'doesn't want to die' because it shouldn't. It's a vast improvement over how people loved their lives for the majority of our existence.
    - rexgallorum2 7y ago
      Education doesn't make the masses any more difficult to control. And it isn't an improvement over anything at all. That is just dogma. I knew my comment would get downvoted though. :P
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        Care to explain your reasoning? What you're saying doesn't make any sense on its face.
        rexgallorum2 7y ago
        I know it sounds strange, as it runs contrary to perceived wisdom on the subject. That is precisely why I question it. I would place the origin of this thinking in the crusading social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, or perhaps more broadly in Protestantism, and later, in emerging nationalist projects (with a few outliers of course). I think it is important to examine the origins of our ideas on compulsory education, and the crucial questions of what purpose an education system actually serves, what purpose it should serve, and how its purpose has changed over time. I would advocate a paradigm shift in how we think about education and its place in modern society. I am of course not the only person who advocates this, but I disagree with those who would carry on the tradition of imbuing education with a social and moral mission. I would not argue against the benefits of a broad humanistic education, or the necessity of technical and vocational education in an advanced economy, but rather point out that we collectively allocate a vast amount of resources to education, and place an almost religious faith in its value. The latter points are worthy of debate. I could write a book on the subject, and I've read quite a bit in the area over the years. I'd really love to continue with the historical side of things, as well as my own suggestions and reflections, but it's too much to properly explain here.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  I feel like an entire generation's brains got broken on the subject of education because they were lucky enough to be young when a new industry (web software) got off the ground that was simple and lucrative. So they saw a ton of opportunities to apply high-school-level thinking to entrepreneurship and make a lot of money. And they came to believe was the way the world normally works. It's not. The vast majority of worthwhile, well-paying jobs require significant education and/training after high school. Not because it's a credential game, but because society and work are complex. And it's getting more complex, not less. -- I'll also risk the opinion that there is more to life than work, and higher education has advantages for people far beyond their ability out-compete one another for corporate jobs. And I would argue, for society as a whole.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    I think 2 years post-HS education is probably optimal right now. Trade schools are often 2 years.
  - mrfredward 7y ago
    No one's brain is "broken" here. You're thinking on the individual level, the parent to your comment is looking at it from a societal level. Once someone can read, write, do arithmetic, it's more specialized skills that are needed. There are very few jobs where four years of studying history or political science is necessary. In most cases, a few months of training could do far more than four more years of general education. The value of a degree for most jobs is it shows an ability to learn. Ultimately, having people spend six figures to send this signal is making society worse off. Employers are looking for the qualities that make someone a good student far more than they are looking for experience criticizing ancient works of literature or solving systems of equations.
  - smileysteve 7y ago
    > jobs require significant education and/training after high school. To the parent's point; Many college degrees are "just a credential" at this point; and college degree or not, training still has to happen on the job. I see a trend of millennials (my generation) who go to school to go to school, get good grades to get good grades, not apply the education to the future. Then, there's no entry level jobs (because companies didn't have to train with a recession to get experience) and they jump between unskilled jobs they could have done with a GED or less. We can also see this with the industry survey the other week of employers saying colleges aren't preparing software developers. Higher education does have advantages for people beyond jobs; but only if they learn (not memorize) and apply it.
- bordercases 7y ago
  It offers no additional signalling advantage, but information gleaned from education will not be applied homogeneously across the economy.
- 40acres 7y ago
  > Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower performers just end up with more debt. The problem with this thinking is that it is individualistic, zero-sum, and reeks of "I got mine, fuck you". Society itself gains an advantage when the labor force has a higher level of education, it also contributes to economic dynamism. The major issue with higher education is the amount of debt that students face, aside from that hurdle we should be doing everything we can as a society to encourage students to consider higher education. This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    > This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years. Or perhaps high school should be teaching more advanced subjects. Compare US high school against the equivalent education level in Europe for example
    - DebtDeflation 7y ago
      The problem is that in the US we lump together multiple types of high school diplomas. In most school districts, you can specify either: 1) a College Prep track in which case you will take Algebra/Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus, Biology/Chemistry/Physics, World and American History, English Literature, etc. or 2) a General Ed track where you will take arithmetic, science, social studies, basically 4 more years of middle school. Both sets of students get the same diploma. In other countries you have things like A Levels to differentiate the high school diploma holders who took hard classes vs those that took dum-dum classes. Without that, you end up with an information asymmetry like the market for used cars.
- swasheck 7y ago
  your comment reminds me of this post: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
- bsanr2 7y ago
  The problem with keeping your scheme in high school is that you're then dealing with actual legal minors who are very close to home. You're essentially trying to track young people whose brains aren't even fully physically developed yet, and something tells me that the parents of those children are not going to take the systematic closing of doors of opportunity so lightly. I guess it kind of works in Europe and Japan. But then, Americans reject a lot of things that work in Europe and Japan.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives It literally is; the Blair government specifically had their 50%-go-to-university goal to monkey with youth unemployment figures.
ordinaryperson 7y ago
> "The most selective institutions, she found, spend a lot more on each undergraduate than other colleges do, and they give a significant boost in lifetime earnings, on average, to the students they enroll." OR rich kids tend to go to rich colleges (Harvard, Yale, Stanford) and were predisposed to high incomes anyway -- one study showed that rich kids WITHOUT college degrees earn more than poor kids WITH them [1]. > "It has more or less always been true that the SAT, on balance, benefits college applicants who already enjoy lots of financial and social advantages." Here's the problem with this analysis: what's the alternative? 50 years of education research no one's come up with a more meritocratic method than GPA + test scores. What, you going to rely on personal essays? And you think that's a fair, objective standard?? If not that, then what? Mandatory racial quotas like Carranza is trying to implement in NYC high schools? > "Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of their academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores." What was the sample size he interviewed? A cohort of ~3.3 mil students graduate high school every year and ~66% apply to college, so it's a total population of around 2.2 million students going to college every year. Did he get a representative sample size? I doubt it. Research has consistently shown the data with the highest correlation coefficient of first-year GPA (FGPA) in college are standardized test scores + GPA [2]. This should be common sense, there's obviously wildly different standards in high schools across America, GPA by itself is a noisy signal. > "If they lived in Michigan or Virginia or North Carolina, they would be unlikely to be admitted to their state’s flagship university. But in Texas, their hard work in high school earns them admission to the finest university in the state." Yes, but how many qualified out-of-state students were excluded from admission because of this system? If the goal was to admit a cohort of the most academically qualified student body then this system is, by definition, unfair and not meritocratic. Let me say I am very much pro-diversity. But a lot of what Paul Tough is selling here is wishful thinking -- essentially throwing out standardized testing in favor of high school curricula, which the research shows is uneven and not a meritocratic standard. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02/19/a-college-degree-is-worth-less-if-you-are-raised-poor/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02... [2] https://facultysenate.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2015/03/08-28-08_Academic-Success.pdf https://facultysenate.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
>And over the last couple of decades, there’s been a rapid but uneven growth of students taking AP Calculus in high school. Low-income students are much less likely to attend schools that offer AP Calculus—and then they often end up in freshman calculus at college sitting next to lots of well-off students who have already taken the equivalent of freshman calculus in high school. Complete anecdote here, but I did not take AP Calculus in high school. Many of my Calculus I classmates had taken AP Calculus in high school. However, taking AP Calculus in high school did not seem to provide them any advantages, in fact it seemed to disadvantage them. The issue was that they had learned the various formulas for derivatives, etc but had not gotten a deep appreciation for limits. At the college level, understanding and appreciating the concept of limits was much more important than memorizing formulas ( IIRC they actually provided the formulas for you during the test). Many of the students who had taken AP were frustrated when the problems were not amenable to a blind application of formulas, and required deeper understanding of limits.
- sct202 7y ago
  If they were in Cal 1 and had taken AP Calc, they probably didn't do particularly well on the AP test or they would have tested out.
  - brewdad 7y ago
    Some schools give generic credits but still require freshman students to take the "core" classes there. I'm pretty sure (it's been a few years) I got 6 credit hours towards graduation but still had to take Calc I and Freshman English. I did avoid having to take college level Spanish but I don't think I got any credit hours for it.
    - scarecrowbob 7y ago
      Well, when I was a student I tested out of the 2 freshman comp classes. When I was teaching Freshman Comp, it was routine for folks to test out of one or both. I dunno if that was a great idea, given the skills I was seeing on display from the students who had done that, but personally I did get the credit and was able to avoid the class.
newsreview1 7y ago
This is such an important topic. During my years in law school, I oversaw a volunteer mentoring program that brought 5th grade kids from a local Title 1 school into the law building and paired them with law student mentors who helped with homework for 1 hour a week. The year ended with the law students assisting the kids in a mock trial presentation. One of the aims of the program was to help these kids feel comfortable in a setting of Higher Education, and to give them the opportunity to associate with/ask questions of graduate students. Many of the kids had never been on a college campus, or came from homes where no other family member had attended college. The law professor who founded the program, Brett Scharffs, has written more extensively regarding the program, and his findings are much more than simply anecdotal regarding how programs such as these can give kids a leg up, or at least give them a vision of what "can be". I agree whole-heartedly with Paul Tough's statement that higher education and social mobility have become very intertwined.
opwieurposiu 7y ago
Why not skip college and just have a standardized test to get a degree?
- mymythisisthis 7y ago
  I think with some things this is possible. Start a school that is just about testing. Make sure it has a good reputation for catching cheaters. Post the passing grades online, with a photo of the student. Some people/employers just want written documentation.
  - enjoyyourlife 7y ago
    >Post the passing grades online, with a photo of the student This goes against FERPA.
- specialist 7y ago
  I very much support achievement based credentialing. Like earning an Eagle Scout. With two caveats. There still needs to be minimum hours invested. Skin in the game. Even someone with mastery over a topic must still do something constructive, useful, formative. Work on a project. Mentor, tutor others. Teachers assistant. Whatever. For undergraduate degrees, there still needs to be off topic study. Ethics, humanities, finger painting, banging the rocks together, study abroad, whatever. Anything to expose young minds to stuff outside of their own bubble.
  - specialist 7y ago
    I'm sad that at least two people prefer Taylorism (grades) over humanism (achievement).
  - travisoneill1 7y ago
    So you set an hour limit that is appropriate for the average person and ensure that 50% of people are not ready and the other half are wasting their time.
quaquaqua1 7y ago
In which the author, who dropped out of college, describes how Calculus is designed to be a "gatekeeper to college success for students", says that this is "good for student confidence", but also that he personally "wouldn't re-enroll and finish his BA". I graduated with a degree in history. I am now a front end developer. STEM classed and SATs are a hazing experiment. They are a distraction from getting a job and delivering value and enjoying life
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  I highly doubt either of those are hazing experiments. STEM knowledge (and indirectly, classes) are extremely relevant for many very important professions. The SATs were supposed to be a standardized way to gauge college-preparedness by colleges because GPAs are subject to many per-school disturbances (inflation, etc.) I would actually the SATs are outdated, but neither they nor STEM courses are "hazing experiments".
  - sampleinajar 7y ago
    I think the parent is maybe using hyperbolic language, but I think, at least from my direct experience and second hand accounts, it is fair to say that, especially entry level and foundational, courses in STEM in US universities are used to "thin the herd". At my state school O-Chem and Physics I contributed to high drop and repeat-take rates. These things sure feel like "hazing" especially when you are told and then experience that the upper division courses are nothing like that, and you are suddenly treated better, from an intellectual standpoint.
    - quaquaqua1 7y ago
      This is exactly what I was trying to convey. Additionally, how crazy is it that I am able to work in an analytical capacity as a Software Engineer despite never having taken such difficult courses. The notion that I can't ever in my life do technical work because I didn't pay $3,000 each for a B- in Orgo or Calc I or Intro to Comp Sci? Laughable.
williamDafoe 7y ago
These people are trying to create an American cultural revolution, like China's, in the 1960s. My son went to the toughest high school in California. He didn't become a national merit commended student because "oh Californians are just simply smarter than Iowans so we have moved the goalposts for California kids". He scored 34 on the ACT = 1500 on the SAT because of hard work and sacrifice but he wasn't allowed into ANY "selective" schools because "oh your ZIP code indicates you are privileged and you must have crammed for the SAT. And hey did you hear the news? The SAT means nothing! ". He only did 4 hours of homework per night but was in a school district which educated kids from arguably the #1 University in the USA so the competition was stiff. He was embarrassed and shamed by his friends for having a B+ GPA. He was forced to go to a state school 3000 miles away which accepts 70% of applicants - at huge tuition cost - because it was a backwards state school not implementing "The new cultural revolution!". He applied to 12 schools - none "most selective", none "extremely selective", 1 "highly selective", and 9 "moderately selective" and was admitted to 2 of the lowest schools on the "moderately selective" list. The next rank lower is "admits everyone". Meanwhile I know parents who pulled their kids out of the toughest high school because class rank is THE ONLY THING that universities care about. They sent their kid to a low income school and their achievement test scores plummeted. Their strategy was to "win by slackibg," in the new cultural revolution! This is so they could get into Harvard and so that Harvard could feel good about itself and assuage its white guilt. My son's dad is self made, losing his own dad at age 13. The dad took many financial risks and moved twice to be in better school districts, to challenge the son. His mom came from dirt in China (daughter of a hotel maid). Their hard work has been classified as "privileged background" by virtue of their zip code. The parents inherited $50k total and were both self made and lived like paupers until age 35 to advance their educations, then took high risk unstable jobs to catch up in life...
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  The national merit scholar thing is stupid on many axes. For one, its just a formula on your SAT score, we already have an SAT score, why is there some official entity awarding prizes based on a simple function of that score? Colleges can use whatever function they want. The whole thing should go away.
ahi 7y ago
I really wish I hadn't taken AP Calculus in high school. I sort of got it, but it wasn't intense enough to really grab me and my study habits were non-existent. I took multi-variable calculus as a freshman and was mostly in over my head despite my B+/A- (thanks curve!), and that was it for me and math. Definitely contributes to my impostor syndrome when doing anything more computer sciencey than a CRUD app.
- non-entity 7y ago
  I took AP calc in high school, but paid 0 attention and basically plugged all problems into a solver and passed with a mediocre grade. I didn't even end up going to school after that. > Definitely contributes to my impostor syndrome when doing anything more computer sciencey than a CRUD app. Agreed, I've started working on low level side projects that involve more math and theory and often find I kicking myself for not caring in school and not furthering my education
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Well, it’s never too late, you know! I stumbled through my own CS degree putting as little effort into the math classes as possible - I saw them as a roadblock/filter I had to get through rather than anything particularly useful. Then, a few years after graduation I was doing some graphics work and I had to create a block arrow that could orient itself in any direction. I started working through the calculations to determine the slope of a line and the slope of the perpendicular line and I kept thinking, “man, I know I learned this in algebra, I sure wish I remembered any of it…”. So I picked up a used algebra textbook and read through it and worked some examples until I understood it. I’ve been re-making my way back up through my math education that way on and off for years (I’m up to differential equations now) and it’s actually sort of pleasant since I can take as long as I want or just put it away and come back to it later when I feel like it. I get some odd glances from people when I pull out a calculus textbook (“are you taking a class or something?”), but I understand it all _way_ better than I ever did as an undergraduate. Plus which, I’m able to help my kids with their math homework because all this stuff is actually fresh in my mind.
- 7y ago
vincent-toups 7y ago
My view is that everyone should study calculus more or less for the same reason we almost all study Shakespeare or The Bill of Rights or whatever. Its an enormous human accomplishment whose cultural impact virtually cannot be overstated and a basic understanding of these sorts of things is the birthright of every human being alive.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  > Its an enormous human accomplishment whose cultural impact virtually cannot be overstated That's just your opinion. I think Shakespeare is trash. I don't think most people can even comprehend the Bill of Rights. We should replace Shakespeare with Super Mario. Outside of socialite circles, literally no one cares about Shakespeare. How many kids you see walking around in Shakespeare T-shirts or reading Shakespeare on the school bus? Those kids are into Super Mario, and so are many adults. Super Mario is the embodiment of art, international relations, technology and engineering of the sum-total of humanity at the time. Shakespeare is just some words.
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    I'm rolling my eyes so hard they could fall out of my head. You can only form an opinion about Shakespeare (or Mario (though the kids are into Fortnight these days, they tell me)) if you are exposed to them. Both things have enormous cultural importance and are part of the human experience and all people deserve to be able to engage critically in culture. Shakespeare very well could be trash. The Bill of Rights is by and large a shockingly hypocritical document. But both are part of our history, along with a lot of other stuff about which we could say all sorts of things visa vi what ought to be in a curriculum. But my point is that humans deserve to know their history and their culture and that takes resources and time and energy which are, in the final analysis, justified by the inherent dignity and rights of people.
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      > But both are part of our history Shakespeare is not part of my history, I'm not English, nor am I anglo-american. Shakespeare was never important, only popular, but that's easily confused in the US. Just one of the first generations of celebrity-worship culture. > humans deserve to know their history and their culture People get culture from family and society, not from government run schools.
mreome 7y ago
This article also illustrates what is clearly the biggest problem with standardized testing... those stupid tiny desks! Does anyone in the photo from the article look remotely comfortable? How are you supposed to focus on the material in a potentially-life-altering test when your adult sized body is crammed into a chair arguably sized for someone in middle-school, with your writing work-space only slightly larger (or possibly even smaller) then your papers and shoved directly against your body?
MarkMc 7y ago
"Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of their academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores." I have to admit I'm surprised by this, but it seems to be backed up by research: "As SAT scores are a more consistent indicator of aptitude, one might expect them to better predict a student’s chances of graduating college than high school GPA. But Chingos’ research shows exactly the opposite." [0] By the way, I enjoyed reading Paul Tough's previous book "How Children Succeed" - if you are curious, here is a great excerpt from that book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721868 [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-predicts-college-completion-high-school-gpa-beats-sat-score/#cff67ba4b09f https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-...
- travisoneill1 7y ago
  The SAT score buckets in the analysis max out at >1100 so not very useful. The grade buckets are also not very useful as the top range 3.67 - 4.00 probably includes > 50% of students at most schools (thanks, grade inflation). It also fails to adjust for college difficulty. Students in the >1100 bucket are obviously going to more difficult schools than the <800 bucket.
- AcerbicZero 7y ago
  I had a similar surprise when I first saw that data, but it does look to be solid. The conclusions drawn from it, leave a little more to be desired, as I think these newer studies seem to forget that there have been numerous studies regarding SAT/ACT's and GPA as predictors for college success. I'm not an expert on this topic, so I googled a few older studies, (and skimmed them). The trend of SAT/ACTs being relatively good predictors for college GPA's seems to continue up until around 2008, at which point it starts to diverge more appreciably. (2001) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2a8/25cfc687ce1be8be48a693f08c8caf5da4f6.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2a8/25cfc687ce1be8be48a693... (2003) https://eml.berkeley.edu/~jrothst/publications/rothstein_sat_jmetrics2004.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~jrothst/publications/rothstein_sat... (2006) https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563073.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563073.pdf (2008) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289608000603 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... There are tons of variables to all of this, but its a hard sell to suggest that SAT's have always been poor predictors of college GPA. To me, it seems more likely that changes to both the testing and to the way colleges are run over the past ~30+ years is likely the root cause. College was already like glorified HS when I was there, I can only imagine how bad its gotten over the past few years. And if college is copying high school, is it really surprising that HS GPA is aligning with college GPA's?
maehwasu 7y ago
“In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of economic insecurity.” How the hell do you “interrogate” an abstract proposition? We may as well not even have words if we’re going to use them this thoughtlessly.
viburnum 7y ago
The idea was, "hey, there are a lot of people whose lives are too hard, but college grads seem alright, so let's make everybody college grads." But the actual situation was that there were only so many good lives to go around, and college just sorted out who got them. The obvious thing to do is directly improve life for all people, not doing some kind of trick bank shot to indirectly improve lives. Instead we have baristas with $60,000 in college debt. We ran this giant experiment to see to what extent college was productivity enhancing or merely a sorting mechanism. The results are in.
- orbifold 7y ago
  Well the kind of obvious explanation for that is that success in life is probably strongly determined by intelligence. So when ~10% of the population went to college there was a high chance that those were also approximately the 10% smartest of a generation. If lots more people go to college now, that just means that it ceases to be a good predictor of success.
  - tudelo 7y ago
    I mean, you could probably just sort further via what field they pursue...
  - petermcneeley 7y ago
    When you see people with stem Masters and PhDs working as highschool teachers you begin to wonder if the problem is intelligence. Or when people with PhDs in bio/Chem are working as programmers you wonder if it's a question of talent.
    - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
      The problem is that we decided to inflate education prices while deflating labor prices. You can't do both at the same time and get sane results, because each individual needs to make their labor price correspond to their (former) education price. So you wind up with Biochem PhDs working as programmers. Neither biochemistry nor programming is for stupid people, per se, but programming hires loads of people at salaries actually commensurate with the monetized value of the time-investment spent getting a doctorate, while actual biochemistry, the field of the doctorate, has emphasized cheap labor.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> dominated by students from wealthy families. SAT prep might be correlated, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I grew up in the poor suburbs of Detroit, and nobody was talking about college when I was a kid. I’d say 3/4 of the kids I went to primary school with didn’t even apply to college. Now that I’m in the “wealthy” suburbs of Dallas, though, the kids that my kids go to school (and my kids) have been talking about college admissions since they were in elementary. If you grow up with parents who went to college and who can probably afford to send you to one, it’s just part of the atmosphere.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  Absolutely, this is something I've been saying for ages. People from upper middle and upper-class families know what it takes to land a prestigious job at the banks / law firms / consulting firms / etc. Chances are they themselves work at such firms, or that family members / friends do. Kids naturally want to do what their parents or other mentors do, so they get exposure to those professions early on, just by association. The parents will start investing early on, and depending on where you live, it can start already at pre-school age. Sounds ridiculous, but that's how it is in some circles. So by the time they're 13, they know how important grades are, along with the correct extracurricular activities. Everything is laid out for the kids to succeed and maximize their chance at top schools - which in turn feeds them into the professional world. I'm from a very rural place myself, where like 5% of my HS class went college or university - and it could go years between students that went to prestigious schools, and even less that joined the ranks of investment banks, HF, PE, management consulting firms, biglaw or boutiques, etc. By luck I got in touch with a good mentor that had worked in high-finance for years, and had the same type of background as me. His advice was for me to play the "country boy from nowhere, trying to make it big in the city" image, because it was so removed from the homogeneous mass you'd see in the financial district. Firms love to prop up people like that for PR and hiring. "Look at us, our hiring is so diverse and inclusive - here's our analyst form a third-world country, here's our minority, here's our first gen college grad! ...But never mind that 80% of our hires share the same socio-economic background..." When I got accepted into a top school which feeds students into finance and consulting, I immediately noticed that the majority of kids came from the same wealthy areas. Had to forego a ton of off-campus student activities, because I couldn't cough up hundreds to thousands of bucks for skiing trips at luxury resorts, sailing events, etc.
falcor84 7y ago
The article mentions Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as examples of people who succeeded without college, but I find that to be absurd. Being accepted into Harvard and then intentionally dropping out after 2 years is all the difference in the world from never applying to college.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  Not to mentioned that they could afford to try and fail. It's been discussed to death, but the sad fact of life is that a lot of elite students from unresourceful simply can't take the chance on playing the startup game. They don't have the money, and can't risk potentially throwing away 5-10 years on a pipe dream (statistically speaking). Rich kids with money and connections can afford that. They can graduate from HYPS, try to startup route, and if all fails - no worries, they can always go back to the traditional career route, albeit a bit delayed. Ask a first gen HYPS student from low or lower middle-class what their plans are; Probably not a 12-month "ideating" leisure trip to SV on their family money.
  - wmp56 7y ago
    I'm afraid I have to disagree. The key ingredient is unusually high IQ, not money. If I had a choice between being born with a very high IQ or in a moderately wealthy family (10s of millions), I'd choose the 1st without thinking. The family money rather reduce chances of striking success because they make people lazy from childhood. A 12 month trip to SV gives exactly nothing by itself. We could randomly select 1000 college grads, give them 100k and send them to SV for 1 year. The success rate will be 0.0%. What really helps on the SV path is (1) very high intelligence and (2) real industry experience. If you have the former, you can get the latter by joining one of the few known firms and spend there a decade. Then use your savings and connections to try your own idea. I don't see how family money help to skip that decade of experience or how they help to become smart.

74 points by kaboro 7y ago

This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school. Everyone needs to go. Everyone needs a degree to "get a job". It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives. If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time. If you want to heavily specialize, research, or otherwise go deeper; then go to university. Our policies should encourage following these practices. To start off, we need to fight grade inflation in high school so that it's a real signal for employers. Moving the problem of certification to college will just move the grade inflation problem there, not solve it. Then employers will want to see more credentials from a masters program or something. Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower performers just end up with more debt.

mrlala 7y ago
>If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. No advantage? Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty. Even if they don't directly use that specialty it in their future career, it's still useful. >The lower performers just end up with more debt. Hmm if only there was a way to solve something like that....
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  >Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty No, there is a large set of people who go to college to get the paper they need, and do not end up with any more broad of an education at all, or no more broad, possibly less, than work experience would have given them.
- peterlk 7y ago
  This is only true in theory, not in practice. For example see the "education" that many student athletes obtain. As demand for college increases, and subsidies from the government continue, the incentive for colleges to offer a good education decreases. Going to college does not ensure broad knowledge or a quality education.
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    Student athletes are such a narrow subset of the overall population of a college, that using them as an example doesn't really make any kind of case about whether subsidies help or hurt. Going to college doesn't ensure broad knowledge or a quality education, but it sure is a prerequisite to those things in this day and age. And we should try to give that opportunity to as many smart, motivated people as we can find in our country, irrespective of their ability to pay. The alternative is a return to deep class stratification. There's no guarantee that anyone will receive a quality education even at a quality school. Demanding that as a prerequisite to subsidies is like demanding that farmers not lose crops as a prerequisite to subsidizing corn.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  The intellectual gain is there, but sadly it is wasted on job tasks which are nor intellectually challenging, or even require the knowledge learned during college - EVEN if your education and job is in the same field. For example, a lot of regular/consumer banking jobs today require a college degree, but did not 15-20 years ago. The job has not changed; The people that work there still mainly help people with savings accounts, mortgages, loans, etc. But since there are so many applicants for these positions, you now need a Bachelors degree in Economics, Business Administration, or similar. I've seen job ads for bank greeters and receptionists that required a bachelors.
  - hellisothers 7y ago
    Man that is crazy but I guess it makes sense if the employer can be picky. It does go to show that college has become a signaling mechanism in addition to or instead of credentialing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  > Everyone would have a much broader education including a specialty. No. People inclined towards that kind of thing would go to college anyway. Compelling others to also go to college won't have those positive results unless the high school already failed them, in which case college is just a "sorry four years of your life were wasted, let's have a do-over". But it seems like the better answer is to fix broken high schools.
mymythisisthis 7y ago
We need to move to a 4 day work week, with 1 day of adult education. This way people get a chance to keep building their skills. Employers don't care about the worker; use them for 60hrs a week, fire them when no longer needed, pay minimum wage.
- AndrasL 7y ago
  I think something like this would be a huge improvement on the current system. I could also see 3 month alternations between school and work - so that the learning is more closely tied to the real world. (Even if many of the classes, e.g., philosophy, sociology, may not be directly applicable.)
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  I think the idea is a good one in some ways. But I can also imagine some bad outcomes, like dragging things out a long time, and being responsible to two masters.
vincent-toups 7y ago
"It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives. If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time." Some guy on the internet said 12 years is enough to get a good job so I guess its true? A number other than 12, the product of history and chance, must be a sinister plan to uh extend childhood indefinitely by some cabal for some mysterious reason. (Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to).
- peterlk 7y ago
  I don't think that your response is in good faith. Not everyone wants to spend a third of their life in school. And I have proof that it is not necessary in all cases by the existence of at least one counterexample: I have a friend who did not receive a college degree. He is now a professional fabricator, and a better mechanical engineer than most of the mechanical engineers I went to school with
  - vincent-toups 7y ago
    I wasn't saying _everyone_ needs to have a greater than 12 year education. I was pointing out that 12 years is an arbitrary number to place so much faith in. It was formalized in an entirely different historical moment.
- ocschwar 7y ago
  > (Full disclosure, I went to school till I was 28. It fucking ruled and I think everyone should do it if they want to). If they want to, sure. Hurrah for education-for-its-own-sake.
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  If 20+ years of school is what you want, go for it. But a lot of people want to move on sooner, and so we should use the first 12 years of education efficiently. High schools don't get to just pass the buck onto the college system for all the kids that they failed to educate. And students who don't use their HS opportunities well shouldn't have the excuse that they will just get a HS do-over in college (at taxpayer expense).
gumby 7y ago
> This is all just leading to college becoming four more years of high school. Everyone needs to go. You point out a shift never discussed: 40 years ago you could graduate and be prepared for middle class life and as a member of civic society (home ec, how to vote, etc) — for free! It was assumed that it was in everybody’s interest for everyone to have a reasonable baseline. Now the baseline preparation isn’t free, so a significant section (majority) of adults aren’t getting adequate preparation. Is that really what we want?
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  Maybe we should bring the baseline in high schools up? Maybe people should leave high school more prepared? Otherwise, you'll just be saying the same thing about the same students after college: they're unprepared. No. Time box your time to get prepared, and do it. Also, there is no such thing as free. Every year costs a year of your life, possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children.
  - willismichael 7y ago
    possibly disrupting your chances to have biological children You can have children while attending college. I did it, and I know plenty of other people that did it and it didn't ruin their life.
    - jeffdavis 7y ago
      True, but it's not for everyone and not without its own costs and complications. That's why I said "possibly". The main point is that nothing is really free, it's costing time, opportunities, etc.
    - sethammons 7y ago
      I had my first kid when I was fifteen. I'm doing alright, but I would not recommend it! Later is better. My former boss had his first kid at 40. He would not recommend it as earlier is better. The sweet spot is probably mid twenties for starting.
  - 7y ago
linuxftw 7y ago
There is a dogmatic belief that 'higher education' some some panacea around these parts. I personally think all grades across all levels of education should be pass/fail. This would give everyone a fair chance at competing, and job interviews would be based on your portfolio of work (or internships, etc), rather than HR gate-keeping of GPAs. Oh, you had to work in school so you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us? We need to start at the grass-level and remove Bachelors degrees as a credentialing requirement for as many positions as we can. Why should one have a Bachelors degree to become a CPA? Why can't you just attend a CPA trade school, or self-study? It's gate-keeping by the academic class.
- hellisothers 7y ago
  I agree on trade schools, I imagine there is some sort of NIMBY like feelings from the existing establishment of CPA (or other groups) that wouldn’t want to see this happen. They’re used to working with “a certain type of person” and that type of person went to college. It’s like a nice neighborhood blocking public transit
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > you got a couple C's in stupid-filler-class, guess you're not good enough to work for us? I get the cosmic justice sentiment behind this, but if there is somebody else who didn’t get any C’s, and that’s all they know about the two of you, how is it unreasonable for them to just pick the higher-on-paper achiever? If everybody had a 2.0 GPA, then employers would have to pick from somebody with a 2.0 GPA, but that’s not the case.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    Why bother with interviews if we can just pick those with highest scores from school?
    - commandlinefan 7y ago
      > Why bother with interviews Every time I participate in one I wonder the same thing.
bilbo0s 7y ago
Just a few nit-picks with what you're saying. >If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. One issue here is "advancement", "innovation", or whatever else you would like to label it as. Schools can't know when a student starts 7th or 8th grade, what technologies will be in use 10 or 20 years later. So schools have to teach general subjects that confer a broad foundation for later trainers to build on. That's just schools doing what makes sense. They can't teach tools and techniques that have a very good chance of not having been invented yet. The fact that employers are expecting employees to be able to use tools and techniques that are becoming more complex and requiring a bit more abstract thought to use with any sort of facility is exactly the reason employers are asking for college grads. They know there is no way anyone in high school could have been trained on a lot of those tools. Finally, none of this movement towards universal undergrad precludes high performers from going further in their educational pursuits. So in short, I do see the whole movement towards universal undergrads. I understand it from the perspective of employers. But I also see where people who maybe got undergrads before everyone had to have them might feel a bit hoodwinked. It's like they were told, "this is the advanced training." And now are learning, "No, that was just the normal training. You have to do more if you want to advance."
smileysteve 7y ago
> It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives. I agree with this; Somewhere where high schools started "college prep" curriculums, students forgot that they were working towards a job. A high school diploma means something; it signals you're trained in core subjects more than ~40% of peers who didn't graduate with one. You should have more job prospects that being a server or cashier as you have a formal education in professional writing and even complex math. I assume this was lost in the transition to "college prep" curriculum; where trade classes and apprenticeships in high school clearly show you are some degree of about to be an adult and able to enter the workforce in a trade.
MarkMc 7y ago
> If you need to just get some generic "good job", then the answer is to learn what you need in the first twelve years of school. I think that's enough time. The 'Everyone needs to get a degree' mentality is really just part of a long term trend: 100 years ago 6 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'. 50 years ago 10 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'. 25 years ago 12 years of schooling was enough to get some generic 'good job'. In another 25 years, 12 years of schooling will not be enough to get some generic 'good job'. > If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. A degree isn't just a way to give someone an advantage in a zero-sum game - it actually changes the way people think and makes them proficient at different types of work.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  100 years ago, the industrial revolution was the only type of automation that existed. 50 years ago a computer was still potentially someone that did a math calculation. 25 years ago personal computers were just barely a thing. If you can understand how a computer works, and build one and write programs for it in 12 years, then you probably don't have need of any further need of education.
  - tudelo 7y ago
    You think that if somene know how a computer works, can build one, and write some basic programs that they have no further need of education?
    - helpPeople 7y ago
      If you can do this, you can make 60k per year. And this is low skill imo. We don't have people who are highly educated in useful things despite 16+ years of school.
      - tudelo 7y ago
        We do have people who are highly educated doing useful things. This is so incredibly obvious that I am not sure what the purpose of your statement is.
rexgallorum2 7y ago
I would seriously rethink whether we need to subject young people to compulsory education at all. Mass education is a sacred cow that just doesn't want to die.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  A brief glance at history would seem to say otherwise. Uneducated masses are easy to control. It 'doesn't want to die' because it shouldn't. It's a vast improvement over how people loved their lives for the majority of our existence.
  - rexgallorum2 7y ago
    Education doesn't make the masses any more difficult to control. And it isn't an improvement over anything at all. That is just dogma. I knew my comment would get downvoted though. :P
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Care to explain your reasoning? What you're saying doesn't make any sense on its face.
      - rexgallorum2 7y ago
        I know it sounds strange, as it runs contrary to perceived wisdom on the subject. That is precisely why I question it. I would place the origin of this thinking in the crusading social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, or perhaps more broadly in Protestantism, and later, in emerging nationalist projects (with a few outliers of course). I think it is important to examine the origins of our ideas on compulsory education, and the crucial questions of what purpose an education system actually serves, what purpose it should serve, and how its purpose has changed over time. I would advocate a paradigm shift in how we think about education and its place in modern society. I am of course not the only person who advocates this, but I disagree with those who would carry on the tradition of imbuing education with a social and moral mission. I would not argue against the benefits of a broad humanistic education, or the necessity of technical and vocational education in an advanced economy, but rather point out that we collectively allocate a vast amount of resources to education, and place an almost religious faith in its value. The latter points are worthy of debate. I could write a book on the subject, and I've read quite a bit in the area over the years. I'd really love to continue with the historical side of things, as well as my own suggestions and reflections, but it's too much to properly explain here.
snowwrestler 7y ago
I feel like an entire generation's brains got broken on the subject of education because they were lucky enough to be young when a new industry (web software) got off the ground that was simple and lucrative. So they saw a ton of opportunities to apply high-school-level thinking to entrepreneurship and make a lot of money. And they came to believe was the way the world normally works. It's not. The vast majority of worthwhile, well-paying jobs require significant education and/training after high school. Not because it's a credential game, but because society and work are complex. And it's getting more complex, not less. -- I'll also risk the opinion that there is more to life than work, and higher education has advantages for people far beyond their ability out-compete one another for corporate jobs. And I would argue, for society as a whole.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  I think 2 years post-HS education is probably optimal right now. Trade schools are often 2 years.
- mrfredward 7y ago
  No one's brain is "broken" here. You're thinking on the individual level, the parent to your comment is looking at it from a societal level. Once someone can read, write, do arithmetic, it's more specialized skills that are needed. There are very few jobs where four years of studying history or political science is necessary. In most cases, a few months of training could do far more than four more years of general education. The value of a degree for most jobs is it shows an ability to learn. Ultimately, having people spend six figures to send this signal is making society worse off. Employers are looking for the qualities that make someone a good student far more than they are looking for experience criticizing ancient works of literature or solving systems of equations.
- smileysteve 7y ago
  > jobs require significant education and/training after high school. To the parent's point; Many college degrees are "just a credential" at this point; and college degree or not, training still has to happen on the job. I see a trend of millennials (my generation) who go to school to go to school, get good grades to get good grades, not apply the education to the future. Then, there's no entry level jobs (because companies didn't have to train with a recession to get experience) and they jump between unskilled jobs they could have done with a GED or less. We can also see this with the industry survey the other week of employers saying colleges aren't preparing software developers. Higher education does have advantages for people beyond jobs; but only if they learn (not memorize) and apply it.
bordercases 7y ago
It offers no additional signalling advantage, but information gleaned from education will not be applied homogeneously across the economy.
40acres 7y ago
> Don't you see? If everyone has a degree, it offers no advantage. The lower performers just end up with more debt. The problem with this thinking is that it is individualistic, zero-sum, and reeks of "I got mine, fuck you". Society itself gains an advantage when the labor force has a higher level of education, it also contributes to economic dynamism. The major issue with higher education is the amount of debt that students face, aside from that hurdle we should be doing everything we can as a society to encourage students to consider higher education. This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years.
- inetknght 7y ago
  > This isn't the 50s anymore, you can't build the economy on folks with a high school degree who get a union job at a factory for 30 years. Or perhaps high school should be teaching more advanced subjects. Compare US high school against the equivalent education level in Europe for example
  - DebtDeflation 7y ago
    The problem is that in the US we lump together multiple types of high school diplomas. In most school districts, you can specify either: 1) a College Prep track in which case you will take Algebra/Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus, Biology/Chemistry/Physics, World and American History, English Literature, etc. or 2) a General Ed track where you will take arithmetic, science, social studies, basically 4 more years of middle school. Both sets of students get the same diploma. In other countries you have things like A Levels to differentiate the high school diploma holders who took hard classes vs those that took dum-dum classes. Without that, you end up with an information asymmetry like the market for used cars.
swasheck 7y ago
your comment reminds me of this post: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
bsanr2 7y ago
The problem with keeping your scheme in high school is that you're then dealing with actual legal minors who are very close to home. You're essentially trying to track young people whose brains aren't even fully physically developed yet, and something tells me that the parents of those children are not going to take the systematic closing of doors of opportunity so lightly. I guess it kind of works in Europe and Japan. But then, Americans reject a lot of things that work in Europe and Japan.
goatinaboat 7y ago
It all seems like a giant plan to prevent people from starting their adult lives It literally is; the Blair government specifically had their 50%-go-to-university goal to monkey with youth unemployment figures.

ordinaryperson 7y ago

> "The most selective institutions, she found, spend a lot more on each undergraduate than other colleges do, and they give a significant boost in lifetime earnings, on average, to the students they enroll." OR rich kids tend to go to rich colleges (Harvard, Yale, Stanford) and were predisposed to high incomes anyway -- one study showed that rich kids WITHOUT college degrees earn more than poor kids WITH them [1]. > "It has more or less always been true that the SAT, on balance, benefits college applicants who already enjoy lots of financial and social advantages." Here's the problem with this analysis: what's the alternative? 50 years of education research no one's come up with a more meritocratic method than GPA + test scores. What, you going to rely on personal essays? And you think that's a fair, objective standard?? If not that, then what? Mandatory racial quotas like Carranza is trying to implement in NYC high schools? > "Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of their academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores." What was the sample size he interviewed? A cohort of ~3.3 mil students graduate high school every year and ~66% apply to college, so it's a total population of around 2.2 million students going to college every year. Did he get a representative sample size? I doubt it. Research has consistently shown the data with the highest correlation coefficient of first-year GPA (FGPA) in college are standardized test scores + GPA [2]. This should be common sense, there's obviously wildly different standards in high schools across America, GPA by itself is a noisy signal. > "If they lived in Michigan or Virginia or North Carolina, they would be unlikely to be admitted to their state’s flagship university. But in Texas, their hard work in high school earns them admission to the finest university in the state." Yes, but how many qualified out-of-state students were excluded from admission because of this system? If the goal was to admit a cohort of the most academically qualified student body then this system is, by definition, unfair and not meritocratic. Let me say I am very much pro-diversity. But a lot of what Paul Tough is selling here is wishful thinking -- essentially throwing out standardized testing in favor of high school curricula, which the research shows is uneven and not a meritocratic standard. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02/19/a-college-degree-is-worth-less-if-you-are-raised-poor/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02... [2] https://facultysenate.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2015/03/08-28-08_Academic-Success.pdf https://facultysenate.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

>And over the last couple of decades, there’s been a rapid but uneven growth of students taking AP Calculus in high school. Low-income students are much less likely to attend schools that offer AP Calculus—and then they often end up in freshman calculus at college sitting next to lots of well-off students who have already taken the equivalent of freshman calculus in high school. Complete anecdote here, but I did not take AP Calculus in high school. Many of my Calculus I classmates had taken AP Calculus in high school. However, taking AP Calculus in high school did not seem to provide them any advantages, in fact it seemed to disadvantage them. The issue was that they had learned the various formulas for derivatives, etc but had not gotten a deep appreciation for limits. At the college level, understanding and appreciating the concept of limits was much more important than memorizing formulas ( IIRC they actually provided the formulas for you during the test). Many of the students who had taken AP were frustrated when the problems were not amenable to a blind application of formulas, and required deeper understanding of limits.

sct202 7y ago
If they were in Cal 1 and had taken AP Calc, they probably didn't do particularly well on the AP test or they would have tested out.
- brewdad 7y ago
  Some schools give generic credits but still require freshman students to take the "core" classes there. I'm pretty sure (it's been a few years) I got 6 credit hours towards graduation but still had to take Calc I and Freshman English. I did avoid having to take college level Spanish but I don't think I got any credit hours for it.
  - scarecrowbob 7y ago
    Well, when I was a student I tested out of the 2 freshman comp classes. When I was teaching Freshman Comp, it was routine for folks to test out of one or both. I dunno if that was a great idea, given the skills I was seeing on display from the students who had done that, but personally I did get the credit and was able to avoid the class.

newsreview1 7y ago

This is such an important topic. During my years in law school, I oversaw a volunteer mentoring program that brought 5th grade kids from a local Title 1 school into the law building and paired them with law student mentors who helped with homework for 1 hour a week. The year ended with the law students assisting the kids in a mock trial presentation. One of the aims of the program was to help these kids feel comfortable in a setting of Higher Education, and to give them the opportunity to associate with/ask questions of graduate students. Many of the kids had never been on a college campus, or came from homes where no other family member had attended college. The law professor who founded the program, Brett Scharffs, has written more extensively regarding the program, and his findings are much more than simply anecdotal regarding how programs such as these can give kids a leg up, or at least give them a vision of what "can be". I agree whole-heartedly with Paul Tough's statement that higher education and social mobility have become very intertwined.

opwieurposiu 7y ago

Why not skip college and just have a standardized test to get a degree?

mymythisisthis 7y ago
I think with some things this is possible. Start a school that is just about testing. Make sure it has a good reputation for catching cheaters. Post the passing grades online, with a photo of the student. Some people/employers just want written documentation.
- enjoyyourlife 7y ago
  >Post the passing grades online, with a photo of the student This goes against FERPA.
specialist 7y ago
I very much support achievement based credentialing. Like earning an Eagle Scout. With two caveats. There still needs to be minimum hours invested. Skin in the game. Even someone with mastery over a topic must still do something constructive, useful, formative. Work on a project. Mentor, tutor others. Teachers assistant. Whatever. For undergraduate degrees, there still needs to be off topic study. Ethics, humanities, finger painting, banging the rocks together, study abroad, whatever. Anything to expose young minds to stuff outside of their own bubble.
- specialist 7y ago
  I'm sad that at least two people prefer Taylorism (grades) over humanism (achievement).
- travisoneill1 7y ago
  So you set an hour limit that is appropriate for the average person and ensure that 50% of people are not ready and the other half are wasting their time.

quaquaqua1 7y ago

In which the author, who dropped out of college, describes how Calculus is designed to be a "gatekeeper to college success for students", says that this is "good for student confidence", but also that he personally "wouldn't re-enroll and finish his BA". I graduated with a degree in history. I am now a front end developer. STEM classed and SATs are a hazing experiment. They are a distraction from getting a job and delivering value and enjoying life

Ancalagon 7y ago
I highly doubt either of those are hazing experiments. STEM knowledge (and indirectly, classes) are extremely relevant for many very important professions. The SATs were supposed to be a standardized way to gauge college-preparedness by colleges because GPAs are subject to many per-school disturbances (inflation, etc.) I would actually the SATs are outdated, but neither they nor STEM courses are "hazing experiments".
- sampleinajar 7y ago
  I think the parent is maybe using hyperbolic language, but I think, at least from my direct experience and second hand accounts, it is fair to say that, especially entry level and foundational, courses in STEM in US universities are used to "thin the herd". At my state school O-Chem and Physics I contributed to high drop and repeat-take rates. These things sure feel like "hazing" especially when you are told and then experience that the upper division courses are nothing like that, and you are suddenly treated better, from an intellectual standpoint.
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    This is exactly what I was trying to convey. Additionally, how crazy is it that I am able to work in an analytical capacity as a Software Engineer despite never having taken such difficult courses. The notion that I can't ever in my life do technical work because I didn't pay $3,000 each for a B- in Orgo or Calc I or Intro to Comp Sci? Laughable.

williamDafoe 7y ago

These people are trying to create an American cultural revolution, like China's, in the 1960s. My son went to the toughest high school in California. He didn't become a national merit commended student because "oh Californians are just simply smarter than Iowans so we have moved the goalposts for California kids". He scored 34 on the ACT = 1500 on the SAT because of hard work and sacrifice but he wasn't allowed into ANY "selective" schools because "oh your ZIP code indicates you are privileged and you must have crammed for the SAT. And hey did you hear the news? The SAT means nothing! ". He only did 4 hours of homework per night but was in a school district which educated kids from arguably the #1 University in the USA so the competition was stiff. He was embarrassed and shamed by his friends for having a B+ GPA. He was forced to go to a state school 3000 miles away which accepts 70% of applicants - at huge tuition cost - because it was a backwards state school not implementing "The new cultural revolution!". He applied to 12 schools - none "most selective", none "extremely selective", 1 "highly selective", and 9 "moderately selective" and was admitted to 2 of the lowest schools on the "moderately selective" list. The next rank lower is "admits everyone". Meanwhile I know parents who pulled their kids out of the toughest high school because class rank is THE ONLY THING that universities care about. They sent their kid to a low income school and their achievement test scores plummeted. Their strategy was to "win by slackibg," in the new cultural revolution! This is so they could get into Harvard and so that Harvard could feel good about itself and assuage its white guilt. My son's dad is self made, losing his own dad at age 13. The dad took many financial risks and moved twice to be in better school districts, to challenge the son. His mom came from dirt in China (daughter of a hotel maid). Their hard work has been classified as "privileged background" by virtue of their zip code. The parents inherited $50k total and were both self made and lived like paupers until age 35 to advance their educations, then took high risk unstable jobs to catch up in life...

gameswithgo 7y ago
The national merit scholar thing is stupid on many axes. For one, its just a formula on your SAT score, we already have an SAT score, why is there some official entity awarding prizes based on a simple function of that score? Colleges can use whatever function they want. The whole thing should go away.

ahi 7y ago

I really wish I hadn't taken AP Calculus in high school. I sort of got it, but it wasn't intense enough to really grab me and my study habits were non-existent. I took multi-variable calculus as a freshman and was mostly in over my head despite my B+/A- (thanks curve!), and that was it for me and math. Definitely contributes to my impostor syndrome when doing anything more computer sciencey than a CRUD app.

non-entity 7y ago
I took AP calc in high school, but paid 0 attention and basically plugged all problems into a solver and passed with a mediocre grade. I didn't even end up going to school after that. > Definitely contributes to my impostor syndrome when doing anything more computer sciencey than a CRUD app. Agreed, I've started working on low level side projects that involve more math and theory and often find I kicking myself for not caring in school and not furthering my education
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Well, it’s never too late, you know! I stumbled through my own CS degree putting as little effort into the math classes as possible - I saw them as a roadblock/filter I had to get through rather than anything particularly useful. Then, a few years after graduation I was doing some graphics work and I had to create a block arrow that could orient itself in any direction. I started working through the calculations to determine the slope of a line and the slope of the perpendicular line and I kept thinking, “man, I know I learned this in algebra, I sure wish I remembered any of it…”. So I picked up a used algebra textbook and read through it and worked some examples until I understood it. I’ve been re-making my way back up through my math education that way on and off for years (I’m up to differential equations now) and it’s actually sort of pleasant since I can take as long as I want or just put it away and come back to it later when I feel like it. I get some odd glances from people when I pull out a calculus textbook (“are you taking a class or something?”), but I understand it all _way_ better than I ever did as an undergraduate. Plus which, I’m able to help my kids with their math homework because all this stuff is actually fresh in my mind.
7y ago

vincent-toups 7y ago

My view is that everyone should study calculus more or less for the same reason we almost all study Shakespeare or The Bill of Rights or whatever. Its an enormous human accomplishment whose cultural impact virtually cannot be overstated and a basic understanding of these sorts of things is the birthright of every human being alive.

linuxftw 7y ago
> Its an enormous human accomplishment whose cultural impact virtually cannot be overstated That's just your opinion. I think Shakespeare is trash. I don't think most people can even comprehend the Bill of Rights. We should replace Shakespeare with Super Mario. Outside of socialite circles, literally no one cares about Shakespeare. How many kids you see walking around in Shakespeare T-shirts or reading Shakespeare on the school bus? Those kids are into Super Mario, and so are many adults. Super Mario is the embodiment of art, international relations, technology and engineering of the sum-total of humanity at the time. Shakespeare is just some words.
- vincent-toups 7y ago
  I'm rolling my eyes so hard they could fall out of my head. You can only form an opinion about Shakespeare (or Mario (though the kids are into Fortnight these days, they tell me)) if you are exposed to them. Both things have enormous cultural importance and are part of the human experience and all people deserve to be able to engage critically in culture. Shakespeare very well could be trash. The Bill of Rights is by and large a shockingly hypocritical document. But both are part of our history, along with a lot of other stuff about which we could say all sorts of things visa vi what ought to be in a curriculum. But my point is that humans deserve to know their history and their culture and that takes resources and time and energy which are, in the final analysis, justified by the inherent dignity and rights of people.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    > But both are part of our history Shakespeare is not part of my history, I'm not English, nor am I anglo-american. Shakespeare was never important, only popular, but that's easily confused in the US. Just one of the first generations of celebrity-worship culture. > humans deserve to know their history and their culture People get culture from family and society, not from government run schools.

mreome 7y ago

This article also illustrates what is clearly the biggest problem with standardized testing... those stupid tiny desks! Does anyone in the photo from the article look remotely comfortable? How are you supposed to focus on the material in a potentially-life-altering test when your adult sized body is crammed into a chair arguably sized for someone in middle-school, with your writing work-space only slightly larger (or possibly even smaller) then your papers and shoved directly against your body?

MarkMc 7y ago

"Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of their academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores." I have to admit I'm surprised by this, but it seems to be backed up by research: "As SAT scores are a more consistent indicator of aptitude, one might expect them to better predict a student’s chances of graduating college than high school GPA. But Chingos’ research shows exactly the opposite." [0] By the way, I enjoyed reading Paul Tough's previous book "How Children Succeed" - if you are curious, here is a great excerpt from that book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5721868 [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-predicts-college-completion-high-school-gpa-beats-sat-score/#cff67ba4b09f https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2018/06/11/what-...

travisoneill1 7y ago
The SAT score buckets in the analysis max out at >1100 so not very useful. The grade buckets are also not very useful as the top range 3.67 - 4.00 probably includes > 50% of students at most schools (thanks, grade inflation). It also fails to adjust for college difficulty. Students in the >1100 bucket are obviously going to more difficult schools than the <800 bucket.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I had a similar surprise when I first saw that data, but it does look to be solid. The conclusions drawn from it, leave a little more to be desired, as I think these newer studies seem to forget that there have been numerous studies regarding SAT/ACT's and GPA as predictors for college success. I'm not an expert on this topic, so I googled a few older studies, (and skimmed them). The trend of SAT/ACTs being relatively good predictors for college GPA's seems to continue up until around 2008, at which point it starts to diverge more appreciably. (2001) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2a8/25cfc687ce1be8be48a693f08c8caf5da4f6.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e2a8/25cfc687ce1be8be48a693... (2003) https://eml.berkeley.edu/~jrothst/publications/rothstein_sat_jmetrics2004.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~jrothst/publications/rothstein_sat... (2006) https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563073.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563073.pdf (2008) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289608000603 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... There are tons of variables to all of this, but its a hard sell to suggest that SAT's have always been poor predictors of college GPA. To me, it seems more likely that changes to both the testing and to the way colleges are run over the past ~30+ years is likely the root cause. College was already like glorified HS when I was there, I can only imagine how bad its gotten over the past few years. And if college is copying high school, is it really surprising that HS GPA is aligning with college GPA's?

maehwasu 7y ago

“In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of economic insecurity.” How the hell do you “interrogate” an abstract proposition? We may as well not even have words if we’re going to use them this thoughtlessly.

viburnum 7y ago

The idea was, "hey, there are a lot of people whose lives are too hard, but college grads seem alright, so let's make everybody college grads." But the actual situation was that there were only so many good lives to go around, and college just sorted out who got them. The obvious thing to do is directly improve life for all people, not doing some kind of trick bank shot to indirectly improve lives. Instead we have baristas with $60,000 in college debt. We ran this giant experiment to see to what extent college was productivity enhancing or merely a sorting mechanism. The results are in.

orbifold 7y ago
Well the kind of obvious explanation for that is that success in life is probably strongly determined by intelligence. So when ~10% of the population went to college there was a high chance that those were also approximately the 10% smartest of a generation. If lots more people go to college now, that just means that it ceases to be a good predictor of success.
- tudelo 7y ago
  I mean, you could probably just sort further via what field they pursue...
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  When you see people with stem Masters and PhDs working as highschool teachers you begin to wonder if the problem is intelligence. Or when people with PhDs in bio/Chem are working as programmers you wonder if it's a question of talent.
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    The problem is that we decided to inflate education prices while deflating labor prices. You can't do both at the same time and get sane results, because each individual needs to make their labor price correspond to their (former) education price. So you wind up with Biochem PhDs working as programmers. Neither biochemistry nor programming is for stupid people, per se, but programming hires loads of people at salaries actually commensurate with the monetized value of the time-investment spent getting a doctorate, while actual biochemistry, the field of the doctorate, has emphasized cheap labor.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> dominated by students from wealthy families. SAT prep might be correlated, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I grew up in the poor suburbs of Detroit, and nobody was talking about college when I was a kid. I’d say 3/4 of the kids I went to primary school with didn’t even apply to college. Now that I’m in the “wealthy” suburbs of Dallas, though, the kids that my kids go to school (and my kids) have been talking about college admissions since they were in elementary. If you grow up with parents who went to college and who can probably afford to send you to one, it’s just part of the atmosphere.

TrackerFF 7y ago
Absolutely, this is something I've been saying for ages. People from upper middle and upper-class families know what it takes to land a prestigious job at the banks / law firms / consulting firms / etc. Chances are they themselves work at such firms, or that family members / friends do. Kids naturally want to do what their parents or other mentors do, so they get exposure to those professions early on, just by association. The parents will start investing early on, and depending on where you live, it can start already at pre-school age. Sounds ridiculous, but that's how it is in some circles. So by the time they're 13, they know how important grades are, along with the correct extracurricular activities. Everything is laid out for the kids to succeed and maximize their chance at top schools - which in turn feeds them into the professional world. I'm from a very rural place myself, where like 5% of my HS class went college or university - and it could go years between students that went to prestigious schools, and even less that joined the ranks of investment banks, HF, PE, management consulting firms, biglaw or boutiques, etc. By luck I got in touch with a good mentor that had worked in high-finance for years, and had the same type of background as me. His advice was for me to play the "country boy from nowhere, trying to make it big in the city" image, because it was so removed from the homogeneous mass you'd see in the financial district. Firms love to prop up people like that for PR and hiring. "Look at us, our hiring is so diverse and inclusive - here's our analyst form a third-world country, here's our minority, here's our first gen college grad! ...But never mind that 80% of our hires share the same socio-economic background..." When I got accepted into a top school which feeds students into finance and consulting, I immediately noticed that the majority of kids came from the same wealthy areas. Had to forego a ton of off-campus student activities, because I couldn't cough up hundreds to thousands of bucks for skiing trips at luxury resorts, sailing events, etc.

falcor84 7y ago

The article mentions Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as examples of people who succeeded without college, but I find that to be absurd. Being accepted into Harvard and then intentionally dropping out after 2 years is all the difference in the world from never applying to college.

TrackerFF 7y ago
Not to mentioned that they could afford to try and fail. It's been discussed to death, but the sad fact of life is that a lot of elite students from unresourceful simply can't take the chance on playing the startup game. They don't have the money, and can't risk potentially throwing away 5-10 years on a pipe dream (statistically speaking). Rich kids with money and connections can afford that. They can graduate from HYPS, try to startup route, and if all fails - no worries, they can always go back to the traditional career route, albeit a bit delayed. Ask a first gen HYPS student from low or lower middle-class what their plans are; Probably not a 12-month "ideating" leisure trip to SV on their family money.
- wmp56 7y ago
  I'm afraid I have to disagree. The key ingredient is unusually high IQ, not money. If I had a choice between being born with a very high IQ or in a moderately wealthy family (10s of millions), I'd choose the 1st without thinking. The family money rather reduce chances of striking success because they make people lazy from childhood. A 12 month trip to SV gives exactly nothing by itself. We could randomly select 1000 college grads, give them 100k and send them to SV for 1 year. The success rate will be 0.0%. What really helps on the SV path is (1) very high intelligence and (2) real industry experience. If you have the former, you can get the latter by joining one of the few known firms and spend there a decade. Then use your savings and connections to try your own idea. I don't see how family money help to skip that decade of experience or how they help to become smart.