12 ms·

Going to elite Indian colleges improves earnings, but not test scores

141 points by blueblisters 6y ago

zhang_sage 6y ago
Why should we expect it to? Education does not increase fluid intelligence.
- ajkjk 6y ago
  Uh. Other things probably factor into test scores than that?
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  You're asking why we should expect college to increase test scores?
addicted 6y ago
I’m not sure I understand. This study doesn’t really seem to distinguish between what the economist says it’s distinguishing. The economist appears to be arguing that this study indicates that elite colleges lead to higher wages due to signaling and not the quality of education. However, the study basically compares the wages of people who scored about the same in the standardized exams after separating those who made it into the elite colleges and those who didn’t. The ones who made it into the elite colleges appeared to make more money than those who didn’t. So basically, this study tells us that going to an elite college helped someone make more money than someone else who had about the same intelligence (as defined by their standardized test scores to enter the college) but went to a non elite college. However, unlike what the economist is claiming, this does not tell us whether this effect is because of signaling, or because the quality of education is better. The economist claims that the study indicates its signaling, but the higher earnings could very well be explained by better instruction in the elite colleges as well. I also suspect those who went to elite colleges feel far more pressure to inflate their reported earnings relative to those who didn’t.
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  Recruiters want to optimize for success (because it means they’ll get commission) so they rely on easy low-effort proxy signals like school name and referrals within the company to help filter who they engage with during their limited time for the hiring process. As a broad rule of thumb, it works even if there are false positives and false negatives.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  Exactly, they don't show how these people performed in a standardized exit test _after_ college, so there's no way to measure how well they did relative to each other in terms of education.
  - sgillen 6y ago
    No, I believe the study shows exactly that. According to the article india apparently has standardized exit exams in many schools.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - sks 6y ago
      Well I am from India and did not take any standardized exit exam when graduating. We do have standardized entrance exams.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      > I believe the study shows exactly that No, the article itself says the exit exam is for Secondary School, i.e. High School.
      - sgillen 6y ago
        They have exit exams both post high school and post college. “India is atypical in that its college students have to take standardised exit exams. ” The first figure has high school entrance exam as the x axis and college exit as the y. I see lots of complaints in this thread that the article is inaccurate, but this is what it says.
satya71 6y ago
I went to an "elite" Indian college. Anecdotally, I can say the quality of education was quite a bit higher than what could be had at non-elite colleges. I can also say with reasonable certainty that the large salary difference is mostly due to signalling. Even the graduates from a top college has much to learn before they can contribute to their job. Also, elite college admissions are based on test score on one day in the student's life in high school, while their brain is still developing. I have personally seen many who didn't qualify, but have gone on to do great things. Their initial salary was definitely low.
- sadfev 6y ago
  Completely agree with your assessment, I also went to an ‘elite’ college, had the exact same experience.
- austincheney 6y ago
  To add to this with numbers the US military imposes a standardized test on all service members and many high school students who never become service members. The test, the ASVAB, is composed of several sections but all anybody really looks at is the GT score. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Apti... The first time I took the test as a dumb 17 year old who was at risk of failing out of high school my GT score was only 107 (out of 130) and my average performance placement compared to all other test participants that year was 79 (on a scale of 0 - 99). Generally, everybody who entered the military as a teenager notices dramatic improvement on that test when retaking it later life even with no preparation. When I wanted to become a warrant officer I had to retake the test because of my low scores. The minimum GT score to become a warrant officer is 110. I retook the test at the age of 35 after 8 years of being a full time software developer in the corporate world. My new GT score was 129 (out of 130) and my placement amongst other test takers that year (on a scale of 0 - 99) was 98. I think research generally bears this out across a variety of metrics and meaures including violent crime data. The human brain is still developing until around age 24 give or take two years. This is why applaud California's recent decision to halt standardized tests, such as SAT and ACT, as a mandatory placement criteria for entering university. All those tests measure, given the youth and maturity of traditional high school students, is extreme preparation and not performance or potential. Preparation in that regard is a socio-economic stratifier as it takes time and money outside of the student's own initiative and state provided education.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sb2nov 6y ago
Can the exam be the confounder here, where the exam is just not good at differentiating the different in educational experience between the universities. Second the job interview and exam might just be looking for skills on different dimensions ?
- zwaps 6y ago
  Yes that is a possibility in this sort of research design. The exit-test scores are obviously taken as proxy for educational quality and the study cannot test for any "secret sauce" beyond that. On the other hand, there's only so much one can do with observational data doing these sort of causal analyses. I'd say its still an interesting outcome.
j45 6y ago
Like most things, it’s not what your education makes of you, but what you make of your education, specifically your ongoing self-education.
blocked_again 6y ago
The article talks about how students who went to elite Indian collegs perform similiar to students who went to low tier colleges in standardized exit tests wich is apparently a thing in India. The only issue is, students don't take any standardized exit tests in India. Which makes the whole paper pointless. I went some digging to see what data this paper is using. Apparently this is what I found out. > All students in colleges (private or public) affiliated with the same university take the same exit exams. These exams vary by stream of education, but conditional on the stream, private and public college students study the same curriculum and take the same exit tests. > I obtained administrative data from colleges in a district in North India and the university with which they were affiliated. The issue with using this data is that almost none of elite colleges in India are affliated to some University. They are their own University. So apparently the data of the paper doesn't include any elite colleges! Kind of ironic given the title of the paper "Prestige Matters: Wage Premiumand Value Addition in Elite Colleges"
- square_usual 6y ago
  > students don't take any standardized exit tests in India From the article: > There, pupils in their final year of secondary school sit a leaving exam known as the Senior Secondary School Examination. (Emphasis mine.) There is a bit of a mistake here. There isn't any one Senior Secondary School Examination, but many. Some of them are standardized at the state level, and I know of two which are standardized across the country, the largest of which is the CBSE. I assume this mistake is from the Economist, since the abstract of the paper itself says "Admission to the elite public colleges is based on the scores obtained in the Senior Secondary School Examinations" (emphasis mine). Going through the "data" archive linked on the paper's page, I see references to the CBSE, which makes it likely that that was the standardized test the author considered. The CBSE is, by definition, a standardized exit test for secondary school students in India. > am actually amused this article was based on an research paper published by Universitry of Virginia The author of this paper is of Indian origin.
  - blocked_again 6y ago
    I was referring to the exit test scores that is used by the author for comparing students who goto elite vs normal college. See my updated comment above.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zwaps 6y ago
Important caveat: The test in question seems to be the exit score of junior colleges, equivalent to 12th grade education. Which suggests that the discontinuity found might very well be due to the educational quality of the "regular" college. It would, likely, only get rid of general intelligence as confounder. This, however, would just make educational quality more pertinent rather than less. Edit: Well I found a working paper from 2011. The matter is more complex. Apparently, in India, both public and private colleges exist under the heading of a single local university. The students at private and the more prestigious public colleges then take the same exams in Bachelor. The authors have collected data from one university and a couple of colleges. For that sample, they control for ability with the entrance scores, but then match the regression discontinuity on exit scores. That is: Public colleges have on average higher exit scores. The paper shows that this is due to having stronger students (entry exams). Controlling for this, they find no difference in the "educational trajectory" of public vs. private colleges, however, public colleges then have better job outcomes. So my earlier caveat should read: The study shows results for one Indian university (with several colleges) in the field of liberal arts. Whether the study is externally valid for IITs I'll leave up to the reader.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Get it from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1257/app.20140105 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1257/app.20140105 :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aaron695 6y ago
Nothing to see here. You don't graduate university for test scores. Test scores only work in low level learning like high school. For this study they used - "These exams test for language competencies (English and regional language) and stream-specific competencies; for example, commerce students take tests in accounting, taxation, and so forth." Basically IQ tests. Maybe they learned more. Maybe it's about cohorts. Maybe elite universities are used to signal. You can't tell from this study. DOI: 10.1257/app.20140105
canistel 6y ago
The so called exit exams(tests) in Indian colleges may not be what Westerners expect it to be. In Indian exams, challenging problems are not touched upon at all. Exams are about how much ground can be foraged rather than how deep you can wade in. You can easily get by through cramming and rote learning. I am sure university/college/school exams still lack questions that force students to solve problems, applying learned concepts along with their analytical skills. There are two types of exams in India:- Entrance exams - where the grasp of concepts, analytical ability etc are tested. School/college exams - where it is all about regurgitation of information. With latter, the only aptitude that can possibly be assessed is the tolerance for a monotonous and brainless desk job.
- thewhitetulip 6y ago
  A funny anecdote. Our Visual Studio C++ professor fell sick so another prof took our practical exams These were the questions: 1. Write an even number program 2. Odd number program 3. Palindrome Not an elite college, mine.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  It's similar in the US, where we have the SAT IQ test and the GRE (SAT repeat plus basic knowledge test in a subject area). Neither has the sort of deep knowledge you'd see in a US Graduate Degree "qualifying exam" which tests depth of understanding of undergraduate material (for which many students use remedial graduate school classes to prepare)
  - ska 6y ago
    This is broadly true, but qualifying exams can be wildly different even within faculties, let alone across schools - enough so that I can't imagine a meaningful comparison of "results". They are also often pass/fail.
tbenst 6y ago
It’s also possible that tests are simply a very poor way to assess knowledge/aptitude. I certainly felt this way when taking the SAT/GRE in the US at least.
bambam24 6y ago
Please, please Stop sharing articles which requires paid subscription.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  It's explicitly allowed by the HN site rules.
- DanBC 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597733
jonplackett 6y ago
Who you know, not what you know...
starpilot 6y ago
Are these tests like the SAT? I studied pretty specifically for it before college. I imagine I'd do worse after college because my degree didn't have much to do with the tricky algebra questions or weird vocabulary that it seemed to focus on.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  I don't know. One difference between k-12 and college is that we are much better at long-term remembering things we learned earlier in life.
muktabh 6y ago
I dont disagree with the premise that credential based tertiary education credits for jobs are pointless and a genius can come out of any university. You can do well despite of where you studied. There are people who succeed in life due to no talent and just connections. However, this analysis is just based on outright flawed data. The author has no idea about how education system works in India, or deliberately chose to ignore it because this is what could be done on the data they had accumulated. And I am not talking about the disclaimer about data sample being small, the entire model is wrong for majority of Indian students. Couple of things I want to comment on when you look at the article and the original paper : 1. The study treats few public institutions as "elite" and private institution as for non-elite people. That is wrong. There are private institutions which are elite too. My alma-mater is one of the elite ones and it was not a public university. This is the least problematic error in analysis. 2. The assumption is a common academic score being used to score university students. For college entrants in early 2000s (the time period when the survey respondents applied to colleges), people had to literally give 50 different entrance exams to get into universities. The score which is used to evaluate who was marginally better to get into elite university and who was rejected (the entire premise of the article), IS NOT what is used to decide entrance into universities in India. Its getting slightly standardized now, but was really chaotic 15-20 years back. There is a common exam that people give at secondary / senior secondary level but very few universities entertain them at entrance. Actually there are many "boards" to give Senior Secondary exams as well. Net net, there is very large variety of ways by which universities in India take entrance. Even the elite ones. I think, given the author is from the field of economics, they are overgeneralizing. A few (not all) economics elite universities do treat senior secondary tests as entrance criterion. 3. Exit exams used to compare academic credentials of students to see if they are academically better than the other DO NOT EXIST ! They dont even exist now and there is no point of them existing. Every public/private university in India (at least the elite ones), have their own grading/curriculum. So the academic credentials cannot be compared directly. With different universities having different grading method, people having somewhat similar academic distribution is a known thing (I dont recollect the name of the phenomenon exactly, but its studied and published). That said, it doesn't go with how the data has been modeled here. Overall, the author's model is wrong for many (50%+) of Indian students. They might be referring to economics colleges (given they come from field of economics) Delhi University, Mumbai University and Kolkata University type of institutions where their model of tertiary education fits correctly, but in that case her analysis doesn't work well for most of "India". Totally wrong messaging.
contingencies 6y ago
<various babble> This just means "Nepotism is real". Results should carry to all countries, though I doubt that large and present studies are available.
Mortiffer 6y ago
Am I the only one that finds their primary data plot at the top terrible? Journalists should have a look at the Grammar OF Graphics .
mikorym 6y ago
This is an interesting topic and has many analogies. If you gave mathematicians some general exam and have all universities participate, I would also not expect top universities to score the most. However, if you asked instead what the money value is of their research, then MIT, Oxford, et al. would score highly. I don't want to extrapolate on the economist.com article, and whether it's true or not, but rather just illustrate that this happens in other contexts. Another example is salaries. Are the best programmers in the areas that pay the most? I think no, but the ones whose work make the most money for their employers probably are. A case in point is the alpine Emacs coder that featured in a comment a few days ago, Thierry. The main issue is that if you focus on the money part, then you focus on ideas that have settled. Many small places or small universities are still at the distillation step and the distillate tends to move to where the money is. I use this argument as one of the main arguments for fundamental research, and also for why it has cognitive dissonance with earning potential.
- augustt 6y ago
  Well there's the Putnam competition, which MIT has been completely dominating recently (https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/AnnouncementOfWinners2019.pdf https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/AnnouncementOfWinners20...).
sumgame 6y ago
There is a caveat that this article doesn't consider. In India, if you are studying for elite colleges, in this case the IIT's, you write the entrance exam designed specifcally for that, which is IIT-JEE. Most people go for separate training camps to study for JEE. The 12th grade exams are a cakewalk compared to these exams, and the stuff you study for the JEE is sometimes super advanced, like calculus in super advanced levels. Most kids studying for JEE ( I was one of them), don't optimize for 12th grade exams because the JEE exam rank is all that matters to get into these "prestigious" institutions. So a bad 12th grade score is by design more than anything. Though there is definitely a lot of signaling, the research has ignored a very important behaviour.
screye 6y ago
The difference in quality of preparation of students who study to get into the top universities (IITs, NITs, BITS, handful of private/local universities = ELITE) so far outstrips the preparation of your average engineering candidate, that it is not even funny. To study computer science at an IIT, you have to be in the 0.01 percentile (1 in 1000). Most of my cousins with sufficient wealth, opted to go study Math/CS at Stanford, MIT, etc. instead of going through the grind of getting into an IIT. That's how difficult it can be. High school exit examinations are a joke. I studied for less than a week for them. I studied for 2 years (8+ hours per day) for JEE, and I was considered one of the 'lazy ones who started late'. > In short, elite colleges probably do offer their students more value than their competitors—just not in their lecture halls. This is an outright lie. The difference in education between the ELITE universities I mentioned above and your average engineering college is that of Harvard vs a Community College. My brother goes to a well regarded sub-elite university, and the drop of quality from the ELITE and his is mind-boggling. Most IIT professors have PHDs at US top 20 universities. Most sub-elite professors are teaching because they couldn't find a job in CS and have never published a paper in their lives. (The delta is 10x worse for any core engineering branches such as Mech,EEE,Civil,etc) I would have loved for it to be different. It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive. But, that is the truth of how things are in India.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive. I was pretty lazy at that age, and I know that if I had applied myself a little bit more, I'd be way further ahead now (in fact, the way things ended up going in the 90's, I'd probably be comfortably retired by now if I'd been a bit more academically successful when I was a teenager). I'm not bitter or upset about it, though - I feel like I've gotten what I was willing to work for. I'm watching my own, much more disciplined and motivated, son grind away through his junior year of high school trying to keep his perfect GPA so that he can get into a top college and I can't help but worry that any attempt to make things "fair" would disadvantage not just students like him (potentially, anyway) but everybody: if there's an upper threshold of effort beyond which additional effort is ignored in the name of fairness, it becomes impossible to distinguish the really committed from the "just showing up".
baba_ramdev 6y ago
Some details from the paper: - The paper studies colleges that offer a three-year undergraduate course in arts and science (no engineering or medicine). So, extrapolating this for IIT/NIT vs non-IITs is just argumentative with no data points. - The statistical data did not survey students who managed to secure a seat in an elite public college using reservation quota. - The sample data is from admission cohorts a couple of decades ago (1999 - 2002). - The detailed in-person survey was done only in urban areas during 2011-2012 time frame. - Data sample: * Initial survey request sent - 1981 * Actual surveyed - 1506 (76%) * Either self-employed or salaried - 748 (49% of surveyed) * Final data sample - 439 (58% of employed) # public colleges - 190 observations # private colleges - 249 observations - The entire analysis (and the claim) is made comparing the outcomes of students at the margin of admission (around admission cut-offs). So, if a student secured top score and entered into a public college and gets a top dollar salary, the author weakly attributes it to better learning environment.
nym3r0s 6y ago
Disclaimer: I graduated in CS from one of these "elite" colleges. I also took the JEE in 2013 when it underwent significant changes. Back in 2011, the government decided to revamp the educational grading system by introducing "Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation" (CCE) for class X. We were the first batch to go through it and every assignment/internal exam had some weightage in your final grade. Fast forward to 2013, there was a repeated attempt to bring similar change to this system. The central government merged the AIEEE and the IIT-JEE into two sets of exams - the JEE Mains and the JEE advanced. They also introduced weightage to your XII grade marks in the final rankings - meaning you had to do well in your boards in addition to the one-day exam. Admittedly, this was less radical than year-round performance, but it was still significant enough to tell everyone - "Hey, you need to perform all across our evaluations, not just in one exam". This meant that you could have gone through all the folks who took the CBSE XII exams in my class - and they would have been in the top 5% (maybe even top 1%). Having said that, at the end of the day - apart from signalling, the main reasons to get into the IIT/NITs were infrastructure, the environment and the network. The infrastructure was way better than a smaller, private university and your entire class is filled with the top people from your batch. Even if we conceded that the curriculum and the faculty were not at par with the top universities in the world, the talent surely is. The extra-curriculars and the competition within ensured that you constantly honed your skills to remain relevant - we took MIT OCW courses, participated in global hackathons etc. TL;DR - High-school test scores were relevant when it mattered in college entrance exams. The moment the weightage was lost, the relevancy was lost.
ssivark 6y ago
There are no standardized “exit exams” for Indian universities, unless one is talking about those colleges affiliated to a specific university system (but those are not referred to as “elite” institutions in common parlance; just terminology, I’m not making value judgements). Many states in India have a 10+2 education system where the “+2” (last two years of high school) are referred to as “junior college”. And admission to “elite” institutions is through specialty purpose entrance exams which are typically considered to be much harder than high school / junior college exit exams. Evaluation in the latter can also be a crapshoot, so scored in the high school / junior college exit exams might not have a very strong correlation with scores in the university entrance exams. I don’t understand what’s actually being analyzed or commented on (both the Economist article and the source journal article are paywalled for me)

141 points by blueblisters 6y ago

zhang_sage 6y ago

Why should we expect it to? Education does not increase fluid intelligence.

ajkjk 6y ago
Uh. Other things probably factor into test scores than that?
happytoexplain 6y ago
You're asking why we should expect college to increase test scores?

addicted 6y ago

I’m not sure I understand. This study doesn’t really seem to distinguish between what the economist says it’s distinguishing. The economist appears to be arguing that this study indicates that elite colleges lead to higher wages due to signaling and not the quality of education. However, the study basically compares the wages of people who scored about the same in the standardized exams after separating those who made it into the elite colleges and those who didn’t. The ones who made it into the elite colleges appeared to make more money than those who didn’t. So basically, this study tells us that going to an elite college helped someone make more money than someone else who had about the same intelligence (as defined by their standardized test scores to enter the college) but went to a non elite college. However, unlike what the economist is claiming, this does not tell us whether this effect is because of signaling, or because the quality of education is better. The economist claims that the study indicates its signaling, but the higher earnings could very well be explained by better instruction in the elite colleges as well. I also suspect those who went to elite colleges feel far more pressure to inflate their reported earnings relative to those who didn’t.

Hydraulix989 6y ago
Recruiters want to optimize for success (because it means they’ll get commission) so they rely on easy low-effort proxy signals like school name and referrals within the company to help filter who they engage with during their limited time for the hiring process. As a broad rule of thumb, it works even if there are false positives and false negatives.
d3nj4l 6y ago
Exactly, they don't show how these people performed in a standardized exit test _after_ college, so there's no way to measure how well they did relative to each other in terms of education.
- sgillen 6y ago
  No, I believe the study shows exactly that. According to the article india apparently has standardized exit exams in many schools.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sks 6y ago
    Well I am from India and did not take any standardized exit exam when graduating. We do have standardized entrance exams.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    > I believe the study shows exactly that No, the article itself says the exit exam is for Secondary School, i.e. High School.
    - sgillen 6y ago
      They have exit exams both post high school and post college. “India is atypical in that its college students have to take standardised exit exams. ” The first figure has high school entrance exam as the x axis and college exit as the y. I see lots of complaints in this thread that the article is inaccurate, but this is what it says.

satya71 6y ago

I went to an "elite" Indian college. Anecdotally, I can say the quality of education was quite a bit higher than what could be had at non-elite colleges. I can also say with reasonable certainty that the large salary difference is mostly due to signalling. Even the graduates from a top college has much to learn before they can contribute to their job. Also, elite college admissions are based on test score on one day in the student's life in high school, while their brain is still developing. I have personally seen many who didn't qualify, but have gone on to do great things. Their initial salary was definitely low.

sadfev 6y ago
Completely agree with your assessment, I also went to an ‘elite’ college, had the exact same experience.
austincheney 6y ago
To add to this with numbers the US military imposes a standardized test on all service members and many high school students who never become service members. The test, the ASVAB, is composed of several sections but all anybody really looks at is the GT score. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Apti... The first time I took the test as a dumb 17 year old who was at risk of failing out of high school my GT score was only 107 (out of 130) and my average performance placement compared to all other test participants that year was 79 (on a scale of 0 - 99). Generally, everybody who entered the military as a teenager notices dramatic improvement on that test when retaking it later life even with no preparation. When I wanted to become a warrant officer I had to retake the test because of my low scores. The minimum GT score to become a warrant officer is 110. I retook the test at the age of 35 after 8 years of being a full time software developer in the corporate world. My new GT score was 129 (out of 130) and my placement amongst other test takers that year (on a scale of 0 - 99) was 98. I think research generally bears this out across a variety of metrics and meaures including violent crime data. The human brain is still developing until around age 24 give or take two years. This is why applaud California's recent decision to halt standardized tests, such as SAT and ACT, as a mandatory placement criteria for entering university. All those tests measure, given the youth and maturity of traditional high school students, is extreme preparation and not performance or potential. Preparation in that regard is a socio-economic stratifier as it takes time and money outside of the student's own initiative and state provided education.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sb2nov 6y ago

Can the exam be the confounder here, where the exam is just not good at differentiating the different in educational experience between the universities. Second the job interview and exam might just be looking for skills on different dimensions ?

zwaps 6y ago
Yes that is a possibility in this sort of research design. The exit-test scores are obviously taken as proxy for educational quality and the study cannot test for any "secret sauce" beyond that. On the other hand, there's only so much one can do with observational data doing these sort of causal analyses. I'd say its still an interesting outcome.

j45 6y ago

Like most things, it’s not what your education makes of you, but what you make of your education, specifically your ongoing self-education.

blocked_again 6y ago

The article talks about how students who went to elite Indian collegs perform similiar to students who went to low tier colleges in standardized exit tests wich is apparently a thing in India. The only issue is, students don't take any standardized exit tests in India. Which makes the whole paper pointless. I went some digging to see what data this paper is using. Apparently this is what I found out. > All students in colleges (private or public) affiliated with the same university take the same exit exams. These exams vary by stream of education, but conditional on the stream, private and public college students study the same curriculum and take the same exit tests. > I obtained administrative data from colleges in a district in North India and the university with which they were affiliated. The issue with using this data is that almost none of elite colleges in India are affliated to some University. They are their own University. So apparently the data of the paper doesn't include any elite colleges! Kind of ironic given the title of the paper "Prestige Matters: Wage Premiumand Value Addition in Elite Colleges"

square_usual 6y ago
> students don't take any standardized exit tests in India From the article: > There, pupils in their final year of secondary school sit a leaving exam known as the Senior Secondary School Examination. (Emphasis mine.) There is a bit of a mistake here. There isn't any one Senior Secondary School Examination, but many. Some of them are standardized at the state level, and I know of two which are standardized across the country, the largest of which is the CBSE. I assume this mistake is from the Economist, since the abstract of the paper itself says "Admission to the elite public colleges is based on the scores obtained in the Senior Secondary School Examinations" (emphasis mine). Going through the "data" archive linked on the paper's page, I see references to the CBSE, which makes it likely that that was the standardized test the author considered. The CBSE is, by definition, a standardized exit test for secondary school students in India. > am actually amused this article was based on an research paper published by Universitry of Virginia The author of this paper is of Indian origin.
- blocked_again 6y ago
  I was referring to the exit test scores that is used by the author for comparing students who goto elite vs normal college. See my updated comment above.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zwaps 6y ago

Important caveat: The test in question seems to be the exit score of junior colleges, equivalent to 12th grade education. Which suggests that the discontinuity found might very well be due to the educational quality of the "regular" college. It would, likely, only get rid of general intelligence as confounder. This, however, would just make educational quality more pertinent rather than less. Edit: Well I found a working paper from 2011. The matter is more complex. Apparently, in India, both public and private colleges exist under the heading of a single local university. The students at private and the more prestigious public colleges then take the same exams in Bachelor. The authors have collected data from one university and a couple of colleges. For that sample, they control for ability with the entrance scores, but then match the regression discontinuity on exit scores. That is: Public colleges have on average higher exit scores. The paper shows that this is due to having stronger students (entry exams). Controlling for this, they find no difference in the "educational trajectory" of public vs. private colleges, however, public colleges then have better job outcomes. So my earlier caveat should read: The study shows results for one Indian university (with several colleges) in the field of liberal arts. Whether the study is externally valid for IITs I'll leave up to the reader.

searchableguy 6y ago
Get it from https://sci-hub.tw/10.1257/app.20140105 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1257/app.20140105 :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

aaron695 6y ago

Nothing to see here. You don't graduate university for test scores. Test scores only work in low level learning like high school. For this study they used - "These exams test for language competencies (English and regional language) and stream-specific competencies; for example, commerce students take tests in accounting, taxation, and so forth." Basically IQ tests. Maybe they learned more. Maybe it's about cohorts. Maybe elite universities are used to signal. You can't tell from this study. DOI: 10.1257/app.20140105

canistel 6y ago

The so called exit exams(tests) in Indian colleges may not be what Westerners expect it to be. In Indian exams, challenging problems are not touched upon at all. Exams are about how much ground can be foraged rather than how deep you can wade in. You can easily get by through cramming and rote learning. I am sure university/college/school exams still lack questions that force students to solve problems, applying learned concepts along with their analytical skills. There are two types of exams in India:- Entrance exams - where the grasp of concepts, analytical ability etc are tested. School/college exams - where it is all about regurgitation of information. With latter, the only aptitude that can possibly be assessed is the tolerance for a monotonous and brainless desk job.

thewhitetulip 6y ago
A funny anecdote. Our Visual Studio C++ professor fell sick so another prof took our practical exams These were the questions: 1. Write an even number program 2. Odd number program 3. Palindrome Not an elite college, mine.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
It's similar in the US, where we have the SAT IQ test and the GRE (SAT repeat plus basic knowledge test in a subject area). Neither has the sort of deep knowledge you'd see in a US Graduate Degree "qualifying exam" which tests depth of understanding of undergraduate material (for which many students use remedial graduate school classes to prepare)
- ska 6y ago
  This is broadly true, but qualifying exams can be wildly different even within faculties, let alone across schools - enough so that I can't imagine a meaningful comparison of "results". They are also often pass/fail.

tbenst 6y ago

It’s also possible that tests are simply a very poor way to assess knowledge/aptitude. I certainly felt this way when taking the SAT/GRE in the US at least.

bambam24 6y ago

Please, please Stop sharing articles which requires paid subscription.

chrisseaton 6y ago
It's explicitly allowed by the HN site rules.
DanBC 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597733

jonplackett 6y ago

Who you know, not what you know...

starpilot 6y ago

Are these tests like the SAT? I studied pretty specifically for it before college. I imagine I'd do worse after college because my degree didn't have much to do with the tricky algebra questions or weird vocabulary that it seemed to focus on.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
I don't know. One difference between k-12 and college is that we are much better at long-term remembering things we learned earlier in life.

muktabh 6y ago

I dont disagree with the premise that credential based tertiary education credits for jobs are pointless and a genius can come out of any university. You can do well despite of where you studied. There are people who succeed in life due to no talent and just connections. However, this analysis is just based on outright flawed data. The author has no idea about how education system works in India, or deliberately chose to ignore it because this is what could be done on the data they had accumulated. And I am not talking about the disclaimer about data sample being small, the entire model is wrong for majority of Indian students. Couple of things I want to comment on when you look at the article and the original paper : 1. The study treats few public institutions as "elite" and private institution as for non-elite people. That is wrong. There are private institutions which are elite too. My alma-mater is one of the elite ones and it was not a public university. This is the least problematic error in analysis. 2. The assumption is a common academic score being used to score university students. For college entrants in early 2000s (the time period when the survey respondents applied to colleges), people had to literally give 50 different entrance exams to get into universities. The score which is used to evaluate who was marginally better to get into elite university and who was rejected (the entire premise of the article), IS NOT what is used to decide entrance into universities in India. Its getting slightly standardized now, but was really chaotic 15-20 years back. There is a common exam that people give at secondary / senior secondary level but very few universities entertain them at entrance. Actually there are many "boards" to give Senior Secondary exams as well. Net net, there is very large variety of ways by which universities in India take entrance. Even the elite ones. I think, given the author is from the field of economics, they are overgeneralizing. A few (not all) economics elite universities do treat senior secondary tests as entrance criterion. 3. Exit exams used to compare academic credentials of students to see if they are academically better than the other DO NOT EXIST ! They dont even exist now and there is no point of them existing. Every public/private university in India (at least the elite ones), have their own grading/curriculum. So the academic credentials cannot be compared directly. With different universities having different grading method, people having somewhat similar academic distribution is a known thing (I dont recollect the name of the phenomenon exactly, but its studied and published). That said, it doesn't go with how the data has been modeled here. Overall, the author's model is wrong for many (50%+) of Indian students. They might be referring to economics colleges (given they come from field of economics) Delhi University, Mumbai University and Kolkata University type of institutions where their model of tertiary education fits correctly, but in that case her analysis doesn't work well for most of "India". Totally wrong messaging.

contingencies 6y ago

<various babble> This just means "Nepotism is real". Results should carry to all countries, though I doubt that large and present studies are available.

Mortiffer 6y ago

Am I the only one that finds their primary data plot at the top terrible? Journalists should have a look at the Grammar OF Graphics .

mikorym 6y ago

This is an interesting topic and has many analogies. If you gave mathematicians some general exam and have all universities participate, I would also not expect top universities to score the most. However, if you asked instead what the money value is of their research, then MIT, Oxford, et al. would score highly. I don't want to extrapolate on the economist.com article, and whether it's true or not, but rather just illustrate that this happens in other contexts. Another example is salaries. Are the best programmers in the areas that pay the most? I think no, but the ones whose work make the most money for their employers probably are. A case in point is the alpine Emacs coder that featured in a comment a few days ago, Thierry. The main issue is that if you focus on the money part, then you focus on ideas that have settled. Many small places or small universities are still at the distillation step and the distillate tends to move to where the money is. I use this argument as one of the main arguments for fundamental research, and also for why it has cognitive dissonance with earning potential.

augustt 6y ago
Well there's the Putnam competition, which MIT has been completely dominating recently (https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/AnnouncementOfWinners2019.pdf https://kskedlaya.org/putnam-archive/AnnouncementOfWinners20...).

sumgame 6y ago

There is a caveat that this article doesn't consider. In India, if you are studying for elite colleges, in this case the IIT's, you write the entrance exam designed specifcally for that, which is IIT-JEE. Most people go for separate training camps to study for JEE. The 12th grade exams are a cakewalk compared to these exams, and the stuff you study for the JEE is sometimes super advanced, like calculus in super advanced levels. Most kids studying for JEE ( I was one of them), don't optimize for 12th grade exams because the JEE exam rank is all that matters to get into these "prestigious" institutions. So a bad 12th grade score is by design more than anything. Though there is definitely a lot of signaling, the research has ignored a very important behaviour.

screye 6y ago

The difference in quality of preparation of students who study to get into the top universities (IITs, NITs, BITS, handful of private/local universities = ELITE) so far outstrips the preparation of your average engineering candidate, that it is not even funny. To study computer science at an IIT, you have to be in the 0.01 percentile (1 in 1000). Most of my cousins with sufficient wealth, opted to go study Math/CS at Stanford, MIT, etc. instead of going through the grind of getting into an IIT. That's how difficult it can be. High school exit examinations are a joke. I studied for less than a week for them. I studied for 2 years (8+ hours per day) for JEE, and I was considered one of the 'lazy ones who started late'. > In short, elite colleges probably do offer their students more value than their competitors—just not in their lecture halls. This is an outright lie. The difference in education between the ELITE universities I mentioned above and your average engineering college is that of Harvard vs a Community College. My brother goes to a well regarded sub-elite university, and the drop of quality from the ELITE and his is mind-boggling. Most IIT professors have PHDs at US top 20 universities. Most sub-elite professors are teaching because they couldn't find a job in CS and have never published a paper in their lives. (The delta is 10x worse for any core engineering branches such as Mech,EEE,Civil,etc) I would have loved for it to be different. It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive. But, that is the truth of how things are in India.

commandlinefan 6y ago
> It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive. I was pretty lazy at that age, and I know that if I had applied myself a little bit more, I'd be way further ahead now (in fact, the way things ended up going in the 90's, I'd probably be comfortably retired by now if I'd been a bit more academically successful when I was a teenager). I'm not bitter or upset about it, though - I feel like I've gotten what I was willing to work for. I'm watching my own, much more disciplined and motivated, son grind away through his junior year of high school trying to keep his perfect GPA so that he can get into a top college and I can't help but worry that any attempt to make things "fair" would disadvantage not just students like him (potentially, anyway) but everybody: if there's an upper threshold of effort beyond which additional effort is ignored in the name of fairness, it becomes impossible to distinguish the really committed from the "just showing up".

baba_ramdev 6y ago

Some details from the paper: - The paper studies colleges that offer a three-year undergraduate course in arts and science (no engineering or medicine). So, extrapolating this for IIT/NIT vs non-IITs is just argumentative with no data points. - The statistical data did not survey students who managed to secure a seat in an elite public college using reservation quota. - The sample data is from admission cohorts a couple of decades ago (1999 - 2002). - The detailed in-person survey was done only in urban areas during 2011-2012 time frame. - Data sample: * Initial survey request sent - 1981 * Actual surveyed - 1506 (76%) * Either self-employed or salaried - 748 (49% of surveyed) * Final data sample - 439 (58% of employed) # public colleges - 190 observations # private colleges - 249 observations - The entire analysis (and the claim) is made comparing the outcomes of students at the margin of admission (around admission cut-offs). So, if a student secured top score and entered into a public college and gets a top dollar salary, the author weakly attributes it to better learning environment.

nym3r0s 6y ago

Disclaimer: I graduated in CS from one of these "elite" colleges. I also took the JEE in 2013 when it underwent significant changes. Back in 2011, the government decided to revamp the educational grading system by introducing "Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation" (CCE) for class X. We were the first batch to go through it and every assignment/internal exam had some weightage in your final grade. Fast forward to 2013, there was a repeated attempt to bring similar change to this system. The central government merged the AIEEE and the IIT-JEE into two sets of exams - the JEE Mains and the JEE advanced. They also introduced weightage to your XII grade marks in the final rankings - meaning you had to do well in your boards in addition to the one-day exam. Admittedly, this was less radical than year-round performance, but it was still significant enough to tell everyone - "Hey, you need to perform all across our evaluations, not just in one exam". This meant that you could have gone through all the folks who took the CBSE XII exams in my class - and they would have been in the top 5% (maybe even top 1%). Having said that, at the end of the day - apart from signalling, the main reasons to get into the IIT/NITs were infrastructure, the environment and the network. The infrastructure was way better than a smaller, private university and your entire class is filled with the top people from your batch. Even if we conceded that the curriculum and the faculty were not at par with the top universities in the world, the talent surely is. The extra-curriculars and the competition within ensured that you constantly honed your skills to remain relevant - we took MIT OCW courses, participated in global hackathons etc. TL;DR - High-school test scores were relevant when it mattered in college entrance exams. The moment the weightage was lost, the relevancy was lost.

ssivark 6y ago

There are no standardized “exit exams” for Indian universities, unless one is talking about those colleges affiliated to a specific university system (but those are not referred to as “elite” institutions in common parlance; just terminology, I’m not making value judgements). Many states in India have a 10+2 education system where the “+2” (last two years of high school) are referred to as “junior college”. And admission to “elite” institutions is through specialty purpose entrance exams which are typically considered to be much harder than high school / junior college exit exams. Evaluation in the latter can also be a crapshoot, so scored in the high school / junior college exit exams might not have a very strong correlation with scores in the university entrance exams. I don’t understand what’s actually being analyzed or commented on (both the Economist article and the source journal article are paywalled for me)