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It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they c

It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself. Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability. Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.

warkdarrior 6y ago
We do not need to find this randomized-admission institution for your analysis. Just take an Ivy and several state universities of different rankings, and pick students with similar high-school backgrounds (top grades, similar family net worth, etc.). Such students of similar capability must exist, unless we think top universities admit all the top students and there is no one left for lower-rank schools. Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  What you're describing wouldn't work because the interactions between the students would influence the things you're measuring. Students don't exist in a vacuum. It would only be possible if the school's students were entirely random. Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
- deleted 6y ago
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- ep103 6y ago
  Better yet, solve two birds with one stone. Pass a law that caps the maximum percentage of a person's income that can be paid to college loan (minimum) payments. Just like that you would have stopped the primary source of collegiate tuition inflation (the fact that students believe they need college to enter the workplace, but cannot discharge loans due to bankruptcy, and loans are guaranteed by the gov). And you would have created a free-market solution tying actual college value added to collegiate tuition prices. Its not a flawless proposition. But it does mean that those students who spend years and go heavily into debt pursuing higher education wouldn't then be force to compete only for the highest paying jobs that will cover their loans. Upset that the greatest minds in our generation work in advertising? Wondering why more highly education people aren't willing to take teaching positions or devote themselves to societal service? Here's your fix.
  - dangerlibrary 6y ago
    Your solution is called income based repayment, and already exists - the US has about a dozen different IBR / PAYE (Pay As You Earn) plans. Generally speaking, people with student loan debt can opt into them. Obama's version from his first term even has debt forgiveness for those who have made 120 monthly payments while working for a nonprofit / government (PSLF - public service loan forgiveness). Though the Devos Education department was running the show when those applications started coming in, and they rejected something like 98% of them out of some combination of malice and incompetence. My favorite silver bullet solution for the mounting debt and affordability crisis is to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, and force colleges and universities to carry some substantial amount (20-30%) of the debt load they force their students to take on. It has all kinds of negative consequences for admission of at-risk / low-income students at risk-averse institutions, but it does solve some of the game theoretical problems with rising tuition costs.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- unreal6 6y ago
  This is also ignoring the significant credit that having a "brand" name school as well as alumni network, like those in the Ivy League, has on one's job prospects. A significant portion of the value of one's graduation from these institutions is an affiliation with their name, which is more valuable than those of various (especially mid-tier) state schools.
zkid18 6y ago
As a non-US citizen I was always surprised US universities doesn't require any examination test for the admission.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Huh? In general they do — either the SAT or the ACT. Only a few big universities don't require them (though COVID has led many/most to change their policies at least temporarily).
  - scarmig 6y ago
    In other countries, though, the admissions exams are much more heavily weighted. Here they play a minor role. No one is getting into Harvard on the basis of a perfect SAT score, and plenty of people get in on more than a standard deviation below a perfect score.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Minor role is unfair. It's more like a good score is necessary but not sufficient. Basically, you can have a perfect SAT score and GPA from high school but you have no hobbies or other interests than studying and your essays are unimaginative, you're probably not getting admitted. But you do need to demonstrate some base level of academic ability.
      - scarmig 6y ago
        Well, you can also have a perfect SAT and GPA and lots of interesting hobbies and extracurricular successes, but then get rejected in favor of other applicants with significantly weaker applications simply because subjective evaluations, under the direction of admissions offices, tend to claim that people of your racial background are all unimaginative drones...
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      You're right that a perfect SAT isn't a guarantee of success, although anyone who nails the SAT will be admitted to a pretty good school (assuming their GPA is commensurate). Part of the issue is that the SAT is not difficult enough to stratify the applicant population, which means that it's not a super useful tool for schools at the very top. The elite liberal arts college I attended liked to brag that they turned away half of the 1600s that applied — and their overall acceptance rate is much higher than H/Y/S. It would be interesting to think about what would happen if the SAT were more rigorous (or if there were another test that students could take that offered this stratification). Some schools (think Caltech) would probably put a decent amount of weight on such a test. Other schools, who currently optimize for more variables, would presumably not pay much attention.
dolni 6y ago
It makes sense to group people for education based on ability. If a low performer is in a class of high performers, one of two things will likely happen: * the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities * the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  I'll have to find the research, but this generally is not true (at least with K-12). From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them. This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers. Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental. In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome. That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).
  - dolni 6y ago
    Good K-12 schools _do_ batch people by ability, though. The inner city schools -- the ones that are struggling, they do a poor job putting underperforming students into remedial courses. They similarly do a poor job putting high performing students into honors and AP/IB courses. Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet. I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.
debacle 6y ago
We have too many smart people for capitalism in its current form to support. If you look for them, you will see artificial barriers erected throughout society to stymie real meritocracy.
- fullshark 6y ago
  Agree, we have an abundance of capital and labor but a dearth of opportunities for both. At least compared to the Post WW2 era.
  - debacle 6y ago
    Well said. It's going to cause us to re-think the capital/labor relationship. UBI will almost certainly be a necessity, but then the question is who will mop the floors and what is the impetus of progress.
- exyi 6y ago
  Do you think there is not enough demand for software engineering? I find it more likely that these barriers are in place because of political incompetence (expensive US schools) or as a legacy (stupid high school system, no support and motivation for above average students).
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Capitalism has lots of opportunities for smart people to create wealth. It's hard to just be a "worker" or "researcher", but if you are smart and determined you should be able to create a business that makes the whole world richer. I do agree though there is a lot of wasted talent and effort.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    That requires lots of risk that may not be feasible to students funding their education with debt, and with skills in spaces that have regulatory overhead.
beforeolives 6y ago
> beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
- endisneigh 6y ago
  I agree with you. I went to a top school in order to improve my life prospects as well. However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able. I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    I'm not sure what kind of data you would use to drive it. A lot of the most important aspects of education aren't readily measurable: the ability to write, the network connections you make (to fellow students, professors, alumni, donors, etc), capacity to work in teams, and so on. You risk the same things you get with tech firms using leetcode and puzzles to select... well, to select those who are good at leetcode and puzzles. You can measure it in terms of career success, but even there it's very hard to deal with the selection bias. Those who succeed are those who succeed. I'm a big fan of Signum University, which is an online-only university dedicated to the soft skills that have to be taught personally, rather than a MOOC. It can't develop connections like Harvard and Stanford but it can develop those skills that make the hard-to-measure differences between those who succeed and those who are merely very good at taking tests. It remains, however, impossible to factor out those connections, which seem to make the biggest difference.
    - endisneigh 6y ago
      I’m not sure what having a network has to do with being educated.
insert_coin 6y ago
This is how it's supposed to work. Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.
option 6y ago
and this is why it is best to go to schools like Princeton and Harvard - because you know you’ll get to network with successful people.
klmadfejno 6y ago
I went to a middle tier undergrad and a top tier grad school. The difference was night and day in terms of rigor and general academic interest. I don't know that the profs were particularly better or worse at one school, but the student body was very, very different in terms of interest and ability, and that has a huge impact on the way you learn. I took a single writing class in undergrad. Most students were not capable of writing an argument and supporting it with evidence. No hyperbole, the basic reasoning and writing ability of the average student is appalling. I would strongly favor environments that cluster only demonstrated high ability students.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  In my experience the largest difference in rigor was the department. My macroeconomics class was laughably trivial ( spent a week on point/slope), but all my engineering and science classes had high expectations.
mgh2 6y ago
What selection mechanism would you recommend for early indicator of ability than high school? I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent)
tyingq 6y ago
I remain stunned by the level of incompetence in university administration. The covid epidemic really shined some light on it for me. I have one child still in university, and the school still has no plan for what to do about the foreign study and foreign internship requirements for his degree program. Everyone is just on-hold and unable to graduate. We also continue to run into silly requirements to appear in-person, which requires flying him out and back. Basic stuff that seems obvious to me seems unsolvable to them. And they won't even admit it. The answer for everything is just that they "understand" and "are working on it".
Bancakes 6y ago
That's assuming random people are driven to excel in highly competitive environments and that going to university is a mostly academic and self-improvement pursuit and not just a diploma.
mgh2 6y ago
What selection criteria would you recommend for early indicator of ability than high school? I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics). I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)
nvarsj 6y ago
This is the single most important issue imo in modern higher education. It is fundamental to the success of our society that we can provide high quality education to all who want it. If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students. So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1] It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space. Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory. [1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.
- sosborn 6y ago
  For a school to increase admittance numbers, they generally need to a) increase fac/staff and b) create more classroom space. Those two things can be very complicated depending on a school's situation. I work at a school and we are pretty much tapped out for space, so we wouldn't really be able to add more classrooms even if we wanted to.
- labby5 6y ago
  Does it? I've been to college, and while there is value there, it's mostly not in the education. Virtually everything important I've learned that is directly applicable to my life and career I either learned in elementary school, learned through experience, or learned myself. The value in college, at least for me, was its environment, social network, and opportunity network. People underestimate how valuable these things are, and similarly fail to realize just how bad the internet is at all three. Online education is stunningly comprehensive, but the internet is a terrible learning environment, just as it is a terrible social and opportunity environment. The goal of modern society should be to realize that the qualities which make colleges so good at these things are not fundamentally connected to their curriculum, and can be incorporated into society at large. There is no reason why we couldn't create districts in cities which have the same learning, social, and professional qualities for young people as a university. For certain professions we arguably already do, and that is with literally no coordinated effort to create them. Imagine if we actually tried.
slibhb 6y ago
> Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability. > Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates. At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Exactly. As I said in another reply, remediating a poor K-12 education is not the point of going to college.
  - phobosanomaly 6y ago
    Many community colleges offer excellent programs for later-in-life learners to get them up to speed on things like math and writing skills. You can use community college to go from being a college dropout to transferring into Berkeley. It's important that we preserve those mechanisms for social mobility.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  I didn't mention anything about increasing socioeconomic prospects of students. The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
  - slibhb 6y ago
    It's not contradictory at all. > If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students? I did not equate "academically gifted high school graduates" with "good people". You did! What an insane idea. It's very clear to me that most jobs do not require a 4 year degree. The fact that we only give good entry-level positions (that aren't manual labor) to college graduates is an absurdity. College should be for the most promising, academically interested students. Students who have a good shot at a career in academia. Employers won't be able to only hire from that pool because it will be a very small pool.
brightball 6y ago
The way to get there, IMO, is a lot more freedom to experiment. Not just charters, but something closer to a startup culture. A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased. E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program. This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  It only takes looking at the responses to the common core to see how resistant parents can be to any innovation in education. "Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.
  - brightball 6y ago
    It's entirely different when the teachers and the parents "choose" something like common core. My kids went to a private school for elementary in the middle of the common core dust up in public schools, so before we enrolled them the one of the first questions we asked about was common core. They told us they were also adopting the approach but that their teachers had been discussing it for years, had a complete transition plan for how to introduce it at each grade level, transition kids based on what they'd been taught at previous grade levels and how to inform parents about what to expect. The key was that the teachers and admins, through their own professional expertise, were able to research options to improve how they taught and implement them with the blessing of the parents who choose to send their kids to the school. And it went great. All of the common core horror stories that I've heard, especially around math, were due to horrible execution after the program was essentially forced on everyone. It's a completely different experience when everyone involved decides, "this is the best way and here's how we're going to do it well" vs "everybody has to do it this way now." Common core was the main driver of choosing a private school for elementary up to at least 4th grade largely because we wanted a consistent learning experience for our kids in their early developmental years. I didn't want risk politics causing disruption in those early years (ideally ever, but early years are where I have my biggest concerns).
offtop5 6y ago
You could probably give a 23 year old a degree from a top school, without him or her actually attending it and still massively improve their life. If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.
Aunche 6y ago
At my selective university, the vast majority of the value came from the students paying to attend rather than college itself. Some professors were brilliant, but others were completely useless and you basically had to learn by yourself or from your peers. Meanwhile, a large chunk of tuition dollars was going towards the construction of new buildings that end up being very underutilized. Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities. (742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University
- lthornberry 6y ago
  Princeton prides themselves on being a top-tier research university where teaching is taken seriously. That's different from being a teaching university. They spend a ton of money on research, and faculty have much lighter teaching loads than almost anywhere else. They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.
titzer 6y ago
So, you think that top schools having top faculty and educators has zero effect on educational outcomes? And somehow they only produce good outcomes because they select good students and that "most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have". It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take. You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.
- gautamdivgi 6y ago
  Do top faculty and top educator correlate well? They may when you do research but probably not at an undergraduate level. Top faculty is generally a top researcher with bundles of grant money. They could be horrible educators. The opposite is true as well.
  - titzer 6y ago
    As it turns out, schools hire faculty for more than just research. Not only are faculty usually required to teach, and evaluated on that, but there are faculty roles that are geared to teaching, as well as lecturer roles.
outlace 6y ago
Pros and cons like anything but one big pro of corralling all the most productive and intelligent people together is the network effect that can have. Big things can happen when you get a bunch of really smart people together that wouldn’t have happened if they were all dispersed.
silicon2401 6y ago
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).
- endisneigh 6y ago
  What do you mean up to the level of ivy leagues? I think you missed my entire point.
1980phipsi 6y ago
In the US, you can condition employment on the quality of the school someone went to, but it is much more difficult to condition it based on IQ or a standardized test of some kind.

warkdarrior 6y ago

We do not need to find this randomized-admission institution for your analysis. Just take an Ivy and several state universities of different rankings, and pick students with similar high-school backgrounds (top grades, similar family net worth, etc.). Such students of similar capability must exist, unless we think top universities admit all the top students and there is no one left for lower-rank schools. Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.

endisneigh 6y ago
What you're describing wouldn't work because the interactions between the students would influence the things you're measuring. Students don't exist in a vacuum. It would only be possible if the school's students were entirely random. Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ep103 6y ago
Better yet, solve two birds with one stone. Pass a law that caps the maximum percentage of a person's income that can be paid to college loan (minimum) payments. Just like that you would have stopped the primary source of collegiate tuition inflation (the fact that students believe they need college to enter the workplace, but cannot discharge loans due to bankruptcy, and loans are guaranteed by the gov). And you would have created a free-market solution tying actual college value added to collegiate tuition prices. Its not a flawless proposition. But it does mean that those students who spend years and go heavily into debt pursuing higher education wouldn't then be force to compete only for the highest paying jobs that will cover their loans. Upset that the greatest minds in our generation work in advertising? Wondering why more highly education people aren't willing to take teaching positions or devote themselves to societal service? Here's your fix.
- dangerlibrary 6y ago
  Your solution is called income based repayment, and already exists - the US has about a dozen different IBR / PAYE (Pay As You Earn) plans. Generally speaking, people with student loan debt can opt into them. Obama's version from his first term even has debt forgiveness for those who have made 120 monthly payments while working for a nonprofit / government (PSLF - public service loan forgiveness). Though the Devos Education department was running the show when those applications started coming in, and they rejected something like 98% of them out of some combination of malice and incompetence. My favorite silver bullet solution for the mounting debt and affordability crisis is to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, and force colleges and universities to carry some substantial amount (20-30%) of the debt load they force their students to take on. It has all kinds of negative consequences for admission of at-risk / low-income students at risk-averse institutions, but it does solve some of the game theoretical problems with rising tuition costs.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
unreal6 6y ago
This is also ignoring the significant credit that having a "brand" name school as well as alumni network, like those in the Ivy League, has on one's job prospects. A significant portion of the value of one's graduation from these institutions is an affiliation with their name, which is more valuable than those of various (especially mid-tier) state schools.

zkid18 6y ago

As a non-US citizen I was always surprised US universities doesn't require any examination test for the admission.

gnicholas 6y ago
Huh? In general they do — either the SAT or the ACT. Only a few big universities don't require them (though COVID has led many/most to change their policies at least temporarily).
- scarmig 6y ago
  In other countries, though, the admissions exams are much more heavily weighted. Here they play a minor role. No one is getting into Harvard on the basis of a perfect SAT score, and plenty of people get in on more than a standard deviation below a perfect score.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Minor role is unfair. It's more like a good score is necessary but not sufficient. Basically, you can have a perfect SAT score and GPA from high school but you have no hobbies or other interests than studying and your essays are unimaginative, you're probably not getting admitted. But you do need to demonstrate some base level of academic ability.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      Well, you can also have a perfect SAT and GPA and lots of interesting hobbies and extracurricular successes, but then get rejected in favor of other applicants with significantly weaker applications simply because subjective evaluations, under the direction of admissions offices, tend to claim that people of your racial background are all unimaginative drones...
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    You're right that a perfect SAT isn't a guarantee of success, although anyone who nails the SAT will be admitted to a pretty good school (assuming their GPA is commensurate). Part of the issue is that the SAT is not difficult enough to stratify the applicant population, which means that it's not a super useful tool for schools at the very top. The elite liberal arts college I attended liked to brag that they turned away half of the 1600s that applied — and their overall acceptance rate is much higher than H/Y/S. It would be interesting to think about what would happen if the SAT were more rigorous (or if there were another test that students could take that offered this stratification). Some schools (think Caltech) would probably put a decent amount of weight on such a test. Other schools, who currently optimize for more variables, would presumably not pay much attention.

dolni 6y ago

It makes sense to group people for education based on ability. If a low performer is in a class of high performers, one of two things will likely happen: * the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities * the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.

endisneigh 6y ago
I'll have to find the research, but this generally is not true (at least with K-12). From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them. This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers. Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental. In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome. That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).
- dolni 6y ago
  Good K-12 schools _do_ batch people by ability, though. The inner city schools -- the ones that are struggling, they do a poor job putting underperforming students into remedial courses. They similarly do a poor job putting high performing students into honors and AP/IB courses. Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet. I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.

debacle 6y ago

We have too many smart people for capitalism in its current form to support. If you look for them, you will see artificial barriers erected throughout society to stymie real meritocracy.

fullshark 6y ago
Agree, we have an abundance of capital and labor but a dearth of opportunities for both. At least compared to the Post WW2 era.
- debacle 6y ago
  Well said. It's going to cause us to re-think the capital/labor relationship. UBI will almost certainly be a necessity, but then the question is who will mop the floors and what is the impetus of progress.
exyi 6y ago
Do you think there is not enough demand for software engineering? I find it more likely that these barriers are in place because of political incompetence (expensive US schools) or as a legacy (stupid high school system, no support and motivation for above average students).
akvadrako 6y ago
Capitalism has lots of opportunities for smart people to create wealth. It's hard to just be a "worker" or "researcher", but if you are smart and determined you should be able to create a business that makes the whole world richer. I do agree though there is a lot of wasted talent and effort.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  That requires lots of risk that may not be feasible to students funding their education with debt, and with skills in spaces that have regulatory overhead.

beforeolives 6y ago

> beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).

endisneigh 6y ago
I agree with you. I went to a top school in order to improve my life prospects as well. However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able. I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.
- jfengel 6y ago
  I'm not sure what kind of data you would use to drive it. A lot of the most important aspects of education aren't readily measurable: the ability to write, the network connections you make (to fellow students, professors, alumni, donors, etc), capacity to work in teams, and so on. You risk the same things you get with tech firms using leetcode and puzzles to select... well, to select those who are good at leetcode and puzzles. You can measure it in terms of career success, but even there it's very hard to deal with the selection bias. Those who succeed are those who succeed. I'm a big fan of Signum University, which is an online-only university dedicated to the soft skills that have to be taught personally, rather than a MOOC. It can't develop connections like Harvard and Stanford but it can develop those skills that make the hard-to-measure differences between those who succeed and those who are merely very good at taking tests. It remains, however, impossible to factor out those connections, which seem to make the biggest difference.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    I’m not sure what having a network has to do with being educated.

insert_coin 6y ago

This is how it's supposed to work. Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.

option 6y ago

and this is why it is best to go to schools like Princeton and Harvard - because you know you’ll get to network with successful people.

klmadfejno 6y ago

I went to a middle tier undergrad and a top tier grad school. The difference was night and day in terms of rigor and general academic interest. I don't know that the profs were particularly better or worse at one school, but the student body was very, very different in terms of interest and ability, and that has a huge impact on the way you learn. I took a single writing class in undergrad. Most students were not capable of writing an argument and supporting it with evidence. No hyperbole, the basic reasoning and writing ability of the average student is appalling. I would strongly favor environments that cluster only demonstrated high ability students.

jnwatson 6y ago
In my experience the largest difference in rigor was the department. My macroeconomics class was laughably trivial ( spent a week on point/slope), but all my engineering and science classes had high expectations.

mgh2 6y ago

What selection mechanism would you recommend for early indicator of ability than high school? I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent)

tyingq 6y ago

I remain stunned by the level of incompetence in university administration. The covid epidemic really shined some light on it for me. I have one child still in university, and the school still has no plan for what to do about the foreign study and foreign internship requirements for his degree program. Everyone is just on-hold and unable to graduate. We also continue to run into silly requirements to appear in-person, which requires flying him out and back. Basic stuff that seems obvious to me seems unsolvable to them. And they won't even admit it. The answer for everything is just that they "understand" and "are working on it".

Bancakes 6y ago

That's assuming random people are driven to excel in highly competitive environments and that going to university is a mostly academic and self-improvement pursuit and not just a diploma.

mgh2 6y ago

What selection criteria would you recommend for early indicator of ability than high school? I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics). I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)

nvarsj 6y ago

This is the single most important issue imo in modern higher education. It is fundamental to the success of our society that we can provide high quality education to all who want it. If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students. So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1] It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space. Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory. [1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.

sosborn 6y ago
For a school to increase admittance numbers, they generally need to a) increase fac/staff and b) create more classroom space. Those two things can be very complicated depending on a school's situation. I work at a school and we are pretty much tapped out for space, so we wouldn't really be able to add more classrooms even if we wanted to.
labby5 6y ago
Does it? I've been to college, and while there is value there, it's mostly not in the education. Virtually everything important I've learned that is directly applicable to my life and career I either learned in elementary school, learned through experience, or learned myself. The value in college, at least for me, was its environment, social network, and opportunity network. People underestimate how valuable these things are, and similarly fail to realize just how bad the internet is at all three. Online education is stunningly comprehensive, but the internet is a terrible learning environment, just as it is a terrible social and opportunity environment. The goal of modern society should be to realize that the qualities which make colleges so good at these things are not fundamentally connected to their curriculum, and can be incorporated into society at large. There is no reason why we couldn't create districts in cities which have the same learning, social, and professional qualities for young people as a university. For certain professions we arguably already do, and that is with literally no coordinated effort to create them. Imagine if we actually tried.

slibhb 6y ago

> Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability. > Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates. At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.

throwawayboise 6y ago
Exactly. As I said in another reply, remediating a poor K-12 education is not the point of going to college.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Many community colleges offer excellent programs for later-in-life learners to get them up to speed on things like math and writing skills. You can use community college to go from being a college dropout to transferring into Berkeley. It's important that we preserve those mechanisms for social mobility.
endisneigh 6y ago
I didn't mention anything about increasing socioeconomic prospects of students. The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
- slibhb 6y ago
  It's not contradictory at all. > If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students? I did not equate "academically gifted high school graduates" with "good people". You did! What an insane idea. It's very clear to me that most jobs do not require a 4 year degree. The fact that we only give good entry-level positions (that aren't manual labor) to college graduates is an absurdity. College should be for the most promising, academically interested students. Students who have a good shot at a career in academia. Employers won't be able to only hire from that pool because it will be a very small pool.

brightball 6y ago

The way to get there, IMO, is a lot more freedom to experiment. Not just charters, but something closer to a startup culture. A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased. E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program. This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.

InitialLastName 6y ago
It only takes looking at the responses to the common core to see how resistant parents can be to any innovation in education. "Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.
- brightball 6y ago
  It's entirely different when the teachers and the parents "choose" something like common core. My kids went to a private school for elementary in the middle of the common core dust up in public schools, so before we enrolled them the one of the first questions we asked about was common core. They told us they were also adopting the approach but that their teachers had been discussing it for years, had a complete transition plan for how to introduce it at each grade level, transition kids based on what they'd been taught at previous grade levels and how to inform parents about what to expect. The key was that the teachers and admins, through their own professional expertise, were able to research options to improve how they taught and implement them with the blessing of the parents who choose to send their kids to the school. And it went great. All of the common core horror stories that I've heard, especially around math, were due to horrible execution after the program was essentially forced on everyone. It's a completely different experience when everyone involved decides, "this is the best way and here's how we're going to do it well" vs "everybody has to do it this way now." Common core was the main driver of choosing a private school for elementary up to at least 4th grade largely because we wanted a consistent learning experience for our kids in their early developmental years. I didn't want risk politics causing disruption in those early years (ideally ever, but early years are where I have my biggest concerns).

offtop5 6y ago

You could probably give a 23 year old a degree from a top school, without him or her actually attending it and still massively improve their life. If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.

Aunche 6y ago

At my selective university, the vast majority of the value came from the students paying to attend rather than college itself. Some professors were brilliant, but others were completely useless and you basically had to learn by yourself or from your peers. Meanwhile, a large chunk of tuition dollars was going towards the construction of new buildings that end up being very underutilized. Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities. (742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University

lthornberry 6y ago
Princeton prides themselves on being a top-tier research university where teaching is taken seriously. That's different from being a teaching university. They spend a ton of money on research, and faculty have much lighter teaching loads than almost anywhere else. They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.

titzer 6y ago

So, you think that top schools having top faculty and educators has zero effect on educational outcomes? And somehow they only produce good outcomes because they select good students and that "most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have". It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take. You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.

gautamdivgi 6y ago
Do top faculty and top educator correlate well? They may when you do research but probably not at an undergraduate level. Top faculty is generally a top researcher with bundles of grant money. They could be horrible educators. The opposite is true as well.
- titzer 6y ago
  As it turns out, schools hire faculty for more than just research. Not only are faculty usually required to teach, and evaluated on that, but there are faculty roles that are geared to teaching, as well as lecturer roles.

outlace 6y ago

Pros and cons like anything but one big pro of corralling all the most productive and intelligent people together is the network effect that can have. Big things can happen when you get a bunch of really smart people together that wouldn’t have happened if they were all dispersed.

silicon2401 6y ago

> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).

endisneigh 6y ago
What do you mean up to the level of ivy leagues? I think you missed my entire point.

1980phipsi 6y ago

In the US, you can condition employment on the quality of the school someone went to, but it is much more difficult to condition it based on IQ or a standardized test of some kind.