19 ms·

How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

182 points by colour 5y ago

hardwaregeek 5y ago
As a current student, I see this first-hand. I go to a school that is moderately prestigious, but not well known for CS. Far too many of my classmates are obsessed with the same hamster wheel of optimizing grades, superficial extracurriculars and rec letter chasing. This isn't surprising; it's what got them into this school in the first place. Unfortunately for them it's also quite useless in tech. Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go? This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard. People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.
- phone8675309 5y ago
  If I owned a company I would refuse to hire graduates from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. It's much more likely that you were good at lying than at studying if you went there, and I don't have time to teach the basics.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I'll accept the premise that it's possible to fake your way into a school like that. I think it would be much harder to fake your way to a diploma though. Am I wrong?
    - fridif 5y ago
      Admission is harder than graduation for sure. I only had an 80th percentile SAT but 99th percentile GPA
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        So getting in to Stanford is harder than graduating with a STEM degree? Doens't say much about the vaunted reputation of that school. I went to a midwest state university. Getting in was easy. Completing my CS degree took a lot of work. I cannot imagine any way I could have bullshitted my way through that.
        fridif 5y ago
        Google the concept of the gentleman's B. if you show up, most teachers will take pity and not fail you even if you are subpar on your tests. i dont know what trauma you went through at iowa state university's calc 3 hazing but I personally pulled the patrician move and graduated with a degree in history, only to get a job programming straight away anyway. leetcode, system design, and book knowledge questions about java will forever be more manageable than a compilers class or multivariable calculus, for purposes of making enough money to live a middle class life without burning out
        medvezhenok 5y ago
        Yes, this is the case for most of the top universities (and likely med school, law school, you name it). Universities like to keep their graduation rates high to ensure competition at the front of the pipeline. Also, by keeping admission so competitive you basically ensure that whoever does end up getting in has the capacity to do well at any program (though statistics are still gamed - for example it is almost impossible to "drop out" of MIT - you are just placed on indefinite leave if you express that desire. That way their graduation rate very high since the people on indefinite leave don't factor into it).
- est31 5y ago
  Maybe that kid who made the wrong website put more emphasis on things that places like MIT prioritize instead of reading about "useless" subjects like learning how to create secure websites? The issue is comparability. You can compare by SAT scores and grades far better than by a metric like "built a secure website". If places like MIT prioritized such things more, they'd become even more unfair. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather work with you on a team than with someone who cares only about their personal success above the team's success, and can't listen to input as to why their approach was wrong. As for the Zuckerberg example, I think it's a prime example because a social network website is comparatively cheap to create, but the key question is to get people to sign up. By launching first for top colleges, people who want to stay in touch with their "successful" mates would want access as well. Someone without access to a top tier institution's social life would not have been able to pull it off.
- hzay 5y ago
  The kid who returned user's passed hash -- he could have simply learned more about better programming practices no? You make it sound like it's a crime and he's inherently flawed. But all of us did dumb mistakes in school/college in our early programming days, and then most of us learned not to do them.
  - hardwaregeek 5y ago
    Yeah that was maybe not the best example. Although I did explain it to him a couple times and he still didn't get it. He also didn't do his share of work but of course took credit for the accomplishments of the group in his college applications. What I was trying to point it is that these students used these supposedly impressive accomplishments in the college applications when really they didn't do much at all.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > when really they didn't do much at all That's where the in-person interview comes in. It's a lot harder to fake one's way through that.
      - hardwaregeek 5y ago
        The in person interview has little to no bearing on your application. It can provide a minor positive boost but no negative value. Besides, the interviewers I had were all nice enough people but definitely possible to trick or BS.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        Even if one asks probing questions about the project the candidate lied about doing?
        ryandrake 5y ago
        So, the technical interviewer says “no hire.” But the VP (who went to the candidate’s alma mater) says yes. And the Director who knows the candidate’s uncle from the country club says yes. And the candidate really laid it on thick for the hiring manager who has the final say. What did the tech nerd say, again? It increasingly feels like the world’s reward systems have been captured by and saturated with these charming phonies who only know how to game the system. Put all your skill points into charisma and people will just hand you money and opportunities. I’ve spent my whole career perpetually a couple of rungs down the totem pole from these well-pedigreed charmers, and hear them talk their smooth, but ultimately empty talk over and over. Whether it’s college applications or job applications, the longer I go at it, the more convinced I am that the ability to “seem like the right kind of successful sort of person” gives you the best results. Better than track record, better than demonstrable skills, better than potential and willingness to do hard work.
- caseysoftware 5y ago
  Years ago, I was advising the "entrepreneur club" at a major university and I met with one of the students. He introduced himself as "president" and we chatted and talked out their Vision. A week later, I met with him and another member who introduced herself as "president" Slightly confused, I asked if they'd just had an election. Nope. Turns out they called their members "president" which looked great on their resumes. I was impressed they gamed it so simply.
  - musingsole 5y ago
    In any other context, that'd be at least a little slimey. But here, with these budding grifters? It's downright admirable.
- usaar333 5y ago
  > People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. There's probably edge cases, like for some startup founders or supreme court justices, but for the more "advantaged" than average children, it largely doesn't seem to matter in aggregate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimating_the_Return_to_College_Selectivity_Over_the_Career_Using_Administrative_Earnings_Data https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimatin...)
  - SadCanadian 5y ago
    The economic pie is shrinking. Elites are spending more and more of their money sending their kids to the best prep schools and resume padding to ensure they don't slip through the growing cracks in the developed world (i.e. inequality that is well accepted at this point). See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope. While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy. Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      The economic pie isn't shrinking, it's not being allowed to grow. Companies produce more things when the price goes up. This works amazingly well for consumer goods. However, companies have been banned from doing so in the housing market. What follows is a shortage, the driver of all inflations. However, this only reflects rents, not necessarily the prices of homes because they are primarily driven by the availability of cheap credit whose monthly payments may stay the same despite a more expensive house. From what I can tell rent inflation itself went up by 3%+ every year since 2000. One problem with rents is that the only way they can employ people is via construction and since that isn't happening it will not translate into increased wages, which will cause wages to lag behind as most people are employed in an industry whose maximum wage increases are effectively bounded by CPI+productivity growth, not rent inflation+productivity growth, rents outpacing wages is only natural. Education is one way to increase productivity growth, but another way would be to simply reduce the productivity growth needed to have a normal life, by building more housing. rent inflation - CPI = education shortfall or rent inflation - CPI = construction shortfall it's a choice and a lot of people are picking 1. because it's other people that have to get educated to pay for the shortfall, not the ones owning the land.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Bukhmanizer 5y ago
  > Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go? You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.
  - Hydraulix989 5y ago
    Not only that, the recall is high, even if the precision is low at these top universities. Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class. So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners. My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.
    - zhdc1 5y ago
      > Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats. The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck. What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening. So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.
- wait_a_minute 5y ago
  It’s way better than this, to be honest. It’s okay and safe to be more optimistic. These organizations are not perfect but I personally have seen for myself that they do tend to support the best and brightest, and they are actively expanding free offerings rapidly to do this for anyone with internet. It’s becoming more accessible each year to get that quality education in tech and science and business in general, in a condensed quality format.
- StandardFuture 5y ago
  > obsessed with the same hamster wheel Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life. Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling? The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability). Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Yes! I wish more people realized all of this is unnecessary. Sit down to your keyboard and start typing! You will fail, that's correct - learn from that failure, don't take it personally and never stop! So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. He did something. Bad code is better than no code. > Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard. They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know. Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".
- strikelaserclaw 5y ago
  When i was in hs, we started a new robotics club, in our first year we went to nationals, we had a kid who literally did nothing for the club but wanted some kind of title in the club (i didn't understand why at that time because i came from a type of household where my parents never cared enough to even see my report card), he was in no way exceptional except his parents pushed him to work hard so that he got good grades. I bet he wrote a college essay about his passion for robotics and how he had helped build this successful robotics teams that did fairly well at nationals. He went to Harvard. In high school, for every person i saw who valued learning for its own sake, i saw about 10 people who were obsessed with grades/ec's because their parents told them that going to prestigious university x was their only hope for a future (I don't necessarily blame the kids when it is mainly the parents driving the show). I think this kind of attitude towards college and education is pernicious because i believe a society which moves towards an excessive superficial emphasis on brand names (not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable lifestyles/professions) moves away from individuality into a collective type of society and i strongly believe revolutionary creativity which could advance society always come from individuals.
hnzix 5y ago
This has become so culturally ingrained that people will casually shame a person for studying an Arts or Humanities degree. "Have fun working at McDonalds you idiot!" An economy is not a society.
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  I am very troubled by this. Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Local history, news and art you won't find on the internet. You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that. These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. As we squeeze these people down we lose our own selves. We need a generous public commitment to these things because they will probably never pay for themselves.
  - mnouquet 5y ago
    > Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure. > These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. These days, they are more the people re-writing history to fit a narrative, against any hard evidence.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      > Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure. I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you.
      - mnouquet 5y ago
        > I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you. Of course, that's why I'm constantly getting downvoted, and got disowned. I witnessed my shitfaced +$150,000 salary co-worker in Santa Monica "educates" a hobo (with certainly his own fair share of mental health & drug issues) about how he claimed he had been rude to another co-worker. The same way some of my world travelling c-level execs family members tried to "educate" my gf about her carbon emission daily 30 miles commute. ALL these pricks have never known hunger, not having a roof over their head or not knowing what tomorrow will be made of. I cherish what I have now, and they will only pry it from my cold dead hands... and I won't go without a fight. All my guns are locked and loaded.
DubiousPusher 5y ago
Fascinating. I've been reading a bit of legal history about the U.S. and it's honestly a bit disturbing how long it's been like this at the top courts and political positions. It feels like there must be something distoetionary going on to ensure so many people from elite colleges end up with power. Still it seems like there would be some incentive for a top performer to target colleges in the 2nd rung. That being, you could basically write your own ticket. Want to work on some interesting part of the law or join some specific project? At an elite school you will be fighting to get that. At one level down you can probably walk into whatever you want.
Anatole_maarika 5y ago
Something that keeps me up at night is my fear that I only studied computer science and became a programmer because of economic and status reasons. I do feel incredibly lucky to have the job and freedom I do, but it drains me. And now I feel it's such a specialized education and I didn't explore enough to know anything else, and so I have no idea if I would have liked something completely different.
- pugio 5y ago
  Since this feels like it's responding to the common wisdom /advice to "follow your passions" (and the fear that comes from missing out on this), I recommend reading Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You" for an alternative mindset which may provide an antidote to that class of worry. (Also, consider that the freedom you gained from what is a pretty good career choice might afford you the free time to discover other things which bring you joy.)
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  You may not be in school any more, but you can still study whatever you want. I went the other direction: studied humanities in school, taught myself programming once I was working as a professional because I found it intriguing, and now I do this for a living. You have a whole lifetime. If you want to learn something, you can do it. Even Einstein got started in his spare time.
  - spekcular 5y ago
    Hold on a second. While I totally support self-directed learning, "Even Einstein got started in his spare time" seems to suggest that he learned physics recreationally. My apologies if you did not intend this, but just to clarify, this is definitely not the case. He earned a PhD from the University of Zurich, which is about the most traditional path in theoretical physics education possible!
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      To be fair it does say, “got started,” which is correct. He got started learning math via self learning.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
A lot of invention and innovation in the past few decades is focused around doing more with less - e.g IKEA furniture made out of wood shavings vs. real wood years ago, apartments made more efficient and compact vs. big houses years ago, more biking and public transit vs. enough roads to fit everyone years ago. My theory is that on a macro level, the world keeps getting more competitive because we keep on churning out babies and expect their living standards to be just as good as they always were. I am not blaming anyone for that, but obviously supporting 7.6bn people (2019) at a given living standard is much harder than supporting 6.1bn people (2000) and there's no sign of stopping. As the western population ages and the period of retirement becomes longer, this becomes even harder because they need more support than someone of working age. Humanity as a whole keeps pulling miracles out of hats to make us even more efficient in the resources we consume but of course it is going to get harder and harder to do so.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > and there's no sign of stopping Actually, there's every sign of stopping. Look at population growth rates from the 1970s to now: in general, the wealthier you make a population, the less kids they have.
  - julienchastang 5y ago
    Exactly. The world population is expected to peak in the coming decades and then start declining slowly thereafter (presenting its own set of challenges).
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  Economically speaking it is not necessarily a fact that more people will drive the living standard lower. That is basically a disproved 19th century theory. In fact, more people makes a healthy economy richer overall. Because in a healthy economy, each added person contributes more than their economic cost. This creates net wealth for the society. Some of the problem we're seeing with costs is coming from the opposite of a decrease in footprint but from an increase. A small apartment seems cheaper and compared to a modern house it is. But a modern small apartment has many more requirements than even a mansion from 1890. The safety, environmental and equipment demands of a modern home of any kind are much greater. On the other hand there has been a concerted effort to hold wages flat for the people at the bottom half of the income ladder. These two things taken together largely account for the perceived decline in quality of life for most people.
xvector 5y ago
> the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence. The author does not seem to understand that these are not mutually exclusive. You can receive a fantastic, genuinely excellent education that is also a competitive advantage. Indeed, they go hand in hand - I’d argue it’s harder to give an excellent education that’s somehow not advantageous. This article is a rant against elite education because it enables elite opportunities. But perhaps there is something to be said for the students of such schools too, that employers are more likely to give them elite opportunities. There are too many confounding variables to determine the true cause of this “problem”, if it (a merit-based system enabling social mobility) is problematic at all. There are things we can improve, but overall, the emphasis on education is a step in the right direction for humanity.
- kungito 5y ago
  The problem I personally felt was that the criteria used to filter out the people "not worthy of the degree" felt very detached from the idea of knowledge. The facts and methods required for minimal passing criteria felt very arbitrary and unless you were one of the people learning 100% of the subject it felt a lot like a system which needed to be gamed to get a good/passing grade. As soon as you need explicit and exact filters for grades and passing the learning resolves less around ideas and concepts and more about facts and techniques which is not what at least to me science and engineering is about.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  What about the rest of us? Should we just be just be shunted to the second, third, and fourth rungs of society because we didn’t have the right extracurriculars or only got a 1450 instead of a 1550? 99% of Americans have never attended and likely could not gain admittance to the top 20 schools, to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan the rest of us should not be crucified on a cross of Ivy.
  - navait 5y ago
    Are the second, third and fourth rungs so horrible? The bottom of the ladder is pretty bad, but people going to uni are unlikely to be on the bottom. As far as computer science goes, you can be a total fuck up and still easily live an upper middle class life.
sashavegas 5y ago
Consider old Russian system After 8 years of school there were exams (written and spoken) where person would be selected to go to 2 more years of school (equivalent of hi school) or if he performs poorly on exam, he can go to professional school for associated degree. The person who goes to 2 more years of hi school, take exam again, and receive diploma. Then the person can apply to any university, but to get there it was require to take another 4-5 exams, (entry exams) based on selected study subject. For example, if person decided to go to math/physics, it was required to pass 4 exams (2 for math, written and spoken) and 2 for physics. Based on result, (average score from all entry exams) the person either accepted or not. If he not accepted, he can repeat it next year or go for associated degree or some lower school. It was very nice system, where everybody have a shot based on brain and knowledge, no matter from what school person was.
- mgarfias 5y ago
  I don’t mean to sound like an ass (but probably will), but the style of your writing here couple with the subject cracked me up.
- molesy 5y ago
  https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
  - huitzitziltzin 5y ago
    Nice paper. Another example of the corruption of the Russian system which I have heard (quite likely apocryphal) follows: a female student is taking an oral exam in front of her <whatever subject> teacher. (These exams are or can be one on one.) The teacher indicates that the student should unzip her dress or she will receive a low score. She is extremely uncomfortable but attempts to comply. The zipper gets stuck. She says “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t go any lower.” The teacher replies with “Then I can’t go higher than a 3!” (Exams in Russia are out of 5.) You can complain about the SAT all you want (and I won’t defend it) but it doesn’t have that particular disadvantage.
- jollybean 5y ago
HenryKissinger 5y ago
In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sharp social stratifications and popular resentment among working people that "elites" (defined overwhelmingly as people with significant economic capital, political influence, and elite pedigrees) are detached from the reality on the ground. Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites. Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. This is only going to get worse. The ruthless competition to get into elite colleges is both a cause, and a product of, economic inequality. The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, and that investment banks recruit mostly from a handful of targets. If prospective law students were confident they could earn 90% as much, or 100% as much, as graduates from T-10 law schools, if they attended lower ranked schools, there wouldn't be so much competition to get into the same handful of elite schools. This winner take all economy is stupid, and it's making us sick in pursuit of success. People should act in their best personal interests, and this competition is the result. We can't blame parents for wanting the best outcomes for their children. But everyone deserves a bit of blame, some more than others, for helping make American society so unequal.
- nradov 5y ago
  In complex legal issues involving lots of money, clients have a strong incentive to hire the very best lawyers. Even if a lawyer charges >$1000 per hour that's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall stakes. Thus top law firms play it safe and recruit from only top schools instead of taking a risk on lower tier candidates. So a winner-take-all outcome is completely rational and expected.
  - 5y ago
starchild_3001 5y ago
College is a mix of virtue signaling, a proof of analytical and other abilities, a learning environment. Employers want smart and capable people, best colleges produce the smartest and often most capable people. Roughly speaking there's a good match. If we were all identical droids, authors like this would be most satisfied. That would completely eliminate inequality. And would ensure 100% (or 0%) social mobility, depending on how you look at it. Too bad we aren't identical droids.
adventured 5y ago
At least in the US, the university system has become another enormous mid upper-class handout scheme, much like healthcare. It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf. Again as with healthcare, all you have to do is look at who got all the money from the cost of education hikes - where did it all go - over the past two decades. We know where it went, we know who got that money. There is nobody willing to do anything about it, the latest proposals are to just throw more money at the disaster (which will send the cost of education even higher), more de facto welfare handouts for an already well-off class of white collar parasites.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  For both healthcare and college, a handout to whom? > It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf. By price fixing? You'd have a stronger point college is a racket because you need it to get a good job, and there aren't viable alternatives, though that implies more collusion between employers and colleges than there actually is. > We know where it went, we know who got that money. Again, this isn't obvious. Part of the increase in the price of college is because room, board, and amenities have gotten better, and easy access to student loans have accommodated this. This isn't a "handout," though. Healthcare is somewhat similar in that the fee-for-service model led to higher costs, but it came about in a very natural way, and it's more about patient expectations and liability than handouts. > There is nobody willing to do anything about it Purdue hasn't raised tuition in 10 years. That's something.
- bo1024 5y ago
  > who got all the money from the cost of education hikes Can you recommend a source on this? My first guess is construction companies and football coaches.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education is a recommended read on this topic.
- qntty 5y ago
  Bryan Caplan is a charlatan
  - dang 5y ago
    Thoughtful critique is welcome here, but personal attacks and name-calling aren't, so please do the former instead of the latter. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
flowerlad 5y ago
College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions. Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated. Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized. Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ). Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )
- phobosanomaly 5y ago
  That really depends on what you mean by 'destiny.' If you go to community college, work hard, and get decent grades you are more-or-less guaranteed a transfer spot at a good state school. It's actually pretty easy to transfer from a California community college right into UCSD, UCLA, UCR, etc., and these are all excellent, affordable schools. Nowhere in that process do you have to take the SAT or the ACT. You just take college classes, and get college grades that show how you perform in college. You prove yourself by actually doing the thing the standardized test is supposed to evaluate. I would propose that we look at tests not as the solution, but as another layer of bullshit hoops people have to jump through. Just get people bootstrapped into the damn thing at low-cost, and see how they perform. Evaluate them based on that. Being an SAT savant doesn't mean someone will actually be able to do anything meaningful in the real world. Sure, that path may not guarantee you a spot at MIT, but if you come from a variety of backgrounds and have some humility about the whole thing you're going to be just fine and you will have more than enough control to steer your destiny in whatever direction your interests lead you. Anecdotal, but all of my friends who make over $100k went to state schools for undergrad and grad school, and not going to Yale didn't seem to pose too much of an obstacle to them leading happy, productive, and fulfilling lives.
hintymad 5y ago
> Skeptics challenge test scores and rankings on their own terms. Most commonly, critics say that the SAT is culturally or racially biased and fails to predict college grades or future career success. The deeper issue is not that scores and rankings are bad at calibrating what they try to measure. Test scores and rankings are bad at capturing education: SAT may not "capture education", but some tests certainly do. The key is to have free-form questions as in college, such as proofs, derivations, and word problems. I'm sure there will be false positives, but what system doesn't? I was checking out those college-entrance exams by Japanese universities. If a kid can excel those questions, the kid for sure gets real education and is smarter than most of her peers, statistically speaking. And I don't agree that everyone can game the system by cramming. It's like few people could get into USAMO by cramming. A well-designed test is like USAMO, but easier.
- sjg007 5y ago
  This is apparent in the SAT2s. Or APs. But the elites still want high SATs. Test prep makes a big difference.
minikites 5y ago
>Busyness has become a badge of honor as elites boast of their workloads: A 2015 advertisement for The Wall Street Journal stated, “People who don’t have time make time to read The Wall Street Journal.” It's the hustle culture of capitalism applied to every facet of life. If you're not productive every single moment, you're falling behind and your self worth deserves to decline because of it. We've eliminated any "slack" from our jobs, from our lives, from our relationships in pursuit of ever more efficiency. We procrastinate because we feel guilty about not being maximally productive 100% of the time, there's no room for honest slack, we have to self-flagellate. We can't enjoy our time off because we know that work is piling up in our absence, having slack staff to compensate would be a waste. Our time with friends has to be scheduled and planned so it doesn't get in the way of our productivity, there's no room for slack in our social activities. We do all of these things because if we fall behind our job might be on the chopping block when the shareholders decide to squeeze fractions of a percent out of the share price. If we lose our jobs we lose medical care, food, shelter, and more. We could fix all of these things if we chose to make our society that way, but we find it preferable for one man's divorce to have global implications for dozens of organizations and charities, all the people who work for him, and all the people who depend his whims for aid.
- max_ 5y ago
  Maybe most of contemporary employment is slavery as people like David Greaber, Noam Chomsky & Nassim Taleb have asserted. The problem with a change that alters this however, is that you may be tampering with the bread of alot of powerful people. There alot of incentives for the powerful to keep things the way they are.
  - minikites 5y ago
    There are a lot more of us than there are of them. The problem is that many people have been tricked into believing they are on the same side as the capital class.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ab_testing 5y ago
This kind of acacdemic rat race is very common in developing countries like India and China where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs. For a long time, the US colleges avoided this competition mainly because the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great and being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. However now with the exorbitant college costs and the reduced career choices for non STEM majors means that American students have to become competitive right from the time they enter high school.
- SadCanadian 5y ago
  Yep. And the more the developed world stagnates, the worse the tournament will get.
- StandardFuture 5y ago
  > where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs And there it is. This same phenomenon is also exactly the "leetcode phenomenon" that we see in the SE field, btw. You could call it an Eastern culture thing, but your summation captures the why more accurately. > being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. I imagine that up until the 80s and possibly even 90s this was an upper middle class guarantee. > the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great I have never seen it expressed this way but this is spot on. The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so. And therefore shouldn't require the cost of a degree and the time of a degree. A lower-middle-class lifestyle wouldn't be nearly so bad if you had four more working years and no debt at the start...
duxup 5y ago
I had some very smart and capable friends who exceled at school. I did not, I dropped out for a variety of reasons. But entering the workforce things changed. I thrived, I easily solved problems, and enjoyed what I thought of as "real work". Many of my friends did not. They seemed to thrive in the comfort of a syllabus, clear and defined paths to positive reinforcement, and status... but work isn't generally like that. You're not told what to do, exactly how and to reproduce it, you need to find that out yourself, and you will fail, maybe often... I had similar experiences with interns who when given an assignment and told they were to do their best and see what resources they could put together.... seemed lost without a specific set of step by step instructions... Everyone did fine in the end, but the differences were striking to me. Amusingly I think I'd love to go back to school now, I'd think much differently of it now than I did at the time.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > defined paths Maybe they went to the wrong school? I once did an analysis of the stress produced when the gear box ran full speed into the stops. My colleague looked it over, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" They weren't in the book, I derived them from principles. I.e. I wasn't trained to plug values into formulas, but how to get the formulas needed.
WalterBright 5y ago
> The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking. This seems to be the crux of the article. If only people would study humanities instead of science & engineering. Science & engineering isn't a real education. I disagree. I derive great pleasure from the engineering & science education I received in college. I haven't the slightest interest in French Literature, etc., and don't feel at all deprived for not being educated in it.
- GPerson 5y ago
  Respectfully, this is not the crux of the article. The article is an examination of American cultural beliefs about meritocracy, our systems of meritocracy, and relevant societal effects. In my opinion this quote is more representative of the “crux” of this particular piece, “A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated.” But I actually think that there’s quite a bit here and in Markovits’s other work. If you have a chance to take a break from your compiler work, I recommend a lecture he does called “The Meritocracy Trap” and perhaps also his conversation with Glenn Loury.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from): "A scientist would fearlessly peer into the Gates of Hell if he thought it would advance his knowledge." I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college. And besides, I don't see much elitism in S&E professions based on the college. Employers don't care if you hail from MIT or UW if you can get s*t done.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Maybe someone on HN can answer this for me. Why are these articles about the American system written as if they are new developments. Nothing in this article sounds any different from how things were 50 years ago, and probably earlier. I am guessing that 1. more kids are going to college today than 50 years ago (that should be a good thing) and competing for spots at top schools (thus more competition) and 2. the American economy has not expanded to make use of this increased number of college graduates. I have no idea if that is true, though. Articles like these make it sound like the author is reporting on some great, newly discovered unfairness. But things have been this way in America for over at least half a century. The only obvious difference between then and now is perhaps that there's more people competing. EDIT: Cheers for the answers. I am going to do some research on tuition increases at state universities, as well as the historical numbers on student borrowing. Any pointers to where I can find such data already compiled would be appreciated.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  A few things have changed. College is no longer a tool of social mobility. It is table stakes to keep your current status. If you do not go to college, you are unlikely to stay within the middle class. People may cite plumbers but they don't make a fortune and the physical toll is quite serious. Second, funding has been cut for public universities significantly. A lot of public universities charge tuition that is far more than it was 50-60 years ago. Ironically the expensive private schools are where you want to go for low cost college. They can afford to give full rides to a large portion of their population. Hence the competition. People have gotten better at playing the game. It's like how chess ELO keeps going up. If you did SAT prep, was a nationally ranked fencer/golfer/tennis player, did volunteer work, founded a tech club and had a 95 average in the 80's, you'd have your pick of colleges. Much in the same way your average GM would kill if they were playing back in the 80's. These days you'd still do okay but you'd be competing against a larger pool of people who also did all of these things.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago
Clewza313 5y ago
> In law, for example, of the roughly 2,000 people admitted to the top-five law schools each year, no more than a smattering choose to enroll in a law school ranked outside the top 10. Am I the only one whose parser is throwing a syntax error for this sentence? "People already admitted to top-5 law schools don't choose to go non-top-10 schools instead"?
- DreamScatter 5y ago
  Maybe that flawed logic / grammer you point out is itself a symptom of what the article is discussing (failure of education).
- username90 5y ago
  The problem here is that you can't imagine students being admitted to top schools not wanting to go to other schools. That was his whole point, top schools are seen as such a superior choice that some people can't even imagine students choosing to go to lesser schools.
Bukhmanizer 5y ago
> even marriage now depends on school. The share of marriages in which both partners possess college degrees grew by 800 percent from 1960 to 2010. This is a meaningless statistic unless we know the base rate of people with college degrees in 1960 and 2010.
- Bukhmanizer 5y ago
  cont. > Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give. Look up the citations for this claim. It all seems like complete nonsense to me. AFAI can tell, they just pulled numbers out of thin air.
hkt 5y ago
The Jane Austen quote that starts this article is completely misread: she was being ironic. Her point was, why would a single man in possession of a fortune want a wife? It is a little off topic but it is most discouraging to see a writer in the Atlantic make a mistake like that. Especially a professor...
gnicholas 5y ago
> In law, graduates of top-10 schools make on average half more than graduates of schools ranked 21 to 100 When you consider where the people who graduate from top-10 schools live, this is neither surprising nor impressive. Most of these law grads live in NYC/Chicago/DC/SF/LA or a handful of other expensive cities. They make good money — starting salaries are around $200k — but they also pay tons in rent, mortgages, private school bills, etc. Compare this with a graduate of a 50-something ranked law school. This person probably lives in a city or town that where the cost of living is half of NYC/SF. They likely also work fewer hours than their top-10 counterparts. If they are making 2/3 of what a top-10 law grad is making, they're getting the better deal by far. Source: former Palo Alto lawyer
- Hydraulix989 5y ago
  That's a weird wording: Half more would mean 50% more (so not double, but 1.5x)? I think the real reason people willingly take on that Big City grind is to have a shot at making partner at a top firm (which would mean they make 10x more than their midwest prairie dweller counterparts).
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    Yes, it is very weird wording. It is also strange that the comparison omits graduates of schools ranked 11-20. Those schools are not as prestigious as the top-10, but their graduates (like me) go on to practice in the same expensive cities so their salaries are in the same order of magnitude. Including this cohort in the comparison would have made the not-shocking 50% gap even less impressive.
J253 5y ago
I have a (perhaps unpopular) pet theory that college as we know it going to cease to exist sometime in the next several decades. In its current direction it feels like it’s becoming more about gaming the system. Those who do the “best” are really just the best at looking like the best. I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually. I’ll try an analogy—-it feels like college is social media and students are aspiring influencers, all jockeying to find the right aesthetic and be that perfect shining light with all the followers but it turns out they’re all optimizing to the same local max and end up as copies of copies of copies. In the end all their resumes look the same. A bit drab, sweeping, and cynical, admittedly, but that’s what I think. Anyway, my theory is that with ubiquitous high speed Internet, remote work being more widely acceptable, and continued suburbanization, future generations will look less favorably at taking on a huge debt burden to attend in-person college and something _like_ highly niche online trade/vocational schools or guilds will become popular and widely acceptable as a substitute for a four year degree in certain positions.
- FriedrichN 5y ago
  >I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually. I can absolutely identify with this. I've seen way too many class mates get way higher grades than me without even really knowing any of the concepts they're supposed to be showcasing. Meanwhile all I ever had was conflict with teachers. My theory is that school is simply aimed to produce docile bodies that will do what is asked of them. The whole learning bit is just smoke and mirrors to fool you into thinking that it's useful.
  - SadCanadian 5y ago
    You would be correct, that is indeed a large part of modern "education". See the signaling theory of education for more.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    This is nothing new. These sentiments have always been common. Clips from a well-known 1960s documentary with context from one of the filmers (Sixteen at Webster Groves): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQxUkZ4Anc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQxUkZ4Anc
jl2718 5y ago
Is college still a thing? I sort of thought that it would at least start to die in the permanent-pandemic era. Right now even the elites look a lot like University of Phoenix Online, and I don’t think they’re ever going back to any meaningful physical experience. It sounds a lot more like a very expensive honorarium.
xyzzy21 5y ago
This is why big name degrees on resumes are generally a red flag for me. The bigger the name, the more likely the value of degree is BS.
cafard 5y ago
Divorced from learning? Let's say that it has been an open marriage for quite a while now. I leave it to the interested to look up Henry Adams's remarks on his student days at Harvard.
strikelaserclaw 5y ago
This obsession (disease) with brands seems to be accelerating in the USA, not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable professions, acceptable companies to work for (FAANG?), acceptable startup startup accelerators, perhaps it is an inevitability of a winner take all society. How can the richest country in the history of earth produce a mindset of scarcity in it's people, i think this is a failure of the economic/political system that needs to be corrected. I originally come from a country where they decide a persons future based on a test they take before they are 18, let me tell you that this society has not produced anything noteworthy in thousands of years. When you create conditions in a society where everyone must fit a mold, you essentially erase a large part of happiness and creativity that exists in a people.

182 points by colour 5y ago

As a current student, I see this first-hand. I go to a school that is moderately prestigious, but not well known for CS. Far too many of my classmates are obsessed with the same hamster wheel of optimizing grades, superficial extracurriculars and rec letter chasing. This isn't surprising; it's what got them into this school in the first place. Unfortunately for them it's also quite useless in tech. Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go? This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard. People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.

phone8675309 5y ago
If I owned a company I would refuse to hire graduates from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. It's much more likely that you were good at lying than at studying if you went there, and I don't have time to teach the basics.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I'll accept the premise that it's possible to fake your way into a school like that. I think it would be much harder to fake your way to a diploma though. Am I wrong?
  - fridif 5y ago
    Admission is harder than graduation for sure. I only had an 80th percentile SAT but 99th percentile GPA
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      So getting in to Stanford is harder than graduating with a STEM degree? Doens't say much about the vaunted reputation of that school. I went to a midwest state university. Getting in was easy. Completing my CS degree took a lot of work. I cannot imagine any way I could have bullshitted my way through that.
      - fridif 5y ago
        Google the concept of the gentleman's B. if you show up, most teachers will take pity and not fail you even if you are subpar on your tests. i dont know what trauma you went through at iowa state university's calc 3 hazing but I personally pulled the patrician move and graduated with a degree in history, only to get a job programming straight away anyway. leetcode, system design, and book knowledge questions about java will forever be more manageable than a compilers class or multivariable calculus, for purposes of making enough money to live a middle class life without burning out
      - medvezhenok 5y ago
        Yes, this is the case for most of the top universities (and likely med school, law school, you name it). Universities like to keep their graduation rates high to ensure competition at the front of the pipeline. Also, by keeping admission so competitive you basically ensure that whoever does end up getting in has the capacity to do well at any program (though statistics are still gamed - for example it is almost impossible to "drop out" of MIT - you are just placed on indefinite leave if you express that desire. That way their graduation rate very high since the people on indefinite leave don't factor into it).
est31 5y ago
Maybe that kid who made the wrong website put more emphasis on things that places like MIT prioritize instead of reading about "useless" subjects like learning how to create secure websites? The issue is comparability. You can compare by SAT scores and grades far better than by a metric like "built a secure website". If places like MIT prioritized such things more, they'd become even more unfair. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather work with you on a team than with someone who cares only about their personal success above the team's success, and can't listen to input as to why their approach was wrong. As for the Zuckerberg example, I think it's a prime example because a social network website is comparatively cheap to create, but the key question is to get people to sign up. By launching first for top colleges, people who want to stay in touch with their "successful" mates would want access as well. Someone without access to a top tier institution's social life would not have been able to pull it off.
hzay 5y ago
The kid who returned user's passed hash -- he could have simply learned more about better programming practices no? You make it sound like it's a crime and he's inherently flawed. But all of us did dumb mistakes in school/college in our early programming days, and then most of us learned not to do them.
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  Yeah that was maybe not the best example. Although I did explain it to him a couple times and he still didn't get it. He also didn't do his share of work but of course took credit for the accomplishments of the group in his college applications. What I was trying to point it is that these students used these supposedly impressive accomplishments in the college applications when really they didn't do much at all.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > when really they didn't do much at all That's where the in-person interview comes in. It's a lot harder to fake one's way through that.
    - hardwaregeek 5y ago
      The in person interview has little to no bearing on your application. It can provide a minor positive boost but no negative value. Besides, the interviewers I had were all nice enough people but definitely possible to trick or BS.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Even if one asks probing questions about the project the candidate lied about doing?
        ryandrake 5y ago
        So, the technical interviewer says “no hire.” But the VP (who went to the candidate’s alma mater) says yes. And the Director who knows the candidate’s uncle from the country club says yes. And the candidate really laid it on thick for the hiring manager who has the final say. What did the tech nerd say, again? It increasingly feels like the world’s reward systems have been captured by and saturated with these charming phonies who only know how to game the system. Put all your skill points into charisma and people will just hand you money and opportunities. I’ve spent my whole career perpetually a couple of rungs down the totem pole from these well-pedigreed charmers, and hear them talk their smooth, but ultimately empty talk over and over. Whether it’s college applications or job applications, the longer I go at it, the more convinced I am that the ability to “seem like the right kind of successful sort of person” gives you the best results. Better than track record, better than demonstrable skills, better than potential and willingness to do hard work.
caseysoftware 5y ago
Years ago, I was advising the "entrepreneur club" at a major university and I met with one of the students. He introduced himself as "president" and we chatted and talked out their Vision. A week later, I met with him and another member who introduced herself as "president" Slightly confused, I asked if they'd just had an election. Nope. Turns out they called their members "president" which looked great on their resumes. I was impressed they gamed it so simply.
- musingsole 5y ago
  In any other context, that'd be at least a little slimey. But here, with these budding grifters? It's downright admirable.
usaar333 5y ago
> People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. There's probably edge cases, like for some startup founders or supreme court justices, but for the more "advantaged" than average children, it largely doesn't seem to matter in aggregate (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimating_the_Return_to_College_Selectivity_Over_the_Career_Using_Administrative_Earnings_Data https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228303493_Estimatin...)
- SadCanadian 5y ago
  The economic pie is shrinking. Elites are spending more and more of their money sending their kids to the best prep schools and resume padding to ensure they don't slip through the growing cracks in the developed world (i.e. inequality that is well accepted at this point). See the college admissions scandal. That was the canary in the coalmine for intra-elite competition. They spent hundreds of thousands to low digit millions to send their kids through the backdoor because they couldn't afford the backdoor. These were like low-level elites (not hyper wealthy). The point is that if these people are concerned about their status, the middle and lower classes have little hope. While the average outcomes may have been true in past decades, one must ask if this will be the case going forward. In a low-to-no-growth economy, where most of the gains are financialized in limited sectors (high finance and tech), how else will one penetrate these sectors if not through an elite institution? Answer: they probably will not and will resign themselves to working in a stagnating part of the economy. Respectfully, I think people who subscribe to your view are whistling in the dark about the future of the country.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    The economic pie isn't shrinking, it's not being allowed to grow. Companies produce more things when the price goes up. This works amazingly well for consumer goods. However, companies have been banned from doing so in the housing market. What follows is a shortage, the driver of all inflations. However, this only reflects rents, not necessarily the prices of homes because they are primarily driven by the availability of cheap credit whose monthly payments may stay the same despite a more expensive house. From what I can tell rent inflation itself went up by 3%+ every year since 2000. One problem with rents is that the only way they can employ people is via construction and since that isn't happening it will not translate into increased wages, which will cause wages to lag behind as most people are employed in an industry whose maximum wage increases are effectively bounded by CPI+productivity growth, not rent inflation+productivity growth, rents outpacing wages is only natural. Education is one way to increase productivity growth, but another way would be to simply reduce the productivity growth needed to have a normal life, by building more housing. rent inflation - CPI = education shortfall or rent inflation - CPI = construction shortfall it's a choice and a lot of people are picking 1. because it's other people that have to get educated to pay for the shortfall, not the ones owning the land.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Bukhmanizer 5y ago
> Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go? You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.
- Hydraulix989 5y ago
  Not only that, the recall is high, even if the precision is low at these top universities. Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class. So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners. My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    > Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). I agree with the general sentiment, but I think it's worth adding in a couple of caveats. The demand to get into a top university in the US is so high that even if you meet all of the prerequisites, getting accepted into Tier 1 university relies on an uncomfortable and ever growing amount of luck. What people forget is that this dynamic is driven by growing demand, and that an increasing number of qualified applicants are being pushed into lower tier universities. While this isn't an absolute guarantee that the overall quality, and marketability, of these universities will increase, this is, in fact, what has been happening. So yes, work hard, but don't set your goal on achieving a target that is driven as much by random chance as it is by your own effort.
wait_a_minute 5y ago
It’s way better than this, to be honest. It’s okay and safe to be more optimistic. These organizations are not perfect but I personally have seen for myself that they do tend to support the best and brightest, and they are actively expanding free offerings rapidly to do this for anyone with internet. It’s becoming more accessible each year to get that quality education in tech and science and business in general, in a condensed quality format.
StandardFuture 5y ago
> obsessed with the same hamster wheel Perhaps this is by design? Imagine that same level of obsessions, dedication, and intelligence redirected at building competing entities to existing large corporations, investment firms, or establishing new political parties? Instead of competing on an ever-decreasing probability window of being one of those who are "in the top 1%" of everything in life. Top 1% high school. Top 1% standard test scores. Top 1% University. Top 1% internship. Top1% GPA. Top 1% corporate job. Dont' forget that those probabilities multiply ... Oh woops, can't even get wealthy even if you do win those insane odds? Hmm. Whose game is this again? Who is profiting from this funneling? The problem is that right here on HN there will be a few who have won those odds and will fail to see past their personal anecdotes (out of a lack of desire and not ability). Stop playing the crony capitalism lottery. YC is one alternative, but starting any business (technical or not) is another. Business is 100% about how you compete. If you are already willing to do that for numbers that are not your bank account then why not just do that instead for your bank account?
- emteycz 5y ago
  Yes! I wish more people realized all of this is unnecessary. Sit down to your keyboard and start typing! You will fail, that's correct - learn from that failure, don't take it personally and never stop! So many people around me (friends of my university-going girlfriend) say "no, I can't do that, that's done after doctorate and years of working for others" when I suggest starting a business. They usually don't believe when I tell them I started my first business in high school, these thoughts are too alien for them. School has ingrained in them that they have to be perfect on the first try and that any mistake is fatal.
908B64B197 5y ago
> This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. He did something. Bad code is better than no code. > Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard. They understood probability: what are the chances the school would audit carefully these claims? Just doesn't scale. That's shady, but the risk v. reward functions heavily skews toward embellishing your application. And was there really a captain tittle given at the school? Often sports league won't record these since they aren't official tittles. So there's little way to know. Now, with the Harvard admission scandal, it's also tempting to choose an "ethnicity of convenience too".
strikelaserclaw 5y ago
When i was in hs, we started a new robotics club, in our first year we went to nationals, we had a kid who literally did nothing for the club but wanted some kind of title in the club (i didn't understand why at that time because i came from a type of household where my parents never cared enough to even see my report card), he was in no way exceptional except his parents pushed him to work hard so that he got good grades. I bet he wrote a college essay about his passion for robotics and how he had helped build this successful robotics teams that did fairly well at nationals. He went to Harvard. In high school, for every person i saw who valued learning for its own sake, i saw about 10 people who were obsessed with grades/ec's because their parents told them that going to prestigious university x was their only hope for a future (I don't necessarily blame the kids when it is mainly the parents driving the show). I think this kind of attitude towards college and education is pernicious because i believe a society which moves towards an excessive superficial emphasis on brand names (not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable lifestyles/professions) moves away from individuality into a collective type of society and i strongly believe revolutionary creativity which could advance society always come from individuals.

hnzix 5y ago

This has become so culturally ingrained that people will casually shame a person for studying an Arts or Humanities degree. "Have fun working at McDonalds you idiot!" An economy is not a society.

DubiousPusher 5y ago
I am very troubled by this. Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Local history, news and art you won't find on the internet. You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that. These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. As we squeeze these people down we lose our own selves. We need a generous public commitment to these things because they will probably never pay for themselves.
- mnouquet 5y ago
  > Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure. > These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. These days, they are more the people re-writing history to fit a narrative, against any hard evidence.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    > Do you mean by putting themselves on a pedestal without having experienced life _at_all_ and living in nothing but theories. Yeah, sure. I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you.
    - mnouquet 5y ago
      > I hope the irony that this describes a large portion of the tech industry is not lost on you. Of course, that's why I'm constantly getting downvoted, and got disowned. I witnessed my shitfaced +$150,000 salary co-worker in Santa Monica "educates" a hobo (with certainly his own fair share of mental health & drug issues) about how he claimed he had been rude to another co-worker. The same way some of my world travelling c-level execs family members tried to "educate" my gf about her carbon emission daily 30 miles commute. ALL these pricks have never known hunger, not having a roof over their head or not knowing what tomorrow will be made of. I cherish what I have now, and they will only pry it from my cold dead hands... and I won't go without a fight. All my guns are locked and loaded.

DubiousPusher 5y ago

Fascinating. I've been reading a bit of legal history about the U.S. and it's honestly a bit disturbing how long it's been like this at the top courts and political positions. It feels like there must be something distoetionary going on to ensure so many people from elite colleges end up with power. Still it seems like there would be some incentive for a top performer to target colleges in the 2nd rung. That being, you could basically write your own ticket. Want to work on some interesting part of the law or join some specific project? At an elite school you will be fighting to get that. At one level down you can probably walk into whatever you want.

Anatole_maarika 5y ago

Something that keeps me up at night is my fear that I only studied computer science and became a programmer because of economic and status reasons. I do feel incredibly lucky to have the job and freedom I do, but it drains me. And now I feel it's such a specialized education and I didn't explore enough to know anything else, and so I have no idea if I would have liked something completely different.

pugio 5y ago
Since this feels like it's responding to the common wisdom /advice to "follow your passions" (and the fear that comes from missing out on this), I recommend reading Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You" for an alternative mindset which may provide an antidote to that class of worry. (Also, consider that the freedom you gained from what is a pretty good career choice might afford you the free time to discover other things which bring you joy.)
planet-and-halo 5y ago
You may not be in school any more, but you can still study whatever you want. I went the other direction: studied humanities in school, taught myself programming once I was working as a professional because I found it intriguing, and now I do this for a living. You have a whole lifetime. If you want to learn something, you can do it. Even Einstein got started in his spare time.
- spekcular 5y ago
  Hold on a second. While I totally support self-directed learning, "Even Einstein got started in his spare time" seems to suggest that he learned physics recreationally. My apologies if you did not intend this, but just to clarify, this is definitely not the case. He earned a PhD from the University of Zurich, which is about the most traditional path in theoretical physics education possible!
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    To be fair it does say, “got started,” which is correct. He got started learning math via self learning.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

A lot of invention and innovation in the past few decades is focused around doing more with less - e.g IKEA furniture made out of wood shavings vs. real wood years ago, apartments made more efficient and compact vs. big houses years ago, more biking and public transit vs. enough roads to fit everyone years ago. My theory is that on a macro level, the world keeps getting more competitive because we keep on churning out babies and expect their living standards to be just as good as they always were. I am not blaming anyone for that, but obviously supporting 7.6bn people (2019) at a given living standard is much harder than supporting 6.1bn people (2000) and there's no sign of stopping. As the western population ages and the period of retirement becomes longer, this becomes even harder because they need more support than someone of working age. Humanity as a whole keeps pulling miracles out of hats to make us even more efficient in the resources we consume but of course it is going to get harder and harder to do so.

crooked-v 5y ago
> and there's no sign of stopping Actually, there's every sign of stopping. Look at population growth rates from the 1970s to now: in general, the wealthier you make a population, the less kids they have.
- julienchastang 5y ago
  Exactly. The world population is expected to peak in the coming decades and then start declining slowly thereafter (presenting its own set of challenges).
DubiousPusher 5y ago
Economically speaking it is not necessarily a fact that more people will drive the living standard lower. That is basically a disproved 19th century theory. In fact, more people makes a healthy economy richer overall. Because in a healthy economy, each added person contributes more than their economic cost. This creates net wealth for the society. Some of the problem we're seeing with costs is coming from the opposite of a decrease in footprint but from an increase. A small apartment seems cheaper and compared to a modern house it is. But a modern small apartment has many more requirements than even a mansion from 1890. The safety, environmental and equipment demands of a modern home of any kind are much greater. On the other hand there has been a concerted effort to hold wages flat for the people at the bottom half of the income ladder. These two things taken together largely account for the perceived decline in quality of life for most people.

xvector 5y ago

> the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence. The author does not seem to understand that these are not mutually exclusive. You can receive a fantastic, genuinely excellent education that is also a competitive advantage. Indeed, they go hand in hand - I’d argue it’s harder to give an excellent education that’s somehow not advantageous. This article is a rant against elite education because it enables elite opportunities. But perhaps there is something to be said for the students of such schools too, that employers are more likely to give them elite opportunities. There are too many confounding variables to determine the true cause of this “problem”, if it (a merit-based system enabling social mobility) is problematic at all. There are things we can improve, but overall, the emphasis on education is a step in the right direction for humanity.

kungito 5y ago
The problem I personally felt was that the criteria used to filter out the people "not worthy of the degree" felt very detached from the idea of knowledge. The facts and methods required for minimal passing criteria felt very arbitrary and unless you were one of the people learning 100% of the subject it felt a lot like a system which needed to be gamed to get a good/passing grade. As soon as you need explicit and exact filters for grades and passing the learning resolves less around ideas and concepts and more about facts and techniques which is not what at least to me science and engineering is about.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
What about the rest of us? Should we just be just be shunted to the second, third, and fourth rungs of society because we didn’t have the right extracurriculars or only got a 1450 instead of a 1550? 99% of Americans have never attended and likely could not gain admittance to the top 20 schools, to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan the rest of us should not be crucified on a cross of Ivy.
- navait 5y ago
  Are the second, third and fourth rungs so horrible? The bottom of the ladder is pretty bad, but people going to uni are unlikely to be on the bottom. As far as computer science goes, you can be a total fuck up and still easily live an upper middle class life.

sashavegas 5y ago

Consider old Russian system After 8 years of school there were exams (written and spoken) where person would be selected to go to 2 more years of school (equivalent of hi school) or if he performs poorly on exam, he can go to professional school for associated degree. The person who goes to 2 more years of hi school, take exam again, and receive diploma. Then the person can apply to any university, but to get there it was require to take another 4-5 exams, (entry exams) based on selected study subject. For example, if person decided to go to math/physics, it was required to pass 4 exams (2 for math, written and spoken) and 2 for physics. Based on result, (average score from all entry exams) the person either accepted or not. If he not accepted, he can repeat it next year or go for associated degree or some lower school. It was very nice system, where everybody have a shot based on brain and knowledge, no matter from what school person was.

mgarfias 5y ago
I don’t mean to sound like an ass (but probably will), but the style of your writing here couple with the subject cracked me up.
molesy 5y ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
- huitzitziltzin 5y ago
  Nice paper. Another example of the corruption of the Russian system which I have heard (quite likely apocryphal) follows: a female student is taking an oral exam in front of her <whatever subject> teacher. (These exams are or can be one on one.) The teacher indicates that the student should unzip her dress or she will receive a low score. She is extremely uncomfortable but attempts to comply. The zipper gets stuck. She says “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t go any lower.” The teacher replies with “Then I can’t go higher than a 3!” (Exams in Russia are out of 5.) You can complain about the SAT all you want (and I won’t defend it) but it doesn’t have that particular disadvantage.
jollybean 5y ago

HenryKissinger 5y ago

In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sharp social stratifications and popular resentment among working people that "elites" (defined overwhelmingly as people with significant economic capital, political influence, and elite pedigrees) are detached from the reality on the ground. Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites. Countries with more equal societies, like the Nordics, and Canada, do not have strong populist movements like those in the US and the UK. This is only going to get worse. The ruthless competition to get into elite colleges is both a cause, and a product of, economic inequality. The article mentions that the graduates of law schools ranked in the top 10 earn 50% more than the graduates of law schools ranked 21-100, and that investment banks recruit mostly from a handful of targets. If prospective law students were confident they could earn 90% as much, or 100% as much, as graduates from T-10 law schools, if they attended lower ranked schools, there wouldn't be so much competition to get into the same handful of elite schools. This winner take all economy is stupid, and it's making us sick in pursuit of success. People should act in their best personal interests, and this competition is the result. We can't blame parents for wanting the best outcomes for their children. But everyone deserves a bit of blame, some more than others, for helping make American society so unequal.

nradov 5y ago
In complex legal issues involving lots of money, clients have a strong incentive to hire the very best lawyers. Even if a lawyer charges >$1000 per hour that's a drop in the bucket relative to the overall stakes. Thus top law firms play it safe and recruit from only top schools instead of taking a risk on lower tier candidates. So a winner-take-all outcome is completely rational and expected.
- 5y ago

starchild_3001 5y ago

College is a mix of virtue signaling, a proof of analytical and other abilities, a learning environment. Employers want smart and capable people, best colleges produce the smartest and often most capable people. Roughly speaking there's a good match. If we were all identical droids, authors like this would be most satisfied. That would completely eliminate inequality. And would ensure 100% (or 0%) social mobility, depending on how you look at it. Too bad we aren't identical droids.

adventured 5y ago

At least in the US, the university system has become another enormous mid upper-class handout scheme, much like healthcare. It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf. Again as with healthcare, all you have to do is look at who got all the money from the cost of education hikes - where did it all go - over the past two decades. We know where it went, we know who got that money. There is nobody willing to do anything about it, the latest proposals are to just throw more money at the disaster (which will send the cost of education even higher), more de facto welfare handouts for an already well-off class of white collar parasites.

dehrmann 5y ago
For both healthcare and college, a handout to whom? > It's governed and protected much as a cartel might protect its turf. By price fixing? You'd have a stronger point college is a racket because you need it to get a good job, and there aren't viable alternatives, though that implies more collusion between employers and colleges than there actually is. > We know where it went, we know who got that money. Again, this isn't obvious. Part of the increase in the price of college is because room, board, and amenities have gotten better, and easy access to student loans have accommodated this. This isn't a "handout," though. Healthcare is somewhat similar in that the fee-for-service model led to higher costs, but it came about in a very natural way, and it's more about patient expectations and liability than handouts. > There is nobody willing to do anything about it Purdue hasn't raised tuition in 10 years. That's something.
bo1024 5y ago
> who got all the money from the cost of education hikes Can you recommend a source on this? My first guess is construction companies and football coaches.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education is a recommended read on this topic.

qntty 5y ago
Bryan Caplan is a charlatan
- dang 5y ago
  Thoughtful critique is welcome here, but personal attacks and name-calling aren't, so please do the former instead of the latter. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

flowerlad 5y ago

College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions. Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated. Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized. Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ). Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )

phobosanomaly 5y ago
That really depends on what you mean by 'destiny.' If you go to community college, work hard, and get decent grades you are more-or-less guaranteed a transfer spot at a good state school. It's actually pretty easy to transfer from a California community college right into UCSD, UCLA, UCR, etc., and these are all excellent, affordable schools. Nowhere in that process do you have to take the SAT or the ACT. You just take college classes, and get college grades that show how you perform in college. You prove yourself by actually doing the thing the standardized test is supposed to evaluate. I would propose that we look at tests not as the solution, but as another layer of bullshit hoops people have to jump through. Just get people bootstrapped into the damn thing at low-cost, and see how they perform. Evaluate them based on that. Being an SAT savant doesn't mean someone will actually be able to do anything meaningful in the real world. Sure, that path may not guarantee you a spot at MIT, but if you come from a variety of backgrounds and have some humility about the whole thing you're going to be just fine and you will have more than enough control to steer your destiny in whatever direction your interests lead you. Anecdotal, but all of my friends who make over $100k went to state schools for undergrad and grad school, and not going to Yale didn't seem to pose too much of an obstacle to them leading happy, productive, and fulfilling lives.

hintymad 5y ago

> Skeptics challenge test scores and rankings on their own terms. Most commonly, critics say that the SAT is culturally or racially biased and fails to predict college grades or future career success. The deeper issue is not that scores and rankings are bad at calibrating what they try to measure. Test scores and rankings are bad at capturing education: SAT may not "capture education", but some tests certainly do. The key is to have free-form questions as in college, such as proofs, derivations, and word problems. I'm sure there will be false positives, but what system doesn't? I was checking out those college-entrance exams by Japanese universities. If a kid can excel those questions, the kid for sure gets real education and is smarter than most of her peers, statistically speaking. And I don't agree that everyone can game the system by cramming. It's like few people could get into USAMO by cramming. A well-designed test is like USAMO, but easier.

sjg007 5y ago
This is apparent in the SAT2s. Or APs. But the elites still want high SATs. Test prep makes a big difference.

minikites 5y ago

>Busyness has become a badge of honor as elites boast of their workloads: A 2015 advertisement for The Wall Street Journal stated, “People who don’t have time make time to read The Wall Street Journal.” It's the hustle culture of capitalism applied to every facet of life. If you're not productive every single moment, you're falling behind and your self worth deserves to decline because of it. We've eliminated any "slack" from our jobs, from our lives, from our relationships in pursuit of ever more efficiency. We procrastinate because we feel guilty about not being maximally productive 100% of the time, there's no room for honest slack, we have to self-flagellate. We can't enjoy our time off because we know that work is piling up in our absence, having slack staff to compensate would be a waste. Our time with friends has to be scheduled and planned so it doesn't get in the way of our productivity, there's no room for slack in our social activities. We do all of these things because if we fall behind our job might be on the chopping block when the shareholders decide to squeeze fractions of a percent out of the share price. If we lose our jobs we lose medical care, food, shelter, and more. We could fix all of these things if we chose to make our society that way, but we find it preferable for one man's divorce to have global implications for dozens of organizations and charities, all the people who work for him, and all the people who depend his whims for aid.

max_ 5y ago
Maybe most of contemporary employment is slavery as people like David Greaber, Noam Chomsky & Nassim Taleb have asserted. The problem with a change that alters this however, is that you may be tampering with the bread of alot of powerful people. There alot of incentives for the powerful to keep things the way they are.
- minikites 5y ago
  There are a lot more of us than there are of them. The problem is that many people have been tricked into believing they are on the same side as the capital class.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ab_testing 5y ago

This kind of acacdemic rat race is very common in developing countries like India and China where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs. For a long time, the US colleges avoided this competition mainly because the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great and being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. However now with the exorbitant college costs and the reduced career choices for non STEM majors means that American students have to become competitive right from the time they enter high school.

SadCanadian 5y ago
Yep. And the more the developed world stagnates, the worse the tournament will get.
StandardFuture 5y ago
> where there are many times the number of candidates as available good jobs And there it is. This same phenomenon is also exactly the "leetcode phenomenon" that we see in the SE field, btw. You could call it an Eastern culture thing, but your summation captures the why more accurately. > being a college graduate meant that you were almost guaranteed to achieve a middle class lifestyle. I imagine that up until the 80s and possibly even 90s this was an upper middle class guarantee. > the difference between good and bad career choices was not that great I have never seen it expressed this way but this is spot on. The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > The worst part about this modern reality is that the vast vast majority of jobs that "require a degree" really should not be doing so. And therefore shouldn't require the cost of a degree and the time of a degree. A lower-middle-class lifestyle wouldn't be nearly so bad if you had four more working years and no debt at the start...

duxup 5y ago

I had some very smart and capable friends who exceled at school. I did not, I dropped out for a variety of reasons. But entering the workforce things changed. I thrived, I easily solved problems, and enjoyed what I thought of as "real work". Many of my friends did not. They seemed to thrive in the comfort of a syllabus, clear and defined paths to positive reinforcement, and status... but work isn't generally like that. You're not told what to do, exactly how and to reproduce it, you need to find that out yourself, and you will fail, maybe often... I had similar experiences with interns who when given an assignment and told they were to do their best and see what resources they could put together.... seemed lost without a specific set of step by step instructions... Everyone did fine in the end, but the differences were striking to me. Amusingly I think I'd love to go back to school now, I'd think much differently of it now than I did at the time.

WalterBright 5y ago
> defined paths Maybe they went to the wrong school? I once did an analysis of the stress produced when the gear box ran full speed into the stops. My colleague looked it over, and asked "what book did you get these formulas from?" They weren't in the book, I derived them from principles. I.e. I wasn't trained to plug values into formulas, but how to get the formulas needed.

WalterBright 5y ago

> The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking. This seems to be the crux of the article. If only people would study humanities instead of science & engineering. Science & engineering isn't a real education. I disagree. I derive great pleasure from the engineering & science education I received in college. I haven't the slightest interest in French Literature, etc., and don't feel at all deprived for not being educated in it.

GPerson 5y ago
Respectfully, this is not the crux of the article. The article is an examination of American cultural beliefs about meritocracy, our systems of meritocracy, and relevant societal effects. In my opinion this quote is more representative of the “crux” of this particular piece, “A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated.” But I actually think that there’s quite a bit here and in Markovits’s other work. If you have a chance to take a break from your compiler work, I recommend a lecture he does called “The Meritocracy Trap” and perhaps also his conversation with Glenn Loury.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I admit to being biased against articles about higher education that are dismissive of Science and Engineering majors. They don't understand the contributions of such to modern society. They talk about art, but isn't a cell phone a work of art? Isn't a Saturn V a work of art? Isn't knowledge of how stars work amazing? What could be more beautiful than Yosemite? I recall a quote (can't remember where it came from): "A scientist would fearlessly peer into the Gates of Hell if he thought it would advance his knowledge." I felt I was learning the keys to the universe in college. And besides, I don't see much elitism in S&E professions based on the college. Employers don't care if you hail from MIT or UW if you can get s*t done.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Maybe someone on HN can answer this for me. Why are these articles about the American system written as if they are new developments. Nothing in this article sounds any different from how things were 50 years ago, and probably earlier. I am guessing that 1. more kids are going to college today than 50 years ago (that should be a good thing) and competing for spots at top schools (thus more competition) and 2. the American economy has not expanded to make use of this increased number of college graduates. I have no idea if that is true, though. Articles like these make it sound like the author is reporting on some great, newly discovered unfairness. But things have been this way in America for over at least half a century. The only obvious difference between then and now is perhaps that there's more people competing. EDIT: Cheers for the answers. I am going to do some research on tuition increases at state universities, as well as the historical numbers on student borrowing. Any pointers to where I can find such data already compiled would be appreciated.

hardwaregeek 5y ago
A few things have changed. College is no longer a tool of social mobility. It is table stakes to keep your current status. If you do not go to college, you are unlikely to stay within the middle class. People may cite plumbers but they don't make a fortune and the physical toll is quite serious. Second, funding has been cut for public universities significantly. A lot of public universities charge tuition that is far more than it was 50-60 years ago. Ironically the expensive private schools are where you want to go for low cost college. They can afford to give full rides to a large portion of their population. Hence the competition. People have gotten better at playing the game. It's like how chess ELO keeps going up. If you did SAT prep, was a nationally ranked fencer/golfer/tennis player, did volunteer work, founded a tech club and had a 95 average in the 80's, you'd have your pick of colleges. Much in the same way your average GM would kill if they were playing back in the 80's. These days you'd still do okay but you'd be competing against a larger pool of people who also did all of these things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago

Clewza313 5y ago

> In law, for example, of the roughly 2,000 people admitted to the top-five law schools each year, no more than a smattering choose to enroll in a law school ranked outside the top 10. Am I the only one whose parser is throwing a syntax error for this sentence? "People already admitted to top-5 law schools don't choose to go non-top-10 schools instead"?

DreamScatter 5y ago
Maybe that flawed logic / grammer you point out is itself a symptom of what the article is discussing (failure of education).
username90 5y ago
The problem here is that you can't imagine students being admitted to top schools not wanting to go to other schools. That was his whole point, top schools are seen as such a superior choice that some people can't even imagine students choosing to go to lesser schools.

Bukhmanizer 5y ago

> even marriage now depends on school. The share of marriages in which both partners possess college degrees grew by 800 percent from 1960 to 2010. This is a meaningless statistic unless we know the base rate of people with college degrees in 1960 and 2010.

Bukhmanizer 5y ago
cont. > Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give. Look up the citations for this claim. It all seems like complete nonsense to me. AFAI can tell, they just pulled numbers out of thin air.

hkt 5y ago

The Jane Austen quote that starts this article is completely misread: she was being ironic. Her point was, why would a single man in possession of a fortune want a wife? It is a little off topic but it is most discouraging to see a writer in the Atlantic make a mistake like that. Especially a professor...

gnicholas 5y ago

> In law, graduates of top-10 schools make on average half more than graduates of schools ranked 21 to 100 When you consider where the people who graduate from top-10 schools live, this is neither surprising nor impressive. Most of these law grads live in NYC/Chicago/DC/SF/LA or a handful of other expensive cities. They make good money — starting salaries are around $200k — but they also pay tons in rent, mortgages, private school bills, etc. Compare this with a graduate of a 50-something ranked law school. This person probably lives in a city or town that where the cost of living is half of NYC/SF. They likely also work fewer hours than their top-10 counterparts. If they are making 2/3 of what a top-10 law grad is making, they're getting the better deal by far. Source: former Palo Alto lawyer

Hydraulix989 5y ago
That's a weird wording: Half more would mean 50% more (so not double, but 1.5x)? I think the real reason people willingly take on that Big City grind is to have a shot at making partner at a top firm (which would mean they make 10x more than their midwest prairie dweller counterparts).
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Yes, it is very weird wording. It is also strange that the comparison omits graduates of schools ranked 11-20. Those schools are not as prestigious as the top-10, but their graduates (like me) go on to practice in the same expensive cities so their salaries are in the same order of magnitude. Including this cohort in the comparison would have made the not-shocking 50% gap even less impressive.

J253 5y ago

I have a (perhaps unpopular) pet theory that college as we know it going to cease to exist sometime in the next several decades. In its current direction it feels like it’s becoming more about gaming the system. Those who do the “best” are really just the best at looking like the best. I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually. I’ll try an analogy—-it feels like college is social media and students are aspiring influencers, all jockeying to find the right aesthetic and be that perfect shining light with all the followers but it turns out they’re all optimizing to the same local max and end up as copies of copies of copies. In the end all their resumes look the same. A bit drab, sweeping, and cynical, admittedly, but that’s what I think. Anyway, my theory is that with ubiquitous high speed Internet, remote work being more widely acceptable, and continued suburbanization, future generations will look less favorably at taking on a huge debt burden to attend in-person college and something _like_ highly niche online trade/vocational schools or guilds will become popular and widely acceptable as a substitute for a four year degree in certain positions.

FriedrichN 5y ago
>I saw so many of my peers in college “learning” strictly for the sake of getting good grades, not to understand the material conceptually. I can absolutely identify with this. I've seen way too many class mates get way higher grades than me without even really knowing any of the concepts they're supposed to be showcasing. Meanwhile all I ever had was conflict with teachers. My theory is that school is simply aimed to produce docile bodies that will do what is asked of them. The whole learning bit is just smoke and mirrors to fool you into thinking that it's useful.
- SadCanadian 5y ago
  You would be correct, that is indeed a large part of modern "education". See the signaling theory of education for more.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  This is nothing new. These sentiments have always been common. Clips from a well-known 1960s documentary with context from one of the filmers (Sixteen at Webster Groves): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQxUkZ4Anc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQxUkZ4Anc

jl2718 5y ago

Is college still a thing? I sort of thought that it would at least start to die in the permanent-pandemic era. Right now even the elites look a lot like University of Phoenix Online, and I don’t think they’re ever going back to any meaningful physical experience. It sounds a lot more like a very expensive honorarium.

xyzzy21 5y ago

This is why big name degrees on resumes are generally a red flag for me. The bigger the name, the more likely the value of degree is BS.

cafard 5y ago

Divorced from learning? Let's say that it has been an open marriage for quite a while now. I leave it to the interested to look up Henry Adams's remarks on his student days at Harvard.

strikelaserclaw 5y ago

This obsession (disease) with brands seems to be accelerating in the USA, not only in terms of college but in terms of acceptable professions, acceptable companies to work for (FAANG?), acceptable startup startup accelerators, perhaps it is an inevitability of a winner take all society. How can the richest country in the history of earth produce a mindset of scarcity in it's people, i think this is a failure of the economic/political system that needs to be corrected. I originally come from a country where they decide a persons future based on a test they take before they are 18, let me tell you that this society has not produced anything noteworthy in thousands of years. When you create conditions in a society where everyone must fit a mold, you essentially erase a large part of happiness and creativity that exists in a people.