5 ms·

It was a (possibly-overly-blunt) attempt to tie this cultural shift to outcomes the bureaucracy cares about, but absolutely the biggest loss is to the undergrad

It was a (possibly-overly-blunt) attempt to tie this cultural shift to outcomes the bureaucracy cares about, but absolutely the biggest loss is to the undergraduate culture and future students' experiences. Both future grads and the university will obviously be fine financially.

majormajor 4y ago
My theory is that the root cause is the financialization and rat-race-ification of everything. You gotta go to college to make a good living. You gotta go to a TOP college especially. You gotta work your ass off in high school to get in. And so everyone just is told their whole childhood to compete harder and harder in this race to the bottom and there's no more room for interesting experiences since a truly interesting experience isn't guaranteed to sound as good on an application as a boring "interesting experience" run-of-the-mill extracurricular schedule. Leaving in room for insanity and creativity is counter to what this money-above-all-else societal push for undergrad education wants. But hey, we gotta do that because if we don't, China will! It's not the students who benefit from having to work twice as hard to get the same degree.
- xbar 4y ago
  Perhaps Stanford was culturally co-opted.
- quantified 4y ago
  I put it up to the helicopter-parenting mentality on the part of administrators. Make things safe and predictable, treat 18-22 year olds like either children or 50-year olds
- pvarangot 4y ago
  Yeah degree inflation is really hard on you if for whatever reason you buy into that. The Meritocracy Trap is a good read if you want to witness the existential horror of someone that realizes it's a thing when they come out on the other side.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    I don't know where you're going with "if for whatever reason you buy into that" or whatever. But it's just mathematics. Normalization, basically. If there are X high school seniors in the country, and Y incoming seats in Stanford's next class, you can't take everyone. So if everyone works harder on their profile it's the same as if nobody does. I don't think it's in question that this has happened. I would also go a bit further and say that I believe that assembly-lining more "directed" academic effort into every bit of students' time is going to be counter-productive for innovation and creativity, since those are by nature more spontaneous.
  - astrange 4y ago
    The word "meritocracy" itself was invented for a book about how it's a bad idea that can't work, so it's a surprise to see anyone legitimately trying to do it. See: Goodhart's Law.
    - necovek 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy — thanks for the pointer!
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > there's no more room for interesting experiences So people will become infantile and inexperienced. Between this and atomisation of society, the bill will come due. Aociao connections have massive value, beurocrats just dont know how to measure ir
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Is it possible this is a consequence of proportionally fewer economic opportunities (i.e. increasing income/wealth gap)? Maybe the combination of low hanging fruit having been picked, and automation and technology allowing for massive economies of scale inevitably lead to a “big getting bigger” scenario. And because the lower hanging fruit has been picked, the risk and hence barrier to entry is very high for non conventional routes.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    I think there's a really interesting question in there of "is it a cause, or an effect," that I honestly don't have a strong opinion on currently. I would lean towards cause instead of effect, though. So where you say, "low hanging fruit has been picked resulting in high barrier to entry," I say, "this zero-sum-game of maximizing academic profiles starting in preschool has resulted in higher barriers to entry because the less well-off you are, the harder it is to both know what to maximize and have the time to do it." I see it as a "everyone's defecting in a prisoner's dilemma resulting in everyone having a worse time" game theory problem. If you try to be "merit" based but don't have reliable ways of separating "merit" from "grinding" then you're gonna end up with a lot of grinders as people figure it out.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      When I write the low hanging fruit has been picked, I mean things like online marketplaces and digital communications expanding the competition to the whole country or world even. Whereas before, there were regional arbitrage opportunities due to difficulties in scaling, these arbitrage opportunities are greatly reduced because information flies fast and far, and bigger players can take advantage first. In a situation like this, people may notice that the decreasing probabilities of “getting ahead” via non traditional means and stick to obtaining the “elite” signaling and joining the big entities that are growing.
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  The funny/sad thing is that mostly our society doesn't actually work that way -- we just believe that it does. You can absolutely have a highly successful career and life, for a wide variety of definitions of successful, without attending a top college, and while having "interesting" life experiences for all sorts of definitions of interesting. There are many paths through life even in our current bureaucracy-ridden society -- it's just that we very heavily oversell one specific one to the point that we make it destructively competitive. (There are some paths, mostly in medicine and law, which actually+/- require the Standard Elite Collegiate Life Path, but many other happy and successful outcomes do not actually)
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    Most people aren't successful for the reasons they imagine, but more importantly - most people aren't unsuccessful for the reasons they imagine. The increasingly democratic views of what is and isn't successful are our society's greatest I'll, as much as I do hope people keep supporting the things they love and wish to be.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      I wonder what those 'democratic views' are where you live. Here, there are many distinct views by the many political parties that are part of the democracy and can't really be lumped into one 'view'. The few commonalities between them (here) seem to be around the concept of "bad situations in life shouldn't mean you're screwed forever" and "if we work together when we can, it generally turns out better for everyone". I don't think those concepts (which might also be views) generally dictate the value of success, or describe what that success must be.
    - codefreeordie 4y ago
      Indeed. You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life. Even if you wish to have a life containing moderate wealth, you still don't need that. (Up to you whether you believe that moderate wealth is either required or desirable for a "successful" life) And even if you want "a good, respectable career", there are many paths to achieving that goal as well. I feel that we have allowed too much "program thinking" to control our school-age children. We put them in the best preschool program we can afford, then run them through a carefully managed elementary program, finally we push them into an elite-college-prep high-schools program and then enroll them in a university degree program. Afterward, is it a surprise that these kids graduate and expect to find pre-mapped "programs" to follow for the next part of their lives? And bigger companies know this and will oblige -- intern programs, of course, and then new-grad programs and well-tended career ladder progression with a performance review program. None of this is bad by itself, but it is unnecessarily limiting to look at life as a series of programs. It is allowing others to define success for you. Which is easy -- because deciding what the eff you want out of life is hard -- but it is so limiting. Even if what you end up doing looks kinda like one of the programs, choosing the path yourself is so valuable.
- astrange 4y ago
  Most people in the US don't go to college. If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    > If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men. I don't believe that theory, but I do believe a theory that has similar results: adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work, and the main way that new workers have been added to existing fields in the past 100 years is to encourage women to join those fields. Edit: Actually there are two theories that explain this pattern. The other theory is basically that feminism encourages young women and girls to pursue glamorous, high-status careers, but if you're choosing a career based on how glamorous it is, and it takes a long time to get into it, by the time you're there, the glamor has moved on. This also explains why low-status male-dominant careers can remain male-dominant for just as long as they remain low-status--these fields are consistently even lower status than fields that are predominantly female.
    - astrange 4y ago
      > adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work This is the lump of labor fallacy. If you don't have "enough" software engineers, then adding more makes them all more valuable; some of them can work on productivity tools for the rest, some of them can attract new customers, some of the juniors are needed to turn into senoirs, and so on. It's similar to Henry Ford paying his workers more so they could afford to buy the cars.
      - silvestrov 4y ago
        > afford to buy the cars Maybe that is a red herring and what Ford got from higher wage was workers that cared about the work they did and made sure the quality was good, as the workers would otherwise end up in a lower-paying job. When you make "revolutions" such as the first good assembly line, workers that care make a big difference. Faults on assemble lines can be much more expensive than high wage.

majormajor 4y ago

My theory is that the root cause is the financialization and rat-race-ification of everything. You gotta go to college to make a good living. You gotta go to a TOP college especially. You gotta work your ass off in high school to get in. And so everyone just is told their whole childhood to compete harder and harder in this race to the bottom and there's no more room for interesting experiences since a truly interesting experience isn't guaranteed to sound as good on an application as a boring "interesting experience" run-of-the-mill extracurricular schedule. Leaving in room for insanity and creativity is counter to what this money-above-all-else societal push for undergrad education wants. But hey, we gotta do that because if we don't, China will! It's not the students who benefit from having to work twice as hard to get the same degree.

xbar 4y ago
Perhaps Stanford was culturally co-opted.
quantified 4y ago
I put it up to the helicopter-parenting mentality on the part of administrators. Make things safe and predictable, treat 18-22 year olds like either children or 50-year olds
pvarangot 4y ago
Yeah degree inflation is really hard on you if for whatever reason you buy into that. The Meritocracy Trap is a good read if you want to witness the existential horror of someone that realizes it's a thing when they come out on the other side.
- majormajor 4y ago
  I don't know where you're going with "if for whatever reason you buy into that" or whatever. But it's just mathematics. Normalization, basically. If there are X high school seniors in the country, and Y incoming seats in Stanford's next class, you can't take everyone. So if everyone works harder on their profile it's the same as if nobody does. I don't think it's in question that this has happened. I would also go a bit further and say that I believe that assembly-lining more "directed" academic effort into every bit of students' time is going to be counter-productive for innovation and creativity, since those are by nature more spontaneous.
- astrange 4y ago
  The word "meritocracy" itself was invented for a book about how it's a bad idea that can't work, so it's a surprise to see anyone legitimately trying to do it. See: Goodhart's Law.
  - necovek 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy — thanks for the pointer!
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> there's no more room for interesting experiences So people will become infantile and inexperienced. Between this and atomisation of society, the bill will come due. Aociao connections have massive value, beurocrats just dont know how to measure ir
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Is it possible this is a consequence of proportionally fewer economic opportunities (i.e. increasing income/wealth gap)? Maybe the combination of low hanging fruit having been picked, and automation and technology allowing for massive economies of scale inevitably lead to a “big getting bigger” scenario. And because the lower hanging fruit has been picked, the risk and hence barrier to entry is very high for non conventional routes.
- majormajor 4y ago
  I think there's a really interesting question in there of "is it a cause, or an effect," that I honestly don't have a strong opinion on currently. I would lean towards cause instead of effect, though. So where you say, "low hanging fruit has been picked resulting in high barrier to entry," I say, "this zero-sum-game of maximizing academic profiles starting in preschool has resulted in higher barriers to entry because the less well-off you are, the harder it is to both know what to maximize and have the time to do it." I see it as a "everyone's defecting in a prisoner's dilemma resulting in everyone having a worse time" game theory problem. If you try to be "merit" based but don't have reliable ways of separating "merit" from "grinding" then you're gonna end up with a lot of grinders as people figure it out.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    When I write the low hanging fruit has been picked, I mean things like online marketplaces and digital communications expanding the competition to the whole country or world even. Whereas before, there were regional arbitrage opportunities due to difficulties in scaling, these arbitrage opportunities are greatly reduced because information flies fast and far, and bigger players can take advantage first. In a situation like this, people may notice that the decreasing probabilities of “getting ahead” via non traditional means and stick to obtaining the “elite” signaling and joining the big entities that are growing.
codefreeordie 4y ago
The funny/sad thing is that mostly our society doesn't actually work that way -- we just believe that it does. You can absolutely have a highly successful career and life, for a wide variety of definitions of successful, without attending a top college, and while having "interesting" life experiences for all sorts of definitions of interesting. There are many paths through life even in our current bureaucracy-ridden society -- it's just that we very heavily oversell one specific one to the point that we make it destructively competitive. (There are some paths, mostly in medicine and law, which actually+/- require the Standard Elite Collegiate Life Path, but many other happy and successful outcomes do not actually)
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  Most people aren't successful for the reasons they imagine, but more importantly - most people aren't unsuccessful for the reasons they imagine. The increasingly democratic views of what is and isn't successful are our society's greatest I'll, as much as I do hope people keep supporting the things they love and wish to be.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    I wonder what those 'democratic views' are where you live. Here, there are many distinct views by the many political parties that are part of the democracy and can't really be lumped into one 'view'. The few commonalities between them (here) seem to be around the concept of "bad situations in life shouldn't mean you're screwed forever" and "if we work together when we can, it generally turns out better for everyone". I don't think those concepts (which might also be views) generally dictate the value of success, or describe what that success must be.
  - codefreeordie 4y ago
    Indeed. You don't need "a good, respectable career" to have a good life. Even if you wish to have a life containing moderate wealth, you still don't need that. (Up to you whether you believe that moderate wealth is either required or desirable for a "successful" life) And even if you want "a good, respectable career", there are many paths to achieving that goal as well. I feel that we have allowed too much "program thinking" to control our school-age children. We put them in the best preschool program we can afford, then run them through a carefully managed elementary program, finally we push them into an elite-college-prep high-schools program and then enroll them in a university degree program. Afterward, is it a surprise that these kids graduate and expect to find pre-mapped "programs" to follow for the next part of their lives? And bigger companies know this and will oblige -- intern programs, of course, and then new-grad programs and well-tended career ladder progression with a performance review program. None of this is bad by itself, but it is unnecessarily limiting to look at life as a series of programs. It is allowing others to define success for you. Which is easy -- because deciding what the eff you want out of life is hard -- but it is so limiting. Even if what you end up doing looks kinda like one of the programs, choosing the path yourself is so valuable.
astrange 4y ago
Most people in the US don't go to college. If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > If you believe the theory that jobs get less valued by society when women join them, this is going to happen here as well, since college is increasingly something women do more than men. I don't believe that theory, but I do believe a theory that has similar results: adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work, and the main way that new workers have been added to existing fields in the past 100 years is to encourage women to join those fields. Edit: Actually there are two theories that explain this pattern. The other theory is basically that feminism encourages young women and girls to pursue glamorous, high-status careers, but if you're choosing a career based on how glamorous it is, and it takes a long time to get into it, by the time you're there, the glamor has moved on. This also explains why low-status male-dominant careers can remain male-dominant for just as long as they remain low-status--these fields are consistently even lower status than fields that are predominantly female.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > adding more workers to a field increases the supply of workers and thus reduces the market value of their work This is the lump of labor fallacy. If you don't have "enough" software engineers, then adding more makes them all more valuable; some of them can work on productivity tools for the rest, some of them can attract new customers, some of the juniors are needed to turn into senoirs, and so on. It's similar to Henry Ford paying his workers more so they could afford to buy the cars.
    - silvestrov 4y ago
      > afford to buy the cars Maybe that is a red herring and what Ford got from higher wage was workers that cared about the work they did and made sure the quality was good, as the workers would otherwise end up in a lower-paying job. When you make "revolutions" such as the first good assembly line, workers that care make a big difference. Faults on assemble lines can be much more expensive than high wage.