7 ms·

Why talent sorting in Germany is flawed

33 points by luu 4y ago

Tomte 4y ago
I haven't ever heard of a pupil who was interested in STEM, but decided to go for a medical degree, just in order to prove himself. The whole premise sounds like an invention to me. Moreover, there are clearly prestigious technical universities even in Germany, although the author is correct that they aren't quite as prestigious as American ones. RWTH Aachen and TU München are the two standouts. And then there are specialized champions: Tübingen for bioinformatics, I think. Definitely Saarbrücken for Computational Linguistics.
- 0x008 4y ago
  Adding to that, the whole "schtick" of german education is that the distribution is less extreme on the tails than other countries (looking at you, USA...). So we have a lot of high-class technical universities which are mostly interchangeable in the quality of students they produce, with a few stand-outs (like the ones you mentioened), which, however, stand out less extreme than in the aforementioned US.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    It's also ironic to talk about how egalitarian German academia supposedly is when the school system in contrast is three-tiered for historical (explicitly classist) reasons, and higher education itself retains this multi-tiered approach through the distinction between universities ("Universität"), universities of applied sciences ("Fachhochschule"), trade schools ("Berufsschule") and the like. There may be fewer extreme outliers within the university system but that doesn't mean the system as a whole is egalitarian. Also it's not clear if its a bad thing if universities aren't retaining "elites" if a signficant part of research in Germany isn't happening at universities themselves. If that is a problem, the problem isn't that "elite academics" aren't properly supported, it's that the institutions to support them have been moved out of the universities into a more privatized market, but that sounds like a different conversation.
    - Nitrolo 4y ago
      That's why I was really surprised about the content of the article (to be honest I haven't made it past the TL;DR yet), I would have guessed that the problem would be too little egalitarianism. Kids here are sorted into career paths at age 10 by sending them to Gymnasium, Realschule, or Hauptschule. To even attend higher education you need to have an Abitur, which means going to a Gymnasium or putting in extra years of study after your Realschule. The argument is that this division allows every kid to learn at a level appropriate to them, but the reality is that an overworked teacher of 20+ kids is supposed to accurately assess everyone's level and then give a recommendation for one of the schools. My impression is that a lot more weight is put on formal qualifications here than in the US, so in practice this choice sorts you into your future social status for most kids. My N=1 annecdote is a friend of mine who recently finished his PhD at TUM, the teacher wanted to send him to a Hauptschule. If his parents hadn't intervened his life would probably be very different right now. Annecdotaly I know a couple of engineers who went to Realschule and then had to work hard to get an Abitur before going to Uni. Who knows how many smart people were discouraged from pursuing higher education because it would mean two more years of high school just to even start. The system seem arbitrary at best to me, and at its worst is just reinforcing class status through generations. Parents with university degrees will fight to have their kids go to Gymnasium, or the teacher might send them because they know they come from an Akademikerfamilie, and the others better hope their teacher likes them.
      - Tomte 4y ago
        > My N=1 annecdote is a friend of mine who recently finished his PhD at TUM, the teacher wanted to send him to a Hauptschule. Similar, but extended family in my case: was to be sent to a special-needs school (which doesn't even lead to the opportunity to get vocational training), parents fought (hiring a lawyer, and including psychological examinations), child grew up to finish two masters degrees and one PhD.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        This early classification of kids, for lack of a better term, is so screwed up. And it has all kinds of issues around social background, racial discrimination and whatnot. Ever PISA study I remember basically gave us the same feedback, black on white. Not that I expect it to change in my lifetime so. it did get considerably easier, as opposed to easy, to get access to university level education when starting out at a Hauptschule since I went to school. Back then, like 20 odd years ago, it was basically impossible to do so. I have the highest respect of everyone who actually goes from a Hauptschule to a university degree, this is probably the hardest way to get higher education imaginably around here.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  When he says >I would change my mind on the importance of this problem if.. he should add a point III - if it turns out students don't actually go into Medical school because they want to "prove themselves"
  - hef19898 4y ago
    While some doctors can be arrogant bastards, those people aiming at medical studies are usually highly devoted to the field. One would assume the high entry barrier, based on the Abitur average (upon graduation of the highest tier basic education, and don't get me started how that system is fucked up in its own way), would drive people not directly qualifying for a slot to other fields. Guess what, it doesn't. Since you can get slot by simply waiting it out (your average in improved by 0.1 per semester, at least that's how the NC system worked back the day I care about it). And there are people that wait for years until they qualify for a slot. If working for years side jobs, as waiters or what not, and miss those years of white collar salaries in the end, only to have to spend years of training to start working cruel shifts at a hospital at the early days of their medical careers, doesn't show dedication I don't know what. Side note: All the doctors I met so far, ranging from GPs all the way to surgeons and oncologists, would have made for less than stellar engineers. My oncologist maybe, but being a good oncologist is probably saving more lives than being an electrical or mechanical engineer.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      > And there are people that wait for years until they qualify for a slot. But those are outliers, aren’t they? I’ve dated a med student, and been flatmates with others, the only times I’ve heard of people waiting was if they were doing a gap year or something, 1.5 years for NC improvements being pretty much the maximum and already rare.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Sure, the majority gets into medicine rather quickly. I have yet to meet an engineer of any domain to actually wait longer than mandatory civil or military service. My impression has always been that the average med student is more dedicated than the average engineering student (I am the latter, met quite a few of the former before I started university). And that dedication starts years before going to university, simply because the entry barriers are so much higher.
- squaredot 4y ago
  I agree with that. In addition to that, German students who want to go to elite schools also go abroad (like ETH of Zurich), this is probably an effect that is unknown to US people.
- hnbad 4y ago
  If anything, I'd say that it's a class thing. Children from an upper class "pedigree" ("old money" especially) are often expected to study medicine, law or business[0]. This has little to do with intrinsic "talent" other than these children's parents often being able to afford private tutoring to make up for any academic shortcomings. In fact, politicians (even ones from aristrocratic backgrounds) have repeatedly been involved in scandals over academic fraud like hiring ghost writers to write their thesis in order to get a degree to make them appear more respectable[1]. Talented students still can be and are pursuing STEM degrees but a lot of research these days often doesn't entirely happen directly in the universities themselves but in organizations like the Fraunhofer institutes (also Max-Planck, Helmholtz, Leibniz and DFG), which neatly toe the line between being a quasi public institution and being a for-profit commercial entity. Ironically, a huge shift in German universities happening around the time of the EU replacing local degrees like the German "Magister Artium" with more "standardized" ones like BA/MA was an attempt to push the concept of "elite universities" via special funding programmes supporting university faculties that were already prospering to replicate the exact US model (while also introducing tuition fees for public universities, before having to roll them back due to public outrage). Also on a complete tangent, the graph the article uses clearly shows a sharp decline during the Nazi regime followed by Germany plateuing until the 1990s or so and then having another smaller decline until flatlining again. The article blames the sharp decline in the 1930s and 1940s on "explicit talk of nurturing an elite" being a problem in the Nazi era, which is a ridiculous conflation of modern and past anti-semitism (the Nazis' scapegoat was "international bankers", not "the elites") but also completely misunderstands Nazi ideology, which heavily embraced elitism and "excellence" but was kneecapped by its obsession with avoiding "Jewish" or "degenerate" science. This honestly reads like it's written by someone whose only understanding of Nazism comes from some ahistorical "actually the Nazis were left-wing because they had 'socialist' in their name and used leftist talking points to gain broader support" memes. The other drop in the 1990s is also interesting. The author claims Germany's "problems" are the result of a democratization of universities and egalitarianism but the obvious thing that changed in the 1990s is that "Germany" expanded to include what was previously East Germany, which regardless of any merits of Eastern Bloc academia in the previous decades at this point was economically destitute and underwent a rapid privatization followed by massive "brain drain" as those who could afford to moved westward. [0]: This is also where you're more likely to find "fraternities" which are a much more niche phenomenon and more specifically tied to conservatism than in the US. "Burschenschaften" typically have strict gender roles and historically were more strongly tied to German aristocracy. Though some practices (like fencing duels which would often result in facial scars carried with pride) have fallen out of use, they still often value "tradition" to the point of embracing "völkisch" nationalism, which has a large overlap with white nationalism in the US. [1]: This is less true with younger generations but traditionally Germans would put a lot of stock into both aristrocratic honorifics and academic titles. Academic titles are still protected by law in Germany (i.e. it's a felony to use the title "Dr." or "Doktor" unless you have a doctorate from an institution Germany recognizes) though and people will still treat aristocratic names as if they were titles although aristocratic titles were officially rolled into family names. To explain this for English-speaking readers: imagine you were a "Lord" and your name was "Adam Smith", then your name would have become "Adam Lord Smith" and you would be correctly addressed as "Mr Lord Smith" but some people would still call you "Lord Smith" out of respect -- German laws are actually considerate enough to allow women to use the female equivalent of the title in their family name despite it officially just being part of the name so the daughter of Mr Lord Smith could still be Ms Lady Smith.
adrianN 4y ago
Talent sorting in Germany has many flaws, but "forcing" people to study medicine is definitely not one of them.
- hef19898 4y ago
  If anything, German universities are trying everything they can to dissuade people from studying medicine. There are simply too many candidates for the limited number of slots.
Havoc 4y ago
Many good points, but the author is placing a bit too much value on rankings of "top" universities here. Somehow in this article universities educating doctors doesn't add much to society yet nothing negative is said about this: >Oxford graduates with a language degree can join DeepMind right after university. Distortions from everyone chasing name brands seem quite problematic to society
roenxi 4y ago
Mmm. My impression - and this is a complex subject that deserves a deeper treatment than the article and comments will give it - my impression is that Europe has a number of very well developed systems to protect the social elite from becoming social not-elites. Especially the tax code and measures against people succeeding too much like in America. It is stunning that Europe has failed to participate in the tech boom of the last few decades. Even with the social safety nets to protect against failure. I suspect they have a tax code that punishes high-risk high-reward gambits and that a side effect is the lack of extreme successes. If there are no extreme successes, then medicine is the field most guaranteed to win people moderate and respectable success. The average doctor is more respectable than the average engineer, the outlier engineer is far more important than the outlier surgeons. It isn't close, they were basically raiding top scientists and engineers in WWII out of Germany for example because they could reliably do things of civilisational significance. This is a key problem with equalising the playing fields. Society is dragged forward by outlier successes. Punish them, and progress stops. This is why the big slow trend of people organising against inequality is so concerning.
- heavenlyblue 4y ago
  You don't need extreme success in software if you can wait till the monopolies are established for a decade and then break them up
- jlangenauer 4y ago
  As a very broad generalization, Europe treats businesses as businesses, rather than financial instruments. They are expected to grow and be profitable, rather than be fattened like cows for an eventual slaughter. That's why Europe has thousands of "small" companies whose revenue might "only" be a billion dollars or so, but they are sustainable companies who generally have accrued a competitive global advantage through years, and decades of R&D. The end result of this is that Europe - certainly Western Europe, and increasingly Central and Eastern Europe - has one of the highest standards of living in the world. Sure, the VCs and investors who only want to make money without producing anything of value themselves don't like this model, but fuck 'em.
  - 4y ago
totorovirus 4y ago
What is wrong about the top talents going to medical school? It is the highest paid jobs available.
mrtksn 4y ago
All "sorting" systems have different outcomes, I'm not sure why differences should be necessarily flaws. In many countries there's this centralised testing system where kids take an exam the same day and are placed in schools by preference and that score. So you make a list of schools you want and the school quotas are filled by that preference list with the higher scored candidate gets the place. The result? A school ranking created by high-schoolers and their parents because the "best" students go to the school with the most applicants with highest scores. The problem here is that it creates almost automatic placement for students by score. So if you are really good at math and sciences you score highly but you can't go study physics because the physics departments usually have low minimum scores due to their weak employability and medical schools have very high score due to almost guaranteed employability and high status and compensation. This means, kids scoring well all go to the same schools together with all the other scoring well irrelevant of their interest or aspirations. The thinking goes, if you scored well enough to study medicine you will waste your score if you study something like architecture or chemistry and they are forced to pick something from their score range.
- itronitron 4y ago
  Is the 'here' you are referring to in the US or the EU?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    The countries where the student placement is done this way.
hrbf 4y ago
I couldn’t make it all the way though the article. Its reasoning is baffling, confused and unsubstantiated, all while demonstrating very little understanding of the environment they’re criticizing. It betrays a very exclusive and elitist view of education. If you build a society of elitist institutions, you will get elites. Not only that: if isolated, they will think of themselves as better than most, exceptional in fact. With exceptionality come the exceptions one carves out for oneself and a dismissive view of the common rabble. Of course talented individuals should be fostered. But presenting a US-style university approach as laudable and somehow missing is irresponsible and short-sighted. As another commenter wrote, Germany’s education system has plenty of issues but that’s not one of it.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  >If you build a society of elitist institutions, you will get elites. You get elitists. Not necessarily elites. Subtle difference.
  - hrbf 4y ago
    Agreed, good distinction.
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  I also had a tough time trying to understand what the author was trying to say. My best guess is that he's hardcore into "effective altruism" (based on the rest of his website) and is trying to use this particular hammer with every nail. Most doctors I know got into the profession because they wanted to cure people. They don't care that this is not optimal from a theoretical point of view, and they most certainly didn't do it to "prove themselves". And once you start with a wrong thesis, all bets are off. If the author really wants to solve the health sector problems in Germany he should instead try to figure out why I need to book an appointments months before I get sick. Unfortunately fixing bureaucracy is not as sexy as creating Euro Harvard.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Or why rural areas are losing GPs left and right. Or how health insurance is screwing with diagnosis, or a myriad of other things. But as you said, those things are simply not sexy.
thriftwy 4y ago
We should have more bright but laid-back students instead of having them all rat race through the "top university". High capacity of rote grind does not a genius make.
RamblingCTO 4y ago
We might not have the image of the Ivy League and thus lose Nobel prices in the statistics, but I'd say it's a good thing we're not participating in the anglo-american tradition of elitism. We have our places of excellency but it's not as easy as "this university". It may be one specific field at one university, one research group, an institute that's excelling etc.
- google234123 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s fair to call it that - just look at France right next door to you. They aren’t very Anglo-American :)
  - RamblingCTO 4y ago
    Honestly no idea what France is doing. Are they internationally more renowned then Germany?
    - hef19898 4y ago
      No idea about the international angle, but France is famous for its highly elitist system of Grandes Ecoles covering everything from public services and administration and engineering. With my limited contact with French engineers, I have yet to see a quality difference between the people. Grand Ecole grads have a guarantee on a fast tracked career so.
      - RamblingCTO 4y ago
        Ok interesting, thank you! I've heard of Grand Ecoles before in this context actually. France is weirdly centristic anyway!
_glass 4y ago
I am German and doing my PhD in the management sciences, so I can judge the output, and there are many European institutions that are doing top research, also German ones. I have the feeling it's mostly about tech that we're not top notch. And even there, as a tech worker, I know really good output. I guess, that German universities are not really competing for a high ranking. This is part of German culture, we also don't have these standardized tests to qualify for university.
hef19898 4y ago
The author as much as commits the whole post being speculation: >> I’m uncertain how big the problem of bad talent allocation in Germany really is. However, given that it reduces the likelihood of careers with an outsized positive impact, the damage could be severe. Stopped reading after that.. Kind of sounds like someone who didn't get how the German academic system works, that being suitable for "med school" (there is no such a thing in Germany, as there is in the US, over here you simply start medical studies from semester one onwards) doesn't mean you are suitable for engineering (assuming the author is German, I understand engineering as one of those domains that actually have engineering in the name which excludes "software engineering") which again has nothing to do with software developments, start ups and big IPOs. Which again has nothing to do with improving the world or society. IMHO, every single med student helping out with health care in Africa is doing more good than the majority of software developers at, say, Meta or Amazon.
- vintermann 4y ago
  I don't know how it is in Germany, but in Norway at least, software engineers are actual engineers. We have the same basic package: a little physics, a lot of calculus, some discrete maths, basic economics, basic signal processing, and a bunch of business-related softer topics around leadership, planning etc. The non-software engineers also have a bit of programming in their programs, of course.
  - oytis 4y ago
    Similarly in Russia where I am from, but I've always seen it as a sign of the education of software engineers being outdated. I work in embedded, so actually have some use for physics (thought a tiny part of what has been taught), calculus and signal procesing - but most other software engineers do not at all. They don't even use discrete math really at any deep level. So looks like a lot of time wasted that would better be dedicated to learning version control, cloud computing, up-to-date tools or just a second domain. As of leadership and planning, I hope yours is better that ours. We f..g learned Gantt charts, but zero of Agile or modern project and product management, and equally zero about finance of tech startups (funding rounds etc.).
vintermann 4y ago
Much to think about here, but the author should stop and think if he's really looking at the right problem. Like for instance: is it true that people with perfect grades go into medicine so as to not "waste" their score? You know, maybe it is! But don't you agree then, that this is kind of fucked up? Don't they have, like, actual interests? Or actual goals, besides winning in status games? Not even getting rich? And also. Economically speaking, Germany seems to be doing really, really well, despite "only" having their Heidelbergs, their Aachens, their Jenas, their Humboldts, their Colognes etc. Not having it all concentrated in elite-generating hubs seems to be working out quite well for them. And for us in the rest of the world too, considering where the first mRNA vaccine got developed, or considering where we get much of the high precision industrial equipment necessary to make virtually everything impressive that has been made the last decade. Why the hell should Germany have Ivy envy?
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  > is it true that people with perfect grades go into medicine so as to not "waste" their score? This is largely true in many places - also, often the choice is heavily influenced by parents. Having an offspring be a doctor offers some prestige.
lnsru 4y ago
Working in an university is very delicate matter. People are fed with 1 year contracts during the employment there. Every supermarket cashier has more economically stable life than a young scientist in Germany. So the brightest know this and leave academia immediately after graduation. This funding system is alone seriously flawed and should be fixed to attract more talents. Not getting rental apartment just because one can only show 12 months limited contract is plain stupid. And it happens a lot since universities are in real estate hot spots. Edit: school system in Germany also decides after 4th grade if a person may study later. I don’t think, that 10 year old children are capable to decide if they want go to university or end up with underpaid apprenticeship with dead end job later.
- rob74 4y ago
  You could also argue that universities create (or are a major factor in creating) real estate hot spots. A city with a major university is definitely also more desirable for other groups than a non-university city. Not talking about cities like Munich, that would be hot spots anyway, but smaller cities (e.g. Aachen) definitely gain (or lose, depending on your point of view) a lot through their university.
- fileeditview 4y ago
  There is more than one school system in Germany. Multiple allow to "rank up" after 4th grade (see different types of "Gesamtschule"). Also if you get a lower degree you could as an adult go back to a special school and get you high-school degree to study. Both of my parents did this and became teacher and doctor. Yes it may be harder but it is still possible. I totally agree that these 1-2 year contracts are a problem. They also exist for teachers. Some of them get fired during holidays to save some money and then are re-hired afterwards.. it is disgraceful.
moomin 4y ago
Germany has one of the best health care provisions in the world. It has one of the highest median salaries in the world. It has a powerhouse economy driven by expertise and innovation. Might be worth understanding how the current system supports that before trying to fix it.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I found Germany absolutely dogshit for innovation in IT when I lived and worked there. It took the pandemic to move the needle even slightly on digitalisation of government services, and even then. As for salaries: the salaries in tech in Germany aren't particularly competitive compared to Ireland, America, the UK, etc. As for healthcare: its not free (its mandatory insurance), and the quality/speed of care is often worse than the NHS in my experience, however, I will grant them that they have some fantastic experts available at hospitals like the Charité in Berlin.
fxtentacle 4y ago
This article is based around 3 pieces of flawed research: 1. "German academia doesn’t have world-class universities" https://ommer-lab.com/ https://ommer-lab.com/ just built Stable Diffusion. Lead author of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine paper is from https://tron-mainz.de/ https://tron-mainz.de/ . Fraunhofer with MP3 / MPEG-H, H265.. 2. Paper Count != Quality One of the main points of the article appears to be to compare "Havard Medical School" against "Germany as a whole" solely based on the number of papers published. But that might also just mean that the US has more junk papers. Or different financial incentives for PhD students. They should have compared something like (number x impact). Or maybe look at conference attendance. 3. Patriotism != Nobel Price Their nobel price diagram is probably just due to different levels of patriotism. Not many people in Germany would proudly proclaim "I'm a German!" in their nobel price biography (due to history). For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... states that the US has 4x the number of Nobel laureates compared to Germany, which seems just fine considering that the US also has 4x the number of citizens. After misunderstanding the problem, the author then offers a flawed fix: the highest-IQ students from Germany should move to the US
- hnbad 4y ago
  > TRON (DFG) > Fraunhofer Aha, but those aren't universities, they're institutes. That doesn't invalidate your point but it throws off the statistics the author uses. The author's mistake (if it wasn't intentional) is that they're comparing apples to apples when in this case the honest comparison would be apples to oranges (or rather fruit salads with each other) because in Germany institutes like Fraunhofer are where a lot of the publicly funded research happens that he argues should be happening at universities like in the US.
bionade24 4y ago
The author is very misinformed about the state of student decision-making in Germany & it feels like he describes the state people did who are now older than 40 years. One big thing he doesn't account for is the German school grading system, which doesn't work like the American & thus with easier & less necessary school subjects in last decades, A* equivalent grades are easier to reach. People who want to medicine often choose strategically, things that are easy. They ignore that taking physics & chemistry would help them tremendously at the beginning of university. So a good margin struggles with physics & chemistry for medicine in the beginning of their studies. Those people are, in my personal impression, neither STEM interested or intellegent, you can't just map grade to skill. There are highly intelligent people going into medicine, but I doubt they would do diffrently if they get an "Ivy league" equivalent offer. Most of the medicine students aren't top-notch.
est31 4y ago
Yes, if you are a good students and want to have the same measures of success as successful US students have, then you are going to be disappointed. But that's the US point of view. Germany has different measures of success. E.g. there are high school competitions throughout Germany (Jugend Forscht, etc). For university, smart students can still get into social clubs if they are good, like the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (0.5% of all German students), or if they graduated high school in the right area, the Maximilaneum. You then still study at the normal university but have access to a network of equally successful people as you. I think this setup is way more egalitarian than what the US has going on with its historic graduates and donor families admission setup. It's not a wrong thing in itself to mix intelligent people with rich people, intelligent people need investors for their ideas and rich people need smart people to manage their money and companies. Such a mixing process is I think really good for creating a successful economy. But then call it how it is. It's also a bit of a lie for old money in the US to use their influence and prestige to get their kids into top institutions and then have them later label themselves selfmade millionaires. I prefer the German system, and am not really happy about the federal excellence initiative that tries to "Americanize" the system by creating a divide among universities. The current system is way more in the spirit of "the children of California shall be our children" than what the american elite institutions do.
ouija 4y ago
The author gets the whole system backwards. Medicine is the most expensive thing you can study at a German university (~30K € per student per year). That's why the number of slots is very limited. Now the demand is higher than this limited number of slots, so universities need some criterion to reject applicants. The criterion happens to be mainly the GPA. But I agree that the situation is suboptimal. Ideally, there should be more available slots. If we had too many physicians, we could pay them less and the demand would drop.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Talent in germany is best compensated most for in hierarchical megafauna that is car companys and supply comapany. So its the same as with american financial sector, it attracts the einsteins of today, but wastes them on trivial matters such as financial system micro optimization. It is not status-rewarded to invest into "growing" the cake (aka by discovering new allemende resources) and thus, talent distributions always suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons without state or monopoly sponsored research.
Hendrikto 4y ago
The whole premise if flawed. German students do not get into medical studies over other fields for prestige. In fact, there is a shortage of about 15000 doctors.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  There is always a doctor shortage, because there is a bottleneck in how many doctors can be trained at any given time - hence extremely limited places on medicine courses. Its the same almost everywhere. To keep the standard of teaching high, class sizes must be small enough, there must be sufficient supervision, etc.
mhd 4y ago
I've got some serious issues with the base assumption of what's "talented". Sure, the people with the best secondary school degrees get into medicine. First of all, it's focusing on number because there aren't any other ones, not because it's that good in the first place. Second, it's a bit circular. The people with the 1.0 finals get into medicine, because that's what they needed to have to get in there. People often know what they want to study early enough and adjust their efforts accordingly. Especially when it comes to the decimals. It's not like there's a non-goal-oriented drive to just Be The Best You Can, and after your graduation you're then passed on the German Sorting Hat that puts you into the university best suited to you. Easily confirmed by talking to any German doctor ;) As a final semi-anecdote, there's something slightly unusual going on in psychotherapy. Same top "GPA" needed, then another set of top grades in your bachelor to proceed to your master (the "funnel" is narrower than warranted by drop-outs), and after years and years of that, a lot of the psychotherapists end up working part time, as it's one of the fields where it's easy enough to do that. "Overachievers" investing a lot for a better work-life balance.
caporaltito 4y ago
What an article. From a person who moved from a country with an aristocratic vision of universities (France) to a country which gives people the same opportunities regardless of the reputation of where you are from (Germany), this is simply hilarious. I finally get paid the salary I deserve here, because my fellow countrymen used to not like the name of the university I studied in. German self-flagellation article.
- robert_foss 4y ago
  I too moved to Germany (from Sweden), and I think the talent sorting and the related obsession with titles is both bizarre and suboptimal.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    If you think Germany is title obsessed, try Austria...
    - caporaltito 4y ago
      Or France, as I said. I knew "CTI" software engineers (so, "real" engineers according to the french school system) who didn't know what version control is. Or what a class is. People with a degree of lesser reputation actually do the job while they get the money.
wink 4y ago
I have no idea what the point seems to be, of course it's just anecdata but as a German, every single person I know who went medical school (if you want to call it that way) wanted to become a doctor and all the others went to study whatever they wanted to do. Never heard of this weird claim and also in my experience no one here gives a damn at what university you studied, usually it's a simple checkbox "finished degree?" and only if you are fresh out of university, not 10 years later. I'm also not talking about CS here, there I had most of my offers without ever being asked if I had a degree.

33 points by luu 4y ago

I haven't ever heard of a pupil who was interested in STEM, but decided to go for a medical degree, just in order to prove himself. The whole premise sounds like an invention to me. Moreover, there are clearly prestigious technical universities even in Germany, although the author is correct that they aren't quite as prestigious as American ones. RWTH Aachen and TU München are the two standouts. And then there are specialized champions: Tübingen for bioinformatics, I think. Definitely Saarbrücken for Computational Linguistics.

0x008 4y ago
Adding to that, the whole "schtick" of german education is that the distribution is less extreme on the tails than other countries (looking at you, USA...). So we have a lot of high-class technical universities which are mostly interchangeable in the quality of students they produce, with a few stand-outs (like the ones you mentioened), which, however, stand out less extreme than in the aforementioned US.
- hnbad 4y ago
  It's also ironic to talk about how egalitarian German academia supposedly is when the school system in contrast is three-tiered for historical (explicitly classist) reasons, and higher education itself retains this multi-tiered approach through the distinction between universities ("Universität"), universities of applied sciences ("Fachhochschule"), trade schools ("Berufsschule") and the like. There may be fewer extreme outliers within the university system but that doesn't mean the system as a whole is egalitarian. Also it's not clear if its a bad thing if universities aren't retaining "elites" if a signficant part of research in Germany isn't happening at universities themselves. If that is a problem, the problem isn't that "elite academics" aren't properly supported, it's that the institutions to support them have been moved out of the universities into a more privatized market, but that sounds like a different conversation.
  - Nitrolo 4y ago
    That's why I was really surprised about the content of the article (to be honest I haven't made it past the TL;DR yet), I would have guessed that the problem would be too little egalitarianism. Kids here are sorted into career paths at age 10 by sending them to Gymnasium, Realschule, or Hauptschule. To even attend higher education you need to have an Abitur, which means going to a Gymnasium or putting in extra years of study after your Realschule. The argument is that this division allows every kid to learn at a level appropriate to them, but the reality is that an overworked teacher of 20+ kids is supposed to accurately assess everyone's level and then give a recommendation for one of the schools. My impression is that a lot more weight is put on formal qualifications here than in the US, so in practice this choice sorts you into your future social status for most kids. My N=1 annecdote is a friend of mine who recently finished his PhD at TUM, the teacher wanted to send him to a Hauptschule. If his parents hadn't intervened his life would probably be very different right now. Annecdotaly I know a couple of engineers who went to Realschule and then had to work hard to get an Abitur before going to Uni. Who knows how many smart people were discouraged from pursuing higher education because it would mean two more years of high school just to even start. The system seem arbitrary at best to me, and at its worst is just reinforcing class status through generations. Parents with university degrees will fight to have their kids go to Gymnasium, or the teacher might send them because they know they come from an Akademikerfamilie, and the others better hope their teacher likes them.
    - Tomte 4y ago
      > My N=1 annecdote is a friend of mine who recently finished his PhD at TUM, the teacher wanted to send him to a Hauptschule. Similar, but extended family in my case: was to be sent to a special-needs school (which doesn't even lead to the opportunity to get vocational training), parents fought (hiring a lawyer, and including psychological examinations), child grew up to finish two masters degrees and one PhD.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      This early classification of kids, for lack of a better term, is so screwed up. And it has all kinds of issues around social background, racial discrimination and whatnot. Ever PISA study I remember basically gave us the same feedback, black on white. Not that I expect it to change in my lifetime so. it did get considerably easier, as opposed to easy, to get access to university level education when starting out at a Hauptschule since I went to school. Back then, like 20 odd years ago, it was basically impossible to do so. I have the highest respect of everyone who actually goes from a Hauptschule to a university degree, this is probably the hardest way to get higher education imaginably around here.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
When he says >I would change my mind on the importance of this problem if.. he should add a point III - if it turns out students don't actually go into Medical school because they want to "prove themselves"
- hef19898 4y ago
  While some doctors can be arrogant bastards, those people aiming at medical studies are usually highly devoted to the field. One would assume the high entry barrier, based on the Abitur average (upon graduation of the highest tier basic education, and don't get me started how that system is fucked up in its own way), would drive people not directly qualifying for a slot to other fields. Guess what, it doesn't. Since you can get slot by simply waiting it out (your average in improved by 0.1 per semester, at least that's how the NC system worked back the day I care about it). And there are people that wait for years until they qualify for a slot. If working for years side jobs, as waiters or what not, and miss those years of white collar salaries in the end, only to have to spend years of training to start working cruel shifts at a hospital at the early days of their medical careers, doesn't show dedication I don't know what. Side note: All the doctors I met so far, ranging from GPs all the way to surgeons and oncologists, would have made for less than stellar engineers. My oncologist maybe, but being a good oncologist is probably saving more lives than being an electrical or mechanical engineer.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > And there are people that wait for years until they qualify for a slot. But those are outliers, aren’t they? I’ve dated a med student, and been flatmates with others, the only times I’ve heard of people waiting was if they were doing a gap year or something, 1.5 years for NC improvements being pretty much the maximum and already rare.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Sure, the majority gets into medicine rather quickly. I have yet to meet an engineer of any domain to actually wait longer than mandatory civil or military service. My impression has always been that the average med student is more dedicated than the average engineering student (I am the latter, met quite a few of the former before I started university). And that dedication starts years before going to university, simply because the entry barriers are so much higher.
squaredot 4y ago
I agree with that. In addition to that, German students who want to go to elite schools also go abroad (like ETH of Zurich), this is probably an effect that is unknown to US people.
hnbad 4y ago
If anything, I'd say that it's a class thing. Children from an upper class "pedigree" ("old money" especially) are often expected to study medicine, law or business[0]. This has little to do with intrinsic "talent" other than these children's parents often being able to afford private tutoring to make up for any academic shortcomings. In fact, politicians (even ones from aristrocratic backgrounds) have repeatedly been involved in scandals over academic fraud like hiring ghost writers to write their thesis in order to get a degree to make them appear more respectable[1]. Talented students still can be and are pursuing STEM degrees but a lot of research these days often doesn't entirely happen directly in the universities themselves but in organizations like the Fraunhofer institutes (also Max-Planck, Helmholtz, Leibniz and DFG), which neatly toe the line between being a quasi public institution and being a for-profit commercial entity. Ironically, a huge shift in German universities happening around the time of the EU replacing local degrees like the German "Magister Artium" with more "standardized" ones like BA/MA was an attempt to push the concept of "elite universities" via special funding programmes supporting university faculties that were already prospering to replicate the exact US model (while also introducing tuition fees for public universities, before having to roll them back due to public outrage). Also on a complete tangent, the graph the article uses clearly shows a sharp decline during the Nazi regime followed by Germany plateuing until the 1990s or so and then having another smaller decline until flatlining again. The article blames the sharp decline in the 1930s and 1940s on "explicit talk of nurturing an elite" being a problem in the Nazi era, which is a ridiculous conflation of modern and past anti-semitism (the Nazis' scapegoat was "international bankers", not "the elites") but also completely misunderstands Nazi ideology, which heavily embraced elitism and "excellence" but was kneecapped by its obsession with avoiding "Jewish" or "degenerate" science. This honestly reads like it's written by someone whose only understanding of Nazism comes from some ahistorical "actually the Nazis were left-wing because they had 'socialist' in their name and used leftist talking points to gain broader support" memes. The other drop in the 1990s is also interesting. The author claims Germany's "problems" are the result of a democratization of universities and egalitarianism but the obvious thing that changed in the 1990s is that "Germany" expanded to include what was previously East Germany, which regardless of any merits of Eastern Bloc academia in the previous decades at this point was economically destitute and underwent a rapid privatization followed by massive "brain drain" as those who could afford to moved westward. [0]: This is also where you're more likely to find "fraternities" which are a much more niche phenomenon and more specifically tied to conservatism than in the US. "Burschenschaften" typically have strict gender roles and historically were more strongly tied to German aristocracy. Though some practices (like fencing duels which would often result in facial scars carried with pride) have fallen out of use, they still often value "tradition" to the point of embracing "völkisch" nationalism, which has a large overlap with white nationalism in the US. [1]: This is less true with younger generations but traditionally Germans would put a lot of stock into both aristrocratic honorifics and academic titles. Academic titles are still protected by law in Germany (i.e. it's a felony to use the title "Dr." or "Doktor" unless you have a doctorate from an institution Germany recognizes) though and people will still treat aristocratic names as if they were titles although aristocratic titles were officially rolled into family names. To explain this for English-speaking readers: imagine you were a "Lord" and your name was "Adam Smith", then your name would have become "Adam Lord Smith" and you would be correctly addressed as "Mr Lord Smith" but some people would still call you "Lord Smith" out of respect -- German laws are actually considerate enough to allow women to use the female equivalent of the title in their family name despite it officially just being part of the name so the daughter of Mr Lord Smith could still be Ms Lady Smith.

adrianN 4y ago

Talent sorting in Germany has many flaws, but "forcing" people to study medicine is definitely not one of them.

hef19898 4y ago
If anything, German universities are trying everything they can to dissuade people from studying medicine. There are simply too many candidates for the limited number of slots.

Havoc 4y ago

Many good points, but the author is placing a bit too much value on rankings of "top" universities here. Somehow in this article universities educating doctors doesn't add much to society yet nothing negative is said about this: >Oxford graduates with a language degree can join DeepMind right after university. Distortions from everyone chasing name brands seem quite problematic to society

roenxi 4y ago

Mmm. My impression - and this is a complex subject that deserves a deeper treatment than the article and comments will give it - my impression is that Europe has a number of very well developed systems to protect the social elite from becoming social not-elites. Especially the tax code and measures against people succeeding too much like in America. It is stunning that Europe has failed to participate in the tech boom of the last few decades. Even with the social safety nets to protect against failure. I suspect they have a tax code that punishes high-risk high-reward gambits and that a side effect is the lack of extreme successes. If there are no extreme successes, then medicine is the field most guaranteed to win people moderate and respectable success. The average doctor is more respectable than the average engineer, the outlier engineer is far more important than the outlier surgeons. It isn't close, they were basically raiding top scientists and engineers in WWII out of Germany for example because they could reliably do things of civilisational significance. This is a key problem with equalising the playing fields. Society is dragged forward by outlier successes. Punish them, and progress stops. This is why the big slow trend of people organising against inequality is so concerning.

heavenlyblue 4y ago
You don't need extreme success in software if you can wait till the monopolies are established for a decade and then break them up
jlangenauer 4y ago
As a very broad generalization, Europe treats businesses as businesses, rather than financial instruments. They are expected to grow and be profitable, rather than be fattened like cows for an eventual slaughter. That's why Europe has thousands of "small" companies whose revenue might "only" be a billion dollars or so, but they are sustainable companies who generally have accrued a competitive global advantage through years, and decades of R&D. The end result of this is that Europe - certainly Western Europe, and increasingly Central and Eastern Europe - has one of the highest standards of living in the world. Sure, the VCs and investors who only want to make money without producing anything of value themselves don't like this model, but fuck 'em.
- 4y ago

totorovirus 4y ago

What is wrong about the top talents going to medical school? It is the highest paid jobs available.

mrtksn 4y ago

All "sorting" systems have different outcomes, I'm not sure why differences should be necessarily flaws. In many countries there's this centralised testing system where kids take an exam the same day and are placed in schools by preference and that score. So you make a list of schools you want and the school quotas are filled by that preference list with the higher scored candidate gets the place. The result? A school ranking created by high-schoolers and their parents because the "best" students go to the school with the most applicants with highest scores. The problem here is that it creates almost automatic placement for students by score. So if you are really good at math and sciences you score highly but you can't go study physics because the physics departments usually have low minimum scores due to their weak employability and medical schools have very high score due to almost guaranteed employability and high status and compensation. This means, kids scoring well all go to the same schools together with all the other scoring well irrelevant of their interest or aspirations. The thinking goes, if you scored well enough to study medicine you will waste your score if you study something like architecture or chemistry and they are forced to pick something from their score range.

itronitron 4y ago
Is the 'here' you are referring to in the US or the EU?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  The countries where the student placement is done this way.

hrbf 4y ago

I couldn’t make it all the way though the article. Its reasoning is baffling, confused and unsubstantiated, all while demonstrating very little understanding of the environment they’re criticizing. It betrays a very exclusive and elitist view of education. If you build a society of elitist institutions, you will get elites. Not only that: if isolated, they will think of themselves as better than most, exceptional in fact. With exceptionality come the exceptions one carves out for oneself and a dismissive view of the common rabble. Of course talented individuals should be fostered. But presenting a US-style university approach as laudable and somehow missing is irresponsible and short-sighted. As another commenter wrote, Germany’s education system has plenty of issues but that’s not one of it.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>If you build a society of elitist institutions, you will get elites. You get elitists. Not necessarily elites. Subtle difference.
- hrbf 4y ago
  Agreed, good distinction.
probably_wrong 4y ago
I also had a tough time trying to understand what the author was trying to say. My best guess is that he's hardcore into "effective altruism" (based on the rest of his website) and is trying to use this particular hammer with every nail. Most doctors I know got into the profession because they wanted to cure people. They don't care that this is not optimal from a theoretical point of view, and they most certainly didn't do it to "prove themselves". And once you start with a wrong thesis, all bets are off. If the author really wants to solve the health sector problems in Germany he should instead try to figure out why I need to book an appointments months before I get sick. Unfortunately fixing bureaucracy is not as sexy as creating Euro Harvard.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Or why rural areas are losing GPs left and right. Or how health insurance is screwing with diagnosis, or a myriad of other things. But as you said, those things are simply not sexy.

thriftwy 4y ago

We should have more bright but laid-back students instead of having them all rat race through the "top university". High capacity of rote grind does not a genius make.

RamblingCTO 4y ago

We might not have the image of the Ivy League and thus lose Nobel prices in the statistics, but I'd say it's a good thing we're not participating in the anglo-american tradition of elitism. We have our places of excellency but it's not as easy as "this university". It may be one specific field at one university, one research group, an institute that's excelling etc.

google234123 4y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to call it that - just look at France right next door to you. They aren’t very Anglo-American :)
- RamblingCTO 4y ago
  Honestly no idea what France is doing. Are they internationally more renowned then Germany?
  - hef19898 4y ago
    No idea about the international angle, but France is famous for its highly elitist system of Grandes Ecoles covering everything from public services and administration and engineering. With my limited contact with French engineers, I have yet to see a quality difference between the people. Grand Ecole grads have a guarantee on a fast tracked career so.
    - RamblingCTO 4y ago
      Ok interesting, thank you! I've heard of Grand Ecoles before in this context actually. France is weirdly centristic anyway!

_glass 4y ago

I am German and doing my PhD in the management sciences, so I can judge the output, and there are many European institutions that are doing top research, also German ones. I have the feeling it's mostly about tech that we're not top notch. And even there, as a tech worker, I know really good output. I guess, that German universities are not really competing for a high ranking. This is part of German culture, we also don't have these standardized tests to qualify for university.

hef19898 4y ago

The author as much as commits the whole post being speculation: >> I’m uncertain how big the problem of bad talent allocation in Germany really is. However, given that it reduces the likelihood of careers with an outsized positive impact, the damage could be severe. Stopped reading after that.. Kind of sounds like someone who didn't get how the German academic system works, that being suitable for "med school" (there is no such a thing in Germany, as there is in the US, over here you simply start medical studies from semester one onwards) doesn't mean you are suitable for engineering (assuming the author is German, I understand engineering as one of those domains that actually have engineering in the name which excludes "software engineering") which again has nothing to do with software developments, start ups and big IPOs. Which again has nothing to do with improving the world or society. IMHO, every single med student helping out with health care in Africa is doing more good than the majority of software developers at, say, Meta or Amazon.

vintermann 4y ago
I don't know how it is in Germany, but in Norway at least, software engineers are actual engineers. We have the same basic package: a little physics, a lot of calculus, some discrete maths, basic economics, basic signal processing, and a bunch of business-related softer topics around leadership, planning etc. The non-software engineers also have a bit of programming in their programs, of course.
- oytis 4y ago
  Similarly in Russia where I am from, but I've always seen it as a sign of the education of software engineers being outdated. I work in embedded, so actually have some use for physics (thought a tiny part of what has been taught), calculus and signal procesing - but most other software engineers do not at all. They don't even use discrete math really at any deep level. So looks like a lot of time wasted that would better be dedicated to learning version control, cloud computing, up-to-date tools or just a second domain. As of leadership and planning, I hope yours is better that ours. We f..g learned Gantt charts, but zero of Agile or modern project and product management, and equally zero about finance of tech startups (funding rounds etc.).

vintermann 4y ago

Much to think about here, but the author should stop and think if he's really looking at the right problem. Like for instance: is it true that people with perfect grades go into medicine so as to not "waste" their score? You know, maybe it is! But don't you agree then, that this is kind of fucked up? Don't they have, like, actual interests? Or actual goals, besides winning in status games? Not even getting rich? And also. Economically speaking, Germany seems to be doing really, really well, despite "only" having their Heidelbergs, their Aachens, their Jenas, their Humboldts, their Colognes etc. Not having it all concentrated in elite-generating hubs seems to be working out quite well for them. And for us in the rest of the world too, considering where the first mRNA vaccine got developed, or considering where we get much of the high precision industrial equipment necessary to make virtually everything impressive that has been made the last decade. Why the hell should Germany have Ivy envy?

nibbleshifter 4y ago
> is it true that people with perfect grades go into medicine so as to not "waste" their score? This is largely true in many places - also, often the choice is heavily influenced by parents. Having an offspring be a doctor offers some prestige.

lnsru 4y ago

Working in an university is very delicate matter. People are fed with 1 year contracts during the employment there. Every supermarket cashier has more economically stable life than a young scientist in Germany. So the brightest know this and leave academia immediately after graduation. This funding system is alone seriously flawed and should be fixed to attract more talents. Not getting rental apartment just because one can only show 12 months limited contract is plain stupid. And it happens a lot since universities are in real estate hot spots. Edit: school system in Germany also decides after 4th grade if a person may study later. I don’t think, that 10 year old children are capable to decide if they want go to university or end up with underpaid apprenticeship with dead end job later.

rob74 4y ago
You could also argue that universities create (or are a major factor in creating) real estate hot spots. A city with a major university is definitely also more desirable for other groups than a non-university city. Not talking about cities like Munich, that would be hot spots anyway, but smaller cities (e.g. Aachen) definitely gain (or lose, depending on your point of view) a lot through their university.
fileeditview 4y ago
There is more than one school system in Germany. Multiple allow to "rank up" after 4th grade (see different types of "Gesamtschule"). Also if you get a lower degree you could as an adult go back to a special school and get you high-school degree to study. Both of my parents did this and became teacher and doctor. Yes it may be harder but it is still possible. I totally agree that these 1-2 year contracts are a problem. They also exist for teachers. Some of them get fired during holidays to save some money and then are re-hired afterwards.. it is disgraceful.

moomin 4y ago

Germany has one of the best health care provisions in the world. It has one of the highest median salaries in the world. It has a powerhouse economy driven by expertise and innovation. Might be worth understanding how the current system supports that before trying to fix it.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
I found Germany absolutely dogshit for innovation in IT when I lived and worked there. It took the pandemic to move the needle even slightly on digitalisation of government services, and even then. As for salaries: the salaries in tech in Germany aren't particularly competitive compared to Ireland, America, the UK, etc. As for healthcare: its not free (its mandatory insurance), and the quality/speed of care is often worse than the NHS in my experience, however, I will grant them that they have some fantastic experts available at hospitals like the Charité in Berlin.

fxtentacle 4y ago

This article is based around 3 pieces of flawed research: 1. "German academia doesn’t have world-class universities" https://ommer-lab.com/ https://ommer-lab.com/ just built Stable Diffusion. Lead author of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine paper is from https://tron-mainz.de/ https://tron-mainz.de/ . Fraunhofer with MP3 / MPEG-H, H265.. 2. Paper Count != Quality One of the main points of the article appears to be to compare "Havard Medical School" against "Germany as a whole" solely based on the number of papers published. But that might also just mean that the US has more junk papers. Or different financial incentives for PhD students. They should have compared something like (number x impact). Or maybe look at conference attendance. 3. Patriotism != Nobel Price Their nobel price diagram is probably just due to different levels of patriotism. Not many people in Germany would proudly proclaim "I'm a German!" in their nobel price biography (due to history). For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... states that the US has 4x the number of Nobel laureates compared to Germany, which seems just fine considering that the US also has 4x the number of citizens. After misunderstanding the problem, the author then offers a flawed fix: the highest-IQ students from Germany should move to the US

hnbad 4y ago
> TRON (DFG) > Fraunhofer Aha, but those aren't universities, they're institutes. That doesn't invalidate your point but it throws off the statistics the author uses. The author's mistake (if it wasn't intentional) is that they're comparing apples to apples when in this case the honest comparison would be apples to oranges (or rather fruit salads with each other) because in Germany institutes like Fraunhofer are where a lot of the publicly funded research happens that he argues should be happening at universities like in the US.

bionade24 4y ago

The author is very misinformed about the state of student decision-making in Germany & it feels like he describes the state people did who are now older than 40 years. One big thing he doesn't account for is the German school grading system, which doesn't work like the American & thus with easier & less necessary school subjects in last decades, A* equivalent grades are easier to reach. People who want to medicine often choose strategically, things that are easy. They ignore that taking physics & chemistry would help them tremendously at the beginning of university. So a good margin struggles with physics & chemistry for medicine in the beginning of their studies. Those people are, in my personal impression, neither STEM interested or intellegent, you can't just map grade to skill. There are highly intelligent people going into medicine, but I doubt they would do diffrently if they get an "Ivy league" equivalent offer. Most of the medicine students aren't top-notch.

est31 4y ago

Yes, if you are a good students and want to have the same measures of success as successful US students have, then you are going to be disappointed. But that's the US point of view. Germany has different measures of success. E.g. there are high school competitions throughout Germany (Jugend Forscht, etc). For university, smart students can still get into social clubs if they are good, like the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (0.5% of all German students), or if they graduated high school in the right area, the Maximilaneum. You then still study at the normal university but have access to a network of equally successful people as you. I think this setup is way more egalitarian than what the US has going on with its historic graduates and donor families admission setup. It's not a wrong thing in itself to mix intelligent people with rich people, intelligent people need investors for their ideas and rich people need smart people to manage their money and companies. Such a mixing process is I think really good for creating a successful economy. But then call it how it is. It's also a bit of a lie for old money in the US to use their influence and prestige to get their kids into top institutions and then have them later label themselves selfmade millionaires. I prefer the German system, and am not really happy about the federal excellence initiative that tries to "Americanize" the system by creating a divide among universities. The current system is way more in the spirit of "the children of California shall be our children" than what the american elite institutions do.

ouija 4y ago

The author gets the whole system backwards. Medicine is the most expensive thing you can study at a German university (~30K € per student per year). That's why the number of slots is very limited. Now the demand is higher than this limited number of slots, so universities need some criterion to reject applicants. The criterion happens to be mainly the GPA. But I agree that the situation is suboptimal. Ideally, there should be more available slots. If we had too many physicians, we could pay them less and the demand would drop.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Talent in germany is best compensated most for in hierarchical megafauna that is car companys and supply comapany. So its the same as with american financial sector, it attracts the einsteins of today, but wastes them on trivial matters such as financial system micro optimization. It is not status-rewarded to invest into "growing" the cake (aka by discovering new allemende resources) and thus, talent distributions always suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons without state or monopoly sponsored research.

Hendrikto 4y ago

The whole premise if flawed. German students do not get into medical studies over other fields for prestige. In fact, there is a shortage of about 15000 doctors.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
There is always a doctor shortage, because there is a bottleneck in how many doctors can be trained at any given time - hence extremely limited places on medicine courses. Its the same almost everywhere. To keep the standard of teaching high, class sizes must be small enough, there must be sufficient supervision, etc.

mhd 4y ago

I've got some serious issues with the base assumption of what's "talented". Sure, the people with the best secondary school degrees get into medicine. First of all, it's focusing on number because there aren't any other ones, not because it's that good in the first place. Second, it's a bit circular. The people with the 1.0 finals get into medicine, because that's what they needed to have to get in there. People often know what they want to study early enough and adjust their efforts accordingly. Especially when it comes to the decimals. It's not like there's a non-goal-oriented drive to just Be The Best You Can, and after your graduation you're then passed on the German Sorting Hat that puts you into the university best suited to you. Easily confirmed by talking to any German doctor ;) As a final semi-anecdote, there's something slightly unusual going on in psychotherapy. Same top "GPA" needed, then another set of top grades in your bachelor to proceed to your master (the "funnel" is narrower than warranted by drop-outs), and after years and years of that, a lot of the psychotherapists end up working part time, as it's one of the fields where it's easy enough to do that. "Overachievers" investing a lot for a better work-life balance.

caporaltito 4y ago

What an article. From a person who moved from a country with an aristocratic vision of universities (France) to a country which gives people the same opportunities regardless of the reputation of where you are from (Germany), this is simply hilarious. I finally get paid the salary I deserve here, because my fellow countrymen used to not like the name of the university I studied in. German self-flagellation article.

robert_foss 4y ago
I too moved to Germany (from Sweden), and I think the talent sorting and the related obsession with titles is both bizarre and suboptimal.
- hef19898 4y ago
  If you think Germany is title obsessed, try Austria...
  - caporaltito 4y ago
    Or France, as I said. I knew "CTI" software engineers (so, "real" engineers according to the french school system) who didn't know what version control is. Or what a class is. People with a degree of lesser reputation actually do the job while they get the money.

wink 4y ago

I have no idea what the point seems to be, of course it's just anecdata but as a German, every single person I know who went medical school (if you want to call it that way) wanted to become a doctor and all the others went to study whatever they wanted to do. Never heard of this weird claim and also in my experience no one here gives a damn at what university you studied, usually it's a simple checkbox "finished degree?" and only if you are fresh out of university, not 10 years later. I'm also not talking about CS here, there I had most of my offers without ever being asked if I had a degree.