6 ms·

Wow. Looks like Harvard's Class of 1906-ish was expected to understand and operate parts of the real-world economy. In America. How times have changed!

alephnerd 2y ago
The snark is uncalled for, especially because Harvard does have a (fairly decent) engineering program at the undergrad level, as well as the fact that the 2 most popular concentrations are Econ and CS. Nor does this kind of snark actually add any value to the discussion in HN and clearly breaks multiple rules of HN [0] [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- uoaei 2y ago
  Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - eganist 2y ago
    > Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way. Meta-question on the emphasis above: are you (uoaei) and bell-cot the same user?
    - stevenae 2y ago
      I think this was a confusing use of "this".
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Do you disagree Read the first paragraph > about the intentions of those who push back in this way Follow the HN guidelines (I myself have fallen foul of them on occasion). Low quality snark is not the kind of discourse that has value on this forum. And eaganist brings up a good point.
    - _zoltan_ 2y ago
      And of course you feel like it's your job to tell others what has value and what not? Why do you feel the entitlement to this?
      - eganist 2y ago
        It's probably coming from frustration with non-contributive commentary, of which the topmost comment unquestionably qualifies. It's in poor form to do citizen-policing pretty much anywhere let alone an internet forum, but I won't begrudge the user their frustrations over something that's undeniably a problem. Heh.
        _zoltan_ 2y ago
        The comment you've replied is not wrong. The submission shows real world knowledge vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical. This is what OP talked about.
        eganist 2y ago
        > The submission shows real world knowledge Compared to what specifically? It helps to find relevant, comparable examples of electives in major areas of economic impact and demonstrating how these modern electives fail to do what you described. > vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical. This isn't a direct comparison. But if we were to make this comparison more direct (e.g "more people were prepared in 1907 for application of practical knowledge than today), it's also in need of substance. How much is "a lot"? What is practical knowledge, and how can you be sure that the knowledge taught isn't practical? From the modern curricula linked elsewhere in the thread, it looks like quite a few courses are directly relevant to operationalization in their domains.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bell-cot 2y ago
  "Like previous graduates, most seniors plan to hold jobs in the finance, consulting, and technology sectors..." - https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/senior-survey/after-harvard/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/senior-survey/after-har... "The majority — 58 percent — of Harvard’s graduating class will immediately enter the workforce, and more than half will take jobs in finance, tech, or consulting..." - https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey/after-harvard/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey/after-har... And look at their current Economics electives - https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/econ/files/2024-2025_writing_and_theory_courses_all_electives_v2.pdf?m=1712589572 https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e... - which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful? And Harvard's own numbers here - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-awards-8870-degrees-over-2021-22-academic-year/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-award... - suggest that that "fairly decent" engineering program is a puny fraction of the undergraduate population. And maybe has a pretty poor RoI on its Harvard-sized tuition, given that Harvard feels the need to argue that prospective applicants shouldn't just ignore it, in favor of well-known engineering programs, because "community and location": https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/why-i-chose-harvard-engineering https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/why...
  - eganist 2y ago
    > https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/econ/files/2024-2025_writing_and_theory_courses_all_electives_v2.pdf?m=1712589572 https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e... > which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful? Are you saying that the "Railroad Practice" elective is directly comparable to the "Corporate Finance" elective of today? If anything, I'd say that Railroad Practice is best compared to "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" in that they're both focused on some of the biggest economic facilitators of their respective days, rail and data science. And Harvard's other electives seem similarly tailored, allowing people to get a grasp of fields of practice that can yield them a substantial advantage in practice, e.g in leveraging globalization or serving underserved markets. Your other points aren't comparative to the Harvard of the day but rather speculative ("a puny fraction" and its suggested impact), so there's not much I can do to speak to them. --- Tangent: it'd be an interesting analytic exercise to compare courses and curricula year by year and see what percentage of electives have generalized, what percentage have specialized, and to get a better grasp of how a school's programs are both adapting to and anticipating current and future economics landscapes.
eganist 2y ago
> How times have changed! Have they? What's changed, specifically, in Harvard's various programs in the last 118 years that lead you to your implied conclusion that their business and economics curricula have worsened?
- newsclues 2y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- treyd 2y ago
  Business classes, especially at institutions like Harvard and Sloan, have shifted their focus dramatically towards finance and upper management concerns and away from real boots-on-ground business operations.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    A friend and MIT alum went back through Sloan for a foundation he felt he needed to assemble a venture around IP he'd developed. Approaching it again after, he told me effectively what you described - while he felt he got "executive training", after trying and failing, it didn't provide practical knowledge to build and manage a successful operation. Instead, he hopped in the helm of an existing company and has done well enough with it. It was superset training, in the end.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    But half the questions here are less about ensuring competency to make decisions and more basic definitional stuff manual workers that didn't finish high school would presumably be expected to pick up after a couple of weeks on the job. Don't think we'd be raising standards if we dropped all the calculus and statistics knowledge requirements in a modern Econ course in favour of "name three web technologies" and "describe the difference between an Account Executive and and SDR"
seanhunter 2y ago
Very easy to give a fact-free hot take, but I thought I'd take a look at the "research" section of Harvard's economics department website at the moment[1] to see what they work on. I'm not an economist but it seems like a pretty serious attempt to understand the real-world economy. Picking a paper purely at random (again, I'm not an economist so I just clicked through a few and they seem similar-ish to me in a broad sense) this[2] is a pretty serious analysis of industrial policy with some real-world case studies about the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership around the covid vaccine, German industrial policy given the transition from heavy industry to climate tech and some stuff about how Israel has created a favourable climate for tech startups. That not real-world enough for you? [1] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers [2] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/mazzucato_m._rodrik_d._2023_industrial_policy_with_conditionalities.pdf https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.ed...
- mhh__ 2y ago
  Well the point was about students not researchers afaict. There's a difference between Harvard (or any powerful equivalent) the research establishment and Harvard the school for training America's new elite. Most of the economics students I know (especially the Harvard ones) would not surprise the PC at all. As a subject it doesn't attract particularly serious people.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Those are research papers. But these kinds of case studies aren't unusual at the undergrad level even at state schools. The rubric and results are not as in-depth or built out as published research. Usually the question for these exercises or papers are built on research publications so the professors have answers to grade yours against.
huitzitziltzin 2y ago
(Former) econ prof here (now in industry), though definitely not at Harvard. To be honest "draw a map of a rail yard" or "write up a waybill" does not seem like the kind of exam material college students should be engaging in in 2024. The standard is higher now, a lot of the material more difficult and the questions have changed. The material being tested on that exam looks like middle-high school in parts? In an _intro_ economics class I'd like students to understand what we (think we) know about supply and demand and apply it to relevant public policy issues - housing supply, taxation of vices, etc. I'd like them to discuss policy trade offs. "Railroad economics" was presumably an elective, where the standards now would be even higher than in my intro class.
- queuebert 2y ago
  Having actually taught economics undergrads at Harvard, albeit in a science elective, I can the standards are not quite so high as you might think.
  - hellodang_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
- bell-cot 2y ago
  High-level theory is nice. Ditto public policy savvy. And quite a few of the other questions on the 1906 exam reflect that. But back at the coal face - Rail yards were a very important and expensive part of a ~1906 railroad's infrastructure - both to build, and to operate. And the efficiency differences between a well-designed and poorly-designed yard were huge. A prospective RR manager who can't quickly map out a good rail yard is someone who simply does not understand the at-scale operation of a railroad. Similarly, waybills were the core document for moving individual customer's loads around on an RR. If (fake name) EconoAir's manager at your local airport did not understand Flight Plans well enough to quickly draw one up - would you want to own EconoAir's stock, or fly on their airplanes?
  - nwiswell 2y ago
tmpz22 2y ago
Why build something when you can leverage your social status to take ownership from others and profit off it indiscriminately with minimal effort - i.e. Finance and Upper Management.
princeb 2y ago
in my opinion i expect a vocational institute to teach the practical aspects of the industry, or at least be taught as part of OJT. And I believe many companies actually do provide a significant amount of OJT as part of their management traineeships or apprenticeships, and companies that take in employees earlier in their educational journey, such as pre-college apprenticeships, tend to focus on practical and technical knowledge more quickly. at the college level, i don't really think these are meaningful questions to ask in order to test understanding. these feel like something you'd pick up after a week of working a trade financing desk in a industrial bank.

alephnerd 2y ago

The snark is uncalled for, especially because Harvard does have a (fairly decent) engineering program at the undergrad level, as well as the fact that the 2 most popular concentrations are Econ and CS. Nor does this kind of snark actually add any value to the discussion in HN and clearly breaks multiple rules of HN [0] [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

uoaei 2y ago
Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- eganist 2y ago
  > Do you disagree? I understand the scolding and you may consider it irrelevant to answer my question but I am curious about the intentions of those who push back in this way. Meta-question on the emphasis above: are you (uoaei) and bell-cot the same user?
  - stevenae 2y ago
    I think this was a confusing use of "this".
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > Do you disagree Read the first paragraph > about the intentions of those who push back in this way Follow the HN guidelines (I myself have fallen foul of them on occasion). Low quality snark is not the kind of discourse that has value on this forum. And eaganist brings up a good point.
  - _zoltan_ 2y ago
    And of course you feel like it's your job to tell others what has value and what not? Why do you feel the entitlement to this?
    - eganist 2y ago
      It's probably coming from frustration with non-contributive commentary, of which the topmost comment unquestionably qualifies. It's in poor form to do citizen-policing pretty much anywhere let alone an internet forum, but I won't begrudge the user their frustrations over something that's undeniably a problem. Heh.
      - _zoltan_ 2y ago
        The comment you've replied is not wrong. The submission shows real world knowledge vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical. This is what OP talked about.
        eganist 2y ago
        > The submission shows real world knowledge Compared to what specifically? It helps to find relevant, comparable examples of electives in major areas of economic impact and demonstrating how these modern electives fail to do what you described. > vs a lot of folks coming out today without any practical knowledge, just theoretical. This isn't a direct comparison. But if we were to make this comparison more direct (e.g "more people were prepared in 1907 for application of practical knowledge than today), it's also in need of substance. How much is "a lot"? What is practical knowledge, and how can you be sure that the knowledge taught isn't practical? From the modern curricula linked elsewhere in the thread, it looks like quite a few courses are directly relevant to operationalization in their domains.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bell-cot 2y ago
"Like previous graduates, most seniors plan to hold jobs in the finance, consulting, and technology sectors..." - https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/senior-survey/after-harvard/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/senior-survey/after-har... "The majority — 58 percent — of Harvard’s graduating class will immediately enter the workforce, and more than half will take jobs in finance, tech, or consulting..." - https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey/after-harvard/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2024/senior-survey/after-har... And look at their current Economics electives - https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/econ/files/2024-2025_writing_and_theory_courses_all_electives_v2.pdf?m=1712589572 https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e... - which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful? And Harvard's own numbers here - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-awards-8870-degrees-over-2021-22-academic-year/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/harvard-award... - suggest that that "fairly decent" engineering program is a puny fraction of the undergraduate population. And maybe has a pretty poor RoI on its Harvard-sized tuition, given that Harvard feels the need to argue that prospective applicants shouldn't just ignore it, in favor of well-known engineering programs, because "community and location": https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/why-i-chose-harvard-engineering https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/why...
- eganist 2y ago
  > https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/econ/files/2024-2025_writing_and_theory_courses_all_electives_v2.pdf?m=1712589572 https://economics.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/e... > which, if you're going into finance, consulting, public policy, or political ideology, look great. But if you want to understand or manage a real-physical-world company? Maybe Econ 1745 - "Corporate Finance" would be useful? Are you saying that the "Railroad Practice" elective is directly comparable to the "Corporate Finance" elective of today? If anything, I'd say that Railroad Practice is best compared to "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems" in that they're both focused on some of the biggest economic facilitators of their respective days, rail and data science. And Harvard's other electives seem similarly tailored, allowing people to get a grasp of fields of practice that can yield them a substantial advantage in practice, e.g in leveraging globalization or serving underserved markets. Your other points aren't comparative to the Harvard of the day but rather speculative ("a puny fraction" and its suggested impact), so there's not much I can do to speak to them. --- Tangent: it'd be an interesting analytic exercise to compare courses and curricula year by year and see what percentage of electives have generalized, what percentage have specialized, and to get a better grasp of how a school's programs are both adapting to and anticipating current and future economics landscapes.

eganist 2y ago

> How times have changed! Have they? What's changed, specifically, in Harvard's various programs in the last 118 years that lead you to your implied conclusion that their business and economics curricula have worsened?

newsclues 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
treyd 2y ago
Business classes, especially at institutions like Harvard and Sloan, have shifted their focus dramatically towards finance and upper management concerns and away from real boots-on-ground business operations.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  A friend and MIT alum went back through Sloan for a foundation he felt he needed to assemble a venture around IP he'd developed. Approaching it again after, he told me effectively what you described - while he felt he got "executive training", after trying and failing, it didn't provide practical knowledge to build and manage a successful operation. Instead, he hopped in the helm of an existing company and has done well enough with it. It was superset training, in the end.
- notahacker 2y ago
  But half the questions here are less about ensuring competency to make decisions and more basic definitional stuff manual workers that didn't finish high school would presumably be expected to pick up after a couple of weeks on the job. Don't think we'd be raising standards if we dropped all the calculus and statistics knowledge requirements in a modern Econ course in favour of "name three web technologies" and "describe the difference between an Account Executive and and SDR"

seanhunter 2y ago

Very easy to give a fact-free hot take, but I thought I'd take a look at the "research" section of Harvard's economics department website at the moment[1] to see what they work on. I'm not an economist but it seems like a pretty serious attempt to understand the real-world economy. Picking a paper purely at random (again, I'm not an economist so I just clicked through a few and they seem similar-ish to me in a broad sense) this[2] is a pretty serious analysis of industrial policy with some real-world case studies about the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership around the covid vaccine, German industrial policy given the transition from heavy industry to climate tech and some stuff about how Israel has created a favourable climate for tech startups. That not real-world enough for you? [1] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers [2] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/mazzucato_m._rodrik_d._2023_industrial_policy_with_conditionalities.pdf https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.ed...

mhh__ 2y ago
Well the point was about students not researchers afaict. There's a difference between Harvard (or any powerful equivalent) the research establishment and Harvard the school for training America's new elite. Most of the economics students I know (especially the Harvard ones) would not surprise the PC at all. As a subject it doesn't attract particularly serious people.
giantg2 2y ago
Those are research papers. But these kinds of case studies aren't unusual at the undergrad level even at state schools. The rubric and results are not as in-depth or built out as published research. Usually the question for these exercises or papers are built on research publications so the professors have answers to grade yours against.

huitzitziltzin 2y ago

(Former) econ prof here (now in industry), though definitely not at Harvard. To be honest "draw a map of a rail yard" or "write up a waybill" does not seem like the kind of exam material college students should be engaging in in 2024. The standard is higher now, a lot of the material more difficult and the questions have changed. The material being tested on that exam looks like middle-high school in parts? In an _intro_ economics class I'd like students to understand what we (think we) know about supply and demand and apply it to relevant public policy issues - housing supply, taxation of vices, etc. I'd like them to discuss policy trade offs. "Railroad economics" was presumably an elective, where the standards now would be even higher than in my intro class.

queuebert 2y ago
Having actually taught economics undergrads at Harvard, albeit in a science elective, I can the standards are not quite so high as you might think.
- hellodang_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
bell-cot 2y ago
High-level theory is nice. Ditto public policy savvy. And quite a few of the other questions on the 1906 exam reflect that. But back at the coal face - Rail yards were a very important and expensive part of a ~1906 railroad's infrastructure - both to build, and to operate. And the efficiency differences between a well-designed and poorly-designed yard were huge. A prospective RR manager who can't quickly map out a good rail yard is someone who simply does not understand the at-scale operation of a railroad. Similarly, waybills were the core document for moving individual customer's loads around on an RR. If (fake name) EconoAir's manager at your local airport did not understand Flight Plans well enough to quickly draw one up - would you want to own EconoAir's stock, or fly on their airplanes?
- nwiswell 2y ago

tmpz22 2y ago

Why build something when you can leverage your social status to take ownership from others and profit off it indiscriminately with minimal effort - i.e. Finance and Upper Management.

princeb 2y ago

in my opinion i expect a vocational institute to teach the practical aspects of the industry, or at least be taught as part of OJT. And I believe many companies actually do provide a significant amount of OJT as part of their management traineeships or apprenticeships, and companies that take in employees earlier in their educational journey, such as pre-college apprenticeships, tend to focus on practical and technical knowledge more quickly. at the college level, i don't really think these are meaningful questions to ask in order to test understanding. these feel like something you'd pick up after a week of working a trade financing desk in a industrial bank.