More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

While not always true, most grad students I know tend to have relatively good careers, which they are comparing grad school to. They also tend to be, relatively speaking, born into good fortune with finances and healthy families. This is not universally true, of course, but more often the case than with my coworkers in aforementiones manual labor jobs.

Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not get rid of their legacy admissions program which is the most biased criteria against disadvantaged students. The irony here is that the SAT score was used to counter bias against disadvantaged students in the first place. It was viewed as the only "objective" part of the admissions process which could not be "bought".

My solution to end unfairness in college admissions process is a points based lottery. Each college publicly sets out a points system for GPA, extracurricular activity, SAT, athletics, legacy, etc that they will apply to an applicant and derive a score. Each college publicly sets a "mininum/cutoff" score. Every applicant with a score above the cutoff will enter an independently monitored lottery. The lottery will select the freshman class out of the pool of candidates.

The lawyers for the other side will pursue this.

Doron Zeilberger, a mathematician, coauthors papers with his computer, which he refers to by the name Shalosh Ekhad:

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/ekhad.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doron_Zeilberger

I think a lot of complaining about grad school comes from four areas:

1. As you point out people who become grad students are often fortunate people. They already have a college degree. They are able to do well enough at school to be accepted into a graduate program. This usually means that they could be getting paid 2-15X more while doing far less work at an industry job. So in comparison grad school is miserable.

2. Unlike a top high-skill job grad school is a uncertain career track. You can find out that you spent between 3-12 years of our life with very little to show for it researching something it turns out no one, including you, cares about. The uncertainty gets to some people.

3. PhD programs can place an enormous amount of pressure on the student to be independent, have new ideas and execute those ideas well. This can be a frightening experience.

4. In some fields very strange workloads placed on the student. For instance in some labs students run experiments that require performing a task every 40 minutes for 36-72 hours straight. If the task is not performed perfectly weeks of work is lost. The experiment might involve dangerous chemicals. This is like being a long haul trucker or sound engineer.