301–310 of 914 posts
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Given that the bar for getting into Harvard is rather high these days, shouldn't we expect the median grade in Harvard to be fairly high? If C students aren't allowed into Harvard these days, doesn't it make sense they aren't giving out Cs?
Wouldn't a C in Harvard mean "average for a Harvard student"?
Harvard was one of the leaders of the charge in terms of grade inflation back 20ish years ago
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You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances. I think the median 4 year college gradu…
I think the rigid nature of other systems leads to more promising people being eliminated early on. America was always more fluid: the country of Homer Simpson: A guy that got second chance after second chance and with his own way of doing things(which others like Frank Grimes find absurd), managed to make something of himself. Applying this logic to college, schools used to be more strict yes but there was always le…
> Techies are the boss now
I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today. The normalization of tech has opened it up to average joe's that wouldn't have touched it back then due to the social stigma it had. This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech. But kids that value their studies over their social lives, or just like to have conversations about something more intellectual than video games and the trending tiktoks, are still likely outside the fold whatever the contemporary take on that is. Social norms, bullying, cliques have all changed but being a teenager in a group setting isn't yet a democratic affair.
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> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world Where in the world have you polled?? because this is categorically opposite to my experience discussing the US college system
I dunno, google any university ranking and you will find the top ten has many from the US?
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Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly w…
> Most of the world has severed the two Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades. I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system. Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a unive…
Can you elaborate on this a bit? It's very easy to read uncharitably without further elaboration and reads pretty delusional as is.
Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…
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Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly w…
> Most of the world has severed the two Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades. I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system. Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a unive…
And they also severely restrict who can attend university. Of course this is a non-starter in the current US political environment.
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Germany is a great example of how you don’t need most of the population enrolled in universities. > The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world. The US was a powerhouse economy when it could build the world’s largest navy almost overnight. Since the 1980s, the U.S. economy has become highly financialized. It’s disputed how much American economic dominance is real versus on paper today.
I agree with you, but if the US truly has the best military (and it does 100x) then when push comes to shove, the US will destroy anyone who tries to undermine it. Very dangerous game to oppose it. Being able to construct things quickly is important, but if the US can militarily seize nearly every country on earth in days, the power is not necessarily where the kit is located
Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…
It seems that the US will course correct but the EU seems to be declining into authoritarianism and proto-communism.
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> Most of the world has severed the two Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades. I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system. Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a unive…
> Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades The benefits of the U.S. university system aren’t generated by average people taking a debt-financed 4 year vacation. They are generated by the same subset of people who would still be attending university even in a scaled down system that sent far fewer people to…
Reminiscent of this thread talking about undergraduate-level students mailing it in: https://bsky.app/profile/jesbattis.bsky.social/post/3m6pvvko... Is this not rational behavior? If, through grade inflation, the only thing that matters to an employer is what school you went to and that you completed it (the sheepskin effect), then isn't the correct optimization to reduce wasting time on levers that won't make any pr…
>Is this not rational behavior? If you think the purpose of an education is literally nothing more than the diploma, then yeah sure. If you think that I'm interviewing you for an entry SWE job (yes, we do this still) and you think I'm going to hire you because you hyperoptimized a compsci degree to minimize the work and learning you had to do and maximized your GPA, then you're going to blow the interview and wind up…