111–120 of 247 posts
As a current student, I see this first-hand. I go to a school that is moderately prestigious, but not well known for CS. Far too many of my classmates are obsessed with the same hamster wheel of optimizing grades, superficial extracurriculars and rec letter chasing. This isn't surprising; it's what got them into this school in the first place. Unfortunately for them it's also quite useless in tech. Some of them go as…
Maybe someone on HN can answer this for me. Why are these articles about the American system written as if they are new developments. Nothing in this article sounds any different from how things were 50 years ago, and probably earlier. I am guessing that 1. more kids are going to college today than 50 years ago (that should be a good thing) and competing for spots at top schools (thus more competition) and 2. the Ame…
Second, funding has been cut for public universities significantly. A lot of public universities charge tuition that is far more than it was 50-60 years ago. Ironically the expensive private schools are where you want to go for low cost college. They can afford to give full rides to a large portion of their population. Hence the competition.
People have gotten better at playing the game. It's like how chess ELO keeps going up. If you did SAT prep, was a nationally ranked fencer/golfer/tennis player, did volunteer work, founded a tech club and had a 95 average in the 80's, you'd have your pick of colleges. Much in the same way your average GM would kill if they were playing back in the 80's. These days you'd still do okay but you'd be competing against a larger pool of people who also did all of these things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives Standardized tests are terrible. Predicting the outcomes of standardized tests is very simple, it's a function of your parents income. https://economix.blogs.ny…
> With a 0.95 R^2. That's not the R^2 of your SAT based on income; that's the R^2 of average scores within an income bucket. Predictability based on income is far, far lower with other factors more significant ( https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs5v3pv ). > The idea of standardized tests exists because of racism. It was recognized by its inventor to be a tool for racism and classism. Huh? Prior to tests, schools wer…
You write that as if you disagree with my comment, but then you go on to agree with it. Scores are highly predictable from income and factors like race. Yes. That's what makes standardized tests not just worthless, it makes them classist and racist.
> Huh? Prior to tests, schools were even more classist.
This is why tests were introduced, schools were claiming to admit people based on skill. But then the "wrong" people showed up with skills. So they introduced tests. You should read the history of testing that I linked to before, it explains this very nicely.
> Standardized tests have also been used in all sorts of societies historically explicitly to break class lines. i.e. the Chinese Imperial Examinations (created over 2,000 years ago) intentionally were created so that candidates were not just merely young aristocrats recommended by other aristocrats (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination).
You should totally read a book on this. I suggest "Civil examinations and meritocracy in late imperial China" by Elman. The examinations were extremely onerous and required pretty deep pockets. The exams were a way to choose among elites. Just like standardized tests today!
> Of course, neither the history of testing or holistic admissions says anything about the actual value of them today.
The fact that scores are basically a proxy for income+race does say something about their actual value today. Zero. Let's stop building on the infrastructure of racism and oppression that those who came before up put up.
Maybe someone on HN can answer this for me. Why are these articles about the American system written as if they are new developments. Nothing in this article sounds any different from how things were 50 years ago, and probably earlier. I am guessing that 1. more kids are going to college today than 50 years ago (that should be a good thing) and competing for spots at top schools (thus more competition) and 2. the Ame…
> The turn away from the humanities is a sign of competitive schooling’s most far-reaching effect: It perverts our culture’s understanding of what education is, and makes us forget that schooling has value beyond status seeking. This seems to be the crux of the article. If only people would study humanities instead of science & engineering. Science & engineering isn't a real education. I disagree. I derive great plea…
The article is an examination of American cultural beliefs about meritocracy, our systems of meritocracy, and relevant societal effects.
In my opinion this quote is more representative of the “crux” of this particular piece, “A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated.”
But I actually think that there’s quite a bit here and in Markovits’s other work. If you have a chance to take a break from your compiler work, I recommend a lecture he does called “The Meritocracy Trap” and perhaps also his conversation with Glenn Loury.
In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sh…
Maybe besides the point, but nordic countries do have significant populist movements. In Finland (which I know best) populist Finns Party[1] is the largest party according to polls at the moment. We had our trump/brexit moment in 2011 when they took landslide victory against what the experts and ”elites” expected.
Am I the only one whose parser is throwing a syntax error for this sentence? "People already admitted to top-5 law schools don't choose to go non-top-10 schools instead"?
In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sh…
> Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites It's very deniable. This simply cannot be the explanation. Trump is an elite. He inherited vast amounts of money and vastly und…
Maybe someone on HN can answer this for me. Why are these articles about the American system written as if they are new developments. Nothing in this article sounds any different from how things were 50 years ago, and probably earlier. I am guessing that 1. more kids are going to college today than 50 years ago (that should be a good thing) and competing for spots at top schools (thus more competition) and 2. the Ame…
In addition, college is much, much more expensive as a whole, thus saddling these kids with debt that they foolishly take on because everyone kind of tells them they should go in debt for the prestige and opportunity. Last I read, the average student leaves school with $30,000 in student loans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Donald Trump's election in 2016 has been dissected and explained hundred different ways. But it is undeniable that his victory (despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by approximately three million) is attributable in part to popular resentment against political and business elites It's very deniable. This simply cannot be the explanation. Trump is an elite. He inherited vast amounts of money and vastly und…
> The idea that this is a movement against elites when it is literally spearheaded by an elite is just absurd. Yet if you cast your gaze upon history, you'll find that many social movements are indeed led against members of a political class by members of that very same political class. Many leaders of communist revolutions, for example, come from wealthy families and not the oppressed proletariat that they claim to…
> Yes, Trump is an elite. However, he was still able to present himself as being against the elites, especially because he doesn't move in the same social circles as those elites.
That's just untrue.
Trump loves to play up how he is a business person. He loves to play up his successes. He loves to point out how much money he has. He loves to point at all of his houses. He loves to point out how many rich people he knows. He loves to point out how below him other people are. He loves to point out how he moves in those elite circles!
Have you watched a Trump rally? It's in large part about how awesome and elite he is. As long as people follow this simple story of the Trump movement being anti-elite, they will keep drawing the wrong conclusions about what to do.
The movement is not anti-elite, literally, no one gives a damn that Cruz or Hawley have fancy degrees. It's anti-fact. Trump supporters don't like reality as it is and Trump came out directly to sell them a totally different version of reality that they like a lot more (slavery wasn't all that bad, white people are being oppressed, global warming isn't happening, you never need to switch jobs, etc.). It has nothing to do with elites, it's a basic denial of reality, just as fundamental as flat earth.