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How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

theatlantic.com

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Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#121

Post by thethethethe »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #5
hnzix wrote: post #2

This has become so culturally ingrained that people will casually shame a person for studying an Arts or Humanities degree. "Have fun working at McDonalds you idiot!" An economy is not a society.

I am very troubled by this. Because humanities degree holders are the true carriers of our cultures. Local history, news and art you won't find on the internet. You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that. These people are the ones that work with the primary sources, sifitng them and passing on the highlights. As we squeeze these people down we lose our own selves. We need a…

> You can't read about my town's coal history on wikipedia. A local historian does that.

Why don't they put it on Wikipedia so us unwashed rubes can consume it? Seems like your local historian is slacking or...stuck in the past

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#122

Post by Bukhmanizer »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #45

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…

> Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go?

You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch on in undergrad. Many are good engineers, but I’m not going to decry the ones who aren’t. For some people, it’s just not their thing, and that’s ok too.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#123

Post by Bukhmanizer »

> even marriage now depends on school. The share of marriages in which both partners possess college degrees grew by 800 percent from 1960 to 2010.

This is a meaningless statistic unless we know the base rate of people with college degrees in 1960 and 2010.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#124

Post by GPerson »

nitwit005 wrote: post #114
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #106

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…

There are certain topics that get reliable readers, despite having been true for the last 100 years or so. You can publish them on a slow news day. Stories like "the plight of the small farmer", "child care is awfully expensive", and so forth.

This is an interesting theory but I think it is too cynical. Dan Markovits has written on this topic for the last several years.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#125

Post by usaar333 »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #113
usaar333 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 - in fact, in California at least, both student ethnicity and parental education is more predictive as far as background factors go ( https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs5v3pv ). You write that as if you disagree with my comment, but then you go on to agree with…

> it makes them classist and racist.

What do you mean by these terms? I'd argue that they only are if the results, conditional on future college performance, are biased by class or race. Are they? The article you linked doesn't say.

> The exams were a way to choose among elites. Just like standardized tests today!

What percent of students scoring over a 1500 on the SAT are from the top 1% of household earners? I doubt it is not a minority. There's obviously an income correlation, but it's far better than simply taking rich kids.

How do you propose selecting students?

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#126

Post by [deleted] »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #112
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #106

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…

A few things have changed. College is no longer a tool of social mobility. It is table stakes to keep your current status. If you do not go to college, you are unlikely to stay within the middle class. People may cite plumbers but they don't make a fortune and the physical toll is quite serious. Second, funding has been cut for public universities significantly. A lot of public universities charge tuition that is far…

[deleted]

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#127

Post by heisenbit »

Anatole_maarika wrote: post #4

Something that keeps me up at night is my fear that I only studied computer science and became a programmer because of economic and status reasons. I do feel incredibly lucky to have the job and freedom I do, but it drains me. And now I feel it's such a specialized education and I didn't explore enough to know anything else, and so I have no idea if I would have liked something completely different.

As a person in software you should know you signed up for a lifetime of learning.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#128

Post by hkt »

The Jane Austen quote that starts this article is completely misread: she was being ironic. Her point was, why would a single man in possession of a fortune want a wife?

It is a little off topic but it is most discouraging to see a writer in the Atlantic make a mistake like that. Especially a professor...

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#129

Post by Hydraulix989 »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #122
hardwaregeek wrote: post #45

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…

> Some of them go as far as to apply for a masters program. Where else does a budding CS major with no technical skills but a lot of meaningless accolades go? You’re just being needlessly smug here. The point of life isn’t to be as technically useful to FAANG as possible. I know lots of people who go on to masters programs because they’re curious about advanced topics in CS (e.g. robotics) that you don’t get to touch…

Not only that, the recall is high, even if the precision is low at these top universities.

Several of my classmates are now separate post Series A startup founders (investors similar in stature to to Andreessen invested), another is a professor at a peer institution of MIT heading up a research group in theoretical CS, another created his own cryptocurrency (and it is gaining traction quite rapidly), quite a few YC acceptances from my class, too. By ONLY working at a FAANG-caliber company myself, I am considered one of the "failures" in my graduating class.

So yes, while you can knock a few people that gamed the acceptance system ("student"-athletes, legacies, donors, expert box-checkers, blatant cheaters, etc.), at the end of the day, the applicant pool of these schools includes some of the smartest people in the world, and there will be quite a few winners.

My advice: Do everything you can to get accepted into the very best university possible. It's in your power if you work hard and love what you do (for me, it was coding for fun). "Failure" here would mean attending a Top 20 university instead of a Top 10 (while largely reaping the very same benefits). My parents were ordinary school teachers, my zip code's average income was below the poverty level, and I was one of the few people in my high school's history to get accepted into a Top 10 university.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#130

Post by Bukhmanizer »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #123

> even marriage now depends on school. The share of marriages in which both partners possess college degrees grew by 800 percent from 1960 to 2010. This is a meaningless statistic unless we know the base rate of people with college degrees in 1960 and 2010.

cont. > Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give.

Look up the citations for this claim. It all seems like complete nonsense to me. AFAI can tell, they just pulled numbers out of thin air.

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