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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

#41

Post by qzw »

altcognito wrote: post #35
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you get to bribe school officials so your kid, who obviously is entitled to go to MIT, gets in? You're telling me they have to actually work!? What's sad actually about that is it was far more meritocratic than the current system in the US. Now it's just an extension of high school that honestly has become just as easy as most high school classes depending on where you go.

Oh yes, absolutely no corruption was ever found in the old Soviet system.

Don’t forget that the pure Soviet meritocracy also resulted in a utopian society with unparalleled economic prosperity.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#42

Post by durge »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #32
DubiousPusher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No they aren't. They hold worthless knowledge that literally anybody capable of reading and writing can do. They aren't some sort of priestly class that are only allowed to read and edit Wikipedia pages. They just wasted time getting a degree in something that people only do for fun to satisfy they're curiosity. There is absolutely no skill in being able to read and write about something if everyone else is capable o…

It’s ‘their’, not ‘they’re’.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#43

Post by flowerlad »

College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions.

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. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated.

Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized.

Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ).

Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... )

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#44

Post by rejectedandsad »

xvector wrote: post #8

> the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence. The author does not seem to understand that these are not mutually exclusive. You can receive a fantastic, genuinely excellent education that is also a competitive advantage. Indeed, they go hand in hand - I’d argue it’s harder to give an excellent education that’s somehow not advantageo…

What about the rest of us? Should we just be just be shunted to the second, third, and fourth rungs of society because we didn’t have the right extracurriculars or only got a 1450 instead of a 1550? 99% of Americans have never attended and likely could not gain admittance to the top 20 schools, to paraphrase William Jennings Bryan the rest of us should not be crucified on a cross of Ivy.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#45

Post by hardwaregeek »

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 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?

This culture teaches you to build your own personal potemkin village. Yes, there are some truly exceptional candidates. But for every Malala Yousafzai there are hundreds of students that merely built a very convincing facade. I remember a kid in my high school who worked on the school newspaper website with me. He wrote an API for users that returned the user's hashed password when queried. He didn't understand what was bad about that. I had to take over his work entirely. He's now at MIT. Another kid did no work on the website but begged me to put his name on the masthead when he applied to college. He's now at Penn. A girl at my school lied about being captain of the track team. She went to Harvard.

People try to claim that it really doesn't matter where you go to college. That's not true. Would Facebook have succeeded if Mark Zuckerberg went to Brandeis? What about CUNY? And what does it say about our society that the people who get into Harvard are the ones who lie and scheme? I know that's partially the reality of limited resources, but I'd like to hope that we can do better.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#46

Post by jollybean »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #25
jollybean wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little bit of a desperate attempt at meritocracy however. Affluent parents will still be able to generate systems where their kids get better scores. And 'better scores on exams' might be a very crude predictor of future skills, it's not remotely all encompassing. So 'selecting' for your elite on the basis of a few exams at age 18 is probably a bad idea. Macron just announced the closure of the 'Grand Ecole' o…

> the notion that 'all the power goes to kids from those schools' is a little ridiculous as well. It's really not. "As of November 2020, of the 55 prime ministers to date, 28 were educated at the University of Oxford (including 13 at Christ Church), and 14 at the University of Cambridge (including six at Trinity College)." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_t...

My implication was that 'all the power goes to this group, which is ridiculous' - not 'the idea that people have that all the power is concentrated there is a bad idea'.

Probably my bad.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#47

Post by jollybean »

Dah00n wrote: post #24
jollybean wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little bit of a desperate attempt at meritocracy however. Affluent parents will still be able to generate systems where their kids get better scores. And 'better scores on exams' might be a very crude predictor of future skills, it's not remotely all encompassing. So 'selecting' for your elite on the basis of a few exams at age 18 is probably a bad idea. Macron just announced the closure of the 'Grand Ecole' o…

Elite schools are worthwhile if it isn't in it for the money like most (all?) elite schools in the US. In that regard the Soviet system were far superior.

No, the Soviet System was a complete failure from top to bottom, producing some great scientists is nice but a side show.

Using standardized tests from 14-21 to select leadership feels very meritocratic, but it's also very crude. Also there is the ugly notion that maybe the best way to lead a nation is not purely meritocratic.

American Ivy League, despite their follies, produce a ton of very high calibre people. So does the 2cnd tier and below that, it's possible to get a very decent education but less guarantees of exceptional outcomes.

Some industries are full of Ivy League grads but many are not.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#48

Post by kungito »

xvector wrote: post #8

> the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence. The author does not seem to understand that these are not mutually exclusive. You can receive a fantastic, genuinely excellent education that is also a competitive advantage. Indeed, they go hand in hand - I’d argue it’s harder to give an excellent education that’s somehow not advantageo…

The problem I personally felt was that the criteria used to filter out the people "not worthy of the degree" felt very detached from the idea of knowledge. The facts and methods required for minimal passing criteria felt very arbitrary and unless you were one of the people learning 100% of the subject it felt a lot like a system which needed to be gamed to get a good/passing grade. As soon as you need explicit and exact filters for grades and passing the learning resolves less around ideas and concepts and more about facts and techniques which is not what at least to me science and engineering is about.

Re: How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning

#50

Post by phone8675309 »

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…

If I owned a company I would refuse to hire graduates from MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. It's much more likely that you were good at lying than at studying if you went there, and I don't have time to teach the basics.
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