A mental health crisis in science

> Stanford, MIT

I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best.

MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun.

Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots.

Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots.

The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.)

So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions.

But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc.

And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them.

And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international).

> It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.

Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition.

> if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have?

I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.

Calling it "culture" and laying some "blame" is a convenient "we're the worst off subset of victims; it's not us, it's them" perspective but it will neither solve the problem nor address the actual condition--science is not a utopian island that is separate from big business economics, university branding and wealth, nor from geopolitics.

Scientists have not figured out how to organize as well as any of those entities and will continue to be subjugated to their game and their system. When that is solved, the tools that abusers within the scientific community use against each other are more easily addressed.

Perhaps in the meantime we can pass some more laws that that make it seem like we care, but the existing regulations that make racism/ageism/sexism/abuse illegal are not currently effective. But to be clear: we don't care. We fought as hard as we could to win at that game and we raise our kids to try to win at that game. MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cal, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, : you wanted to get in; maybe you did; you will desire for your kids to get in; they probably won't. The patents and rights of science and research are in the hands of someone who is not doing the work.

I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are structured to reward collecting new data that are very predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.

The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting the responsibility on those who are affected the most.

It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police in the the city and the court system is corrupt.

I had so much disgust for the field since then.