How the Ivy League Broke America
theatlantic.comArticle worth reading.
I think we have three fundamental problems:
1. We’ve created a society where people think that grades and test scores earn them the right to attend a given school. The goal of universities should be to improve society, in whatever vision it has. Grades are probably just one component of that.
2. Race is,unfortunately, a big deal. People are going to be racist or consciously have to try not to be or need policies to prevent one from being. The only place where people tend to be less racist is when racism leads directly and visibly to poor outcomes - most notably sports. Anytime you have to select people and how results are measured is unclear then racism will seep in.
3. There aren’t great output metrics for college. The prestige of a college is almost purely in its selectivity. Id love to know how well does a college do educating and academically average kid who is an introvert, but loves poetry.
That said I feel like the US college system has worked decently well. Not great, but it’s something we can build on.
Yes...but the academic elitism poison has created some additional horrid problems:
4.) "Price No Object" college education. When a college turns itself into a luxury lifestyle club and gold-plated monument to its own glory, it needs to be fully reclassified and taxed as such.
5.) "College Degree Required" credential inflation. If the goal was to debt-burden and generally screw up the lives of average young people, while growing & enriching the whole college industry, I'd count this a huge success. Otherwise? No, FAIL.
For (5), at least in most modern software companies, this isn't actually a "requirement," but places end up having some distribution of people from top schools anyway.
This is usually just due to societal bias (oh, the guy from Harvard _must_ be good!), and honestly, on average, people who graduated from a top school (especially the ones that get in on merit and !legacy) are generally better than average.
I have found that grit, curiosity, and relationship building are far more important than memorizing facts and applying formulae.
Society needs to value those attributes if we're going to solve the really hard problems.
It is somewhat of a catch-22, because any student who has those values already internalized can extract a ton of value even from an archaic educational system. Particularly if it is difficult and can create a sense of shared purpose to excel among the students.
Maybe it is more down to what we consider virtuous as a society, and the rest follows. Again, catch-22, education can have a significant role in that, but it cannot carry the whole burden either.
My whole family is in teaching and pedagogical research. I also have quite a few younger cousins. It is obvious that the situation has changed a ton in the last 20 years (at least in EU public education) and keeps changing rapidly, perhaps too rapidly.
There is much more emphasis on group assignments, forcing students to learn how work together (or how to deal with people who don’t want to do shit, with minimal leverage on them). Also many more open-ended assignments and exams, that force you to take some initiative, actually understand and engage with the subject, and then make you get good at expressing yourself both in writing and orally. And grit is always part of it if the bar is kept high, which is a complex issue on its own.
It’s just much harder to teach well like this, and it has been pushed on teachers haphazardly. Good teachers are better, bad teachers are worse. Same with students to an extent, there’s a bigger burden on them to actively engage, and it is easier to get away with not doing so because evaluation is more fuzzy, and group work can be avoided. At some point you do need to learn some facts, this model relies more on imparting the skills and values for students to then be able to learn anything they need, but they do have to then go and do it, otherwise you end up worse-off in aggregate.
Teaching facts and making sure students memorized them is clearly worse, but it is much easier to do effectively and systematically at scale. Education is at the end of the day a mass-production factory of adults.
It’s a very hard question and lots of people are dedicating their lives to figuring it out.
I tend to agree. How do we measure those things though?
You outline the OKRs and put KPIs against them.
TFA touches on the finding that highly intelligent students do not show a significant tendency to be more creative in their careers. Researchers on creativity doing historical surveys have observed that above average intelligence is not particularly correlated to significant creative achievements. The crucial factors are being at an auspicious confluence of ideas and being in a supportive social environment.
> Generations of young geniuses were given the most lavish education in the history of the world, and then decided to take their talents to finance and consulting.
It has always struck me as an issue that the meritocracy poorly distributes the kind of talent it selects for around society, and instead concentrates it in a relatively small number or elite professions in the cities.
Thinking at a society level, especially in a democracy, society really does needs intellectual talent throughout. Having lots of smart farmers, smart factory workers, etc. is a good thing. Some of that has to with the professions themselves (smart farmers coming up with new farming methods and helping their neighbors farm better), but also democracy (smart farmers and factory workers organizing and effectively representing the interests of their peers).
What meritocracy? It's not about meritocracy at all, the talent flocks to what makes most money because that's the whole incentive of the system. Only a few of the talented ones are not attracted by that and have their own desires to fulfill which they can apply their talents to.
The system is both a very narrow intellectual meritocratic system, and a "greed is our one-and-only God" late-stage capitalist system.
Kinda like a patient having two different kinds of cancer - you gotta keep distinguishing if you're trying to talk about details of the case.
> It's not about meritocracy at all, the talent flocks to what makes most money because that's the whole incentive of the system.
The incentives of the meritocratic system. For instance, in the pre-meritocratic WASP-y system, the intellectual talent couldn't do that, or at least couldn't do it nearly as freely.
there is no meritocracy. there is a moneytocracy. if you have a lot to start with you get extra points towards anything. if you make a lot you get extra points towards anything. this is what billionaires all seem to have figured out. they can do anything they want because they have enough money. there isnt any other metric that is more worth optimizing than money. thats why people go to finance and consulting. it optimizes for making money.
I wasn't expecting much from David Brooks, but it's a surprisingly good article.
I think we've inherited conflicting conceptions of meritocracy. There's an ancient conception that can be traced back to Plato's Republic. The philosopher kings ruled for the sake of society, not for themselves. In Plato's view, philosophers didn't want the job of kings, would rather spend their lives in contemplation, and had to be forced into the unpleasant task of governing because the alternative was much worse, i.e., allowing the incompetent or immoral to rule. Plato's Republic was socialist, not capitalist. Even the raising of children was shared by the community.
Although capitalism is inherently an economic system rather than a moral system—the laws of supply and demand merely descriptive—it has unfortunately taken on a moral sheen. Under this newer conception of meritocracy, those who acquire greater wealth deserve it (morally speaking), due to their greater merit. Wealth is a reward, poverty a punishment. It almost feels as if some people believe that the so-called "Invisible Hand" of the market is God making choices, evaluating the goodness or badness of mortals.
I don't think anyone disputes that our leaders, our doctors, our scientists, ought to be the most qualified people for the jobs. What I personally would dispute is that these people also deserve to be much wealthier than everyone else. I believe that merit is at least partially inborn; it certainly seems that way in my case, and I immediately excelled relative to my peers at a very early age, without even "trying hard". On the contrary, it was quite easy for me and a struggle for them. I don't think that accidents of my birth—genetics and/or family social standing—somehow justify gross inequality in society. I don't think my "merit", whatever that is, makes me deserving of financial success. Perhaps capitalism is the best, most efficient economic system, and rewarding merit is a decent means to an end, but we should never forget that rewarding merit is not the ultimate end, not a moral imperative. The economic system ought to be for the benefit of the masses, not just for the lucky few.