'US College Education Is Nearer To Collapsing Than It Appears' (twitter.com) 448
According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. "is nearer to collapsing than it appears." He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense. Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test.
It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)
Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.
It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)
Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.
What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4, Insightful)
It's already a steam pile of wreckage, and has been for decades. And I'm not even talking about the debt, just the quality of the education. Anybody who has attended a western European university knows this. Some well know Ivy League institutions deliver a fine education of course, but most lesser-known Unis are just appalling.
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A college education is a bigger financial benefit than ever before. This is even true for liberal arts, but doubly so for engineering and CS.
The median debt load for those that use loans is $30k. That is not excessive and the payments are far below the income differential with those who didn't go to college.
Re: Selection Bias (Score:3)
It's called "distance learning" and yes, it can be done, countless it professionals build their skill set exactly this way and have for years.
Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:5, Insightful)
Collapse will happen when there aren't enough students to pay the bills, at least that's what I took from it.
That's why they need college debt forgiveness. They want to keep the pipeline of money flowing so they can keep charging exorbitant tuition and fees.
We need to get out of the college financing business. The costs will drop when the "free money" ends
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That's why they need college debt forgiveness.
Student loan debt should be dismissible through bankruptcy, as it once was. Put the risk back into the equation and the deluge of money will cease. As it should.
But don't call it "Forgiveness" because that's a big "Fuck You" to everyone who paid off their debt.
Re: What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:3)
The problem is the federal government loans money with wild abandon (I'd refer to inebriated sailors, but it would reflect badly on the sailors) for anything a student wants to study - that is insane.
Limit loans to desired/needed professions, not 'anything' and require students to front some money for the first years tuition - if you want to borrow $30-75K from me, it's reasonable to ask them to come to the deal with something - couple grand?
And students should not be borrowing federal money to pay for reme
Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:5, Informative)
Pick a random, ACCREDITED engineering program in some local, po-dunk regional university
Pick a top-10 engineering program that charged 7 times the tuition.
The content in the classes will be nearly EXACTLY the same. I've seen this first-hand. As in, I've been at a table with 2 piles of homework assignments - one pile from a barely-known school and one from the same class at a VERY famous one. Identical content. The accreditation process forces that.
The higher-ranked school will provide things the lower school does not. But the classroom education? Nearly identical. At least in engineering. The quality of engineering education in US universities is actually a really deep pool.
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I have a masters in engineering from a "good" school (not Ivy League, but I don't understand why that would matter). 200k in debt, but I make about 200k per year. I am a good engineer, but honestly looking back at how I learned what I learned I don't see why I couldn't have just used something like Khan Academy if they had advanced engineering courses. Very little was learned in the lab. With this in mind I don't see how the system is sustainable. The 80's era loan backing will eventually lead to competitor
Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4)
"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library".
- Frank Zappa
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"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library". - Frank Zappa
That is a good one. I was thinking of that one while reading these comments.
"I never let my schooling interfere with my education."
- Mark Twan
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Dammit, I went to college and all I got was a great education. Clearly I did something wrong.
To be honest, it isn't about going to college. It should be about going to a university. I went to several 2 year colleges and got a great education. When I went to a University, it was a complete waste of my time. I was there to get my masters in computer science. Why the fuck did I need two classes of "philosophy?" An for the record. I could have taught the computer science classes.
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I agree with this.
I attended a state land grant university.
In my career, I have worked with people from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford.
Do they know stuff that I didn't learn?
No, they don't.
The education is about the same. The only thing they got was a better job network.
Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:5, Insightful)
But they got more than the better job network.
They also got a name on their degree that indicates they have some quantifiable percentage better chance at being good at their job than you.
They don't need better courses for this. They just need a more selective admissions process. Which they have.
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The name on the degree helps you get your foot in the door for your first interview.
After that, it doesn't matter much.
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Now I'm questioning whether you even attended secondary school.
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As a retired engineering manager, I'd hired and worked with hundreds of engineers over the years, including many Ivy league grads. Rarely were any of them any more impressive, and occasionally we'd even get a dud, just like we would from regular state schools. Yes, the sheepskin they had often got them into an interview with us, but I've also hired folks with zero college that did better. The "more selective admissions process" is a pile of cow shit these days.
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Identical content. The accreditation process forces that.
That's simply not true. While it's possible that subject matter experts will review curriculum as part of the accreditation process, they will never prescribe content.
See, accreditation is mostly about the long-term stability of the institution, which means boring things like finances and policies and procedures. Accrediting bodies are far more concerned about having appropriately qualified faculty than they are about the details of any particular course, for obvious reasons.
Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4, Insightful)
I await the day when my doctor has skipped college and I see on the desk a copy of "learn brain surgery in 21 days".
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I await the day when my doctor has skipped college and I see on the desk a copy of "learn brain surgery in 21 days".
Or maybe he'll just stay in a Holiday Inn Express [youtube.com] the night before ...
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Idiocracy is coming, if not already here.
It may not have reached your doctor yet, but in all other jobs it's common to hire unskilled people, hand them a three-ring-binder and require them to follow The Process, valuing uniformity of the results over the experience of anyone who actually would know his trade.
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Maybe you should have gone to a better university. Mine was fine (and also not Ivy League, thank god).
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just the quality of the education. Anybody who has attended a western European university knows this.
I taught at a Western European university for a while, and I say you're an idiot and anyone who doesn't have a massive axe to grind knows this.
Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4, Informative)
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I knew a German girl who went to uni for 4 years and came out dumber than a pile of bricks.
I suspect the level of dipshittery is roughly analogous, and while D&B is an ethnocentric shit-for-brains, i'm not sure your "reverse ethnocentrism" is really any better.
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A shot in the dark, but.... are you by any chance from Germany?
More BS from rich people (Score:2, Insightful)
College was always expensive. We used to heavily subsidize it with state and federal subsidies. Starting in the '80s we began to cut those subsidies and in the 90s we began to slash them. I was in college at the time the cuts began and were planned and laid out. I remember the local college newspaper talking about how the price of college would skyrocket.
As for college being a bad deal? That's nonsense. First and foremost it cost about 200k to get
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It's also worth pointing the finger at administrative bloat and luxurious facilities.
It's not really (Score:2)
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Citation needed.
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I don't think Altman is trying to BS, he's just ignorant.
He's spent years in the really weird atypical world of west coast software startups where twenty somethings plug together a few toolkits, go viral, and end up with a billion dollar company.
For those folks, a traditional university degree maybe doesn't make sense.
But most of the real world doesn't work like that.
Virtually all of those companies fail (Score:2)
Everybody focuses on the lottery winners and not all the people who blew their last five bucks on a lottery ticket. You'd be much better off putting yourself in a position where you're not down to five bucks and hoping you win the lottery.
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College was never as expensive as it is today. Much of this comes from massive expansion of administrative aspects of the college, not the teaching staff. You're getting an inferior product that costs more today. The only thing that is propping the bubble is that accreditation in them is still more or less universally recognized by the companies.
But as "garbage in, garbage out" issue grows into size that can no longer be ignored, you are starting to see that which you see in the OP. More and more companies
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Re: More BS from rich people (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm glad you don't have any more mod points.
tech / trade schools got roped into the (Score:2)
tech / trade schools got roped into the degrees systems and an lot of them got bloated to fit into it. Also the unlimited student loans removed an lot risk from the schools as well. As the banks don't give an dam if you can't pay back your loans as it was very hard to get rid of the debt.
In places like germany they have good trade schools and they are not 2-4 years of pure classroom. No it's classroom and on the job PAID work.
But the USA needs to cut the cost of college education.
Back in the 70's / 80's you
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He just wants to privatize public education (Score:2)
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Yeah, I don't want to waste time on the article but - did the guy make the announcement about his new start-up "to reinvent education" right there in the story, or is he planning on waiting a few more weeks so (in his mind, anyway) it's not as obvious?
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It's only incredibly profitable because of the partial government underwriting of college loans and their enforced repayment with no significant possibility of discharging through bankruptcy. If college loans were considered dischargeable unsecured debt as they damn well should be, the amount of loans approved for degrees outside of STEM and MBAs would drop through the fucking floor.
Oh god another Stanford dropout (Score:4, Insightful)
Standard billionaire delusion. No. Not everyone can do what this guy did. Very few people have this guy's abilities, but he also got obscenely lucky. For every 10,000 people like him, only one gets lucky enough to be that successful. So, THIS IS NOT A MODEL FOR SUCCESS. This is what's called an OUTLIER. Trying to emulate this guy is like taking your shot at pro basketball. 10 million people who all think they can get one of the 25 available slots. There's going to be a lot of bitter, disappointed people.
College education has proven so useless that there's been a wave of companies, established by dropouts, run by dropouts, that hire dropouts. And these companies are beating those old-school, behind-the-times companies that hire people with worthless formal qualifications and degrees. What? Companies like that are actually super rare? The successful ones tend to hire actual engineers with actual qualifications? Wonder what that could mean....
There are plenty of highly competent people with absolutely zero formal eduction. But they are OUTLIERS. At least in STEM.
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Indeed. I've met people who became good programmers without going to college. There are not many of them. Most of the people who go to code camps did it after getting a degree in a different subject.
Getting good at programming without college is about as easy as getting good at programming in college, but you have to be self-motivated.
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I sometimes wonder if it's ego, if they really think that everything fortunate that happened to them is because they made it happen. Or if it's malice, if they want everyone else to make bad decisions based on one in a million chances so that they have a steady stream of desperate consumers and workers.
Current savings (Score:3)
My child just turned six years old. He had $36,000 in his 529 account, and we currently save $10K/year in this account.
It may or may not get used for college, or trade school, or even hookers & blow. College/University in its present form may or may not exist by the time he comes of age. But this money will provide options when he turns 18 or 19, when there would otherwise be a lot less options.
The best thing you can do for your child is to provide options, rather than depending on someone else to do so.
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>"The best thing you can do for your child is to provide options, rather than depending on someone else to do so."
To expand on that more- the best thing one can do for one's child is to be a supportive, involved, caring, and encouraging parent. The lack of this (and especially from fathers) is what has caused the majority of problems for much of the population for generations.
Poor economics isn't great for children and young adults, but poor "culture" is 100 times worse. But it seems most of society r
Re: Current savings (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. One need only look at rates of incarceration to see that people from broken families are massively over represented.
Finish school
Don't have kids before you're married and on a stable income.
Don't have more kids than you can support.
On average your kids will do far better than those who ignore those rules.It's not racism. It's a problem with dysfunctional subcultures. There are plenty of predominantly white subcultures driving self-destructive behaviours.
Re: Current savings (Score:3)
The effects are observable among shire people both in the US and in more racially homogenous countries. I agree though, there is a racist cause. Black people in the US didn't magically discover broken families as their standard. Government policies enabled this lifestyle, impacting blacks disproportionately. Even now, people like yourself continue to deny reality, condemning children to failure. Whatever the race, children deserve the better life they'd have if the government would abandon its social exper
Re: Current savings (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, 'shire' should read 'white'. I'm unfamiliar with the cultural and economic challenges of hobbits.
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Tech companies hire, but will they promote you? (Score:2)
Pleas
Year of the MOOC + 10 Years (Score:2)
Do you remember when the NYT declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC [nytimes.com] and UDacity founder Sebastian Thrun predicted that in 50 years, only 10 physical institutions of higher learning would exist?
Well, within 5 years or less the UDacity vice president declared MOOCs to be "dead" and they'd transitioned to cruddy little nanodegrees for pay (hence eliminating the second "O" in MOOC).
Up next was "adaptive learning" software which also goes roughly nowhere per this article [insidehighered.com].
This cycle just repeats forever. There's a lo
Twitter is a source? (Score:3, Informative)
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Good (Score:2)
Broken Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a case of broken economics and unintended consequences. Colleges are fundamentally bureaucracies that will grow like cancers and spend all funds made available to them. Student loans were created to make college affordable to more Americans. But student loan money was given to schools without strings. There was no requirement that it only be demonstrably used to educate the student. There is no contract, no overhead-rate cap on the use of college loan funds.
Colleges received the loan money, spent it and raised tuition. The government raised the amount they would back, so banks lent more. Rinse and repeat for four decades and we are where we are now.
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>" Student loans are the reason college is expensive. It is a case of broken economics and unintended consequences."
+1000
^THIS more than anything else. There are lots of problems, but this is the biggest. It breaks the free market because when people don't care about the price, then obviously the price will go up and up. The exact same thing happened in the housing market and that exploded.
If the colleges/universities themselves were responsible for the pain of non-payment, things would change
Without reading a Twit thread, here's my take (Score:2)
I don't know about a "collapse" but there are definitely problems. First, K12 got dumbed down to the point where the high school diploma that used to be your ticket was no longer it. Now a bachelor's degree is the new "ticket". That was bad enough, but then they went and decided to make it something that was heavily financed. That was the real kicker. Anything that's financed tends to go up in cost until you can reasonably assume that people will be able to afford the payments that support the inflated
That and if one looks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That and if one looks (Score:4)
UCLA advertised an opening for an Assistant Adjunct professor in Chemistry or Biochemistry with no pay. They were expected to have a PhD and experience teaching, but they made it explicit that there would be no compensation for the position. https://www.insidehighered.com... [insidehighered.com]
It looks like they may have backtracked on the 'no pay' part after the huge outcry, but it just goes to show that it doesn't matter how much education you have, the system will try to exploit the living shit out of you.
Good. (Score:2)
The entire system is so screwed up that it needs to go down in a flaming pile of fail.
While the massive subsidization of scholarships and loans have helped people become upwardly mobile, it has massively and artificially inflated the price of education all out of relation to actual costs. At this point, college is a predatory business practices incubator.
It's also inflated the footprint of educational institutions in terms of manpower required and driven down the quality and substance of instruction.
This i
What's the alternative (Score:2)
I'm not super knowledgeable on this issue. The downsides to standardized tests make sense to me but what's the alternative? It seems like going by grades alone wouldnt be a very good method either.
Re: What's the alternative (Score:2)
Equity (Score:5, Insightful)
Standardized testing is the best system we have when it comes to the sciences. Math tests, and physics tests, and chemistry tests are not discriminatory
Yes, but they're also not "equitable". When 13% of the population is black, equity demands that 13% of college students also be black. That's equity.
The fundamental flaw in racial equity is that the sole reason is racism. In reality, it's a multivariate problem, there are several explanations each one of which contributes a little to the disparity, one of which might be racism.
For example, blacks are more likely to come from a single-parent family. Black-on-black violence is more likely than other categories (by a lot!). Black mothers tend to be younger (give birth earlier) than white mothers.
While racism might explain some of the disparity, it's hard to view single-parenthood as caused by racism.
Scott Adams points out that to be successful if you're black requires 3 don'ts and a do: don't do drugs, don't break the law, don't drop out of school, and do work hard. He points out that any black that can do that can go to college, and afterward will be welcome at any fortune 500 company. Companies would hire them in a heartbeat.
One way to help solve the problem would be to teach child-rearing skills in high school. Another would be to teach young girls/boys about birth control, about how much better their life would be if they finish education, and so on.
Instead, we implement "equity" quotas, which is essentially sacrificing merit for racism. It's not good for anyone, including the beneficiaries of the equitable outcome. Those people will be unable to complete in the workforce, and have a terrible career of disappointment.
There's lots of things we *could" do to achieve racial equity, by attacking some of the root problems.
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"One way to help solve the problem would be to teach child-rearing skills in high school. Another would be to teach young girls/boys about birth control, about how much better their life would be if they finish education, and so on.?"
Good luck getting that past Conservatives.
Sex? Doesn't exist until you are an adult! Unless you are a fetus - and then we'll only care about you till you come out of the womb. You're on your own after that.
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Good luck, some legislatures are trying to make it illegal to teach that racism even exists.
Re: Equity (Score:3)
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Dirt poor (Score:2, Troll)
My dad grew up dirt poor. As in the house he grew up in had a dirt floor. They ate squirrels they'd catch.
He didn't commit crimes, he didn't do drugs, he worked very hard. He worked smart in that he worked hard both at school and at his janitorial job.
He took his kids on the corporate jet, when he was a VP of an oil company.
Growing up, I figured I was pretty much set for success. My parents had done well, so I'd do well, I figured.
While I was trying to fall asleep under a tarp in a vacant lot I lived in, I
Re:Equity (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a tip Scott Adams neglected to mention: "whiten" your resume
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/min... [hbs.edu]
Shania might get a callback; Shaniqua has a lot lower chance.
Re:Equity (Score:5, Insightful)
Well Scott Adams is full of shit.
His second "don't" should be "don't get accused of breaking the law"
Good luck with that.
re: Scott Adams (Score:3)
Actually, Adams is a pretty sharp guy who has a really good understanding of the reality of the business world. (Why do you think he has so much content for his Dilbert cartoon? He lived the office cubicle life for quite a while and was observant about what went on there.)
Being "accused of breaking the law" is meaningless. Either you were *charged* with a crime or you weren't. Nobody's judging anyone for employment based on whether they got arrested. They're judging based on an actual, documented crimina
There's a lot wrong here (Score:3)
There is no more black and black crime when you adjust for their income level and segregation. Just because segregation is technically illegal doesn't mean it went away. Again, redlining.
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Standardized testing is the best system we have when it comes to the sciences. Math tests, and physics tests, and chemistry tests are not discriminatory. English can be if your first language is not English, but then maybe you should apply to a university whos primary language is your first?
It's not (just) about English comprehension. Practice tests and tutoring are much more available to wealthier more privileged families, and these services can provide significant short term boosts to test scores. By focusing on testing you're selecting for the students with families that can obtain these services rather than selecting for the best students.
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It wasn't until I had graduated, had a job for 2 years then was starting to prepare for the exam needed for graduate school, that I even knew practice tests existed.
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I bought the practice tests for both of my kids and worked with them for weeks before the test. They both did much better on the later practice tests and got very good scores on the actual exam.
The book of 5 practice tests cost $15. Any family can afford that.
It is not a matter of having rich parents, but having parents who care, are informed, and willing to devote the time. Of course, those characteristics are strongly correlated with financial success.
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Standardized testing is the best system we have when it comes to the sciences. Math tests, and physics tests, and chemistry tests are not discriminatory.
No they're not. Not even slightly.
American Standardised Tests are very good at testing rapid regurgitation of memorised answers or patterns. That's nothing like doing actual maths. There's no evidence that american standard tests are better than the systems used in other countries.
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I'm not super knowledgeable on this issue. The downsides to standardized tests make sense to me but what's the alternative? It seems like going by grades alone wouldnt be a very good method either.
High School grades are actually a better predictor of post-secondary success. This is fairly obvious if you think about it. What better way to gauge the ability of the person to succeed at one level of school than success at another level of school?
It's also a lot harder for privileged kids to juice their performance with a short burst of test prep.
The only issue with doing High School only is standardization and the tendency for grade inflation so there's probably a need to keep some standardized testing t
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High School grades are actually a better predictor of post-secondary success. This is fairly obvious if you think about it. What better way to gauge the ability of the person to succeed at one level of school than success at another level of school?
The problem with that is there's a HUGE difference in the quality of high schools. I've seen high schools where it's common to be an A student and be happy with scoring 1100-1200 on the SATs, and I've seen high schools where the B students usually got 1300-1400 and the A students were disappointed with 1500s.
Re: What's the alternative (Score:2)
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I was thinking about that, but now most schools have standardized testing at every grade (at least in a lot of states, if not all). So it's probably not a huge problem anymore.
Re: The author is ignorant (Score:2)
The fact that Asians on the average outperform black or Latin applicants does not justify this discrimination. We are supposed to be a meritocracy.
"We are supposed to be a meritocracy." (Score:2)
What? When did that happen? I would suggest that in no way is the current system a meritocracy. The thin slice left over open purely to merit is what's left after one end is divided up among well intentioned social equalization programs. The other end is staked out by wealth, lineage, and exercising of power. Precious few seats get filled purely by somebody looking at a list of achievements and saying, "yeah, they earned it."
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The other end is staked out by wealth, lineage, and exercising of power.
The donations from those rich families fund the endowments that makes scholarships for the poor kids possible.
Precious few seats get filled purely by somebody looking at a list of achievements
The limit is not the number of chairs in the classroom, but the money available. The legacy admissions help with that rather than hurting.
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There's about a 2% differential between SAT scores and admission rates for Asians.
In those 2% of cases, there appears to be a solid mix of sour grapes, and considering schools that assign priority based on family income and locality as "descriminatory against Asians".
As it sits, Asians are 6% of High School graduates, and 24% of Harvard.
Schools have taken steps to try to include more "locals" into schools that are heavily shopped by people who can buy themselves a residency visa.
Here's evidence of discrimination against Asians (Score:2)
This is a long but fascinating and insightful blog post from a Korean-born lawyer about college admissions and Asians. The fascinating part is that after presenting plenty of evidence that Asian students are under-represented relative to their merit, he argues that it's a good thing.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]
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I read the blog. Allow me to summarize it:
"I'm good enough to make it in pretty much every elite university, therefore let me pull up the ladder behind me and ensure that as many future competitors are as incompetent as possible".
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For at least 80 years elite schools have seen a value in diversity, which is why the SAT became valuable. To determine which urban kids could fit in with the white prep school culture most of thei
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The current educational system squanders human potential of all races. The rat race to test scores is a waste of time, but I make money off it. My most productive employee went to UCI, and I have had less productive employees who went to Berkeley, Oberlin, and Harvard. I make more money thatThere are many, many ways to measure a person, and the SAT and grades are not the best.
I know a Black security guard who should have had the opportunity to become the leader he's capable of being, but society isn't ex
Re: The author is ignorant (Score:2)
It's worth pointing out that the author went to a $35k a year private school before college. Maybe that's part of the privilege statement that would be helpful before telling a bunch of students that they too can call on their parents' VC fund friends for an interview.
Re: The author is ignorant (Score:2)
It clearly does discriminate against Asians, there being plenty of evidence that Asians require higher SAT scores for admission than other races.
College is supposed to be about higher education thus the need for a meritocratic system if entry. Either that or it becomes an expensive daycare. If certain groups are scoring poorly in high school then they won't do any better in a useful college. Better they be filtered out earlier. If certain groups are underrepresented then the solution comes far earlier than
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Gender pay gap isn't going away regardless, because many if not most women in their 30s stop fucking around and realize that they want to make a family and take care of their family first, and simply refuse to just double down on the grind that is needed for any high end career and ignore their family the way high end men do.
And until that time, women earn more than men already. Women are simply saner than men, and refuse to just grind their lives away as slaves to material success over taking care of what
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The gender pay gap when accounting for equal work and time in position was all of 5% over a decade ago. Moreover women are more likely to hire a man and if they do hire a woman pay a woman less initially than a man in a similar decision making position will.
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Sorry, but there would have to be less women there for it to only be 60%...
Sexism is alive and well in education - against boys. heavily.
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Well, at least you would be USING the fume hood--- but, there are worse things to be playing with than a standard lab acid.
For instance, you could be playing with hydrocyanic acid, or with elemental fluorine.
Get back with me when you try an icebath titration of anhydrous glycerol with concentrated fuming nitric acid. I want to schedule an extended lunch, :)
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You'd also need to reclassify college debt as unsecured personal debt, thus allowing it to be dischargeable through bankruptcy.
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Umm, what?
France has had a significant black population for a very VERY long time.
You dont look at world maps very often. Do you.
The UK has al;so had a fair number, although to a lesser extent and for different reasons, and not for as long.
Denmark, not so much.
Japan did so well after WW2 thanks mostly to pure stupidity from the US thinking they could rape them for cheap labour, and not realising they would actually use this to their advantage.
Then Korea.
Then China.
It seems Americans are just not that smart