I didn’t even take SAT in high school. I worked for a year after graduating, then went to community college, then transferred to Ann Arbor. It would never have occurred to me to do all the crazy things kids do to get into these overrated schools.
[Monday-morning update]
This seems related: Targeting “meritocracy.”
The real solution to this problem is the one none of the anti-meritocracy articles dare suggest: accept that education and merit are two different things!
I work with a lot of lower- and working-class patients, and one complaint I hear again and again is that their organization won’t promote them without a college degree. Some of them have been specifically told “You do great work, and we think you’d be a great candidate for a management position, but it’s our policy that we can’t promote someone to a manager unless they’ve gone to college”. Some of these people are too poor to afford to go to college. Others aren’t sure they could pass; maybe they have great people skills and great mechanical skills but subpar writing-term-paper skills. Though I’ve met the occasional one who goes to college and rises to great heights, usually they sit at the highest non-degree-requiring tier of their organization, doomed to perpetually clean up after the mistakes of their incompetent-but-degree-having managers. These people have loads of merit. In a meritocracy, they’d be up at the top, competing for CEO positions. In our society, they’re stuck.
The problem isn’t just getting into college. It’s that success in college only weakly correlates with success in the real world. I got into medical school because I got good grades in college; those good grades were in my major, philosophy. Someone else who was a slightly worse philosopher would never have made it to medical school; maybe they would have been a better doctor. Maybe someone who didn’t get the best grades in college has the right skills to be a nurse, or a firefighter, or a police officer. If so, we’ll never know; all three of those occupations are gradually shifting to acceptance conditional on college performance. Ulysses Grant graduated in the bottom half of his West Point class, but turned out to be the only guy capable of matching General Lee and winning the Civil War after a bunch of superficially better-credentialed generals failed. If there’s a modern Grant with poor grades but excellent real-world fighting ability, are we confident our modern educationocracy will find him? Are we confident it will even try?
I’m quite confident that it won’t. As Glenn often says, these people aren’t educated, or competent. They’re just credentialed. They’re the very opposite of elite.
[Bumped]
We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a right of citizenship. TANSTAAFL
There’s nothing for Ivy League schools to fix even if everything the author says is true. If someone wants to hire or elect someone because they went to such a school, why not? Stupidity is a right.
I suppose child abuse is an issue, but the solution is for society as a whole to learn what to value and what not.
School provides a service that students pay for. If costs are too high we need more supply. Any student passing a prerequisite class and having tuition shouldn’t need to pass any further requirement.
The dept. of education, BTW, is a complete waste of money and should be abolished. State education depts. are fine because people can move away.
Forgot my last point. School should be like a barber shop. The teacher rents the classroom and keeps the tuition. Let competition and price signals determine the market.
A separate standards organization can evaluate results like an underwriters lab.
There already are environments like this in the job skills market. This does not work for college level education for several reasons.
The “Ivy League” universities are finishing schools for the elite. Their main purpose is to teach their students how to think and talk like a member of the ruling class and to give them a ticket for the Washington gravy train. They should really be called “the Gravy League”.
I can’t believe this was published in The New Republic! It is a complete rebuff of Progressive education, and a call for an actual education. The author is amazingly perceptive and thoughtful. Perhaps there’s a chance for this country yet!
I suspect it was a veiled insult to TNR’s previous owner, who got rich because he knew Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard.
Yes, the source was amazing.
Indeed. plus one
Rand. Just out of curiosity what community college did you attend? I sort of did the same thing as you. I went to Henry Ford Community College (took some courses at the U of M annex campus next door), was graduated, then entered the U of M Ann Arbor.
Long time ago!
Mott, in Flint. I didn’t bother to get an associates degree, but I took two years of math/engineering classes (and other liberal arts requisites) that U of M considered satisfactory for engineering school.
Your path is basically the one I would advise to most people in the USA who want to have a technical occupation. You basically pay as you go and you don’t get charged out of the wazoo to get basic instruction in college level math if you decide to go there later. It also makes the transition from high school to college smoother. You probably were better prepared than most people who went directly to UMich.
I had lots of issues fitting in college because of the way classes were structured. My first two years in college were a mess because of this until I figured things out.
I’ve had two neighbour’s kids parents ask me for guidance. Their parents are not rich and their grades were not the best. They did not know exactly what do. One was interested in management and the other in cars. One had finished high school and the other had dropped out of high school.
I advised them to go to smaller educational facilities. One went to a business school I recommended to get a three year bachelor degree. He worked afterwards for a couple of years and is now considering getting his masters degree. The other went to a technical school where he is learning for like two or three years how to be a car mechanic and electrician.
The business school degree I recommended to the first guy was in management information systems. So he´s going to have both business and computer science knowledge instead of being another management guy with no technical skills whatsoever.
I also asked him if he was interested in learning accounting as an alternative but he preferred the management information systems course.
Just because I have a PhD in Computer Science does not mean I think everyone should get or needs one. Most youngers today have really short attention spans and tuition is increasingly more expensive. So I think a pay as you go option which still puts you in a path where you can get there if you want to and have skills is more important.
Consider Elon Musk as an example. His parents were from South Africa but he had family in Canada. He was an undergrad at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, got a scholarship, then went to the University of Pennsylvania where he got twin BScs.
I talked to people who started Ann Arbor as freshmen, and heard horror tales of physics and calculus courses with a hundred people in the lecture, by an instructor for whom English was a second language. My classes at community college had a dozen people in them, and great teachers.
“horror tales of physics and calculus courses with a hundred people in the lecture, by an instructor for whom English was a second language”
That makes two of us then. I had a similar experience to those guys. A crowded amphitheater with a teacher which did not speak the language who spent his time in class writing on the board. It took me enough time, but, I eventually figured out I was better off copying someone else’s notes and skipping his classes entirely. I had some good teachers as well but the environment in the first two years in those places is just not conducive to learning.
They actually expect a lot of students (50%) to drop out in the first two years. There are so many students no teacher can devote a lot of time to a single student. The teaching assistants are somewhat more available but even those will typically handle like three classes and they aren’t much use either. Best way is to study the books before class, go to class, and use the teaching assistants to help with issues you had learning the materials by yourself.
How do you know that English was a second language? At one time, the Sun never set on the British Empire, and just because someone is not speaking a regional American dialect doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking a native dialect of English.
I was in Sweden at a scientific conference (in English) on the human voice that brought together many disciplines: physicists considering the production of voice and speech sounds, engineers working on signal processing methods for analyzing voice quality, speech pathologists offering therapies for voice disorders, surgeons operating on the head neck and throat.
A large number of the presentations were from East Asian physics and engineering people and a surgeon from Sweden asked me, “Is it just me or do you understand anything these people are saying?”
I responded, “I am sorry to say this, but I understand them perfectly!” Part of this is as an American native speaker of English, one may have a deeper understanding to be able to parse what is spoken by other English speakers than a European who learned English as a second language, regardless of how correctly they speak it.
Another part is that my parents were non-native speakers, with my mom having a stronger accent and more idiosyncratic use of her own customized words taken from the English-German-Serbian-Hungarian-Turkish lexicon. A perfectly usable English word is mokus (pronounce MOH-kush), taken from the Hungarian for squirrel, but it could be a term of endearment for cuteness or a description of a pest for bad habits, applied usually to a family pet but sometimes to people.
Finally, there is attending engineering school and learning from instructors who speak English differently from your K-12 experience. Perhaps what you are learning is not so much calculus but how to communicate technical content — in English — with people from all over the world?
How do you know that English was a second language?
Because they could barely speak it, but were quite proficient in Chinese or Japanese? I had an Italian math professor for complex analysis whom I could barely understand.
Your path is basically the one I would advise to most people in the USA who want to have a technical occupation.
Your path is basically the one I would advise to most people in the USA who want to have
a technicalany occupation.FTFY
My studies were all over the place. I took some class in this major and some in that but when I got to the end, I could have done most of it for cheaper, and got more practical training, at a community college.
I had a full scholarship at Harvey Mudd contingent on a semester at LACC. I destroyed the lives of 60 Asians in physics because of being graded on a curve (1 guy got a B) thus being hated by them and their tiger moms. I dropped out the week of grades.
I really need to learn not to give a damn about strangers. I even had a friend from my high school MGM class a year ahead of me at HM.
That and prop 13 costing me my internship at JPL made that quite the pivotal year for me.
I did take my girlfriend (Susan, a blond that would turn the most amazing shade of red when I teased her) to a show at the Griffith Park observatory on my 18th birthday, so that made up for that!!! Then she married my roommate.
I went to a four-year university but lived at home because the campus was in town. I never borrowed a dime for tuition or books and yet had years of entertainment watching today’s politics foreshadowed in the ’80s.
The author of the article wrote the book “Excellent Sheep,” which includes many of the themes of this essay. It’s what I would consider an indispensable text for understanding the world the author describes. As the author suggests, a few of those kids (and their parents) are some of the nastiest pieces of work you’ll ever meet. However, most are not; most of the kids are just scared of not living up to their parents’ expectations. You have to marvel that the suicide rate isn’t 20% by the time they finish at Yale or Harvard or Stanford.
I’ll dissent a little. One of my daughters went to Yale and prospered there – access to the principal scholar and historian in the study of Eastern Europe (for whom she still does research) has set her up with great perspective and opportunity in the suddenly relevant field of Russian and Eastern European studies. I’m as proud of her as I am of my other daughter (a sous-chef at the nicest restaurant in Seattle) and my son (a nuke sailor in the US Navy).
Each kid is different and an Ivy is a great place for kids with a certain habit of mind. My own daughter didn’t make a big deal of networking and all of that while in New Haven – mostly she was there to learn and took advantage of the opportunities she had to do so, with some of the best in her field. I would like to think that she approached her opportunity the same way I approached mine at MIT thirty years earlier, but that’s for her to say.
Neither of us had the “conventional college experience,” whatever that means, and maybe would have had more fun or made more friends if we’d done things differently, but I think just about everyone comes out of college thinking that.
TL;DR – An Ivy League education is not necessarily a waste of time.
I’ll dissent some too. I have an Ivy League degree (Cornell Engineering ’74) and was quite proud of it for many years. Elitist? My father was a lab technician and my mother ironed shirts at minimum wage. My older brother was the first in our family to go beyond high school. I had a small scolarship from my high school, and I worked 2 part-time jobs while I was in college. One of those jobs was as a student technician in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, where I learned more than any 4 classes combined. I had fun walking the halls and wondering into random labs and asking: “What’s going on here?” and NEVER getting rebuffed by the grad students and professors.
As for the classes, I rather valued the stories from professors such as Boris Batterman who was one of Heisenberg’s students. He went to conferences and got to hear Heisenberg and Einstein argue the merits of their divergent theories.
On the other hand, the Engineering school was somewhat insulated from the political correctness, and yes, I acted the oblivious nerd that I was. That was over 40 years ago; it certainly has changed. Tuition, for example, has risen an outrageous amount since I was there. I couldn’t afford to go there now.
I need to address this as a manager who has interviewed lots of applicants for engineering jobs. Do I put significance on where you went to college? Yes, but not nearly as much weight as “What did you do on the side?” and “What have you accomplished since you got out of school?”
Yeah but much like you said sometimes it is hard to get the experience outside one of these environments. It does not need to be an Ivy League place but it helps to have some connection to a research lab or enterprise hub.
The various student co-op programs address that rather well. Real world hands-on experience, then back to finish a degree.
I don’t know where people get this impression. I am speaking from seeing this as a student, as an instructor, and as an engineer in an industrial setting who has had to find something to keep coops occupied.
This coop and internship and “real world hands-on experience” is a myth. Your real world experience is to attend the fine lectures yourself instead of cribbing your friend’s notes (What is covered in lecture? The material on the tests — think about this for a moment), put in the hours to do your own homework instead of using study groups as a crutch, and listen as best you are able to the less-than-entertaining non-native-English-speaking instructor during lecture . Were one to do all of that, such is much more valuable than coops or internships where you complete make-work projects doable within your partial engineering training and you come out of same thinking you have accomplished something.
Real world hands-on experience
I got my first real programming job in NYC (BAL, JCL, Univac) because I had written a 6502 assembler / disassembler in BASIC which was enough to impress the VP of systems even though I’d never heard of BAL or JCL at the time. Connecting a 9-track drive to a PC and coding in Bascom and dBase was considered weird, but I got to do a lot of fun stuff with the 3Com ethernet (does 3Com even exist anymore?) We even used punchcards (but not much.)
I also got my lower division classes as a junior college before transferring as a Junior to the university where I got my Bachelors degree. I’m sure I got a better education doing it that way. I didn’t aim for an Associates degree along the way, but happened to get all the necessary classes for one, so I took the joke of a “reading proficiency” test and got the degree.
If you want a smooth transition, start your kids in community college while still in high school. If they’re college material, they’re probably bored in HS anyway.