Professor talking here. My particular bee in my bonnet that contributes to this is the required end of term teaching evaluations. Instead of judging quality of instruction by, say, measuring how much students learn in a class, departments judge me by how much my students say they like me. It's like a baking contest where instead of tasting the finished cake we ask whether the flour and eggs enjoyed the process. We do need feedback, but we never really judge whether the student actually learned what was on the syllabus. One of my colleagues had the lowest dept evals and students complained how boring he was, but as his class was a pre-req to mine, I noticed his students knew their stuff compared to the popular prof's.
My sophomore year, I had a TA who (in retrospect kind of inappropriately) laid out the exact same logic to the class before handing out evaluations for us to fill out. So from then on, I always just gave full marks for all the teachers, regardless of whether I liked them.
Student evaluations as a graduate TA helped me realize I was pretty bad at teaching. I didn't feel very motivated to improve since I disliked teaching. I had previously figured that everybody hates parts of their jobs, but the evaluations helped me see that was unfair to the students. I ended up switching careers away from academia and I suspect I'm much happier for it.
That said, the comments that I seemed boring or that they disliked the class weren't very useful. The comments that I wasn't very good at explaining concepts on the students' level were more convincing/useful.
Reminds me of an event in Uni where we had a new (very Russian) teacher teaching, "Elecromagnetics and Wave Equations," in EE. It was junior year, so the students had been together for a while and knew each other. The teacher came in and started writing these massive multivariable calculus equations on the board and within moments we were looking at each other with wide eyes. Nobody said anything. It was incomprehensible to all of us but we were too embarrassed to say anything.. Six weeks later at the first test, the highest grade was in the 20's (percent). Candid discussions followed.
Most of the course materials were pretty standardized (calculus II), so I don't think it was as bad as that. Some of the students made tons of basic algebra errors (e.g. replacing 1/(x+y) with 1/x+1/y), and I didn't know how to help them. Though perhaps from your prof's perspective, complicated PDEs were on that level of "basic".
I would not want to be evaluated on my students' evaluations, but reading the ones my husband got when he taught could be fun. He had one that said, "At least sometimes his jokes are funny." that he taped to his wall. Another was, "He might be a genius or he might be a robot."
I tell my kids to use "Rate My Professor," like any rating site. Don't look at the numbers, but at the comments. When substantive comments say stuff like, "Good professor, but expects you to do the work," even if the overall rating is low, that is probably the prof you want to take.
Schools should do it this way with their official evals. Don't ask the kids to "rate" the professors at all. Just give them the opportunity to provide non-numerical feedback in the form of a brief essay.
I think Brown University, and maybe some others, used to take that same approach to grades. They didn’t give letters (or numbers) but just wrote comments. Unfortunately, employers don’t want to read 24 brief letters of recommendation - they just want to see a numerical average. (At least, I assume employers look at GPA?)
When I first sought a job in the public sector my poor prospective employer got a transcript that included a mix of 4 point scale grades from my masters program, the weird everyone passes but the top five percent get D for distinguished and the next five percent get E for excellent system from Law Program and my British grades from my post graduate program at Oxford that had been transferred to my weird US concurrent graduate degree mix. In one interview, the interviewer just looked at the weird uncalculated mix and asked me whether I thought my grades in grad school were "good, very good, or only okay" in an obviously desperate attempt to figure out what the hell he was looking at. I told him that I thought my grades accurately reflected the level of mastery I had achieved in each of the classes that I had taken which is really the fundamental purpose of grades and on that basis I thought they were excellent. He found that answer unhelpful but gave me the job anyway.
I think GPA still matters a lot if you're graduating from a school that's either very large or not extremely selective or both. But it matters less if you're graduating from a school like Brown.
If schools wanted to fix the issue it's easy. Just let profs give arbitrary numbers as grades and publish the first 3 moments of the grade distribution. Or just normalize it and also do a regression comparing students in that class to the average student.
Any concerns about the effect of curving the class are small compared to the effect we see now of who taught the class.
I'm a programmer. If I'm interviewing a prospective job candidate fresh out of school a GPA of <3.0 would be a red flag to me that might make me extra careful about verifying they knew their stuff. I have limited time to do interviews so it might be a useful filter.
This negative correlation is real: there’s evidence from the Air Force Academy (Carrol and West) and an Italian university (Braga et al) that students randomly assigned to instructors with worse evaluations do better later.
Because students are not necessarily experts on assessing instruction quality and many bad students just use evaluations as an opportunity to retaliate.
Oooh do I hear you on this. One of the most popular professors in my school teachers a prerequisite for my course. He’s an entertaining man, but his students don’t learn anything other than his particular (and peculiar) takes on the subject.
I think a professor has a duty to not be boring, in addition to effectively conveying material and achieving high student outcomes by the time the class is over. I know that student evals are often ridiculous and unfair, but sometimes they are not.
Too many professors do things “their way”, without regard to student enjoyment, and dismiss complaints about their teaching by blaming it on students resisting high standards.
We have all had high quality professors who also were good at engaging students. If you don’t have that talent, that’s Ok, but don’t pretend like boring=high quality.
Matt, I appreciate your comment. I couldn't agree more that "boring" does not equal "good," but perhaps it was my anecdote about the boring prof being a really good teacher that led to this post. My point was, he was a good teacher if you judged by what his students learned but a poor teacher if judged by the evaluations. What I am objecting to is that the teaching evaluations do not actually evaluate for what students learn, they evaluate for what students like. I will also offer this, I get very high teaching evaluations. And, as I also said, I do want the feedback, but while telling me "I couldn't read your handwriting" is really useful, and telling me "you're funny," is charming, none of the evaluations tell me what was actually learned because that is something even the students cannot assess well. I, like everyone, get the occasional, "he sucks as a teacher," but what would really help is if I understood whether the student thinks that because I really do stink at my job or because the student didn't put in the hours and is failing the course. An evaluation of the finished product would tell me whether I need to change my lessons. Thank you for your comment.
There was a wonderful tweet last week about a student evaluation complaining that the prof had no time management skills and ran over by 30 minutes every lecture.
The student did not realize it was a 90 minute class.
Sufficiently-good standardized testing that can try to assess before- and after-learning gains would seem to be one possible solution, no?
The most fundamental difficulty that I expect is being run into is that we exist in a world in which relative rather than absolute rankings matter as much or more than underlying competence once someone has gained entry into a given domain, which in turn creates essentially inexorable demand-side pressure for grade inflation because "how much did I learn?" is genuinely not the metric on which recipients of grades expect to be judged. A class in which one learned a lot relative to baseline but graduated with a C+ genuinely looks worse on a transcript--and is in some respects potentially less valuable to a graduated student--than a total gut in which they received an A.
Something like this, yes. One colleague opined we should just give last year's final on the first day of class and compare it to the end of term final 3 months later as a good evaluation of how much they learned. At my university, we have a 5 year peer review where a committee looks at your courses. But since your faculty peers don't really want to be hard asses, you typically pass, and if they are hard asses, you can scream "academic freedom" and the Chronicle of Higher Ed will probably make you a martyr. ;-)
I think British universities try to make all tests standardized. This causes massive headaches for faculty, who have to structure everything about their class a year before they even teach it, and can’t respond to current events or new discoveries or changes in student interest.
Honestly I can think of few if any classes I've taken that had intervening events on the order of a year that would have altered the curriculum, though. Isn't the more typical complaint that new editions of textbooks are naked cash grabs with no substantive new material?
Probably right for the majority of undergrad classes.
I was just thinking about this because the most recent class I taught was on artificial intelligence and philosophy of language, and I was talking to a friend at a British university as I was preparing it. None of the assigned readings ended up being published within a year of class date, but I did include some on supplementary readings that had been published after class started.
I don’t think you can have measurable improvement through study at an elite school - maxing out the measurement would be pretty much overnight turn into necessary-but-not-remotely-sufficient for admission.
I must be an outlier, but I can remember at least twice a gave a professor a great eval even though I bombed the class. One of them was Michael Javen Fortner, who wrote a book called 'The Black Silent Majority" that got a little buzz a few years back. Great professor, smart guy, hard class, and I failed that class spectacularly, but he did a great job teaching it.
I was at an event for instructional designers recently and someone asked "If we all know student evaluations are terrible and don't work, why do we do them at all?"
Everyone kind of sat in silence for a minute and then started trying to explain how they would make them better, but no one was really willing to just say "yeah these are bad and let's not do them."
If it's any consolation, at my school the professor who got the best student rankings was invariably fired. It wasn't official policy, it was just that any professor who spent that much time on his students couldn't possibly do the quality of research required.
Yeah, the whole "publish or perish" discussion needs its own Slow Boring take. I mean, where do you even start? I got tenure (twice). I was able to both publish well and teach well. But, I also know really great teachers who just had bad luck on research and that are rocking it now at colleges that don't have the research part. I'm not sure the school that let them go is better off in that deal. (Pssst. Aren't we telling these kids, they should come here to get a great education?) Just me, but I think tenure is past its sell-by date. There was a time that you had to protect people to do controversial research, and, maybe you still do though it seems like a simple contract of "you can't fire me if I publish something controversial," is all you need. One of the big negative externalities tenure based on research created is exactly what you are talking about: you hire for research, hope the teaching is good enough, and then when someone proves they are awesome in the classroom but so-so on the research, the teaching doesn't get rewarded as much. Teaching does matter, but you are right, it isn't the same as the research part.
I get very frustrated that it seems like not enough people are thinking holistically about this problem and imagining what a functional academic department that produces good research and educates students would actually look like, then trying to build that.
Cal Newport threw out the idea on his podcast that if he were starting a new university and wanted to poach the best faculty from the Ivies he would lead the pitch with "at this school you do not need to have an email account"
Faculty spend so much time doing low-value work, and it would be completely possible to have a lot more administrative support specifically around scheduling and communications.
Of course, the flip side of this is that a lot of faculty don't want to be "managed" in this way. But I would love to see a top school just get some buy in at a smaller department and try stuff like this from time to time.
Honestly I would feel really elitist saying unlike most people in America, I deserve a job for life no matter what I do. Not to mention that I felt like tenure was the lowest possible bar to clear, and I'm currently striving for much more (more grants, more papers, a bigger lab, etc.). And I'm honestly kind of bitter at times about some of my colleagues who are no longer "research active" (to use the official term) yet get to coast for 10-20 years (or more!) because they worked hard for a little while in their life.
We could shut down the bar and not be done with this subject. Instead of "congrats you have tenure!" Why not, "congrats we won't bug you again for maybe 5-6 years."
Once you've achieved tenure do you care what your student's think? I was under the impression that once tenured the rewards/compensation you receive are mostly a function of bargained contracts plus some ability to garner outside grants.
Another piece of this is that tenured profs teach an ever-dwindling number of classes and students at many institutions. A lot of grading ends up being done by adjuncts, grad students, "visiting" (Non-TT), and not-yet-tenured faculty. I don't have the exact numbers to cite, so i will refrain from saying "most grading."
This is second-hand from contract negotiations (so take it with a grain of salt). But at the large public university I teach at, I was told it is about a third tenure/tenure track, a third non-tenure/full-time/contract, and a third adjunct.
This seemed accurate based on my experience. Not sure about other universities however.
People say this a lot but I never see numbers. I want to know if this is being driven by some particular fields, or some particular classes of institutions.
That's helpful that this is restricted to full-time faculty! When I've seen numbers just as percentage of "faculty", I've been wondering whether individuals with part-time employment at multiple institutions get counted multiple times, and whether people like Joe Biden (who was hired for a semester or two at U Penn to teach a capstone seminar) were getting counted as non-tenured individuals.
I do see a trend here, both in terms of individuals at institutions without a tenure system, and towards less tenure at institutions with a tenure system. But I still want to know if this is varied by field, if it's the creation of non-tenure but relatively good condition streams like the "Instructional Professor", or if it's lots of adjuncts teaching freshman writing, or what.
Anecdotally, maybe 20% of our department isn't tenure-track, but for most purposes, they are treated the same as us TT faculty, they make almost as much as us (albeit not counting summer salary and with a lower ceiling over time), and none of them have ever been fired.
Whatever your criticisms of higher ed, I'm not sure generalized statements like this are fully accurate. The US still has world class universities producing world class students who go on to become leaders in science, business, etc. And I still think it's generally true that if you're in college and you want a good education, you can still get one.
Of course there's problems! And they're probably getting worse (ie. this piece). But as always, the trust exists in the muddy middle.
Essentially no one attends a competitive institution (how could they) and, as Matt points out, those are doing quite a bit of coasting on just selecting people who perform better anyway. There’s also the problem that there’s an entire literature now on how life outcomes for people attending competitive universities are about the selection effect, there appears to be little or no learning.
From my experience and from I know from my friends still in that world, administrators do not support faculty, do not reward teaching, and keep mandating unpaid labor unrelated to educating to faculty.
No one gets tenure for teaching and the whole online student evaluation system of instructors is a joke.
My point is leadership does not reward good educators.
I've never worked at a university with a strong union and I am not in a union, nor any of my colleagues that I know of. In my case, yes, I would say the teaching evals still matter for annual reviews and the 5-year post tenure reviews.
Very few instructors are tenured faculty, and moreover the latter have TAs grading for them more often than not. The vast majority undergraduate students will have the overwhelming majority of their grading done by instructors who aren’t tenured.
Yeah, I'm a little out of date and only a sample of one, but certainly not "very few" or "overwhelming majority"--I would say about half of my undergrad instructors were at least tenure-track, and more than half of my grad instructors were tenured outright (I can only think of one offhand who was not). I can think of only one grad course that was not instructor-graded.
Any business book will tell you that feedback should be specific and actionable. College students generally have no idea how to give that feedback, and numerical ratings are the least specific / actionable way possible to deliver feedback. I feel for you :/
I agree, but what do you propose as an alternative.
Evals aren't everything but there are alot of profs who are dicks to students for no reason other than bc that's how it was done in their day or to assert their authority.
Without evals the incentivizes are just to make yourself look better by assigning the maximal amount of hw. Probably students should do more work but you don't want professors to basically be incentivized to just suck all the student time so they look better than the profs in the other classes the students take.
But then make that an evaluation and don't pretend it's anything else. "On a scale from 1 to 5 how much of a dick was your prof?" But don't call it a teaching evaluation. As to what to do? A handful of random test questions based on the course syllabus written by another prof and administered along with the final that the prof never sees or grades might be a way to start. Or standardized tests at least on some of the syllabus material. We have a gazillion colleges of ed, I'm sure someone has figured this out.
Replacing evals with some objective evaluation of learning would be great and all but it also eliminates any discretion in what to teach and makes the choice of evaluating tests a huge flash point within departments.
Asking more questions doesn't force anyone to use the results and lots of departments don't really pay too much attention to these numbers.
My sense is that the evals persist because most profs strongly prefer the current system of very light interference into what they teach and how to a much more invasive common curriculum.
I have taught as an adjunct at local community colleges, for continuing ed classes and used to TA at my university while still a student. I feel like the most honest were probably for the continuing ed classes since those were not graded and they probably made the most sense since those folks really do want to know who is likely to get folks to sign up for more. I would say that about 90% of the comments that I got were about my humor rather than my teaching they were flattering but not that helpful.
But I did have one friend who always looked up the rate my prof comments on everyone she met who she discovered taught anywhere and would often share the more interesting ones. I have definitely seen some really horrid one about folks who people said "were less helpful than asking a random guy as best buys to explain computer science" or "were utterly unable to explain anything in a way that made sense" or "gave a weird and creepy vibe." These were mostly for friends' spouses and dates. I confess that they all seemed likely to be pretty spot on and were all for folks who I wouldn't ask to teach me anything.
My sense is that the evaluations probably do help weed out some folks who should not be teaching but the comments are better than the scores.
Being evaluated by student evals seems kind of flawed but we were able to see the scores and feedback ourselves as students and I always felt that was helpful. Some highly regarded profs clearly are just phoning it in with the undergrads and its fine to want to skip those, likewise some people are just dickheads and it's fine if students who are paying a lot of money to go to college want to avoid that. (Paul's act might have served some purpose in high school but by the time I was in college I would have absolutely no patience for having to "up manage" his various emotional issues.)
The 60's spike in GPAs, at least at top schools, probably reflected a genuine increase in intellectual aptitude more than any change in values. Jerome Karabel discusses this at length in The Chosen (2005), about the history of standardized testing, but broadly speaking, this is when the Ivies consciously pivoted from catering to amiable well-connected old-money types (think G.W. Bush) to seeking out the strongest students (it's also about when 50 years of de facto Jewish quotas finally collapsed). Average SAT scores at H/Y/P went up something like 150 points in the course of the decade.
Something similar is at least partly happening today at the same schools. The US population grew by 50% from 1980 to 202, the overall number of undergrad students increased by the same amount, but Harvard's incoming class remained essentially the same.
I'm not clear if you're agreeing with ML that there are other implicit assumptions spoiling things and ML is right to point them out or that ML is making a bunch of implicit assumptions that you disagree with, in which case could you spell out a few?
Sure. He assumes that population size is of key importance to determine the quality of the top students. That's obviously not true, otherwise every country would have roughly the same number of Nobel laureates per capita, for instance. Far more important than population size is the quality of k-12 education, social norms and expectations etc.
Another implicit assumption is that Harvard is actually looking for the best students, and has been doing so in essentially the same manner throughout this period. That's also incorrect. Harvard could easily have a far better student body from the standpoint of pure academic preparedness or ability. It's not even close to filing its seats with literally the best young minds America currently has to offer, nor does it even attempt it.
A third is that, contextually, ML seems to suggest that grade inflation has anything to do with the quality of the work prodcued. That too is implausible. IF anything there is a lot of evidence that the quality of students' work in recent years has been dropping, even as grades are rising. In fact there was an Atlantic(?) article using Harvard specifically as an example for this phenomenon of dropping students' performance.
These are just a few oof the ways why the above is totally off the mark.
Population size increasing while holding everything else constant (including # of spots at elite universities) should make it easier for them to select for better students. The acceptance rate at Harvard when I started undergraduate (not at Harvard) was around 18%, now it's around 5%.
That's an explanation that would naturally lead to a better student body and therefore better students.
I think there _are_ as you say reasons to doubt that's an/the explanation, but it's a reasonable baseline assumption and benefits from an explanation such as yours why you don't think that's the case.
Fair enough. My “exasperation” was at how common this misconception (as I see it) is- to the point that a couple of different people mention it on this very discussion, so it gets tiring for me to counter argue all over again each and every time.
Do you have a good sources for this? (Ideally one that's truly national - I'm sure GPAs at Tier 2 schools went up for the same reason as at Ivies, but if ~all schools saw this pattern the Vietnam answer would be more convincing)
This is my biggest problem with this line of argument, especially for elite schools. There seems to be some sort of normative assumption that it would be good for some kids to get bad grades even though we spend enormous resources these days preventing the kids who would get the bad grades from getting into the school in the first place.
I also think about this with regard to what grades are *for*, something this piece totally ignores. As far as I can tell, the only people who care about grades in college are grad school admissions committees. But what are the grades telling them.
My wife did her PhD in a science discipline at an Ivy and then became a professor at a mid-tier state school. At both places she taught a class called something like "Intro Statistics for [Discipline] Majors," but the courses were nothing like each other. At the Ivy she says she covered at least 3x more material in a semester than at the state school. Like, one place they finished the text book and one place the students could not handle that at all. A below average student in her class at the Ivy learned far more statistics than the very best student in her state school class, but the argument that lots of people make is that the Ivy student should get a B- or whatever while the other kid gets an A. But that's basically conveying false information! The admissions committee that's looking at transcripts is being misled about the relative statistics knowledge of those two students!
Maybe once upon a time there were a lot of gentleman wandering around at Dartmouth and Princeton who truly earned their "gentleman's Cs," but outside the odd literal Rockefeller those guys are all partying at safety schools now while even Andover only sends their five smartest students to Yale.
Really, really smart column, Matt. I especially liked the point about how a clearly stated and well-understood mission helps structure disagreements and manage diversity. Really good point.
Google appears to be relearning this lesson, as they recently fired 28 people for being confused about the mission of the organization, which is the fault of Google's leadership. Hopefully universities will act similarly when students (and, often, professors and staff) get confused about whether they are there for academics or activism.
" a clearly stated and well-understood mission helps structure disagreements and manage diversity" the military and pro sports, probably the two most diverse and integrated institutions in American life, are great examples of this.
Can you expand on the military bit? It seems to me that disagreements are managed by top-down authority. You really wouldn’t want a soldier to have personal conviction about any particular mission, since they may be tasked to a completely different one at any moment.
The military has a pretty clear mission: keeping America safe, and being prepared to do what's necessary to keep America safe. Any other concerns are secondary to that. If two people come from radically different backgrounds and otherwise have radically different values, but they agree on the mission, that can help them maintain a relationship with each other.
Were our soldiers in Vietnam personally bought into Kissinger's ideas about containing the Communists? Did those prosecuting the Gulf War feel a visceral connection between Kuwaiti sovereignty and the safety of their families at home? Did those invading Iraq buy the WMD thing?
I don't doubt that the military works, but I don't think it's because our servicemen are all personally aligned on the geopolitical ends they're working towards.
Kinda a sequitur to your comment: I'm so confused by the student protests on universities. What do the students want universities, their presidents, and their professors, to do about the war in the middle east?
Generally speaking, to financial divest from certain companies, or from Israel, or some combination. Columbia's protestors for example have as their #1 demand financial divestment from certain ETFs that are linked to Israel in some way.
While I think the goals are silly, they are in fact often protesting for actionable goals their university could take.
It's important to bear in mind that disdaining meritocracy is in fact an EXPRESSION of meritocracy in 21st-century elite culture. You work insanely hard to get into the right college and secure your elite status, then you are enculturated into elite norms at college, norms which includes showily disdaining the very hard work you did to get there. This is particularly potent where we live, media; it's a culture of super-intense type-A people who have collectively decided that being straightforward about the effort you've expended to get where you are is somehow to bow down to the Man. This commitment is not actually anti-meritocracy as such. It's just a rational calculation about the importance of demonstrating fealty to the value of their peers. They keep climbing the ladder by pretending not to care about climbing it.
To the degree that there's philosophical justification of this stance, it's tied up in the witless "anti-work" thing. (The left is about labor, in multiple meanings of the word, for the record.) But it's lame to publicly care, the days.
I think this is, to a certain extent, a journalism/arts/academia-specific thing— and a product of specific material conditions in those fields. Most people who succeed in those fields are smart and hardworking, but because the set of good jobs and other rewards is small relative to the number of aspirants (and shrinking), non-merit differentiators tend to be the difference between success and failure. In that context, talking about the role of merit and hard work is hollow (for the unsuccessful) and gauche (for the successful).
By contrast, if you’re a really smart doctor, lawyer, programmer, accountant, etc and you work hard, you’re almost certain to get at least a decent job.
I can't upvote this enough: my wife's department gets >150 applications for every tenure-track position, and close to a hundred of them are credible. My software company usually gets ~10-15 applications for each position, only two or three of which are legit. (This would be different at Google, Meta, etc..)
It's an enormous structural difference that distorts people's understanding of merit, for almost any definition of merit.
Yeah, like, I applied to 60-some academic jobs and got literally zero response, but then literally got the first private-sector job I applied for (with a prestigious employer which paid me over 150k/year right out of the gate.) The whiplash was wild.
I think an underappreciated part of the "meritocracy" discussion is that both "merit" itself and the measurability of merit have really sharp limitations under a variety of circumstances, but that's a hard thing for people to grok, because for genuinely understandable reasons it often cuts against both their personal interests and their underlying sense of how the world works.
The correlations between the various cognitive measures whose shared factor component led Arthur Spearman et al to hypothesize general intelligence start to break down when you get to really high levels. I think this is kind of a metaphor for everything else too. (Much easier to demarcate basic competence vs incompetence than exceptional excellence vs mere solid performance.)
Yeah. I think there are also really big circumstance and time problems. Like, just to take a really obvious example, if you hire Albert Einstein you aren't actually getting the same Albert Einstein at various points in his career and life, and that is true of literally all humans at all times. Anyone who is into sports knows this--it's why sports remain interesting, rather than being a "solved" problem.
Napoleon pre-Peninsular War vs Napoleon post-Peninsular War is another good example-- unparalleled GOAT tactical military genius when he's working with a high-morale mostly-French army, he can move it quickly using good central European roads, and his enemies haven't effectively adapted their army organization and tactics to counter him; gifted but often quite fallible commander as he starts to rely more on less motivated auxiliaries, wages campaigns with tougher supply and mobility conditions, and his enemies start figuring out how to copy him.
Oh, another complicating factor-- generally, if you're really successful at something, that success is often the consequence of a few small parts of your overall effort, with most of what you do washing out.
For example, I run a somewhat-but-not-extremely leveraged mix of long and short positions in my personal brokerage account. Schwab's performance calculator says that I have a 44% cumulative rate of return over the past year (vs 23% for the S&P 500 or 26% for Nasdaq).
Superficially, that looks like investing skill, but most of the return came from a successful bet on big tech stock performance divergence (long NVDA, TSM, AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL; short TSLA and AAPL), with the net performance of most of my other trades coming out as a wash. There's a solid chance that I just got lucky and that I'll see significantly worse returns in future years.
But most investors' performance breakdowns look sort of like this, and consequently measuring skill is actually really hard!
Again, this does not prove that the opinion is widely held and often expressed. You have pointed towards five articles. I am saying that among my peers, it is not the case that people walk around disparaging meritocracy or downplaying their own hard work—in fact, the opposite; people complain about their workloads all the time.
I'll amend my opinion -- I think people widely hold the belief that meritocracy is good but in elite spaces, will express the opposite opinion.
And while I'm sure plenty of your peers complain about having a lot of work to do (which is about the least unique thing imaginable), I don't see a lot of defenses of meritocracy coming from elite spaces. Sure I only provided you with five articles, can you provide me with one from an elite institution that defends meritocracy?
right -- and being for meritocracy is such a putatively banal and obvious position ("do you support or oppose people being rewarded for their talent and effort vs some other alternative") *that the only people who would oppose it* would be people at some intellectual vanguard.
Are you trying to make a substantive point about the quality or value of the anti-meritocracy discussion, or only the point that it exists in "elite spaces"? The thrust of much of the meritocracy discussion is that the thing we call "meritocracy" (especially when it comes to competitive college admissions) is false in the sense that it tends to reflect the social standing and economic resources of the applicants' parents, rather than the inherent merit of the applicants. It's an argument that the system is "rigged" in favor of those with generational social and economic advantages. It's an argument that a system offering more and better opportunities to those with just as much "merit" but without such inherited advantages would serve us better as a society. I don't think this analysis or these ideas are confined to elite writings in elite spaces. I think they are both painfully obvious and broadly shared across the political spectrum. Nor do I think the discussion of meritocracy touches on the value of "hard work" in any meaningful way, except to the extent it criticizes the kind of "fake work" that pads resumes and applications or that strives for somewhat meaningless marginal increases in standardized test scores. Nobody thinks that math tutoring is bad for kids, or that kids knowing more math is bad for society. Hard work and striving for excellence is not something that elites or non-elites denigrate. Indeed, the critique of Michael Sandel (as elite as it gets) is that we have created a system that tries to short-circuit the actual attainment of meritorious achievement by relying on the "reflected glory" provided by institutional credentials. It's "worth it" for parents to bribe their under-achieving children into Ivy League schools because the credential can substitute for the actual work.
Would you personally publish an article defending common criticism of meritocracy (eg, disparate outcomes) and the resulting elitism? If so, would you expect your argument to be broadly accepted by your peers?
Being vocally (in the sense of writing NYT articles) pro or anti anything is obviously an elite phenomenon. The crazy people on the subway ranting about 'the man' are pretty anti-meritocracy though
The last part definitely is. The notion that work is terrible and nobody should have to do it is (1) a recent innovation and (2) a betrayal of core left values about the value and dignity of work and working people.
“ The notion that work is terrible and nobody should have to do it is (1) a recent innovation”
I’m not sure I understand. The idea that gentleman didn’t work is as old as civilization. Or do you mean that the peasants also shouldn’t have to work?
For example, “…to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner…” has been around for a while now. (A more recent version is, “If you want to be photographer, a writer, an artist, a musician, you can do so.”)
The notion that you exist to do whatever you want with no obligations to your fellow human beings is the center of right-libertarianism. It isn't "left" at all. Left is from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Which means we don't do whatever we want without regard to our communities' needs.
Buddy I talk to my professors too and if anything they are more pro-merit on average...not sure what you are trying to prove here but if the argument is that you guys know what people at elite schools think better than I do, then sorry but you just don't.
It is entirely possible* that you are correct in your claim that you are the ultimate knower of what people at elite schools think. However, I thought it is worth noting that condescension (“buddy” etc) is not a great way of convincing people and also not a great look.
Yeah, I think the whole hubbub about the canceled valedictorian speech at USC is a good example of this. It became a national news story because of lot of people in elite spaces thought this was unfair (she worked so hard, she deserves the speech etc), when of course the whole idea that whoever gets the highest grades in a class of thousands should get a special speech to tell everyone what they think is kind of the whole idea of "meritocracy" in a nutshell. I think a lot of people at Harvard etc would be aghast if you replaced valedictorian speeches with a "democratic" system of say having students elect their own speaker prom king style or picked someone at random, a true egalitarian option I favor.
It sounds like grades get a set of a few dozen students and then a faculty committee chose from among those students. I’m not sure whether there was a formal application or recommendation letters or anything.
That's a great encapsulation of the commitment to meritocracy (and Milan's point) right there, they have their own little mini "meritocratic" college acceptance system to pick the valedictorian, which of course is in reality somewhat subjective.
It's probably easier to align subjective metrics with "real merit" (whatever that is) than objective metrics! (I'd rather have a valedictorian with a 3.999 GPA who wrote some really impressive term papers but got one A- in freshman year, than a valedictorian with a 4.000 GPA who got straight A's that were all just perfectly by-the-books with nothing especially impressive.)
Elites disdaining meritocracy is as old as time itself. It's just that in the past the disdain was directed more at those who had to work to get into elite circles as opposed to being born into it. A mark of being a "true" elite was someone who didn't work. There is a reason that one of the most famous jokes in Downton Abbey is the Dowager Countess exclaiming "what's a weekend?".
The social order has obviously changed a lot since then. And one important way is there is a reason both Milan and I are probably especially put off by this description you're putting out. Milan is talking about his friend group, but there is something else likely tying Milan and I's reaction to this post; we're both Indian. Because Indian Americans have the highest median incomes in America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income) which means were' decidedly part of the elite or at least elite adjacent (and definitely part of it at elite colleges) and let me tell you that disdaining hard work is decidedly NOT part of the culture. In fact I'd say it's the opposite; I can't tell you often I've heard about various stories about how many hours kids put in (or parents talking about the hours their kids put in) and my first reaction is "this sounds like a pretty over exaggeration here". But the point being, disdaining meritocracy is extremely NOT part of the culture.
Isn’t the problem with this argument that many people who get into elite colleges do so without much merit / without working insanely hard (because they are legacies, athletes, families made a donation, etc)?
My sense is that people who genuinely did work insanely hard are proud of it and remain so (see all the local news stories about high school scholarship winners who get into multiple Ivies).
Are we sure those time use numbers are right? That suggests six hours a week of classes which is far below what any college I know of requires to get a degree in 4 or even 6 years.
Maybe if you skip a bunch of lectures and never go to the discussion sections you’d get down to 6 hours a week, but it still seems awfully low.
And interestingly, the ratio of “2 hours of non-class work for every hour of class work” more or less holds in the data. So it’s not like students aren’t doing the assigned work, it just seems like they have a tiny courseload. Maybe they are averaging this with the 4 months per year when students aren’t in class (so that gets us up to 9 hours per week while school is in session)? Or maybe people claim to be full time students when they aren’t?
I don’t think it entirely invalidates the premise of this piece, but I just don’t believe it’s possible to graduate with only 6 hours a week of classes.
From what I researched, it's a hard issue to get good survey data on, and that 8.8 hours of sleep definitely doesn't feel fully right to me. But I'd say class skipping is fairly baked in part of college these days. And I imagine with the rising prevalence of remote lectures, it hasn't gotten much better.
Most of us Millennials had recurring dreams for a decade (or more) past graduation where we woke up in a panic thinking we’d accidentally missed all of our classes. Gen Z prefers to take on astronomical debt to live out the nightmare IRL (then demand that the debt be forgiven) 👵🏻✊🏻
Yeah I think the class time estimates are on the low end of reasonable with how much class skipping there is. Not sure exactly where I think those extra sleep hours are coming from, my guess it’s just time spent on non-specific things (like “studying” with people or transit time etc) and since it’s not included in the survey it’s just thrown on to sleep.
8.8 hours a day of sleep on the time-spent chart just blows my mind! I don't think there was a single person I knew who was sleeping that much during undergrad (2 years ago, large public school)!
As a daily average though?? I certainly knew some people that’d sleep a lot on weekends and stuff but 8.8 as an average?? I knew more people that averaged 6 than 8, let alone 10. Lots of napping sure, but my impression is that the nappers aren’t people getting an extra 2 hours on the 8 they got that night, but people who got 4-6 in the night and are catching up on a deficit.
Of course if we include time in bed doomscrolling, 8.8 is much more in play…
I think we can all agree that college students are likely not getting almost 9 hours of sleep per night, lol. But the key points from that survey hold up.
Presumably, students who get more sleep are, like, sleeping in that time instead of being people you know. It’s a really easy thing for a survey to be right while contradicting your experience entirely, like finding out that practically no one actually watched the show “everyone” is talking about.
The numbers seem insane to me but I remind myself that "all students at all colleges" is a very different sample than "successful students" or "prestige schools (or what those schools will tell you about themselves)"
We've seen this chart before! I remember someone in the comments during its last appearance discovered that there's some weird weighting of weekends vs weekdays and semester breaks. I'm honestly a little surprised it was used again
When I dug into it, they sampled people on random days (weekdays or weekends) in September to May, and threw out results that were gathered “on holidays” or where students left out half their hours.
If it was just a 7 day average during the term, then 1.2 hours a day means 8.4 hours a week. Adding in a few weeks when class isn’t in session probably gets you above 9 on a regular school week. If students are enrolled in 15 hours of classes, then that translates to 40% absenteeism. When I teach, that sounds like a lot more absenteeism than I get in classes of 20-30 students but maybe about right for classes of over 100. And I guess more students are enrolled in big classes?
15h coursework and 30h homework was pretty accurate for Stanford (though the homework actually ranged 15-50h depending on how studious/fast you were).
Then again, it's all a matter of perspective since my parents secretly think I'm lazy for not putting in 60 hour weeks. And I'm sure Prof. Hunham would agree with them.
With online or the online lecture portion of hybrid courses - a three-hour class that might traditionally meet for three hours might end up as an 1h20m of online videos that the kids then watch on 1.5x speed. Also, a ton of skipping lectures.
I find almost all video/audio to be easily consumable at > 2x speed because most people are trained to talk slowly. I find it easier to maintain focus at 2x then 1x because i'm less likely to get distracted waiting for the lecture to get to the point.
Yes, this varies a lot based on the lecturer and the listener. 2x is pushing it for me on complex subjects, but I prefer 1.5x to standard speed for most lectures.
Thought the same thing. I think the high percentage for travel probably suggests that they are averaging 9 months of classes overy 12 months since most students don't take classes in the summer. That explain some but not all of it. I was working for my university the entire time I was in udergraduate and graduate school in the US (which is how I graduated with $0 student loans!). I also frequently had some sort of part time outside employment. I don't think I have worked less than 20 hours a week and was often working closer to 35 hours a week but I definitely spent significantly more time in class and doing class work than this suggests. Also got a lot less sleep. Perhaps the new numbers reflect a more healthy appreciation for sleep but they seem off. I know that I worked more than 90% of my peers but I don't think I studied more.
I would like to allocate some of the blame here to employers. Their current very strong preference, at least for the elite employers that drive cultural sentiment and student decisions, is to hire Harvard students who are undistinguished in what they did as undergrads vs IU students who accomplished a lot. If that doesn't change, the rest won't either.
Getting top employers to treat elite degrees as nothing special or inherently better than state schools would be one of the greatest things we could ever do for equity and equality.
I know a prestigious boutique law firm that explicitly avoids Stanford/Yale/Harvard grads because they're not hungry enough, preferring to hire associates with JDs from state schools and working class backgrounds. I haven't heard of anybody else doing this though.
I can't tell you how damaging excessive focus on "elite" colleges vs. very good state schools really is. I know from personal experience; in Indian communities it can be quite gross and honestly probably psychologically damaging to see not going to say Yale and instead going to UConn as some mark of failure when you're degree from UConn is still very likely to be a good degree (with added bonus of watching really good basketball).
The thing is, you don't "know nothing else", and also, that only tells you that your prospect had a high SAT score. Doesn't tell you anything about whether they accomplished anything important in college.
This is true. I am an attorney. I work at a well-paying, Midwest firm. We'll hire anyone with a degree from Harvard. If you went to a state school, then you'll need to be at the top of your class. We are not unique. (And this is why I would still encourage anyone to go to Harvard, ect. despite the trend to say otherwise.)
Law school is different because the T14 law schools draw 90%+ of the top students from across the country. Law school applicants are much more sophisticated than undergrad applicants, a large proportion of whom just go to Big State U, so they are much more meritocratic.
Caveat that there are some people who are exceptionally good, better than most HLS students, who go to Big State U Law (your Jeffrey Suttons and such), but they're unusual, and anyway even very elite firms are happy to hire the #1 person from Big State U Law.
(I'm not saying any of this to disagree with you, I think we're giving the same view, I'm just explaining the firms' logic.)
Hi, employer here, I absolutely do not give a single shit whether somebody went to Harvard if they can't walk me through some interesting and thoughtful interview conversations.
I remember my first day at a Big Tech firm, when I found out one of my coworkers had a CS degree from Harvard.
Surprising choice for someone with the grades to get into Harvard to decide to pursue CS there, when he presumably had many other options at his disposal.
We don't recruit straight of college in the sense of "make some polo shirt serfs stand at a table with brochures in the basketball arena every March". Most (I'd guess 70%) of our hires come from Big State U.
So are you saying you do not represent an employer with major cultural cachet like Goldman or McKinsey or Google or the CIA? Or that your organization is a counterexample?
My employer does not gaze into navels like anyone who cares about hiring from the "elite" pool.
Meanwhile, though Google has fallen ass over teakettle into the world's most lucrative advertising business, I have no idea what 80% of their current employees do and I'm semi-guessing they don't either (fighting over which recent product line to cancel?).
I know lots of people there. Can confirm they don’t know what they do, really, in terms of value add and many spend a lot of time dreading the moment the thing they worked on is just canceled.
To be blunt, does your employer stand out in any way? Does it pay unusually well? Are people who start their careers there disproportionally likely to rise to upper management positions or other roles of status and power? Do employees often possess cultural cachet and influence even if they don't earn a lot, like those at top media companies?
If none of these things apply, then I'm not sure why you think your employer's practices are relevant here. Obviously the vast majority of American employers cannot make a big deal of hiring Ivy grads, seeing as how Ivy grads are less than 0.5% of the population. But the employers that do hire lots of Ivy grads are disproportionally influential, well-paying, and important - that's the point.
“I have no idea what 80% of their current employees do and I'm semi-guessing they don't either (fighting over which recent product line to cancel?).”
There’s a lot of work on optimizing stuff. If you work at a company that only uses a bit of computing resources, then it’s not worth a programmer’s time to speed something up by 0.1%. However, if you work at a company with a ton of huge data centers that hold a shit load of data and crunch a lot of numbers, then a programmer speeding something up by 0.1% can pay for their selves many times over. Ditto for something that increases the efficiency of *programmers* by a small amount.
Google is a weird case though. They hire globally, but hiring committees and hiring managers likely have no idea what (for example) a prestigious school in Poland is and would have no idea how to weight it.
They rely pretty heavily on their interview process. Although I'm sure the recruiting staff is aware and target their active recruiting efforts to a handful of schools.
Agree with this employers and the feds, who dole out a lot of the money are probably the two other institutions we should expect to provide pressure for actual education to be happening.
So to square this essay with yesterday's, what should be done here? Seems like a collective action problem where if one college or department decides to become harder, students will go elsewhere.
I actually think you got close to one when you noted the Summers push— basically, some institutions with so much cachet that they’ll never have trouble attracting students need to move in this direction, and because of their prestige, they’ll pull other schools in that direction too.
In 2020, one Ivy (I forget which) decided to abandon ACT/SAT tests, and the rest of the Ivies followed. This year they collectively decided to start requiring those tests again. If the Ivies started grading students tougher I am sure many state universities would follow after a few years.
Elites can solve coordination problems. I generally lean more egalitarian than hierarchical, but this factor is why I don't think complex societies and organizations can or should be completely flat.
For a lot of questions, it makes sense to kick decision-making down to the department level, but there are some cases where the centralized decision-maker is really helpful. Knowing which kinds of question are which is part of what makes good leaders good.
Princeton had a big and multi-year grade deflation push during the years I was there (I think it started in mid 00s and then they ended the policy in 2014). It wasn't just the president (Shirley Tilghman) stating that she wanted tougher grading—departments were supposed to award a certain percentage of As and A-s (capped at 35%), Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs etc, and if I recall correctly there were no A+s (4.0 or 100% in a class was just an A). Most large 101 and 201 classes were graded on a curve, and the curve could just as easily hurt you as help you. I remember that students complained a bit but we mostly accepted the way of things and people were then pretty happy with a B+ vs. up in arms. I remember that my classmates in almost all majors mostly studied a lot. Typical evening social plans might include meeting friends at the library to study together or do readings together. People also spent 3-4 hours per weekend day studying if not more. Everyone still seemed to really enjoy their experience, still had time for parties on Thursday and Saturday nights, and if anything if you earned a rare A or A-, it was much more rewarding. When you applied to grad school or for a fellowship, Princeton gave you a pre-written letter to include explaining the grade deflation policy. But even with the letter, Princeton started seeing results they didn't like: fewer Rhodes and Marshalls winners, lower acceptance to really competitive grad schools (e.g. med schools), and I think fewer offers for post-grad research. To me it didn't seem like whiny students or parents ended the policy—Princeton didn't like that ITS PRESTIGE was being affected (in real ways). I'm sure individual students were disappointed about not winning a Rhodes, etc, but ultimately it was the aggregate effect on university numbers that led to the change.
Princeton suffered from the classic first mover problem. If everyone had followed them, there wouldn't have been a discernible negative effect with fellowship award numbers or graduate acceptance rates—all the Ivy League and elite colleges would have been producing students with similar GPAs. But Princeton led the charge alone, and then ultimately backtracked.
When I was in college in the late 90's I remember specifically talking to some other students about Princeton and their super strict curve (not the 2004 curve, so presumably had done it before) and the supposition we had was that it made students less likely to work together since another student doing well ate up a place for YOU to have an A.
It doesn't sound like (at least in 2004) you felt this happened. (Was the curve target higher than before?)
It didn't feel competitive to me. It was the norm to be in some sort of study group or work on problem sets together. I wasn't an engineer or science major (which seemed most affected by the grade deflation policy), but had lots of friends in the sciences, and they also seemed to form very friendly and close-knit study groups. I suppose it would have been rational for people to be less cooperative...so I don't really have an explanation for why we collaborated!
It seems like to shift values towards "Let's reward hard work and excellence, and punish the opposite" we'd need a major war or existential crisis. Otherwise I have no idea how we could get from A to B.
Our system of government was thought by those who originally designed it to be incapable of operating successfully without an educated citizenry, with the civic virtue and education - in logic, rhetoric, etc -- to handle it.
In the period of revolutionary fervor after independence, civic republicanism was all the rage, at least in the North, and was linked to many efforts to broaden access to education.
But that kind of high-mindedness is hard to sustain without that revolutionary, almost quasi-religious fervor, and the nature of revolutionary fervor is that it tends not to last. Today there's no major party or movement that explicitly connects personal virtue, education and critical thinking skills with the need for a citizenry capable of democratic republican self-governance.
A couple decades ago I, my dept chair, and a couple colleagues went on a listening tour of some of the big employers of our grads. We wanted to know if there were subjects we should add to the curriculum. Instead, nearly to a person, the employers said essentially, "the curriculum is fine but you need to turn up the heat because it's the pressure of the job that will get them, not the subject matter."
When I worked at a big national law firm we had summer internships where we hired a few select law students and tried to woo them with ball games and dinners and gave them a bunch of make work stuff to do because most law students don't know how to do anything useful and we couldn't charge our clients for garbage. The idea was that these "clerkships" would get us good new associates from Ivy League schools. It did.
But then those students were faced with a job that required them to bill excess of 2000 hours of real billable work on top of learning how to be useful and the only time they got to go to ball games was with the next years summer clerks. They often couldn't cut the workload and had to move on. We had much better luck with our lateral hires.
At one point, one of the partners pointed out that we seemed to be having our best luck with associates coming out of jobs at non-profit legal agencies or the government. As I was one of those, he asked me what sort of work I had done in my initial "clerkship" period at my first legal employer. I laughed and explained that I had been given a card table, folding chair, laptop and binder manual of everything that I needed to know and that I had 60 minutes to read it before my first client intake and that I would be having six intakes a day of 30 minutes each every day and would be expected to do any follow up work in between or after hours.
He then asked what prep I had done for my job in their office that had allowed me to "hit the ground running." I told him that I had skimmed "Insurance Law in a Nutshell" on the bus on the way in and accepted that if they were going to be paying me this much the job was either going to involve an incredible amount of work or doing something evil and so I better show I could work hard from the get go to avoid being asked to do something evil instead.
I didn't got to an elite private school but I went to very good public universities but I did get a sense that folks at elite private schools got told that they were exceptionally smart and valuable simply by virtue of getting in which was 100% not a message that I ever got at my university. I do think imagining you bring inherent special value wherever you go isn't necessarily the best mindset for working harder than the next guy.
Dartmouth has published the median grades of courses next to your personal grade on transcripts since 1994. I think it is a pretty good policy that puts each student's grades in context but it hasn't stopped the medians from creeping up since that time. https://www.dartmouth.edu/reg/transcript/medians/
I went to a small private liberal arts college, and the vast majority of kids had high test scores and were studious. There were 4 or 5 kids who simply dropped out in the first semester of my freshmen year because they found that the norm was that if you skipped classes, professors would be fine failing you, and in addition, there wasn't much incentive to skip classes since there were very few folks to hang out with, because most everyone studied or went to class during the day and socialized (not really partied) after 5pm. It helped that there was very little to do on weekdays except for study and go to classes.
On Fridays and Saturdays a lot of people partied extremely hard to make up for this. This norm was sometimes not the greatest, as kids who were visiting from other schools would say, man, you guys party really hard, and there were the associated extreme binge drinking problems. In retrospect we probably should have been taking other drugs, not in combination with alcohol.
Empirically, all the schools that tried grade deflation have given up because it hurts their students competitively. There's no incentive for schools to work collectively on this, it's all pain and no gain. Grade inflation leads to fewer students and parents crying in office hours and happy alumni who can donate to the institution that gave them good times and a good CV.
My hot take is this doesn't change until Higher Ed collapses under its unsustainable costs and it stops being a default assumption that smart kids go to college. If employers can no longer use school admission as a solitary and strong signal, new metrics will arise and schools can begin to compete on their ability to actually help students master those metrics. The trouble is those metrics have to correlate with actual knowledge (eg standardized tests) and not subjective fluff that can be easily manufactured (extracurriculars).
Regardless, I think higher ed as we know it has to die for education to become a focus again.
Yep. My humble proletarian Central Jersey vocational school tried grade deflation for about a decade, but gave it up following research that showed that it was significantly impacting graduates' job prospects.
Among selective college grads arguing about their schools, "people who care a ton about medical school admissions" seem to be underrepresented (which reflects well on doctors IMO)
Yes, my alma mater tried grade deflation for a little over a decade, rescinded it about 6 years ago, and there are still lots of complaints. People say that it hurt them in law and medical school admissions. I have no idea if that is true. I know for high schools each school has a profile that colleges look at when evaluating for admission. Graduate schools should have something similar.
It seems employers may be revealing that they don't value that much what goes on at colleges. Which implies we should knock a year off the 4-year college degree and save society the resources?
Modest proposal: we retain the college admissions process, but being admitted only consists of getting a "This Person Is Approved" certificate as opposed to spending four years and six figures to learn Not Much.
Hiring managers also like to see completed degrees, which at least somewhat signal the person they are hiring isn't lazy and can be trusted to complete at least some work.
1. Student loans. Loans should require rigorous vetting for RoI on both a student aptitude and program outcome basis.
2. Public Schools. We need to fail more kids. K-12 is totally failing at providing the sorting/signaling value it should be. Sorting people out in college admissions/undergrad major selection is a fucking terrible paradigm.
I think stricter grading is fine, but I don't know about failing. Our high school has lots of kids failing, although it has improved in recent years. This leads to more kids dropping out, and their lives are not great a few years out unless they get their GED.
I wouldn't mind going back to the old NYS model where a Regents diploma was something special. Now everyone has to earn a Regents diploma to graduate which means: 1) the diploma doesn't indicate the same high standard and 2) students who have mastered basic skills but have trouble on a certain exam (usually World History) cannot get a high school diploma.
When I say failing, I mean on a subject by subject, grade level by grade level basis. Doing that rigorously would presumably necessitate various tracks to completion. Differing diplomas and such. That would be good where presumably only a limited number of those tracks would proceed into liberal arts higher ed.
It surprised me too! I think part of the problem was that they were testing people on 2 years worth of content - from the start of humans until now. That changed recently, which I don't think is a good thing. Students in NY still have to take two years of World History, but they only test on part of it. I would rather two tests.
But also - World History is probably the test that requires the highest level of reading ability, and a lot of students in our state are not native English speakers. We tend to focus on high-achieving immigrants, but many, especially those who come from refugee situations where schooling was spotty, have a lot of trouble. For instance, Burmese students in my district who move here after about age 10 have a high dropout rate.
When I was applying to college in 2004 there were a few schools that had the reputation of being much harder (Chicago, Swarthmore, cal tech) I wonder if there is any evidence that they are actually more rigorous and if that helps their graduates.
In his first book published in 1994, David Frum argued that slashing the public subsidy on colleges would make them much more spartan and focused on students with the particular mission of instruction. I don't share the exact zeal of right-libertarianism he put in that section. But going after 529s and publicly underwritten lending for master's programs would probably help cut down the arms race for consumerism. You don't need that much money to run most undergrad majors; it's often a room with books where people meet. It became apparent to a friend and I when studying in Germany just how much money was sloshing around in our private college back home on all sorts of amenities and features that distract from the mission of instruction.
Obviously colleges are not going to like the coming wave of austerity, but it's just unsustainable for everyone to be on the bill for lending into what is increasingly a massive resort with ten different missions all at once. The fact that Biden is effectively turning higher ed into a political machine for grants with his loan changes is not going to make it better. But the real blame rests with what Pelosi and Bush did to graduate lending in 2005, as detailed at further length here in Reason: https://reason.com/2024/02/06/the-real-student-loan-crisis/
Yeah… I went to a school where the only things to do were drink and go to the library, really. Oh, and we had a gym that was like the yard in a prison, housed in some old indoor tennis courts.
I developed a hobby of reading academic papers and whole textbooks on subjects that weren’t even mine. I’m still coasting on that two decades later.
Encourage the use of testing of absolute knowledge rather than reliance on relative class rank by employers so that the terminally-desired knowledge can be both assessed and sought out, rather than pure reliance on selection effects as under the present conditions.
It’ll have to start at the most elite schools that can let employers know what they’re up to so it doesn’t disadvantage students on the job market, eg Princeton or Stanford.
I think this is what British universities try to do. They require faculty to submit their exams a year before the class happens, get it approved by a committee, and then have it graded by someone other than the professor. It sounds like a lot of work. I don’t know if it is all that effective. It certainly makes it hard to teach a class that touches on current research or current events.
I guess I’m a bit of an outlier on this topic (service academy grad) but I’ve seen lots of people who were smart and benefited from a strict and academically rigorous environment. Kids are malleable; it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them would like this sort of thing. Look how many volunteer for sports or fraternities to get the bonding that comes from shared difficulty.
If I were to change something, it would be the composition of admissions officers. Admissions officers are almost universally a bunch of mediocrities with a big soft spot for progressive activism. If they have kids, they probably practice gentle parenting. If they gave grades, they would all be As.
Students know that if they want to get into schools, they have to at least pretend that their goal in life is to start a charity for anxious whales or something. The scary part is that some of these kids aren’t pretending - they end up living in tents when they get a good excuse to do so. They have no interest in studying.
Half baked idea: Replace admissions officers with volunteers who each take a small share of the job remotely. These would end up being partners at law firms or consulting firms or whatever who have capacity to review 50 resumes or so out of duty to the Alma mater. They also would have a good sense of who actually will become a good lawyer or consultant.
My partner's masters degree program is too cheap to hire admissions officers, so they actually do farm out application screening to alumni of the program.
STEM faculty at an ivy here. My undergrad students spend all their time on bullshit, make-work "research" - which is mostly just a rebranding of independent study/reading courses with maybe a bit of data munging tacked on. Meanwhile, they struggle with basic stuff in their core courses...
if this bothers you a lot, I recommend getting involved with the PhD admissions committee and encouraging them to change the admissions process. Right now, undergrad research experience is basically mandatory to be admitted as a PhD student, while grades are relatively less important. The reason for this is that faculty at top universities have decided this is what they care about.
At the very least, depending on how it works in your department, you could start by admitting students to your own group who don't have any undergrad research experience but do have good grades in the core classes.
So, I'm acutely aware of how PhD admissions work these days. Thanks for explaining it to me, though.
The thing is - 90% of the students in my classes doing "research" have no interest in pursuing a PhD.
And the ones who end up going to good PhD programs end up doing something that approximates real research, and they are also the ones who don't have problems in class.
I guess my tone didn't come across -- I understood you knew everything I was telling you. However, I sincerely apologize for being deliberately rude on the internet, it's not productive and doesn't help anything.
I just found it frustrating that you're actually part of the one group of people whose demand for undergraduate research originally created the situation you describe, yet think you are powerless to do anything about it.
I think there are two separate things here - the phd applicants we tend to admit are frankly stellar (I would not have been competitive, and it hasn't been that long since I was applying to schools) - and they have done legitimate research in addition to having done extremely well in school. The world of PhD admissions has gotten insanely competitive, and I don't know how you can't discount legitimate research work done before PhD in evaluating applications, given that grades (even in hard classes) is not a great predictor of the ability to actually be a productive researcher. And I think the problem has gotten harder over time given grade inflation and the tendency of recommendations to be wildly over-enthusiastic.
On the other hand, it saddens me that the path to getting into a good phd program has narrowed significantly, and requires years of careful planning and having the right opportunities (and knowledge about said opportunities). There was an Econ professor posting on twitter a year or so ago at a very good but probably not top-5 department about having applicants with multiple publications in top-tier journals not even making the top 10 in her stack... it's nuts.
But the problem I was talking about is ultimately a bit different - for some reason, everyone at my school "needs" to do "research", in a way that is ultimately pointless and a waste of everyone's time. Most of these students have no interest in grad school, and very little interest or passion for the material they are actually studying, but they feel a deep need to do these extracurriculars at the expense of the stuff they're actually supposed to be learning.
I still am pretty sure that "everyone needs to appear to have done undergrad research" got started as a norm only bc of grad school applications. (Probably include medical school here as well.)
But if it's now an empty signal for industry employers too, or perceived as one by students, I guess it might be out of control.
"I just found it frustrating that you're actually part of the one group of people whose demand for undergraduate research originally created the situation you describe, yet think you are powerless to do anything about it."
In line with yesterday's post, having caused something does not always come with the power to uncause it.
...may I ask what field? The only place where I thought research was a mainstream activity was bio, but there at least you're doing someone else's busywork
And yeah, the lab sciences are different. There is probably some value in the signaling there - if you do a phd in chem or bio, presumably that requires years of working in a lab, so it makes sense to show that you're capable of doing that beforehand.
I work at a top-20 medical school where the students are all heavily involved in research projects with faculty on the side - excessively, in my private opinion. Medical school is hard enough without piling on an additional 10 hours/week of mostly-low impact - as you say, "make-work" - research. Let's focus on getting through the degree and residency and becoming a good doctor, which is the whole point.
Med school admissions also seem nuts to me in that they require so many non-academic activities that, from my observations at least, they heavily incentivize make-work resume padding of the sort you usually associate with undergrad admissions. That said, my background is in law, which is probably too far on the other extreme.
Also STEM Ph.D. My grad school program I graduated from recently overhauled the course track for undergrad students and got rid of Friday classes, all so undergrads could focus more on their own research. Not everyone has to go to grad school!
I think there's more to the connection made between educational rigor and the shift in elite character. As Griffin mentioned, the expectation of effort has been left shifted to before secondary Ed, which seems to me like institutional capture by elite parents, a feedback loop whereby the ideal candidate requires experiences and a background that can really only be reliably had by the children of elites (with some lip service paid, of course, to the poors).
I think this stems from a pretty natural desire for your kids to have it as good or better than you had it, which is a high bar for those who already have it really good. They have worked to make it so their kids are taught the secret handshakes to get into the schools that still drive elite formation, and then once in, all they need is for their kid to do well enough to land a McKinsey internship and go from there.
To be fair, elites have always probably captured these institutions, and I'm not sure if there was ever a time where selection was more egalitarian and rigor more strenuous. Also, grade differentials only matter when attending an insitution isn't enough of a signal - if going to Harvard isn't enough to know whether someone is capable or not, then what grades you got at Harvard matter. My gut is that Ivy schools have very high quality undergrads, so admission is itself enough of a signal for most.
I saw a comment asking us to consider, per yesterday's column, what should be done about this. One solution that came to mind was to work on the admissions side, and adopt something like a UT Austin situation, where elite schools establish a high testing/high school GPA bar and then you lottery from there. This would start to solve the elite admissions problem, and focus the mission of universities on a certain level of academic excellence.
The elite character issue was one of the things about The Holdovers that really stuck with me. Our elites, generally, have lost any sense of noblesse oblige, and visualizing it in terms of military service was an accurate depiction and a striking one. I'm not sure how to reform elite character, but...civic virtue doesn't seem to live there these days.
I’ve never understood the obsession with pushing your children to ”succeed”. I’m reasonably wealthy and highly educated (PhD level) and I don’t care what my son does as long as he is happy and can support himself. It seems so stupid to obsess over class, status and achievment when you have everything you need.
I think that's a fine and fairly benign observation. Joachim is just saying that he wants his son to live a good life, and not care about class. Unless I'm reading this wrong, he's not dismissing a good steady income/education. Just that existing at the very top of society isn't the end all be all.
If your child wants to one day own a home and raise a family in a major metropolitan area, they are going to need to be one of the few thousand highest earners in the world.
Okay. I think a teacher making $40K is better than a business-to-business marketing associate making $400K selling useless "consulting" services (a thing I was part of as a tech writer) or even upcharged versions of a theoretically useful service, like payroll (again, a thing I participated in, including the actual sales presentations).
Money is nice. All things being equal, I would always prefer that you pay me more money rather than less money. But the whole reason that I ended up as a nurse is that making money doing stuff without social value was really unsatisfying and made me really unhappy.
There's nothing wrong with me (or anyone else) feeling that way and making that choice. And, conversely, there just isn't a plausible way to argue that money is a one-to-one measure of the actual social value of a job. It measures things like labor scarcity and resource capture, which is fine, and a lot of people are into it, which is also fine--the pros and cons of this approach is literally a major theme of our culture. But when you go the reductionist route on it, you just turn yourself into a caricature, and you seem smarter than that.
You’re missing the point. Most people making $40k are really struggling and their lives are often very difficult. But at $20/hr they can have the things one needs at some minimal level. Most parents would hope for something better than some minimal level of subsistence.
Do you think your son has the rationality and foresight to make optimal decisions about his future? I’ve always been of the impression that kids choose short term wins and avoid work unless guided otherwise
Responses to this are kind of wild. I think it's good that we don't have an urban-China norm where parents enter their preschooler into pre-professional programs!
unfortunately, your son might find it hard to be happy if all his friends and dating prospects look down on him for not having an elite job. of course there are ways out of that problem, but you either have to live very deliberately, or succeed conventionally. conventional success may be easier.
Maybe. Although the majority of people don't have elite jobs, so he may find he has more friend and dating prospects if interacts with people outside of the small pool.
"unfortunately, your son might find it hard to be happy if all his friends and dating prospects look down on him for not having an elite job...[to avoid this, you] have to live very deliberately"
Those are some pretty crappy "friends" and it doesn't seem that hard to find better ones. Join a bowling league, or something.
Note as well the recent story about UCSD giving a preference in its computer science program for low income students whose parents didn't go to college. This has been heavily criticized including by folks who like traditional affirmative action, because it cannot be gamed.
Most people criticizing UCSD haven't actually looked at the policy. It applies only to students who are changing into selective majors (not just CS, but all several high demand engineering and biology majors). It gives preference to high grades in screening classes, California residents, Pell Grant eligible and first generation students.Still a bad idea but I believe the majority of students in these programs pick their major up front. Also, UCSD has a high share of foreign students, who are the most likely group to be adversely affected. In short, bad policy but lots of nuance here.
It is being criticized because UCSD should just expand its CS program if there is that much demand and qualified applicants, and shrink the departments that no one is interested in.
It is forcing a zero-sum situation where there doesn't need to be one.
'Give the UCs more money' would be a really big policy win, their CS departments absolutely do not fall under declining rigor. Can't do it purely via internal transfers because CS salaries are higher (even for grad students)
But why do they need to expand it? Almost nobody advocating affirmative action was calling for Harvard and Yale to expand their entering class to all who wanted to go there. Because... news flash.... a lot of elites absolutely WANT there to be elite institutions that they and their children have access to. They are fine with equity systems they can game, but not with those they can't.
My understanding is that they aren't limiting admissions to their campus overall. Just the CS program.
The message that comes across is "non-disadvantaged people can attend here, but they are probably going to have to go into one of the trash majors that they are less likely to get a good job with".
They've capped admissions to their CS program for a while (and as I understand it are far from alone in doing so), but the new policy is specifically for students already attending who wish to change their major to CS. It blocks people from applying as English majors and then bailing after year one to get into the more-selective CS program
Not to me. There's no right for elites with a lot of privilege to get a state subsidized education in the most popular major at a selective school. There's lots of other options for them.
If we actually care about equality and equity we need to do a lot more of this (and based on non-gameable class characteristics).
Some wiggle room with “low income/ no college parents.” How many years of nominal non-support before you can disclaim a parent’s income or background? Can you disclaim your parents if say, you don’t get along with them? What about parents who go no-contact with gay or trans???
Also. Does some college but dropped out count? Community college? Not gameable after the fact sure. But a set aside for “non college” might disproportionately favor these liminal people, in the same way affirmative action disproportionately benefits mixed-race applicants and recent immigrants
I found a lot of assigned work in college to be largely useless.
Professors would sometimes say “read this entire book for next week” and then we would discuss very little of it, and also a lot of the book would be poorly written with way too much fluff.
Assignments such as problem sets, essays, projects, etc. really varied in quality. It was also really frustrating when writing assignments would get little feedback.
Quantity ≠ quality, and I think we should be demanding quality assignments before just saying “load on more work, the kids have too much free time!”
Unfortunately, there’s often very little quality control re: teaching, assignments, and course design.
I question now -- and questioned when I was a student, which made me an outlier -- whether the student is the best judge of the "quality" or "usefulness" of an assignment. The assumption that the answer is "yes" seems to be part of the problem that Matt is describing.
I’m not assuming “yes” at all — I totally agree with you 🙂
But I also think it’s not a stretch to say that three different faculty members can teach the same course in different ways with different assignments and have different results in terms of student learning outcomes. Not all assignments are created equally.
And so back to Matt’s point: If we’re going to make a big stink about “students should work harder” or “there should be more assignments” or whatever, we should also be making a stink about trying to ensure that the work that we’re asking them to do is the best that it can be on delivering outcomes. I don’t support piling on busywork for the sake of saying “now the kids are working harder.”
I will also add that, while I agree that students are not always the best at knowing the value of assignments, faculty aren’t necessarily all-knowing either.
1. It can be hard to critically evaluate your own work.
2. Some of the results of student learning outcomes don’t manifest themselves until after the course is over, like when a student is taking a follow-up course or is in the workplace.
3. When you’re already an expert in something, it can be really hard to understand the perspective of a beginner.
4. Faculty often have to bounce between teaching multiple levels of students (e.g. freshmen, grad students) and it can be hard to calibrate your assignments to the perfect level, though hopefully people get better at this with more time and experience.
5. The key credential for many faculty jobs is a PhD—a degree focused on research, not learning how to be a teacher.
6. Plain old disagreement. Faculty members who teach the same course in different ways may simply each think that their own way is best, but that doesn’t mean everyone is right.
Your first sentence notwithstanding, I don't think that we agree at all. Nothing wrong with that. As is so often the case, especially since 10/07/23, in the construction "I agree, but ...", the real message comes after the "but".
It can *both* be the case that students are not always able to judge the quality or usefulness of an assignment (for reasons we might agree on) and faculty are not always able to judge the quality or usefulness of an assignment (for the reasons I listed).
So I was saying that I agree the thing you stated re: students, and adding a thought re: faculty, because I got the sense that perhaps we disagree on the faculty point.
It’s notable that the examples Matt mentions seem very different here! Learning to compose in Latin or Greek seems like teaching a real skill that requires real learning. Learning to memorize poems or dates from the Pelopponesian war seem irrelevant.
Maybe, but as Plato lamented, now that we have writing, it's not as important as it used to be. And now that we can carry unlimited amounts of writing in our pocket, the bigger skill is knowing how to find the thing with all the information you could have memorized, and more.
I can’t speak across domains, but in law and medicine the ability to diagnose problems requires the ability to recall indicia of those problems, however numerous they might be. Maybe AI will replace us all, but until then memory remains a huge part of knowledge, to me.
In the fields I’m more familiar with (math, philosophy, physics, economics) I suppose bigger premium is put on having the kind of understanding that allows you to re-figure-out things rather than memorizing them, so perhaps I don’t put enough emphasis on teaching memory as a skill, especially since there are a decent number of pre-law students that take some of my classes.
I would say emphasize as you fit within your expertise. But, to me, a person with an excellent memory and little else is often worth more than a balanced 110 IQ person. At risk of being redundant, a lot of both law and medicine is pattern recognition and to do them well, you need to know what patterns to look for.
"Professors would sometimes say 'read this entire book for next week' and then we would discuss very little of it, and also a lot of the book would be poorly written with way too much fluff."
Maybe. I wonder whether those professors also were teaching you (intentionally or not) how to find the important parts of a long text.
A not insignificant percentage of my major (biochemistry) takes a knowledge based test (the mcat) at the end of undergrad. You can study for this test but it does create a baseline of “things you need to learn” that probably ensures classes stay somewhat rigorous.
It’s possible but it seems like there has been a reversal on this. A number of schools that dropped the SAT a few years ago have started requiring it again.
Kids primarily hear two messages about the purpose of college: "go to college so you can have a good job" and "you can't miss the college experience." They listen, and think that the point of college is to increase job prospects and to have fun, not to learn. So many of my classmates (graduated 2020 in engineering at a big public university) saw the classes and learning as a game of how-little-can-I-learn-while-still-passing and the resume padding and networking as the real purpose. And like, I don't really blame them? I was annoyed because they whined about hard classes and teachers with high expectations and how "anything I need to know for a job they'll teach me anyway" but their incentives made sense - they wanted a good job and an engineering degree pretty much guarantees one for you
I wish there was a cheaper and easier path towards the credit that a college degree offers in the job market so those that want to demonstrate they would be capable employees had somewhere to go while leaving college for those that want to learn.
The most charitable interpretation of "you can't miss the college experience" is that it's a chance for you to go learn something like Portuguese for no reason at all except that it interests you. But I don't know how often that actually happens in practice.
I think those two things are, by and large, relatively accurate for why we want kids to want to go to college. So I have no problem with those statements.
I'm not sure Matt would either? It seems like he's saying the part where, "...so you can have a good job" should be harder to achieve. Meaning the college should pointedly make academics more difficult in order to pass college (so you can have a good job).
It seems like this will only get worse. Not only does every student have a high tech computer on them at all times, they will soon carry a brilliant intelligent alien with them that can solve almost any problem, answer any question and complete any assignment on their behalf.
Back when I was in college 15 years ago, I used to refer to business, communications, etc. as "catch basin majors." They are designed to keep students enrolled with little demands on the students and little value added. They exist only to collect federal student loan dollars.
And to get you hired. I think a big part of the problem here is that there's a push AND a pull demand. My second job out of college was a combo payroll, HR, and tech support job. The employer required a college degree for my position, but my BA in English and History was fine because the job did not actually require any skills beyond ones that I had when I graduated high school.
Worst of all, the reason it did not require those skills was that the employer had a robust training program to teach all the payroll, HR, tech support stuff, AND they had a must-pass entrance exam on basic math skills as part of the hiring process. The college degree requirement was a pure weed-out / signaling affair. But in my same office there was a wing full of lower-level "associates" who made less money, and the major difference between us and them was that they were not required to have a college degree.
And that, right there, is how you incentivize kids to get a bachelors in business that requires as little work as humanly possible.
I agree generally, but I think the missing piece is that most well run businesses should have a pathway from the lower associate pay role into the higher combo higher paying role for people who demonstrate the necessary aptitude and skills.
Yeah. I think career ladders in general are great and that more businesses should be interested in how you cultivate talent, rather than expecting to hire it.
But, to give the other side their due, I think the flip side is that--speaking as someone who has been a teacher, a corporate trainer, an undergrad instructor, and even a work mentor--teaching people to do stuff is genuinely a hard job with kind of a weird skill set. I bet you have been in some pretty awful corporate training sessions. So it might just be one of those places where the market is struggling, maybe even failing to some degree, to solve a genuinely hard problem.
I agree that teaching people is difficult and many will fail. But as you described in your first post:
"the employer had a robust training program to teach all the payroll, HR, tech support stuff, AND they had a must-pass entrance exam on basic math skills as part of the hiring process."
I work for a firm that has something similar and I've been pleased that we encourage good employees who are in lower echelons to try for the higher postings. To use a very simplistic description, we encourage great enlisted personal to apply for officer level training. (Description only, this is not the military).
Some do fail, but the ones that succeed often end up being some of our best people because they have so much more experience that they can pull from when running into problems.
Sure, but I'm not sure that's actually bad (caveat, if you're accessing good information). The knowledge of facts vs the successful execution of meaningful tasks is a gap a mile wide. With improved access to knowledge and "answers", should more emphasis be placed on larger products, projects, teams, etc? Resourcefulness, coordination, effort, persuasion, things that AI cannot actually do?
Almost all of the world's problems are "here are the known facts, here are the rules and guidelines.... now here is the situation and we need to improve it". Some people can do this really well, and others, well, maybe they're "smart".
Yes, fact-based knowledge matters in my profession (physician), but the real operating challenges are the very human ones and I do not yet see the technology-led solution to most of them.
You need to have a collection of facts and information already acquired to do higher level inference and synthesis when problem solving. If you have to look up things constantly but don't have the base knowledge where to look or what ideas to search from, then you are wasting a lot of time for questions that can be answered relatively quickly.
The problem is the system doesn't teach students how to even follow directions. Just parrot something they glean without any thought and grade inflation/non-zero grading passes incompetents forward. Grades signal competency and comprehension. The greatest travesty is there is a whole cohort of people who are being told they have these qualities when the opposite is true.
When I took my college math classes, Wolfram was capable of solving pretty much every problem in my homework, and I used it extensively. Math class was still challenging and took a lot of critical thinking. Unlike the piece, I think that memorizing sonnets is dumb, but the flip side is that using tools doesn't all of sudden make learning irrelevant.
When I taught myself Taylor expansions for the AP Calc BC test, I remember thinking "this is so dumb, calculators/computers can approximate functions now unlike 300-400 years ago". But after getting farther along in Physics, I realized the utility is really in *understanding* how a function will behave in certain regimes, and therefore knowing what approximations are valid and when.
I have strong feelings about this issue. I was a college professor at Illinois State University starting in 1977 (old man alert here too!). I taught first-generation students, and I LOVED AND RESPECTED THEM. They were grateful and not entitled. I taught in Psychology to primarily education majors---students who wanted to become teachers. I felt a great responsibility to them because they were all serious-of-purpose in becoming good teachers.
I was tough.
When I retired 30 years later I summarized my years of student course ratings. The ratings of me on 'standards" was at the top. I took attendance every class, at the beginning of class. When I was going to lecture over a chapter in the text I gave a 5-point quiz BEFORE the lecture. My exams were hard....half of the exams were essays.
And, the students loved it. My 30-year average of my teaching was off the charts. And it was because of the fact that I set a structure for their courses where they had to be disciplined and study hard outside of class.
Students felt REALLY good getting a passing grade. They knew they had worked hard. It gave them confidence. They would sometimes remark on how structured and demanding I was, but rarely did they complain about it.
I know I prepared them for life as best I could, and I look back at that time with great satisfaction.
It's all about standards. Set them high. Make them study.
My absolute fondest memory was a woman who had a learning disability. She was struggling to get a C, which she needed in order to stay in her program---she wanted to teach learning disabled students. She sat outside my office and studied after class (students often did this). She popped into my office to ask me question after question. She read and read the text.
I happened (fortunately) to be sitting in my office right after final grades were posted, and she stopped by to see her grade. My whole career was worth it seeing the joy in her face when she saw she had earned her C.
(I used to think to myself that if I walked into one of children's classes the next fall and saw any of my students then I would go home and go "ahhhhh!" and know I can relax because I knew they would have a good year)
College is for learning. And students can't learn if they don't spend time. I'm sad to hear what has happened about grade inflation.
I don’t think it’s the availability of grant money that makes the STEM field more rigorous. It’s the fact that if you don’t learn your shit, people will actually die. My husband, who like me is a mechanical engineer, had a professor at his extremely middle-tier state university who refused to give partial credit, because there’s no partial credit if you fuck up a bridge and it collapses. Meanwhile I went to a top 20 private university that was rigorous but honestly I think less rigorous than his program, which was less concerned with keeping applications high so their selectivity would stay low and they could keep their Princeton Review slot.
I used to make a joke about this as a campus tour guide after hearing (but not verifying) that aerospace engineering had tests where you had to get everything right to pass--"who wants to fly on the B- airplane?"
"It’s the fact that if you don’t learn your shit, people will actually die."
One would think that this is all the more true in non-STEM fields: screwing up (say) international relations can start a war.
Edited: This was written late at night, and is a remarkably uncharitable way to look at things. My final sentence used to be:
> But I guess it's easier to deflect blame in that case?
A better final sentence would have been:
> But I guess endeavors in those fields are less brittle, in the sense that their failure (or success!) can rarely be traced to the failure or success of one particular step/detail.
Professor talking here. My particular bee in my bonnet that contributes to this is the required end of term teaching evaluations. Instead of judging quality of instruction by, say, measuring how much students learn in a class, departments judge me by how much my students say they like me. It's like a baking contest where instead of tasting the finished cake we ask whether the flour and eggs enjoyed the process. We do need feedback, but we never really judge whether the student actually learned what was on the syllabus. One of my colleagues had the lowest dept evals and students complained how boring he was, but as his class was a pre-req to mine, I noticed his students knew their stuff compared to the popular prof's.
My sophomore year, I had a TA who (in retrospect kind of inappropriately) laid out the exact same logic to the class before handing out evaluations for us to fill out. So from then on, I always just gave full marks for all the teachers, regardless of whether I liked them.
Student evaluations as a graduate TA helped me realize I was pretty bad at teaching. I didn't feel very motivated to improve since I disliked teaching. I had previously figured that everybody hates parts of their jobs, but the evaluations helped me see that was unfair to the students. I ended up switching careers away from academia and I suspect I'm much happier for it.
That said, the comments that I seemed boring or that they disliked the class weren't very useful. The comments that I wasn't very good at explaining concepts on the students' level were more convincing/useful.
Reminds me of an event in Uni where we had a new (very Russian) teacher teaching, "Elecromagnetics and Wave Equations," in EE. It was junior year, so the students had been together for a while and knew each other. The teacher came in and started writing these massive multivariable calculus equations on the board and within moments we were looking at each other with wide eyes. Nobody said anything. It was incomprehensible to all of us but we were too embarrassed to say anything.. Six weeks later at the first test, the highest grade was in the 20's (percent). Candid discussions followed.
Most of the course materials were pretty standardized (calculus II), so I don't think it was as bad as that. Some of the students made tons of basic algebra errors (e.g. replacing 1/(x+y) with 1/x+1/y), and I didn't know how to help them. Though perhaps from your prof's perspective, complicated PDEs were on that level of "basic".
Stories like this are rampant. One of my profs in grad school stared us down and said, "You know... we always know who wrote what." Ok, then!
I would not want to be evaluated on my students' evaluations, but reading the ones my husband got when he taught could be fun. He had one that said, "At least sometimes his jokes are funny." that he taped to his wall. Another was, "He might be a genius or he might be a robot."
I tell my kids to use "Rate My Professor," like any rating site. Don't look at the numbers, but at the comments. When substantive comments say stuff like, "Good professor, but expects you to do the work," even if the overall rating is low, that is probably the prof you want to take.
Made me laugh. My favorite that I've received was, "He thinks he's funny."
Schools should do it this way with their official evals. Don't ask the kids to "rate" the professors at all. Just give them the opportunity to provide non-numerical feedback in the form of a brief essay.
I think Brown University, and maybe some others, used to take that same approach to grades. They didn’t give letters (or numbers) but just wrote comments. Unfortunately, employers don’t want to read 24 brief letters of recommendation - they just want to see a numerical average. (At least, I assume employers look at GPA?)
When I first sought a job in the public sector my poor prospective employer got a transcript that included a mix of 4 point scale grades from my masters program, the weird everyone passes but the top five percent get D for distinguished and the next five percent get E for excellent system from Law Program and my British grades from my post graduate program at Oxford that had been transferred to my weird US concurrent graduate degree mix. In one interview, the interviewer just looked at the weird uncalculated mix and asked me whether I thought my grades in grad school were "good, very good, or only okay" in an obviously desperate attempt to figure out what the hell he was looking at. I told him that I thought my grades accurately reflected the level of mastery I had achieved in each of the classes that I had taken which is really the fundamental purpose of grades and on that basis I thought they were excellent. He found that answer unhelpful but gave me the job anyway.
I think GPA still matters a lot if you're graduating from a school that's either very large or not extremely selective or both. But it matters less if you're graduating from a school like Brown.
Even so, Brown did switch over to letter grades.
If schools wanted to fix the issue it's easy. Just let profs give arbitrary numbers as grades and publish the first 3 moments of the grade distribution. Or just normalize it and also do a regression comparing students in that class to the average student.
Any concerns about the effect of curving the class are small compared to the effect we see now of who taught the class.
Maybe in some fields but not really no.
I'm a programmer. If I'm interviewing a prospective job candidate fresh out of school a GPA of <3.0 would be a red flag to me that might make me extra careful about verifying they knew their stuff. I have limited time to do interviews so it might be a useful filter.
But that's about it.
This negative correlation is real: there’s evidence from the Air Force Academy (Carrol and West) and an Italian university (Braga et al) that students randomly assigned to instructors with worse evaluations do better later.
Because students are not necessarily experts on assessing instruction quality and many bad students just use evaluations as an opportunity to retaliate.
Interesting.
Oooh do I hear you on this. One of the most popular professors in my school teachers a prerequisite for my course. He’s an entertaining man, but his students don’t learn anything other than his particular (and peculiar) takes on the subject.
I think a professor has a duty to not be boring, in addition to effectively conveying material and achieving high student outcomes by the time the class is over. I know that student evals are often ridiculous and unfair, but sometimes they are not.
Too many professors do things “their way”, without regard to student enjoyment, and dismiss complaints about their teaching by blaming it on students resisting high standards.
We have all had high quality professors who also were good at engaging students. If you don’t have that talent, that’s Ok, but don’t pretend like boring=high quality.
Matt, I appreciate your comment. I couldn't agree more that "boring" does not equal "good," but perhaps it was my anecdote about the boring prof being a really good teacher that led to this post. My point was, he was a good teacher if you judged by what his students learned but a poor teacher if judged by the evaluations. What I am objecting to is that the teaching evaluations do not actually evaluate for what students learn, they evaluate for what students like. I will also offer this, I get very high teaching evaluations. And, as I also said, I do want the feedback, but while telling me "I couldn't read your handwriting" is really useful, and telling me "you're funny," is charming, none of the evaluations tell me what was actually learned because that is something even the students cannot assess well. I, like everyone, get the occasional, "he sucks as a teacher," but what would really help is if I understood whether the student thinks that because I really do stink at my job or because the student didn't put in the hours and is failing the course. An evaluation of the finished product would tell me whether I need to change my lessons. Thank you for your comment.
There was a wonderful tweet last week about a student evaluation complaining that the prof had no time management skills and ran over by 30 minutes every lecture.
The student did not realize it was a 90 minute class.
Considering what they pay them, you are likely to get one or the other (entertaining/capable of teaching) but not both. Which would you prefer?
Sufficiently-good standardized testing that can try to assess before- and after-learning gains would seem to be one possible solution, no?
The most fundamental difficulty that I expect is being run into is that we exist in a world in which relative rather than absolute rankings matter as much or more than underlying competence once someone has gained entry into a given domain, which in turn creates essentially inexorable demand-side pressure for grade inflation because "how much did I learn?" is genuinely not the metric on which recipients of grades expect to be judged. A class in which one learned a lot relative to baseline but graduated with a C+ genuinely looks worse on a transcript--and is in some respects potentially less valuable to a graduated student--than a total gut in which they received an A.
Something like this, yes. One colleague opined we should just give last year's final on the first day of class and compare it to the end of term final 3 months later as a good evaluation of how much they learned. At my university, we have a 5 year peer review where a committee looks at your courses. But since your faculty peers don't really want to be hard asses, you typically pass, and if they are hard asses, you can scream "academic freedom" and the Chronicle of Higher Ed will probably make you a martyr. ;-)
I think British universities try to make all tests standardized. This causes massive headaches for faculty, who have to structure everything about their class a year before they even teach it, and can’t respond to current events or new discoveries or changes in student interest.
Honestly I can think of few if any classes I've taken that had intervening events on the order of a year that would have altered the curriculum, though. Isn't the more typical complaint that new editions of textbooks are naked cash grabs with no substantive new material?
Probably right for the majority of undergrad classes.
I was just thinking about this because the most recent class I taught was on artificial intelligence and philosophy of language, and I was talking to a friend at a British university as I was preparing it. None of the assigned readings ended up being published within a year of class date, but I did include some on supplementary readings that had been published after class started.
I don’t think you can have measurable improvement through study at an elite school - maxing out the measurement would be pretty much overnight turn into necessary-but-not-remotely-sufficient for admission.
Yep. It’s the combo of evals and not wanting your students to be penalized vs the conventional expectations.
I must be an outlier, but I can remember at least twice a gave a professor a great eval even though I bombed the class. One of them was Michael Javen Fortner, who wrote a book called 'The Black Silent Majority" that got a little buzz a few years back. Great professor, smart guy, hard class, and I failed that class spectacularly, but he did a great job teaching it.
I was at an event for instructional designers recently and someone asked "If we all know student evaluations are terrible and don't work, why do we do them at all?"
Everyone kind of sat in silence for a minute and then started trying to explain how they would make them better, but no one was really willing to just say "yeah these are bad and let's not do them."
Same reason we do airport security, which are also terrible and don't work.
Gives the appearance to the students that there is some recourse for noting bad professors.
And it would be bad enough if that's all it was - something to make the students feel better and then shove into a door and never look at again.
But faculty are at least made to think that the evaluations matter and that they should care about them!
If it's any consolation, at my school the professor who got the best student rankings was invariably fired. It wasn't official policy, it was just that any professor who spent that much time on his students couldn't possibly do the quality of research required.
Yeah, the whole "publish or perish" discussion needs its own Slow Boring take. I mean, where do you even start? I got tenure (twice). I was able to both publish well and teach well. But, I also know really great teachers who just had bad luck on research and that are rocking it now at colleges that don't have the research part. I'm not sure the school that let them go is better off in that deal. (Pssst. Aren't we telling these kids, they should come here to get a great education?) Just me, but I think tenure is past its sell-by date. There was a time that you had to protect people to do controversial research, and, maybe you still do though it seems like a simple contract of "you can't fire me if I publish something controversial," is all you need. One of the big negative externalities tenure based on research created is exactly what you are talking about: you hire for research, hope the teaching is good enough, and then when someone proves they are awesome in the classroom but so-so on the research, the teaching doesn't get rewarded as much. Teaching does matter, but you are right, it isn't the same as the research part.
I get very frustrated that it seems like not enough people are thinking holistically about this problem and imagining what a functional academic department that produces good research and educates students would actually look like, then trying to build that.
Cal Newport threw out the idea on his podcast that if he were starting a new university and wanted to poach the best faculty from the Ivies he would lead the pitch with "at this school you do not need to have an email account"
Faculty spend so much time doing low-value work, and it would be completely possible to have a lot more administrative support specifically around scheduling and communications.
Of course, the flip side of this is that a lot of faculty don't want to be "managed" in this way. But I would love to see a top school just get some buy in at a smaller department and try stuff like this from time to time.
> I think tenure is past its sell-by date.
Sometimes I feel like I'm on an island saying that around my colleagues.
Aha! So yours are the other footprints I find on the beach!!
Honestly I would feel really elitist saying unlike most people in America, I deserve a job for life no matter what I do. Not to mention that I felt like tenure was the lowest possible bar to clear, and I'm currently striving for much more (more grants, more papers, a bigger lab, etc.). And I'm honestly kind of bitter at times about some of my colleagues who are no longer "research active" (to use the official term) yet get to coast for 10-20 years (or more!) because they worked hard for a little while in their life.
We could shut down the bar and not be done with this subject. Instead of "congrats you have tenure!" Why not, "congrats we won't bug you again for maybe 5-6 years."
Yeah, it was definitely too far in the other direction. Students were viewed as a necessary evil.
Once you've achieved tenure do you care what your student's think? I was under the impression that once tenured the rewards/compensation you receive are mostly a function of bargained contracts plus some ability to garner outside grants.
Another piece of this is that tenured profs teach an ever-dwindling number of classes and students at many institutions. A lot of grading ends up being done by adjuncts, grad students, "visiting" (Non-TT), and not-yet-tenured faculty. I don't have the exact numbers to cite, so i will refrain from saying "most grading."
This is second-hand from contract negotiations (so take it with a grain of salt). But at the large public university I teach at, I was told it is about a third tenure/tenure track, a third non-tenure/full-time/contract, and a third adjunct.
This seemed accurate based on my experience. Not sure about other universities however.
People say this a lot but I never see numbers. I want to know if this is being driven by some particular fields, or some particular classes of institutions.
NCES collects data on %s of full-time instructional faculty with tenure. See: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_316.80.asp?current=yes and https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_316.81.asp?current=yes. These data don't show what proportion of classes are taught by tenured faculty (for example you could theoretically have a bulk of classes taught by NT faculty while tenured faculty teach fewer, or teach smaller classes with fewer students).
That's helpful that this is restricted to full-time faculty! When I've seen numbers just as percentage of "faculty", I've been wondering whether individuals with part-time employment at multiple institutions get counted multiple times, and whether people like Joe Biden (who was hired for a semester or two at U Penn to teach a capstone seminar) were getting counted as non-tenured individuals.
I do see a trend here, both in terms of individuals at institutions without a tenure system, and towards less tenure at institutions with a tenure system. But I still want to know if this is varied by field, if it's the creation of non-tenure but relatively good condition streams like the "Instructional Professor", or if it's lots of adjuncts teaching freshman writing, or what.
Anecdotally, maybe 20% of our department isn't tenure-track, but for most purposes, they are treated the same as us TT faculty, they make almost as much as us (albeit not counting summer salary and with a lower ceiling over time), and none of them have ever been fired.
Higher ed isn’t about education any more
Whatever your criticisms of higher ed, I'm not sure generalized statements like this are fully accurate. The US still has world class universities producing world class students who go on to become leaders in science, business, etc. And I still think it's generally true that if you're in college and you want a good education, you can still get one.
Of course there's problems! And they're probably getting worse (ie. this piece). But as always, the trust exists in the muddy middle.
1. Most US students go to non-world-class universities.
2. The truth is not always in the muddy middle.
People forget that first bit!
Essentially no one attends a competitive institution (how could they) and, as Matt points out, those are doing quite a bit of coasting on just selecting people who perform better anyway. There’s also the problem that there’s an entire literature now on how life outcomes for people attending competitive universities are about the selection effect, there appears to be little or no learning.
From my experience and from I know from my friends still in that world, administrators do not support faculty, do not reward teaching, and keep mandating unpaid labor unrelated to educating to faculty.
No one gets tenure for teaching and the whole online student evaluation system of instructors is a joke.
My point is leadership does not reward good educators.
I've never worked at a university with a strong union and I am not in a union, nor any of my colleagues that I know of. In my case, yes, I would say the teaching evals still matter for annual reviews and the 5-year post tenure reviews.
Fair enough, Most of my friends who are professors work at a big state university, two others are at Ivies.
Very few instructors are tenured faculty, and moreover the latter have TAs grading for them more often than not. The vast majority undergraduate students will have the overwhelming majority of their grading done by instructors who aren’t tenured.
Data point. I am tenured, and I do all of my own grading.
Yeah, I'm a little out of date and only a sample of one, but certainly not "very few" or "overwhelming majority"--I would say about half of my undergrad instructors were at least tenure-track, and more than half of my grad instructors were tenured outright (I can only think of one offhand who was not). I can think of only one grad course that was not instructor-graded.
Any business book will tell you that feedback should be specific and actionable. College students generally have no idea how to give that feedback, and numerical ratings are the least specific / actionable way possible to deliver feedback. I feel for you :/
I agree, but what do you propose as an alternative.
Evals aren't everything but there are alot of profs who are dicks to students for no reason other than bc that's how it was done in their day or to assert their authority.
Without evals the incentivizes are just to make yourself look better by assigning the maximal amount of hw. Probably students should do more work but you don't want professors to basically be incentivized to just suck all the student time so they look better than the profs in the other classes the students take.
But then make that an evaluation and don't pretend it's anything else. "On a scale from 1 to 5 how much of a dick was your prof?" But don't call it a teaching evaluation. As to what to do? A handful of random test questions based on the course syllabus written by another prof and administered along with the final that the prof never sees or grades might be a way to start. Or standardized tests at least on some of the syllabus material. We have a gazillion colleges of ed, I'm sure someone has figured this out.
Replacing evals with some objective evaluation of learning would be great and all but it also eliminates any discretion in what to teach and makes the choice of evaluating tests a huge flash point within departments.
Asking more questions doesn't force anyone to use the results and lots of departments don't really pay too much attention to these numbers.
My sense is that the evals persist because most profs strongly prefer the current system of very light interference into what they teach and how to a much more invasive common curriculum.
I have taught as an adjunct at local community colleges, for continuing ed classes and used to TA at my university while still a student. I feel like the most honest were probably for the continuing ed classes since those were not graded and they probably made the most sense since those folks really do want to know who is likely to get folks to sign up for more. I would say that about 90% of the comments that I got were about my humor rather than my teaching they were flattering but not that helpful.
But I did have one friend who always looked up the rate my prof comments on everyone she met who she discovered taught anywhere and would often share the more interesting ones. I have definitely seen some really horrid one about folks who people said "were less helpful than asking a random guy as best buys to explain computer science" or "were utterly unable to explain anything in a way that made sense" or "gave a weird and creepy vibe." These were mostly for friends' spouses and dates. I confess that they all seemed likely to be pretty spot on and were all for folks who I wouldn't ask to teach me anything.
My sense is that the evaluations probably do help weed out some folks who should not be teaching but the comments are better than the scores.
Being evaluated by student evals seems kind of flawed but we were able to see the scores and feedback ourselves as students and I always felt that was helpful. Some highly regarded profs clearly are just phoning it in with the undergrads and its fine to want to skip those, likewise some people are just dickheads and it's fine if students who are paying a lot of money to go to college want to avoid that. (Paul's act might have served some purpose in high school but by the time I was in college I would have absolutely no patience for having to "up manage" his various emotional issues.)
The 60's spike in GPAs, at least at top schools, probably reflected a genuine increase in intellectual aptitude more than any change in values. Jerome Karabel discusses this at length in The Chosen (2005), about the history of standardized testing, but broadly speaking, this is when the Ivies consciously pivoted from catering to amiable well-connected old-money types (think G.W. Bush) to seeking out the strongest students (it's also about when 50 years of de facto Jewish quotas finally collapsed). Average SAT scores at H/Y/P went up something like 150 points in the course of the decade.
Something similar is at least partly happening today at the same schools. The US population grew by 50% from 1980 to 202, the overall number of undergrad students increased by the same amount, but Harvard's incoming class remained essentially the same.
This is exasperating. So many implicit assumptions here.
I'm not clear if you're agreeing with ML that there are other implicit assumptions spoiling things and ML is right to point them out or that ML is making a bunch of implicit assumptions that you disagree with, in which case could you spell out a few?
Sure. He assumes that population size is of key importance to determine the quality of the top students. That's obviously not true, otherwise every country would have roughly the same number of Nobel laureates per capita, for instance. Far more important than population size is the quality of k-12 education, social norms and expectations etc.
Another implicit assumption is that Harvard is actually looking for the best students, and has been doing so in essentially the same manner throughout this period. That's also incorrect. Harvard could easily have a far better student body from the standpoint of pure academic preparedness or ability. It's not even close to filing its seats with literally the best young minds America currently has to offer, nor does it even attempt it.
A third is that, contextually, ML seems to suggest that grade inflation has anything to do with the quality of the work prodcued. That too is implausible. IF anything there is a lot of evidence that the quality of students' work in recent years has been dropping, even as grades are rising. In fact there was an Atlantic(?) article using Harvard specifically as an example for this phenomenon of dropping students' performance.
These are just a few oof the ways why the above is totally off the mark.
Thanks for the answer!
Population size increasing while holding everything else constant (including # of spots at elite universities) should make it easier for them to select for better students. The acceptance rate at Harvard when I started undergraduate (not at Harvard) was around 18%, now it's around 5%.
That's an explanation that would naturally lead to a better student body and therefore better students.
I think there _are_ as you say reasons to doubt that's an/the explanation, but it's a reasonable baseline assumption and benefits from an explanation such as yours why you don't think that's the case.
Fair enough. My “exasperation” was at how common this misconception (as I see it) is- to the point that a couple of different people mention it on this very discussion, so it gets tiring for me to counter argue all over again each and every time.
The spike happened everywhere though, not just top schools, so I think the Vietnam attribution is probably fair nationally.
Do you have a good sources for this? (Ideally one that's truly national - I'm sure GPAs at Tier 2 schools went up for the same reason as at Ivies, but if ~all schools saw this pattern the Vietnam answer would be more convincing)
https://gradeinflation.com
This is my biggest problem with this line of argument, especially for elite schools. There seems to be some sort of normative assumption that it would be good for some kids to get bad grades even though we spend enormous resources these days preventing the kids who would get the bad grades from getting into the school in the first place.
I also think about this with regard to what grades are *for*, something this piece totally ignores. As far as I can tell, the only people who care about grades in college are grad school admissions committees. But what are the grades telling them.
My wife did her PhD in a science discipline at an Ivy and then became a professor at a mid-tier state school. At both places she taught a class called something like "Intro Statistics for [Discipline] Majors," but the courses were nothing like each other. At the Ivy she says she covered at least 3x more material in a semester than at the state school. Like, one place they finished the text book and one place the students could not handle that at all. A below average student in her class at the Ivy learned far more statistics than the very best student in her state school class, but the argument that lots of people make is that the Ivy student should get a B- or whatever while the other kid gets an A. But that's basically conveying false information! The admissions committee that's looking at transcripts is being misled about the relative statistics knowledge of those two students!
Maybe once upon a time there were a lot of gentleman wandering around at Dartmouth and Princeton who truly earned their "gentleman's Cs," but outside the odd literal Rockefeller those guys are all partying at safety schools now while even Andover only sends their five smartest students to Yale.
Really, really smart column, Matt. I especially liked the point about how a clearly stated and well-understood mission helps structure disagreements and manage diversity. Really good point.
Google appears to be relearning this lesson, as they recently fired 28 people for being confused about the mission of the organization, which is the fault of Google's leadership. Hopefully universities will act similarly when students (and, often, professors and staff) get confused about whether they are there for academics or activism.
" a clearly stated and well-understood mission helps structure disagreements and manage diversity" the military and pro sports, probably the two most diverse and integrated institutions in American life, are great examples of this.
Fabulous comment, would heart again.
Can you expand on the military bit? It seems to me that disagreements are managed by top-down authority. You really wouldn’t want a soldier to have personal conviction about any particular mission, since they may be tasked to a completely different one at any moment.
The military has a pretty clear mission: keeping America safe, and being prepared to do what's necessary to keep America safe. Any other concerns are secondary to that. If two people come from radically different backgrounds and otherwise have radically different values, but they agree on the mission, that can help them maintain a relationship with each other.
Were our soldiers in Vietnam personally bought into Kissinger's ideas about containing the Communists? Did those prosecuting the Gulf War feel a visceral connection between Kuwaiti sovereignty and the safety of their families at home? Did those invading Iraq buy the WMD thing?
I don't doubt that the military works, but I don't think it's because our servicemen are all personally aligned on the geopolitical ends they're working towards.
I interpreted this column as an oblique criticism of the current campus protests.
I hope not, because, what, 1% of the students are involved in the protests?
Kinda a sequitur to your comment: I'm so confused by the student protests on universities. What do the students want universities, their presidents, and their professors, to do about the war in the middle east?
Generally speaking, to financial divest from certain companies, or from Israel, or some combination. Columbia's protestors for example have as their #1 demand financial divestment from certain ETFs that are linked to Israel in some way.
While I think the goals are silly, they are in fact often protesting for actionable goals their university could take.
It's important to bear in mind that disdaining meritocracy is in fact an EXPRESSION of meritocracy in 21st-century elite culture. You work insanely hard to get into the right college and secure your elite status, then you are enculturated into elite norms at college, norms which includes showily disdaining the very hard work you did to get there. This is particularly potent where we live, media; it's a culture of super-intense type-A people who have collectively decided that being straightforward about the effort you've expended to get where you are is somehow to bow down to the Man. This commitment is not actually anti-meritocracy as such. It's just a rational calculation about the importance of demonstrating fealty to the value of their peers. They keep climbing the ladder by pretending not to care about climbing it.
To the degree that there's philosophical justification of this stance, it's tied up in the witless "anti-work" thing. (The left is about labor, in multiple meanings of the word, for the record.) But it's lame to publicly care, the days.
I think this is, to a certain extent, a journalism/arts/academia-specific thing— and a product of specific material conditions in those fields. Most people who succeed in those fields are smart and hardworking, but because the set of good jobs and other rewards is small relative to the number of aspirants (and shrinking), non-merit differentiators tend to be the difference between success and failure. In that context, talking about the role of merit and hard work is hollow (for the unsuccessful) and gauche (for the successful).
By contrast, if you’re a really smart doctor, lawyer, programmer, accountant, etc and you work hard, you’re almost certain to get at least a decent job.
I can't upvote this enough: my wife's department gets >150 applications for every tenure-track position, and close to a hundred of them are credible. My software company usually gets ~10-15 applications for each position, only two or three of which are legit. (This would be different at Google, Meta, etc..)
It's an enormous structural difference that distorts people's understanding of merit, for almost any definition of merit.
Yeah, like, I applied to 60-some academic jobs and got literally zero response, but then literally got the first private-sector job I applied for (with a prestigious employer which paid me over 150k/year right out of the gate.) The whiplash was wild.
This is also my experience.
+1
I think an underappreciated part of the "meritocracy" discussion is that both "merit" itself and the measurability of merit have really sharp limitations under a variety of circumstances, but that's a hard thing for people to grok, because for genuinely understandable reasons it often cuts against both their personal interests and their underlying sense of how the world works.
The correlations between the various cognitive measures whose shared factor component led Arthur Spearman et al to hypothesize general intelligence start to break down when you get to really high levels. I think this is kind of a metaphor for everything else too. (Much easier to demarcate basic competence vs incompetence than exceptional excellence vs mere solid performance.)
Yeah. I think there are also really big circumstance and time problems. Like, just to take a really obvious example, if you hire Albert Einstein you aren't actually getting the same Albert Einstein at various points in his career and life, and that is true of literally all humans at all times. Anyone who is into sports knows this--it's why sports remain interesting, rather than being a "solved" problem.
Napoleon pre-Peninsular War vs Napoleon post-Peninsular War is another good example-- unparalleled GOAT tactical military genius when he's working with a high-morale mostly-French army, he can move it quickly using good central European roads, and his enemies haven't effectively adapted their army organization and tactics to counter him; gifted but often quite fallible commander as he starts to rely more on less motivated auxiliaries, wages campaigns with tougher supply and mobility conditions, and his enemies start figuring out how to copy him.
Oh, another complicating factor-- generally, if you're really successful at something, that success is often the consequence of a few small parts of your overall effort, with most of what you do washing out.
For example, I run a somewhat-but-not-extremely leveraged mix of long and short positions in my personal brokerage account. Schwab's performance calculator says that I have a 44% cumulative rate of return over the past year (vs 23% for the S&P 500 or 26% for Nasdaq).
Superficially, that looks like investing skill, but most of the return came from a successful bet on big tech stock performance divergence (long NVDA, TSM, AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL; short TSLA and AAPL), with the net performance of most of my other trades coming out as a wash. There's a solid chance that I just got lucky and that I'll see significantly worse returns in future years.
But most investors' performance breakdowns look sort of like this, and consequently measuring skill is actually really hard!
I don’t think this is actually true
Being vocally anti-meritocracy is very much an elite opinion.
My point is that DeBoer is wrong that this opinion is widely held and often expressed in elite spaces. Source: I pay attention to things.
I didn't go to Yale, but I also pay attention to things! Such as:
Vox: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocracy-economic-mobility-daniel-markovits
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/sunday/wasps-meritocracy-ross-douthat.html
Princeton: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you
Duke: https://socialequity.duke.edu/news/the-deep-rooted-myth-of-meritocracy-is-widening-the-racial-wealth-gap/
Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2021/04/rise-of-the-meritocracy-michael-young
I can find countless more examples of this opinion being expressed in elite spaces if you're up for changing you mind.
Again, this does not prove that the opinion is widely held and often expressed. You have pointed towards five articles. I am saying that among my peers, it is not the case that people walk around disparaging meritocracy or downplaying their own hard work—in fact, the opposite; people complain about their workloads all the time.
I'll amend my opinion -- I think people widely hold the belief that meritocracy is good but in elite spaces, will express the opposite opinion.
And while I'm sure plenty of your peers complain about having a lot of work to do (which is about the least unique thing imaginable), I don't see a lot of defenses of meritocracy coming from elite spaces. Sure I only provided you with five articles, can you provide me with one from an elite institution that defends meritocracy?
Here are five more in opposition to it btw:
Yale: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-meritocracy-worsens-inequality-and-makes-even-the-rich-miserable
The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/is-meritocracy-making-everyone-miserable
MIT: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-meritocracy-runs-deep-in-american-history/
The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/meritocracy/418074/
Slow Boring: https://www.slowboring.com/p/meritocracy-is-bad
Do you work in media? And what do you want me to do, exactly - commission a poll in which people directly acknowledge their self-interested hypocrisy?
Just remember, these types of opinions are defined in opposition to a real idea and real culture that exists.
right -- and being for meritocracy is such a putatively banal and obvious position ("do you support or oppose people being rewarded for their talent and effort vs some other alternative") *that the only people who would oppose it* would be people at some intellectual vanguard.
Are you trying to make a substantive point about the quality or value of the anti-meritocracy discussion, or only the point that it exists in "elite spaces"? The thrust of much of the meritocracy discussion is that the thing we call "meritocracy" (especially when it comes to competitive college admissions) is false in the sense that it tends to reflect the social standing and economic resources of the applicants' parents, rather than the inherent merit of the applicants. It's an argument that the system is "rigged" in favor of those with generational social and economic advantages. It's an argument that a system offering more and better opportunities to those with just as much "merit" but without such inherited advantages would serve us better as a society. I don't think this analysis or these ideas are confined to elite writings in elite spaces. I think they are both painfully obvious and broadly shared across the political spectrum. Nor do I think the discussion of meritocracy touches on the value of "hard work" in any meaningful way, except to the extent it criticizes the kind of "fake work" that pads resumes and applications or that strives for somewhat meaningless marginal increases in standardized test scores. Nobody thinks that math tutoring is bad for kids, or that kids knowing more math is bad for society. Hard work and striving for excellence is not something that elites or non-elites denigrate. Indeed, the critique of Michael Sandel (as elite as it gets) is that we have created a system that tries to short-circuit the actual attainment of meritorious achievement by relying on the "reflected glory" provided by institutional credentials. It's "worth it" for parents to bribe their under-achieving children into Ivy League schools because the credential can substitute for the actual work.
Would you personally publish an article defending common criticism of meritocracy (eg, disparate outcomes) and the resulting elitism? If so, would you expect your argument to be broadly accepted by your peers?
Most of my peers would not read the article and if I took the hardline anti-merit view probably would not agree with me.
You are not answering his question directly.
Being vocally (in the sense of writing NYT articles) pro or anti anything is obviously an elite phenomenon. The crazy people on the subway ranting about 'the man' are pretty anti-meritocracy though
The last part definitely is. The notion that work is terrible and nobody should have to do it is (1) a recent innovation and (2) a betrayal of core left values about the value and dignity of work and working people.
“ The notion that work is terrible and nobody should have to do it is (1) a recent innovation”
I’m not sure I understand. The idea that gentleman didn’t work is as old as civilization. Or do you mean that the peasants also shouldn’t have to work?
Obviously elites found various reasons to avoid work. But as Freddie says, that was an aristocratic right wing view of the world.
That depends on what you mean by “recent.”
For example, “…to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner…” has been around for a while now. (A more recent version is, “If you want to be photographer, a writer, an artist, a musician, you can do so.”)
Hardly a betrayal of core left values.
Your first quote isn't anti-work. It's very pro-work.
The notion that elite pursuits are what the Left is all about (the second quote) is new and is indeed a betrayal of core Left values.
It’s not pro-work, it pro-do-whatever-you-want.
The notion that you exist to do whatever you want with no obligations to your fellow human beings is the center of right-libertarianism. It isn't "left" at all. Left is from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Which means we don't do whatever we want without regard to our communities' needs.
And it is not a notion widely held in elite institutions, which I know because I talk to my peers.
I see it often enough in the wild....
The people who like to publish takes and generally be vocal are a self-selected bunch
Undergraduates don’t represent the views of elite institutions…
Buddy I talk to my professors too and if anything they are more pro-merit on average...not sure what you are trying to prove here but if the argument is that you guys know what people at elite schools think better than I do, then sorry but you just don't.
Dear Milan,
It is entirely possible* that you are correct in your claim that you are the ultimate knower of what people at elite schools think. However, I thought it is worth noting that condescension (“buddy” etc) is not a great way of convincing people and also not a great look.
I think your previous interactions with THPacis on other subjects are coloring your interaction here, to your detriment.
Gotta throw the flag here. Even Daniel Markovits?
https://www.amazon.com/Meritocracy-Trap-Foundational-Inequality-Dismantles/dp/0735221995
Yeah, I think the whole hubbub about the canceled valedictorian speech at USC is a good example of this. It became a national news story because of lot of people in elite spaces thought this was unfair (she worked so hard, she deserves the speech etc), when of course the whole idea that whoever gets the highest grades in a class of thousands should get a special speech to tell everyone what they think is kind of the whole idea of "meritocracy" in a nutshell. I think a lot of people at Harvard etc would be aghast if you replaced valedictorian speeches with a "democratic" system of say having students elect their own speaker prom king style or picked someone at random, a true egalitarian option I favor.
It sounds like grades get a set of a few dozen students and then a faculty committee chose from among those students. I’m not sure whether there was a formal application or recommendation letters or anything.
That's a great encapsulation of the commitment to meritocracy (and Milan's point) right there, they have their own little mini "meritocratic" college acceptance system to pick the valedictorian, which of course is in reality somewhat subjective.
It's probably easier to align subjective metrics with "real merit" (whatever that is) than objective metrics! (I'd rather have a valedictorian with a 3.999 GPA who wrote some really impressive term papers but got one A- in freshman year, than a valedictorian with a 4.000 GPA who got straight A's that were all just perfectly by-the-books with nothing especially impressive.)
I'd rather just not have valedictorians
I took Freddie to be talking about influential adults in positions of responsibility.
Edit: scratch the "positions of responsibility" part. I overlooked the bit about anti-work. Just "influential adults".
Edit 2: also, not intended as a roast.
Frankly it's better as a much needed roast.
Elites disdaining meritocracy is as old as time itself. It's just that in the past the disdain was directed more at those who had to work to get into elite circles as opposed to being born into it. A mark of being a "true" elite was someone who didn't work. There is a reason that one of the most famous jokes in Downton Abbey is the Dowager Countess exclaiming "what's a weekend?".
The social order has obviously changed a lot since then. And one important way is there is a reason both Milan and I are probably especially put off by this description you're putting out. Milan is talking about his friend group, but there is something else likely tying Milan and I's reaction to this post; we're both Indian. Because Indian Americans have the highest median incomes in America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income) which means were' decidedly part of the elite or at least elite adjacent (and definitely part of it at elite colleges) and let me tell you that disdaining hard work is decidedly NOT part of the culture. In fact I'd say it's the opposite; I can't tell you often I've heard about various stories about how many hours kids put in (or parents talking about the hours their kids put in) and my first reaction is "this sounds like a pretty over exaggeration here". But the point being, disdaining meritocracy is extremely NOT part of the culture.
Isn’t the problem with this argument that many people who get into elite colleges do so without much merit / without working insanely hard (because they are legacies, athletes, families made a donation, etc)?
My sense is that people who genuinely did work insanely hard are proud of it and remain so (see all the local news stories about high school scholarship winners who get into multiple Ivies).
Are we sure those time use numbers are right? That suggests six hours a week of classes which is far below what any college I know of requires to get a degree in 4 or even 6 years.
Harvard, for instance, says students spend between 14-20 hours a week in class: https://college.harvard.edu/student-life/student-stories/harvard-hard-and-other-commonly-asked-work-related-questions
Stanford suggests about 15 hours a week: https://advising.stanford.edu/current-students/advising-student-handbook/what-unit#:~:text=More%20About%20Units&text=A%20typical%204%2Dunit%20course,which%20may%20be%20class%20time.
Maybe if you skip a bunch of lectures and never go to the discussion sections you’d get down to 6 hours a week, but it still seems awfully low.
And interestingly, the ratio of “2 hours of non-class work for every hour of class work” more or less holds in the data. So it’s not like students aren’t doing the assigned work, it just seems like they have a tiny courseload. Maybe they are averaging this with the 4 months per year when students aren’t in class (so that gets us up to 9 hours per week while school is in session)? Or maybe people claim to be full time students when they aren’t?
I don’t think it entirely invalidates the premise of this piece, but I just don’t believe it’s possible to graduate with only 6 hours a week of classes.
From what I researched, it's a hard issue to get good survey data on, and that 8.8 hours of sleep definitely doesn't feel fully right to me. But I'd say class skipping is fairly baked in part of college these days. And I imagine with the rising prevalence of remote lectures, it hasn't gotten much better.
>class skipping is fairly baked in
This is *insane* to me--what the fuck are you (the general you, not Ben) paying for?
Most of us Millennials had recurring dreams for a decade (or more) past graduation where we woke up in a panic thinking we’d accidentally missed all of our classes. Gen Z prefers to take on astronomical debt to live out the nightmare IRL (then demand that the debt be forgiven) 👵🏻✊🏻
Lectures are freely available on YouTube, so certainly not that. Discussion sections, grading, deadlines, and community of peers more plausibly.
A degree, maybe with good grades. And that's the problem - they'll get it even if they skip.
Yeah I think the class time estimates are on the low end of reasonable with how much class skipping there is. Not sure exactly where I think those extra sleep hours are coming from, my guess it’s just time spent on non-specific things (like “studying” with people or transit time etc) and since it’s not included in the survey it’s just thrown on to sleep.
Students sleep more at non-elite schools than they do at elite schools.
https://qz.com/674854/students-at-top-colleges-all-seem-to-have-the-same-sleeping-pattern
8.8 hours a day of sleep on the time-spent chart just blows my mind! I don't think there was a single person I knew who was sleeping that much during undergrad (2 years ago, large public school)!
Ehh It was pretty normal to sleep 10 hours on a weekend and I knew people who regularly would nap for 2 hours every afternoon after class.
As a daily average though?? I certainly knew some people that’d sleep a lot on weekends and stuff but 8.8 as an average?? I knew more people that averaged 6 than 8, let alone 10. Lots of napping sure, but my impression is that the nappers aren’t people getting an extra 2 hours on the 8 they got that night, but people who got 4-6 in the night and are catching up on a deficit.
Of course if we include time in bed doomscrolling, 8.8 is much more in play…
I think we can all agree that college students are likely not getting almost 9 hours of sleep per night, lol. But the key points from that survey hold up.
Why, though?
Presumably, students who get more sleep are, like, sleeping in that time instead of being people you know. It’s a really easy thing for a survey to be right while contradicting your experience entirely, like finding out that practically no one actually watched the show “everyone” is talking about.
Why not - if you play your cards right you can have no classes start before noon.
The numbers seem insane to me but I remind myself that "all students at all colleges" is a very different sample than "successful students" or "prestige schools (or what those schools will tell you about themselves)"
We've seen this chart before! I remember someone in the comments during its last appearance discovered that there's some weird weighting of weekends vs weekdays and semester breaks. I'm honestly a little surprised it was used again
When I dug into it, they sampled people on random days (weekdays or weekends) in September to May, and threw out results that were gathered “on holidays” or where students left out half their hours.
If it was just a 7 day average during the term, then 1.2 hours a day means 8.4 hours a week. Adding in a few weeks when class isn’t in session probably gets you above 9 on a regular school week. If students are enrolled in 15 hours of classes, then that translates to 40% absenteeism. When I teach, that sounds like a lot more absenteeism than I get in classes of 20-30 students but maybe about right for classes of over 100. And I guess more students are enrolled in big classes?
15h coursework and 30h homework was pretty accurate for Stanford (though the homework actually ranged 15-50h depending on how studious/fast you were).
Then again, it's all a matter of perspective since my parents secretly think I'm lazy for not putting in 60 hour weeks. And I'm sure Prof. Hunham would agree with them.
With online or the online lecture portion of hybrid courses - a three-hour class that might traditionally meet for three hours might end up as an 1h20m of online videos that the kids then watch on 1.5x speed. Also, a ton of skipping lectures.
I find almost all video/audio to be easily consumable at > 2x speed because most people are trained to talk slowly. I find it easier to maintain focus at 2x then 1x because i'm less likely to get distracted waiting for the lecture to get to the point.
Yes, this varies a lot based on the lecturer and the listener. 2x is pushing it for me on complex subjects, but I prefer 1.5x to standard speed for most lectures.
Thought the same thing. I think the high percentage for travel probably suggests that they are averaging 9 months of classes overy 12 months since most students don't take classes in the summer. That explain some but not all of it. I was working for my university the entire time I was in udergraduate and graduate school in the US (which is how I graduated with $0 student loans!). I also frequently had some sort of part time outside employment. I don't think I have worked less than 20 hours a week and was often working closer to 35 hours a week but I definitely spent significantly more time in class and doing class work than this suggests. Also got a lot less sleep. Perhaps the new numbers reflect a more healthy appreciation for sleep but they seem off. I know that I worked more than 90% of my peers but I don't think I studied more.
I would like to allocate some of the blame here to employers. Their current very strong preference, at least for the elite employers that drive cultural sentiment and student decisions, is to hire Harvard students who are undistinguished in what they did as undergrads vs IU students who accomplished a lot. If that doesn't change, the rest won't either.
Getting top employers to treat elite degrees as nothing special or inherently better than state schools would be one of the greatest things we could ever do for equity and equality.
I know a prestigious boutique law firm that explicitly avoids Stanford/Yale/Harvard grads because they're not hungry enough, preferring to hire associates with JDs from state schools and working class backgrounds. I haven't heard of anybody else doing this though.
What does “top employers” even mean
Goldman Sachs would be top of my list. This article from Ezra Klein is from 2014 but almost certainly hold up https://www.vox.com/2014/5/15/5720596/how-wall-street-recruits-so-many-insecure-ivy-league-grads
I can't tell you how damaging excessive focus on "elite" colleges vs. very good state schools really is. I know from personal experience; in Indian communities it can be quite gross and honestly probably psychologically damaging to see not going to say Yale and instead going to UConn as some mark of failure when you're degree from UConn is still very likely to be a good degree (with added bonus of watching really good basketball).
Highest-grossing Substackers
The President and Senate when looking for Supreme Court candidates.
Hey, there is one SCOTUS justice that didn't go Harvard or Yale law. Progress.
And everyone loves her…
"Down with elites! Wait, no, not like that!"
Employers who hire for very desirable, elite poositions.
But, like, aren’t elite degrees (or at least the students with them) better?
Take SAT scores, which I’m glad everyone has realized matter.
At Harvard, the 25th percentile score is 1490. At IU, the 25th percentile is 1180 and the 75th percentile is still only 1400.
If you knew nothing else besides that, wouldn’t you default to hiring the Harvard student?
The thing is, you don't "know nothing else", and also, that only tells you that your prospect had a high SAT score. Doesn't tell you anything about whether they accomplished anything important in college.
This is true. I am an attorney. I work at a well-paying, Midwest firm. We'll hire anyone with a degree from Harvard. If you went to a state school, then you'll need to be at the top of your class. We are not unique. (And this is why I would still encourage anyone to go to Harvard, ect. despite the trend to say otherwise.)
Law school is different because the T14 law schools draw 90%+ of the top students from across the country. Law school applicants are much more sophisticated than undergrad applicants, a large proportion of whom just go to Big State U, so they are much more meritocratic.
Caveat that there are some people who are exceptionally good, better than most HLS students, who go to Big State U Law (your Jeffrey Suttons and such), but they're unusual, and anyway even very elite firms are happy to hire the #1 person from Big State U Law.
(I'm not saying any of this to disagree with you, I think we're giving the same view, I'm just explaining the firms' logic.)
Hi, employer here, I absolutely do not give a single shit whether somebody went to Harvard if they can't walk me through some interesting and thoughtful interview conversations.
To be fair, Harvard’s engineering school is not the Harvard of engineering schools.
I remember my first day at a Big Tech firm, when I found out one of my coworkers had a CS degree from Harvard.
Surprising choice for someone with the grades to get into Harvard to decide to pursue CS there, when he presumably had many other options at his disposal.
Where do you work? What schools do you recruit at? Where did most of your employees go to college?
We don't recruit straight of college in the sense of "make some polo shirt serfs stand at a table with brochures in the basketball arena every March". Most (I'd guess 70%) of our hires come from Big State U.
So are you saying you do not represent an employer with major cultural cachet like Goldman or McKinsey or Google or the CIA? Or that your organization is a counterexample?
My employer does not gaze into navels like anyone who cares about hiring from the "elite" pool.
Meanwhile, though Google has fallen ass over teakettle into the world's most lucrative advertising business, I have no idea what 80% of their current employees do and I'm semi-guessing they don't either (fighting over which recent product line to cancel?).
Google hate is the best hate! What a goofy company; about 3 million different departments and one of them is making money lol.
Is your employer one where prospective students are motivated by the idea of getting a job there? Because if not then it isn't really relevant here.
I know lots of people there. Can confirm they don’t know what they do, really, in terms of value add and many spend a lot of time dreading the moment the thing they worked on is just canceled.
To be blunt, does your employer stand out in any way? Does it pay unusually well? Are people who start their careers there disproportionally likely to rise to upper management positions or other roles of status and power? Do employees often possess cultural cachet and influence even if they don't earn a lot, like those at top media companies?
If none of these things apply, then I'm not sure why you think your employer's practices are relevant here. Obviously the vast majority of American employers cannot make a big deal of hiring Ivy grads, seeing as how Ivy grads are less than 0.5% of the population. But the employers that do hire lots of Ivy grads are disproportionally influential, well-paying, and important - that's the point.
“I have no idea what 80% of their current employees do and I'm semi-guessing they don't either (fighting over which recent product line to cancel?).”
There’s a lot of work on optimizing stuff. If you work at a company that only uses a bit of computing resources, then it’s not worth a programmer’s time to speed something up by 0.1%. However, if you work at a company with a ton of huge data centers that hold a shit load of data and crunch a lot of numbers, then a programmer speeding something up by 0.1% can pay for their selves many times over. Ditto for something that increases the efficiency of *programmers* by a small amount.
Google is a weird case though. They hire globally, but hiring committees and hiring managers likely have no idea what (for example) a prestigious school in Poland is and would have no idea how to weight it.
They rely pretty heavily on their interview process. Although I'm sure the recruiting staff is aware and target their active recruiting efforts to a handful of schools.
Agree with this employers and the feds, who dole out a lot of the money are probably the two other institutions we should expect to provide pressure for actual education to be happening.
So to square this essay with yesterday's, what should be done here? Seems like a collective action problem where if one college or department decides to become harder, students will go elsewhere.
Because I don’t have a good solution, I am going to say we need a shift in values.
I actually think you got close to one when you noted the Summers push— basically, some institutions with so much cachet that they’ll never have trouble attracting students need to move in this direction, and because of their prestige, they’ll pull other schools in that direction too.
In 2020, one Ivy (I forget which) decided to abandon ACT/SAT tests, and the rest of the Ivies followed. This year they collectively decided to start requiring those tests again. If the Ivies started grading students tougher I am sure many state universities would follow after a few years.
Elites can solve coordination problems. I generally lean more egalitarian than hierarchical, but this factor is why I don't think complex societies and organizations can or should be completely flat.
For a lot of questions, it makes sense to kick decision-making down to the department level, but there are some cases where the centralized decision-maker is really helpful. Knowing which kinds of question are which is part of what makes good leaders good.
Princeton had a big and multi-year grade deflation push during the years I was there (I think it started in mid 00s and then they ended the policy in 2014). It wasn't just the president (Shirley Tilghman) stating that she wanted tougher grading—departments were supposed to award a certain percentage of As and A-s (capped at 35%), Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs etc, and if I recall correctly there were no A+s (4.0 or 100% in a class was just an A). Most large 101 and 201 classes were graded on a curve, and the curve could just as easily hurt you as help you. I remember that students complained a bit but we mostly accepted the way of things and people were then pretty happy with a B+ vs. up in arms. I remember that my classmates in almost all majors mostly studied a lot. Typical evening social plans might include meeting friends at the library to study together or do readings together. People also spent 3-4 hours per weekend day studying if not more. Everyone still seemed to really enjoy their experience, still had time for parties on Thursday and Saturday nights, and if anything if you earned a rare A or A-, it was much more rewarding. When you applied to grad school or for a fellowship, Princeton gave you a pre-written letter to include explaining the grade deflation policy. But even with the letter, Princeton started seeing results they didn't like: fewer Rhodes and Marshalls winners, lower acceptance to really competitive grad schools (e.g. med schools), and I think fewer offers for post-grad research. To me it didn't seem like whiny students or parents ended the policy—Princeton didn't like that ITS PRESTIGE was being affected (in real ways). I'm sure individual students were disappointed about not winning a Rhodes, etc, but ultimately it was the aggregate effect on university numbers that led to the change.
Princeton suffered from the classic first mover problem. If everyone had followed them, there wouldn't have been a discernible negative effect with fellowship award numbers or graduate acceptance rates—all the Ivy League and elite colleges would have been producing students with similar GPAs. But Princeton led the charge alone, and then ultimately backtracked.
Short version from The Atlantic here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/end-grade-deflation-princeton-university-inflation-as/310231/
When I was in college in the late 90's I remember specifically talking to some other students about Princeton and their super strict curve (not the 2004 curve, so presumably had done it before) and the supposition we had was that it made students less likely to work together since another student doing well ate up a place for YOU to have an A.
It doesn't sound like (at least in 2004) you felt this happened. (Was the curve target higher than before?)
It didn't feel competitive to me. It was the norm to be in some sort of study group or work on problem sets together. I wasn't an engineer or science major (which seemed most affected by the grade deflation policy), but had lots of friends in the sciences, and they also seemed to form very friendly and close-knit study groups. I suppose it would have been rational for people to be less cooperative...so I don't really have an explanation for why we collaborated!
It seems like to shift values towards "Let's reward hard work and excellence, and punish the opposite" we'd need a major war or existential crisis. Otherwise I have no idea how we could get from A to B.
Our system of government was thought by those who originally designed it to be incapable of operating successfully without an educated citizenry, with the civic virtue and education - in logic, rhetoric, etc -- to handle it.
In the period of revolutionary fervor after independence, civic republicanism was all the rage, at least in the North, and was linked to many efforts to broaden access to education.
But that kind of high-mindedness is hard to sustain without that revolutionary, almost quasi-religious fervor, and the nature of revolutionary fervor is that it tends not to last. Today there's no major party or movement that explicitly connects personal virtue, education and critical thinking skills with the need for a citizenry capable of democratic republican self-governance.
Of employers. If they don't care about what students have learned why should parents?
A couple decades ago I, my dept chair, and a couple colleagues went on a listening tour of some of the big employers of our grads. We wanted to know if there were subjects we should add to the curriculum. Instead, nearly to a person, the employers said essentially, "the curriculum is fine but you need to turn up the heat because it's the pressure of the job that will get them, not the subject matter."
Well, if that’s all they want, we should just have a program that requires high SAT scores and rewards you by sending you to work in a sweatshop.
When I worked at a big national law firm we had summer internships where we hired a few select law students and tried to woo them with ball games and dinners and gave them a bunch of make work stuff to do because most law students don't know how to do anything useful and we couldn't charge our clients for garbage. The idea was that these "clerkships" would get us good new associates from Ivy League schools. It did.
But then those students were faced with a job that required them to bill excess of 2000 hours of real billable work on top of learning how to be useful and the only time they got to go to ball games was with the next years summer clerks. They often couldn't cut the workload and had to move on. We had much better luck with our lateral hires.
At one point, one of the partners pointed out that we seemed to be having our best luck with associates coming out of jobs at non-profit legal agencies or the government. As I was one of those, he asked me what sort of work I had done in my initial "clerkship" period at my first legal employer. I laughed and explained that I had been given a card table, folding chair, laptop and binder manual of everything that I needed to know and that I had 60 minutes to read it before my first client intake and that I would be having six intakes a day of 30 minutes each every day and would be expected to do any follow up work in between or after hours.
He then asked what prep I had done for my job in their office that had allowed me to "hit the ground running." I told him that I had skimmed "Insurance Law in a Nutshell" on the bus on the way in and accepted that if they were going to be paying me this much the job was either going to involve an incredible amount of work or doing something evil and so I better show I could work hard from the get go to avoid being asked to do something evil instead.
I didn't got to an elite private school but I went to very good public universities but I did get a sense that folks at elite private schools got told that they were exceptionally smart and valuable simply by virtue of getting in which was 100% not a message that I ever got at my university. I do think imagining you bring inherent special value wherever you go isn't necessarily the best mindset for working harder than the next guy.
It could be driven in either direction, I think.
This is why the term "wicked problem" exists.
Dartmouth has published the median grades of courses next to your personal grade on transcripts since 1994. I think it is a pretty good policy that puts each student's grades in context but it hasn't stopped the medians from creeping up since that time. https://www.dartmouth.edu/reg/transcript/medians/
I went to a small private liberal arts college, and the vast majority of kids had high test scores and were studious. There were 4 or 5 kids who simply dropped out in the first semester of my freshmen year because they found that the norm was that if you skipped classes, professors would be fine failing you, and in addition, there wasn't much incentive to skip classes since there were very few folks to hang out with, because most everyone studied or went to class during the day and socialized (not really partied) after 5pm. It helped that there was very little to do on weekdays except for study and go to classes.
On Fridays and Saturdays a lot of people partied extremely hard to make up for this. This norm was sometimes not the greatest, as kids who were visiting from other schools would say, man, you guys party really hard, and there were the associated extreme binge drinking problems. In retrospect we probably should have been taking other drugs, not in combination with alcohol.
Empirically, all the schools that tried grade deflation have given up because it hurts their students competitively. There's no incentive for schools to work collectively on this, it's all pain and no gain. Grade inflation leads to fewer students and parents crying in office hours and happy alumni who can donate to the institution that gave them good times and a good CV.
My hot take is this doesn't change until Higher Ed collapses under its unsustainable costs and it stops being a default assumption that smart kids go to college. If employers can no longer use school admission as a solitary and strong signal, new metrics will arise and schools can begin to compete on their ability to actually help students master those metrics. The trouble is those metrics have to correlate with actual knowledge (eg standardized tests) and not subjective fluff that can be easily manufactured (extracurriculars).
Regardless, I think higher ed as we know it has to die for education to become a focus again.
Yep. My humble proletarian Central Jersey vocational school tried grade deflation for about a decade, but gave it up following research that showed that it was significantly impacting graduates' job prospects.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/end-grade-deflation-princeton-university-inflation-as/310231/
Among selective college grads arguing about their schools, "people who care a ton about medical school admissions" seem to be underrepresented (which reflects well on doctors IMO)
Yes, my alma mater tried grade deflation for a little over a decade, rescinded it about 6 years ago, and there are still lots of complaints. People say that it hurt them in law and medical school admissions. I have no idea if that is true. I know for high schools each school has a profile that colleges look at when evaluating for admission. Graduate schools should have something similar.
It seems employers may be revealing that they don't value that much what goes on at colleges. Which implies we should knock a year off the 4-year college degree and save society the resources?
I think employers clearly value the selection process that colleges do.
Modest proposal: we retain the college admissions process, but being admitted only consists of getting a "This Person Is Approved" certificate as opposed to spending four years and six figures to learn Not Much.
Hiring managers also like to see completed degrees, which at least somewhat signal the person they are hiring isn't lazy and can be trusted to complete at least some work.
What are the prospects for people with bachelor’s degrees below 3.2?
1. Student loans. Loans should require rigorous vetting for RoI on both a student aptitude and program outcome basis.
2. Public Schools. We need to fail more kids. K-12 is totally failing at providing the sorting/signaling value it should be. Sorting people out in college admissions/undergrad major selection is a fucking terrible paradigm.
I think stricter grading is fine, but I don't know about failing. Our high school has lots of kids failing, although it has improved in recent years. This leads to more kids dropping out, and their lives are not great a few years out unless they get their GED.
I wouldn't mind going back to the old NYS model where a Regents diploma was something special. Now everyone has to earn a Regents diploma to graduate which means: 1) the diploma doesn't indicate the same high standard and 2) students who have mastered basic skills but have trouble on a certain exam (usually World History) cannot get a high school diploma.
When I say failing, I mean on a subject by subject, grade level by grade level basis. Doing that rigorously would presumably necessitate various tracks to completion. Differing diplomas and such. That would be good where presumably only a limited number of those tracks would proceed into liberal arts higher ed.
It surprised me too! I think part of the problem was that they were testing people on 2 years worth of content - from the start of humans until now. That changed recently, which I don't think is a good thing. Students in NY still have to take two years of World History, but they only test on part of it. I would rather two tests.
But also - World History is probably the test that requires the highest level of reading ability, and a lot of students in our state are not native English speakers. We tend to focus on high-achieving immigrants, but many, especially those who come from refugee situations where schooling was spotty, have a lot of trouble. For instance, Burmese students in my district who move here after about age 10 have a high dropout rate.
Tax 100% of any college's endowment if said college has an average GPA above 3 for more than three straight years
Not a bad half baked idea.
Takings clause of the Constitution disagrees with your silly idea.
It’s not a taking if it’s structured as a tax.
John Roberts agrees.
Lol, no kidding
The top colleges are insanely competitive. Any one of them could go this direction with minimal harm. Probably even benefit in the long term.
The problem is admins at top institutions view the primary goal of their universities as something other than education and learning.
Credentialing. And most students take the same view.
When I was applying to college in 2004 there were a few schools that had the reputation of being much harder (Chicago, Swarthmore, cal tech) I wonder if there is any evidence that they are actually more rigorous and if that helps their graduates.
In his first book published in 1994, David Frum argued that slashing the public subsidy on colleges would make them much more spartan and focused on students with the particular mission of instruction. I don't share the exact zeal of right-libertarianism he put in that section. But going after 529s and publicly underwritten lending for master's programs would probably help cut down the arms race for consumerism. You don't need that much money to run most undergrad majors; it's often a room with books where people meet. It became apparent to a friend and I when studying in Germany just how much money was sloshing around in our private college back home on all sorts of amenities and features that distract from the mission of instruction.
Obviously colleges are not going to like the coming wave of austerity, but it's just unsustainable for everyone to be on the bill for lending into what is increasingly a massive resort with ten different missions all at once. The fact that Biden is effectively turning higher ed into a political machine for grants with his loan changes is not going to make it better. But the real blame rests with what Pelosi and Bush did to graduate lending in 2005, as detailed at further length here in Reason: https://reason.com/2024/02/06/the-real-student-loan-crisis/
Yeah… I went to a school where the only things to do were drink and go to the library, really. Oh, and we had a gym that was like the yard in a prison, housed in some old indoor tennis courts.
I developed a hobby of reading academic papers and whole textbooks on subjects that weren’t even mine. I’m still coasting on that two decades later.
Encourage the use of testing of absolute knowledge rather than reliance on relative class rank by employers so that the terminally-desired knowledge can be both assessed and sought out, rather than pure reliance on selection effects as under the present conditions.
It’ll have to start at the most elite schools that can let employers know what they’re up to so it doesn’t disadvantage students on the job market, eg Princeton or Stanford.
Why is it a collective action problem?Can't they just coordinate?
They have regular meetings where they discuss policies, they have full and open information and are legally allowed to collaborate.
If it requires coordination, then it’s a collective action problem. Sometimes coordination is possible, but it’s often very hard.
I think this is what British universities try to do. They require faculty to submit their exams a year before the class happens, get it approved by a committee, and then have it graded by someone other than the professor. It sounds like a lot of work. I don’t know if it is all that effective. It certainly makes it hard to teach a class that touches on current research or current events.
British universities have a big grade inflation problem too. Something like 70-80% of students get the top two grades.
I guess I’m a bit of an outlier on this topic (service academy grad) but I’ve seen lots of people who were smart and benefited from a strict and academically rigorous environment. Kids are malleable; it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them would like this sort of thing. Look how many volunteer for sports or fraternities to get the bonding that comes from shared difficulty.
If I were to change something, it would be the composition of admissions officers. Admissions officers are almost universally a bunch of mediocrities with a big soft spot for progressive activism. If they have kids, they probably practice gentle parenting. If they gave grades, they would all be As.
Students know that if they want to get into schools, they have to at least pretend that their goal in life is to start a charity for anxious whales or something. The scary part is that some of these kids aren’t pretending - they end up living in tents when they get a good excuse to do so. They have no interest in studying.
Half baked idea: Replace admissions officers with volunteers who each take a small share of the job remotely. These would end up being partners at law firms or consulting firms or whatever who have capacity to review 50 resumes or so out of duty to the Alma mater. They also would have a good sense of who actually will become a good lawyer or consultant.
My partner's masters degree program is too cheap to hire admissions officers, so they actually do farm out application screening to alumni of the program.
STEM faculty at an ivy here. My undergrad students spend all their time on bullshit, make-work "research" - which is mostly just a rebranding of independent study/reading courses with maybe a bit of data munging tacked on. Meanwhile, they struggle with basic stuff in their core courses...
if this bothers you a lot, I recommend getting involved with the PhD admissions committee and encouraging them to change the admissions process. Right now, undergrad research experience is basically mandatory to be admitted as a PhD student, while grades are relatively less important. The reason for this is that faculty at top universities have decided this is what they care about.
At the very least, depending on how it works in your department, you could start by admitting students to your own group who don't have any undergrad research experience but do have good grades in the core classes.
So, I'm acutely aware of how PhD admissions work these days. Thanks for explaining it to me, though.
The thing is - 90% of the students in my classes doing "research" have no interest in pursuing a PhD.
And the ones who end up going to good PhD programs end up doing something that approximates real research, and they are also the ones who don't have problems in class.
I guess my tone didn't come across -- I understood you knew everything I was telling you. However, I sincerely apologize for being deliberately rude on the internet, it's not productive and doesn't help anything.
I just found it frustrating that you're actually part of the one group of people whose demand for undergraduate research originally created the situation you describe, yet think you are powerless to do anything about it.
All good dude.
I think there are two separate things here - the phd applicants we tend to admit are frankly stellar (I would not have been competitive, and it hasn't been that long since I was applying to schools) - and they have done legitimate research in addition to having done extremely well in school. The world of PhD admissions has gotten insanely competitive, and I don't know how you can't discount legitimate research work done before PhD in evaluating applications, given that grades (even in hard classes) is not a great predictor of the ability to actually be a productive researcher. And I think the problem has gotten harder over time given grade inflation and the tendency of recommendations to be wildly over-enthusiastic.
On the other hand, it saddens me that the path to getting into a good phd program has narrowed significantly, and requires years of careful planning and having the right opportunities (and knowledge about said opportunities). There was an Econ professor posting on twitter a year or so ago at a very good but probably not top-5 department about having applicants with multiple publications in top-tier journals not even making the top 10 in her stack... it's nuts.
But the problem I was talking about is ultimately a bit different - for some reason, everyone at my school "needs" to do "research", in a way that is ultimately pointless and a waste of everyone's time. Most of these students have no interest in grad school, and very little interest or passion for the material they are actually studying, but they feel a deep need to do these extracurriculars at the expense of the stuff they're actually supposed to be learning.
I see the clearer distinction now.
I still am pretty sure that "everyone needs to appear to have done undergrad research" got started as a norm only bc of grad school applications. (Probably include medical school here as well.)
But if it's now an empty signal for industry employers too, or perceived as one by students, I guess it might be out of control.
And I should add, I'm on various grad committees and have expressed these feelings
"I just found it frustrating that you're actually part of the one group of people whose demand for undergraduate research originally created the situation you describe, yet think you are powerless to do anything about it."
In line with yesterday's post, having caused something does not always come with the power to uncause it.
...may I ask what field? The only place where I thought research was a mainstream activity was bio, but there at least you're doing someone else's busywork
Not a lab science. More like Stats/ML/CS.
And yeah, the lab sciences are different. There is probably some value in the signaling there - if you do a phd in chem or bio, presumably that requires years of working in a lab, so it makes sense to show that you're capable of doing that beforehand.
I work at a top-20 medical school where the students are all heavily involved in research projects with faculty on the side - excessively, in my private opinion. Medical school is hard enough without piling on an additional 10 hours/week of mostly-low impact - as you say, "make-work" - research. Let's focus on getting through the degree and residency and becoming a good doctor, which is the whole point.
Med school admissions also seem nuts to me in that they require so many non-academic activities that, from my observations at least, they heavily incentivize make-work resume padding of the sort you usually associate with undergrad admissions. That said, my background is in law, which is probably too far on the other extreme.
That’s odd. At my university, lots of bio Sci majors do research, and it’s not at all make-work bullshit. They do actual hands-on research in labs.
I thought bullshit make-work research was what the summer term is for
Also STEM Ph.D. My grad school program I graduated from recently overhauled the course track for undergrad students and got rid of Friday classes, all so undergrads could focus more on their own research. Not everyone has to go to grad school!
I think there's more to the connection made between educational rigor and the shift in elite character. As Griffin mentioned, the expectation of effort has been left shifted to before secondary Ed, which seems to me like institutional capture by elite parents, a feedback loop whereby the ideal candidate requires experiences and a background that can really only be reliably had by the children of elites (with some lip service paid, of course, to the poors).
I think this stems from a pretty natural desire for your kids to have it as good or better than you had it, which is a high bar for those who already have it really good. They have worked to make it so their kids are taught the secret handshakes to get into the schools that still drive elite formation, and then once in, all they need is for their kid to do well enough to land a McKinsey internship and go from there.
To be fair, elites have always probably captured these institutions, and I'm not sure if there was ever a time where selection was more egalitarian and rigor more strenuous. Also, grade differentials only matter when attending an insitution isn't enough of a signal - if going to Harvard isn't enough to know whether someone is capable or not, then what grades you got at Harvard matter. My gut is that Ivy schools have very high quality undergrads, so admission is itself enough of a signal for most.
I saw a comment asking us to consider, per yesterday's column, what should be done about this. One solution that came to mind was to work on the admissions side, and adopt something like a UT Austin situation, where elite schools establish a high testing/high school GPA bar and then you lottery from there. This would start to solve the elite admissions problem, and focus the mission of universities on a certain level of academic excellence.
The elite character issue was one of the things about The Holdovers that really stuck with me. Our elites, generally, have lost any sense of noblesse oblige, and visualizing it in terms of military service was an accurate depiction and a striking one. I'm not sure how to reform elite character, but...civic virtue doesn't seem to live there these days.
I’ve never understood the obsession with pushing your children to ”succeed”. I’m reasonably wealthy and highly educated (PhD level) and I don’t care what my son does as long as he is happy and can support himself. It seems so stupid to obsess over class, status and achievment when you have everything you need.
The “can support himself” is doing a lot of work there.
I think that's a fine and fairly benign observation. Joachim is just saying that he wants his son to live a good life, and not care about class. Unless I'm reading this wrong, he's not dismissing a good steady income/education. Just that existing at the very top of society isn't the end all be all.
As is “is happy.”
If your child wants to one day own a home and raise a family in a major metropolitan area, they are going to need to be one of the few thousand highest earners in the world.
90% of Americans can support themselves already today and we’re talking about future persons after 20 years of economic growth
You can work 40 hours a week and make $400k or you can work 40 hours a week and make $40k. $400k is better.
I think a teacher making $40K is better than a drug dealer making $400K.
We’re talking about the range of legal career options.
Okay. I think a teacher making $40K is better than a business-to-business marketing associate making $400K selling useless "consulting" services (a thing I was part of as a tech writer) or even upcharged versions of a theoretically useful service, like payroll (again, a thing I participated in, including the actual sales presentations).
Money is nice. All things being equal, I would always prefer that you pay me more money rather than less money. But the whole reason that I ended up as a nurse is that making money doing stuff without social value was really unsatisfying and made me really unhappy.
There's nothing wrong with me (or anyone else) feeling that way and making that choice. And, conversely, there just isn't a plausible way to argue that money is a one-to-one measure of the actual social value of a job. It measures things like labor scarcity and resource capture, which is fine, and a lot of people are into it, which is also fine--the pros and cons of this approach is literally a major theme of our culture. But when you go the reductionist route on it, you just turn yourself into a caricature, and you seem smarter than that.
You’re missing the point. Most people making $40k are really struggling and their lives are often very difficult. But at $20/hr they can have the things one needs at some minimal level. Most parents would hope for something better than some minimal level of subsistence.
Do you think your son has the rationality and foresight to make optimal decisions about his future? I’ve always been of the impression that kids choose short term wins and avoid work unless guided otherwise
They don’t have to make ”optimal” decisions (Harvard?) to be happy and have a middle class lifestyle
Responses to this are kind of wild. I think it's good that we don't have an urban-China norm where parents enter their preschooler into pre-professional programs!
There is a lot of room between:
'I just want my kids to be happy...' and
'I want my kids to be successful, their happiness be damned'
There's also a lot of room between not caring about your kids' success at all, and being disappointed if they don't get an "elite" job.
I agree, it surprises me a lot! I thought people here were wiser
People who are pushed to be more capable and knowledgeable, and take life seriously, are more likely to survive when serious hardship arises.
You may have everything you need, but will your son?
There is no evidence that stressed out people are happier
There is evidence that rich and successful people are happier, and that poverty is a serious inducer of both stress and misery.
unfortunately, your son might find it hard to be happy if all his friends and dating prospects look down on him for not having an elite job. of course there are ways out of that problem, but you either have to live very deliberately, or succeed conventionally. conventional success may be easier.
Maybe. Although the majority of people don't have elite jobs, so he may find he has more friend and dating prospects if interacts with people outside of the small pool.
"unfortunately, your son might find it hard to be happy if all his friends and dating prospects look down on him for not having an elite job...[to avoid this, you] have to live very deliberately"
Those are some pretty crappy "friends" and it doesn't seem that hard to find better ones. Join a bowling league, or something.
Plenty of nurses out there to date
I'm similar situated. My (semi-serious) goal is to make enough money so my kids don't have to go to college.
Note as well the recent story about UCSD giving a preference in its computer science program for low income students whose parents didn't go to college. This has been heavily criticized including by folks who like traditional affirmative action, because it cannot be gamed.
Most people criticizing UCSD haven't actually looked at the policy. It applies only to students who are changing into selective majors (not just CS, but all several high demand engineering and biology majors). It gives preference to high grades in screening classes, California residents, Pell Grant eligible and first generation students.Still a bad idea but I believe the majority of students in these programs pick their major up front. Also, UCSD has a high share of foreign students, who are the most likely group to be adversely affected. In short, bad policy but lots of nuance here.
It is being criticized because UCSD should just expand its CS program if there is that much demand and qualified applicants, and shrink the departments that no one is interested in.
It is forcing a zero-sum situation where there doesn't need to be one.
'Give the UCs more money' would be a really big policy win, their CS departments absolutely do not fall under declining rigor. Can't do it purely via internal transfers because CS salaries are higher (even for grad students)
I mean, sure, that's the stated criticism.
But why do they need to expand it? Almost nobody advocating affirmative action was calling for Harvard and Yale to expand their entering class to all who wanted to go there. Because... news flash.... a lot of elites absolutely WANT there to be elite institutions that they and their children have access to. They are fine with equity systems they can game, but not with those they can't.
My understanding is that they aren't limiting admissions to their campus overall. Just the CS program.
The message that comes across is "non-disadvantaged people can attend here, but they are probably going to have to go into one of the trash majors that they are less likely to get a good job with".
It's like the worst of all possible approaches.
They've capped admissions to their CS program for a while (and as I understand it are far from alone in doing so), but the new policy is specifically for students already attending who wish to change their major to CS. It blocks people from applying as English majors and then bailing after year one to get into the more-selective CS program
Unless they are first-generation students or their parents make under $45k.
Not to me. There's no right for elites with a lot of privilege to get a state subsidized education in the most popular major at a selective school. There's lots of other options for them.
If we actually care about equality and equity we need to do a lot more of this (and based on non-gameable class characteristics).
Some wiggle room with “low income/ no college parents.” How many years of nominal non-support before you can disclaim a parent’s income or background? Can you disclaim your parents if say, you don’t get along with them? What about parents who go no-contact with gay or trans???
Also. Does some college but dropped out count? Community college? Not gameable after the fact sure. But a set aside for “non college” might disproportionately favor these liminal people, in the same way affirmative action disproportionately benefits mixed-race applicants and recent immigrants
People focus on what the feel their are owed from society rather than their own obligations to society.
Ask nawt what yourah country can do fah you
I found a lot of assigned work in college to be largely useless.
Professors would sometimes say “read this entire book for next week” and then we would discuss very little of it, and also a lot of the book would be poorly written with way too much fluff.
Assignments such as problem sets, essays, projects, etc. really varied in quality. It was also really frustrating when writing assignments would get little feedback.
Quantity ≠ quality, and I think we should be demanding quality assignments before just saying “load on more work, the kids have too much free time!”
Unfortunately, there’s often very little quality control re: teaching, assignments, and course design.
I question now -- and questioned when I was a student, which made me an outlier -- whether the student is the best judge of the "quality" or "usefulness" of an assignment. The assumption that the answer is "yes" seems to be part of the problem that Matt is describing.
I’m not assuming “yes” at all — I totally agree with you 🙂
But I also think it’s not a stretch to say that three different faculty members can teach the same course in different ways with different assignments and have different results in terms of student learning outcomes. Not all assignments are created equally.
And so back to Matt’s point: If we’re going to make a big stink about “students should work harder” or “there should be more assignments” or whatever, we should also be making a stink about trying to ensure that the work that we’re asking them to do is the best that it can be on delivering outcomes. I don’t support piling on busywork for the sake of saying “now the kids are working harder.”
I will also add that, while I agree that students are not always the best at knowing the value of assignments, faculty aren’t necessarily all-knowing either.
1. It can be hard to critically evaluate your own work.
2. Some of the results of student learning outcomes don’t manifest themselves until after the course is over, like when a student is taking a follow-up course or is in the workplace.
3. When you’re already an expert in something, it can be really hard to understand the perspective of a beginner.
4. Faculty often have to bounce between teaching multiple levels of students (e.g. freshmen, grad students) and it can be hard to calibrate your assignments to the perfect level, though hopefully people get better at this with more time and experience.
5. The key credential for many faculty jobs is a PhD—a degree focused on research, not learning how to be a teacher.
6. Plain old disagreement. Faculty members who teach the same course in different ways may simply each think that their own way is best, but that doesn’t mean everyone is right.
Your first sentence notwithstanding, I don't think that we agree at all. Nothing wrong with that. As is so often the case, especially since 10/07/23, in the construction "I agree, but ...", the real message comes after the "but".
I literally do agree with you, though!
It can *both* be the case that students are not always able to judge the quality or usefulness of an assignment (for reasons we might agree on) and faculty are not always able to judge the quality or usefulness of an assignment (for the reasons I listed).
So I was saying that I agree the thing you stated re: students, and adding a thought re: faculty, because I got the sense that perhaps we disagree on the faculty point.
It’s notable that the examples Matt mentions seem very different here! Learning to compose in Latin or Greek seems like teaching a real skill that requires real learning. Learning to memorize poems or dates from the Pelopponesian war seem irrelevant.
Is memory not its own skill? Probably one of the most important ones, in my opinion.
Maybe, but as Plato lamented, now that we have writing, it's not as important as it used to be. And now that we can carry unlimited amounts of writing in our pocket, the bigger skill is knowing how to find the thing with all the information you could have memorized, and more.
I can’t speak across domains, but in law and medicine the ability to diagnose problems requires the ability to recall indicia of those problems, however numerous they might be. Maybe AI will replace us all, but until then memory remains a huge part of knowledge, to me.
In the fields I’m more familiar with (math, philosophy, physics, economics) I suppose bigger premium is put on having the kind of understanding that allows you to re-figure-out things rather than memorizing them, so perhaps I don’t put enough emphasis on teaching memory as a skill, especially since there are a decent number of pre-law students that take some of my classes.
I would say emphasize as you fit within your expertise. But, to me, a person with an excellent memory and little else is often worth more than a balanced 110 IQ person. At risk of being redundant, a lot of both law and medicine is pattern recognition and to do them well, you need to know what patterns to look for.
"Professors would sometimes say 'read this entire book for next week' and then we would discuss very little of it, and also a lot of the book would be poorly written with way too much fluff."
Maybe. I wonder whether those professors also were teaching you (intentionally or not) how to find the important parts of a long text.
A not insignificant percentage of my major (biochemistry) takes a knowledge based test (the mcat) at the end of undergrad. You can study for this test but it does create a baseline of “things you need to learn” that probably ensures classes stay somewhat rigorous.
Until of course med schools stop using the MCAT as an admissions criterion due to its discriminatory effects on BIPOC students.
It’s possible but it seems like there has been a reversal on this. A number of schools that dropped the SAT a few years ago have started requiring it again.
Kids primarily hear two messages about the purpose of college: "go to college so you can have a good job" and "you can't miss the college experience." They listen, and think that the point of college is to increase job prospects and to have fun, not to learn. So many of my classmates (graduated 2020 in engineering at a big public university) saw the classes and learning as a game of how-little-can-I-learn-while-still-passing and the resume padding and networking as the real purpose. And like, I don't really blame them? I was annoyed because they whined about hard classes and teachers with high expectations and how "anything I need to know for a job they'll teach me anyway" but their incentives made sense - they wanted a good job and an engineering degree pretty much guarantees one for you
I wish there was a cheaper and easier path towards the credit that a college degree offers in the job market so those that want to demonstrate they would be capable employees had somewhere to go while leaving college for those that want to learn.
The most charitable interpretation of "you can't miss the college experience" is that it's a chance for you to go learn something like Portuguese for no reason at all except that it interests you. But I don't know how often that actually happens in practice.
Have you seen the coeds?
I think those two things are, by and large, relatively accurate for why we want kids to want to go to college. So I have no problem with those statements.
I'm not sure Matt would either? It seems like he's saying the part where, "...so you can have a good job" should be harder to achieve. Meaning the college should pointedly make academics more difficult in order to pass college (so you can have a good job).
I grew up in a small town and what I wanted out of college was to stay there and abuse the library.
It seems like this will only get worse. Not only does every student have a high tech computer on them at all times, they will soon carry a brilliant intelligent alien with them that can solve almost any problem, answer any question and complete any assignment on their behalf.
Our brains are in our pockets now.
Back when I was in college 15 years ago, I used to refer to business, communications, etc. as "catch basin majors." They are designed to keep students enrolled with little demands on the students and little value added. They exist only to collect federal student loan dollars.
And to get you hired. I think a big part of the problem here is that there's a push AND a pull demand. My second job out of college was a combo payroll, HR, and tech support job. The employer required a college degree for my position, but my BA in English and History was fine because the job did not actually require any skills beyond ones that I had when I graduated high school.
Worst of all, the reason it did not require those skills was that the employer had a robust training program to teach all the payroll, HR, tech support stuff, AND they had a must-pass entrance exam on basic math skills as part of the hiring process. The college degree requirement was a pure weed-out / signaling affair. But in my same office there was a wing full of lower-level "associates" who made less money, and the major difference between us and them was that they were not required to have a college degree.
And that, right there, is how you incentivize kids to get a bachelors in business that requires as little work as humanly possible.
I agree generally, but I think the missing piece is that most well run businesses should have a pathway from the lower associate pay role into the higher combo higher paying role for people who demonstrate the necessary aptitude and skills.
Yeah. I think career ladders in general are great and that more businesses should be interested in how you cultivate talent, rather than expecting to hire it.
But, to give the other side their due, I think the flip side is that--speaking as someone who has been a teacher, a corporate trainer, an undergrad instructor, and even a work mentor--teaching people to do stuff is genuinely a hard job with kind of a weird skill set. I bet you have been in some pretty awful corporate training sessions. So it might just be one of those places where the market is struggling, maybe even failing to some degree, to solve a genuinely hard problem.
I agree that teaching people is difficult and many will fail. But as you described in your first post:
"the employer had a robust training program to teach all the payroll, HR, tech support stuff, AND they had a must-pass entrance exam on basic math skills as part of the hiring process."
I work for a firm that has something similar and I've been pleased that we encourage good employees who are in lower echelons to try for the higher postings. To use a very simplistic description, we encourage great enlisted personal to apply for officer level training. (Description only, this is not the military).
Some do fail, but the ones that succeed often end up being some of our best people because they have so much more experience that they can pull from when running into problems.
Sure, but I'm not sure that's actually bad (caveat, if you're accessing good information). The knowledge of facts vs the successful execution of meaningful tasks is a gap a mile wide. With improved access to knowledge and "answers", should more emphasis be placed on larger products, projects, teams, etc? Resourcefulness, coordination, effort, persuasion, things that AI cannot actually do?
Almost all of the world's problems are "here are the known facts, here are the rules and guidelines.... now here is the situation and we need to improve it". Some people can do this really well, and others, well, maybe they're "smart".
Yes, fact-based knowledge matters in my profession (physician), but the real operating challenges are the very human ones and I do not yet see the technology-led solution to most of them.
You need to have a collection of facts and information already acquired to do higher level inference and synthesis when problem solving. If you have to look up things constantly but don't have the base knowledge where to look or what ideas to search from, then you are wasting a lot of time for questions that can be answered relatively quickly.
The problem is the system doesn't teach students how to even follow directions. Just parrot something they glean without any thought and grade inflation/non-zero grading passes incompetents forward. Grades signal competency and comprehension. The greatest travesty is there is a whole cohort of people who are being told they have these qualities when the opposite is true.
When I took my college math classes, Wolfram was capable of solving pretty much every problem in my homework, and I used it extensively. Math class was still challenging and took a lot of critical thinking. Unlike the piece, I think that memorizing sonnets is dumb, but the flip side is that using tools doesn't all of sudden make learning irrelevant.
When I taught myself Taylor expansions for the AP Calc BC test, I remember thinking "this is so dumb, calculators/computers can approximate functions now unlike 300-400 years ago". But after getting farther along in Physics, I realized the utility is really in *understanding* how a function will behave in certain regimes, and therefore knowing what approximations are valid and when.
For better or for worse, if the tech advances to that point, human labor will basically be economically irrelevant or on its way to being so.
Is that a brain in your pocket, or you just happy to see me?
I have strong feelings about this issue. I was a college professor at Illinois State University starting in 1977 (old man alert here too!). I taught first-generation students, and I LOVED AND RESPECTED THEM. They were grateful and not entitled. I taught in Psychology to primarily education majors---students who wanted to become teachers. I felt a great responsibility to them because they were all serious-of-purpose in becoming good teachers.
I was tough.
When I retired 30 years later I summarized my years of student course ratings. The ratings of me on 'standards" was at the top. I took attendance every class, at the beginning of class. When I was going to lecture over a chapter in the text I gave a 5-point quiz BEFORE the lecture. My exams were hard....half of the exams were essays.
And, the students loved it. My 30-year average of my teaching was off the charts. And it was because of the fact that I set a structure for their courses where they had to be disciplined and study hard outside of class.
Students felt REALLY good getting a passing grade. They knew they had worked hard. It gave them confidence. They would sometimes remark on how structured and demanding I was, but rarely did they complain about it.
I know I prepared them for life as best I could, and I look back at that time with great satisfaction.
It's all about standards. Set them high. Make them study.
My absolute fondest memory was a woman who had a learning disability. She was struggling to get a C, which she needed in order to stay in her program---she wanted to teach learning disabled students. She sat outside my office and studied after class (students often did this). She popped into my office to ask me question after question. She read and read the text.
I happened (fortunately) to be sitting in my office right after final grades were posted, and she stopped by to see her grade. My whole career was worth it seeing the joy in her face when she saw she had earned her C.
(I used to think to myself that if I walked into one of children's classes the next fall and saw any of my students then I would go home and go "ahhhhh!" and know I can relax because I knew they would have a good year)
College is for learning. And students can't learn if they don't spend time. I'm sad to hear what has happened about grade inflation.
I don’t think it’s the availability of grant money that makes the STEM field more rigorous. It’s the fact that if you don’t learn your shit, people will actually die. My husband, who like me is a mechanical engineer, had a professor at his extremely middle-tier state university who refused to give partial credit, because there’s no partial credit if you fuck up a bridge and it collapses. Meanwhile I went to a top 20 private university that was rigorous but honestly I think less rigorous than his program, which was less concerned with keeping applications high so their selectivity would stay low and they could keep their Princeton Review slot.
I used to make a joke about this as a campus tour guide after hearing (but not verifying) that aerospace engineering had tests where you had to get everything right to pass--"who wants to fly on the B- airplane?"
Aka a Boeing…
[Imagine Chris-Pratt-as-Andy-from-Parks-&-Recreation-going-Oh! animated GIF here]
"It’s the fact that if you don’t learn your shit, people will actually die."
One would think that this is all the more true in non-STEM fields: screwing up (say) international relations can start a war.
Edited: This was written late at night, and is a remarkably uncharitable way to look at things. My final sentence used to be:
> But I guess it's easier to deflect blame in that case?
A better final sentence would have been:
> But I guess endeavors in those fields are less brittle, in the sense that their failure (or success!) can rarely be traced to the failure or success of one particular step/detail.