(2024-06-26) ZviM Childhood And Education Roundup #6 College Edition

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #6: College Edition. Childhood roundup #5 excluded all developments around college. So this time around is all about issues related to college or graduate school, including college admissions.

Tuition and Costs

What went wrong with federal student loans? Exactly what you would expect when you don’t check who is a good credit risk. From a performance perspective, the federal government offered loans to often-unqualified students to attend poor-performing, low-value institutions. Those students then did not earn much and were often unable to repay the loans. The students are victims here too, as we told them to do it.

Alas, none of the proposed student loan solutions involve fixing the underlying issue.

Colorado governor Jared Polis, who really ought to know better, signs bipartisan bill to make first two years of college free for students whose family income is under $90k/year at in-state public schools

The obvious bad news is that this is effectively one hell of a tax increase.

The less obvious bad news is this is setting up a huge disaster. Think about what the student who actually needs this help will do. They will go to a local college for two years for free.

Then the state will say ‘oops, time to pay tuition.’ And what happens now? Quite a lot of them will choose to, or be forced to, leave college and get a job.

This is a disaster for everyone. The benefits of college mostly accrue to those who finish

What Your Tuition Buys You

ASU makes its courses available to anyone for $25/course. After you take the class, if you want the grade you got added to an official transcript with a credit you can use, +$400. These are real college credits

Aside from being virtual, this product is vastly better than the normal one. You get to try out courses for $25 and bail if they are no good. If you struggle, or you get bad grades, you can start over again for another $25 or bail.

Of course, this is Arizona State University, so the real product (by reputation) is neither education nor credential.

Decline of Academia

trust in academia, like many American institutions, is rapidly collapsing, among essentially all groups.

The 21st c has became the age of the unfocused institution—the age of mission inflation, goal ambiguity, and complex orgs losing any clear sense of priority, or identity.

My expectations is that the replacement will emerge out of the transformations wrought by AI, whether or not it is an improvement.

Grading and Stress

Harvard University students are highly stressed, despite having made it to Harvard, says Harvard Crimson. I would note that getting mental health counseling is often a function of how and when counseling is provided as much as it is about actual mental health

Harvard, the author says, is now a group of students obsessed with their relative status. Sounds like what would happen if you filter for exactly that type of young person, then put them all in the same place to compete, without the ability to differentiate themselves with grades because everyone who wants one has a 4.0.

Obviously we need a meaningful range of grades, otherwise students cannot differentiate themselves based on grades, so they both won’t care about doing well and learning, and they will become obsessed with other signals and status markers.

schools will need to hand out Cs and Ds that put students at the risk of real negative consequences, like loss of scholarships, getting kicked out of school, or heading into the job market looking like a real fuckup.

And then you get the problem that Hunham confronted: Is this what students and their parents want?

It is indeed not what most parents and students want. Which means we know what product they are mostly buying, and the universities are mostly selling.

And like so many other things these days, there is remarkably little product differentiation. (positioning)

Lower Standards

The killing of Harvard’s Math 55. John Arnold contrasts an ‘06 Crimson article on how hard the course is, with a ‘23 Crimson article showing how it is no longer special

Degree Value

the value of your Ivy League degree is going to be affected if people start to associate your school with political activism instead of academic rigor.

People who hire undergrads for highly competitive jobs (tech, finance, consulting etc) that are moving away from the Ivies and towards flagship state universities, citing better cultural and professional fit.

Preston Cooper provides an entry in the genre where you measure the financial ROI of various college degrees given different universities and majors. 31% of degrees were negative ROI

That then interacts with different colleges, which differ in many ways including completion rates

The return on master’s degrees was not so great.

Medical school & law school have huge payoffs. But nearly half of master’s degree programs leave students in the red.

How much government funding goes to programs with no return?

$122bn (29%) flowed to negative-ROI programs.

Here is the data dashboard. In which I learned that my degree and major had negative ROI by this metric, whereas if I had switched college majors from Mathematics to Economics like I considered, I would have had a vastly easier job all around and also picked up almost three million dollars (!) in expected value

Shifting Consumer Preferences

A lot of students just want to go to college to drink beer, hook up, go to football games, and emerge with a degree that will give them gainful employment. They far, far outnumber the political activist types. And they’re voting with their feet, it looks like.

college is a package deal. (Almost?) all the selective colleges have lots of political activism and force you to care deeply about things that are neither fun nor going to be useful to your future or part of getting a traditional education. And at least faking those things is deeply tied to your admission to those schools and to your social life and experience in class and administrative rules set once you arrive.

Standardized Tests in College Admissions

Colleges are reversing course, and admitting that yes standardized test scores are required for admissions

It was completely insane to drop this requirement. Doing so only hurt the exact people they claimed to be trying to help

Discrimination in College Admissions

A new way has been found to discriminate. Steve Miller: UCSD announced a new policy April 9 to exclude students whose parent is college educated and makes over $45,000 from enrolling in computer science or other selective majors, unless spots are available after first generation or low income students enroll.

This policy applies to students seeking to enroll in selective majors after their initial admission to the university

Those making these decisions have made their motivations and intentions clear, so go in with your eyes open, both reading the fine print and realizing that they could add more fine print later.

The Hill: A survey found that 34 percent of white students who applied to colleges falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application

Required Classes and Choosing Your Major

Phil Magness: If you want to genuinely disrupt higher education for the better, impose severe limits on the number of mandatory GenEd classes that students must take

Those same GenEds serve another function though: they create jobs for faculty in otherwise unpopular disciplines. And the depts that have the heaviest presence on the GenEd curriculum (e.g. English) also tend to be the largest departments on campus, despite drawing few majors

That is another issue with all the required classes. There is little room for exploration, most of those slots are already spoken for.

Which majors are most often regretted? Humanities. Jacob Shell: What they don’t tell you in high school or college advisor offices is some of these are “winner take all” majors and others aren’t. The comp sci normie is making a nice living right now, but the physics major is a sunlight-deprived lab tech for 30 years in a row.

Everything I Need To Know That Waited Until Graduate School

Thread of what Basil Halperin learned in graduate school. Increasing returns to effort for specialization in terms of skills, whether that translates to world improvement or pay is another question. Nothing here made me think anyone should go to grad school

my basic advice here would be that going to graduate school is something you should only do with a very specific purpose, and generally only if you can attend an elite institution

When You See Fraud Say Fraud

What is academia for, then? Presumably something else. Aella: It’s insane how much academia is not about figuring stuff out. The current state of academia is not what it would look like if we went “hey I wanna figure out the truth behind a thing.”

Free Speech

As Jill Filipovic and Jonathan Haidt each note, it would be great if universities used the recent protest moment to realize they their systematic error, and broadly once again embrace free speech the way they used to do.

Harvard Goes Mission First

Harvard declares it is now mission first. It will no longer make ‘official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function

*Nate Silver: Notable exceptions to free speech:

• Incitement
• Defamation
• Criticizing Harvard*

The University of Waterloo Model

They have a five year program that does not break for the summer, the culture focuses on working on projects rather than partying or sports, they have a startup accelerator on campus, and despite having a lot of CS students they are very selective (claimed 4% acceptance rate).

DEI

Joshua Rauh nots that his training on DEI included an example of where someone saying ‘DEI has gone too far’ is the first sign of prejudice and on the job discrimination. Alex Tabarrok in response: DEI has gone too far.

WaPo Editorial Board: The last thing academia — or the country — needs is another incentive for people to be insincere or dishonest

Paul Graham: People in the sciences thought they could ignore the fools over in the humanities and just focus on their research. But now the fools’ ideology is colonizing the sciences. John Sailer: NEW: Yale University’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry requires all job applicants to submit a DEI statement.

John Sailer: NEW: For hiring new professors, Columbia University recommends valuing “contributions to DEI” on par with “research.”

*John Sailer: BREAKING: A university spokesperson has officially confirmed to me that MIT will no longer use diversity statements in faculty hiring—making it the first elite private institution to backtrack on the controversial policy.

As recently as late 2023, MIT required prospective nuclear scientists to submit “a statement regarding their views on diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” No longer.*