[HN Gopher] The price students pay for a prized IIT seat
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The price students pay for a prized IIT seat
Author : rustoo
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-03-22 21:13 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theprint.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (theprint.in)
| listmaking wrote:
| As data, here is a list of each year's top-ranked student in the
| IIT "joint entrance exam" (JEE) since 1979, and what they're
| doing now: https://dev.studentgiri.com/last-38-years-iit-jee-
| toppers/
|
| I know a couple of them personally, and a fair number of other
| IIT graduates besides, and while many of them did work hard, all
| of them did/do have hobbies and all that, not quite fitting the
| "No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood" headline or the
| rest of the picture painted here.
| lokeshk wrote:
| I didn't exhaustively scanned each entry, but sampled many (>
| 15) and one thing that I found to be odd was that all of them
| were male. I'm not sure if it's cultural but it's quite
| interesting.
| ghgdynb1 wrote:
| I used to think that the "holistic" criteria elite US colleges
| use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was
| that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let
| in students who wouldn't grind but wanted prestige and had rich
| parents.
|
| But if you tie a person's social status to performance on a
| single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be
| doing if they didn't have to solely dedicate themselves to prep.
| So maybe we're doing okay as-is.
| [deleted]
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| I'm becoming convinced by the idea that meritocracy itself is
| bad and a terrible way to organize society. But perhaps I'm
| biased by being a failure in the meritocratic system.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm interested in hear about why you believe you're a failure
| in the meritocratic system.
|
| I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of
| reasons:
|
| 1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end
| of the day everything is subjective
|
| 2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic
| traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| That's around my line of thinking, pure meritocracy is both
| too subjective and far too harsh to the people who aren't
| in the lucky egg club, especially in increasingly global
| winner take all games (an inevitable consequence of
| globalization).
|
| I'm a failure by meritocracy by nature of losing at all of
| the tests we use to judge success and merit - test scores,
| elite school admission, elite institutions etc.
| olladecarne wrote:
| I still think the "holistic" approach is flawed. The "holistic"
| criteria benefits upper-class students because lower and middle
| class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved
| in extra-curricular activities the way upper-class kids are. I
| experienced this first hand growing up, many future Ivy league
| students almost seemed to have been trained for it from the
| moment they were born. The parents had connections all over the
| place and their kids could study/work on all sorts of
| interesting hobbies. On the other hand the lower class people
| had no idea that this world existed and at best spent some time
| studying for the standardized exams if their parents were
| really invested in their future.
|
| Basically, whatever thing you choose as the metric, people with
| more resources and information will be able to optimize for it
| better. However, the more difficult the metric becomes to
| achieve, the more it benefits those who already benefit from
| the resource and information asymmetry.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be
| involved in extra-curricular activities
|
| I almost can't think of something _more_ middle-class than an
| aggressive dedication to as many extra-curricular activities
| as possible.
| majormajor wrote:
| The trick would be coming up with an exam you can't study for.
| But even "IQ test" style stuff hasn't been immune to this, and
| many attempts to do so fall victim to "select for people with
| upbringing like the test authors, so actually they did study
| their whole life, they just didn't realize that's what they
| were doing."
|
| Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the
| self-reported amount of time wasted on leetcode around here.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| How would that help?
|
| Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the
| opposite of meritocratic.
| thomasahle wrote:
| It might be meritocratic by some definitions, but it's
| hardly egalitarian or humanistic.
| gumby wrote:
| Really depends on your definition of "merit" (which is
| frequently misunderstood the same way evolutionary
| "fitness" is often misunderstood).
|
| Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a
| satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval!
|
| Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ"
| (loosely defined) is in fact the _proper_ definition of
| meritocracy.
|
| (In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| If many people loosely equate IQ to merit then that is
| worrying to me.
|
| It's all well and good if you're smart because it
| increases your advantage two-fold. But it basically
| screws over everyone else.
| majormajor wrote:
| None of these tests are rewarding people for doing useful
| work. If you still look at grades in addition to the
| standardized tests, like in the US, you'll wash out the
| not-willing-to-put-in-any-effort crowd like that.
|
| Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be
| fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify
| by institution, so that you have one single gate into
| university, instead of looking at the output of four years
| of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you
| can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of
| their time will be the result of what they personally put
| into it?
| endisneigh wrote:
| elite colleges basically have to have positive sentiment. a
| purely meritocratic admissions process wouldn't be conducive to
| this, because "rich" people generally do things that increase
| the sentiment of their schools, like become president or start
| famous companies.
|
| This is why Stanford and Harvard are far more popular and
| recognizable compared to Caltech and MIT even though the
| quality of the students is virtually identical.
|
| if you work in admissions as a place like Harvard or Stanford
| they will tell you point blank they make those kinds of
| "sentiment" considerations. I'm personally not a fan, but I get
| it.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > elite colleges basically have to have positive sentiment. a
| purely meritocratic admissions process wouldn't be conducive
| to this, because "rich" people generally do things that
| increase the sentiment of their schools, like become
| president or start famous companies.
|
| Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, Sciences Pos, X, ENA
| are all counter examples. You can select purely on academics
| just fine.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't know what you consider academics but I went to a
| university in your list and they definitely had plenty of
| things other than what I'd consider academics to select on.
| Firstly they had basic biographical information (eg your
| name, which school you went to, I think your age). Secondly
| they had interviews where they could use whatever
| impression they liked. Thirdly they had discretion in the
| offer they made to you (ie "we'll give you a place if you
| get these grades") and discretion in which of the students
| not meeting their offers they chose to accept ("you didn't
| meet your offer but we deliberately give out too many too-
| difficult offers and we've decided we prefer you out of the
| candidates who didn't make it").
|
| Obviously the people involved in the process were generally
| ethically minded but if this thread shows anything, it's
| that two people may do quite different things while each
| trying to act ethically.
| majormajor wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. MIT and Caltech are very niche, but
| inside that niche, seem to have a pretty clear reputational
| advantage over Harvard. (Stanford, on the other hand, has
| some more niche overlap in CS at least.) Sadly, it's not a
| niche that lends itself to "future President prestige." But
| is that really hurting either MIT or Caltech, or their grads?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Compared to Stanford and MIT, Caltech is not getting the
| same caliber student since the late 70s-early 80s (and
| definitely since the mid 2000s) when looking at
| international Olympiad winners, etc
| yudlejoza wrote:
| False choice fallacy.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I thought the GP had a reasonable suggestion for a common
| other way of doing things to competitive examinations. What
| alternatives did you have in mind?
| mochomocha wrote:
| As a counter-example, I have gone through a relatable
| experience though not in India but France (our "preparatory
| classes" system also has similar high competitiveness/high
| pressure characteristics, to prepare for a few deciding exams).
| It only lasts for 2 years, but the stakes are somewhat similar
| from what I understand from the article.
|
| Having lived in the US for a decade now, one of the biggest
| culture gap I keep and that probably won't ever go away is how
| it's somewhat accepted here that "letting rich kids cheat/buy
| their way into Ivy League is not that bad, and look it pays for
| a new cafeteria".
| ghgdynb1 wrote:
| I get it, and I actually agree that the culture you describe
| isn't a good look.
|
| What I'm going for is more the idea that if you consider the
| best alternative I can think of to the "holistic" approach,
| you get selecting applicants purely based on entrance exam
| scores. In such a world you'd be punishing a kid who plays
| with Arduino out of interest. Any energy devoted towards
| something other than test prep is energy wasted.
|
| In the American system, as I'm coming to see it, the kid who
| plays with Arduino is punished less. The test won't take you
| all the way anyways, and you even get a little "refund" on
| attention sunk into some types of activity which qualify as
| extracurricular.
| mochomocha wrote:
| Yes... It's a balance. I don't think tests-only admissions
| are the panacea either to be clear. The key problem is how
| to introduce some level of subjectivity in the admission
| process without creating doors wide open for corruption or
| cottage industries to "prep your application" with semi-
| fake accomplishments demonstrating your "soft skills".
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| All gatekeepers are subject to corruption. This is a
| human issue.
| smhost wrote:
| yeah, one of my professors would openly talk about how rich
| kids in grad school just pay other people to do their
| research for them. i don't think he meant to be demoralizing,
| but i remember thinking to myself 'so what the fuck am i
| doing here, then?'
| haltingproblem wrote:
| tl;dr - the writer passes of systemic flaws as those peculiar to
| one elite institution in search of clickbait without presenting
| non-existent alternatives.
|
| This is what happens when a reporter at a online publication
| which is somewhere between Buzzfeed and Slate in India (liberal
| to very liberal) writes an article on an apex institution.
| Admission to the IITs is widely considered in India to writing a
| golden ticket in life. They can study abroad at virtually any
| university, get hired by multinationals in India or abroad etc.
| etc.
|
| The points the reporter makes might be factually correct but are
| misguided and erroneous. This is not like students who don't
| study for the IITs get a more holistic education. Ask what
| exactly would the kids do if not study for the IITs? Workout,
| train physically, work with their hands on vocational skills? All
| these are either absent in Indian society or looked down upon.
|
| The whole Indian system by virtue of demand >> supply due to 70
| years of socialism/quais-communism is about state monopoly on
| education. Indian spend 10s of billions of dollars sending their
| children abroad for undergraduate and masters education because
| supply is so meagre. If your family is not wealthy then this is
| the only guaranteed way out, rather used to be, as things are
| slowly changing.
|
| Hate to say this but there is also an element of sour grapes to
| the writer's lament - IIT graduates command social prestige, job
| opportunities and mating opportunities.
|
| Now go write about how kids in the US work so hard to pass BUDS
| spend all their lives perfecting their physical endurance in
| detriment to their mind. Or the football players who devote all
| their energies to get noticed by college scouts. IIT's are no
| different just in a different realm. I would _almost_ argue that
| the IIT exams are superior as they are atleast not damaging their
| body and wasting prime years of their lives not developing their
| minds.
| mprovost wrote:
| And yet from the US tech side of things there is basically a
| complete lack of awareness on the part of American (or European)
| staff of which schools are considered good (or the equivalent of
| Ivy League) in India. I would bet if you asked any engineer or
| manager who conducts interviews for a FAANG to name the
| equivalent of MIT in India they would be stumped. (Unfortunately
| I count myself in this group.) Then there's also a general lack
| of trust in credentials - does anyone actually check that you
| went to the school that you said you did? I suspect this is one
| reason for the notorious whiteboard interviews - it doesn't
| really matter where you went to school, you just have to be able
| to reverse a binary tree.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| So, when do the parents step out of the picture, if ever? Sounds
| like the worst affected would fly apart the moment they had to
| live on their own. This is a type of student I've heard of in the
| US of course, but this appears to affect a huge portion of the
| students.
| analog31 wrote:
| For the elite, never. If nothing else, there is always a family
| safety net, and some starting capital.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| There is an argument to be made that to be the best at something
| you have to commit like that.
|
| You could write a similar story about pro athletes probably,
| although team sports would include some level of socialization by
| default, not all sports are team sports. And I imagine a lot of
| other sacrifices (friendships outside the team or sport, hobbies,
| education) are made in pursuit of a pro athlete dream too. And of
| course there are tons of people who put that kind of work and
| sacrifice into becoming a pro athlete and never make it.
|
| I think the part that really makes this story stand out to me is
| the fact that even the ones who make it into this prestigious
| program don't actually wind up in some top echelon. The article
| says they find the skill gap between what the industry wants and
| what they have studied is too big.
|
| That is incredible. Absolutely bonkers to sacrifice so much at a
| shot at some "top" thing that basically never actually pays off
| for anyone.
| hintymad wrote:
| > You could write a similar story about pro athletes probably,
|
| That's my question too. When it comes to studying, "toil" is a
| four-letter word for American people. Oh, you study too hard.
| Oh you have a lost childhood. Oh solving math problems is not
| FaIr to other kids, for it shadows the true talent.
|
| But when it comes to sports? Oh man, the tone totally changes.
| "Toil" is da word! Mileage matters! Have you seen LA of 4am in
| the morning? Do you know the kid next door trains 5 hours every
| day, and breaks his bones at least 3 times and still does not
| give up? Mommy wants you to know the story of whoever
| practicing free throws a thousand times a day. Daddy will use
| all the retirement savings to hire a coach for you. Don't be
| like that Asian family who spend all their money hiring science
| tutors. If you train hard, you get better results.
|
| So much hypocrisy.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _I think the part that really makes this story stand out to me
| is the fact that even the ones who make it into this
| prestigious program don 't actually wind up in some top
| echelon. The article says they find the skill gap between what
| the industry wants and what they have studied is too big._
|
| It heavily _implies_ that. The story says "Despite all the
| hard work engineering students put in, a survey conducted in
| 2019 found that 80 per cent of engineers "are not fit for any
| job in the knowledge economy and only 2.5 per cent of them
| possess technical skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that
| industry requires"."
|
| But if you follow the link it goes here:
| https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/indian-engine...
|
| That story is about engineers in general, not IIT graduates
| specifically. It seems disingenuous to highlight the
| exceptional efforts required to become an IIT graduate yet
| downplay graduates' post-graduation prospects by referring to
| engineers in general.
| Daishiman wrote:
| It's not even being "at the top". Ultimately the difference in
| education in high-quality institutions just isn't really _that_
| big. And while it 's true that it is a useful signal that
| you're sufficiently dedicated to study something deeply for a
| few years, the correlation between actual success or utility
| outside of that just doesn't seem to make it worth much.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > It's not even being "at the top"
|
| It seems to me that the kids pursuing it think it will take
| them to the top. I don't think anyone works that hard and
| sacrifices everything for a shot at being mediocre.
| cmdli wrote:
| It seems to me that the problem is what these students should
| be the "best" at.
|
| Taking tests and learning academic material? They appear to be
| super successful. Being able to navigate the world of business
| and working with other people? Well, they aren't learning all
| the soft skills and life experience they need.
|
| I see this partially as a failure of the metrics used for
| acceptance. Social skills and other activities are important to
| the success of an individual, and they should be measured as
| such when considering who to accept.
| paxys wrote:
| The comparison to pro athletes is apt, although a key
| difference here is that it isn't taboo to tell an otherwise
| good amateur athlete that they probably won't make it to the
| big leagues. So you don't have millions of kids every year
| sacrificing their lives in pursuit of pro sports.
|
| Try telling an Indian parent to drop their kid out of school in
| grade 9 to join a cricket camp full time. But doing it for IIT
| is totally acceptable.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| A lot of amateur athletes wind up forced out due to injury or
| other things outside their control (parent divorces, stuff
| like that) too.
| univalent wrote:
| I went through this in 1998. Went from around 130 or so pounds in
| grade 10 to 200ish by the time I got into college. Would get up
| at 2am every day to study and spend every waking minute studying.
| The only exercise I got was walking around while still reading
| books. Still struggling with my weight after all these years. The
| pressure I went through those 2 years was indescribable. Spare a
| thought for folks who went through all this and didn't even get
| in.
| vishakad wrote:
| Absolutely. Knew of some who didn't get in and their self-
| esteem was pretty shot for some years.
| univalent wrote:
| I was one of those 'not so smart' kids that got in. I know
| this because I struggled mightily once I did get i to
| maintain a respectable GPA. I think the system is most brutal
| on middle of the road students like me. If you know you
| aren't good enough, you get an out. Or if you are really
| smart you can coast in. The average folks get hosed :)
| vishakad wrote:
| "Float to the top, or sink to the bottom. Everything else
| in the middle is the churn." - Amos Burton.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I would love to see really elite schools lowering the threshold
| for the quantitative measurements like the JEE to say, 85%
| percentile, and just randomly selectively students who meet it.
|
| In my experience there's definitely a point in which better
| scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with both
| college performance, life satisfaction or even career earnings.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Why throw merit out the window? There's already a zillion
| legacy, sports, and diversity admits to Ivy/Pac12. Let those
| with the most merit and aptitude win rather than random chance
| or born attributes. If that means deemphasizing tests as much
| and looking for accomplishments like genuine leadership,
| projects, and other works, this would be fantastic.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It's quite a radical suggestion, but it's not throwing merit
| out the window. Top 15% is still pretty good.
| airhead969 wrote:
| "Pretty good" compared to what? Top 15% of how many for how
| many spots?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > In my experience there's definitely a point in which better
| scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with
| both college performance, life satisfaction or even career
| earnings.
|
| Bring the citations because the research shows that doing
| better on highly g loaded tests is basically an unalloyed good.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Does it really show that doing a bit better at the very top
| of the distribution is useful for something? I'd imagine it's
| a satisfaction type dynamic, where the benefits taper off.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) system is almost an
| order of magnitude more competitive than the average Ivy League
| University in the US.
|
| About 0.9% of IIT applicants will be admitted. Compare to Ivy
| League Universities, which range from 4.5% (Harvard) to 10.6%
| (Cornell).
|
| That said, I spoke with one IIT graduate who tried to downplay
| the experience. I could never tell if he was being humble or
| polite, or if he really felt the difficult was exaggerated. He
| was smart, but he didn't seem to have missed out on a childhood
| for the sake of getting into IIT. Of course, I grew up with
| several smart peers who made getting into Ivy League universities
| look like a walk in the park.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm skeptical of acceptance rates, because the denominator is
| not controlled in any way. Maybe IIT's application fee is
| lower.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| 4.5% for Harvard honestly seems high to me. Do you have a
| source? (Not doubting, moreso curious about other Ivys).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Acceptance rates are pretty meaningless.
|
| For example Oxford and Cambridge have seemingly very high
| acceptance rates... but this is because in the UK students
| can only apply to one top-tier university. The Ivy League has
| tiny acceptance rates because many students apply to many of
| them. I guess you could apply to literally all of them if you
| wanted to? Does that make them harder to get into?
| perpetualpatzer wrote:
| It was 4.5 in 2019 (the last non-COVID cycle).[0]
|
| [0]https://qz.com/1584304/acceptances-rates-at-top-us-
| colleges-...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| This article is a gross misrepresentation of what it takes to get
| into IITs. I got into one, and I can guarantee that this article
| pretty much picks and chooses data points as it wants. Yes it is
| academically challenging to get into IITs, but there's two ways
| you can get into one: Devote your entire life towards "cracking"
| the game that's the entrance exams, or just study enough that
| you've mastered the understanding of math and science, but don't
| kill yourself over it.
|
| Me and my batch of high school buddies managed to get into IITs
| (and NITs which are a step down from IITs) while putting in some
| work, but not killing ourselves. All of us were athletes, so a
| 2-3 hours of sports daily for us was a must. All of us did some
| amount of coaching, and though the coaching classes gave us
| enough exercises to last us the entire month, daily, we had
| enough sense to figure out how much practice was enough practice.
| (Surprisingly, it's not a lot) Most of us did have other hobbies,
| some of us ended up pursuing them full time.
|
| Yes we always had the kind of students the article mentions,
| spending each moment they're not asleep on DPPs (daily practice
| problems). Guess what, some of them made it into IITs (which they
| would have even if they put in less effort), but a lot of them
| actually never made it despite putting in that effort.
|
| Not all of us are the soulless robots described here.
| haltingproblem wrote:
| Accuracy and a balanced nuanced view does not create click-bait
| articles. I did not go to an IIT but know plenty who did and
| while some are uber-nerds others are on the opposite end of the
| spectrum. Mixed-bag. Nothing different than what you would find
| at an elite US institution.
| pizza wrote:
| Couldn't help but wince at the irony that one of the entrance
| exams is called NEET, just like the catchall term for people
| who've fallen through the cracks (Not in Education, Employment,
| or Training)
| primitivesuave wrote:
| I have been hiring IIT graduates and building a team in India for
| several years now. They are all really smart people with a strong
| work ethic, but their approach to work tends to be the same as
| the approach they needed to succeed in a test-based education
| system. The engineers will grind until any hour of the night to
| ensure that all feature requirements are met and JIRA tickets
| checked off, but nobody will stop to ask _why_ things are being
| done a particular way, or offer up some alternative. When success
| is measured solely on hard metrics (e.g. ticket completion, bug
| reports), there isn 't much emphasis placed on critical analysis
| or many of the "soft skills" referred to in the article.
|
| I don't mean to say that IIT graduates lack creativity - there
| are many well-known examples to the contrary. My point is that an
| academic system where success is predicated on test-taking
| ability will produce great test-takers who function quite well as
| cogs in the machine. The system does not cultivate enough
| creative thinkers who can imagine the machines that have not yet
| been built.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Don't write this off as a solely as a symptom of education.
|
| Being able to question the judgement of an authority figure /
| decision maker is a privilege. A squeaky wheel gets the grease
| but a raised nail gets the hammer. Engineers generally lean
| more nail than wheel in most orgs, and being a minority or
| otherwise less respected subset of that group makes you feel
| even more like a nail.
|
| Dotting I's and crossing T's is exactly the kind of behavior
| one would expect from a person who is smart enough to recognize
| something is a stupid idea and knows that they lack the
| authority to make any changes and will bear the bunt of a
| failure.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Dotting I's and crossing T's is exactly the kind of
| behavior one would expect from a person who is smart enough
| to recognize something is a stupid idea
|
| Maybe? But it makes them useless for my purposes. Which
| requires them to think for themselves.
| flowerlad wrote:
| Something is really wrong, if he highly capable kids are
| signing off "JIRA tickets". Couldn't you find some college
| dropouts in Oklahoma instead?
| Aeolun wrote:
| They wouldn't even be able to check off tickets?
| hintymad wrote:
| What's wrong with students doing everything they can to get into
| IIT? How is it different from the US? A student aspiring to get
| into HYPM in the bay area often needs to get full GPA, complete
| more than 10 AP courses, be the leader in multiple voluntary
| groups, be a captain in a sports team, sleep 5 hours a day, and
| take illicit smart drugs. Do such students have a childhood? Do
| they have life? Do they have true hobby? So it's okay to toil for
| so-called "holistic admission", but it's not okay to play the
| game in India? What kind of twisted moral superiority is this?
| fireeyed wrote:
| This is what happens when supply side overwhelms demand side. I
| remember in my teens, a person who graduated highschool with a
| modicum of technical aptitude could get hired as an entry level
| engineer in electronics, manufacturing, automotive etc. No longer
| the case. They won't even hire you for dog catcher with that
| background.
| jkaptur wrote:
| I was curious, so I looked it up: "There are no formal
| education or experience requirements for this position."
|
| https://a127-jobs.nyc.gov/psc/nycjobs/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HR...
|
| It doesn't invalidate your broader point in the slightest, of
| course.
| KSS42 wrote:
| When was that? 40? 50 yrs ago?
|
| Did you really mean engineer or did you mean entry level
| technician?
|
| When I graduated high school in the late 80's, you would at
| least need a community college degree to become even a
| technician or technologist.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Are we overpopulated?
| somesortofthing wrote:
| No, it's just that desperately needed, useful work goes
| undone(and the people who would have otherwise done it go
| unemployed) because the market doesn't incentivize it.
| Lammy wrote:
| No, but we did move all the entry-level work overseas as a
| response to the successes of the civil rights movement. See
| also: Detroit, Camden, Gary, etc.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| Over-accreditation might be the issue instead.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_.
| ..
|
| Hard to tell how you would easily stop the trend of
| educational inflation though, degrees are an easy way to sort
| through applicants.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| The USA has sub-replacement fertility, as do almost all
| Western countries.
|
| Population growth is entirely due to immigration.
|
| We should open our borders to other very-high-HDI countries:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev.
| ..
|
| (With diversity and equality requirements, eg. max 10% from
| any one country, max 49% males from any one country)
|
| And disallow immigration from all others.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| In other words, let our population continue to shrink.
|
| Perfect for the "elite" who get to coast on trust funds
| while the unemployed poors die off.
|
| Not so perfect when an outside force decides to declare
| war.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Falling population leads to cheaper housing, higher
| wages, less congestion for government services and
| infrastructure.
|
| More affordable housing is a major factor in fertility
| rates, so eventually the population just finds a stable
| equilibrium.
|
| Increasing population leads to the opposite - the elites
| are the ones pushing for mass-immigration, since they
| benefit from rising land prices and lower wages.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| "A stable equilibrium" might as well read stagnation.
|
| How do you suppose we incentive competition in
| stagnation?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Prosperity IMHO means a growth in per-capita wealth. On
| the other hands, "the elites" may prefer a growth in
| total wealth (since part of that growth accumulates to
| them) through a population increase even if it comes at
| the cost of decrease in per-capita wealth for the actual
| society.
| medium_burrito wrote:
| We can even speed up the process by letting the poors
| have unlimitied opiates!
| wppick wrote:
| The whole world could live in Texas. It's a failure of the
| people in leadership positions and who control the resources
| to create a game where everyone can find a fulfilling role to
| play. Instead its rent seeking and actively blocking the game
| from changing because that would risk their wealth.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| "The whole world could live in Texas"
|
| 7.48805 trillion sq feet in Texas / 7.8 billion world
| population = 960 sq feet per person. So theoretically
| possible but where would we put the cows ?
| Larrikin wrote:
| If you are asking this question because you think we are,
| what steps are you willing to take to ensure you don't have
| kids?
| bvoq wrote:
| Isn't this the same place everywhere that has a meritocratic
| system? In Japan/South Korea it's the final test at high school,
| in Switzerland it's the 1st year of university, etc.
|
| I prefer the system in Switzerland, because everyone gets a shot
| at studying in the university but only those who can pass the
| exams can continue studying. Of course it means that the entire
| university experience is high pressure but it's more
| meritocratic, since different high schools have different
| standards for a good grade.
| vishakad wrote:
| I went through the IIT system 10+ years ago. At that point, it
| was 3,500 people to be selected from a pool of 250,000 or so.
| These ratios have remained the same over the years I think.
|
| My hobbies were largely desk-bound/sedentary --- coding, trivia
| --- that I was able to carry out at a reduced pace, and resume
| after I cleared the exams. The pressure during the ages 15-17 was
| definitely quite intense --- I'd typically come home at 3 in the
| afternoon, and work until midnight with a few short breaks in
| between. However, I think I did create a narrative of what I was
| going through that led to me actually enjoying the reading and
| problem-solving (in spite of feeling stressed out). At that age,
| it can feel like a superpower to be given a list of chemicals and
| predict what structures would emerge in a chemical reaction, or
| be able to compute the motions of particles in an EM field. With
| over 10+ years of hindsight now, I feel the following ---
|
| -- The notion of an "ideal" childhood being lost depends on how
| you define the ideal. (edit : There was no pressure to have a
| girlfriend or boyfriend at that age. No "jocks" bullying studious
| "nerds". The "nerds" were the "cool" kids all through in fact. )
| Of course, I don't imagine that people killing themselves or
| burning out would count as normal in any culture.
|
| -- I'd say the ability to slog things out for many hours of the
| day across weeks many is something that has stayed with me. At
| the same time, there are numerous great scientists and engineers
| who have developed this ability without having to go through this
| process (edit: at ages 15-17).
|
| -- As one person in the article points out, yes, I definitely was
| very late to pick up many life skills that are likely second-
| nature to teenagers in the West.
|
| -- While I could solve problems and apply concepts easily, it was
| from a shallow understanding of topics. I definitely did _not_
| develop a meta-understanding of why, say, Newton 's laws are
| structured that way, or what consequences it has for the
| structure of physical laws relying on Newton's laws. These skills
| I had to learn much later on.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Uhh, this may not be completely accurate. I worked with several
| CS IITians. They have/had other stuff they did growing up and
| took different career paths.
| savanpatel wrote:
| Last year, 1.5 million students took the JEE to qualify for
| 13,000 seats in 23 IITs across the country - in other words, for
| each seat there were 115 aspirants.
|
| -- Wrong Math. Count in the reservation. General Category
| Students have to compete more for a seat. Ratio will be higher
| for them.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| It's the chance for a lot of kids to chance to get out of the
| hood and change their entire family's fortune. It's a competitive
| world.
| lordnacho wrote:
| "Like a 23-year-old machine learning engineer based out of
| Florida, who started his JEE preparation as early as Class 8,
| because his peers had started as early as Class 6. The engineer
| says he was so engrossed in his prep that he ignored basics such
| as good hygiene, good grooming, or even making friends."
|
| Wow, this is insane. For all the kids in the world who are doing
| this sort of thing, JEE or Gaokao style 1-in-100 pass rate, keep
| some things in mind:
|
| - When you're older, you will appreciate your school friends more
| than any others. They're the only people whose parents have fed
| you. You know their life stories. You're each other's support
| network. Today, my friend from school lost his dad. I drove right
| over. We phoned another classmate who had the same thing happen
| to him the week before. I don't know what people do if they don't
| have these kinds of relationships.
|
| - Very few people will pass, but everyone can learn the material.
| You can learn the material (Machine Learning, civil engineering,
| linear algebra, etc) to a high standard, and still forgetting one
| little thing will make you not be top 1%. We can't all be top,
| but CAN all understand the knowledge that people before us have
| discovered.
|
| - When you leave university, there are no more exams. If you
| optimize your whole life towards passing exams, you will suddenly
| come to a point where somehow you will be judged on things other
| than finite, concisely answerable questions. Both open ended
| questions like "how should we design this system" and more vague
| ones like "how do we all work together".
|
| - To even have a chance of passing a 1% bar, you need a fair bit
| of privilege. You're likely to have come from a better off,
| stable family. You also need some luck at that level. The simple
| fact of the examiner deciding to include a topic that is fresh in
| your mind could be the difference between passing and failing.
|
| - You're not actually learning things when you study for an exam
| of this high a bar. You're memorizing tables, because if you
| don't happen to have that trigonometric identity in your head,
| you won't pick up that marginal point. Or you memorize constants
| that in any real life situation would be a lookup in a book. Or
| you memorize proofs so that you don't have to spend valuable exam
| time actually thinking.
|
| - Even after you pass through the eye of the needle, you will not
| feel that special. I went to a top, world-famous uni, and people
| were mostly ordinary. I'd say half of my higher level math and
| physics classmates from high school would have done just fine. I
| didn't think there were many especially smart people there, maybe
| a few reasonably hard workers. But none of the John Nash in A
| Beautiful Mind kind of striking genius.
|
| - It's turtles all the way down. What's natural after you pass
| this exam is that certain businesses will present their hiring
| pipeline as the next step. Don't buy their crap. There's just
| more and more filters, and the ones in the corporate ladder are
| brutal. There's no official exam result, and very few places in
| the next round of musical chairs. Someone is bound to pass every
| single hurdle, but it won't be you.
|
| - This style of exam belongs in math contests. I used to enjoy
| those in high school, and framing it as an extracuricular allows
| the people who don't want to compete to opt out. It's totally
| fair to have a high bar in a math contest, and it's totally fair
| to ask unintuitive questions like that IMO question with the
| windmill. In the end it's a bit of extra exercise for the brain
| with low cost of failure. You don't have to feel bad if you get a
| math contest question wrong.
|
| Finally, I think the real problem is that India is a huge country
| that really ought to have more spaces. If you're at a point where
| over 100 kids are competing for one space, you can add some
| spaces and get more engineers out, without compromising quality.
| Making extra lessons for people to pass doesn't increase the
| number of spaces, the majority of the effort of crawling over
| your cohort is wasted.
| sgt101 wrote:
| A colleague went to an IIT. I chatted with her about my daughters
| school and asked about her experience. She said that the pressure
| was intense in her late teens, but manageable "just three of the
| girls in my class killed themselves". She _honestly_ didn 't have
| a flicker on her face as she said it, it was haunting.
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