I don’t support scandals, but scandals support me! Thanks to #CollegeGate, I’m in the next issue of TIME. Highlights:
Consider why these parents would even desire to fake their kids’ SAT scores. We can imagine them thinking, I desperately want my child to master mathematics, writing and history — and no one teaches math, writing and history like Yale does! But we all know this is fanciful. People don’t cheat because they want to learn more. They cheat to get a diploma from Yale or Stanford — modernity’s preferred passport to great careers and high society.
Since I didn’t like the idea of overrating a rare, vivid event, I even managed to downplay it while I capitalized on it:
When the FBI went public with this case, many of my Twitter friends declared victory on my behalf. Yet truth be told, this salacious scandal proves next to nothing. It just illustrates the obvious. Though we casually talk about our “institutions of higher learning,” little learning is going on.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Mar 14 2019 at 10:59am
Some good zingers. Especially the last two sentences of the piece.
A Country Farmer
Mar 14 2019 at 1:04pm
Computer science is becoming softer (I have a B.S. in CompSci). Employers are starting to notice. Some are even using the “FizzBuzz” test on interviews to test, if, after 4 years, the person can do the most basic of programming tasks. Anecdotally, when the conversation comes up on forums such as Hacker News, with real life interviewing managers at software companies, they say that a shocking percentage of C.S. grads fail. This is partly the reason why programming bootcamps are having significant success.
Christophe Biocca
Mar 14 2019 at 2:24pm
FizzBuzz isn’t a new trend though (people were already discussing that very question 12 years ago), and people have been bemoaning the uneven quality of new grads for decades now. Programming bootcamps are much more about helping people get into the industry on an accelerated schedule (usually because they’re switching careers), than about any decrease in the quality of CS grads.
Liam
Mar 14 2019 at 6:50pm
I don’t get it.
Robert EV
Mar 18 2019 at 9:47am
You say stuff like this, but these students must also have a delight in the rigid structure of of the class and semester schedule, an ability to read text books without falling asleep, and a desire to learn to the course material in the order provided and regurgitate it back in the structure required by the homework. All this while task switching multiple unrelated courses per semester, and switching to a new set of often only semi-related courses next semester.
A “passion for ideas” doesn’t cut it. You need a passion for their lassez-faire, rigid, fourty course, clean-your-plate-or-else, clashing palette, sampler banquet.
Robert EV
Mar 18 2019 at 10:12am
They have to enjoy all that after having already been conditioned however they were by the previous 12 years of primary and secondary school.
Robert EV
Mar 18 2019 at 11:00am
#BryanCaplanDoesn’tGoFarEnough
Phil H
Mar 22 2019 at 10:57pm
“They cheat to get a diploma from Yale or Stanford — modernity’s preferred passport to great careers and high society.”
Maybe not even the diploma. A very large part of the value of going to these colleges is to form social circles with the future rich & powerful. Consider this thought experiment: Would these parents prefer that their daughter spend 4 years at Harvard, then drop out with no degree, or would they prefer that their daughter get a decent degree from a local university? I think many would choose the former.
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