Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

http://www.stanford.edu/group/reichresearch/cgi-bin/site/2011/03/24/are-stanford-students-just-really-excellent-sheep/

by schmico • 14 years ago

142 167 14 years ago

Alex3917• 14 years ago

"It portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like conformists."

Colleges go out of their way to select 'herd-like conformists' during the admissions process, so why would they then try to change them once they got there? This Brooks article never made any sense to me.

wmf• 14 years ago

The admissions people say they reject excellent-but-bland applications, but perhaps it's a matter of degree.

alwold• 14 years ago

I think by "bland" they just mean that they reject people who don't have enough of the conforming resume-building activities that they expect :)

Spearchucker• 14 years ago

There's a school of thought in the UK that feels institutions like this reject applications from applicants who's family don't have deep pockets.

Similarly, there's the perception that Eton is capable of producing well-educated idiots.

Understand me here - this isn't my view. Just saying it's a view that's out there.

EricDeb• 14 years ago

Yes... so instead they accept people who superficially differentiate themselves and pretend to be non-conformists which then becomes another "admission strategy."

gojomo2• 14 years ago

This is one of the reasons I think people err by reading too much into accounts from the 'Stanford Prison Experiment'.

The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some other authority was managing the consequences.

etherael• 14 years ago

This is a very interesting observation, while I don't doubt the observation about typical elite university students is true, I wonder if the inverse observation about the "general population" is enormously less true. This would be necessary in order to expect a different result from said experiment.

In my experience, the person who feels no desire to conform whatsoever is an extreme aberration. Far more frequent are people that pretend to be such and actually simply flip the expected behaviour from a conformist norm and behave in a different way but still conforming to some social group.

Sure, they're individuals, just like the other members of their subculture / social clique, etc.

scott_s2• 14 years ago

Eliezer Yudkowsky, in his excellent essay "Lonely Dissent" (http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/): Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

cjimmy• 14 years ago

The participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment weren't Stanford students. I'm not sure any of them were. They were selected by Zimbardo from responses to an ad in Palo Alto. They were selected for their normal-ness, mentally and physiologically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

gojomo2• 14 years ago

You're right that they may not have been exclusively Stanford students. But they were recruited through city and campus newspapers, limited to male college students who were in Palo Alto for the last two weeks of August 1971, and had to report to an on-campus location to sign up.

I've seen definitive references that some were Stanford students, and my guess under those conditions would be that most were.

But even if most were not: a cohort of 24 male college students (23 white; 1 asian) in 1971 was not representative of society at large. Those in comfortable Palo Alto for the last 2 weeks of summer break, even less representative. And those who arrived on campus in response to a classified ad for paid volunteers "needed for psychological study of prison life", less representative again.

(As one of the followup studies footnoted in Wikipedia discovered, the mere presence of the "study of prison life" phrase in the recruitment ad changes what kind of people respond.)

IsaacL• 14 years ago

As a member of generation Y, I think the original "Organisation Kid" article really got what is wrong with my generation. We're not lazy, entitled, or afraid of competition, despite hundreds of articles by gen X/boomers claiming the opposite. We compete and work hard but never ask what it's all for.

debacle• 14 years ago

When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game.

It's 2012. You can get HD pornography on a phone. Are we still expected to worry about all of this menial shit from the 60s?

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

> When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working hard, because you realize it's an old man's game.

That's one possible result. There are others.

chubbard• 14 years ago

No generation ever knows what its all for until they're 40 possibly 35 because you're outside the holy grail of advertising demographic. Coincidence? Yea probably. If you haven't figured it out by then your not paying much attention anyway. There's prescript of zoloft by the door for you.

Anyway, This essay is much the same that Allan Watts articulated in the 60s and I think he did it with much more panache and charm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4

I find its best to laugh because it really has been a well executed practical joke.

Drbble15• 14 years ago

Gen Y are you. The Gen Z millenials are the lazy coddled ones.

jeffpersonified2• 14 years ago

William Deresiewicz's address to West Point, "Solitude and Leadership" (http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/) remains the best piece on leadership I've read to date. Ironically, as pointed out by Deresiewicz, the address is given to newly minted officers in the US military.

The address was requisite reading in this year's Venture for America application process, and is more than just a guide in becoming a better leader, but a phenomenal exposition on why our educational system has calcified into "hoop" jumping.

Estragon3• 14 years ago

I agree; that is an excellent speech.

twodayslate• 14 years ago

The speech was given to the freshmen at the academy. They still have 4 more years until they become officers.

maeon32• 14 years ago

95% of people are sheep, just look around you. Clothing fashions all change with eachother according to what the others are doing. Church: just tell me What to believe. Bars, drinking toxic liquids and smoking radioactive smoke because it's cool. Resumes which plead for others to make us worthy members of society.

It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world expects you to be.

Peaker• 14 years ago

The toxic liquids tend to be actually fun to many :)

maeon32• 14 years ago

Thank you for being a part of my statistic. Alcohol makes you misrable. Say baaa sheep. :) you were trained to say it's fun by billion dollar psychoogical ad campaigns to brainwash you to think it fun.

It's abuse in a bottle, wolves realize this and profit off the sheep.

skittles• 14 years ago

I'll go a step beyond. Most people look to others for cues. Some others bend over backwards to not conform (like the "I wake every day at 4:54 am" weirdo--just say 4:55 man!). Much more rare is the person who just does exactly what they want.

Tsagadai• 14 years ago

> Much more rare is the person who just does exactly what they want.

Arseholes aren't particularly rare.

What is rare is the person who does exactly what they want without ruining life for everyone around them while actually improving the world in some way.

rfurmani• 14 years ago

I agree that the typical person can be a sheep, however:

* the church callout is unnecessary, it can be a type of self-analysis

* Alcohol is not toxic and in reasonable quantities does not have a purely deleterious effect.

* When needing to make personal connections (which one always will since you learn a lot from others, not to mention the benefits of having connections and even just social interactions) it is good to look like you fit in, so others do not become defensive.

* there's a limited amount of time and energy available for coming up with your own things. If somebody gives me clothes that are comfortable and look good, I won't spend time thinking of what clothes would "really be me as an individual". On my last personal project I had my own design, but we ended up looking through a Web Design idea book, made something that looked rather standard, and ended up with a better reaction, as it's what was expected and hence more usable. In other words, pick your battles, save up for the big innovations, recognize the value of others, and stand on their shoulders, even if you have to conform a bit to do so

lmm2• 14 years ago

Alcohol is toxic in the strict, technical sense (as are many things).

blake8086• 14 years ago

I am always amused at this mentality. Have you ever noticed how Reddit is full of people who all think everyone else are sheep?

Everyone is unique if you only count the things that make them different, and people are pretty similar if you look for things that make them alike.

sliverstorm5• 14 years ago

Absolutely. You are always a sheep in some regard; non-conforming in every regard is an exhausting and worthless endeavor. Not to mention, you almost have to pay more attention to trends than the unconscious conformer, at which point... who is the slave to trends?

unimpressive• 14 years ago

>Have you ever noticed how Reddit is full of people who all think everyone else are sheep?

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/610/ (Also a great statement on solipsism.)

Actively defying the norm for its own sake is counterproductive. If your choices are based directly on trends by actively pushing against every one of them you notice your still a slave to them.

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

I find the whole idea of using "sheep" as a shorthand for adherence to social norms to be immature. To me it smacks of the adolescent impulse to distinguish oneself from one's parents, and by extension, from any perceived authority--social or otherwise. It's not a great long-term strategy, but it satisfies an emotional need.

Drbble15• 14 years ago

I love how you wrote "Reddit" because you had to hold the party line that HN is more sophisticated than Reddit.

matwood• 14 years ago

And you're a sheep that rejects the other sheep because being anti-sheep is cool right now.

I do what I want to do because I want to do it. Sometimes that means doing things that gasp other people also enjoy doing. Are we all sheep then? I get the Fight Club anti-consumerism mentality, but taking it just as far in the other direction isn't any better. Trading one sheeps skin for another means you're still a sheep.

BTW, wines and beers have been produced for almost as long as humanity has been around. If everyone who enjoys a drink once in awhile is only doing it because it's cool, then alcohol is longest lasting fad known. :)

joedev2• 14 years ago

95% of non-conformists are sheep. Just look around you. All dressed the same, all act the same, all with the same too-cool-to-be-conforming attitude.

It would really take a special kind of defiance to say "no thank you" to what the non-conformists clique expects their own to be.

RedwoodCity• 14 years ago

Everyone forms groups with shared behaviors and values whether they realize it or not. This is neither good or bad, but it does serve to define each and everyone of us whether we accept it or not.

Most animals are driven by a desire to eat, sleep and reproduce including humans. There are exceptions like worker bees and ants that can't reproduce, there is no analog in humans.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

You can only be sure you're really rejecting society's desires when everyone thinks you're mentally ill. Good luck with that.

But seriously, if you keep going down this line of thought you will soon end up a lunatic staggering through a hall of mirrors. Just give up and be yourself, whatever that seems to be at any given moment.

rogerclark• 14 years ago

i bet absolutely no one ever wants to hang out with you

icandoitbetter• 14 years ago

That's textbook Reddit garbage right there. When you don't have good insight on people, they all look the same.

alecbenzer• 14 years ago

I occasionally drink and/or smoke. It has nothing to do with wanting to be cool. It has to do with feeling good and, to a slightly lesser extent, having something to do with friends. I don't really know anyone who actually drinks or smokes just because it's cool.

treenyc5• 14 years ago

That is why people who attended Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf school perform so well in College. It is a school that DOES NOT give grades to students. And the teach write feed back to the students based on whole aspects of their development including social interaction. When college get ride of tests and grade will be a good start.

MartinCron• 14 years ago

If colleges get rid of grades, however will Peter Thiel know which hedge fund analysts to hire?

treenyc5• 14 years ago

well, business school like wharton prohibits employers to ask about their graduate's grade anyway.

callil• 14 years ago

Hello fellow waldorf student in the wild! Remember that most waldorf schools in the country DO grade in highschool. However it is process that allows for more feedback and conversation about your performance.

treenyc5• 14 years ago

Brought up in China. I was NOT fortunate enough to have being a waldorf student myself. But my various experiences in life have lead me to meet many graduates and teacher of waldorf school. So far all of them I meet a incredibly intelligent and very nice to around.

trentmb• 14 years ago

I'm not familiar with this form of education, but are the students of these schools actually representative of the population as a whole?

jes5199• 14 years ago

I like the no-grades aspect of it, but I'm pretty turned off by the way they pressure parents to avoid having computers and recorded media around children - and that they even delay learning how to read - and that the prohibition is for religious reasons that they don't usually discuss in public.

treenyc5• 14 years ago

interesting, I know they explore much on spirituality, but I didn't realize wardorf school is religiously related.

I do think reading and technology are not important in education. We people retain information far better through audio vs reading. See research from University of Regensburg http://www.linguatec.de/products/tts/references/uni_regensbu...

jeffpersonified2• 14 years ago

Let's be clear, though – hoop jumping isn't relegated to the university/educational system today. It's ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and general staffing practices in corporations. It's typical in society.

Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."

schmico2• 14 years ago

Very true. But this is a virtue of human nature, and power. And in business (very generalised) you have the efficiency cycle and the efficacy cycle. Bosses generally only want advice on how the company can become more efficient, to question efficacy is to question his/her judgement and power.

But the ease by which people can now try, test, and launch an idea and business is tearing this model down. I think that very soon, the companies who fail will be those who do not recognise the leaders from within, with the ability to improve on enterprise efficacy.

tkahn6• 14 years ago

Hoop jumping in the real world, however, typically nets you real material wealth.

Drbble15• 14 years ago

Those rare people tend to be found in places like Stanford and other great universities and successful businesses like Apple and Google...

Estragon3• 14 years ago

What mentality is he pointing to when he derides "The idea that every activity they undertake be “a growth experience.”"? Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.

mtgentry• 14 years ago

I think he means that by framing an activity as a "growth experience", it loses a bit of it's soul. Ghandi, Lindbergh, Jobs - they all changed the world because they had a fire in their belly and couldn't sit still. They didn't pursue things because it would grow their character. They did things because they we're compelled to.

fumar• 14 years ago

You are correct. Certain individuals have proven that with tenacity anything is possible. Still, it appears most people need structure. Structure, to give them a yardstick to measure themselves by. Stanford, or any college, give students goals. They are prepared sheep with plenty for 'growth experience.'

Estragon3• 14 years ago

Oh, choosing activities on the basis of how they extend experience. Thanks, I understand now.

endtime• 14 years ago

I don't think a world in which everyone is trying to be (or thinks they are) the next Steve Jobs would be so great.

pnathan• 14 years ago

becomes a rat race when you view life in that light, continually maximizing your life-experience-point measure for all actions taken.

SagelyGuru• 14 years ago

Don't forget the exams. That is loop jumping par excellence and should you try to be a non-conformist over that, you will be out of college before you know it and unable to listen to these excellent lectures on how not to conform.

joedev2• 14 years ago

"We are slouching toward a glorified form of vocational training."

What's wrong with vocational training? Maybe the issue is that the market is demanding vocational skills yet schools are trying to find, or trying to artificially create, a market for liberal-arts skills.

ElliotMingee• 14 years ago

Very good point. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet but it also isn't feasible to have an entire society (or even just the population of people with undergraduate/graduate degrees) asking the big questions and shaking everything up. Society needs people to keep the cogs turning which involves a lot of "menial" jobs (I use menial not to imply that they do not require intelligence or skill, but instead to point out that they are simply not novel or unique)

karpathy• 14 years ago

It's a fair point. Doing well in my undergrad classes felt like a game, and I've developed many rules of playing the game to score many points. I think it's fair to say that good grades are some kind of a measure of combination of ambition, perseverance and determination to be the sheep you're asked to be.

The most interesting people I think are those who excel at that game because they realize that it's just the way society functions, but on a side maintain a soul-- interesting extracurricular interests, projects, etc. They use their knowledge not only to pass tests, but attempt to expand on it and apply it in their own creative ways.

That's why I think the article's title is not very appropriate. I'd call it "Is Stanford training just (really excellent) sheep?". There are some good arguments to be made for an affirmative answer, and yet that's not who I see when I look around me.

oldschooltaper• 14 years ago

The "problem" is that the problem that top tier education raises -- the one this topic is focused on -- is not really a problem for graduates of those institutions, namely:

Getting accepted is the biggest hurdle. Once you are in all you really need to do to secure an opportunity is graduate. It's in the institution's best interest to see that you graduate and carry on the good name of the institution after graduation in whatever position you decide to take in whatever sector of the economy.

People will listen to you merely based on the fact you graduated from a top tier institution. They will assume you are intelligent. There is no need to prove it.

Some people will even hire you solely based on those phenomena.

Why would any graduate be against this? There is very little incentive to think outside the box.

The sheep are not the graduates of top tier institutions. The sheep are the people who blindly follow them.

There is little need to be a good leader when you can be a leader "by default" thanks to "presumed competence" and the fear of questioning anyone who has graduated from a top tier institution.

lhnz• 14 years ago

I am getting quite tired of listening to people argue for or against conformity.

You don't become a shepherd by making yourself into a black sheep.

And there is nothing wrong with conforming.

There is nothing wrong with wearing fashionable status symbols. There is nothing wrong with climbing hierarchies, nothing wrong with pleading for a comfortable life, or listening to what your friends think is cool. There really isn't. These are all suitable ways of enjoying your life.

We all seem to want to be rare. But what does rare get you?

Solitude.

Maybe you truly want this? But think it through: are the grapes so sour? We are social animals.

I covet the courage to be and do whatever I wish to. I don't need to be scared to be seen along side others. This is a whim to will.

It is crazy to want to be more of an individual than others just for the sake of it, and it has nothing to do with living the way I just mentioned.

scizo• 14 years ago

I generally like this sentiment, but I think there are definitely times when the grapes are too sour. If we aren't able to intellectually ask hard questions that challenge our own assumptions we will never recognize sour grapes.

schmico2• 14 years ago

I agree as well, but to a point. Do we really want our most targeted education resources being directed towards conformists? I think these institutions should be (almost) reserved for those who are pursuing leadership and cutting edge thinking.

Drbble15• 14 years ago

Why do you think the place for noncomforists is in an institution? Why would they want to attend an institution?

eternalban• 14 years ago

> Solitude.

I can remark on this. (20+ years. Not by choice, entirely.)

Your point regarding conformity is valid given the qualification that for the overwhelming majority that is a perfectly reasonable choice. This holds true even for some remarkably exceptional people. As an example, Euler somehow managed to be Euler and a family man. And then you have individuals such as Beethoven who seemed destined for solitude even though he was not happy about it at all.

> rare

The long standing mantra of "to thine own self be true" holds. This is the golden compass. For some, being true one's self may require the path of solitude. For others, it may not.

The rare thing is to follow the sage advice.

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

No one is arguing for disagreeing just for the sake of disagreeing. We're arguing for disagreeing only when it's the best option to disagree. As opposed to conforming to a worse option only out of fear of being different.

"Wrong" is subjective, but a clear consequence of conformism (as I just described) that one might want to avoid. Is that it makes you more vulnerable to sacrificing your own interests for the interest of others. And more often than not, that means being vulnerable to scammers.

Now do it like everyone else, and make me a sandwich.

goblin89• 14 years ago

I believe there are cases for being an outsider on purpose. For example, you may want to sacrifice being a part of particular social group (which you may happen to be born into) in order to increase your social mobility and gain future advantage. This may not be a conscious decision and does not exclude a possibility of fitting into another, desired social group later.

(Anecdotally, sometimes I have a feeling that lack of social interaction is an easy way to being if not a bit smarter, then at least more focused. However, some social interaction is still important, since 1) the lack of it isn't healthy, and 2) most of us in the end are working for the public anyway (sometimes without realizing it), so it's important to keep track that you work on the right things.)

yelsgib• 14 years ago

The post is not arguing against conformity - it is arguing against submission. It is arguing against a system that rewards submission.

I believe that a generation of extremely sophisticated, powerful, people who are eager to submit is a powerful and evil tool.

Fashionable status symbols are means by which one man dominates another. Many believe that a society of mutual respect will not seek tools of domination.

The issue with hierarchies is that they are historically weapons of oppression wielded against the marginal and unprivileged.

The issue with listening to what your friends think is cool is that your friends might be twats.

There really are problems with these behaviors, categorically. There really is a problem with submission, categorically. We are animals, we are spirits, we are not robots.

There's nothing wrong with robots. Be a robot if you want to. There are many people eager to use and reward you.

rodly• 14 years ago

"And there is nothing wrong with conforming. There is nothing wrong with wearing fashionable status symbols. There is nothing wrong with climbing hierarchies, nothing wrong with pleading for a comfortable life, or listening to what your friends think is cool. There really isn't. These are all suitable ways of enjoying your life."

There are important contextual distinctions that need to be addressed here. There is nothing wrong? That's as foolish as saying conformity isn't wrong. Right or wrong, it's not about the morality of it. It's about the message you're sending about yourself and your abilities.

A sheep needs to be guided, everyday and everywhere. If you're the kind of person that needs to be shown what's cool/interesting/important/not important/funny/stupid then ultimately you have no leadership abilities and I would never hire you for anything useful. It not only speaks volumes about your leadership abilities, but also about your self-confidence. You don't value your own personal views enough to act on them. You don't look/act/create with the belief that YOU know what you're doing.

If, at the end of the day, you find you're not very useful as your own body, then conforming is ultimately the best thing to do. I personally feel that anyone that tries to stop conforming and just act and be according to their own personality 100% won't fail though. You'll find your niche, and you'll dominate it.

Drbble15• 14 years ago

This post, so far down the page, is why HN needs Reddit's feature of collapsing flamewars under highly voted flamebait posts.

astrofinch• 14 years ago

Well there is also a strong intelligence requirement for getting into Stanford. The real question is how many people of the same age as Stanford students are just as intelligent but less sheeplike? Personally, I would guess that elite university undergraduates make up a fairly large fraction of the people their age who are as smart as they are.

jcnnghm7• 14 years ago

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual thought and understanding. Memorization will do nothing for you.

I started to think seriously about going back two years ago, as I observed friends that had graduated in soft subjects moving up in their careers, to the point where they were making hiring decisions. An overheard conversation that really stuck out, was when I heard someone relating their thought process in deciding not to hire a technically capable but degree-less candidate, "How could I hire them? That's a hard technical position. It's impossible to do something like that without college. I had to spend four years learning HRs, and that was really hard. That job is even tougher than HRs." It started to become obvious after a while that people that make hiring decisions in large companies many times are not very intelligent, and it would be basically impossible to get a job many places without a degree. Your resume will get bounced by HR before it ever gets to the technical people that should be doing the interviews. It would be OK if my company succeeded, since I could point at it and say it sold for $X, justifying the decision to drop out. But if it failed, these people would never understand. So I went back as a hedge, part time.

The only difference between the first and second time I went to school, is that the second time I was determined to get straight A's, and graduate as quickly as possible, so I could get into a good post-grad program. I was able to do a little over 30 credits one summer when I maxed out the number of Credit-By-Exam courses I transferred in. I found that if I studied anything that I had a general understanding of for about four hours (like Business Ethics), I could easily pass the exam by a large margin. The actual coursework was mostly very easy. Almost always, it was more a question of doing all the work, and turning it in on time, than anything else. I would take the syllabus, and check off everything that had to be done as I completed it. Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about.

People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it. From my experience many grads will require a lot of hand holding to actually complete their work the first time, because they don't really know how to do anything, and can't think for themselves. The degree indicates that they are trainable; once they are shown what to do, they can keep checking the boxes for at least 4 years. I wish I didn't have to go back to school, it cost time and money disproportionate to what I got out of it. Having said that, for now, a degree is difficult to avoid without seriously limiting prospects. It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years.

WiseWeasel3• 14 years ago

Well that would have been boring! How about a BS in four-five years with a bunch of random cool-sounding classes in between, along with a fair share of partying and establishing hopefully enduring friendships and romantic relationships.

barry-cotter• 14 years ago

None of that needs to cost most of $100,000 dollars.

jcnnghm7• 14 years ago

Or you could graduate, and do the same thing, except making $10k+ a month while you are doing it. The idea that college is now about romance and partying is part of what's skewing the prices.

vecter3• 14 years ago

If your subjects were that easy, it sounds like you weren't challenging yourself enough. Quantitative degrees like math or physics weed out a lot of people who simply can't complete the material. For most soft subjects, I agree that it's only a matter of putting in time, but those honestly aren't difficult or interesting (as you've noted).

If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major, I know that not only can they "complete a list of work", but that they're also probably smart. If I see a person who has straight As but majored in social sciences, I really can't conclude much about them.

karamazov2• 14 years ago

Even quantitative degrees just require patience and perseverance - it might be intimidating to be surrounded by people much better at math/physics/cs than you, but if you put in the time and effort, getting a degree in one of these subjects is very doable. It's a matter of effort rather than being smart.

jcnnghm7• 14 years ago

My major was computer science. It's still just a list of work. The math largely isn't as difficult as it is poorly explained and tedious. It's possible to obtain an intuitive understanding of most topics, and when you do, it's practically trivial to derive the underlying equations.

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

I think there is a lot of wisdom in these lines above. A degree (any degree) communicates some bare minimum qualification, rather than high standards of ability or talent.

A comment by a Phd. friend comes to mind: "A Phd. proves that a person can grind at one seemingly endless problem for years upon years, unperturbed by the countless setbacks and seeming lack of progress along the way to (hopefully) a breakthrough. Nothing more, nothing less."

Let's suppose that a Phd. really only proves this one trait about someone. Is this "signal" worthless?

I personally don't think so. I for one am a person who definitely cannot stick to one particular problem for years upon years. I'm not suitable for a position in, say, IBM Labs [1]. For a Hiring Manager in such a place, screening for a Phd. does in fact make sense.

[1] Thankfully, the world has options for invalids like myself.

fivethirty2• 14 years ago

At the risk of sounding trite, college is what you make of it. If all you care about is trading in your four years and n-thousand dollars for a marketable degree, then of course you aren't going to feel like you learned anything, but I argue that this is your fault for not prioritizing actual learning and understanding (aside: "actual learning and understanding" is an incredibly vague phrase and that bothers me. Oh well).

Just like Y Combinator is a fantastic chance to be around mentors who know a ton about startups, college is an opportunity to hang around faculty who know a ton about whatever it is you are interested in. It's perhaps easy to get an A in a class by "doing everything" required of you on the syllabus, but that doesn't mean that the opportunity for learning isn't there. If you are legitimately interested in a topic, you almost certainly have some sort of open ended question about it. Ask said questions in class of office hours, talk to your professors, get involved with research. These are all things are at the very least much harder to do outside of college, even with the internet making communication between experts trivially easy.

I'm not trying to say that you can't educate yourself outside of college to the same level that you can within, and certainly there are people who don't need to go to college to do great things, but if, when presented with the opportunities that college provides, if you can't find any way to further your own "intelligence" and "understanding", then it seems like those are not the things that you are optimizing for.

jcnnghm7• 14 years ago

your fault for not prioritizing actual learning and understanding

How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this? When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".

You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it. This is a real problem with computer science degrees. I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.

sliverstorm5• 14 years ago

It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years

Well, on the other hand, if you secure grants or scholarships, you can take the 4 year pace and use the extra time to pursue your own interests. This has a bad rap (Underwater basket weaving, anyone?) but nobody says you can't be spending that time in a lab with a professor, or in the library, or any number of countless opportunities to explore. For example, I still wish I had made the time to learn a little about quantum physics and general relativity (both out of the scope of my studies). I can still learn about those things now, but at a university you have classes, professors and students all at your disposal.

You might think that sounds senseless now, but you already know what interests you, and have probably already explored other territory.

larsberg• 14 years ago

I did exactly that and can't recommend it highly enough. I finished the CS major in my first 2 years and then spent the next two years taking "independent study" courses and just generally hacking and doing research for a few different faculty members.

Protip: you can take "freshman physics/chemistry" as a senior if it's not a pre-req for anything else you need. And by then, you'll have learned to study more effectively than when you were a freshman and it'll be ~2 hours a week of work.

ye-olde-taper• 14 years ago

This is nice summary. I would add that one of the major things you are paying for with university is the opportunity to be assessed. You are paying for the right to sit the exams and to be graded. You can then take that document evidencing your marks with you to future "assessors" such as HR departments.

The grading function you are paying for is important. Otherwise you could just take a syllabus, go off and complete the work on your own and be done.

You need to pay someone to assess the work.

Whether the amount you pay for this "service" is proportional to the benefit you get from it is for you to decide.

But you need to have those "assessments" done.

Admission to a top tier institution functions as an early assessment. You gain credentials just by being admitted, assuming you manage to graduate. This is interesting since the assessment is only based on a brief period of observation, e.g. the person's achievements up to the end of high school.

A criticism that has sometimes been levelled at Stanford is that once you are admitted you can coast your way to graduation.

Obviously that is certainly not true at lower tier universities. Faculty will fail students and those institutions will not hesitate to send them packing. There is always another student to fill the empty seat.

dlo3• 14 years ago

> A criticism that has sometimes been levelled at Stanford is that once you are admitted you can coast your way to graduation.

This is an odd criticism. While I was at Stanford, the school administrators were extremely concerned with a ubiquitous problem on campus called "Stanford Duck Syndrome": looking serene and peaceful above the surface, but underneath the water, paddling as hard as possible to keep from sinking.

You could say I was an academically-inclined kid. I started high school a year early. And during that year, I passed AP Calculus with the maximum score of 5. I studied for the SAT for a week, took it only once, and if I recall correctly scored in the 98th percentile. And finally, I matriculated at Stanford at age 16.

But still, Stanford was by a large margin the most difficult thing I'd ever done up to that point. And it would not be a huge stretch to include everything I've done ever since.

I've come to understand since graduating that, for many other institutions, the professor applies a curve to an exam in response to the overall performance of the class being poor. At Stanford, it is expressed at the start that the exam will be curved -- because the professors intend to make it so difficult that they are confident that, in their classroom of highly motivated, intelligent students, only a small handful will be able to get As; it is intended to be a way to differentiate the very top students.

Let me give you a sense of what this feels like. I was taking the freshman physics series with the world champion in physics. Blake Ross, one of the guys behind Firefox, was attending while I was there. Even while I was learning how to swim at Avery Aquatic Center, I saw Don Knuth finishing up lap swimming....

Drbble15• 14 years ago

I don't understand your distinction between tiers. Plenty of schools just placate students and cash tuition checks. Top tier competitive admission schools would be the ones with most students in lone to fill the seats.

gavanwoolery5• 14 years ago

My question: how does a piece of paper that thousands of others hold distinguish you? It doesn't. Take those four years and $120k-$240k you would spend on an "education" and get a real education - build a company. Building a legit company (successful or not) is worth 1000 times what that piece of paper is. Your mind will be tempered in the fires of reality.

As I've said many times, a degree is just your ticket to being some else's bitch.

is74• 14 years ago

Not having a degree is like not dressing well for an interview. It's superficial, but people are judged for it. Largely because there are more, percentage-wise, unqualified people without degrees than with degrees.

A person may decide that it's not worth investing 4 years and lots of money for the sake of a degree, but a degree has advantages that should not be ignored.

sciurus• 14 years ago

That depends on what you want to do with your life, doesn't it? Obviously, running a company should teach you how to run a company. It won't teach you how to be a chemist, or an electrical engineer, or a teacher, or a composer, etc.

Drbble15• 14 years ago

Your employees must love working with you.

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

How many financial institutions are going to lend $120-140k to an 18 year old for any purpose other than going to college?

It's also worth bearing in mind that spending 3-4 years focused on learning stuff like math,econ and CS rigorously can help your abilities to build a business later.

You might be able to setup your web dev shop at 18 and make a nice living for a few years making CRUD apps or whatever but once the market starts to demand something else then you are likely to get stuck if you haven't put some study into higher level principles.

Besides there is nothing stopping you from running a simple business at the same time as going to college. Myself and a few others on my CS course used to build websites and fix PCs during the holidays and made more money for about half the hours as the people working at the supermarkets and pubs.

infinitesimal2• 14 years ago

"Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about."

You don't have a representative experience. Try going to a top 5 school in science/ engineering/ math.

elviejo• 14 years ago

Isn't by definition going to a "top 5 school" not a representative experience.

Maybe his experience is the representative of most colleges and yours from a "top 5 school" the exception.

blahedo3• 14 years ago

So: you went to college determined to find a path through it that would let you "get straight A's" and "graduate as quickly as possible", and then treated each course as a list of stuff to "check off"... and you're upset that you didn't get very much out of college?

Well, duh.

Every year I get a number of students whose entire motivation to be in my class is that they want to get the piece of paper. This sort of purely extrinsic motivation does not tend to make them very good students (although occasionally I have one that does well and gets an A, good for them). I'm always a little disappointed in them, because the class is more fun for both of us if they're more internally motivated; sometimes I can manage to get them actually interested, and then they perk up and are happier (and often do better), but sometimes they've just decided that they're not going to like college, and you know what? I can't force them to.

So, I guess they "win" that argument. But, it's an expensive argument to win; and it's kind of a shame, really.

As an aside, I also wanted to respond to this line:

> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything

Yes and no. In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A. It sounds like your background meant that you'd already learned a lot of the material independently, so your situation is different, but I think comments like the above are rather misleading for the bulk of students, who are learning this material on their first time around.

userdeveloper2• 14 years ago

While I understand what you're saying, I'm not sure that the purpose of a university education is to "make it fun" for professors.

More likely, the purpose of a university education is to learn.

And that does not necessarily require the professor to happen.

There should never be anything wrong with doing work outside of class, or any implication that doing the work is "not enough". Often learning happens in that time outside of class spent "just doing the work", not "in class" where a professor is struggling to "have fun".

jcnnghm7• 14 years ago

No, I went to college determined to learn a lot, spent about 2 years on pre-reqs, then dropped out because I wasn't really learning anything. Starting a company was far more interesting than going to school at the time, and still is. When I went back, I decided to go as fast as I could, because I wanted to get it over with, fully aware that there wasn't much to learn from earlier experience.

There were some instructive classes. I had a professor that was passionate about assembly, and another that I had for several classes, that gave me an FPGA board and told me I could build whatever I wanted, and he would grade me on that, since the coursework would be very easy for me. I built a basic processor, with an assembly language I devised, which was more instructive than anything I ever actually did in a class. The vast majority, however, were not worth much.

What's interesting is that I was interested enough in the subject to learn tons about it on my own over the course of more than a decade. A couple years of institutional bullshit was enough to change that. Today, I'd much prefer to do Udacity or Coursera courses than go to an actual school. At least I can study exactly what I want, and the assignments are well thought out.

Doesn't that really depend on the material. I flipped through some of the assignments you have on your website, and while you do have some interesting assignments, you also have stuff like Homework 5 in your sys admin class, where the student has to use traceroute to learn about the topology of the school's network. I am certain I could have done that assignment in 6th or 7th grade without difficulty. If I had to do it now, I would absolutely hate it. It is a fine assignment for students that have never troubleshot a networking issue, but if you have any experience whatsoever, its simply tedious and not particularly instructive. Nobody is going to be motivated by tedious easy assignments.

In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A.

I believe that you sincerely believe this. I sincerely believe it is not true. Checking boxes is indistinguishable from outstanding work, by your metrics. Somebody that is checking a checkbox by definition won't miss anything, the truly interested student is more likely to deeply explore one area and go lightly on another, becoming the A- or B+ student. If you have knowledge going in, the easiest thing to do is juke the stats and grind out as fast as possible.

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

I think his point was more that it was possible to get high grades simply by checking things off. In my experience , some people are better at doing things this way than others, while you will also get students (like me) who enjoy learning things but have little motivation for doing things like coursework when the coursework is something like "implement a BST" or "implement Newton's method for root finding".

I know people who got high grades (in CS) at college who couldn't write a practical program to save their lives and are now working in some business role. I also know people with mediocre grades who are busy doing interesting stuff with machine learning and cloud computing.

fusiongyro2• 14 years ago

> People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it.

One of my professors (Dr. Mazumdar, NMT) had a saying about complexity theory: "A computer science degree will never get you a job, but it may keep you from getting fired."

maclaren• 14 years ago

> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding.

Cheating at solitaire? Of course you can go through the motions, but for the money (even public) education costs, that seems like quite a waste of opportunity.

rimantas• 14 years ago

> There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual > thought and understanding. Memorization will do nothing > for you.

Memorization will do a lot for you. First of all it will get the building blocks for all that "thought and understanding" into your head. Just like lego: you may arrange bricks in very creative and novel ways, but bricks must be there to begin with.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

Well, perhaps college is a little more than 'just doing the work' - I grinded out calculus 2, actually went to all the lectures, did all the assignments - still only managed to get a C+ - integration by parts is just one of the elements that required more memorization of patterns, and speed than I could pull off. And we had a LOT of hard working, disciplined students flunk out of the EE program.

kitsune_• 14 years ago

People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it.

I have a question about this observation. How is this different from someone with years of work experience, who demonstrated in practice that he or she was able to finish large software projects on time, on specification and on budget as a lead developer?

I'm asking this because I dropped out of college because of money constraints. I had a three hour commute each day, had a job next to my studies, and slowly but surely piled up debt in order to cover my basic expenses (food, rent, insurance, books). I had zero support from my family or the government.

I make the same observations as you, it seems to me that many doors will remain closed to me. Not all, mind you, over time you get to know people and build a network of sorts.

gutnor• 14 years ago

The doors will remain closed unless you provide an experience the guy making the hiring understands and values. Problem is that there are a lot of people involved, each with veto power.

First is that except for college, you have almost nothing in common with HR people that are filtering the CV, so they may undervaluate your experience.

Then there is the generation gap with the middle managers that have risen to their position before the big waves of outsourcing by following the now mythical career path. They will overvalue college degrees vs experience.

Then there is the prestige of the company: lot of companies only hires people with college degree as a policy, period. Other companies have implicit policy: nobody has ever been fired to hire a Stanford graduate.

Finally there is bias - if you paid a lot for your education, or are paying a lot for your kid education - you will have a positive bias toward people with education (and sometimes, negative bias against people that dropped out)

The sad conclusion is - having a degree is never perceived as something negative, at worst, it is ignored. Not having a degree is never a positive thing, at best it is ignored.

rayiner• 14 years ago

We've created a winner-take-all society where the cost of losing is a soul-sucking micro-managed job and the constant worry that getting sick could mean medical bills that can never be paid off. In this society you do not get points for asking big questions. You get points for getting the right degrees to serve the right signaling functions to get the right jobs which offer luxuries like health insurance and the flexibility to leave the office for 15 minutes during the day to take care of an errand.

Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking big questions.

nazgulnarsil• 14 years ago

"Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered."

To be fair economics has only been around for 300 or so years. We've had birth control in one form or another for thousands and we haven't even caught up with that yet.

ShiningThrough• 14 years ago

Nailed it completely. Great comment.

ShardPhoenix• 14 years ago

It's not like countries with universal health-care are so different in this respect. People are under a bit less stress but most still aim for normal "sheep"-like jobs and lives.

gammarator• 14 years ago

Daniel Brook's book "The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America" [1] does a great job showing how the rising costs of student loans, urban living, and health care drive students into corporate jobs.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

I think it's far more likely that the faculty of elite schools are selected for being really excellent sheep.

They have jumped through many more hoops for a much longer period of time.

I could buy that the student body were largely using the elite schools for their own ultimately non-conformist ends, but it's much harder to convince myself that the faculty is doing so.

Lednakashim• 14 years ago

Are State School Students Just (Mediocre) Sheep?

splicer• 14 years ago

I'm so fucking glad I'm done school. Now I finally have time to learn things like Prolog :)

currywurst• 14 years ago

Datalog's where the action is at now ;) !

tantalor• 14 years ago

Two word summary: navel gazing.

kamaal• 14 years ago

I absolutely hated my academics apart from the patches that involved doing projects and interesting 'real world' work.

My experience with academic education was something like this. It was always a blind race for scoring marks/grades. At the end of every day what comes are series of boring assignments and homework whose use no one knows of. Not doing the boring stuff gets punished. Exams are always about getting a seat in a nice institution. And the cumulative effect of that is to get a good interview call. People with higher grades and marks ultimately get placed in better places to repeat the same kind of boring stuff in big corporates.

Well I am from India. The best experience in my college days Ironically came from working at a Government Military organization called as GTRE(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishm...). I learned more in the 6 month apprenticeship than what I learned in years. We also did great work, I can't disclose the work as its defense stuff and I'm under NDA. Next best experience came during working for a start up during my semester holidays.

Every time I went back to college I felt pathetic.

Post college, I saw the so called toppers were all about two things. Do their MBA from a B-School and then join a Bank or some business role, Or work for a nice start package at a large corporate. The silliest thing I saw was even the job scenes were filled with interview procedures designed to hire top rote learners. Knowing algorithms by heart, memorizing arcane facts, learning puzzles from a particular book, stuff like that. Practially 0 importance for things like hardwork, productivity and getting things done.

Second bizarre things I noticed was large corporates required completing pointless certifications for hikes and promotions. This was college all over again for me.

adrianhoward• 14 years ago

I don't think it's a Stanford problem, or a university problem, or even an academic problem. It's a people problem. I've seen just as many industry sheep as I have academic ones :-)

The sort of folk who are going to just jump through the academic hoops and nothing else are exactly the same sort of people who jump through similar industry hoops. They do what they're supposed to do and not a lot else.

The people who see the degree certificate as the goal are the same sort of folk who see the promotion or the parking space or the corner office as the goal. They see the what, but not the why.

People seem bent towards that particular approach to life long before they get to work or university.

dazuck• 14 years ago

This is a pretty discouraging thread to read. The vast majority of posters seem to be of a CS (or related) background, extremely smart (academically, at least), and hold their college experience in low regard. Consensus seems to be that the core CS coursework was pretty easy, forced conformity, and didn't have much interesting material to spark learning or creativity.

How many of the people complaining of this branched out to other subjects? Learned about political philosophy, geology or maybe tried some creative writing? True, those courses are 'easier' so won't be more challenging to get your coveted "A", and yes they might not help you graduate as quickly as humanly possible to get out of school or help you make millions in the marketplace. But there is a reason they are there, and it's not so less intelligent people can also get a Stanford degree. They tackle other questions, other problems, other ways of thinking. You might do very well in those classes without tons of work, but they undoubtedly would have provided another avenue to learn and experience a lot of things you don't get from CS.

The discussions around tuition cost, learning in the real world where you can make $10K/month, how easy 'soft' courses are, the dismissive idea that college is partially about having fun, making friends, romantic relationships, etc. probably does a lot to explain why the majority of this thread didn't feel like Stanford offered much to them besides a piece of paper that society demands. There is so much you didn't bother to do because it didn't fit into your specific and very narrow idea: learn CS to make money. Of course I'm generalizing here, and I doubt anybody actually thought 'learn CS to make money', but it really doesn't sound like many people who have posted had a ton of experience in school to develop their self, rather than just their career.

Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

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