When Systems Design Themselves
Charles Eliot had concerns:
In the process of improving the secondary schools, colleges, and professional schools of the United States, —a process which has been carried on with remarkable energy since the civil war, — certain new difficulties have been created for the higher education in general, and particularly for colleges. These difficulties have to do with the age at which young men can get prepared for college, and therefore with the ages at which boys pass the successive stages of their earlier education. The average age of admission to Harvard College has been rising for sixty years past, and has now reached the extravagant limit of eighteen years and ten months. Harvard College is not at all peculiar in this respect; indeed, many of the smaller colleges find their young men older still at entrance. The average college student is undoubtedly nearly twenty-three years old at graduation; and when he has obtained his A. B., he must nowadays allow at least three years for his professional education.
This is only the opening. He goes on from there. And 130 years later, we’re still confronted with a remarkable number of the same issues. Except that now we are not so concerned about “men” specifically (and white men, which hardly needed to be said).
It’s really difficult to come up with a national system that incorporates such a diverse set of people. The timelines that he is concerned about – and I am, too – are perfectly appropriate for some. But what about the others? This is a question we have been asking ourselves a lot lately, as we figure out what to do about our gifted daughter and a public school system we believe is ill-suited for her. We’ve settled on a different private school mentioned in the piece that addresses most of the concerns I had. But that’s not an option that scales. Nor is it an option that especially needs to, since if our daughter was meeting the usual benchmarks, we had fully prepared to put her immediately into a mass-production model that would have had her exiting at 18 along with everyone else.
For lack of alternatives, that’s the model she’s likely to end up in anyway. We’re either delaying the inevitable or preparing her to enter that system a year ahead of where she would otherwise be, graduating at 17. If there was an easier mechanism by which she could graduate at 16, we might be looking at that, too.
That’s been done, of course, but there is only so much you can push against the bounds of a system’s norms before it starts pushing back. If a child is a year ahead, they’re unusually young. Two years, they’re isolated. It ceases to matter how intellectually and psychologically ready they, in particular, are, if the system isn’t ready for them. Just as it doesn’t matter if college is unnecessary for a lot of the kids who go to college, as long as the system prizes it to a degree where you are penalized if you don’t go. I’ve been coming around to the idea that most liberal arts majors are better than a lot of more career-oriented degrees (business in particular) when it comes to acquired skills, but that only matters to whatever extent the system (in this case the economic and labor systems as determined by employers) says it does.
Which is, naturally, the cost of living in a society. Things that aren’t wrong become wrong because enough people around you decide they are wrong. Then, it having become wrong to do whatever that thing is, people who go that route are isolated or in bad company. People who don’t go to college because they determined it wasn’t right for them have their resumes put in the same stack as those who didn’t go because they weren’t equipped to. All of these decisions are made by people with college degrees, who might be biased in evaluating the value of college degrees. Academia continues to get fresh blood despite a perennially atrocious job market because the shepherds of young minds went that route and, when they advise their flock, they express their own value in favor of it.
Almost none of this is a matter of policy, and so little of it can be changed by policy. Short of a complete system overhaul, there is no public policy answer to the questions we’ve had regarding our daughter. A complete system overhaul is unlikely because the system, as it exists, is more than adequate for the standard range of students. From vouchers and charters to overall school funding, almost the entire debate around public education is completely removed from our prospective experiences of it as parents. Not as a product of our decision to (for now) pursue private school, but to some degree as a cause of it.
Eliot seeks for ways to change the system, but changing the system is hard. It is comprised of individuals, who went through the existing systems. Graduating at 18 is completely normal. Four years of college or more is increasingly essential as has been decided by those who went to college for four years. Eventually, it will probably be six. Which ironically demonstrates a capacity for change, but a passively designed one.
We can’t decide any of this, even as we ultimately decide all of it.
For financial reasons, we may not be able to stay in our current house much longer. We’ve been contemplating what to do if we can’t. One of the thoughts has been to move to the next town over. When my wife was working so much, we considered actually renting a small house over there in addition to our current one because what she was having to spend on hotel rooms (when she was too tired to drive home) was starting to exceed the cost of renting an entire house (about $900 vs $750 per month). Now, we could buy a house over there with the equity we have built on this one.
Despite her job being over there (at the time), one of the big reasons we didn’t get a house over there was a higher degree of confidence in this county’s school system. But private school would negate that factor and make living there a more attractive option. All of it wrapped up into schooling. All of which is crazy, when you think about it. Which, maybe we’re the crazy ones. But if we are, we are not alone. More people would probably be willing to live there and improve the school district if more people would be willing to live there and improve the school district[1]. But instead they don’t, so they don’t, so we won’t. Since “neighborhood character”[2] isn’t an issue in this case (the counties are big and varied enough that schooling is the common variable), settlement is largely being directed by schools.
No one decided it should be this way. We all decided it should be this way.
[1] The question came up last time about whether it was about school funding. I looked into it to see if there was a large differential in funding. I’ve found two sources with different results. One shows both districts being below but within range of state and federal averages with our county spending slightly more per student ($500), and the other shows a substantial difference ($2500) in favor of the neighboring county.
[2] Tangential: If you’re wondering about racial demographics, they’re largely the same.
Two quick anecdotes:
– Because we were low-income at the time, my daughter did both Head Start and Jump Start. I worried a lot about her losing that progress when she joined the other kids who didn’t go through those programs. She loved learning though and self-augmented the education she was getting at school by reading everything she could get her hands on. I also tried to give her lots of other learning opportunities at home, taking her to museums, science centers, whatever. She was light years ahead of her high school classmates in some areas like reading, but right with them in other areas she hated like math. The lesson I learned was that it’s totally possible for kids to thrive in a mainline education if they are motivated to put in the extra work.
– Also, I was a very average student all through grade school and high school. At the Catholic prep school I attended I felt very mediocre. But I did pretty well on the ACT and started community college and was shocked by what I found among my classmates there. Turned out that mediocre at my school was still above average and so I gained this huge confidence boost that carried me through college. Along the way I met lots of people smarter than me, but mostly people of equivalent or less intelligence that were just grinding through college to try to better their lives. It was good prep for the real world. Sometimes I am in work meetings and I feel like the genius in the room and other times I keep my mouth shut so i don’t look like a dummy.
All of this is to say that probably the biggest thing to watch for when choosing schools for the Littlest Truman is how many school suspensions they have, what is the attendance like, how robust is their PTA, etc. Those are real factors that can lead to good or bad outcomes. The academics will sort themselves out.Report
The fact that gains from programs like Head Start tend not to be durable always struck me as both less surprising and less problematic than a lot of people make them out to be. Skills can atrophy if you don’t use them enough, and nobody would be surprised to learn that running five miles a day isn’t tremendously helpful 10 years after you stop.
I went through a pretty different academic track, but one thing that I’ve come to believe is that there’s no education credential so lofty that an absolute numbskull can’t get it, and no credential so basic that you can’t find a really brilliant person that doesn’t have it.Report
I had a manager once that was absolutely brilliant when it came to managing his account and managing our relationship with our customer. he was an ex-Marine, never went to college. I still work with him from time to time on projects and he still impresses me in that environment. On the other hand, when I discussed other topics with him it was startling how ill-informed he was. Not just lack of knowledge, but just clueless about topics that I thought most people had a basic understanding of.
And then I also work with people who have degrees and I can’t figure out how they graduated from high school.Report
There are some people who are extremely good at the things related to their job but have no interest in even basic-ass knowledge if it isn’t immediately useful (or maybe is associated with some hobby of theirs).
Quite a few of them are research scientists IME.Report
This.Report
Charles Eliot, not Chris. Eliot was president of Harvard more or less forever, and a very influential public intellectual through the late 19th century and into the 20th.
As for humanities versus business degrees, there are three types of university degrees nowadays:
(1) The ever-popular minimum-effort degree that serves to check of that box. This has been around forever. It is pure signalling, mostly of social class. There is little or no educational function, so students taking these degrees typically arranges their classes so as to minimize their impact on their social life.
(2) The high-end vo-tech degree. These are, most prominently, STEM and to a lesser extent business degrees. These serve as specific training for your first job. These students tend to be serious about their studies (STEM more than business) but regard any classes not directly relevant to that job to be a waste of time.
(3) The traditional liberal arts degree. This is by far the least popular. It used to be that the (1) type of degree was a liberal arts degree, but aiming for the gentleman’s C. Since at least the late 20th century there have been easier alternatives. At school it was anything with “communications” in it. I don’t know if this is universal. This has the benefit that liberal arts departments generally have (not counting their general education classes) students who are interested in the subject, but this turns out to be a small group.
The thing about the liberal arts degree is that while its traditional justification is (arguably airy) talk about producing a well rounded person, it incidentally emphasizes skills that are really useful in the real world: reading and understanding a text, and writing intelligibly.
That business degree might help you get your first job, but that English degree will help you get your second. And reading and writing are skills most easily learned when young. If you find you need a business degree to advance, it is pretty easy to go back and check that box off later.
My advice to kids: If you want to work in tech, choose your college and major with that in mind. If you haven’t a clue what you want to do with your life, you absolutely shouldn’t choose a STEM major. You will hate life, and probably fail. If you are academically minded–if you voluntarily read books–then get a traditional liberal arts degree. It’s fun, and will serve you well in the long run. If you can’t imagine voluntarily reading a book, but you come from a socio-economic class where college is expected, or you have aspirations to enter that happy state, then go a college appropriate to your background and get that minimum-effort degree. Don’t be too obnoxious to the kids who are trying to study.Report
Name corrected. Thanks.Report
“The thing about the liberal arts degree is that while its traditional justification is (arguably airy) talk about producing a well rounded person, it incidentally emphasizes skills that are really useful in the real world: reading and understanding a text, and writing intelligibly.”
Amen to that. I know I have mentioned this on OT before but my boss will only hire liberal arts majors into our Quality department. He just believes we are more well-rounded and he thinks its invaluable to have that outside perspective when trying to solve problems. We also have to write a lot more than the average operator does. We also do a lot of silly thought exercises just to keep us thinking critically. One time we spent at least an hour white-boarding who would win in a fight between a grizzly bear and a gorilla. It keeps us sharp and helps us think as a team. The business majors in other groups just think we are weirdos.Report
I don’t want to search for it now but my brother posted an article that made an economic argument for the liberal arts degree, without it there would be no entertainment and arts industry. These add billions of dollars to the economy. I think the aim was showing that humanities does have a pragmatic real world effect beyond well-rounded person.Report
I would add that the most valued and lucrative job positions in any industry are not the technical STEM sort of skills, but management and subjective decision-making, of the sort that require people skills.
Notice how all these management guru type books are essentially liberal arts texts in disguise, advising us of how to move someone’s cheese or reconceptualize their paradigm without them causing strife or rebellion.
In other words, stuff that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Dickens could have told us.Report
“I would add that the most valued and lucrative job positions in any industry are not the technical STEM sort of skills, but management and subjective decision-making, of the sort that require people skills.”
Which is why I would rather have a manager with an English degree and the right Myers-Briggs score than a guy out of Business School that can spot the missing decimal in a report but should not be allowed around people.Report
without it there would be no entertainment and arts industry
I’m somewhat under the impression that the entertainment and arts industries predate university educations.
While I will defend the humanities to my dying day, defending the humanities does *NOT* *ABSOLUTELY* *NOT* require defending liberal arts degrees.Report
“Charles Eliot, not Chris”
Chris Eliot is a deep thinker in his own right.Report
Really?!
No, not really.Report
If the problem worsens, there are special schools for freaky smart kids so they can properly socialize while staying on track to finish a college degree in their teens. Duke University has an outreach program for the parents of children whose age and ACT or SAT scores put them on the far edge of the Bell curve. One of my coworker’s children, while a 7th grader, got a 32 on the ACT, so the family ended up going to the two-day get-together at Duke, where thousands of families in the same boat discuss all the options. I think he and his wife settled on a special boarding school in Western Kentucky that is set up for such kids.Report
The future is going to be weird. I don’t think that college works as a signaler like it used to. Lambda school is likely to be a far greater signifier in the future than it is today (and it’s a *HUGE* signifier today).
The huge amounts of debt for graduates (and the gargantuan amounts of debt for those who have “some college” before dropping out) are not sustainable. The more that college is seen as a 4 year party, the more that degrees that don’t have weed-out courses will be seen as signifiers for things other than employability and suitability for OJT.
Hell, they could try to fix this by making college “free” and turning high school into an 8-year program.
And then wondering why employers don’t care about college degrees in the same way that they don’t care about high school diplomas now.Report
My co-workers and I often joke about how stupid we were to put the college’s we actually went to on our resumes. I have been asked to provide a transcript exactly one time in the 16 years since I graduated.
Just playing the odds, I think someone could lie about their degree and probably make a lot more money over the course of their career. If they got caught once in awhile, no big deal, there are very few industries that are cohesive enough to actually black list some one.Report
The only time anyone ever cared about my college was when I was applying to a job that was, in retrospect, clearly intended for fresh-outs who didn’t actually understand how much an engineer was supposed to be paid for their work.
(“Well my college experience was 22 years ago, do you really consider it relevant?” “yes, we ask everyone.” “So, how does compensation go here?” “Well, we mostly pay in stock options.” “What’s the actual salary?” “We don’t really put things in terms of salary, we consider this more of an investment position…”)Report
There are a lot of jobs today, especially entry level jobs, that have no real reason to require a college degree today, except as a socio-economic signifier. And I can attest that a lot of undergrads in the 1980s regarded college as a four year party. So I don’t see what here will change. What may change is a better understanding of what positions need an actual college education, whether STEM or business or liberal arts.Report
I imagine that jobs will start requiring degrees that required passing a number of weed-out courses.
People with BAs Need Not Apply.Report
I’m not sure if “socio-economic signifier” is really getting at the cause.
For example, what forces cause companies to demand that a receptionist have a college degree?
Its not like the clients who come in the door have any way of knowing.
I keep coming back to the general labor surplus, where buyers of labor can demand almost any qualification, and get it.Report
I keep coming back to the general labor surplus, where buyers of labor can demand almost any qualification, and get it.
If there were a way to force the labor market to tighten, this might result in the buyer’s market becoming somewhat less of a buyer’s market.
Enough tightening and it becomes a seller’s market.Report
Your ideas intrigue me, etc.Report
Eh, it involves having more solidarity with union members than scabs.Report
I know you’re teasing, since when we talk about the minimum wage I am usually all in for forcibly distorting the market.
But I think conservatives do have a point in that government control over the marketplace can only go so far before it loses effectiveness.
If we were talking about some labor surplus that was localized to a region or sector or time, some sort of government intervention could probably work.
But (IMO) labor all over the globe is slowly becoming less valuable as machines supplant not just physical labor but mental labor as well.
And it doesn’t require vast wholesale changes in demand to make a drastic change in value.
Like the way a change from 5% unemployment to 10% unemployment is a small change numerically, but is drastic enough to swing presidential elections.
In the Great Depression it was 25% and that created real fears of violent revolution.Report
Douthat has a good insightful tweet about this.
Now, I *PERSONALLY* am of the opinion that if we are to hike the minimum wage, doing it when unemployment is hovering around 4 percent is probably the best time to do it.
But I also know that tight labor markets will eventually lead to higher wages all by themselves without prompting (assuming that there is no release valve).
Indeed, we see employers complaining about such things all the time.Report
Builders “can’t find laborers” to fill those positions.
Is there an economist around here who can put that sentence into English?
Isn’t this like how I can’t find a Lambourghini for sale anywhere, even though I offer a hundred dollars?
OK, so maybe if immigration is restricted, builders will be forced to offer more money?
“builders are now scrambling to file H-2B applications, and they are lobbying Congress and the administration to get the Department of Homeland Security to double the allocation.”
Ah, but since Trump is so well known for being hostile to immigration, he is sure to cut off the supply of H-2B visas…
Oh. Nevermind.Report
Oh, indeed. What’s most likely to happen is that Trump is not going to enforce the law against those who employ undocumented laborers.
This way they’ll get their labor, the laborers will be here and “scary”, the manual laborers in this country who have papers will have to compete against people who don’t have documents, and everybody’s happy.Report
And honestly, I don’t think immigration is even germane to this essay.
The temp workers, the gig workers, the Precariat aren’t competing against field laborers.
They are- we are- competing against automation which is always the final trump card in any discussion of labor.Report
I have no doubt that you don’t.
But the employers sure as hell do.Report
Employers demand college degrees from baristas because of immigration?
That seems…farfetched.
Part of the problem is the temptation to search for One Big Problem for stagnant wages which is like looking for One Big Problem for the damage done to the vast ecosystem.
You could for instance say that absent immigrants, construction labor wages would rise.
OK. But did immigrants cause the steel industry and textile industry and manufacturing sector to flee America?
The downward pressure on wages is coming from a lot of different sources.Report
The downward pressure on wages is coming from a lot of different sources.
So long as we’re willing to acknowledge that employers think that more immigrants is one of the sources of downward pressure, I’m good.
Heck, I’m down with saying “I have more solidarity with the poor Mexican laborer than I do with the American lazybones!”, so long as we acknowledge that employers see immigration as a release valve.Report
So we would then agree that a massive draconian intervention in the marketplace is needed to boost wages?
That conversation could lead to some really interesting place.
Your newsletter is sounding more and more intriguing.Report
So we would then agree that a massive draconian intervention in the marketplace is needed to boost wages?
Using what definition of “draconian”?
The one that involves reading the laws that we have on the books and then enforcing them?
While I agree that that would be a massive intervention, it’d be massive on the same scale that not enforcing the laws is.
It’d just have different winners and losers.
But this goes back to who you have solidarity with.
Is it employers?Report
If the word “draconian”” sticks in your craw, lets just agree that the amount of government power and scope needed to restrict immigration is massive.
Massive for all the same reasons we have discussed about the drug war or speed limits.
And if this can bury “free markets” as a rallying cry once and for all, I for one, welcome our new socialist overlords.Report
It’s not sticking in my craw. It’s a word with a definition.
It’d be like saying “It’s not like the group of folks was decimated or anything like that. Only 10% of them were killed.”
I’d assume that the person making the statement was making a joke. When I point out that “I see what you did there”, I’m accused of being hung up on words.
lets just agree that the amount of government power and scope needed to restrict immigration is massive.
Oh, yeah.
My take is that it already has this power and people who pipe up and say “the government shouldn’t have this much power” get called “libertarians”.
If the choice is between the amount of power the government has now and the amount the government will have tomorrow, I guess I’d pick today.
But, seriously, we need to stop expecting that if we give the government that much power over every nook and cranny then it will use those powers for what people like us think is good.
Because it won’t. People like them are in control of it.Report
@chip
You can’t possibly think that if only builders offered more money applicants would come running? It’s not a wage issue, it’s a I-don’t-want-to-work-with-my-hands issue. Folks like Jesse or Saul consider construction to be a ‘shit job’ and I think they are a representative sample.
And it’s not just construction jobs. My company has continued to raise hiring wages in the 19 years I have worked there and our health benefits are really good. We are desperate for warehouse workers. The Americans we get have zero interest in advancing, are frankly crap workers and more trouble than they are worth most of the time. We get lots of legal immigrants and they knock it out of the park.Report
Why do you hold such a moralizing view of manual labor, that you don’t hold to say, executive or managerial labor?
If a CEO says “I refuse to work unless you meet my price” we applaud him as a savvy negotiator.
When a barista says “I refuse to pick lettuce unless you meet my price” they are somehow an immoral effete dandy.Report
When a barista says “I refuse to pick lettuce unless you meet my price” they are somehow an immoral effete dandy.
Because we can hire Juanita over here and she’ll work the same wages without complaining and be in fear that we’ll out her to the INS. Bryce Hypenated-Lastname won’t. So we hire Juanita. And Bryce gets to work on zher screenplay.
If a CEO says “I refuse to work unless you meet my price”, it’s a lot closer to something like works in Hollywood.
Sometimes the CEOs are Pierce Brosnan and, seriously, nobody else can possibly play that role in The Thomas Crown Affair. Sometimes the CEOs are like Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future and easily swapped out with another vaguely charismatic guy.
When you think of CEOs, you probably think of people like Bezos or Gates or Holmes or Zuckerberg. For what it’s worth, the CEO of my company does light janitorial. Vacuums, takes the trash out, that sort of thing. Because it’s *HIS* company.
Labor where it’s easy to find someone else to do the job will always be held in less esteem than labor that seems to be able to have only one person who can do it… whether that be an actor, a musician, or a CEO.
How long would it take to train you to become a serviceable barista, do you think?
How long would it take to train a serviceable barista to do your job, do you think?Report
@chip
In my company probably 98% of our management, including me, started out as hourlies, kept our heads down and worked our way up. I was driving forklifts with two college degrees at one point, waiting for the right opportunity. So, I also believe in management taking their lumps to advance.
Now we get Americans coming in that either A) just want to toil at the bottom and actively avoid promotions or B) if they have a degree they think they should start in middle management. They no longer believe in working your way up.
So…I will take the immigrants who still believe in hard work and steady forward progress and if the other folks want to vote with their feet, as Jaybird says, they can work on their screenplays while they wait for companies to change their hiring strategies.Report
“We get lots of legal immigrants and they knock it out of the park.”
Legal immigrants are Americans, sir.Report
They will be, and good for them. I’m thrilled to have them.here.Report
Well, I’ve told the story a hundred times of my manager friend who would rather hire someone who has spent the four years after high school being the assistant manager at Domino’s or McDonald’s than a humanities grad… but that’s an anecdote.
I’d just say that, if you’ve got a position to fill for a barista job, what would *YOU* look for in the ideal candidate?
And then… wouldn’t you try to hire someone like that?
(Personally, if I were hiring a barista, I’d want someone capable of showing up on time, capable of working hard, and relatively certain that they wouldn’t quit 20 minutes after they were trained… and I don’t know that a bachelor’s holder would give me that… not at a coffee shop, anyway. For a receptionist? Yeah, I could see wanting someone with a degree in communications or graphics design or something. Give the receptionist the Instagram for the company or the twitter account and ask for something company-related every day.)Report
“what forces cause companies to demand that a receptionist have a college degree?”
if you have a college degree you’re probably not black
Oh, what about the people whose parents bought the degree? lol, that’s even more an indicator of Probably Not BlackReport
My understanding is that employees used to be able to administrate IQ tests and general skills tests to employees but this stopped for various reasons during the late 60s and early 70s. The college degree replaced the employee administrated test for these positions.Report
“You paid $100,000 for a degree in the Humanities?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Hmmm.”Report
Somewhat on topic, Caitlyn Flanagan’s article about the college admissions scandal in The Atlantic had a perceptive comment:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
“The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all.”
As the pool of good paying jobs slowly dries up, there is a mad scramble for the remaining pockets and parents become increasingly desperate to escape the harsh desert that others have lived in all their lives.Report