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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] lhnz|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eternalban|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yelsgib|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scizo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodly|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goblin89|14 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] schmico|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vibrunazo|14 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffpersonified|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Estragon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twodayslate|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cjimmy|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
[+] [-] etherael|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] IsaacL|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] chubbard|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gammarator|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...
[+] [-] ShardPhoenix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|14 years ago|reply
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|reply
[+] [-] oldschooltaper|14 years ago|reply
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.
.
[+] [-] Alex3917|14 years ago|reply
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|reply
[+] [-] joedev|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jcnnghm|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kamaal|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] astrofinch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treenyc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MartinCron|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jes5199|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trentmb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splicer|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] currywurst|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dazuck|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] karpathy|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeffpersonified|14 years ago|reply
Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how could we do this better."
[+] [-] schmico|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tkahn6|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianhoward|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SagelyGuru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Estragon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgentry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|14 years ago|reply