'Grades Did Not Matter' 100 years ago so much.
It was where 'the only educated people sent their kids to be educated'.
Or maybe the nouveau riche bourgois did.
Now it's a 'Giant International Competition'.
You can see this where students are competitive with grades elsewhere in the world.
They're competing for jobs at OpenAI among a million others.
I'm shamed to admit I can't remember the quote from someone who lamented the fact that traditionally people 'knew their place' and there was on some level a quietude in that, a zen - but when 'anyone can be anything' it creates hyper competition, anxiety, sense of failure for most people who can never live up to being the 'most exceptional at whatever', and the constant stress of 'keeping up with the Jones's'.
See: Instagram - it's not pictures of family and friends - it's almost entirely 'social competition through lifestyle narration' ... which that includes University's as 'brand'.
Hence the competition.
Everyone is in competition now. Everyone has to prove their worth, all the time. It's more egalitarian but it also creates a lot of stress.
Let me explain healthcare right now.
To get into a radiation tech program, there are 260 applicants, almost all with all As, for 20 slots at my local community college.
Maybe in the very first instant you’d think it’s merit based. But, EVERYONE is playing the game. Getting homework and tests from friends who already took the class, taking classes at several different schools to get the easier teachers, paying multiple times the tuition cost on tutors and other study aides (eg $2k+ for all the anatomy models), every demographic is using paid ChatGPT. We all know which teachers to take. We spend much of class strategizing like this.
Every single student. It’s just another game to play or you lose.
Also, how do they decide which students to pick? And I would love to know the gender ratio.
Another reason is these people know how to grind, but can’t afford a 4 year program.
> but can’t afford a 4 year program
There’s one state school for my program within 100 miles of me (physical therapy assistant)
And a four year program is still 2 extra years of tuition even at the subsidized amount, and most would work fewer hours if at all because they need high GPAs.
That much pay for a 2 year program is very hard to beat.
At that point, it has almost nothing to do with regular education and institutions.
It's cray cray land
There is still a lot of bias and in -group preferences present in hiring. Not to mention that most places will weight candidates who are recommended by employees higher than unconnected external applicants. That might be a reasonable filter but it unquestionably is not egalitarian
Admissions for elite schools is just crazy - they can't go purely by 'scores', they have gender/national/racial issues which are actual quite real, even if it becomes unfair - there is just no way to do it in the ultra egalitarian way in which some would want.
It's a very scarce resource and that's it.
If it were a 'common' thing - like local state college, then it takes a different form. But the acute nature of the situation really brings out some ugly dynamics.
When it was a little club, you had to think of your family's reputation in the club, and like you say there was a particular framework of their morality.
When the elite franchise was expanded, one problem was that everyone in the elite then had different ideas of morality. When they got into business, the only thing that really united everyone was that they all liked money.
One thing that used to help that we've lost is a moral code in the universities that elites have to attend to get into the club now.
Another thing, after it became illegal to teach the bible in public schools, was "secular bible stories." You had secular saints, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. They each had a characteristic story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return 2 cents, and Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering that lightning was electricity. Later on, MLK was added to the canon for a whole bunch of stories of courage in defense of justice. All of the stories had a moral lesson about what it meant to be a Good American.
Lately we've cancelled most of our secular saints, and my guess is that the few that are left are on borrowed time. That's not to say that these guys never did anything wrong by any means, but the point of teaching the story wasn't even necessarily even that the story actually happened exactly as it was told, the point was the moral lesson. We've basically just given up on moral education, and all we have left are things like Social Emotional Learning, but it is thin gruel.
Not sure if you intended this but this is basically exactly Byung-Chul Han's point in The Burnout Society.
There's a rather technical but not too dry book about how elite overproduction tends to cycle, with comparisons of past cycles: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691232607/we...
Really? Reading the comments here on HN I was left with the impression that everyone would prefer to compete for the gold in butt naked giant porcupine rodeo than to work for any company helmed by Altman, Musk, Zuckeberg or Thiel.
Francis Fukuyama wrote in a recent blog post: "The United States is no longer a high-trust country. We must regain what’s been lost."
I object to these "wide brush" social commentaries. Normally, they are written by powerful/famous men and frequently negative. I call it "Packaged Doomerism". The US is so huge that is hard to generalise about its culture. There are at least six distinctive cultural regions. Take California as an example: There is a surprisingly large cultural gap between the north (Bay Area) and south (LA/Orange/San Diego). That is just one state. In the same way that the US is huge, so is Europe -- about 50 countries. I cringe when I see the phrase, "In Europe, ..."
Here is just an example of one: Moving from Brooklyn to a small surbuban town:
- very few lock their bikes at the local schools, or "town center". Bikes aren't stolen and kids don't worry about it.
- "town center" has umbrellas out for public use, people use them and put them back.
- People generally don't lock front doors, or don't worry if they aren't.
- If there are problems, people call police, they show up quick [non emergency] and they sort out the problem.
- People happy to pay taxes and they know where it goes
I can go on... these are just examples I've seen.
The example I always point to is golf. I'm a huge golf nerd, and if there's one thing I hate it's professional golf. They sit there and pretend it's a "gentleman's game" and then let people like Patrick Reed openly and obviously cheat... repeatedly. They even got rid of the ability for fans to call in rules violations. Why? Because it's no fun, boo. Players used to want to not win when they broke the rules.
Gambling in college and pro sports? We went from the Black Sox shame and a Pete Rose being banned, to now players getting slaps on the wrist. Our society does not reward honor, so most people will not be honorable, plain and simple. Yes, there are plenty of us who will care more about integrity, but the vast majority of us won't care.
Last: I never heard of Patrick Reed before your post. I Googled him. Check it out: "Reed's collegiate career was cut short following his dismissal from the University of Georgia golf team. Allegations from teammates included cheating in qualifying rounds and stealing merchandise and money from the team locker room..." What a stand up guy!
We're talking about Princeton, here. Trust among elites remains persistently high. In fact, it's likely higher than ever due to assortative mating & geographic sorting. Elites, even students in the Ivies, still have trust of government and elite institutions, which the elite stratum itself runs. Trust between elites and lower strata has declined, where elites and middle- and lower-classes have significant mistrust between each other, and the latter have lower trust within their own strata than in the past.
What's more likely IMO is that 1) the cost of cheating (i.e. the cost of assembling a ripped off assignment multiplied by the risk of being caught) has declined precipitously due to LLMs and 2) elite institutions remain the most ruthlessly competitive in the country and even the world.
Which, in the era of social media, video surveillance, smartphones and dashcams, is crazy. Once you leave your home, you have to assume everything you do is recorded and might end up online or in court.
I don't think any human alive believes this. The "elite" are just known as being scammers who lie and BS about everything very openly and they'd sell their own child if it got them a dollar. The past 10 years have been nothing but "elites" churning scams and paying bribes and bragging about it. They most certainly aren't trusting each other. Just look at how the president holds people up as his greatest ally one day, then discards and villainizes them the next day once he realizes he can get more benefit from elsewhere.
The elite in-group trust hypothesis would however explain Musk sustaining an unreasonable Tesla share price in the face of falling sales, delayed launches to the extent competitors pre-empt him on his own announcements, and political toxicity to the extent his showrooms got smashed up and burned.
When Lee Kuan Yew visited London for the first time after World War II, he was impressed by the fact that it had unattended newspaper stands where people were trusted to take a newspaper and leave money: https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8. As someone from a low trust society, I fully concur with his assessment that this was the mark of a truly “civilized society.”
Not complaining. It’s a neat concept. And if you have a bunch of crap you want to get rid, it’s a lot of fun to build a big birdhouse looking thing, prop it up on the side walk, and keep it stocked with all the crap you don’t want anymore. This is why I created the Little Free Lumberyard to discard my woodworking offcuts. Seriously considering expanding into e-waste because it works so damn well.
That said, the UK is becoming lower trust.
This is the mark of a low-trust society masking its issues with technological band-aids. In high-trust countries, you still pay exclusively with cash at these unattended roadside stands.
https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/shoplifting-gangs-have-pla...
Getting to “high trust for the majority” is the 0 to 1 of civilizational development. Most societies never get there—they’re low trust for everyone.
1950 Census
---------------------------------------------
Race Percentage of Total Population
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White 89.5%
Black 10.0%
Other Races 0.5%
If you get rid of race it doesn't fix anything because the underlying cause was never race - it was, and remains, humanities perverse desire for hierarchy and prejudice.
The white people will just then find some other irrelevant bullshit to be mad at each other about and will then segment themselves more. They will literally invent new races and ethnic groups, if they have to, to distinguish themselves from others.
Also what’s the definition of multiculturalism? Can orthodox Christians be chill with Catholics? How about Japanese with Korean?
Stupid shit.
Also what’s your definition of white? Does it include Mediterranean climates? Fair-skinned Arabs? How about the Irish? What about a French citizen born in Morocco who has a passing French accent but is fluent in Arabic, but isn’t Muslim - is he white?
Can’t believe in the year of our lord 2026 we’ve still got buffoons writing shit like this in earnest.