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.