Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of the chapters of the book, The Elephant in the Brain , has (part of the) answer to the why-is-education-so-obviously-messed-up-and-why-do-employers-still-give-it-value-at-hiring question. The purpose of the education system, say the authors, is for students to signal their “work potential” to the world. Future work productivity is what employers look for: “The best employees have a whole bundle of attributes – including intelligence, of course, but also conscientiousness, attention to detail, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to conform to expectations.” A technical test can only find “intelligence”, but not the other aspects. So employers use “school performance as a proxy” for the other points. Here’s what an employer can infer about a straight A’s student from a top college: 1)       “She might have retained that knowledge, but statistically speaking, she’s probably forgotten a lot of it…”; 2)      “(Far more imp...

Stephen Levy, in his book titled Hackers writes about college kids: “You begin working conscientiously as a student… and then you discover something that puts classes into their proper perspective: they are totally irrelevant to the matter at hand.” He cites this case where a professor drops a robot arm in the computer lab at MIT, and leaves. Here’s how the student feels: “Nothing in the world is as essential as making the proper interface between the machine (computer) and the robot arm, and putting the robot arm under your control… Then you can see your offspring come to life. How can anything as contrived as an engineering class compare to that?” Of course, this is a universal criticism of education world over. In The Elephant in the Brain , the authors point out the usual reasons we cite as to why students go to school (to learn, which in turn is a means to a higher paying job) isn’t the entire truth. After all, they say, many top American universities allow anyone t...