[sashank_1509]

At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.

If the sole purpose of college is to rank students, and funnel them to high prestige jobs that have no use for what they actually learn in college then what the students are doing is rational.

If however the student is actually there to learn, he knows that using ChatGPT accomplishes nothing. In fact all this proves is that most students in most colleges are not there to learn. Which begs the question why are they even going to college? Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.

[rr808]

It starts at admissions where learning is not a rewarded activity. You should be making impact in the community, doing some performative task that isn't useful for anything except making you different to your class mates who naively read the books and do the classwork honestly.

[Spivak]

I don't think it's the admissions office's fault. This is one of the lessons I will have to impose on my future kids once they get to high school age. Being, like, really really good at school is cool and all but if what you have is a 4.25 GPA, fifteen AP classes all with 5's, a 35 on your ACT, a school sport and chess club or whatever I'm very smart extra curricular then you're competing with the other thousand identical applications. You're likely to stand out and be interesting with literally anything else, even if it makes you look less good at school.

The world you occupy at that age makes it seem like being good at school is the formula to looking impressive meanwhile once you leave the bubble and enter adult world you realize that making an angsty punk band with your friends and playing at shitty dives sounds way more impressive than got an A in chemistry.

[the_snooze]

College is wildly useful for motivated students: the ones who go out of their way to pursue opportunities uniquely available to them like serving as TAs, doing undergrad research, rising up the ranks in clubs and organizations, etc. They graduate not just with a credential but social capital. And it's that social capital that shields you from ChatGPT.

College for the "consumer" student isn't worth much in comparison.

[testfoobar]

For elite colleges, it is a pithy aphorism that the hardest part is getting in.

[robocat]

FAQ: Harvard say they graduate 98%

https://college.harvard.edu/resources/faq/what-harvards-grad...

[danaris]

It's not for "signaling," and it's not for "high prestige" jobs.

It's for jobs, period. Because a) as the world grows more complex, more and more jobs genuinely require higher education, and at the same time b) with the near-total disappearance of training by employers, they expect job seekers to come into every job with all the skills needed, and with the decline in labor power (as compared to the late 20th century), there's very little meaningful resistance to that.

[subhobroto]

> At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.

I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin, piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship from an elite college.

This has been working extremely well except now you have AI agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.

There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse making as students go through the flywheel already in motion with the current approach.

However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach no longer works for a large population. It never really did but there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game going for a while. For one, college has become extremely expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage for a long time.

> Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies

Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the past

[WalterBright]

> Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies.

This topic comes up all the time. Every method conceivable to rank job candidates gets eviscerated here as being counterproductive.

And yet, if you have five candidates for one job, you're going to have to rank them somehow.

[jrm4]

As a college instructor, one issue I find fascinating is the idea that I'm supposed to care strongly about this.

I do not. This is your problem, companies. Now, I am aware that I have to give out grades and so I walk through the motions of doing this to the extent expected. But my goal is to instruct and teach all students to the best of my abilities to try to get them all to be as educated/useful to society as possible. Sure, you can have my little assessment at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for the companies.

[Zababa]

>Sure, you can have my little assessment at the end if you like, but I work for the students, not for the companies.

Most of the students are here because they want to be in the companies, not for the joy of learning.

[WalterBright]

I didn't suggest you should care about company selection processes.

But I would have been pretty angry to have been educated in topics that did not turn out to be useful in industry. I deliberately selected courses that I figured would be the most useful in my career.

[jval43]

If I could go back in time and change what courses I took for my CS degree, it would be the exact opposite.

I wish I'd gone more into theoretical computer science, quantum computing, cryptography, and in general just hard math and proofs.

I took a few such courses and some things have genuinely been useful to know about at work but were also mind-expanding new concepts. I would never ever have picked up those on the job.

Not to say the practical stuff hasn't been useful too (it has) but I feel confident I could pick up a new language easily anytime. Not so sure about formal proofs.

[jrm4]

Right, but that is the thing I pay attention to. Again, I want to hear from former students that I did right by them, not current companies asking for free screening.

[rr808]

As someone who interviews students for internships and grad programs I mostly agree, however I think you should listen to the best, hardest working students to hear if they're getting picked OK. I suspect the students with the best jobs are the ones who do the minimum classwork and spend their time doing leetcode and applying for jobs - I would think that is sub optimal for everyone including yourself.

[WalterBright]

The GPA and course schedule should be sufficient.

[tolerance]

~4-10 years of social media history; email identifiers; DNA data to confirm pedigree from alumnus.