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<p>Zuck did eventually withdraw, but after an entire semester of concurrently building Facebook while (ostensibly) still at Harvard. </p>
<p>But that only illustrates the point. Harvard is an elite school. How many elite employers would give you the free time to engage in effectively a full-time “side-project” for months at a time without firing you, or at least giving you a poor performance review? Heck, tales of former investment bankers include such woes as not even having the time to do your own laundry, but just buying new packages of underwear every week or so while throwing away your soiled ones. Yet Harvard - and surely other schools as well - allows you ample time outside of the classroom to build your own company while remaining in perfectly good academic standing. </p>
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<p>Who exactly? With a whopping 98% 6-year graduation rate (and almost certainly the remaining 2% consisting of voluntary dropouts such as Zuck), seems as if practically nobody is flunking out. Contrast that with, say, Caltech, whose students are even more highly qualified than Harvard students, at least as measured by test scores and grades, yet has a relatively miserly 89% 6-year graduation rate. Caltech does indeed flunk a significant percentage of students out. </p>
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<p>Here’s a better example. Go to Harvard on a Saturday night and check out the lines streaming from and raucous music blaring from the Finals Clubs. Granted, I’m not saying that hedonistic stripping is happening inside as portrayed in the movie, but on the other hand, it sure doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of studying going on in there either. </p>
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<p>Harvard offers a bevy of advanced CS courses. In addition, Harvard students enjoy full cross-registration privileges at MIT with which you can surely find CS coursework to fulfill any particular talent level, even those that would baffle the most gifted programmers in the world. As skilled of a developer as Zuck may have been, he surely could have find every challenge he could desire in advanced MIT and Harvard coursework where they are attempting to learn methods to solve famous problems such as whether P=NP or whether the exponential time hypothesis is true. Computer scientists have devoted their entire careers to solving these problems. As talented as Zuck may have been, I find it hard to believe that he couldn’t find coursework that would have challenged him to the very core. </p>
<p>But he apparently didn’t do that. And that’s the point that the author was making - many (probably most) undergrads are not really there to challenge themselves academically. Rather, they’re more interested in accessing the social and recruiting resources at the school while picking up a degree without excessive effort. </p>
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<p>Really? The average college graduate makes about $35-40k to start. That’s not exactly what I would call a ‘considerable cost to the employers’, particularly given that that college graduate had to spend 4 years of supposed ‘training’ to receive that wage. After 4 years of expensive education both in terms of tuition and in opportunity cost of not working, one would think that you might be paid would be worthy of more than $35-40k a year. </p>
<p>Secondly, that number is what is earned by the college graduates who do pass the filter. What about all of those students who attend college, but don’t graduate, and hence do not pass the filter, but nevertheless have to pay for the tuition and opportunity cost for their school tenure. Who pays for that? The employers certainly don’t. </p>
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<p>One simple reform is to enact grade equity, something that I have endorsed for years. In a nutshell, different majors should not exhibit wildly disparate grade distributions. For example, if only X% of engineers should receive A’s, then fine, the same X% of American Studies students should also receive A’s. Put another way, if the engineers should be weeded out through harsh grading, then students in every other major should also be weeded out just as vigorously. Otherwise, don’t weed out the engineers. What’s fair is fair. To enforce this policy, every department could institute a ‘grade bank’ where only a certain allotted percentage of letter grades could be allotted.</p>
<p>Outrageous? Well, that’s basically what Stuart Rojstaczer has been proposing:</p>
<p>I don’t believe that the sciences and engineering should demand less of their students. Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to demand more.</p>
<p>[Grade</a> Inflation: Your Questions Answered - NYTimes.com](<a href=“Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times”>Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times)</p>
<p>Another strategy would is something that schools such as Dartmouth do now - print on students’ transcripts, next to the grade that they received, also the median grade alloted in that class. An A- received in a grade where the median grade was also an A- is then relatively unimpressive, whereas an A- received in a class where the median was a C would look highly impressive indeed. You could then also include next to one’s cumulative GPA, a ‘matched’ GPA of a hypothetical student who took the exact same courses you did and received the median grade every time, along with a percentile ranking of where you would fit relative to a theoretical matched group of students. That way, employers and grad schools would be able to tell in an instant whether you have high grades just because you happened to have taken extremely easy classes. For example, if your GPA is a 3.5, but the ‘matched’ median student would have had a 3.7, then your transcript would show that you were clearly a below-average student in the classes you took, despite the supposedly impressive grades. </p>
<p>Now, granted, even that reform would not account for the different talent levels of students would might tend to congregate into different courses. One could imagine controlling for that by tweaking the system for, say, average SAT scores of the students in each particular course. Nevertheless, even the above reform would be a vast improvement over the current system, where students are highly incentivized to cherry-pick the easiest possible courses to rack up a string of undemanding A’s. </p>
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<p>Students (and their families) are still paying the bulk of the costs even at state schools when you add in opportunity costs. 4 years of not working, or at least, not working full-time, represents a large loss of income, even for somebody with only a high school diploma.</p>
<p>But nevertheless, whoever truly is paying the costs, what is indisputable is that employers are not. Yet they reap the benefits. That’s a fantastic deal for the employers. But for regular people, not so much.</p>