Lemmings

Parents Forum
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It seems like folks are giving me more antidotes but no empirical studies to support their claim. Maybe I will give you one at the end of this post. One good turn deserves another.

Two quick comments. It seems like a vocal minority never bothered to read the research papers presented. How can we carry on if any evidence presented is ignored? People continue to believe that elites do not admit students who are unable to do the work they went there for, after I posted the Duke study that shows exactly that.

Secondly, I don’t think misrepresenting someone is terribly helpful. If I were to say “adcoms sometime make mistakes”, I know it will become “Canuckguy think adcoms are clueless” very quickly. Just quote me instead. This will help to facilitate communication.

Since someone mentioned behavioural economics, here is a quote from a pioneer in the field, Vernon Smith:

Caltech was a meat grinder like I could never have imagined. I studied night, day, weekends and survived hundreds of problems,
I was majoring in physics, but switched to electrical engineering, which was in the same division (Mathematics, Physics and EE) as a senior. In this way I did not have to take the dreaded “Smyth’s course,” required for physics majors, but not EE, and received my BS on schedule in 1949
After Caltech, Harvard seemed easy, and I got virtually straight A’s. …Graduate school is an endurance test, but was not that demanding for me after having survived the undergraduate meat grinder.
The difference between Harvard and Caltech? “At Harvard they believe they are the best in the world; at Caltech they know they are the best in the world.”

I suspect some of you will jump to the conclusion that “Smith said Caltech is harder than Harvard”. I think a more nuance opinion is that Smith finds Caltech physics harder than Harvard economics. Nothing earth-shattering really. I think he has a point.

@alh Very good observation.My concern with employability knows no bound. Is it because I grew up in boarding houses, where drunks falling off the stairs woke me at night? (One died, btw). Or perhaps because my father told us that food does not fall from Heaven? Don’t know.

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It also confused the result with the ‘raw material’ so to speak. There is significant drift within MIT once you arrive toward certain engineering disciplines.

There are a number of reasons for this, but in my conversations with students, the driving factor is economic: every single message these students hear, at and outside of MIT, is “if you don’t know how to program and/or make machines (that) do stuff, you will have your job taken the the programs/robots other people are making.”

When I was a graduate student in CMS/W at MIT, I went to the career fair to talk to the folks from ESPN, thinking they’d be interested in people studying new media. Alas, they were only recruiting Course 6.

MIT recently announced a Course 6 minor. In principle, this should help by allowing students to train/credential themselves with an MIT CS education while majoring in their primary discipline/topic of interest. We’ll see if it works in practice.

I came here because a couple people messaged me to say that in this thread there were Wrong and Bad Opinions (“someone is wrong on the internet!”). After reading the most recent 5 pages, I can see most of the points being discussed, although I think @Pizzagirl’s characterization of the MIT rep is actually pretty dated (and deservedly so).

I do take issue with the frame of the thread, though. It’s unfair, to my mind, to characterize students choosing engineering as lemmings, a metaphor that implies a kind of mindless following behavior, when in fact these students are in the main choosing to heed the “code or die” message broadcast by everyone from the highest levels of government and industry down to the recruiters at the local career fair.

As a graduate of / lecturer in SHASS, I’ve found my students to be outstanding, thoughtful, and profoundly engaged in the humanistic and social sciences. If you think the numbers on the first page make MIT students narrow, idk what to tell you ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Thank you. But if lemmings implies mindless following and students are choosing to code or die for external reasons, I’m not sure where that leaves this thread.

But Canuckguy, I respectfully suggest that anyone spend more time vetting the purpose, context, and limits of any study, not simply quote them as facts or link them as proofs. Reading for the sound bites can be quite misleading and give more weight to some snapshots than they deserve.

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@Pizzagirl :

"The other assumption is that everyone just so WANTS to be STEM / engineering / yada yada but they regretfully and sadly “drop down” to (say) psychology because they just can’t hack it.

No, maybe they are inspired by something they learn in a class and they happily change because they find something more interesting."

Please repeat this. Please repeat this.

It would be such a wonderful thing if kids would heed their own soul’s call.

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I thought @PurpleTitan 's “lemmings” metaphor referred not to MIT students mindlessly choosing engineering as a herd, but to MIT-quality students interested in humanities or social sciences who mindlessly chose to apply to Ivy League and similar institutions as a herd while ignoring MIT. Either way, the metaphor worked a lot better as click-bait than as a description of the phenomenon. But I think he or she raised and interesting point, and @MITChris provides some insight.

@Canuckguy , I read what you linked. For the most part, I was already familiar with the studies on which they were reporting, because many of them are involved in the whole question of whether/how minority students who are less prepared when they enter college get steered away from STEM majors and careers, and whether different (and somewhat “separate but equal”) educational regimes would serve them better. Mostly, they are about as interesting as studies showing that the sun consistently rises in the East and sets in the West. Yes, students who are failing in one subject choose another where they won’t fail. Yes, students who have trouble with math choose majors where they won’t have to do as much math. Stunningly, students in majors that require a lot of math competency and practice systematically do better on an exam with a large math component than students in majors that don’t involve math competency or practice. And, yes, across the whole spectrum of higher education, some majors are harder than others on average, and students successfully completing those majors are objectively smarter on average.

None of that tells you much of anything about the population of students who might apply to and get accepted by MIT. The entire universe of MIT and its elite alternatives represents something like 1% or less of college students. They are students for whom the highest average GRE scores by major in the data you provided would be embarrassingly low, no matter what their major. Of course, some of them will still have trouble with organic chemistry or multivariable calculus, in most cases mainly by comparison with other elite students. Those students are less likely to apply to MIT, probably. Those students, of course, will wind up as humanities or social science majors (and often very successful ones, by the way, because in the real world learning multivariable calculus is not a requirement for success). That means that an Old Ivy U English major is less likely, on average, to be able to learn multivariable calculus than a Physics major classmate. But it doesn’t mean that all, or most, or even a lot of Old Ivy U English majors are incapable of handling multivariable calculus, or would have more trouble with MIT than the average MIT student.

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Hey folks.

So did I miss much?

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Only like any family bickering, haha.

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@MITChris --I actually thought the lemmings were supposed to be the students NOT applying to MIT, because they thought it was too techy. But I could be wrong. I asked a couple times and never got a straight answer.

But anyhoo, I’m reasonably certain that the original post was a dig at the rest of us, not your students (for whom I have the utmost respect.)

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@blossom, empathy can be taught. People have changed through reflection. That doesn’t mean that it’s done systematically or that corporations find it worthwhile or know how to do it, however.

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Agreed…and an unjustified dig considering students desiring a greater critical mass of fellow humanities/social science majors and institutional support than what’s available at schools like MIT is often a well-thought out justifiable decision…not a mindless one implied by the “lemmings label”.

And one no different than what a couple of hardcore engineering majors I knew and mentioned in previous posts would have done if they had a chance to relive their HS application years…especially the HS classmate/hardcore engineering major who turned down MIT for Harvard and ended up regretting her choice due to the very same type of “fit” issue…just in reverse to the Lemmings issue OP posed.

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@JHS and @garland assume right.

Guess I inadvertently have become an adept click-bait artist. I’ll have to add that as a new skill on my resume and LinkedIn.

Oh, and as an aside, referring to the discussion several pages ago, the structuring of math education in the US (which tends to go down the path that math historically evolved) is asinine*. What the Brits (and others in the former British Empire) teach for Maths and Further Math’s (http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/mathematics/as-and-a-level/mathematics-6360, http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/mathematics/as-and-a-level/further-mathematics-6360) makes a lot more sense. Why shouldn’t algorithms, numerical methods, networks, and dynamic programming be taught in HS? Many/most of those subjects (along with stats) are arguably more useful than calculus or trig in real life even though people invented them later.

*Need to live up to my reputation and all. . .

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I think the thread’s loop into STEM studies as an externally driven impulse may have been suggested by my post #53, and only picked up on by MITChris. I spoke more directly to the impact of this trend on the labor market, thus undermining the value of the degree holder due to saturation of the market:

“I’ve been wondering, and even moreso now with your last post, if the lemmings are the hordes of people who are going in to the STEM fields at a near-abandonment rate of other courses of study. The markets, especially for CS and some of the engineering fields, are going to be saturated to the point of there being little room for all the graduates seeking work.”

But MITChris’ comment, focusing on the specific forces of this movement, is one I did not speak to, though most certainly suspect and hold to be true as forces in the trend.

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Where @JHS wrote, “But it doesn’t mean that all, or most, or even a lot of Old Ivy U English majors are incapable of handling multivariable calculus, or would have more trouble with MIT than the average MIT student,”

Of course, the inverse is true as well. A lot of MIT STEM majors are capable of handling - and being moved by- analysis and deconstruction of Kant, or Joyce, or de Beauvoir, etc.

Some of us here talk of the MIT STEM student as a linear figure, a linear mind, of finite capacities and interests, and nothing could be further from the truth.

The MIT STEM student is one who has explored and been deeply engaged and accomplished at many things, in many areas, that have nothing to do with STEM studies.

What those students have chosen to focus on at MIT is a choice to hone in on one aspect of their brilliance, diversity and expansiveness (and that is where they are not bridging multiple studies at MIT).

MIT could fill its halls with the uber-whatever-you-want-to-call-it exclusively, if it chose. But the amazing thing is that they have chosen to gather students who sat in interview, and submitted applications, which reveal how multi-faceted, happy, quirky, talented, dynamic and unfinished they really are.

The kids are musicians, actors, singers, jugglers (yes, jugglers), pirates (!), designers and seamstresses, AND they study STEM.

To play on the metaphor of the tree, STEM is just one branch of what these kids do.

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The point I was trying to make is simply this: whatever the purpose, context and limitations of any given study, they all point to the same conclusion. In fact, even meta-analyses have shown similiar results. You can not expect much more from social science research than this.

@JHS I actually agree with much of what you say. Here are a few things that I see differently:

For me, what is of interest is how legacies, despite better preparation in high school, are still showing the switching characteristics of certain minorities. According to many here on CC, legacies are every bit as qualified as the unhooked. Which is it?
The Arcidiacono study also goes a long way in “revealing” how elites really choose applicants. Again, it does not fit the narrative of many vocal CCers, I am afraid.

My point is that MIT students are expected to do multivariable calculus at the MIT standard. To expect humanities or social science students to have that level of competency is asking for a lot. I think we differ mainly on the %tage of students capable of this level of achievement.

Btw, is this an April Fool’s joke, or some Harvard students are really this clueless?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo

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“My point is that MIT students are expected to do multivariable calculus at the MIT standard. To expect humanities or social science students to have that level of competency is asking for a lot. I think we differ mainly on the %tage of students capable of this level of achievement.”

This is only really important if one thinks that multivariable calculus at the MIT standard is necessary for life success and/or professional career success. You tend to do that, because you have a limited worldview about the opportunities in the business world, and you tend to think primarily of those jobs that are heavily quant-y, where knowing how to do MV calculus (and beyond) is a skill used on a frequent basis. That’s nice, but there’s more to the world than STEM and finance. Those of us with broader business experience know that while having quantitative skills in general is likely a Good Thing, there are sooooooo many different types of jobs out there where the ability to do MV calculus is just not all that relevant.

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“For me, what is of interest is how legacies, despite better preparation in high school, are still showing the switching characteristics of certain minorities.”

See, I don’t personally consider the switching characteristics all that concerning. I would be concerned if there were systemic barriers to people who wanted to enter STEM fields not being “allowed” to do so (e.g., people of a certain demographic were explicitly told - you’re not welcome here, get out).

I’m not concerned at all if the “free market” (so to speak) works, and the kid who thought he wanted to be a neuroscience major takes a political science course and decides he wants to become a lawyer instead. The ability to switch freely between majors is a FEATURE, not a bug.

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“I would be concerned if there were systemic barriers to people who wanted to enter STEM fields not being “allowed” to do so (e.g., people of a certain demographic were explicitly told - you’re not welcome here, get out).”

Will not name the school, but students at a certain university my son was accepted to told my husband and son of a version of this scenario which takes place there. Students who seek office hours and inquire about additional help are brusquely re-directed to consider other fields of study routinely, according to the students.

All in all, this is not done anymore, but was reported to the routine experience of many students … way back when.

The conversation at CC has often been one which highlights the differences between (presumably) minority students/low income/ new-to-the-university-system students and those who come from families with a long standing tradition of attending and successfully navigating university life. The differences in the comfort, ability and willingness to approach professors for help, work with other students in group, and seek assistance from the tutoring centers and resources on campus have, in these discussions, been posited as central to the reasons for minority students’ failure to thrive.

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Do you mean all students who seek office hours / help are redirected, or just those of a certain demographic (women, certain ethnicities, etc.)?

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Typically, CC views various components of elite admissions in a flat way.

Who says elites can’t look for first gens who…show they’re able to self advocate? Or is it another CC assumption only higher SES kids can?

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“Do you mean all students who seek office hours / help are redirected, or just those of a certain demographic (women, certain ethnicities, etc.)?”

Oh, yes, didn’t specify. It is the Black male students who made this claim, made this statement.