We didn't play the Ivy game. We targeted our flagship state university - the University of Washington. My kids found that ~ 75% of their peers in Honors / IB programs in high school were the children of highly educated South and East Asian immigrants - and they were very much grinds. Most of the Anglo students were unwilling to study that hard.
I work in tech and I told my kids - welcome to your workforce peers. You will have to reasonably match them. You will be working with and competing with them for the rest of your life. Even in a good school system I was not impressed with the standards - so I supplemented them.
My daughter's comments was that her friends had Chinese dragon mothers, Hindu elephant mothers, and she had an American Eagle father.
My daughter dropped out of high school after 10th grade to do early admission and her Civil Engineering degree. My son did Running Start and then did Business - MIS. A lot of my son's classmates were Chinese students. My son was not that impressed.
When I went to high school there was a similar situation - but I was competing with the children of the Holacaust survivors, who were also outsiders and very academically oriented.
My son works in tech now and his peers definitely are an international bunch. The civil engineering workforce is not as international.
I think the signalling function is particularily important outside of STEM. There is signalling within STEM, but it works somewhat differently snf strongly depends upon specifics - are you targeting academic reputation, industrial / startup, ... and there is strong field dependence as well.
Abandoning the vast elite status game is a reward unto itself. You might lose some money and status... but you'll show courage and gain resilience and integrity.
I just wish these people admitted that they were engaged in a status game. That is the ONE topic that none of them will ever discuss. It makes them uncomfortable...
For every Asian kid who succeeds due to the immigrant grindset, 10 more fail and burn out, or struggle in every other aspect of their life such as dating. The overemphasis on test scores and education has already cratered birthrates in East Asia and led to a large percentage of their youth simply "lying flat".
It's interesting, and makes an argument so opposite to the generally accepted conventional wisdom as to be downright shocking, but still feels like it misses something...
The higher education signal is theoretically a proxy for competence. Whether graduates are highly competent by selective enrollment or actual skills building is largely irrelevant in terms of application of credentialing. That credentialing is then used for sorting future workers into positions in the economy. The need to accomplish that sorting doesn't disappear even if we deemphasize education. Companies still need a way to identify the best potential workers, customers still need to identify the best service providers, and future workers themselves need some means of reference to understand how they genuinely compare to their competitors in ability and accomplishment. No matter what means of measurement you use, it's going to be vulnerable to these same effects and the effort to game the signal will scale with the value of the reward.
So what's the solution to THAT problem? The job market genuinely is somewhat zero sum. There are only so many top jobs to go around and the rewards for those top jobs will always naturally scale with their value. We need a sorting mechanism for workers. Education serves that purpose (badly), so it can't be deemphasized without a replacement to serve that function at least as well.
> The need to accomplish that sorting doesn't disappear even if we deemphasize education. Companies still need a way to identify the best potential workers, customers still need to identify the best service providers, and future workers themselves need some means of reference to understand how they genuinely compare to their competitors in ability and accomplishment.
Arctotherium directly suggests overturning Griggs, ie allowing IQ testing as part of the interview process.
Which all FAA(N/M)Gs and finance already do, and have been doing for ages. Remember when everyone was treating MSFT or GOOG interview questions like brain teasers several years ago?
But I agree that overturning Grigg's would help a lot of people, particularly genuinely talented minorities and middle class people who got stuck with crappy schools and so don't show well on paper.
But what he doesn't answer is how we test for conscientiousness and discipline. Many a wild hair can max on an IQ test, but then doesn't deliver solid results over time, are lazy, are inconsistent, fail to see the big picture, fail to map their work back to business value, and more. That's such a prevalent factor, in fact, that Google basically gave up on the brain teaser style interviews! They were optimizing for the wrong thing, and it didn't correlate with actual success in their work life.
I'd be interested in his or anybody else's ideas on that front.
I largely agree that school is probably 90% signaling. But as a founder and employer who's interviewed and hired lots of smart people over the years, the "Ivy" signal is super strong and very worth it for entry level employees. I'm not sure an IQ test can replace it, because IQ tests only test part of what makes somebody good at their job, and conscientious and discipline are both long-term traits that you can't assess in an interview.
My background is military, so I dug into the research on assessing promotion potential a while ago. The boards we currently use at the lower levels (basically an interview, but with much more rote memorization) are effectively useless at predicting long term accomplishment. Longer period assessments (hours or days) similar to a corporate leadership retreat were only marginally better. Paper assessments based on a few years of performance evals were somewhat better still, but not by nearly as much as people assume. I know the Army also looked at the Big 5 and other personality measures for cyber Soldiers, but haven't found the results made public anywhere. Even if that works much better than anything else we've tried (which it probably will since it actually does get data on traits like conscientiousness), it's obviously easy to game a self-report survey on your own traits if you see a predictable advantage to doing so.
Frankly, that seems to be the real trait that most higher education somewhat honestly signals: simple attendance and minimum competence. A job that requires ANY degree, without really caring what in, is mostly just using it as a filter for finding someone with the minimum necessary reading, writing, and math skills to function in the modern workplace, enough of a work ethic to show up on time, presentable, and turn in work, and enough emotional regulation and manners to not piss off authority figures enough to get kicked out. It's a drastically overpriced and inefficient way to prove that someone is minimally competent and reliable.
Pretty much the ENTIRE value of the Ivy's is the selection for high IQ and conscientiousness. I've seen studies that suggest that Ivy students tend to actually graduate with WORSE scores on tests of logical thinking than they had upon enrollment. These days they teach critical theory, not critical thinking.
I don't have any great answers either. IQ and personality traits are usually rather stable, so maybe test for them much earlier in life to avoid wasted years on grinding prep (although stratifying children by predicted potential has its own serious issues and possible undesired consequences), then focus on more long duration real world performance tests, like classes that produce a portfolio of work product and internships. I wouldn't want it to become just another checkbox in resume competition, but normalizing part time work for teens again would also likely help (even if the resultant recommendation letters from former bosses are basically worthless, it satisfies the same requirement for demonstrating attendance, regulation, and minimal competence as school while earning money and being productive rather than spending money consuming irrelevant instruction).
> Pretty much the ENTIRE value of the Ivy's is the selection for high IQ and conscientiousness.
Yeah, it sounds like we're pretty much on the same page overall.
I do think you also get a "competitive competence" and "ambition" buff from Ivy kids - the Red Queen's Race to get in is so high stakes and so furious, they really had to want it and try hard to get there.
But I'm with you - there's basically no good test for the "competent, conscientious, and good enough emotional regulation and short and long term planning" that's the other part of the educational signal.
Even Big 5 conscientiousness isn't good enough, as you point out. And I think the "real world projects" would get furiously gamed and/or cheated on, that's basically ALREADY gamed in the Ivy Red Queen's Race.
To your "teens working" point, I'm a big fan (and that was my own experience as a teen), but in my own experience, even 3 month internships aren't totally reliable - I'd give a strong internship showing as maybe a 50% credible signal of actual performance at the 1 and 2 year marks.
"conscientious and discipline are both long-term traits that you can't assess in an interview"
A resume when well done presents 'a story' about origins and character that can be delved into during interview and then followed up with trustworthy referees, if need be.
"I'm not sure an IQ test can replace it, because IQ tests only test part of what makes somebody good at their job, and conscientious and discipline are both long-term traits that you can't assess in an interview."
IQ is not the final measure of elite performance (the best businessmen do not necessarily have the highest IQ's. As you suggest other traits become more important at 'elite' levels.
Business solved the testing problem forever ago through having professional organisations acting as gate keepers. As long as the incentives align with professional excellence then some goodharting is not too damaging. Ideally, there would be none but that would probably be inhuman.
> Business solved the testing problem forever ago through having professional organisations acting as gate keepers. As long as the incentives align with professional excellence then some goodharting is not too damaging.
You mean like passing the bar and medical residencies and such?
I agree, they're probably doing a good job of setting a relevant (and valuable) floor on competence, as do degrees from T20 universities, for example.
But the question is always how you identify the best future employees, isn't it? Or at least "top quintile" or better. And I'm not sure the professional orgs do that. And all of the metrics and methods we've tried over the years across umpteen companies hasn't figured this out (I personally know that Google threw some serious brainpower and modeling efforts at this, and that's just one company, I'm sure the collective brainpower and time devoted to this across all companies is staggering).
My vague impression is that the SAT has been particularly prone to whatever it is Asians are doing to score higher. The ACT less so, and the professional school tests even less so.
My guess would be that we could actually reform the tests to make them less sitting ducks for Asian tiger mothering. But nobody seems to be publicly studying this question.
The hardest signal to game is of course the genome itself. Moreover, assuming for the sake of argument that massive scientific progress has been made, it's the cheapest signal to measure. Perhaps the best anti-Goodhart model is genetic determinism.
Say we have as complete an understanding of the genetic bases of cognitive traits as is possible. Maybe in addition to intelligence we have some idea about the propensity for creativity. As for personality, assume can do better than just estimating conscientiousness; we can do a full HEXACO model with estimation of the dark triad of personality traits (the latter of which might actually appeal to some employers, or voters).
Parents submit their kids' genomic profile to prospective employers or professional guilds at or even before birth. The legal guild then says this one looks like a potential rainmaker, bring her back when she's 12. If she can prove pass or fail mastery of English, and has no red flags, she can start shadowing partners. NASA or Space X do the same with prospective Martians. From there, a path of professional development might follow, with many sensible off-ramps along the way.
Not sure if they're still doing it, but remember when Harvard and others were scoring admission-interviews perfectly weighted to match their AA objectives? You knew the results were fake when Hispanics were scoring below blacks but also above whites. But a priori, those interviews were attempting to get at something truly important, that pure academic ability may be necessary but is miles from sufficient.
The genomic method above is of course just another version of academic resume plus interview that is speculative in its own way. Have to admit, it doesn't feel remotely utopian.
Thank you for writing this. It captures an uncomfortable truth that plagues the upper echelons of the US education system and a growing number of towns and cities. My experience is that the East Asian students in humanities classes in high school and college add little to nothing to the classroom discussion. They sit silently, diligently taking notes rather than engaging in true discussion or debate (this was not the case for Jewish students). It’s not simply shyness. None of them have anything to say unless they’re third generation kids who have gone way off the track of their predecessors. Perhaps this is different or less pertinent in STEM classes, but the effect is a dampening of the number one Anglo technique for learning: rigorous discussion and debate. So, what do they contribute? This certainly isn’t assimilation; it’s gaming the system to extract a credential good. This is why a lot of US colleges also want to cap East Asian enrollment. Those students may have high test scores, but they do not go on to do anything spectacular, worthy of the elite college’s historic brand. East Asians choose safe paths to higher mediocrity. They are not the engine of the US economy or innovators, on average. And the grind culture is awful, both for the spirit of the kids and for the outcomes they produce. It’s imperative that hard-headed leaders hold onto and reinvigorate the Anglo education culture that has produced the balanced but dynamic culture that has shaped the world. It would be wonderful to have East Asians in the US assimilate into this culture fully. Are they willing and capable? If not, cap legal immigration.
Your comment is interesting. I see the point you are making, but I think we need to go beyond cultural essentialism here. K-12 School systems differ greatly across nations, and it is highly unlikely that a student East Asia receives reading instruction that’s on par with even a poorly resourced school in the United States. There is little to zero opportunity to learn argumentation, logic, critical thinking etc. Engaging in debate can thus be harder because these students are on not on an even plane with their white peers. Second, East Asians do have accomplishments as business and tech leaders, so I’m not fully convinced that they only pick safe paths to mediocrity. Third, Anglo education culture have the world much including serving as a tool for colonialization and Western imperialism. The higher education institutions East Asian international students enrol in, are often entrenched in these norms, adding another layer to this complexity.
I should add: what East Asians currently offer to the US economy is the stuff most likely to be replaced by AI. So this may become a moot point. Sad, but true.
Similar picture in the UK, where university is destroying value in at least one third of cases but almost certainly far more for reasons you set out. If employers want signals for conscientiousness and capability, university degrees are so dumbed down they dont even provide that. Govt could encourage alternative proosof these qualities
Very interesting (as a father of 3 'recent' graduates with another due in 2 years).
So the subtext is, rather than waste effort on 'goodharting' the ed system, have students qualify through certification in specific skills or knowledge schemes?
To not incentivise goodharting these will need to be evaluated by subsequent outcomes (ie commercial gains for applied degrees and research impact for academic degrees). A tricky problem.
As an aside, in NZ there has been a fair amount of Uni grade inflation that began in the 90s (and somewhat in the 80s) as intakes increased and the $ cost to individuals of degrees rose (as government subsidies reduced). However, it is nothing in comparison to what one of my kids reports from the UK.
As a further aside in many diploma and degree subjects, NZ Uni's still differentiate between a 4 year (or 5 year (in the case of Masters) academic path that is signalled by award of 'honours' and the usual 1 or 2 year diploma or 3 year degree followed by entry to a profession upon certification based on evaluation of work outputs. Is this not the case elsewhere?
You should note that the chart of Asian subgroup achievement, cognitive ability, and academic effort relative to a white baseline is for students within the same schools, which will bias the Asian advantage downwards, because the white students who go to school with Asians will have greater cognitive ability and work ethic than other white students. I would be surprised if South Asians in the United States had lower cognitive ability than Whites (as is suggested by the chart) given the strength of immigration selection effects. Richwine wrote an article which cited an estimate of Indian-American IQ based on a backward digit span test of about 112, and although this should be taken with a grain of salt, it makes it implausible that Indian IQ is ~97 as implied by a naive interpretation of your chart. Human Varieties queried an NIH dataset and arrived at an estimate of 102. The same query puts North East Asian IQ at about 110, not the commonly cited 105, which is also implied by the chart. However, the chart does provide evidence for your proposed mechanism for high school GPA, even if it's a biased measure of population averages in cognitive ability.
The Asian-White IQ gap growing from 5 points to 10 points is a plausible alternative explanation for the growth of the Asian-White SAT gap. The Chinese in the UK are not remotely representative of the Chinese population, and tend to come from large East Coast cities or Hong Kong. And I think it's plausible that the sources of Chinese immigrantion to the United States have shifted over time.
Edit needed? “Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented *her* daughters to maximise status.”
I did a stint in the SAT tutoring business a long time ago so I think I have some explanation for why Asians improve more with test prep.
Most Asians will already have maxed out their math as pre before starting prep, but their verbal score can use some work. This is because for a lot of them English is their second language. Or if not their second language they grew up in a mixed language household or three family moved to the USA after they were born.
For a lot of these kids a little test prep can go a long way on the verbal side in a way it can’t for native speaker.
The test has changed a lot since my day so maybe I’m out of date but the data I saw and personal experience indicated that test prep outside this second language stuff was not any more effective then it was with whites. That is to say the first couple of practice tests get you 90% of the very modest benefit.
As to cheating our school had the #1 math team in the country and we had a huge cheating scandal with an East Asian.
The thing about cheating in a mathematics competition is that you still have to be smart enough to fool somebody whose job it is to judge a mathematics competition. It's still a very g-loaded activity.
I think a good dose of social shaming would certainly help. Needing linguistic help is fine, particularly given that since your home country's language should be something you use every day, the new of it you're capable of learning will actually stick to a degree reflective of your general intelligence. But sacrifice should always be judged in relation to the effort and necessity it demands. It is never a good thing in and of itself, and the seeing of it as such is a slavish morality unworthy of a free people.
The difference between North Korea and South Korea or mao china and deng china isn’t ‘g’. It’s having a system in which people with ‘g’ apply it to productive rather than zero sum pursuits.
It's very confusing how you use the term "Asian". I'm not from the US (I'm European). And here "Asian" means "East Asian". But you seem to use it sometimes as "East Asian" and sometimes as "Asian" including "Indians" for example. Would be nice if you could clarify: Does Asian in the US include people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan? Do they really perform so well at standardized testing in the US (or at institutions like M.I.T) - since the average IQ for South Asians measured is very low?
I see, but this is an insane definition. But how come Asians as a whole are then so high performing in the US. I'd assume the lower IQ Asian groups (Indians, Afghans, Pakistanis and so on) would pull down the higher IQ Asian groups (Chinese, SKearns, Japanese) in g-loaded standardized tests.
"I'd assume the lower IQ Asian groups (Indians, Afghans, Pakistanis and so on) would pull down the higher IQ Asian groups (Chinese, SKearns, Japanese) in g-loaded standardized tests."
They do, or I should say they would, but in the case of Indians, the lower IQ individuals do not tend to immigrate to the United States.
That makes sense, thank you. What about the other ethnicities (in case you know the numbers)? Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis , SEA - are they selected heavily too (similar to Indians)?
India is a special case. They have been involved in 'selective breeding' for a long time, through the Caste system. Additionally, they have a population of 1.4 billion people; by chance alone, there are bound to be a sizable number of the cognitive elite.
We didn't play the Ivy game. We targeted our flagship state university - the University of Washington. My kids found that ~ 75% of their peers in Honors / IB programs in high school were the children of highly educated South and East Asian immigrants - and they were very much grinds. Most of the Anglo students were unwilling to study that hard.
I work in tech and I told my kids - welcome to your workforce peers. You will have to reasonably match them. You will be working with and competing with them for the rest of your life. Even in a good school system I was not impressed with the standards - so I supplemented them.
My daughter's comments was that her friends had Chinese dragon mothers, Hindu elephant mothers, and she had an American Eagle father.
My daughter dropped out of high school after 10th grade to do early admission and her Civil Engineering degree. My son did Running Start and then did Business - MIS. A lot of my son's classmates were Chinese students. My son was not that impressed.
When I went to high school there was a similar situation - but I was competing with the children of the Holacaust survivors, who were also outsiders and very academically oriented.
My son works in tech now and his peers definitely are an international bunch. The civil engineering workforce is not as international.
I think the signalling function is particularily important outside of STEM. There is signalling within STEM, but it works somewhat differently snf strongly depends upon specifics - are you targeting academic reputation, industrial / startup, ... and there is strong field dependence as well.
Abandoning the vast elite status game is a reward unto itself. You might lose some money and status... but you'll show courage and gain resilience and integrity.
I just wish these people admitted that they were engaged in a status game. That is the ONE topic that none of them will ever discuss. It makes them uncomfortable...
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/its-not-real
For every Asian kid who succeeds due to the immigrant grindset, 10 more fail and burn out, or struggle in every other aspect of their life such as dating. The overemphasis on test scores and education has already cratered birthrates in East Asia and led to a large percentage of their youth simply "lying flat".
It's interesting, and makes an argument so opposite to the generally accepted conventional wisdom as to be downright shocking, but still feels like it misses something...
The higher education signal is theoretically a proxy for competence. Whether graduates are highly competent by selective enrollment or actual skills building is largely irrelevant in terms of application of credentialing. That credentialing is then used for sorting future workers into positions in the economy. The need to accomplish that sorting doesn't disappear even if we deemphasize education. Companies still need a way to identify the best potential workers, customers still need to identify the best service providers, and future workers themselves need some means of reference to understand how they genuinely compare to their competitors in ability and accomplishment. No matter what means of measurement you use, it's going to be vulnerable to these same effects and the effort to game the signal will scale with the value of the reward.
So what's the solution to THAT problem? The job market genuinely is somewhat zero sum. There are only so many top jobs to go around and the rewards for those top jobs will always naturally scale with their value. We need a sorting mechanism for workers. Education serves that purpose (badly), so it can't be deemphasized without a replacement to serve that function at least as well.
> The need to accomplish that sorting doesn't disappear even if we deemphasize education. Companies still need a way to identify the best potential workers, customers still need to identify the best service providers, and future workers themselves need some means of reference to understand how they genuinely compare to their competitors in ability and accomplishment.
Arctotherium directly suggests overturning Griggs, ie allowing IQ testing as part of the interview process.
Which all FAA(N/M)Gs and finance already do, and have been doing for ages. Remember when everyone was treating MSFT or GOOG interview questions like brain teasers several years ago?
But I agree that overturning Grigg's would help a lot of people, particularly genuinely talented minorities and middle class people who got stuck with crappy schools and so don't show well on paper.
But what he doesn't answer is how we test for conscientiousness and discipline. Many a wild hair can max on an IQ test, but then doesn't deliver solid results over time, are lazy, are inconsistent, fail to see the big picture, fail to map their work back to business value, and more. That's such a prevalent factor, in fact, that Google basically gave up on the brain teaser style interviews! They were optimizing for the wrong thing, and it didn't correlate with actual success in their work life.
I'd be interested in his or anybody else's ideas on that front.
I largely agree that school is probably 90% signaling. But as a founder and employer who's interviewed and hired lots of smart people over the years, the "Ivy" signal is super strong and very worth it for entry level employees. I'm not sure an IQ test can replace it, because IQ tests only test part of what makes somebody good at their job, and conscientious and discipline are both long-term traits that you can't assess in an interview.
My background is military, so I dug into the research on assessing promotion potential a while ago. The boards we currently use at the lower levels (basically an interview, but with much more rote memorization) are effectively useless at predicting long term accomplishment. Longer period assessments (hours or days) similar to a corporate leadership retreat were only marginally better. Paper assessments based on a few years of performance evals were somewhat better still, but not by nearly as much as people assume. I know the Army also looked at the Big 5 and other personality measures for cyber Soldiers, but haven't found the results made public anywhere. Even if that works much better than anything else we've tried (which it probably will since it actually does get data on traits like conscientiousness), it's obviously easy to game a self-report survey on your own traits if you see a predictable advantage to doing so.
Frankly, that seems to be the real trait that most higher education somewhat honestly signals: simple attendance and minimum competence. A job that requires ANY degree, without really caring what in, is mostly just using it as a filter for finding someone with the minimum necessary reading, writing, and math skills to function in the modern workplace, enough of a work ethic to show up on time, presentable, and turn in work, and enough emotional regulation and manners to not piss off authority figures enough to get kicked out. It's a drastically overpriced and inefficient way to prove that someone is minimally competent and reliable.
Pretty much the ENTIRE value of the Ivy's is the selection for high IQ and conscientiousness. I've seen studies that suggest that Ivy students tend to actually graduate with WORSE scores on tests of logical thinking than they had upon enrollment. These days they teach critical theory, not critical thinking.
I don't have any great answers either. IQ and personality traits are usually rather stable, so maybe test for them much earlier in life to avoid wasted years on grinding prep (although stratifying children by predicted potential has its own serious issues and possible undesired consequences), then focus on more long duration real world performance tests, like classes that produce a portfolio of work product and internships. I wouldn't want it to become just another checkbox in resume competition, but normalizing part time work for teens again would also likely help (even if the resultant recommendation letters from former bosses are basically worthless, it satisfies the same requirement for demonstrating attendance, regulation, and minimal competence as school while earning money and being productive rather than spending money consuming irrelevant instruction).
> Pretty much the ENTIRE value of the Ivy's is the selection for high IQ and conscientiousness.
Yeah, it sounds like we're pretty much on the same page overall.
I do think you also get a "competitive competence" and "ambition" buff from Ivy kids - the Red Queen's Race to get in is so high stakes and so furious, they really had to want it and try hard to get there.
But I'm with you - there's basically no good test for the "competent, conscientious, and good enough emotional regulation and short and long term planning" that's the other part of the educational signal.
Even Big 5 conscientiousness isn't good enough, as you point out. And I think the "real world projects" would get furiously gamed and/or cheated on, that's basically ALREADY gamed in the Ivy Red Queen's Race.
To your "teens working" point, I'm a big fan (and that was my own experience as a teen), but in my own experience, even 3 month internships aren't totally reliable - I'd give a strong internship showing as maybe a 50% credible signal of actual performance at the 1 and 2 year marks.
"conscientious and discipline are both long-term traits that you can't assess in an interview"
A resume when well done presents 'a story' about origins and character that can be delved into during interview and then followed up with trustworthy referees, if need be.
"I'm not sure an IQ test can replace it, because IQ tests only test part of what makes somebody good at their job, and conscientious and discipline are both long-term traits that you can't assess in an interview."
As well as integrity.
IQ is not the final measure of elite performance (the best businessmen do not necessarily have the highest IQ's. As you suggest other traits become more important at 'elite' levels.
Business solved the testing problem forever ago through having professional organisations acting as gate keepers. As long as the incentives align with professional excellence then some goodharting is not too damaging. Ideally, there would be none but that would probably be inhuman.
> Business solved the testing problem forever ago through having professional organisations acting as gate keepers. As long as the incentives align with professional excellence then some goodharting is not too damaging.
You mean like passing the bar and medical residencies and such?
I agree, they're probably doing a good job of setting a relevant (and valuable) floor on competence, as do degrees from T20 universities, for example.
But the question is always how you identify the best future employees, isn't it? Or at least "top quintile" or better. And I'm not sure the professional orgs do that. And all of the metrics and methods we've tried over the years across umpteen companies hasn't figured this out (I personally know that Google threw some serious brainpower and modeling efforts at this, and that's just one company, I'm sure the collective brainpower and time devoted to this across all companies is staggering).
Yes, and selection from a population where most are unfamiliar to you is a tricky problem.
What I see from university graduates, elite or otherwise, is indoctrination, not education. With the exception of STEM, most graduates are lacking.
My vague impression is that the SAT has been particularly prone to whatever it is Asians are doing to score higher. The ACT less so, and the professional school tests even less so.
My guess would be that we could actually reform the tests to make them less sitting ducks for Asian tiger mothering. But nobody seems to be publicly studying this question.
The hardest signal to game is of course the genome itself. Moreover, assuming for the sake of argument that massive scientific progress has been made, it's the cheapest signal to measure. Perhaps the best anti-Goodhart model is genetic determinism.
Say we have as complete an understanding of the genetic bases of cognitive traits as is possible. Maybe in addition to intelligence we have some idea about the propensity for creativity. As for personality, assume can do better than just estimating conscientiousness; we can do a full HEXACO model with estimation of the dark triad of personality traits (the latter of which might actually appeal to some employers, or voters).
Parents submit their kids' genomic profile to prospective employers or professional guilds at or even before birth. The legal guild then says this one looks like a potential rainmaker, bring her back when she's 12. If she can prove pass or fail mastery of English, and has no red flags, she can start shadowing partners. NASA or Space X do the same with prospective Martians. From there, a path of professional development might follow, with many sensible off-ramps along the way.
Not sure if they're still doing it, but remember when Harvard and others were scoring admission-interviews perfectly weighted to match their AA objectives? You knew the results were fake when Hispanics were scoring below blacks but also above whites. But a priori, those interviews were attempting to get at something truly important, that pure academic ability may be necessary but is miles from sufficient.
The genomic method above is of course just another version of academic resume plus interview that is speculative in its own way. Have to admit, it doesn't feel remotely utopian.
Great article!
Thank you for writing this. It captures an uncomfortable truth that plagues the upper echelons of the US education system and a growing number of towns and cities. My experience is that the East Asian students in humanities classes in high school and college add little to nothing to the classroom discussion. They sit silently, diligently taking notes rather than engaging in true discussion or debate (this was not the case for Jewish students). It’s not simply shyness. None of them have anything to say unless they’re third generation kids who have gone way off the track of their predecessors. Perhaps this is different or less pertinent in STEM classes, but the effect is a dampening of the number one Anglo technique for learning: rigorous discussion and debate. So, what do they contribute? This certainly isn’t assimilation; it’s gaming the system to extract a credential good. This is why a lot of US colleges also want to cap East Asian enrollment. Those students may have high test scores, but they do not go on to do anything spectacular, worthy of the elite college’s historic brand. East Asians choose safe paths to higher mediocrity. They are not the engine of the US economy or innovators, on average. And the grind culture is awful, both for the spirit of the kids and for the outcomes they produce. It’s imperative that hard-headed leaders hold onto and reinvigorate the Anglo education culture that has produced the balanced but dynamic culture that has shaped the world. It would be wonderful to have East Asians in the US assimilate into this culture fully. Are they willing and capable? If not, cap legal immigration.
Your comment is interesting. I see the point you are making, but I think we need to go beyond cultural essentialism here. K-12 School systems differ greatly across nations, and it is highly unlikely that a student East Asia receives reading instruction that’s on par with even a poorly resourced school in the United States. There is little to zero opportunity to learn argumentation, logic, critical thinking etc. Engaging in debate can thus be harder because these students are on not on an even plane with their white peers. Second, East Asians do have accomplishments as business and tech leaders, so I’m not fully convinced that they only pick safe paths to mediocrity. Third, Anglo education culture have the world much including serving as a tool for colonialization and Western imperialism. The higher education institutions East Asian international students enrol in, are often entrenched in these norms, adding another layer to this complexity.
I should add: what East Asians currently offer to the US economy is the stuff most likely to be replaced by AI. So this may become a moot point. Sad, but true.
Similar picture in the UK, where university is destroying value in at least one third of cases but almost certainly far more for reasons you set out. If employers want signals for conscientiousness and capability, university degrees are so dumbed down they dont even provide that. Govt could encourage alternative proosof these qualities
https://open.substack.com/pub/sfhwebb/p/what-is-the-point-of-university?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1cycu5
Very interesting (as a father of 3 'recent' graduates with another due in 2 years).
So the subtext is, rather than waste effort on 'goodharting' the ed system, have students qualify through certification in specific skills or knowledge schemes?
To not incentivise goodharting these will need to be evaluated by subsequent outcomes (ie commercial gains for applied degrees and research impact for academic degrees). A tricky problem.
As an aside, in NZ there has been a fair amount of Uni grade inflation that began in the 90s (and somewhat in the 80s) as intakes increased and the $ cost to individuals of degrees rose (as government subsidies reduced). However, it is nothing in comparison to what one of my kids reports from the UK.
As a further aside in many diploma and degree subjects, NZ Uni's still differentiate between a 4 year (or 5 year (in the case of Masters) academic path that is signalled by award of 'honours' and the usual 1 or 2 year diploma or 3 year degree followed by entry to a profession upon certification based on evaluation of work outputs. Is this not the case elsewhere?
You should note that the chart of Asian subgroup achievement, cognitive ability, and academic effort relative to a white baseline is for students within the same schools, which will bias the Asian advantage downwards, because the white students who go to school with Asians will have greater cognitive ability and work ethic than other white students. I would be surprised if South Asians in the United States had lower cognitive ability than Whites (as is suggested by the chart) given the strength of immigration selection effects. Richwine wrote an article which cited an estimate of Indian-American IQ based on a backward digit span test of about 112, and although this should be taken with a grain of salt, it makes it implausible that Indian IQ is ~97 as implied by a naive interpretation of your chart. Human Varieties queried an NIH dataset and arrived at an estimate of 102. The same query puts North East Asian IQ at about 110, not the commonly cited 105, which is also implied by the chart. However, the chart does provide evidence for your proposed mechanism for high school GPA, even if it's a biased measure of population averages in cognitive ability.
The Asian-White IQ gap growing from 5 points to 10 points is a plausible alternative explanation for the growth of the Asian-White SAT gap. The Chinese in the UK are not remotely representative of the Chinese population, and tend to come from large East Coast cities or Hong Kong. And I think it's plausible that the sources of Chinese immigrantion to the United States have shifted over time.
Richwine: https://archive.ph/MGOkw
Human Varieties write-up: https://humanvarieties.org/2023/05/27/iq-scores-by-ethnic-group-in-a-nationally-representative-sample-of-10-year-old-american-children/
Edit needed? “Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book about how she and other Chinese immigrants aggressively (some might say abusively) parented *her* daughters to maximise status.”
Fixed
Great work. Compelling and challenging.
I did a stint in the SAT tutoring business a long time ago so I think I have some explanation for why Asians improve more with test prep.
Most Asians will already have maxed out their math as pre before starting prep, but their verbal score can use some work. This is because for a lot of them English is their second language. Or if not their second language they grew up in a mixed language household or three family moved to the USA after they were born.
For a lot of these kids a little test prep can go a long way on the verbal side in a way it can’t for native speaker.
The test has changed a lot since my day so maybe I’m out of date but the data I saw and personal experience indicated that test prep outside this second language stuff was not any more effective then it was with whites. That is to say the first couple of practice tests get you 90% of the very modest benefit.
As to cheating our school had the #1 math team in the country and we had a huge cheating scandal with an East Asian.
The thing about cheating in a mathematics competition is that you still have to be smart enough to fool somebody whose job it is to judge a mathematics competition. It's still a very g-loaded activity.
I think a good dose of social shaming would certainly help. Needing linguistic help is fine, particularly given that since your home country's language should be something you use every day, the new of it you're capable of learning will actually stick to a degree reflective of your general intelligence. But sacrifice should always be judged in relation to the effort and necessity it demands. It is never a good thing in and of itself, and the seeing of it as such is a slavish morality unworthy of a free people.
The difference between North Korea and South Korea or mao china and deng china isn’t ‘g’. It’s having a system in which people with ‘g’ apply it to productive rather than zero sum pursuits.
It's very confusing how you use the term "Asian". I'm not from the US (I'm European). And here "Asian" means "East Asian". But you seem to use it sometimes as "East Asian" and sometimes as "Asian" including "Indians" for example. Would be nice if you could clarify: Does Asian in the US include people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan? Do they really perform so well at standardized testing in the US (or at institutions like M.I.T) - since the average IQ for South Asians measured is very low?
The US Government currently defines everybody from the Khyber Pass to the Bering Strait as "Asian."
I see, but this is an insane definition. But how come Asians as a whole are then so high performing in the US. I'd assume the lower IQ Asian groups (Indians, Afghans, Pakistanis and so on) would pull down the higher IQ Asian groups (Chinese, SKearns, Japanese) in g-loaded standardized tests.
"I'd assume the lower IQ Asian groups (Indians, Afghans, Pakistanis and so on) would pull down the higher IQ Asian groups (Chinese, SKearns, Japanese) in g-loaded standardized tests."
They do, or I should say they would, but in the case of Indians, the lower IQ individuals do not tend to immigrate to the United States.
That makes sense, thank you. What about the other ethnicities (in case you know the numbers)? Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis , SEA - are they selected heavily too (similar to Indians)?
India is a special case. They have been involved in 'selective breeding' for a long time, through the Caste system. Additionally, they have a population of 1.4 billion people; by chance alone, there are bound to be a sizable number of the cognitive elite.