In “Universities and Economic Growth”, I blamed the poor job that colleges do of educating for our sluggish economic growth. A story in today’s New York Times also blames colleges for our dim economic prospects, but says that the problem is that students don’t stick with the full program.
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Colleges train our smartest people to work badly.
In college, the best result a student can expect is a 4.0 GPA, which is a 93% grade. In real life, that means you screw up every fifteenth thing you try. Or if you do something that takes ten steps to work, you screw up half the time!
Now most people would try something and check. But most of the college graduates I worked with felt that being fast and close was much, much better than being careful and right. It was almost impossible to convince them to slow down and check.
I couldn’t figure out how a college would train students to rush like that, but there’s an interesting comment in the summary of a lecture in the linked article: “how grades are determined … but then we use judgment as well.” Aha! If you’re the first student to blurt out an answer that isn’t obviously totally wrong, the professor thinks you’re smart, and gives you a better grade than the slow student who gets the right answer a minute later.
So if you need to hire someone with a college-taught skill (like programming originally was) then your employee will come with years of training designed to make them screw up.