
Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep? - schmico
http://www.stanford.edu/group/reichresearch/cgi-bin/site/2011/03/24/are-stanford-students-just-really-excellent-sheep/
======
lhnz
I am getting quite tired of listening to people argue for or against
conformity.

You don't become a shepherd by making yourself into a black sheep.

And there is nothing wrong with conforming.

There is nothing wrong with wearing fashionable status symbols. There is
nothing wrong with climbing hierarchies, nothing wrong with pleading for a
comfortable life, or listening to what your friends think is cool. There
really isn't. These are all suitable ways of enjoying your life.

We all seem to want to be rare. But what does rare get you?

Solitude.

Maybe you truly want this? But think it through: are the grapes so sour? We
are social animals.

I covet the courage to be and do whatever I wish to. I don't need to be scared
to be seen along side others. This is a whim to will.

It is crazy to want to be more of an individual than others just for the sake
of it, and it has nothing to do with living the way I just mentioned.

~~~
schmico
I agree as well, but to a point. Do we really want our most targeted education
resources being directed towards conformists? I think these institutions
should be (almost) reserved for those who are pursuing leadership and cutting
edge thinking.

~~~
Drbble
Why do you think the place for noncomforists is in an _institution_? Why would
they want to attend an _institution_?

------
jeffpersonified
William Deresiewicz's address to West Point, "Solitude and Leadership"
(<http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/>) remains the best
piece on leadership I've read to date. Ironically, as pointed out by
Deresiewicz, the address is given to newly minted officers in the US military.

The address was requisite reading in this year's Venture for America
application process, and is more than just a guide in becoming a better
leader, but a phenomenal exposition on why our educational system has
calcified into "hoop" jumping.

~~~
Estragon
I agree; that is an excellent speech.

------
gojomo
This is one of the reasons I think people err by reading too much into
accounts from the 'Stanford Prison Experiment'.

The students then (as now) weren't a sample of all people, but a particular
kind of privileged young male, especially deferential and trusting towards
professors, and especially willing to role-play with confidence that some
other authority was managing the consequences.

~~~
cjimmy
The participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment weren't Stanford students.
I'm not sure any of them were. They were selected by Zimbardo from responses
to an ad in Palo Alto. They were selected for their normal-ness, mentally and
physiologically.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment>

~~~
gojomo
You're right that they may not have been _exclusively_ Stanford students. But
they were recruited through city and campus newspapers, limited to male
college students who were in Palo Alto for the last two weeks of August 1971,
and had to report to an on-campus location to sign up.

I've seen definitive references that some were Stanford students, and my guess
under those conditions would be that _most_ were.

But even if most were not: a cohort of 24 male college students (23 white; 1
asian) in 1971 was not representative of society at large. Those in
comfortable Palo Alto for the last 2 weeks of summer break, even less
representative. And those who arrived on campus in response to a classified ad
for paid volunteers "needed for psychological study of prison life", less
representative again.

(As one of the followup studies footnoted in Wikipedia discovered, the mere
presence of the "study of prison life" phrase in the recruitment ad changes
what kind of people respond.)

------
IsaacL
As a member of generation Y, I think the original "Organisation Kid" article
really got what is wrong with my generation. We're not lazy, entitled, or
afraid of competition, despite hundreds of articles by gen X/boomers claiming
the opposite. We compete and work hard _but never ask what it's all for_.

~~~
debacle
When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working
hard, because you realize it's an old man's game.

It's 2012. You can get HD pornography on a phone. Are we still expected to
worry about all of this menial shit from the 60s?

~~~
jpdoctor
> _When you start to ask "What is it all for?" you stop competing and working
> hard, because you realize it's an old man's game._

That's one possible result. There are others.

------
rayiner
We've created a winner-take-all society where the cost of losing is a soul-
sucking micro-managed job and the constant worry that getting sick could mean
medical bills that can never be paid off. In this society you do not get
points for asking big questions. You get points for getting the right degrees
to serve the right signaling functions to get the right jobs which offer
luxuries like health insurance and the flexibility to leave the office for 15
minutes during the day to take care of an errand.

Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are
offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are
going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in
consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health
insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived
in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to
the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER
visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those
circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking
big questions.

~~~
gammarator
Daniel Brook's book "The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All
America" [1] does a great job showing how the rising costs of student loans,
urban living, and health care drive students into corporate jobs.

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F76G2Q/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=explthedataun-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B003F76G2Q)

------
oldschooltaper
The "problem" is that the problem that top tier education raises -- the one
this topic is focused on -- is not really a problem for graduates of those
institutions, namely:

Getting accepted is the biggest hurdle. Once you are in all you really need to
do to secure an opportunity is graduate. It's in the institution's best
interest to see that you graduate and carry on the good name of the
institution after graduation in whatever position you decide to take in
whatever sector of the economy.

People will listen to you merely based on the fact you graduated from a top
tier institution. They will assume you are intelligent. There is no need to
prove it.

Some people will even hire you solely based on those phenomena.

Why would any graduate be against this? There is very little incentive to
think outside the box.

The sheep are not the graduates of top tier institutions. The sheep are the
people who blindly follow them.

There is little need to be a good leader when you can be a leader "by default"
thanks to "presumed competence" and the fear of questioning anyone who has
graduated from a top tier institution.

.

------
Alex3917
"It portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely
bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like
conformists."

Colleges go out of their way to select 'herd-like conformists' during the
admissions process, so why would they then try to change them once they got
there? This Brooks article never made any sense to me.

~~~
wmf
The admissions people say they reject excellent-but-bland applications, but
perhaps it's a matter of degree.

~~~
Spearchucker
There's a school of thought in the UK that feels institutions like this reject
applications from applicants who's family don't have deep pockets.

Similarly, there's the perception that Eton is capable of producing well-
educated idiots.

Understand me here - this isn't my view. Just saying it's a view that's out
there.

~~~
socksy
I'm not sure Eton is really applicable here, since the income of your parents
matters a whole lot more than the application process (and Eton suffer for it
in the league tables) — and whilst you may argue that Ivy League schools do
just that, I doubt it's quite to the same extent.

~~~
234547556
Bear in mind that the ivy leagues get to grade their own students whereas the
etonians sit national exams...

------
joedev
"We are slouching toward a glorified form of vocational training."

What's wrong with vocational training? Maybe the issue is that the market is
demanding vocational skills yet schools are trying to find, or trying to
artificially create, a market for liberal-arts skills.

~~~
ElliotMingee
Very good point. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet but it also isn't
feasible to have an entire society (or even just the population of people with
undergraduate/graduate degrees) asking the big questions and shaking
everything up. Society needs people to keep the cogs turning which involves a
lot of "menial" jobs (I use menial not to imply that they do not require
intelligence or skill, but instead to point out that they are simply not novel
or unique)

------
jcnnghm
I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last
week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it
was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to
start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it
would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every
problem requires actual thought and understanding. Memorization will do
nothing for you.

I started to think seriously about going back two years ago, as I observed
friends that had graduated in soft subjects moving up in their careers, to the
point where they were making hiring decisions. An overheard conversation that
really stuck out, was when I heard someone relating their thought process in
deciding not to hire a technically capable but degree-less candidate, "How
could I hire them? That's a hard technical position. It's impossible to do
something like that without college. I had to spend four years learning HRs,
and that was really hard. That job is even tougher than HRs." It started to
become obvious after a while that people that make hiring decisions in large
companies many times are not very intelligent, and it would be basically
impossible to get a job many places without a degree. Your resume will get
bounced by HR before it ever gets to the technical people that should be doing
the interviews. It would be OK if my company succeeded, since I could point at
it and say it sold for $X, justifying the decision to drop out. But if it
failed, these people would never understand. So I went back as a hedge, part
time.

The only difference between the first and second time I went to school, is
that the second time I was determined to get straight A's, and graduate as
quickly as possible, so I could get into a good post-grad program. I was able
to do a little over 30 credits one summer when I maxed out the number of
Credit-By-Exam courses I transferred in. I found that if I studied anything
that I had a general understanding of for about four hours (like Business
Ethics), I could easily pass the exam by a large margin. The actual coursework
was mostly very easy. Almost always, it was more a question of doing all the
work, and turning it in on time, than anything else. I would take the
syllabus, and check off everything that had to be done as I completed it.
Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real
intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about.

People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be
given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and
complete the work. That's it. From my experience many grads will require a lot
of hand holding to actually complete their work the first time, because they
don't really know how to do anything, and can't think for themselves. The
degree indicates that they are trainable; once they are shown what to do, they
can keep checking the boxes for at least 4 years. I wish I didn't have to go
back to school, it cost time and money disproportionate to what I got out of
it. Having said that, for now, a degree is difficult to avoid without
seriously limiting prospects. It is the present reality, and if I could do it
over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high
school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years.

~~~
gavanwoolery
My question: how does a piece of paper that thousands of others hold
distinguish you? It doesn't. Take those four years and $120k-$240k you would
spend on an "education" and get a real education - build a company. Building a
legit company (successful or not) is worth 1000 times what that piece of paper
is. Your mind will be tempered in the fires of reality.

As I've said many times, a degree is just your ticket to being some else's
bitch.

~~~
jiggy2011
How many financial institutions are going to lend $120-140k to an 18 year old
for any purpose other than going to college?

It's also worth bearing in mind that spending 3-4 years focused on learning
stuff like math,econ and CS rigorously can help your abilities to build a
business later.

You might be able to setup your web dev shop at 18 and make a nice living for
a few years making CRUD apps or whatever but once the market starts to demand
something else then you are likely to get stuck if you haven't put some study
into higher level principles.

Besides there is nothing stopping you from running a simple business at the
same time as going to college. Myself and a few others on my CS course used to
build websites and fix PCs during the holidays and made more money for about
half the hours as the people working at the supermarkets and pubs.

~~~
gavanwoolery
A good portion of students receive little or no financial aid. Even if you do
get that money loaned, its still debt on your head that you would have to save
up for / pay off.

A common mistake people make is that any given subject (math, econ, etc) is
limited to your studies in college. I have studied biology, architecture, the
classics, geology, meteorology, botany, and much more outside of college.

It does depend whether or not you are a self learner, but is paying 120k+
really worth it to have someone twist your arm? Everything you can learn in
college, you can learn outside, for free -- the interent has democratized
information.

------
kamaal
I absolutely hated my academics apart from the patches that involved doing
projects and interesting 'real world' work.

My experience with academic education was something like this. It was always a
blind race for scoring marks/grades. At the end of every day what comes are
series of boring assignments and homework whose use no one knows of. Not doing
the boring stuff gets punished. Exams are always about getting a seat in a
nice institution. And the cumulative effect of that is to get a good interview
call. People with higher grades and marks ultimately get placed in better
places to repeat the same kind of boring stuff in big corporates.

Well I am from India. The best experience in my college days Ironically came
from working at a Government Military organization called as
GTRE([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_Turbine_Research_Establishment)).
I learned more in the 6 month apprenticeship than what I learned in years. We
also did great work, I can't disclose the work as its defense stuff and I'm
under NDA. Next best experience came during working for a start up during my
semester holidays.

Every time I went back to college I felt pathetic.

Post college, I saw the so called toppers were all about two things. Do their
MBA from a B-School and then join a Bank or some business role, Or work for a
nice start package at a large corporate. The silliest thing I saw was even the
job scenes were filled with interview procedures designed to hire top rote
learners. Knowing algorithms by heart, memorizing arcane facts, learning
puzzles from a particular book, stuff like that. Practially 0 importance for
things like hardwork, productivity and getting things done.

Second bizarre things I noticed was large corporates required completing
pointless certifications for hikes and promotions. This was college all over
again for me.

------
astrofinch
Well there is also a strong intelligence requirement for getting into
Stanford. The real question is how many people of the same age as Stanford
students are just as intelligent but less sheeplike? Personally, I would guess
that elite university undergraduates make up a fairly large fraction of the
people their age who are as smart as they are.

------
treenyc
That is why people who attended Rudolf Steiner's Waldorf school perform so
well in College. It is a school that DOES NOT give grades to students. And the
teach write feed back to the students based on whole aspects of their
development including social interaction. When college get ride of tests and
grade will be a good start.

~~~
MartinCron
If colleges get rid of grades, however will Peter Thiel know which hedge fund
analysts to hire?

~~~
treenyc
well, business school like wharton prohibits employers to ask about their
graduate's grade anyway.

~~~
Drbble
That's likely because they promote an image that all their students are
perfect. It's also possible, but doubtful, thatthey believe class grades are
personal development tools, not external qualifications.

------
splicer
I'm so fucking glad I'm done school. Now I finally have time to learn things
like Prolog :)

~~~
currywurst
Datalog's where the action is at now ;) !

------
dazuck
This is a pretty discouraging thread to read. The vast majority of posters
seem to be of a CS (or related) background, extremely smart (academically, at
least), and hold their college experience in low regard. Consensus seems to be
that the core CS coursework was pretty easy, forced conformity, and didn't
have much interesting material to spark learning or creativity.

How many of the people complaining of this branched out to other subjects?
Learned about political philosophy, geology or maybe tried some creative
writing? True, those courses are 'easier' so won't be more challenging to get
your coveted "A", and yes they might not help you graduate as quickly as
humanly possible to get out of school or help you make millions in the
marketplace. But there is a reason they are there, and it's not so less
intelligent people can also get a Stanford degree. They tackle other
questions, other problems, other ways of thinking. You might do very well in
those classes without tons of work, but they undoubtedly would have provided
another avenue to learn and experience a lot of things you don't get from CS.

The discussions around tuition cost, learning in the real world where you can
make $10K/month, how easy 'soft' courses are, the dismissive idea that college
is partially about having fun, making friends, romantic relationships, etc.
probably does a lot to explain why the majority of this thread didn't feel
like Stanford offered much to them besides a piece of paper that society
demands. There is so much you didn't bother to do because it didn't fit into
your specific and very narrow idea: learn CS to make money. Of course I'm
generalizing here, and I doubt anybody actually thought 'learn CS to make
money', but it really doesn't sound like many people who have posted had a ton
of experience in school to develop their self, rather than just their career.

------
waterlesscloud
I think it's far more likely that the faculty of elite schools are selected
for being really excellent sheep.

They have jumped through many more hoops for a much longer period of time.

I could buy that the student body were largely using the elite schools for
their own ultimately non-conformist ends, but it's much harder to convince
myself that the faculty is doing so.

------
karpathy
It's a fair point. Doing well in my undergrad classes felt like a game, and
I've developed many rules of playing the game to score many points. I think
it's fair to say that good grades are some kind of a measure of combination of
ambition, perseverance and determination to be the sheep you're asked to be.

The most interesting people I think are those who excel at that game because
they realize that it's just the way society functions, but on a side maintain
a soul-- interesting extracurricular interests, projects, etc. They use their
knowledge not only to pass tests, but attempt to expand on it and apply it in
their own creative ways.

That's why I think the article's title is not very appropriate. I'd call it
"Is Stanford training just (really excellent) sheep?". There are some good
arguments to be made for an affirmative answer, and yet that's not who I see
when I look around me.

------
jeffpersonified
Let's be clear, though – hoop jumping isn't relegated to the
university/educational system today. It's ubiquitous in hiring, promotion, and
general staffing practices in corporations. It's typical in society.

Rare are the people who constantly ask "why do we do what we do," and "how
could we do this better."

~~~
schmico
Very true. But this is a virtue of human nature, and power. And in business
(very generalised) you have the efficiency cycle and the efficacy cycle.
Bosses generally only want advice on how the company can become more
efficient, to question efficacy is to question his/her judgement and power.

But the ease by which people can now try, test, and launch an idea and
business is tearing this model down. I think that very soon, the companies who
fail will be those who do not recognise the leaders from within, with the
ability to improve on enterprise efficacy.

------
adrianhoward
I don't think it's a Stanford problem, or a university problem, or even an
academic problem. It's a people problem. I've seen just as many industry sheep
as I have academic ones :-)

The sort of folk who are going to just jump through the academic hoops and
nothing else are _exactly_ the same sort of people who jump through similar
industry hoops. They do what they're supposed to do and not a lot else.

The people who see the degree certificate as the goal are the same sort of
folk who see the promotion or the parking space or the corner office as the
goal. They see the what, but not the why.

People seem bent towards that particular approach to life long before they get
to work or university.

------
SagelyGuru
Don't forget the exams. That is loop jumping par excellence and should you try
to be a non-conformist over that, you will be out of college before you know
it and unable to listen to these excellent lectures on how not to conform.

------
Estragon
What mentality is he pointing to when he derides "The idea that every activity
they undertake be “a growth experience.”"? Sounds like a damn fine idea to me.

~~~
mtgentry
I think he means that by framing an activity as a "growth experience", it
loses a bit of it's soul. Ghandi, Lindbergh, Jobs - they all changed the world
because they had a fire in their belly and couldn't sit still. They didn't
pursue things because it would grow their character. They did things because
they we're compelled to.

~~~
endtime
I don't think a world in which everyone is trying to be (or thinks they are)
the next Steve Jobs would be so great.

~~~
mattstreet
There would be even more kids with no father in their lives.

------
Lednakashim
Are State School Students Just (Mediocre) Sheep?

------
tantalor
Two word summary: navel gazing.

------
maeon3
95% of people are sheep, just look around you. Clothing fashions all change
with eachother according to what the others are doing. Church: just tell me
What to believe. Bars, drinking toxic liquids and smoking radioactive smoke
because it's cool. Resumes which plead for others to make us worthy members of
society.

It takes a special kind of defiance to say no thank you to What the world
expects you to be.

~~~
blake8086
I am always amused at this mentality. Have you ever noticed how Reddit is full
of people who all think everyone _else_ are sheep?

Everyone is unique if you only count the things that make them different, and
people are pretty similar if you look for things that make them alike.

~~~
sliverstorm
Absolutely. You are always a sheep in some regard; non-conforming in _every_
regard is an exhausting and worthless endeavor. Not to mention, you almost
have to pay _more_ attention to trends than the unconscious conformer, at
which point... who is the slave to trends?

~~~
spindritf
Nonconforming is not the same as anticonforming. And the fact that you observe
and analyse trends doesn't mean you're a slave to them.

~~~
sliverstorm
_the fact that you observe and analyse trends, doesn't mean you're a slave to
them_

Even if you are making the opposite choice, if your every decision is
predicated on the trends, I'd still call you a slave to them.

~~~
Drbble
"To manipulate children, you simply say 'no'. " --The Fantasticks

