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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
Yes, and the likely effects on outcomes are:
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"Jamie, pull up that article about gen z kids raised on iPads not knowing what files and folders are."
I feel bad for feeling this way, and I do genuinely wish society as a whole hadn't failed these kids, but there's a part of me that's saying "Whew, I'll be secure in my software development career until retirement, even with the alleged threat of AI replacing me." I feel awful for feeling this way but I imagine there are others here that feel similarly?
I think it's the same feeling that motivates the (stereotype of) boomers going "Fuck them entitled kids." The part of me that's in control, however, is still pushing to fix society in the limited ways I can to hopefully fix things for future generations (I'm in agreement that despite how bad I feel for these kids there's probably no foi for the retard-maxxing for most of them this late in the game).
As far as what those fixes are, they're the same nonsense most of our right-wing denizens have already been harping on here for years (DEI, lowered standards, etc.). So I won't delve into them because I'm sure the other replies have already started that.
I think it's another "every generation feels the next is dumbner for not knowing things" paired with the fact that it's always true and we are probably consistently getting dumber year to year.
Old people made fun of me for knowing nothing about cars or the civil war generals, and now we get to make fun of them for computers.
Even our "dumb college students" stereotypes are getting dumbner. Compare this freshman of philosophy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=57vCBMqnC1Y
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I think focusing on DEI and affirmative action is misleading. This college is talking about a change in the past five years. The US has had affirmative action since the 1970s, the expansion of higher ed started in the 1980s, grade inflation in high school since the 1960s. Some happened between 2020 and 2025 that drastically changed the competence level of the incoming cohort.
It's probably the phones.
These changes were made within the last five years, they were explicitly made to increase minority enrollment, and CA knew that these changes would result in a bunch of unprepared students. Their justification for the change is public (below), and it is solely focused on increasing minority enrollment.
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf
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They dropped the SAT in 2020, after a two year process: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-board-regents-unanimously-approved-changes-standardized-testing
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I’m very grateful that I haven’t grown up with the educational system of the post-millennium compared to what I went through. Relative to what you have today, my K-12 education was preindustrial by comparison. Education was harder in a sense because it’s meant to be. You’re meant to achieve breakthroughs in your understanding as you build upon concepts from the simple to the more advanced. Book reports were still a regular. Cheating was more difficult. You still had calculators but good luck smuggling them into math class. For English literature we had SparkNotes to provide us with synopses for crap like Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which definitely put me to sleep. Can’t a brother read about Alexander the Great slapping people all over the Indian subcontinent?
Education has been very slow to adapt to the changing landscape over the last 20-30 years or so. If I were a teacher in 2025, all tech would be banned in my classroom and everything would be done in pen and paper. Forget homework. Hand out study guides with the expectation of upcoming exams. That’s your pass or fail. Anything that could be construed as a digital or electronic device at your desk is an automatic F. Classroom sizes should be much smaller IMO and unruly little POS should be thrown out of the classroom. I don’t recall where I saw the data on this but I read charter schools are vastly outstripping the performance of the public educational system. Maybe there’s some social/economic bifurcation there were the increase in mediocre performance is kept to one side (e.g. public schools, or urban vs. suburban vs. rural, etc., in more detail). I grew up in suburbia so I can’t comment on what education is like outside of it.
It’s funny one of the last books I read was Human Diversity by Charles Murray. The book contains a lot of width that covers much ground, but one thing he states is that much of the environmental landscape in education is going to be demystified. We know there’s significant interplay between heredity and environment and all is some mix and interplay of the two categories. Men and women for instance are remarkably similar and perform just as well in science and math as men do, but men concentrate more heavily in proportion to that category because of social and cultural factors. Men on the other had have been observed to be slower to develop if not sit below girls in social skills, and that’s actually due to biological factors. It’s the People-Things distinction and boys and girls use different cognitive and psychological tools in how they learn and navigate the world. How the educational system can reconstruct itself around those differences I’m not too sure.
Yes, because of two things:
It already kind of has; we just... don't bother teaching about things any more. Too dangerous, you see.
I don't even know that "ability to afford" is necessarily even financial: around here, charter (public) schools are covered by the state (with funds taken from the local district, which gets some political consternation). There may be some cost/time differences for parents regarding bus transportation, though. I think parents who select non-default education options are likely more invested in educational outcomes than probably even the median, regardless of prices --- which may well also have an impact.
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This is true, but probably not in the sense that you mean it. There may be exceptions in terminology somewhere, but in general charter schools in the United States do not charge tuition. The price you must afford to send your kid to charter school isn't paid in cash, but in the currency of executive function: do you have the foresight to get your kid on an admissions list ASAP (we didn't try until our oldest was moving from a decent-enough elementary school to a weaker selection of middle schools, and so it wasn't until two years later that she got into a charter), and can you reliably shuttle your kid(s) to a more distant school, possibly with a less-standard schedule, without the school bus services that any public school will offer?
You could outdo charter school selection effects in any mid-size public school district by just using an admissions test (most charter schools aren't allowed to use one), but even where this happens it's just hanging on by a thread.
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I know what TM’s general view is on this and the logic that tends to sit behind it and in one sense I’m with them, but we differ in how we interpret the science on this (IQ). I’m quite the strong hereditarian myself but people vastly overemphasize its importance relative to other effect sizes.
They [almost] tend to think IQ has a causal direct link to some kind of meritocracy in the way they think about it. And I don’t like how they treat the matter in reference to other populations, because then everything goes haywire and becomes a shouting match.
Here’s where TM and I agree. Yes to two points:
Success requires mental ability.
Social rewards are often linked to this success.
But here’s where it makes implicit assumptions that are highly contentious. First it assumes people only labor for material gain. Human beings don’t solely labor for extrinsic reward and the corollary of that assumption is to assume that if human beings didn’t, the mass of them would simply sit around and vegetate. If I could make more money working at a call center than I do with my current employer, I still would not partake of that arrangement due to other factors at play. And in fact I’m prepared to abandon my present vocation for a less satisfying and more demanding job because of the way in which it aligns my priorities with family life.
And how to we rank IQ and merit in this sense? Along what axes? Is a call center clerk of less social value than an NBA player or a software engineer? Why do any of these racial or phenotypic distinctions matter except under the assumption that we’d want to live in a racist society. In the current paradigm it has about as much important as height does (which is to say it’s not irrelevant at all, but it isn’t at the forefront of policy decisions in such regard). IQ in this sense is mostly irrelevant for the state of an individual to want to be what he is and pursue what he chooses for himself.
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I'm working on researching elementary schools. We have school choice, which means charters are an option. Maybe n=4 is not enough to be meaningfully significant, but I've noticed that no charter school I've seen talks about individual teachers on their webpage. I would think that they'd be worth advertising - if they're considered to be a cut above.
Am I reading signals wrong? Or do I just need to lurk moar?
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Wait, 15 years? Was there a sea change after the recession, or something?
Anyway. I was putting together a response about supply vs. demand shocks, and how the change in student population really doesn’t have to represent a change in the overall one. Then I read the recommendations section of the actual report.
Guess what year UCSD dropped their SAT/ACT requirements?
If you throw out the single best metric you’ve got to measure math ability, you are going to get more variance. Doesn’t matter if the population got worse or even better, you are giving up your ability to find them. You’ll have to use proxies like (inflated!) grades and made-up clubs. The workgroup was quite unsatisfied with their options.
This is rather frustrating. The SAT and ACT genuinely do have a host of systemic problems thanks to their effective duopoly on standardized testing. Apparently Goodhart’s law wasn’t one of them. But it’s not for lack of trying—you can’t drive a block in my town without hitting a Karen Dillard. Too many suburban strivers racing to the bottom. That whole ecosystem is only going to be boosted by all the dissident rightists looking to score points against DEI. Big win for credentialism.
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I find it unlikely the COVID generation has "banana brains". A low-quality 1 to 2 years of high school shouldn't knock the reasonably intelligent back THAT far. You'd expect some drop but not as bad as they're describing. They also note that "Beginning with the cohort entering in 2021, standardized test scores were no longer used in the admissions process." This is probably the major part of the problem -- note that MIT, which one would expect to be more sensitive to this stuff, was among the quickest to return to standardized testing.
Since I am indeed an HBD believer, I find it unlikely we're creating too many more stupid people; that would take serious miseducation at a much younger age, or more dropping of people on their head. Instead, the UC system is probably sorting more poorly, with too many stupid kids ending up in the better schools and some of the smarter kids probably being displaced elsewhere (e.g. lower down in the UC or Cal State system, or to other schools which did not drop standardized testing).
Assuming we don't get a DEI revival when President AOC takes over in 2028, I think what we'll see is less-efficient hiring for a few years, with more of the stupid having to be sorted out in the employment market rather than by college admissions. Or, if the colleges maintain their own standards (which I find less likely) a greater fail-out rate in college.
Yeah, I doubt covid has anything to do with it frankly. It's almost certainly just the dropping of standardized testing as an admit requirement.
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One angle that isn't discussed here (because I'm not sure it's relevant yet) is that there will soon be fewer college age kids. As the number of young adults decreases, colleges will either realign to enroll less qualified individuals or they will close. For now, that outcome has been staved off with immigration. But the good times will not last forever.
Is there a large population of people who would go to college but were rejected from every college? People in Community College are basically this demographic, right?
So that number seems to be going down. Is it going down because institutions have lowered their requirements? I don't know. I think this is what we'd see if it was, though.
And why can't that continue for many, many years to come? People use hyperbolic talk about recent immigration with terms like "flood," but we, particularly in America, have not seen anything like what an actual flood of immigrants would look like.
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Enrollment should go down purely on account of the fact that we have far too many people enrolled already. There are ‘way’ too many kids in higher education than there should be.
I don’t think the major universities or even community colleges will likely close. Maybe their endowments should change. Some commitments these institutions have put upon themselves may have to be rolled back as a consequence of them perhaps being involved in programs and outreach they shouldn’t be involved in. But I doubt it’ll be a closure similar to what people have worried about, with libraries closing for instance because of the digitalization efforts and also a far smaller population of readers (which is sad).
There is probably a minimum number of kids a college needs to maintain the facilities they have already built. If a college with dorms and lecture halls to support 10,000 students over the course of a few years suddenly only has 5,000 students apply, they are going to have to try to give away property to avoid going bankrupt. And that's ignoring administrative bloat, post docs, etc.
The top 20% of schools would see the same number of students apply and they are selective enough there wont be much change. The next 20% of schools might need to start accepting people they wouldn't normally. The bottom 20% of schools will start to see fewer kids apply, because all the kids they used to get are applying and getting into the second quintile of schools. And so on as demographics collapse.
The alternative is to admit foreigners. But even foreign demographics will collapse eventually.
Already starting to happen -- see Figure 1 near the end. The top quintile will probably do fine, and the larger schools in the next quintile (which is so far unaffected) can probably "build down" by consolidating campuses and programs. Schools lower than that and not part of a system don't have a clear path to survival; it seems inevitable that many of them will not.
I know at least in New York State, community colleges are already in trouble. I don't think any have closed but at least one lost its campus and had to co-locate with the nearby SUNY school.
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Certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa look like they're holding up for now, and if their demographics do eventually collapse, it probably won't be any time this century.
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Bailouts for the education-managerial complex are always highly relevant.
In this case, bailing them out means "the government aids in forcing everyone they can into paying their salaries".
This is the primary driver for credentialism (and more recently, for handing out student visas like candy in countries with semi-private university systems). Legal requirements are a form of [corporate] welfare, it's just that corporation is a union of a large cross-section of society. And yes, it obviously robs the youth of valuable time and money to pay professors and administrators who have no business being there in the first place, just like everything else society does.
I expect other New World countries to nationalize universities as enrollment falls to enshrine the welfare program permanently.
Are there many near-financially-failing public (state/city) schools? I would expect the upper half of the university system to do okay regardless of student applications dropping. The failing schools will be the ones already struggling to put butts in seats, and I'm not sure exactly which those are. A number of small liberal arts schools have already folded. Are there borderline state schools unable to fill classes?
The most high profile example of this that I'm aware of is up in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania State University is not exactly a state school, but it is one of the "big three" schools that are affiliated.
Three years ago they announced a hiring freeze. It's nominally still active at the end of 2025. I know some people who work there who say that their teams have been reduced by more than half simply through attrition.
Earlier this year, they announced that they will be closing seven of their branch campuses. Students who are still attending them will be given financial assistance and priority admission to attend other schools.
The enrollment cliff is real, and it scares the hell out of higher ed administrators.
Sources: Hiring freeze, campus closure
However: This document indicates that each of the seven satellite campuses being closed had fewer than 800 students. The dire situation at those satellite campuses doesn't really reflect the university as a whole, whose main campus enrolls 49,000 students and has not seen its enrollment fall over the past ten years.
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How much of that changed over the 2020-2025 period being examined, though? Race based affirmative action has been banned by California's constitution for almost 30 years. Not to mention the Supreme Court's own decision in 2023. No Child Left Behind, as an educational slogan, goes all the way back Bush's first term.
The report itself gives three contributors to the phenomena:
Learning loss from the pandemic decreasing students' retention and preparedness.
The move away from standardized tests to GPAs making it more difficult for admissions officers to asses student's actual capabilities.
For UCSD specifically, a large increase in admission rates for students from LCFF+ schools, which the report describes as:
A lot changed. UC went SAT optional in 2020, and UC had a big push on LCFF at about the same time. I am just going to quote from the report (link below) subsections on your items 2 & 3:
I think getting rid of the SAT makes admissions particularly tough. If you look at Table 3 in the UCSD report in 2024 the high school math GPA of a UCSD Math 2 admit (Math 2 is middle school math) was 3.65. The high school math GPA for Math 10 (calculus I) is 3.74. Really hard to get a math competence signal from high school math grades.
Nobody at UC cares if affirmative action is banned. They do it regardless, with the explicit purpose of increasing minority enrollment.
"No we aren't doing affirmative action, we just lowered the admission standards from high schools with lots of minorities because of our equity concerns."
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf
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I wonder how much of this has to do with viewing the university as a monolith. I believe this may be a case of increased enrollment in 'underwater basket weaving' majors giving an impression that the rigor for STEM courses has gone down.
UCSD is a lot more reputed in my circles (Bio, CS, Engg). UCSD is known for being the most academically rigorous and nerdy among the tier 1 UCs (UCLA is smart party kids. Berkeley is smart hustlers, UCSD is nerds). By research output, UCSD is the world's 4th best university to study CS, above MIT or Stanford. It is top 10 in the world for bio-tech (Top 5 in the US).
UCSD is an elite school by every metric. Arguably better than most Ivy League schools at every field that will define the future (silicon, tech, biotech). Among international students, it's incredibly competitive to get into. In my university's graduating class, couple of students got into graduate programs there (my school needed at least top 1 percentile national scores to get in) and only the university gold/silver medalists got acceptance letters. Practically all of them had perfect quantitative scores on the GRE.
This contrast confuses me. How can a university become increasingly more selective and lower the bar at the same time ?
I think I found the answer. Certain majors are considered 'selective' and students are not allowed to switch into these majors later during their undergrad. It is no surprise that this covers all majors for which UCSD is considered an 'elite school'.
This model is similar to Europe, where getting into a top school is trivial, but a majority of students are weeded out through rigorous freshmen courses. It gives the impression of egalitarianism, while maintaining the high bar necessary to survive in difficult majors. There seems to be a class system emerging at these universities. The name of the university will mean little unless paired with the major that the student completed.
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Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.
Many college kids can learn a computer game in an evening, order stuff online, backpack on another continent and drive a car through rush hour traffic. Yet they can't do long division which only requires repeating four simple steps. Someone who is mentally incapable of learning 332423/234 after 12 years of math training stands no chance when it comes to being able to buy cinema tickets in an app in five minutes or using a self checkout machine. People claim to be too low Iq to learn the times table yet are capable of memorizing other things.
School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have. Math is one of the toughest subjects to skip chapters in. If you haven't mastered one chapter in the book the next chapter is impossible. Kids develop an identity of being bad at math and society accepts this instead of forcing them to repeat the basics until they have mastered it.
This, in my opinion, is the largest problem facing the modern US public education system: total collapse of standards for the lowest levels (and that level seems to be creeping ever higher over time). The compounding effect of a kid being passed ahead without learning the previous year’s curriculum is ruinous. On top of the direct problems of incapacity, it teaches kids that actually learning things in school doesn’t matter and so there’s no need to try, while also simultaneously teaching the more studious kids that any setback is a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (because if no one ever gets a C on anything then it must be really unforgivably bad). Similar problems with discipline/behavior only compound the issue further.
For example, you may have heard of the “Mississippi miracle”, where Mississippi public schools have gone from rock-bottom for reading skills to top-10 in the country in a very short time (and one of the only states to show improvement at all), and without any significant spending increase. There are two reasons for this, and they’re excruciatingly simple: they changed to a “back to basics” reading-and-writing curriculum focused on core competency at young ages and without assuming the kids were reading or being read to at home; and they made it significantly easier for schools to hold back students who weren’t reading at grade level.
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Holy crap, I just realized I don't know how to do long division anymore.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
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My first inclination was to blame the COVID-era shutdown of schools. It fits the timeframe of the sharp decline well; the great down leveling of schools, although terrible, has been going on for decades and doesn't explain the cliff.
UCSD isn't just finding inability to perform high school math, though; it's had to start teaching remedial classes in middle school and even elementary school level math.
Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math when they started high school; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.
We should have empathy for the kids, though: they've experienced actual harm, as opposed to the imagined abstract harm of disparate impact. Does give me an increased feeling of job security.
My wife and I were discussing something related yesterday: the question of the day was have we become Boomers, those most maligned of people.
Her little sister, a teacher, has made a series of bad decisions, and now wants to embrace a "tradwife" lifestyle. The issue is her boyfriend has no job. He's currently "studying" social media late into the hours of the night (as daytimes are reserved for chilling at the beach) so that he can become an influencer; he has no money and relies on her for housing, transportation, and food. They want to have kids ASAP and travel the world. And they are both in their early 30s.
We are not fans of this. But, are we just yelling at kids like old people now, not understanding all their challenges?
I don't know whether this is new or not, and whether it'd make me feel better or worse if it was new or not. All I know is that the kids are not all right.
You know what surprises me? I don't think I've seen a woodworking video where the woodworker does their own math. I understand mathing fractional inches takes a little bit more effort than decimal cm, but it's all still powers of two. And yet, almost everybody I watch whips out a cell phone, relies on CAD software, or avoids mathing entirely by marking their workpieces against the actual dimensions of the partially completed project.
Apparently that last method is actually the best as compounding errors/imprecision always throw off your calculations. But I feel like my point remains.
Did none of these people ever learn how to do fractions? Even 10-20 years ago when our education system supposedly functioned? I doubt it. I doubt it's just students that are being cognitively mutilated.
If you want to see lots of math and geometry, look at the folks doing (manual) machine shop stuff. Things like "the drawing gives this weird dimension relative to another face over there: I need to include adjustments for tolerance over the separate steps to make all the intermediate features". Lots of concerns about reference faces, accumulating error, cutter geometry, and a fair amount of trigonometry.
Only professional cabinetry woodworkers are going to care about repeatability: for everyone else, a single piece of furniture only needs to fit together by itself, not have interchangable parts.
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Infinity Indians. I'm not even joking.
I wish I could form an opinion on this, but there is simply no good data. Kids today are fucking stupid, sure, that's a data point. Is it because of screens? Is it room temperature IQ third worlders? Is it Asian cheating rings? Indian fake credentials? Decades of teachers being activist forwarding a social agenda instead of teaching the "Three R's"? All of the above? None of the above?
We'll never know, and we'll never fix it in time. The default option is to mass import workers from countries that at least fake teaching more convincingly, so that's the option that will be taken. This study won't contribute to any positive change what so ever, and will instead by another talking point behind the further ethnic cleansing of the nation.
I seriously doubt that the Indians struggling in math courses. Indians struggle at writing and capacity for self-actualization. But, 'math' ? That's like saying the Brazilians struggle at football.
Given the nature of affirmative action, Asians at UCs (Indians or East Asians) are already more qualified than their peer whites or POCs.
What informs your negative perception of Indians ?
That's not what Coil meant - he meant that the "policy outcome" of the existence of "a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds" will be increased immigration from India to fill their slots in the economy.
Ah, that makes more sense. I am a 30 something Indian engineer in the US. So..... guilty as charged.
America's missing STEM kids is an incentive problem. Most STEM grads make average salaries, have a demanding job and are considered uncool. CS was the exception, but CS new grads have been in dire straits since 2023. Why would American kids pursue STEM degrees ?
Contemporary US is a nation of lawyers, salesmen and MBAs. America's smartest grow up admiring one of these 3. Ofc they don't want to be engineers. If they are nerdy and smart, they become doctors instead. More reliable money and higher status.
Even among tech billionaires, there is a reason why many are STEM program drop outs. It says : "Gaining expertise in this difficult subject is meaningless. I must transform into a salesman, make money and then I'll hire all the experts".
In the US, the Senate is about 50% Lawyers and the house is about 33% lawyers. In contrast, the Senate has 1 engineer and the house has 9. Now see China. 13/24 Politburo members are have engineering degrees and only 2/24 are lawyers. Tells you what the culture and people think is prestigious.
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