UNIVERSITIES DON’T TEACH. THEY SORT BY WORK CAPACITY, CONSCIENTIOUSNESS, AND IQ.
You pay 150k in debt, four years of earning, four years of life, one or two fewer children, delayed homeownership, on what’s nothing more than a class, personality, and IQ test. That’s all it is. There is no evidence you learn anything in university unless it’s math, comp-sci, or engineering, that can’t be taught part-time in two years or less. The rest is ‘recreation’ or ‘indoctrination’.
Now, you will find that CEO’s tend to the 130 IQ range for deterministic reasons (I have an undergrad in art history and founded a dozen companies). And the demand for CEO talent varies dramatically by sector. Some are political (GM), some technical, some engineering, some finance.
The difference is that they have 130 plus IQ’s, and have high conscientiousness, and can work harder than most people can imagine it’s possible to work, have extraordinary endurance, high pain tolerance – especially psychological. It’s equivalent to being a professional athlete.
So your argument is well-intentioned but false: one’s chances of becoming a fortune X ceo have nothing at all to do with education. Just as almost everything in life has to do with one’s social and economic market value: determined by fitness, manners, conscientiousness, & IQ.
If you study for example Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and Stanford JD courses it’s postmodern drivel. It’s intellectually embarrassing. If you study at a state school or just read the literature, and apprentice (in the past) you’d do better.
Universities don’t teach. They Sort. That’s all they do.
One response to “Universities Don’t Teach. They Sort by Work Capacity, Conscientiousness, and IQ.”
Great post. And it’s amazing because the sorting is completed at the very BEGINNING of the process, on High School students, by the admissions office, before the four years of expense and indoctrination.
It is not difficult, AT ALL, to get THROUGH the Ivy League, it is only difficult to get in.
Ironically, the Ivy League has been aggressively destroying its credibility on its core sorting function for decades now. The admissions office now cares far more about the ethnicity and politics of admits than about their work capacity, conscientiousness, and IQ.
Two amazing tidbits show how extreme this has gotten. One, roughly 50% of white students at Harvard and Yale are Jewish. For any given set of grades and test scores, the admissions rates for white gentiles are wildly lower than for any other group. (See Unz for the analysis.)
Two, the Ivy League actively discriminates against rural students, who they fear may be (gasp!), from families who vote Republican. Applicants who cite the 4H Club among their high school activities find it almost impossible to gain admission to the Ivy League, regardless of how good their grades and test scores are.
The establishment appears to want things this way. For many “institutions” who prefer loyalty and malleability over competence, the Ivy League’s sorting mechanism is exactly what they want, overt and covert affirmative action included.
But for serious employers who really need the best employees sorted by work capacity, conscientiousness, and IQ, college degrees offer an increasingly useless signal. The employers now subject applicants to tests, trial projects, probationary periods, etc. Because they know that a Harvard degree ain’t what it used to be, not even as a sorting mechanism for high school students.