After complaining about 1 percenter articles in the New York Times, I’m going to write a 1 percenter, — well, maybe a ten percenter — parenting blog post.
David Brooks’s column is an open letter to businesses about the types of people that they should hire. An excerpt:
Bias hiring decisions against perfectionists. If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated job applicants, you’ve probably been flooded with résumés from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success. They got 3.8 grade-point averages in high school and college. They served in the cliché leadership positions on campus. They got all the perfect consultant/investment bank internships. During off-hours they distributed bed nets in Zambia and dug wells in Peru.
When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there’s something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity. Either they have no desire to chart out an original life course or lack the courage to do so. Shy away from such people.
He goes on to tell them to avoid hiring people who have high GPAs, who have followed traditional paths to success, and who have predictable cover letters. Basically, his post is a rant against the products of middle-class or upper middle class schools and families. Our schools are pumping out boring, predictable, over-scheduled robots. And we should stop rewarding the system that produces them.
Sudden flashback to the video of the meat grinder image in the Pink Floyd video.
It’s funny that this note of rebellion is coming from oldies, and not from the kids. Maybe they are too tired and stressed out to protest.
Tangential rant against the conformity of teenage girls’ hair. Why do they all have long straight hair in a pony tail? What happened to other hair styles?
Apt. 11d 
Brooks is just trying to lull everybody else into complacency so that his grandkids can get better jobs.
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Ah yes, my thought exactly. Really, who is going to hire the person with the lower GPA, unless they have something else to offer? The premise here is that having a high GPA is a sign that you aren’t also awesome, and the fact, is that those high achiever kids he thinks are social conformists (because, I presume, he thinks they would have lower GPAs if they weren’t conforming in every way) are actually kids who manage the perfect GPA along with being amazing in other ways.
As evidence, I cite the Harvard Med School Spleen video:
These are Harvard med students, who are, by many definitions, the definition of academic conformity. But, they can do this, too. That’s true of the people I know who went to Harvard med, too. They got perfect GPAs, volunteered in hospitals, did independent research, and worked in their parents convenience store, learned English, spoke another language fluently, . . . . and they were interesting people who had interesting minds.
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Funny!
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Having chatted with some people who’ve talked about their hiring decisions, in very general terms, I have to say David Brooks is way off.
In my acquaintances’ experience, it isn’t a question of being biased to the “perfect cookie cutter person.” It’s the difficulty finding basic competence at basic tasks, such as middle school math. For lawyers, finding young lawyers who can write is apparently difficult.
I do wonder these days, when visiting colleges. Some will brag about the share of each graduating class attending grad school. Some will brag about the grads “working for industry.” It’s two sides of a coin.
I think employers are more likely to hire students who have worked during high school or college. Whatever David Brooks thinks, the lack-of-experience-barrier is hard to overcome. It’s more likely a new graduate will get a job through the good opinion of her summer boss at Anthropologie, than through the 3.8 in Anthropology.
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” It’s the difficulty finding basic competence at basic tasks, such as middle school math. For lawyers, finding young lawyers who can write is apparently difficult.”
So much this – I have had ivy league grads hand me things with the numbers off by an order of magnitude. They look at me blankly when I hand it back and say go check the numbers. What is wrong must be explained in excruciating detail.
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In my acquaintances’ experience, it isn’t a question of being biased to the “perfect cookie cutter person.” It’s the difficulty finding basic competence at basic tasks, such as middle school math.
Tell them to raise salaries, and they’ll find skilled workers. Successful companies do not have trouble doing so. Oh, they’d rather pay less and still attract top notch talent? Not a public policy problem.
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The salaries are not low. The applicants are educated. The jobs are desireable, entry-level jobs in white-collar companies, some quite large.
The applicants had graduated from well-regarded colleges. They were the “top notch talent.”
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Sorry, I’m not buying it, outside of a few very specific sectors. It’s basic microeconomics that I teach every year. If there were severe skills shortages, wages should increase. They are not, and have not been for an exceedingly long time. The labor market data simply are wildly at odds with the idea that there are severe skills shortages, and I trust the data vastly more than I do shopworn, cliche criticisms that have been made for the past few millennia.
The employers have no more of a cause for complaint than I do for not being able to buy a Lamborghini. The Lamborghinis of employees are in fact out there. And if you want one, pay up.
As a professor at Wharton (that hotbed of lefty worker agitation) put it:
“A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages,” Cappelli noted in The Wall Street Journal. In his book he adds, “When I hear stories about the difficulty in finding applicants, I always ask employers if they have tried raising wages, which in many cases have not gone up in years. The response is virtually always that they believe their wages are high enough.”
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0113/feature2_1.html
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I agree whole-heartedly that the first thing that an employer should be trying when they can’t find the employees who can do the job is to raise wages. Then, they could also offer to train employees, so that they had the employees they wanted.
Instead, what they want is an labor force that comes pre-trained (and thus, has to take its own risks on the type of training that an employer might want) but then want an employee available immediately when they need them, and not before, or after.
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They’ll find them eventually. There’s no need to raise wages [i]when the supply of underemployed college graduates is at an all-time high.[/i] It takes longer, but there are people to be hired.
The authors said this trend of higher unemployment for new graduates began with the 2001 recession, improved when the economy recovered, and deteriorated again during the most recent economic downturn.
Problems facing new graduates are compounded because more students graduate with massive amounts of debt due to spiraling costs for higher education. About 70 percent of U.S. students who graduated in 2012 had student loan debt, with the average borrower owing $29,400, up from $26,000 the previous year.
The underemployment rate for recent graduates is also higher than in the previous two decades. That rate was 34 percent in 2001. By 2012, it had risen to 44 percent. Because of the scarcity of jobs, recent graduates have tended to take low-paying jobs or jobs that don’t require a college degree such as positions as bartenders or retail clerks.http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/06/usa-studentloans-jobs-idUSL2N0KG1SW20140106
There is an interesting correlation with such works as _Academically Adrift_.
Of course, it is possible that the “underemployed” bartender or construction worker is making more money at a blue-collar job, than in an entry-level white collar job at a bank, brokerage house, or law office. That’s a different conversation.
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It’s not a different conversation. I can assure you that anybody who works as a bartender or a construction worker while out-earning what an entry-level white collar worker earns is very able to handle lots of math and quickly.
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To MH: but would he prefer to be working in an office, if only the pay were higher?
There is the upper middle class inclination to regard office work as superior; given a choice of two options, bartending or paper-pushing, one chooses paper-pushing.
I don’t think 44 percent of recent college graduates are refusing to take entry-level jobs due to the pay. There do seem to be a fair number of college students who plan a career in nonprofit management, but I don’t think that wages in nonprofits will ever be competitive with accounting. (And a bias could be introduced there by the supply of friends student reporters have to hand. They may know more Zambian bed-net distributing students than proto-Wall Street types.)
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You’d mentioned bank tellers, which pays less than most non-profit positions I’ve heard of. Both pay less than bartending or waiting tables at a nice place. I agree that some people want the prestige of an office job, but I think that’s because it used to be you’d only spent a couple of years at a low wage before being promoted up. That isn’t happening as often.
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MH, I wasn’t thinking of tellers. There are other jobs at banks.
The piece is typical David Brooks, which seem to me to be often amalgams of cocktail party vignettes. It’s college admissions results season right now, about to segue into graduation season, so I suppose the NYT oped party circuit is full of mothers worrying about their children’s college admissions/job prospects. The “cookie cutter kids” are thus the rivals whose parents are hanging out at other, no doubt more prestigious, cocktail parties.
The sad part of the whole essay, though, is that I do wonder if it is true? And is the GPA a screen for competence at writing? How inflated are grading scales at the colleges attended by the children of Brooks’ cocktail party friends? (Think of the A- essay written by the UNC football player. Lots and lots of UMC children aim to be recruited athletes, which is *totally crazy*, but beside the point at present.)
Or (more likely), this is the equivalent of the Perfect College Applicant in high school parent lore, the valedictorian who takes on all the campus leadership positions, has oodles of community service, and is much less interesting than (insert rival child’s name here.) It’s Perfect High School Student Act II: College Graduate and Starter Job Edition. Soon to be followed by Perfect Young Couple, First in Their Group of Friends to Marry, Find a Condo Perfectly Postitioned Between Both Sets of Parents and Both Jobs, and First to Produce Grandchild.
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Not really. The problem is the sorting. Lots of companies with people beating down the doors for every job opening they have can’t tell who is a great candidate and who is terrible. Remember the conversation about Google hiring (they found all the measures were largely useless for picking good hires). And Google has not shortage of willing would-be employees.
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On a short note, UMC parents are *not* trying to get their kids basketball or football scholarships at top D1 schools. Squash scholarships at Yale, yes, but that is a completely different ballpark. College sports as a funnel for professional leagues has it’s own problems, but that is actually a completely separate issue from UMC parent concerns.
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No scholarships at Yale, so it’s squash (and lacrosse, and golf, and sailing) as a hook to get into Yale and its ilk.
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Bj, the Ivy League recruits athletes. They have arguably more pull than the “Scholarship Schools,” because any financial aid is not tied to athletic performance. In the “Scholarship Schools,” the scholarships are one year scholarships. If the coach doesn’t like your performance, your scholarship is not renewed. The coach has no such power in the Ivy League.
Athletics is always a hook. Especially at the Ivy Leagues. I recommend “Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values,” by Bowen and Levin, for more details.
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Right, I was being sloppy. Some UMC parents are trying to get their kids into elite schools through athletic slotting. The point still stands though, that they’re not trying to get their kids into the NFL or NBA via college sports. Slotting has problems, I would argue even more so with legacy students, but athletes at Ivies or other UMC parents’ dreams don’t get shortchanged on their education the way athletes at top D1 schools do.
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I have to admit my first thought was that it’s now not enough to be competent and have a strong work ethic but you have to have had a totally interesting life as well?
Reading the post, I actually agree with a lot of it in terms of recognizing the value of people who have varied experiences and bring that to work, sure.
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Seriously though. 3.8 GPA as the avatar of perfect success? He must be remembering back before grade inflation.
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Friends don’t let friends read David Brooks. (But I repeat myself.)
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I think creative flexible thinking is difficult to come by, and that it is not at all incompatible with excellence in the required endeavors. I think Brooks’ is committing a serious mistake if he imagines that not doing well, say, in a math class, is a sign of creativity, usually.
I do worry ( a NY times article, talking about the automation of tasks that used to require people, like searching for information about a topic) that the cognitive skills required in the future for the “good” jobs (i.e. once that cannot be done more efficiently by computers/robots) are going to be more challenging and that fewer people are going to be able to do them, and that education might not be a panacea. We’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that economically.
I dont’ think we’ve reached that stage yet, though.
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I know what you mean about the straight hair in pony tales. I believe that hair was actually more individual in the 80’s/90’s for a while. I base the position on pictures of my HS graduating class, of which I’ve at least glanced at about a 100 years of photos. 100 years ago, there are too few students, and they are of such little diversity that it’s difficult to say anything about their hair. But, 50 years ago or so, people started to look the same even when they weren’t all the same ethnicity (at least, say within whites, like there were irish, italian, and swedish whites). This lasted through the mid 70’s or so, and then hair started to actually be different. There would be girls with short hair, with the dorothy hamill hair cut, with long hair, big hair, curly hair, straight hair. Now, I feel like hair has reverted, to a single style.
I think I blame better technology — that hair diversity increased when racial/ethnic diversity increased because people *couldn’t* have the same hair. But now, practically everyone can treat/iron their hair into the same long straight style.
My daughter has decided that straight hair is an ideological issue and refuses to straighten her hair (which can be straightened, but is naturally wavy and looks like hair from a L’Oreal commercial)
(And, My favorite hair is the curly, irish, redhead, Laura, and I think it’s simply a sin when that hair gets transformed into the cookie-cutter straight pony tale).
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I believe that hair was actually more individual in the 80′s/90′s for a while.
In the 80s, it was acceptable to just cut your hair and/or clothes w/ a pair of garden sheers. It’s hard to get too much similarity when you’re doing that. I’ll admit that I miss it, in a way. (When my wife tells me to stop wearing rags, I tell her that’s an 80’s nostalgia look.)
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I haven’t consulted any photographs, but my recollections are of perms, curling irons, and huge, carefully maintained bangs. Oh, and my classmates were religious about visiting the tanning bed–I suppose they’re probably paying the price for that now.
I kind of miss having wavy permed hair, but it’s nice that my hair doesn’t crunch anymore (the chemical damage from all of that was TERRIBLE).
I suspect that girls’ sports is probably the major cause of the pony tail plague.
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Oh, and huge planet-killing clouds of hair spray in the girls’ locker room.
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Isn’t this just the one percent calling the two through ten percent boring? It’s what they’ve always thought about us.
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Two attempts to reply to B.I. were lost.
To be short, UMC parents aim for recruitment. My children know athletes committed to Big Name colleges as sophomores. They will attend those colleges, barring serious injury or test scores below the level acceptable for athletes–determined by the college’s Academic Index. Our family knows kids recruited for: Field Hockey, Fencing, Golf, Lacrosse, Cross Country, as well as Basketball and Football.
These students attend recruiting summer camps. Search for lacrosserecruits (dot) com. That’s just one list of camps for one sport.
It’s not money. It’s bragging rights, and setting the child on the path to being a wealthy executive who played varsity sports in college and joined a fraternity.
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Right, I agree with you, but my point was this has nothing to do with the N Carolina essay. Playing lacrosse at Davidson isn’t the same as playing football at Michigan State. The pressure to pass barely literate athletes is an issue at schools where sports are semi-professional. These are not the schools and sports that UMC parents are aiming for. When a football player doesn’t get drafted, he has few employable skills. He doesn’t become a hedge fund manager.
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True, however, I think you overestimate the access to the curriculum available to athletes, even in non-helmet sports. I do know an UMC family whose son is playing D1 football. The schedule is brutal. I also know an UMC family whose son passed up D1 fencing, due to the time commitment.
My children are firmly non-athletic, but I have begun asking tour guides about the division between athletes and non-athletes on college campuses. I began after a friend’s daughter transferred from her small liberal arts college. One of her reasons for transferring was the athletes’ isolation from the rest of the student body. (She was an athlete.) When you ask “real” tour guides, i.e., not semi-pro admissions shills, you hear interesting things.
One campus had two gyms–one for the athletes, one for everyone else. (At which point, I started thinking of the gym for everyone else as the “true” campus gym.) Other colleges have special housing for athletes. My friend’s daughter claimed the other students didn’t sit with the athletes at meals–although I don’t know if that meant there were dining halls or sections just for athletes, or if the students self-segregated into interest groups during meals.
Brooks spoke of the “perfect” candidate with 3.8 GPA. My concern was, how demanding is it, in certain courses of study, to get a 3.8? Stanford athletes supposedly had a list of “easy classes:” http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/.
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