Asian immigration and the signalling model of education, at Aporia. It's almost a year old now - I don't know how I missed it.
"Arcotherium" is a particularly interesting writer at Aporia. He combines knowledge known to the education skeptics and heritability-focused but little-known (or disbelieved) by even the educated general public, and additional surprises not generally known to the skeptic/heritablist group either. I read along with the frequent thought That isn't what I would have thought, but it sounds quite possible. Hmm. This article is longer than most substacks, but my interest did not flag. He includes homework hours, SAT and SAT-prep, performance in both home country and in US, and IQ. There is a lot here. Key to the understanding is that parenting that is beneficial for the educational success of the individual is collectively bad for the society, as it destroys the signal that education is supposed to provide.
Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits.
Asian success in education is partly (1) but more of (2).
He summarises his argument:
1. Education is mostly signaling, so increasing competition among students and investment in education is collectively wasteful, while individually rational.
2. Asian immigrants, through a combination of grinding and cheating, Goodhart this signal for cultural reasons, thereby attaining more education than expected from their abilities.
3. Given (1) and (2), Asian immigration to the US makes life for aspiring upper-middle class children and their parents significantly worse—by worsening the college admissions grind that has come to dominate childhood.
Note: I did not read the comments there. They often have some good ones, so I intend to get back to that. I am still overwhelmed from too much input last week, so not today.
1 comment:
A Helen Andrews post on X and a NYT article on SAT cheating seem to have inspired Steve Sailer to write a similar article about changes to college admission criteria that might produce more equitable results than the combination of SAT/ACT scores and high school GPA that predominated until about 2010.
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