I still think it will be hard to get credible evidence that someone didn’t attend something like college.
As a parallel: Employers value people who got medals at the IMO. Preparing for the IMO doesn’t teach any useful job skills or cultural fit (though maybe it teaches some conscientiousness). So I’m pretty sure that preference for IMO medalists is mostly explained by intelligence+conscientiousness signaling.
It is more impressive to be an IMO silver medalist if one is from Denmark with very little IMO preparation culture than if someone is from Hungary that has specialized schools and extracurricular math training camps. Even within a country, it is more impressive if someone got an IMO silver from a random small-town high school than if they attended the best specialized school in the country. And it’s more impressive if someone didn’t attend the extracurricular math camps than if they did.
But I never heard of any employer screening for any of this. I assume some employers have some heuristic that getting a silver from Africa is more impressive, but I don’t think it’s more fine-grained than that. I never heard of anyone mentioning the Denmark vs Hungary heuristic, or to give extra scores for coming from a small town. I think it’s pretty hard to have legible metrics for all these disadvantages, so HR just doesn’t take them into account.
And I definitely never heard of any student following the galaxy-brained plan of intentionally not enrolling in the best high school, not attending any of the math camps and after-class seminars, meticulously document all of this, and then presenting evidence to future employers that they got an IMO silver while intentionally handicapping their own study.
I expect that your scheme of students demonstrating that they passed the test without doing something like college fails for the same reason—it’s hard to legibly demonstrate that one didn’t do something like college or other structured prepping.
The one credible signal I see is age: if someone passes the big final exam at 19, while everyone else only at 22, that’s legibly more impressive. (Indeed, in the parallel, getting an IMO silver in 10th grade is more prestigious than getting one in 12th grade.)
I think there could be some economic value in setting up the possibility of doing the college final exams at a younger age, but I think the result would be pretty dystopian cram schools during childhood. My guess is that in the West not very many people would take the opportunity to take the test early and then start working at 19, it doesn’t sound very appealing.
I wonder though why it’s not more common in East Asia to just immediately hire people at 18; I don’t know how much additional signal college provides once people demonstrated they can sit through years of cram school and get a high score on their admission exam. But I know very little about East Asia.
I still think it will be hard to get credible evidence that someone didn’t attend something like college.
As a parallel: Employers value people who got medals at the IMO. Preparing for the IMO doesn’t teach any useful job skills or cultural fit (though maybe it teaches some conscientiousness). So I’m pretty sure that preference for IMO medalists is mostly explained by intelligence+conscientiousness signaling.
It is more impressive to be an IMO silver medalist if one is from Denmark with very little IMO preparation culture than if someone is from Hungary that has specialized schools and extracurricular math training camps. Even within a country, it is more impressive if someone got an IMO silver from a random small-town high school than if they attended the best specialized school in the country. And it’s more impressive if someone didn’t attend the extracurricular math camps than if they did.
But I never heard of any employer screening for any of this. I assume some employers have some heuristic that getting a silver from Africa is more impressive, but I don’t think it’s more fine-grained than that. I never heard of anyone mentioning the Denmark vs Hungary heuristic, or to give extra scores for coming from a small town. I think it’s pretty hard to have legible metrics for all these disadvantages, so HR just doesn’t take them into account.
And I definitely never heard of any student following the galaxy-brained plan of intentionally not enrolling in the best high school, not attending any of the math camps and after-class seminars, meticulously document all of this, and then presenting evidence to future employers that they got an IMO silver while intentionally handicapping their own study.
I expect that your scheme of students demonstrating that they passed the test without doing something like college fails for the same reason—it’s hard to legibly demonstrate that one didn’t do something like college or other structured prepping.
The one credible signal I see is age: if someone passes the big final exam at 19, while everyone else only at 22, that’s legibly more impressive. (Indeed, in the parallel, getting an IMO silver in 10th grade is more prestigious than getting one in 12th grade.)
I think there could be some economic value in setting up the possibility of doing the college final exams at a younger age, but I think the result would be pretty dystopian cram schools during childhood. My guess is that in the West not very many people would take the opportunity to take the test early and then start working at 19, it doesn’t sound very appealing.
I wonder though why it’s not more common in East Asia to just immediately hire people at 18; I don’t know how much additional signal college provides once people demonstrated they can sit through years of cram school and get a high score on their admission exam. But I know very little about East Asia.