The Signaling Model of Education and Asian Immigration
The Elephant in the Room of the College Admissions Grind
The College Admissions Grind
There’s a small cottage industry of articles, blog posts, and essays pointing out how much more difficult, time-intensive, and grindy upper-middle class American childhoods have become in the 21st century [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. All of these identify the same cause: elite university admissions have become far more competitive even as returns to education have risen leading to far more intensive helicopter parenting to stop kids from falling behind in the increasingly important education-status race. It’s not just money. The social decay afflicting America since the 1960s is far worse among the non-college-educated (see: Coming Apart), and so avoiding downwards mobility is much more important than it once was.
This has gotten so intense that it even continues into university, turning what was once the start of independent adult life into a further extension of childhood. The effects of this are widely lamented; the pressures of Ivy League admissions are said to be crushing kids into status-obsessed zombies. The effort this requires from parents is even blamed for falling birth rates1. And even setting aside the broader societal implications and long-term effects on people, isn’t making kids unnecessarily miserable for 13 years of their lives bad enough in and of itself?
One reply might be that this is worth it. Feeding 30% of kids into the college admissions meatgrinder might be bad, but stagnation and miserable poverty are the default state of humanity and avoiding that is worth the cost. If it takes heroic efforts on the part of 12-year-olds to develop the skills needed to keep technological civilization running, then that’s a sacrifice that must be made. But is that really what’s going on?
The Signaling Model of Education
The signaling model of education is that the labor market returns of education2 are primarily signaling, not human capital (education causally makes students more productive) or selection (highly educated people are paid more because they are more productive, but this has nothing to do with education per se). That is, about 80% of the education premium is because more education shows you have traits that make you more productive than your peers, not anything you actually learn in school.
There are a few big lines of evidence for this. First, massive sheepskin effects. A graduation year (high school or college) is worth 6-7 times more on the labor market than a non-graduation year, and graduates (both high school and college) earn significantly more than otherwise identical non-graduates (this is not just selection; it applies to identical twins). If labor market returns to schooling were mostly about human capital, it’s hard to explain why graduation years should be worth so much more than any other year.
Second, when tested, most students retain very little of the specific skills or knowledge they learn in school (and if asked, they will tell you this). Unschooled kids, who receive no formal instruction at all, score only a grade level behind their schooled peers on standardized tests. If students don’t learn much in school, then it’s hard to see how it can significantly improve their labor market skills.
Third, the skills and knowledge students learn in school tend not to be related to whatever jobs they do afterwards. This is often used to attack the humanities3—knowing what years WWII occurred in or the proper structure of a sonnet is irrelevant to essentially all jobs—but it applies to STEM subjects too. Only an infinitesimal fraction of people will need to factor cubic equations or understand the water cycle in their professional lives.
Fourth, countries occasionally do education reforms wherein the curriculum is increased or decreased by a year. Since it applies to all students equally, this has no effect on the earnings of students. This is compatible with both signaling and selection explanations, but not with human capital.
Fifth, credential inflation. As education expands, the same jobs, requiring the same skills, tend to increase their required credentials. Jobs that used to have no education requirements require high school graduation, jobs that require high school graduation require college, jobs that require college require postgrad, and jobs also begin adding subject-specific credential requirements. People have been pointing this out since the 1970s!
Sixth, international comparisons. Conditional on highly-g-loaded test scores, additional years of education do not predict economic growth. Conditional on years of education, higher g-loaded-test-scores do predict economic growth. This strongly suggests national intelligence, and not education, is primarily responsible for the widely-acknowledged link between international educational attainment and development.
Likewise, much of sub-Saharan Africa has a more comprehensive schooling system than would be expected from its poverty and weak states because of foreign aid; this has not led to economic development (though it does tank fertility, so maybe still worth it given how important natural resources and arable land are in sub-Saharan Africa).
A more comprehensive case for the signaling model of education is laid out in Bryan Caplan’s book, The Case Against Education.4
Implications
Education is very expensive in both dollars and time (it takes 17 years of education of a typical American’s life, from kindergarten to college graduation, to have a decent shot at middle-class status), and on top of that appears to causally reduce fertility (by delaying both pairing and childbearing) and increase divorce risk5 (in parents).
The chief implication of the signaling model of education is that investing in education is individually rational, but collectively destructive. You, personally, can greatly increase lifetime earnings by getting more education than your peers. If everyone follows the individual incentives, the signal degrades and to stand out you need more education. There’s no upper limit; the amount of education required can keep increasing to consume ever more money and time. This is analogous to an arms race (if you prefer evolutionary biology to international relations, a Red Queen’s Race); more investment in education makes everyone worse off6.
In the long term, the only beneficiaries of expanding education are those within the education apparatus itself.
In the modern7 context, this implies that the “cultures that value education” beloved by conservatives are actually bad. Here’s Thomas Sowell:
Lebanese immigrants to various countries have, in their early stages, included many who were illiterate and few who were highly educated. Nevertheless, they—like the Chinese, the Jews, the Armenians, and others—came from a culture that valued education, even when most of them had very little education themselves. Nor was education the key to their initial rise. Typically it was after becoming established economically as entrepreneurs that middleman minorities could then afford to dispense with their children’s labor in order to let them go to school instead and, still later, pay for them to continue on into higher education.
The signaling hypothesis of education suggests that by prioritizing education and investing heavily in it, these groups make life worse for everyone else. This (in addition to envy and sour grapes) is why “strivers” and “grinds” are often hated. This review of a biography of Admiral Hyman Rickover explains the dynamic well:
Class standing is extremely important at the Naval Academy. It determines relative seniority in the Navy at graduation and the order in which one "makes his number" for future promotions as vacancies occur; both pay and seniority are involved. Class standings are also important to selection boards for war colleges and other competitive assignments throughout a career. If a midshipman reaches the top of his class through sheer brilliance—or perhaps favored by several years of university experience before entering—he is not ordinarily resented, but the grind who sacrifices athletics, girls, and other normal leisure pursuits to devote all his energy to academics is resented as a cutthroat who gains numbers in class standing—and future seniority in the Navy—by unfair competition, hence by cutting the throats of his classmates. Both "perforated page" incidents related to cutthroats; both were number 1 or 2 men in their class; both were selfish, abrasive personalities; and both happened to be Jewish.
Goodhart’s Law
Goodhart’s Law states:
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 (Goodharting). Educational attainment (in years, in graduation rates, in college prestige) has been a target for a very long time, so it’s not surprising that it’s been aggressively gamed. From a student’s perspective8, optimizing for signaling education rather than learning looks like:
Cheating. Whether that be copying homework, using LLMs to write essays, plagiarism, paying College Board employees for early access to the SAT, or even paying people to take tests in your place (this is common practice in India).
Taking standardized tests again and again to grind out a few extra points with superscoring and chance. The same applies to intensive test prep such as memorizing thousands of vocabulary words or learning various tricks you can use on the SAT or ACT to move faster (without any difference in knowledge or ability). Test prep, on average, doesn’t do much… but that average includes dozens of people for whom prep means a few hours of instruction for every person like my friend in high school who took 60 practice SATs during junior year.
Memorizing everything needed right before the test, then forgetting it all immediately afterwards.
Sacrificing an extra-scholastic life to study harder, except where the studying is directly related to retained real-life skills (which, given the signaling model of education, it almost never is).
Many, many things related to extracurriculars in the college admissions process. It’s not gaming the system to start a real business as a high schooler, but it is to start a fake one to look good on your college application. It’s not Goodharting to join clubs, but it is to join them to get into Harvard. Rinse and repeat with sports, music, charity work, and so on. Another of my classmates in high school boasted about entering impressive-sounding but low-competition science fairs to easily win to pad his application.
With the exception of cheating, none of these are immoral. Students didn’t create the system they operate within, and kids are told from a young age to do well in school by essentially every authority figure (and they are right to listen). But nevertheless, all of these practices reduce the prospects of peers who don’t engage in them and as they become widespread, make everyone’s lives, including those of those using them, worse.
Asian Grinds?
If you’ve ever spent time tutoring or attending a college admissions prep course, gone to a test-score selective institution like Stuyvesant High School in New York or the Center for Talented Youth (CTY) summer camp, or done STEM at a selective college, you might notice a glaring omission in all of the articles linked in the introduction9. Not one of them mentions Asian10 immigration, except in the context of them being harmed by affirmative action at elite colleges.
Stereotypes suggest that Asian immigrants put much more effort into Goodharting education (and other zero-sum status signals) than other groups in the United States. Don’t take my word for it; Yale Law professor Amy Chua wrote an entire book11 about how she, like many Chinese immigrants, aggressively (some might say abusively) parented her daughters to status-maximize.
As is usually the case in the social sciences, stereotypes are backed up by data. Asian-Americans, as a group (though not every subgroup), have a small but consistent intelligence advantage over their white peers, but this does not explain their enormously superior academic achievement. What does explain it? Academic effort. This might seem laudable, but investing more in a negative-sum signaling contest is a collective vice, not a virtue.
Everyone loses from Asians putting more effort into academics. It’s easy to see how white kids shut out of opportunities by lower GPAs (that are totally unrelated to the opportunities at hand) are hurt, but in turn Asian kids feel worse about themselves, spend less time with friends, and are not as close with their parents as their white peers.
Of the portion of the academic gap explicable by easily-measurable socio-cultural factors (about ⅓), 69-80% is explained directly by immigration status. This grind culture is found in first- and second-generation immigrants, and I would expect it to dissipate by the third generation (sample sizes are too small to check, but Jews had a similar reputation in mid-20th century America and don’t any more). Pro-immigration conservatives often use this focus on education status-signaling as evidence of immigrant moral superiority, but in fact it is destructive and wasteful.
International Evidence
As you’d expect from persistence of traits, these US observations on the Asian obsession with educational attainment match the international evidence. Korean private tutoring schools, or hagwons, are infamous. Approximately 78% of Koreans between first and twelfth grade attended a hagwon in 2022, as did 83% of five-year-olds in 2017, and about 95% of Koreans do at some point in their student lives. The average hagwon student attends 7.2 hours a week, in addition to regular studies and homework, and as a consequence the average South Korean student works 13 hours a day. South Korea spends three times the OECD average on private schooling as a percentage of GDP, the highest in the world. These thousands of hours of studying over more than a decade are all to get high scores on the CSAT, the standardized test that determines most college admissions in South Korea. Government regulations and crackdowns to try to stop South Korean parents from spending such massive amounts of money and their own and their kid’s time on wasteful zero-sum signaling has thus far failed.
South Korea is the most extreme case, but isn’t alone. About 73% of junior high schoolers in Taiwan attend some form of cram school, for an average of 6.24 hours per week. About 70% of Singaporean students do the same. China is much poorer than South Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore, and hence has far fewer resources to spend on costly signaling like education and statistics are harder to come by, but the Chinese education industry grew at 11.3% per year between 2019 and 2023. This provoked a massive government crackdown in 2023-24 that banned offering classes in English, Chinese, or mathematics for profit. As with South Korea, demand is so high that the ban led to an explosion in underground quasi-legal tutoring, also because China12 relies primarily on standardized tests for college admissions.
In terms of wasted child-years, legitimate grinding is almost certainly worse, but outright cheating should be seen as the tip of the iceberg of gaming the education system. If students will put in the effort and take the risk to cheat, they should be expected to avail themselves of more legitimate options for Goodharting too. China and India are both infamous for rampant cheating to the point that there have been riots by students in both countries when students were prevented from cheating by investigators (and China now threatens students with jail time for cheating). International Asian SAT takers are also notorious for cheating1314, with common methods including impersonation15, purchasing tests from insiders at College Board, buying questions and answers from test takers in other time zones, and smuggling in information such as vocabulary lists. Persistence of traits would suggest that this doesn’t stop after entering the US, and indeed anecdotes (hard statistics are not available for this sort of question) from teachers suggest recent Asian immigrants are dramatically overrepresented in cheating rings16.
SAT
Some would-be education reformers, trying to fight both massive affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics and the rise of structured extracurricular activities sucking up ever more of children’s time, have proposed relying exclusively on standardized test scores for college admissions. Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China, and India do rely much more heavily on test scores, and the result is that the focus of grinding and cheating shifts to the tests rather than extracurriculars (and increasing in intensity and quantity, the reverse of what reformers want). It’s not that standardized tests are impossible to game17, it’s that the effort isn’t usually worth it in the US because the rewards are too low. But this has already started to change, with Asian test prep practices becoming increasingly common in the US (sometimes overseas extensions of existing companies in Asia).
If you follow SAT scores, you’ve probably seen this chart before. The SAT score gaps between every major race (American Indians have small samples) in the United States have been roughly constant since the late 1970s, with all trending up and down together in line with test changes, external factors such as the COVID lockdown, the rise of the test prep industry, and other things that might affect scores. With one glaring exception: Asian-Americans, who have gone from testing approximately equal to whites to breaking away from the pack like Secretariat at Belmont, to the point that they are now about 100 points ahead of whites on average.
By itself, a 100 point gap on the SAT wouldn’t be shocking. 100 SAT points corresponds to 5.24 IQ points assuming a standard deviation of 229 and an IQ-SAT correlation of 0.8, and in high-quality samples the white-Asian IQ gap in the United States is 2-5 points depending on the measure. But the SAT has a fairly low ceiling, and as such the Asian score distribution is truncated and not normally distributed.
If you move backwards from SAT scores to IQ scores, this would correspond to a 10 point IQ gap between Asians and whites in the US, a full 5-8 points larger than direct measurements show. The result is that Asians absolutely dominate the upper reaches of the SAT. A full 25% (!) of Asians in Michigan (which forces all high schoolers to take the SAT and hence is more representative than other states) scored between 1400 and 1600 vs 4% of white students and test takers as a whole.
This is not a criticism of the SAT. The SAT is not intended to measure intelligence, it’s intended to measure college readiness, and Asians get just as good grades in college as you would expect based on their SAT scores. That’s because the same traits, mindsets, and practices (a mix of ability, genuine learning, and Goodharting via grinding or cheating) that allow students to do well on the SAT also work to get high college GPAs. With that said, I suspect that the reason for the changing pattern over time is that the changes to the SAT designed to reduce the gaps between men and women and whites and blacks have inadvertently made the test more gameable and preppable, and Asian test-preppers have figured out how to exploit that.
Proponents of standardized-testing maximalism defend them against the charge that they are structurally racist thanks to test prep by pointing out that test prep gains are small and test prep isn’t actually that common. But there’s one exception.
When measured, East Asians are much more likely to take test-prep courses than other groups, and gain much more from them (they’re not broken out here, but I bet Indians would be intermediate between East Asians and the rest, and the signal is getting swamped by other Asians). But this is only for explicit test prep courses (and doesn’t take into account superscoring). The SAT tests specific skills learned in school (you will have a much easier time on certain problems if you remember things like kinematic equations), not just innate ability, and hence more general academic grinding will also help with SAT scores.
This suggests that high-scoring Asian students are not, on average, as capable as you’d expect them to be compared to their peers of other races18. And anecdotes bear this out. From the pseudonymous teacher and test tutor known as Education Realist:
I’ve known a lot of high scoring students of every ethnicity over the years–and by high scoring, I mean 1400-1600 on the 1600 SAT, and 2200-2400 on the 10 years with the three tests. 5s on all AP tests, 700+ on all Subject tests. Until that conversation, I would have said kids that had high test scores were without exception tremendously impressive kids: usually creative, solid to great writing, opinionated, spotted patterns, knew history, knew the underlying theory of anything that interested them. I could see the difference, I’d say, between these kids and those slightly lower on the score scale–the 1200s, the kids who were well rounded with solid skills who were sometimes as impressive, sometimes not, sometimes a swot, sometimes a bright kid who didn’t see much point in striving. (…)
Since that first real awareness, I’ve met other kids with top 1% test scores who are similarly…unimpressive. 98+ percentile SAT scores, eight 5 AP scores, and a 4.5 GPA with no intellectual depth, no ability to make connections, or even to use their knowledge to do anything but pick the correct letter on the multiple choice test or regurgitate the correct answer for a teacher. Some I could confirm their high scores, others I just trusted my gut, now that I’d validated instinct. These are kids with certainly decent brains, but not unusually so. No shame in that. But no originality, not even the kind I’d expect from their actual abilities. No interest in anything but achieving high scores, without any interest in what that meant.
It probably won’t come as a shock to learn that all the kids with scores much higher than demonstrated ability were born somewhere in east Asia, that they all spent months and months learning how to take the test, taking practice tests, endlessly prepping.
Checking the Thesis
If it’s true that Asians systematically Goodhart the education signal more than other groups, it should come out somewhere. Not necessarily in personal incomes (because a signal gained through Goodhart’s Law is still a signal) or even proxies for innovation19 like patenting or paper writing (also gameable and dependent on positions within academia and industry that can themselves be gained through abusing education signaling), but somewhere. And it does.
It’s no surprise blacks and Hispanics, who benefit from massive affirmative action and lower standards in schools and have lower means to regress towards, are not as skilled as whites conditional on education. But, when tested in cases where there is no incentive to Goodhart, Asians are also less skilled, conditional on education, than their white counterparts (this is consistent with higher Asian IQs, since Asian educational attainment is so much higher).
This is exactly what you’d expect if Asians systematically optimize harder than other groups for educational attainment orthogonal to actual skills learned in school, and explains why educated second-generation Asians earn less than their white peers. Something similar occurs with men and women; girls get better grades in school (and have as far back as there are records) and are much more likely to attend and graduate college. Despite this, men have more general world knowledge (Cohen’s d = 0.5) and are probably slightly more intelligent (d = 0.2). Women’s educational attainment advantage over men is analogous to the Asian advantage over other groups (though Asians actually are slightly smarter, just not nearly as much as the education gap would imply).
Vivek Ramaswamy
On December 26th, 2024, Vivek Ramaswamy said the same thing about Asian immigrant culture I’ve been arguing, only with the valence reversed. It’s worth quoting in full:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
Vivek is wrong about America20, which is unusually hard working for a wealthy country and also has the world’s highest race-adjusted educational test scores21, but that’s not the main point.
According to him, superior foreign education culture (he doesn’t say Asian, but he’s Indian and Hispanic immigrants to the US are not renowned for their STEM performance) is the reason tech companies demand foreign workers22 and the reason immigrants and their children are so prominent in US STEM. The reason American kids (in his own words: “it starts YOUNG”) can’t measure up is that they (supposedly) value athletics and social life over academics, while their parents foolishly allow them sleepovers, time hanging out with friends, and TV rather than force them into math tutoring and extracurriculars. To Vivek, South Korea’s hellish scholastic grind is the ideal that American kids need to adopt.
It would be one thing if this really did produce incredible results. But it doesn’t, it just Goodharts the education signal and makes both childhood and parenthood worse for everyone. Because schooling is mostly signaling, education competition is negative-sum and the correct move is to minimize it. Why on Earth should we force American middle schoolers to work 13 hour days to become accountants23?
Is This Practically Significant?
My argument can be summarized as follows:
Education is mostly signaling, and so increasing competition among students and investment in education is collectively wasteful, if individually rational.
Asian immigrants, through a mix of grinding and cheating, Goodhart this signal for cultural reasons, thereby systematically attaining more education than expected from their abilities.
Given (1) and (2), Asian immigration to the US makes life for aspiring upper-middle-class children and parents significantly worse by virtue of worsening the college admissions grind that has come to dominate UMC childhoods.
The arguments for points (1) and (2) are strong, but impossible to rigorously quantify because measuring Goodharting is very difficult (almost by definition) and because the ways in which education signaling affects people’s choices are so complex and opaque24. Based on what I’ve presented so far, it’s entirely plausible that (3) is real but the effects are too small to matter. After all, Asians are only 5.5% of US K-12 students.
I’ve written before that the acid test of whether or not immigration is beneficial to the prior population is which direction they move. Towards the immigrants, to take advantage of the new economic opportunities, technologies, food, or anything else they offer (examples: French Huguenots in Germany, Europeans in Africa)? Or away, to avoid job competition, housing prices, crime, public noise, dysfunctional politics, culture clash, or whatever other problems they bring (examples: modern London, New York, Berlin, and Paris)? There is no way to precisely enumerate, weigh, and measure every possible effect immigrants have, so it’s better to look at revealed preferences than try to come up with a single number to judge them on, like their effects on personal income or housing prices.
As it turns out, Asian immigrants to the United States cause white flight. Unlike Hispanics or blacks, this is not because of crime or strain on public services; Asians are a low-crime, high-income group. It is because of education competition in public schools. This effect is huge; the arrival of 1 Asian student leads to 1.5 white departures on average (there is no effect on black or Hispanic students, presumably because of how little education competition there is between those groups and Asians) (Boustan, Cai, & Tseng, 2023). From a signaling perspective, this is entirely rational. Asian arrivals don’t reduce white test scores (and hence don’t affect the human capital or selection aspects of the education premium), but do reduce their relative rank. Since, unlike market competition25, this is zero-sum, there is no corresponding gain here26.
The effects aren’t just local. They’re even more dramatic at the very pinnacle of national education competition, entry to top colleges. Asians are enormously overrepresented at these institutions relative to their population. For instance, the Harvard class of 2028 is 37% Asian (vs 31% white, 16% Hispanic, 14% black), while MIT, which takes test scores more seriously, is 47% Asian (vs 37% white, 11% Hispanic, 5% black, total exceeds 100%). For reference, Asians are 39% of top decile SAT scorers, whites 46%.
In practice (and despite this being illegal and repeatedly banned on both the state and federal level), essentially all selective colleges in America have a certain fraction of spots reserved ahead of time as racial privileges for blacks and Hispanics. Colleges also face pressure from conservative anti-Affirmative Action crusaders to use test scores more and to stop discriminating against (specifically) Asians. The combined effect is to squeeze white applicants from both directions, freezing out non-athletes without connections from elite universities and hence elite networks, not to mention the upper levels of US STEM27.
This numerical dominance of future elite networks matters because Asians (especially Indians) are extremely left-wing and hostile towards the other races in the United States28, especially whites. This gets much worse with younger generations; in 2024, a year in which Trump massively expanded Republican appeal to the young and to nonwhites, young Asians went Harris +49, practically indistinguishable from their Harris +50 black counterparts (by contrast, young Hispanics were Harris +17 and young whites Trump +10).
Conclusions
Conservatives who lionize Asian immigrants for focusing on education as a means of upwards mobility are making a mistake. Because education is mostly signaling, emphasizing education is throwing more resources into a negative-sum competition. Asians prioritizing education does not benefit America or the United States as a whole; instead it results in overworked helicopter parents, miserable kids, the elimination of white Americans from the future US elite, and a more powerful higher education complex. This Goodharted educational attainment is then used as an argument for even more Asian immigration.
The good news is that Goodharting education to the extent Asian immigrants in the US do really is cultural. If it’s anything like similar practices among Jews in 20th century America, it will disappear in the third generation. The bad news is that 80% of Asian-Americans are first- or second-generation, and given high immigration and low fertility, that number will remain high indefinitely unless legal immigration is slashed.
Right-wing anti-Affirmative Action crusaders and higher-education reformers, such as the University of Austin, often advocate for test-first admissions policies under the belief that this will limit the college admissions rat race because tests can’t be gamed. They’re wrong. As South Korea, India, and China and their diasporas in the United States show, standardized tests can be Goodharted (via cheating or countless hours of prep) like any other admissions criteria and this can easily consume far more of kid’s and parent’s time than even America’s holistic admissions nightmare. The reason this isn’t yet a huge problem in the US is that, because test scores are only one part of the admissions process, the reward:effort ratio of grinding tests is too low to be worth it for most parents and kids, and America doesn’t have much of a culture of test prep or cheating. But if standardized tests become overwhelmingly important, that will change, especially if Asian immigration from countries that already have well-developed cheating and grinding cultures continues.
There are two ways to fix the college admissions grind:
Reduce college’s status as a gatekeeper. One way to do this is eliminating disparate impact as a doctrine, which will allow employers to test for proficiency more directly rather than rely on degrees (contra Caplan, disparate impact really does matter). Another way is for governments to stop demanding credentials for their own employees. A third is to stop publicly subsidizing colleges; this will lower educational attainment and hence the importance of the signal.
Restricting immigration (including student visas) to the US. This article has focused on Asian immigrants Goodharting the US education system, but obviously black and Hispanic immigrants benefit more directly from Affirmative Action, which has a similar result. Something like half (41% in 2007, almost certainly higher now) the black students at elite universities are first- or second-generation immigrants.
One of my X mutuals suggested increasing school size. This would reduce differentiation at the top end of the education pyramid, which would lower signaling incentives. Being one of 1500 annual Harvard grads? Worth a lot. Being one of 15,000? Worth a lot less.
These require nasty political fights, but have the benefit that, unlike test-based admissions, they will actually work.
Alleviating the education signaling spiral is not the main reason to restrict Asian immigration to the United States, or even in the top 329. But giving aspiring middle class kids (including the Asian ones) miserable childhoods for no greater purpose, as Vivek Ramaswamy would prefer, is in and of itself a bad thing, and right-wingers should stop celebrating it.
Wrongly, but it’s understandable why someone might come to that conclusion.
I’m choosing my words carefully here. Education can do a lot more than just affect labor market returns, and school is about more than education (school advocates often bring up daycare for parents and prison-alternative for potential delinquents). And obviously it is possible for people to learn specific technical skills in school. It’s just that, in aggregate, that’s not what school is really about in 21st century America.
I consider this sort of attack, made in general terms, philistinism, though I really can’t see a reason to force the vast majority of students who don’t care to pretend to learn history or poetry for a few years. This shouldn’t be taken as a defense of actually-existing humanities academia, which has been thoroughly captured by leftist ideologues and probably can’t be saved.
This should not be taken as a full-throated endorsement of The Case Against Education across the board. I think Caplan is basically right about the signaling model of education as laid out here, but he badly misuses his evidence. His references are better than the book itself. For example, the low test scores he cites as evidence of the irrelevance of K-12 education are dragged down by blacks, Hispanics, and recent immigrants (Caplan, of course, supports open borders). In a book that advocates total defunding of public education, Caplan never once addresses the race problem, at the core of US education policy since the 60s.
On the other hand, the fact that marriage is increasingly the province of the college-educated is entirely due to selection (on intelligence). Education is not causal. I posit that this is because no-fault divorce has made marriage a comparatively worse deal for the higher-time-preference, less intelligent, and more impulsive.
In prisoner’s dilemma terms: getting more education is defecting.
I specify modern because it doesn’t really apply in the US until the 1960s, and later elsewhere. Many intuitions about the social value of education, like so many other things, are stuck in the past.
From a school’s perspective, this looks like rampant grade inflation because students and parents (rationally) value the signal of a high GPA far more than what is ostensibly supposed to be learned.
You might also have guessed what I didn’t say about my high school classmates in the Goodhart’s Law section.
When I say Asian, I mean first- and second-generation Chinese (including overseas Chinese/Singapore/Taiwan/Hong Kong), Korean, Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants.
She also wrote World on Fire, which is a great book about market-dominant minorities and the common problems afflicting societies dependent on them, from ubiquitous affirmative action to pogroms to ethnic networking to repressive minority-backed dictatorships. Western countries (and East Asian ethnostates) are blessed by having market-dominant majorities; it’s insane to give that up through mass immigration (which both creates new market-dominant minorities where none previously existed and is turning the old majority into another market-dominant minority).
Some qualitative reading on the South Korean and Chinese education systems.
There is also rampant fraud in other parts of the international student system, mostly in South Asia. In general, international students in the 21st century are a massive scam that transfers money from taxpayers to universities and employers using student visas as low-end labor visas, while screwing over aspiring domestic STEM grads. Not to mention tech transfer to China. This is especially bad in Canada, Britain, and Australia. Scaling it up in the US, as many immigrationists want to do, is nuts; the US should exclude China on national security grounds and the entire Indian subcontinent until they get scams and fraud under control, plus end the OPT visa to make sure foreign students are actually students (and birthright citizenship, to stop foreign students from doing an end-run around the US immigration system via anchor babies). See also.
For the record, birthright citizenship makes this much worse. It means any sort of immigration at all, including supposedly-temporary labor migration and study migration, permanently affects the culture, politics, and demographic composition of the country. Unbundling physical residency from political rights would allow for a huge win-win. And yet I virtually never find anyone who wants to massively expand immigration for economic or scientific (brain drain) reasons supporting ending birthright citizenship.
I first became aware of how commonplace this particular method is when reading The Billionaire’s Apprentice, in which the author nonchalantly (and with zero shame) describes her socialist Indian father losing the opportunity to join the Raj civil service because he was caught paying someone to take the test for him.
This also accords with personal experience. I went to a heavily Asian high school. Cheating (usually in the form of circulating previous years or earlier class periods exams) was rampant and a regular subject of concern among parents, students, and staff/teachers. Several (Asian) students wrote poems or short stories in English class about the ubiquity of cheating and how difficult it was to avoid doing it themselves. I don’t want to exaggerate this. I don’t know how common it was, but it clearly wasn’t universal (I didn’t cheat and was generally at or near the top in my classes), and many of my fellow classmates were exceptionally intelligent and didn’t need to cheat (even if they were). But even so.
Neither are actual IQ tests. They work because nobody bothers to game them, as gaming them gets you nothing. If scoring well at Raven’s Matrices got you a spot at Harvard, you’d see a massive Raven’s Matrices prep industry pop up overnight, and it would be effective.
LLMs optimized for benchmarks underperforming headline numbers is analogous.
True innovation as opposed to incremental improvement, of the zero-to-one sort beloved of Peter Thiel, is something else, but naturally resists quantification.
Should go without saying that as galling as seeing your own nation and culture criticized by an outsider is, truth is the ultimate defense. If Vivek were right, that would be that. Some criticisms of America, like our obesity or disgusting and violent cities, are correct and justified. But he’s wrong. Him being wrong, and not him attacking Americans, is the problem.
The US education system is very expensive, but as far as actual learning goes, it is world-class. But you can’t make gold out of dross, and you can’t turn people of average intelligence (or less) into calculus masters. Which I think almost everyone would be OK with if not for the politically unacceptable intelligence gap between whites and blacks (Hispanics and Asians are less politically salient, though at this point probably more important). So instead, every time TIIMS or PISA results come out, we get a bunch of reformers talking about how great the Finnish (Lower intensity! Letting kids do what they want! High quality teachers!) and South Korean (Extremely intensive grinding! Kids need more homework and fewer breaks!) school systems are.
Again, he’s wrong. If you look at H1-B breakdowns, it’s Europeans, not known for their grinding, who are the highest rated and compensated.
I think part of the reason the tech-right doesn’t get this is that in tech startups, there are often superlinear returns to effort and the potential payoff is almost unlimited. Working 80 hour weeks for a 99th percentile income or a shot at becoming a billionaire is reasonable. Demanding ordinary Americans do so to become middle-class accountants or IT professionals or managers, when there is no compelling need (it would be one thing if the alternative was Third World poverty, but it isn’t), is ridiculous. The other part is a cynical grab for cheap (with all the externalities foisted off on their countrymen and the future) and dependent (for the record, I support ending the H1-B and OPT visas entirely, but if they must be kept workers on these visas should have the right to change employers at will) foreign labor.
How much does K-12 education, prospects of future college attendance, and prospective college prestige affect parent decision making? What about decisions made on that basis percolating indirectly to other parents through peer group effects? How do you quantify, let alone measure that? By inspection and by housing markets for school districts, the answer is clearly “a lot,” but you can’t put a dollar amount on it. And what about kids, who can do much to thwart their parent’s will about studying or extracurriculars?
Modulo obvious concerns like externalities, fraud, and so on.
Unlike, for example, losing a job opportunity to a more capable applicant. This hurts the losing candidate but the winning candidate’s gain is equal to their loss and customers and/or employers benefit on top of that.
Those who believe this is fine because Asians are better at STEM anyways should consider the cases of Alec Radford (Bachelor’s at the Olin College of Engineering) or Luke Farritor (Bachelor’s at the University of Nebraska). Both are white male American geniuses, and neither was picked up by the enormously competitive top universities in the country. They’ve made it work, but how many similar figures exist (or would have existed, if not for the shutout of white men from top networks) in fields less sexy than machine learning, ones that require significant capital, teams, mentoring, and networks to properly accomplish things? How many more who are not quite at that genius level, but would still make excellent researchers or engineers at top-tier institutions were they given the opportunity? These are the type of men who powered American STEM during its 20th century glory days, when Americans invented the modern world, won two World Wars and the Cold War, and went to the Moon. Identifying these men and giving them pathways to succeed was the original purpose of the SAT and most of the pre-Civil Rights education reforms movements in the 20th century USA.
Contrary to what might be expected by brain-drain fantasists or those pointing to the relative success of Asians at legible signals such as education or gameable benchmarks such as patents, US STEM has gotten visibly worse since the massive Asian influx started in the 1990s (the H1-B visa was created in 1990). Rather than improving American STEM, the Asian influx has instead allowed it to continue functioning at all in the face of enormous political pressure to reduce the number of white men (a microcosm of this: Google was built by white men, but Asians came to dominate hiring in the late 2010s as the company’s major product became infamously enshittified).
This is not to claim that Asians are incapable of STEM. That would be silly. I just claim that they are less capable than legible metrics make them look, and that as such freezing white men out of top-tier STEM institutions like MIT on meritocratic grounds is bad.
I assume readers are sophisticated enough to understand the difference between individuals and averages and between individual behavior and group dynamics without me being explicit, but just in case I include this disclaimer here. I am not claiming all Asians are left-wing (though as voters, politicians, activists, judges, lawyers, journalists, and professors, they are in aggregate). I am definitely not claiming all Asians are hostile to other races, or even that most individuals are in their personal lives (intermarriage, coworker and peer relationships, and friendships all suggest otherwise). I am claiming that organized Asian political institutions, such as the Congressional Indian Caucus, are. This is what matters for the future of the American polity.
In order, I’d rank these as:
The noxious political effects of Asian, and especially Indian, immigration.
Ethnic conflict. Diversity per se is bad, and adding more diversity to the US is bad in and of itself. Restricting immigration wouldn’t turn the US into Japan (or the US in 1960 for that matter), but when you’re in a hole, stop digging!
Deep roots. The iron law of immigration is that immigrants make the receiving countries more like the sending countries. There are millions of talented Chinese, Indians, and South Koreans. Nevertheless, I, and I think almost all Americans, would strongly prefer the United States remain the United States and not come to resemble South Korea, China, or India. Though at least one prominent Indian-American (maybe scare quotes would be appropriate) immigration advocate, Suketu Mehta, openly says that he is motivated by wanting the United States to become shittier than India so Americans are forced to beg for visas. The joys of skilled immigration.
Tbh this just goes to show there is really *no* benefits to external immigration for the natives. Even the real "engineers and doctors" are just replacing natives who could have performed those roles, and done so in a less atomised and more contextually relevant manner.
I always remember being at a private school aged 9 and turning and making an innocuous comment to a boy named "Winston Yap" - an uppity chinese 9 year old. And he gave a scathing repsonse back. I just think, how dare he? (speak that way to a native in his own country). Regardless, I think he was just jealous and he most likely grew up to be a squinty eyed 5'7" dork. But his personality sure sucked. And that's what this kind of education produces.
A robust community should aim higher than turning out hyper-credentialed drones like Winson who, ironically, lack the agency to shape society in a positive way.
Gutting education as you suggest would undermine institutions. This is only acceptable if you introduce a new institution in which people can place their trust. I think you underestimate how vital academia is to the functioning of the America state, and how quickly things would get nasty in the event of a power vacuum. Trump has 50% of the populace, and the Republican Party is now Trump. But Trump is a man, and basing an institution on a man is not a recipe for stability.
I agree with your general criticism of education as signaling, but instead of gutting education, I think we should fortify it against Goodharting. I think the best way to do that is to introduce a physical fitness requirement for college admissions, and tie this requirement to federal funding.
There is no reason why every single Ivy League graduate cannot be a Division 1 athlete. There are enough athletes in the country with sufficient test scores. Essentially, I am suggesting affirmative action for athletes, to the degree that non-athletes are completely excluded from elite universities.
This would have a few effects:
1. Because muscle growth is inversely correlated with cortisol, parents who force stressful training regimes on their children would see diminishing returns.
2. Since immigrants have a weaker culture of athleticism, they would be less competitive.
3. Black students benefit the most from athletic affirmative action. However, black students are not Goodharting (with the exception of the immigrants you refer to from Africa).
The counter-argument to my scheme is that introducing athletic requirements for universities is a fantasy that will never come true, while your proposed solution of "accelerating the decline of prestige" is much more realistic.
I still believe it is important to put forth constructive solutions which attempt to imagine better institutions, rather than hollowing out existing ones and expecting the result to be fine. Stable institutions reduce the likelihood of inter-elite conflict and civil war.