There's a saying at Harvard Business School... (I didn't attend, so I'm not namedropping!)
The A students become professors. The B students work for the C students.
The academic society forces this focus on high grades across all subjects that is unhealthy.
But what's a student to do? If you can't get into a top school with a couple of Bs, life gets tougher. If you want to major in Computer Science, any school is fine. If you want to major in Philosophy, you had better get into a top 10 school. And once there, you'd had better get top grades because you'll need to go to graduate school.
The problem is even larger than the author suggests. If you're in a large city, to get into the nice high school with the fancy IB program, you might need straight As in junior high. And that junior high school may have competitive admissions.
That saying is rather amusing, given Harvard's (and other US colleges) grade inflation - for example, only 5% of Harvard undergrads get a C or less[1]. I wish the article had touched on this, the system makes it surprisingly difficult for kids to fail in the first place. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that anything less than an A is seen as failing, so A is redefined as the new norm.
The wonderful thing about today's society is that making a living off of creativity doesn't require these credentials. I'm not sure where he went to high school, but Johnny Lee (the man behind the Kinect and Google's Tango project) went to the University of Virginia for undergrad, and after that went to CMU and then on to create some interesting hacks and products. The University of Virginia is probably a good school but not the place a parent who believes credentials are an end in themselves would choose to send their kid to be a successful engineer.
I bet its extremely rare for a person to both be very well credentialed and also very successful in their field (where the field does not explicitly depend on credentials--the Supreme Court is a counterexample).
I don't think this generalizes as well as you think it does. Even in technology, credentials haven't become un-important, just less so, and I think it's the furthest along that path. I suspect most of these kids want to be successful doctors, lawyers, scientists, (non-software-) engineers, or "traditional" business management rather than hackers, and credentials are still the way to do those things, and will be for the foreseeable future.
> I suspect most of these kids want to be successful doctors, lawyers, scientists, (non-software-) engineers, or "traditional" business management rather than hackers, and credentials are still the way to do those things, and will be for the foreseeable future.
In the case of doctors and lawyers (and engineers in many cases), there is a legal requirement to have credentials in order to be involved in practice.
I believe it is different in the US, but in the UK, experience is valued most regarding hacking (IT work). A CS degree holds little water, since many of them are, well, inadequate.
It is not that credentials are not needed--in my example, Johnny Lee still has credentials--but that it is not essential to gain the very best credentials in order to find work where one's creativity matters.
I think it's more a relative point. If you want to major in Philosophy/Art History/Religion and get a good job, only a small handful of schools matter, and UVa isn't one of them. UVa also isn't on the list of schools that NYC Upper East Side parents fight over. (I'm still happy to see it when a resume crosses my desk though)
I think credentials do count. As an example, I have worked with many people who have studied at MIT. They have all been very effective. I now find myself with a strong positive bias towards MIT grads.
That said, someone I used to babysit when I was a teenager dropped out of college and sold his last software company for over $300M, and this was about twelve years ago when three hundred million dollars was real money :-)
The A students become professors. The B students work for the C students.
The academic society forces this focus on high grades across all subjects that is unhealthy.
But what's a student to do? If you can't get into a top school with a couple of Bs, life gets tougher. If you want to major in Computer Science, any school is fine. If you want to major in Philosophy, you had better get into a top 10 school. And once there, you'd had better get top grades because you'll need to go to graduate school.
The problem is even larger than the author suggests. If you're in a large city, to get into the nice high school with the fancy IB program, you might need straight As in junior high. And that junior high school may have competitive admissions.
It's a wonder that any creativity survives!