The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.
Not quite true, but what I have noticed is that, at the graduate-school level, there's a very low correlation between the quality of the program and the students.
If you go to a top-5 PhD program, you'll be surprised by how many of these supposedly "best in the generation" people just aren't that good. Many are, and the talented outnumber the talentless, but you'd expect there to be zero talentless schmucks at the top programs, and it just ain't so. This is where the OP's perception that PhD programs are "full of weak students" probably comes from; the fact that even top PhD programs can't keep the schmucks out. It's not hard, even for a total mediocrity, for a 22-year-old packing socioeconomic advantages, and already coming from an elite college, to appear smart.
Drop down to the #10 or #20 or even #35 department, and the talent distribution isn't much different. The difference, in raw intelligence, between the students isn't that strong. There are some really good students and some terrible ones, at any of them. The change is barely perceptible. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference except by the reputation of their advisors.
If you go in to a top school and expect its students to be the best of the best, you'll be disappointed when only 75-85% of them are halfway intelligent, and you might conclude that the #30 school has no intelligent students. In fact, it has almost as many. There are probably 20-100 times as many people (probably 3-5% of the general population) with the talent for academia as actually put themselves anywhere near contention for the positions.
What we now have, and it's not new, is evidence of a sorting system that doesn't really work. We can't sort talent from well-positioned mediocrity (read: socioeconomic status) before college, we certainly can't do it in college, and we don't do it for graduate school (George W. Bush is a Harvard Business School graduate). At all levels, we do a terrible job. We're actually talent-rich as a society, because we've had the smartest people coming here for generations. We just haven't a clue what to do with it.
Why are you so surprised that a metric like GPA (or undergrad accomplishment in general), with a hard ceiling, loses its correlation with actual talent at the top end of the scale? That is, most undergrads will simply never get the opportunity to publish one paper in undergrad, let alone two or three, so if you admit them to grad-school based on maybe a publication, good grades, and maybe some internship/REU experience, you should expect to admit some highly talented students and some students who were very talented at optimizing the capped metrics on their resume to the maximum but not at actual research.
Hell, in a way, it's basic reinforcement learning, is it not? What sort of rational agent or system will "go above and beyond" when the reward signal is capped at a maximum value? When you look at it that way, every single step of the selection, sorting, and filtering process we call academic meritocracy is optimizing for irrational devotion to careerist signaling, which has only a weak correlation to real devotion to science.
Well, one thing you can do is admit everyone who a colleague you know and trust says can do research (what I've heard, quite logically, is the #1 way to get into a good graduate program, after of course convincing a professor in one to demand your admittance).
So the "schmucks" ... and I've known of one MIT professor who didn't get tenure who was in that category (a friend tried to do research in her laboratory and found it impossible, it was so badly run, something subsequent events proved) ... are either false positives from the above metric or from the cohort of department's best guesses after running out of them.
>Well, one thing you can do is admit everyone who a colleague you know and trust says can do research
I always thought this was simply how you get into grad-school: do research in undergrad, and have your research mentors write you letters of recommendation, trusting their reputation to carry information the admissions committee will understand and care about where grades and awards won't.
>So the "schmucks" ... and I've known of one MIT professor who didn't get tenure who was in that category (a friend tried to do research in her laboratory and found it impossible, it was so badly run, something subsequent events proved) ... are either false positives from the above metric or from the cohort of department's best guesses after running out of them.
Kinda. Politics become a problem, but it is true that once you actually get to the point of publishing papers, the cap on your achievements disappears, so you do, in some way, get career credit for doing more.
Not quite true, but what I have noticed is that, at the graduate-school level, there's a very low correlation between the quality of the program and the students.
If you go to a top-5 PhD program, you'll be surprised by how many of these supposedly "best in the generation" people just aren't that good. Many are, and the talented outnumber the talentless, but you'd expect there to be zero talentless schmucks at the top programs, and it just ain't so. This is where the OP's perception that PhD programs are "full of weak students" probably comes from; the fact that even top PhD programs can't keep the schmucks out. It's not hard, even for a total mediocrity, for a 22-year-old packing socioeconomic advantages, and already coming from an elite college, to appear smart.
Drop down to the #10 or #20 or even #35 department, and the talent distribution isn't much different. The difference, in raw intelligence, between the students isn't that strong. There are some really good students and some terrible ones, at any of them. The change is barely perceptible. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference except by the reputation of their advisors.
If you go in to a top school and expect its students to be the best of the best, you'll be disappointed when only 75-85% of them are halfway intelligent, and you might conclude that the #30 school has no intelligent students. In fact, it has almost as many. There are probably 20-100 times as many people (probably 3-5% of the general population) with the talent for academia as actually put themselves anywhere near contention for the positions.
What we now have, and it's not new, is evidence of a sorting system that doesn't really work. We can't sort talent from well-positioned mediocrity (read: socioeconomic status) before college, we certainly can't do it in college, and we don't do it for graduate school (George W. Bush is a Harvard Business School graduate). At all levels, we do a terrible job. We're actually talent-rich as a society, because we've had the smartest people coming here for generations. We just haven't a clue what to do with it.