Solutions From The Multiverse
Hosts Adam Braus (@ajbraus) and Scot Maupin (@scotmaupin) meet up each week where Adam brings a new idea to help the world and Scot picks and prods at it with jokes and questions. The result is an informative and entertaining podcast that always gets you thinking.
Solutions From The Multiverse
Solving Hiring Prejudice: Make Educational Attainment a Protected Class | SFM E90
Could your diploma be silently sabotaging your job prospects? This week we're tearing down the ivory towers of higher education, proposing a radical shift in hiring practices that could ignite a firestorm of debate. Buckle up as we examine the prospect of educational attainment as a protected category, challenging employers to value skills and achievements over the name of your university. Our conversation spans the potential upheaval of prestigious institutions' business models to the real implications of meritocracy versus privilege in the job market. We're not shying away from the tough questions: Is an Ivy League education just a glorified membership to an exclusive club, or does it genuinely set you up for success?
Join us, alongside guests from varied academic paths, as we share insights from our stints at places like St. John's College and the University of Kansas. We weigh in on the recent San Francisco high school decision to drop entrance exams, opening up a broader dialogue on educational equality and fairness in society. The crux of our debate: should the value of one’s work experience and tangible accomplishments trump the brand of their alma mater? We're not just theorizing; we scrutinize how the #MeToo movement has already influenced hiring in the finance industry, hinting at the seismic changes that could ripple through the job market if educational discrimination were curtailed. Tune in for a thought-provoking journey through the intersection of education, hiring, and societal change.
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Email: solutionsfromthemultiverse@gmail.com
Adam: @ajbraus - braus@hey.com
Scot: @scotmaupin
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Thanks to Jonah Burns for the SFM music.
okay, I've got a solution. That's what we're here for, okay what do you got?
Speaker 2:that's a higher education solution. Oh no, I'm out, I'm out I'm sorry you're done.
Speaker 1:No, no higher education is perfect. Actually, we don't need anything's fine. I checked in yesterday and they said they're good. No more a year yeah right, jesus christ.
Speaker 2:okay, so here the solution. So we've talked about in the past in this podcast about protected categories right, like your race, your gender, sexual orientation, you can't hire people or not hire people based on protected categories Based on certain.
Speaker 1:yeah sure.
Speaker 2:And so you can't be prejudiced, you can't say well, there are some exceptions. Like the Supreme Court recently said, you can refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding yeah, you don't have to hire someone who says fire in a crowded theater.
Speaker 1:Right, that's what. That is what the supreme court showed. Yeah, I think we're getting our. Well, that's okay. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 2:You're right, I think that's right I mean with this supreme court who knows right. Okay, so I'm going to say a solution to higher education would be. It would. So I think it would solve all, and I'm an expert in higher education. We can talk about my book.
Speaker 1:We have a whole book on this topic, but here's another solution, which is we should make educational attainment a protected category. Educational attainment Now you're not trying to say edutainment, right, You're not trying to like the thing where they're like, we're like, we're gonna entertain you while we you're trying to say attaining.
Speaker 2:This is not blues clues yeah, okay, okay, right.
Speaker 2:So I'm saying like I'm not saying you can't be prejudiced against people you know, prejudice in the pot in the sense of discerning right, deciding on people's qualities for like a job based on what they know, like actual knowledge. I'm saying that you cannot ask them where they went to school and what level of degree they have. So I think we should make it illegal for an employer to ask that, okay, and that would make it so that instead they would have to ask can you actually do the tasks that are for this job? And people would have to demonstrate that they can.
Speaker 1:So the where and what of your schooling would be like behind closed doors, like a password or your social security?
Speaker 2:your social. It'd be like what your religion was. No one could ask what your religion is in a job interview okay, I got you, I got you no one could ask what your nation of origin is. They can't say like oh, that's your name. Is that mean, are you from norway? Like you can't. You can't do that in a job interview. That's not a lot. That's not legal okay it should also be.
Speaker 2:Oh, I see that you went to mit. That should also not be legal because it's unfair and it doesn't work and it's all bullshit.
Speaker 1:It'd be much better for the employers and for the workers and for education for people to just not ask that now not to stick up for these people, but you know who's going to have a problem with this is all the big institutions that charge lots of money for the people to be able to put their names on the resumes which is what you're saying shouldn't happen anymore. But wait, if I'm in the same bucket as everyone else, then why did I pay so much for my education of college Exactly.
Speaker 2:Why did you pay for that? Because it was an unfair that's what they're gonna apartheid system, although they will also say obviously it's we're.
Speaker 1:We're providing something that's worth more right.
Speaker 2:They'd say well they're, they're better, they're smarter people they're better people right, right, and so you should pay attention to if they went to harvard, or, or.
Speaker 1:MIT or whatever, then that should be reflected in their interview and their personality and how they come off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and things they've accomplished in the real world, like they can be like. Here's a project I did. Here's a referral from someone who I worked with who says I'm really good. Here's, you know, I built a product and grew it to millions and millions of people. I was super successful as a marketer.
Speaker 2:Hire me as a marketer, or whatever it is With your 35, way more relevant to who you are is what you've been doing the last 10 years, not what you did for the four years in college and where that was yeah, 20 years before, right, and so if we did this, I honestly think that if we, we did this, so there's a lot of people out there I'm not like a strict egalitarian, okay. I'm not like, oh, I want to tear people down, to make people more equal. I don't. I don't really believe in that. I actually think it's fine for there to be fair fair in a fair way, for people to excel way beyond other people. As long as it's fair and as long as there's and we long as we provide for the most vulnerable people, I don't care how the cookie crumbles and where people end up. The problem is when it's not fair and when we don't provide for the least vulnerable. We're not really talking about providing for the least vulnerable in this episode. We're talking about the fair meritocracy, the fair competition in society, and right now it it's just not fair and it doesn't lead to good outcomes for there to be this huge 900-pound gorilla on your resume.
Speaker 2:Oh, I went to Stanford or I went to Harvard, and all of a sudden, doors are all just booted open for you for no reason. These people are not more impressive than someone who can say I did impressive things. Look at the impressive things I did. That should actually count far more than I'm. I went to stanford oh, what's the point? You know what's the? What does that show?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah. And the system where doors are opened based on, like, who has money to go to these institutions or the networking to get in, or whatever, that doesn't serve us better either we're all served better by a system that looks at the person and not like the piece of paper that they hold right, you know and maybe, like I don't know, 50 years ago you'd be like well, how are you gonna, you know, know all that you know?
Speaker 2:but but now it's so, it's so simple, I mean you just look at their LinkedIn, yeah. Our social media profiles show everything we do and have done, and it's not hard to just scroll through the greatest hits of somebody's LinkedIn and you can see what they did. Not to mention, we could just have AIs that would look at your whole thing and just tell people yeah, this is like how.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I already have two eyes and I already use those to look at no. Ais? No, I have two. You're supposed to use A, just a single eyes.
Speaker 2:That's funny Two eyes. Two eyes are better than one, two eyes are better than A, although I am jealous, you know, by eye patches. You know, I heard a thing about pirates wearing eye patches. Do you know why they always wore eye patches? Because they lost their eyes in sword fights.
Speaker 1:No, that's not why To use the periscope thing.
Speaker 2:No, why no? This is so crazy, but I read this, I believe it's true. Pirates would always wear eye patches so that they could go below decks and switch the eye patch, and their eye was already accustomed to the dark.
Speaker 1:What? That's pretty cool. Yeah, actually that's pretty smart, Isn't that cool?
Speaker 2:What? So they could be out in the daylight and one eye is covered. Yeah, and it's bright. So one eye is getting all the light and then they duck under the decks. It's totally dark. They don't want to be blind for 20 seconds. Early version of night vision goggles. You just switch it and now you have a dark eye that you can walk around down underneath.
Speaker 1:now that's crazy, isn't that cool? Yeah, because it does make no sense that so many pirates were losing one eye all the time. I mean, like what? Is that cool? Yeah, because it does make no sense that so many pirates were losing one eye all the time, right, I mean, like in a sword fight. That's a how do you get the eye right? Either you're gonna die or you're not gonna die. The idea of losing just an eye and nothing else feels very difficult they're gentlemen fighting.
Speaker 2:They only put the sword in one inch, no matter where they hit you, they just put it in one inch. It hits the eye. One inch, one inch out, you know, okay. So reddit is saying that this is a fate.
Speaker 1:This is not true it's not true, but it's just saying no, this is a fable that surfaced a few years ago.
Speaker 2:It's not corroborated by any sources. Oh, but I wanted to believe it. Very few pirates were an eye patch and if they did, it's because they covered a missing eye. Damn it I liked your story though I know this says there's no reason. Practically this makes no sense because pirates didn't move below decks during attacks Attacks so it doesn't make any sense. This is like a great urban legend. Though it's so sticky and fun, pirates actually use it. Hey, I bought it immediately.
Speaker 1:I was like great, I love it. I did too. I can't wait to tell everyone I know in all of my subsequent pirate conversations yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Tell every single person alive.
Speaker 1:That's the bad thing.
Speaker 2:That's why I have to check all these things, because I will spread stuff that was so sticky it pushed even what the solution for today was out of my mind. I have no idea now, I'm just free floating, now I'm just surfing. We were solution higher education. Oh yeah, make make higher. Make educational attainment a protected category. Yes, now people on the right and like libertarians will hate on this idea because they'll say you're attacking the meritocracy, right, you're attack, you're just, you know, because what they?
Speaker 2:What the big, the big debate here between, like ideologically, the debate between kind of right wing and sort of left, generally right wing and left wing people although it doesn't always break down that way, is you know? This is the way it's framed. Left wing people want equality of outcomes and right wing people want equality of opportunity within diversity of outcomes, maybe even inequality of outcomes. Okay, there's major problems with this. One is the.
Speaker 2:The right wing people are not trying to get equal opportunity. That's insane, because they don't bring up, they're not bringing up the base, right? They don't say everyone gets, you know, free access to education, free, and then their merit would actually decide where they achieve. They're putting huge bear. You know what do they say? Some people start the race on the fin, you know, two inches from the finish line and other people start a mile behind. So it's not equal opportunity but the but the left wing. I think there is a good criticism of the left wing that equal outcomes is not actually a good goal. A better goal is equal opportunity, and sometimes the the left wing and the very egalitarian members of the left wing start to think of equality of outcome as a success if they can't get equality of opportunity.
Speaker 1:So help me out. Why would equality of outcomes not be a desirable thing?
Speaker 2:Well, because in order to get equality of outcomes, you have to bring down the high performers and bring up the bottom performers. You have to kind of limit people. Yeah, exactly, okay, okay. So like, for example, in san francisco, there was a big debate a couple years ago where I think they actually succeeded at removing the entrance examination for one of the gifted high schools in san francisco, like a famous gifted high school, okay, and it was overrun with, like, asian people. Of course you know, I think that's, you know, a compliment to asian people. Of course you know, I think that's you know, a compliment to asian people. They're very, you know folk, they're culturally overrun.
Speaker 1:It's a very complimentary language.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not using complimentary language, but it's, it's. It was great. You know they they people who really valued education, turns out most of them were asian. They got their kids into this like high-powered, you know, gifted high school and it was because there was an entrance examination so only people who had prepared could get into it. And these San Francisco leftists tried to end that and get rid of the entrance exam. And then there was this huge pushback from kind of right-wing San Franciscans which are like left-wing in the country, but they're kind of right-wing here, they're like techies and they were like no, no, no, no, keep the entrance exam, because it's like merit, it's a meritocracy, right?
Speaker 2:so if you say, oh, we're gonna make, we're gonna make, we're gonna make educational attainment a protected category to the right wing type people, that's gonna sound like I'm just, I'm doing this. I'm trying to do the same stupid left wing move of like trying to limit, you know, limit, uh, the the heights people can reach in order to like create equality of outcomes. But actually that's not what I'm trying to do at all. I'm trying to create, I'm trying to make it so that the meritocracy actually rewards people of merit and not just people who have gamed the system, who were born on third base, who then go to these elite colleges and then get all like all opportunities. The rest of their life are just like made easier for no reason.
Speaker 1:Do you think it will have a huge shift on like? Will it affect much like? Will it change the stratus? I feel like some of it gets on the paper but like there's also a lot of stuff that you get just from going to those institutions, from like making connections and like you know good old old boys clubs and those sorts of things. That may still. I mean, there's no way to fix everything. But you know, that may still be a thing where you're like, oh no, I'm still, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I see what you're saying sure I mean, if you, if you and your friends are like you know, like I heard about this after me too that in the finance industry, like if you got a finance bro in new york like kind of drunk and you were just talking to him at a bar, you'd be like so what do you think this me too stuff is gonna have gonna lead to in your like industry, they just tell you like, yeah, we're not gonna hire women, as much you know, they can't legally write that down or like say that, like really, you know, in any way, leave a paper trail of that.
Speaker 2:But they were just like, yeah, finance is just not going to hire women because then we might hit on them and lose our freaking careers, I guess. So that's a really bad outcome, sure, so you? So you can be racist, and this is what I'm saying you can break those laws, but you just can't do it legally. So the same thing would be for this. You could say, hey, hire people from ivy league schools. But like, but then? But no one would ever put on their resume the ivy league school and you couldn't ask them directly where they went to school you know?
Speaker 1:yeah, I guess I'm wondering if, like, if that, if the prestige came from them actually being, on the whole, a better like, do you think like, going to an ivy league does that put you in a better spot to compete in the in the work?
Speaker 2:world, absolutely not, absolutely not those people. I find ivy league people extremely boring and and not smart and obedient. So there's no, you don't think there's anything like worth, like there's not a.
Speaker 1:what I'm wondering is like oh, is there a thing to be? Maybe going to those institutions you do get a better, stronger education, you come out as a better person?
Speaker 2:No, I don't think so, so maybe it's warranted that way. Actually, I think it's just a lot of name recognition. Oh, that's a good department. There's a concentration of talent density. That happens to be in Carnegie Mellon's mechanical engineering department, and so you will get probably a better education and it's hard to get into that.
Speaker 1:If you're crushing all the courses at MIT, you're probably a very smart Maybe.
Speaker 2:But even MIT.
Speaker 2:For example, I know this for MIT specifically because an MIT professor was brought in to critique my program that I built and designed and everyone was so happy like, oh my God, we got this prestigious MIT professor to review our curriculum. He came in and I had an hour-long conversation with him talking about the curriculum and most of that was me explaining to him educational sciences that he did not understand or know. He didn't know how to do an assessment strategy, which is what any teacher knows. Any even high school teacher knows an an assessment strategy, which is like what any teacher knows. Any like even high school teacher knows what an assessment strategy is. And this guy didn't know because he knew a lot about, like physics or some shit, like some you know mit thing, but he actually he wasn't a very good teacher like he didn't know basic educational science.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like if you went to the doctor really deep in his own field but not in like how to right. It's like if you went to the doctor really deep in his own field, but not in. Yeah, like how to right?
Speaker 2:it's like if you went to the doctor and the doctor was, like I'm your podiatrist, so they're supposed to know everything about like your feet, and so they do know a lot about feet, but they don't really know how to like do medicine of the feet. Like they just know all the bones and all the muscles and all the, but they don't really know the diseases and like the cures. You know that's like it's like that's. There's a big gap there, so I don't actually think these ivy leagues are providing much benefit, except for a selection bias.
Speaker 2:So they're generally.
Speaker 1:You know it's hard to get in hard to get a bunch of strong students get in who are already super prepared and because of the name recognition, they can certainly bolster a good success rate of the graduates and then they have a success rate because of the name recognition I don't think. I don't think there's necessarily.
Speaker 2:Uh, much of a. The benefit is mostly the selection bias and the name recognition. I think the actual schools are just like holding pens. They're just like places where there's a lot of talent density because of selection bias and then those that. That that feeds on itself and the students get smarter and you know they do things because they're. They would have done things anyways and there's.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, I don't, I I think I don't know a lot about I just I think of it like like a professional sporting league where I'm like there's got to be professors who are all-star, like amazing professors, and I'm imagining that the, the fancy schools, get to buy those professors and have them come to their the way that you buy like basketball players, there's no the research actually goes the other way so if you actually look at the research, the the strongest outcomes of students like the most learning.
Speaker 2:the most learning that students actually do is under the most capable educators, not the biggest researchers, and all of these schools try to identify the biggest researchers and make them into professors. And so the evidence would suggest the exact opposite.
Speaker 2:And actually I think the best proof of this is if you look at Ivy League schools' professors. The professors are not from Ivy League schools. They're usually mostly getting their PhDs at state schools. They work their way up to… and then they're the best because they went not to the Ivy League. And then they get into the Ivy Leagues as the professors because they actually went through a meritocratic process outside of the Ivy Leagues, right.
Speaker 2:And then they go into the Ivy Leagues and now all the graduates don't have the same outcomes as so it's kind of like. That right there shows that it's like an emperor's with no clothes on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was going to say I've heard that conversation a lot. Where they're talking about now there's too much emphasis on research and publishing for professors and not as much for teaching quality and engagement with students and student satisfaction, like they've put the weight on the wrong foot there and it has results that they want to get, but it also turns down some other stuff that they may not have. Turns down some other stuff that they may not have.
Speaker 2:The other thing this would fix is a big gender and just in general problem with job descriptions. So job descriptions say they always say two things and both of them are bad and should be illegal to say Only boys, no girls.
Speaker 1:What you can't put that on a job you can't put that either.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. So what they do is they say you must have a bachelor's degree or you must have a master's degree. And then the other thing they say is you must have five years experience or two years experience or whatever. Both of those things should not be allowed to be put on job recs, Largely because women will underestimate their abilities and men will overestimate their abilities, will underestimate their abilities and men will overestimate their abilities. So if it says five years experience, a man with two years experience might happily apply, but a woman with four years experience won't, because on average she'll think well, I don't have five years experience.
Speaker 2:But instead, if it said, must be able to run a sophisticated campaign of digital marketing or do this, do an actual? Wrote out the competency that you actually are supposed to be able to have. Then men or women can be like huh, yeah, I can do four of those seven.
Speaker 2:And it says if you can do four of the seven of these competencies you'd be a great candidate. More seven out of seven, better candidate, right, but like four at a minimum. And if they did that, that instead of what kind of degree you have, what, what um, what kind of degree you have and like how many years experience you have, if you got rid of that then there would be much better matching between competencies and job, actual job roles so that's kind of separate from the school name thing, right, that's an additional thing.
Speaker 1:But I think this all kind of conglomerates into an HR solution.
Speaker 2:You need HR practices to and HR only responds to legality because HR is one of the most regressive parts of any company.
Speaker 1:They're just trying to make the company sue's like the one thing they're trying to do so that's why it's not a lot of innovation and it's just like right, stay between the lines. All right, maybe we should do double.
Speaker 2:maybe we should say it's a protected category your, your educational attainment, and it's a protected category how many years you've worked in any industry or place, although that'd be silly, because you have to tell people where you worked.
Speaker 1:Yeah, making a requirement, I think, like you were saying, competency-based instead of time-based.
Speaker 1:Because you could have spent five years being the worst employee at a terrible place and be like well, bing, bing, bing, I'm good I can go there, and, as opposed to someone who spent like a year and a half being the star at a place and goes you know what, I've outgrown this place I need something more. You'd want a system that identifies the star that outgrew their place and not the person who languished until they were let go and so and you know yours is it just a bad metric sometimes? Yeah, sometimes it's good, but having it be the be all end, all I think you're right is is putting it on the wrong spot I think that.
Speaker 2:So I've never heard of people saying like.
Speaker 2:So I've heard things in the end in the industry around the tech industry, where people will unfairly say like, for example, I won't say what companies, but multiple companies that I know of mcdonald's nike, the ceo and the ct like the ceo says to the cto and to the HR team, only hire people from Ivy League schools and the reason why is because they can then put on their investment decks and in their investment due diligences that they give to investors and say we have 40% of our engineering team went to Ivy League schools. Right, mit went together.
Speaker 1:On this boat.
Speaker 2:All our oarsmen are geniuses, right and that is perceived, and not just perceived, but becomes worth more. The company literally becomes, they say. They say, for every ivy league engineer, the company's worth five hundred thousand dollars more, and for every non-ivy league engineer it's only worth like two hundred thousand dollars more,000 more in the base of the company and but?
Speaker 2:so, if so, that's why I think, but I've never heard anything like that in terms of years of experience. No one's like, oh, we've got a bunch of gray beards, great, the company's worth more. No, like people you know, that's not so. So I don't think there's like a pressure to unfairly reward you know more years of experience. So there's no reason, I think, to create any kind of um, you know, like law around that. Also, it'd be hard to enforce and hard to interpret.
Speaker 2:Educational attainment easy to interpret, easy, you know, don't, don't? You're not allowed to ask people where they went to school or they can volunteer that information. But you technically can't use it in your hiring. And if you do, we could you know they? Someone can sue you. Someone who went to the community college can sue you and say, hey, I think that you guys have been using educational attainment for your hiring practices. You shouldn't be doing that because it's illegal. You should be using competency-based. And now you couldn't have all that paper trail of investors saying, yeah, get more Ivy League. The CEO telling the HR, yeah, only hire Ivy League. All that would be illegal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're like, here's my completely nondescript resume on my Harvard Law School letterhead.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, I mean, yeah, they could volunteer that information and it might still have an impact, but it would tamp it down and it would suggest this competency-based approach. Yeah, people are going to think this is totally crazy, but but I actually think it's not that crazy.
Speaker 1:I think this is actually a really good idea well, the people who will be the most upset are the people who've invested the most in that system and would have the most to lose from it going away but it's true, it's fun. It's a good, interesting thing to think about I like it would fix accreditation too.
Speaker 2:So this is where you would fix accreditation by making it so nobody could really, uh, trade on the accreditation status of their school. They could only trade on their own actual skills and competencies, which then would mean people could go to school anywhere. I could start a school tomorrow. That said, I will actually get you the competencies that you will need and and it's illegal for employers to ask you where you went to school. So right now I it's equalized um, actual education with brand name, you know official legacy things adam, I am I allowed to ask you where you went to school?
Speaker 2:sure where'd you go school? I went to school at a small, extremely expensive liberal arts college called St John's College, which is not Ivy League, but it's. Everyone in higher education knows about St John's and so when I tell people I went to St John's, they're like, oh, the great book school, that's what everyone says because it has a very unique curriculum. But I mean, yeah, st John's is not exactly an Ivy League. There's no like old boys club that I can tap into, uh, to speak of, although there are some wealthy members. I mean, it's an expensive school. So, just like some people who are already very wealthy go there like, uh, the, the, the creators of the stag leap winery, which is like a major winery in california. They're johnny's and they gave like 50 million dollars to the school once because they just they're insanely wealthy. I just like the name johnny, that's pretty fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's cool yeah, st john's is a great program, great school. Yeah, yeah well.
Speaker 1:I went to the university of kansas. I also have a my degrees from a state school. No, no fancy bancy stuff for me, but I liked it, it also hasn't come in.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's really played a huge factor either way for me, but I think for a lot of people that's a that's a foot in the door or foot out of the door moment is what they have written on that paper, and I think this could change at least early prospects, because trying to get a job and get your foot in that door is so frustrating. Anything that can make it more equal, I think, for everybody is probably better for everybody, even the equal opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even though some people will complain, a little bit fair. It should be more fair, like you should be. You should be, you should be comparing apples to oranges, right?
Speaker 1:or apples to apples yeah, and you should want the companies in this world to like be getting better people and not just people who like have a stamp on their forehead. Right, exactly, have a certain name.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, yeah. And there's also these schools like I have a professor in college who was a Harvard professor before he came to St John's and in the class he said he said when I was at Harvard, the first thing I would tell all the freshmen is welcome to Harvard. You'll never get anything less than an A, because it's just blatant. Everyone knows this. Everyone at Harvard knows there's just complete and blatant grade inflation. So everyone who graduates from Harvard has like a 3.9, 4.0, 4 plus, you know, and it's like they were all just doing college like anyone else. They were just you know. That's crazy and that's just a sign, that's just one indication. I mean, you hear these things like this all across the board.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just watched not directly related to this, but I just watched a movie recently called the Holdovers with Paul Giamatti and it's an Looks good. Was it good? It is, it was good, I enjoyed it. It's a Christmas movie, right, it takes place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it takes place place over that time, but it's all set in a the the environment is a prep school, a high school prep school, with these kids who are on that final stage to get into those ivy leagues and like they're worried about their high school grades because it'll affect whether or not, right, they can go to those fancy schools which we know now impacts the rest of their life so greatly on what trajectory they're able to go on and everything that will come out of it, no one really explained that to me when I was in high school.
Speaker 2:I didn't really pick up on all that. I was somehow just dense about that it would make such a big difference. Now I know that it would. The thing is is it shouldn't make such a big difference, right? I'd like to propose an idea here that I think is quite important. Wait, you've already. We're already late in the episode.
Speaker 1:Not a solution.
Speaker 2:Not a solution, just a way to think about higher education. I think it's important to think about higher education like the apartheid system of racism, you know so, segregation or South African apartheid. I think in america right now we have a legal apartheid system, we have a legal wealth apartheid system, but we also have a legal education attainment apartheid system and it reinforced meaning.
Speaker 2:So apartheid generally people think of apartheid as just separating blacks and whites, but actually every system of segregation, of apartheid are is actually a pyramidal system where a certain race is the dominant race and then there are actually rungs of different races all the way down to the lowest, like lowest, uh, value valorized race okay, so like in in south africa.
Speaker 2:It was like the, it was like the, the afrikaans whites, then below them were the english, then below them were the English whites, then below them were the lighter brown people, like Indian people, then below them were like half black.
Speaker 1:But you're saying, we should do this, we should not do this.
Speaker 2:No, I'm saying, this is wrong and horrible and bad, and what we have today is an educational apartheid system. And we could eliminate that educational apartheid without doing things like getting rid of meritocracy, like entrance examinations. I think entrance examinations are great because it's an equal. Everyone can go and take the test and, yeah, whoever's ready for it can get into the better school. That's okay. I think the problem is we've created this educational apartheid where if you've stood on your kind of ladder of privilege, you get this sort of moniker oh, you went to Harvard, you went to MIT or you went to Berkeley. I mean, some state schools have this kind of thing Prestige yeah.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that's prestige. And now that prestige unfairly drives all kinds of future privileges, if we just say you're not really allowed to look at that, they can go and do that for their own well-being. They can go to those schools because those schools will give them the skills they need to be excellent at their future jobs. But you can't actually just do the skip, the jump to the name, to the pretend you knowend that the name means you have the skills, because it's not true.
Speaker 1:You're just wanting to bosh all the name value out of. You're like go to a place where you will get the things that you actually get from the place and then hire a person to get the things that you will actually get from the person. Don't trade on name value.
Speaker 2:Don't buy the brand jeans because you think the brand is going to make the jeans better it's right. No, just pick up the jeans and go like this and be like this is a good pair of jeans, you know, and then get those jeans.
Speaker 1:You know, this t-shirt is not worth seven times as much as that t-shirt, because it has the, because it has right stop treating people like like, like shoes or like or like t-shirts, right, and instead just treat them like how functional is this?
Speaker 2:Treat them actually more like athletes. So we already do this with athletes. If you go to the Olympics, everyone there is actually the best at what they're doing, because they actually had to run and jump or run and run fast or throw something and they had to throw it further than everybody else Like.
Speaker 2:Let's treat people and employees and and and students more like athletes and less like you know commodities, and I think that's great because now now we'll have this race to the top in terms of skill building, in terms of how much value people can deliver to society, not just kind of who can like sort of strut more like a different, you know, like a peacock, and sort of get the right sort of you know associations behind their name. Right, Right yeah.
Speaker 1:It would fix accreditation.
Speaker 2:It would fix a lot of things about education, or I think it would fix a lot of things about our economy. Yeah, it's just get rid of the education apartheid with uh, with. That sounds good anyways and all you have to do is add one little line to the law. These are the lists of protected categories, and then just add educational.
Speaker 1:But then everyone else has to redo our resumes. We have to redo that's right.
Speaker 2:Well, people would probably still share, like they'd be like I went to mit. But then it would be like, okay, you know, the hiring manager has to be like okay, okay, you know, like that they can't ask any questions about it or like reference it ever, you know in writing.
Speaker 1:I noted this fact and I have no opinions one way or the other about it let's continue our interview. It's like if you walked in and you were like I'm super gay.
Speaker 2:they'd be like, okay, we can't do anything about it, say anything.
Speaker 1:It's a weird thing to lead with, but all right. Yeah, right Great. Let's talk about what your greatest work failure was? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Well cool. This was a fun one. I like it. Out of the box solution to problems with education.
Speaker 1:Off the page Out of the box and off the page Because we're taking the information off of the pages, alright well thanks everybody for joining us. Thank you, adam. See you here next week. Bye, thank you.