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Comment by vkgcr | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah for sure, but I think that's the case "in spite of" the trajectory of the educational system.

From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families. I don't think school plays that much of a role in the grand scheme of things compared to family influences. There's a lot of inertia to society in general.

However, what we lost is that modern educational systems are really bad at identifying and "pulling up" talented kids from poor / under-educated families, because the standards and expectations are so low that you can't differentiate them from their peers.

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Anecdata, but in my honors / AP courses in High School, I was one of two students, our of ~30, whose parents did not have a college degree. Like 20 of the student's parents worked at the local Lockheed Martin. I don't think this was entirely genetics, as much as culture, since I knew plenty of people in my life who were quite smart but lacked academic discipline.

I'm more in your camp of "it's culture" but I think it's a lot to do with the amount of attention a parent can pay to their kids education. Some of that is cultural but sometimes it's just a time constraint. Either due to financial constraints (and time spent working), single parents or whatever.

Kids obviously vary in aptitude but the ones that actually get the chance to excel are usually the ones that are getting an extra push at home. Some kids you just can't stop though and excel regardless.

The issue is not what happens in high school.

The issue is that when all of these AP/Honors Calc people get to college they don't even make it to Simpson's rule before they're weeded out. That's the problem that most college professors are talking about. How are we creating more and more and more AP/Honors/"Gifted" kids every year, yet the performance of all of these kids when they enter university is abysmal? How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

I mean, I can totally see where the professors are coming from. We send every state flagship university what all of these very good high schools claim are the cream of the crop, and many of the students sent are just not up to the task. It has to be the school system at some point?

I took a calculus course in high school. There were maybe six of us. Everyone elss took stats. The teacher was fine, if if a bit. Most of us used the class as a goof off segment. I often snuck out to go work on freelancing projects I was doing at the time. We found we could mostly pass the course work could be plugging in to online solvers. The tests were heavily curved.

Frankly if you threw a simple derivative or integration at me these days I'd be staring at you like and idiot.

I remember snidely telling people I didnt care because it didnt need calculus to develop software. I do regret it.

> How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

German universities have a simple solution: students who believe that they have already "learned" calculus in school (in a sense every pupil with an Abitur school diploma (the kind of school diploma that you need in Germany to study at a university) had to learn) should hold to this belief at their own peril. :-)

Hint: After one week, these kids will hopefully have realized that the level of calculus that they learned in school was very shallow. :-)

Exactly. The US tech hubs draw heavily from the subset of very talented Americans who aren't seeing the typical dumbed-down part of the education system, and from immigrants, who are over-represented. If anything, they're constantly complaining that they can't find enough talent domestically -- which, yes, is partly "we don't want to pay them enough", but when you consider the costs to sponsor an immigrant, can't entirely be about that.

The small rural high school I attended in the early 80s was unable to find a math teacher able to teach calculus for my junior/senior year, which significantly reduced my college options.

>From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families .. [from overseas]. FTFY

As someone acquainted with the insides of AI labs, and who has worked with NIWs in the past, I can tell you the extent to which our advances are dependent on migrant brainpower long ago crossed the "we're able to deny it" threshold.

Most people think of skilled immigration as H1Bs. It's not. H1B is to NIW as TF/PyTorch monkey is to real AI expert. They're just not, at all, the same thing.

There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though. At the places I worked these folks would always be paid the same as the locals - they really were hired for talent and not to cut costs. Contributors to Linux, GCC, and the like, not your typical software simian. I guess these days one can get an NIW and not work for the Department of Energy?

> There are plenty of H1Bs who are similarly smart but don't want to build weapons though

Which companies are employing H-1B labor to work on presumably ITAR/EAR-regulated articles?

NIW doesnt mean you have to build weapons.

Simple cybersecurity (offensive or defensive) qualifies for NIW, as well as other fields

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