So when, in my 3rd semester review with my technique instructor, he asked me why I came to the school, I was frustrated enough to tell him the truth.

"I couldn't get in to college."

He very nearly spat his water in surprise. This broke the ice and we had one of the most encouraging, pleasant conversations I had while at that school. He told me I was good at this, and I told him that I enjoyed it. We both agreed that even though I wasn't as crazed as the rest of the students and staff, there was no good reason not to take my shot.

So, I stayed at the school and started auditioning not long after. I landed my first off-broadway gig a couple months later, then a film, then I co-founded a theatre company that turned a profit on our first off-off-broadway show. While I am living a different life now, I am so thankful for that small moment of encouragement in the midst of all the angst I was exposed to every day. I genuinely believe that short meeting with my instructor inspired the early risks I took, and it certainly kept me going when I wanted to walk away.

Thanks for writing your counter-point. Reminded me of an important time in my life.

Amazing what a diverse audience ends up at HN, and how much you can learn by reading comments to an article.

Appreciated.

It's designed to address the underlying sense of entitlement students at the World's best universities can have. As these places can be so hard to get into, successful applicants can adopt a defensive "I'm here because I'm the cleverest and deserve it" mentality. For somewhere like Stanford, having a lot of (daddy's) money is, for most students, also a pre-requisite to attending. The Author is exactly right, being born into a family with money does not mean you deserve to be there, even if you did work really hard during grade school and college. The Freshman's are enormously lucky to have been given the chance to study at Stanford and it is up to them to earn their place, retrospectively. Society will be the judge based on their future work.

The message is not so much "don't get comfortable because 50% will be gone by the end of the year" but rather more of "Welcome to Stanford. Understand that you are here though very little of your own merit. You have the opportunity to change that if you work hard and focus on the bigger picture of society and not just furthering your own wealth".

Saying "understand that you are here through very little of your own merit" is a recipe for causing already overly stressed students to do something rash, like jumping out of a building: http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/www/mit-suicides/ (this list isn't even up to date).

Motivating people to work hard to feel like they've earned their place is a completely different thing than reinforcing the doubts and insecurities almost all of them have anyway.

The pressure at this place (and it's the same at any top-tier place) has been almost too much for me to handle sometimes, and that's without foolish words from foolish people designed to increase it.

MIT alum here. I know what you mean; the pressure can be tough. But also, they've got a lot of resources on campus to help.

I'm going to be on campus tomorrow and Thursday if you're interested in meeting up and talking about the stress. My email address is in my profile.

Maybe a more useful rephrasing is that your presence at the institution is a blessing, a gift, given whether you currently deserve it or not. Enjoy the gift and grow into it.

However, for some students attending Harvard, Stanford, Oxford or Cambridge can be an expectation and a realistic one at that if they have been given every opportunity to increase their chances of entry thanks to their parents influence and wealth. I understood the Author to be addressing these students. Perhaps they're a minority, but looking at the ranks of politicians and World leaders (from wealthy families I might add) coming from these institutions, it looks like more than just coincidence to me.

But who is going to address the underlying sense of entitlement of the guy delivering the "go fuck yourself" speech? Spiteful turtles all the way down?

I'm 20, all of my friends are students. I live right next to the university in my city. I know, meet, or merely converse with lots of students, and one thing that kills me is this pervasiveness of expectation that after 4 years (and for some, more than that) of sliding by, they will walk away with a degree and a nice cushy job, regardless of the degree or the effort put forth.

By no means do they all think this, but I find the number who do a bit alarming. The number of CS students I've met that think they'll land a nice cushy developer job just like mine when they couldn't implement a linked list if their lives depended on it is almost farcical. Then again, with the amount of new developer jobs I see in the area, maybe they will. But what of the students going for a degree in something like Religious Studies where employers aren't exactly tripping over themselves to find folks with such a degree and no real work experience to speak of?

Given the costs associated with a bachelors degree in the US at an in-state university, more people need to start drilling realism into the students' heads. These students cannot afford to waste 4 years and something like 10.000 USD per year, not including living expenses. People need to be more realistic and they need to start doing it sooner than the freshman introductory speech because you are right, they won't listen at that point. It's too little too late.

To suggest otherwise is a core affront to their entire cultural outlook. What, you say that once the King creates me as a Baron, I'm not going to automatically be issued a Barony to rule? How dare you claim otherwise?

To some extent aided and abetted by some HR staffers who also buy into the credentialism / title of nobility outlook on life.

Although its annoyingly self perpetuating and popular, it can be a pretty toxic poison in a business setting.

Most college students comes directly from High School. To them (or at least to me at the time) it was a "natural" continuation. We have been in school for over a decade. That's all we've known was to sit in a class room, jot down some notes, and then take some test.

I totally agree, fast forward 10 years, and you realize how much of a privilege it is to do that. I'm doing very well for myself, but most folks aren't. And its because life takes over. You have kids, relationships, bills to worry about. It take an act of Congress to be able to have 30 mins to yourself a day.

Sometimes I joke around and say "Let the kids work first then have them go to school". I would love to see such a program that did that. Perhaps, when I have kids and they grow up, I'll have my kids work for a couple of years, then send them to college. I'm betting that they would appreciate it.

Sometimes you need that break to realize what you want in life.

Maybe they'll be great students and just need a break, in which case I might suggest a backpacking trip and/or internship. Or maybe they'll be unmotivated students barely scraping by in which case I might send them into The Real World to earn money towards their education (and find out why an education is important).

I've thought a _lot_ about why I didn't do very well in college (beyond the obvious procrastination), and what might have helped, and filing those thoughts away for my own kids.

The only problem is that kids want to be with their friends, and if their friends aren't taking a year off then it might be hard to convince them to break away from the pack.

But I went straight into college after high school because a) I was "college bound" and that's what college bound kids did, and b) I would not be eligible for my scholarship if I took time off. I was pretty broke at the time so I needed the scholarship (and couldn't afford a backpacking trip anyways).

I did fine in college but not as good as I could/should have. Like you, I thought a _lot_ about why and in particular I thought about why some people were doing better than me. This is what stood out to me:

When the professors introduced a new data structure these classmates would talk about how they wish they knew about it for a previous project or how it got them thinking about a different way to build something they were working on. The people who were doing better than me had a reason to learn.

I was just learning what the professors told me to learn. If they talked about a new data structure I learned about a new data structure. If they talked about when to use a data structure I learned when to use the data structure.

I was "gifted", "college bound", and all sorts of other labels that presumably light the path to success. But I didn't understand my "gift" and I figure most my early educators didn't either, because they just kept encouraging me to keep doing what I was doing. Which was basically nothing.

Moral of the story is don't let your kids' success blind you to the fact that they really need opportunities to explore themselves and their world. Whether they are "rocking it" or not, you should encourage them to seek these opportunities and help them get to them as much as possible.

I did that. Takes forever. Its called join the .mil in the reserves (ideally while not in an eternal war on multiple fronts, may not work so well in 2013), then get an associates degree basically for free with the GI bill, then get a "real" entry level job with tuition reimbursement, then night school the bachelors, etc. Just keep on upgrading till you're sick of it or lifestyle incompatibility.

It helps to have actual experience in computers / electronics / RF before you take the classes. How weird it must be to first use an oscilloscope in a classroom, or first run a compiler as a school assignment, or first solder something after you're old enough to drink. I never got to experience that, which must be stressful / interesting.

One of my best friends went that route, and when we attended college they were really squared away. As much petty bullshit as professors and graders throw at you, it'll be a drop in a bucket compared with whatever you survived in the service.

Not quite a 1:1 mapping, but the co-op program at the University of Waterloo has students alternate 4-month paid work terms with 4-month school terms over the course of five years.

While I did learn a lot in school, I definitely agree with this sentiment. I'd get a hell of a lot more out of it if I were going now -- ten plus years later -- than I did when I was fresh out of high school.

Of course, it gets a whole lot harder once certain parts of "Real Life" kick in and the ease of dropping everything to spend all of your time learning dissolves in a cloud of uncertainty.

Reading the comments on here I wonder if it's a "tradition" among STEM majors. I honestly thought the pressure, stress, and competition in my program was universal across all fields until I met my current girlfriend. The very idea of a 90% attrition rate or classes that practically required three hours of sleep a night was completely foreign to her. Even the very culture within our programs were radically different. I was subjected to a lot of "Most of you won't get your MDs or PhDs", whereas she had a much more encouraging rather than discouraging environment.

Even first semester calculus wasn't that high of an attrition rate, maybe only 50%. Something I never really understood about the whole process of attrition is most of the dropouts happened during the really easy stuff like basic continuity concept or perhaps definition of basic derivation equation. Then everyone still present when we talked about the derivative of x squared, mostly made it thru diffeqs together although the difficulty ramped up sharply and smoothly over time. Although freshman classes may distribute on some bell curve, or graduating classes may bell curve, I don't think filter classes have a distribution anything like a bell, because then I'd expect people to randomly drop out at a decreasing rate thru the curriculum rather than all at once in the start.

(edited to add there's probably a startup opportunity to "help" attrition rates by introducing prospective EEs to ohms law or similar in other fields. All the ham radio operators (including myself) pretty much slept thru the early classes with straight As so conceptually an early introduction and filter in a non-uni setting should be possible in other fields?)

Isn't that what you'd expect? If the 'easy' stuff was too hard why bother continuing once you know you're out of your depth.

You're a freshman, I take it? If you start giving up on shit as "too hard" now, everything's going to be too hard in the future. Learning only gets harder when you get older. If you need to enroll in a more remedial class first, fine, but don't waste your and your parents' money by avoiding classes that are "too hard" for four years of college. You are what you repeatedly do.

I don't think we came anywhere close to a 1/3rd dropout rate in the classes I took, but then I was LS&A rather than Engineering.

Germany: if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP

U.S.: we don't care too much if you drop out later, as long as you pay your enormous tuition in a timely manner.

That makes sense to me...

if you're not gonna make good use of this education, stop wasting tax payer money ASAP

This is your interpretation. Thing is, it doesn't do more than leave people with a bad feeling. My point is: Whatever you say in a welcome-speech doesn't affect the choices of freshmen in the slightest. People will drop out, that's for sure. But not because some smartass Dean or professor holds a self-righteous speech, but because some students find that university (or that particular subject) isn't for them. They'll find out by EXPERIENCE and not by a stupid speech.

For years, I've heard musings among Americans that suggest motivational speeches do more harm than good to those present. I've often wondered how true that is, because the other side of the coin seems just as detrimental--if not more so--to young, impressionable minds. More importantly, though, I think you're absolutely right: It's experience that's the real teacher, not some bloviating figurehead whose speech will be forgotten before the end of the day. If someone's not cut out for it, no amount of (de)motivation will help. Sink or swim.

Cheers, my friend.

Also, the people who are arrogant self-entitled little sods are not going to listen to the negative speech anyway, they will naturally assume it is directed at the other people and think that their parents connections are all the guarantee of finishing with a good grade that they need, and depending on where they are and what they are studying, they may well be right.

The people who are more likely to take something like that to heart is the nervous rather than the untalented or arrogant.

They didn't say that to discourage people or to imply that they had some failure quota but to let people know that they couldn't expect to just show up and slide though any more like a lot of kids do in high school.

I think it is no mistake if one of the most highly regarded commencement speech is that of David Foster Wallace (aka "The Truth With A Whole Lot Of Rhetorical Bullshit Pared Away"): http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

Also, I have received the "50% attrition" comments (I'm from Belgium). In our computer science class, it was more like 70% attrition. But consider that a big difference is that in our countries, getting in a university is not "achievement". You can litteraly just walk in there and if you can't afford the 1K euros a year it costs, the government will pay for you. This is a good thing -- but it needs no one will tell you that you deserve anything. Neither should it be the case in the US because most of the time, access to these universities are conditioned by factors that are largely out of the student direct control.

Even the comparison with MIT is arguably invalid, as elite tech university admissions are more objective and less discretionary, making the archetypal student less likely both to have an entitled mentality and to have received perks that helped their admission. Perhaps the author wouldn't have objected to the word "deserve" at an MIT convocation, nor at one in Germany.