Schools and certifications

Schools are starting again in Finland shortly and many school-goers are having a difficult time to motivate themselves to do their best. Not so with my cousin, who is very eager to get to first grade, but alas, I fear that even she will wake up one morning and decide that school is annoying. Of course the parents are always going on about how important it is to go to school and do your best, and as is typical, they are right. The motivation, however, may sometimes be borderline despotic: "You'll go to school because the law says so, as do I."

This morning I actually got around to wondering what it is that you actually get from schools. Of course when you look at grades 1-6, you're taught to read, write, do basic mathematical operations. Then of course the long process of conditioning the child to adhere to authorities and to just follow instructions is started. But the further along the road you go, the less important things become. Now, don't get me wrong, learning the history of the egyptians is important, as is learning that F=ma and that you can derive many interesting other formulas from it. But if I reflect what I'm doing in school, most of the lectures are about topics that can't really be applied to real world things, at least not without experience. It's nice to listen to smart people drone on and on about competitive advantage or corporate strategy, but then what? You won't really learn anything as such, nor does the exam grade really tell anything either. The topics are such that you need to go the extra mile yourself and think about them. And even then they'll require years of experience before you can really say that you're starting to understand them.

So, if in primary school you are taught discipline and given a basic set of tools with which you can search for information and process information with, what's the rest about? In some way I can't help but think that it's all a very long and tedious certification process. Sort of like when company XYZ decides that it wants start shipping products that utilize technology ABC as part of a network. XYZ needs to obtain a certificate for their implementation to show others that they know how to talk ABC. Of course XYZ may also skip the certification and just implement the specification and it will still work, even without the certification.

What is the point of a certification, then? As is the case with technology certifications, the lack of school certifications does not necessarily mean that a person is somehow lesser. And from the other side, possessing a certificate that certifies that XYZ's product complies with the ABC spec does not necessarily mean anything, as the certification process may also be flawed. But if the product displays the logo of the certifying organization, it certainly goes a long way to suggest that it should work. It decreases the risk involved. Same goes for schools. Schools ram students through a pipeline, more or less. Some are especially efficient and have a good reputation. Their graduates go on to brilliant places, further enhancing the value of the certifier in the eyes of the clients, in this case the employers who are highering the graduates.

The employer is naturally trying to minimize the risk associated with new recruits, and certificates are one easy way to screen people. If you hold an engineering degree from MIT and it is commonly known that degrees awarded by MIT require quite a bit of work, then the expected value increases as the associated risk for negative outcome decreases and the risk for positive outcome increases. Of course, a person may not be MIT-certified, meaning that the risk increases. But it may be that the person is very brilliant too. But the issue is still that even though every company says that they are highering the top 5%, that can't be true, since then the other 95% of the workforce would be unemployed. So regardless of the fact that rockstar employees are very nice, in the long run you'll end up also employing people who are average, or even below average. And situations like these increase when the company grows. And all of a sudden the fact that you are able to decrease risk, decrease the volatility of candidates, becomes very attractive.

So from one perspective schools can be seen as certificate awarding institutes. Their interest, typically, is to keep up churning out very competitive people. This serves both of their customer groups: the students and the companies employing the graduates. If the graduates are of high quality, the companies will compete more for the graduates. This in turn signals the students that the school has a good reputation and that the graduates from the school are often recruited into good positions. Interestingly enough, though, some schools have to be worse for the other schools to be better. Only 50% of schools can be above average schools, after all.

In light of this, it seems, a rationale player should optimize her studies to be able to obtain certificates with high enough marks to gain access to better schools and earn more certificates. This is at least the route of a risk-averse player. A risk neutral or risk-seeking player, however, may be more satisfied with skipping the certificates and aiming to provide good expected value by looking for unlimited upsides, however unlikely they are. In fact, this trail of thought would lead us to a discussion about how engineers and other boring people are often clustered very closely into the average of a Gaussian distribution whereas artists and other more free-spirited people tend to not follow a Gaussian distribution and instead have more people cluttered at both ends of the scale (i.e. some become very successful and others never break even near to success--think about actors).