We live in a world of rejection letters, poor grades and disillusioning resumes.
We test people. We test exhaustively. I been to hundreds of test in differing magnitudes until this day. They wanted to know my language skills, how good can I do math? Is it possible for me to drive a manual stick shift vehicle. Some test made sense and good for the individual as for the community. Some did little sense though?
What do we test for? Ability, natural talent, aptitude or plain old memorization potential? Why do we need tons of people to get in colleges. Are they doing any better? And the magnitude of testing situation was projected to get backed up year after year. There are more prospective college student every year around the globe, more college graduates, more job applicants, more Green Card applicants. More of everything in we can imagine to categorize.
Current situation
In today’s world whether you are a student, a prospective employee or just about anything that involves a process of selection and elimination. There would be more people to compete with you. Also this competition will be carried on deeper waters than any point of the history. Because the enrollment rates on tertiary education plans continues to rise, as it is generally believed to be the way to get and hold onto a job that is not a dead-end to the holder.
Similar to job market students on different parts of their educational careers often see challenges. For example US has seeing unprecedented college admission rates in the last 4-5 years. Brutal entrance exams such as Gaokao in China and all the shallow and shady processes that comes with them like admission scandals, stolen tests, private tutors, donors vs equality of opportunity problem that would make you rethink the whole picture of education admissions.
Why this all had to happen?
For most of the time it’s simple economics, it really is and for the best of it, it really should be! Every agent (Employer, school, agency, accelerator or fund) behaves rationally to make their best outcome on their lowest or moderate efforts. Suggesting otherwise wouldn’t be only challenging to defend but also inefficient to develop solutions to combat their worst possible outcomes that we encounter on our daily lives.
Having said that I should point my argument on this: We became so invested around this process of eliminating that we have created systems around it. Systems that have no other forms without eliminations. And for a long time nobody, seriously stand up to call upon it.
Even with or without the powers of Covid-19 the crushing experience of employee screening and college application filling is expected to continue. Because there will be efforts pointed directly at you when you applied for a job or entered a specific college. So I wouldn’t expect this concepts to be changed overnight.
But
Do we really need to open a Google Forms to collect applicants for your university’s STEM project’s fair?
Do you really need to get 30.000+ applications to only accept 25 of them so that your programs' selectiveness stands near the top. Hey congrats to you! I couldn’t have thought of a better way to arrange this business since everything you do is just arrange some people in your inner cycle to come and present in a co-working and collectively circle-jerk about your selectivity.
Do we need to pre-screen and elimination for best ideas to make a blog post about how to tackle the negative effects of climate change?
The point is this: you would want to make the opportunities you are giving to other people to be as accessible as possible regardless of time, social network and cost constraints. If the work you are putting out is not tied to you being invested in a person or a person so much that you should pre-screen. Otherwise focus on creating accessible materials.
Because
People tend to forget, they miss deadlines.
Some amazing people may not know about your application form about a close call get-together just because they never met you and never meant to be in the get-together in the first place. But they may see the materials you put out for open-access usage and who knows what your or your team’s collective work can amplify!
Even super-inclusive hyper-sensitive ones of us may miss little details here and there that may prevent people to join because of various reasons.
Yes, selectivity means something sometimes including everybody’s means losing touch with your community because you started to lack a common language. Then you shall compartmentalize! Keep your inner talk with insiders but keep sharing your wisdom with outer space. This is the way to convert or convince others to you have a strong message indeed. It’s an another way to re-state your impact.
Covid-19 showed us that in challenging times as we are in right now. It is important to make grassroots changes on how we amplify our impact and to whom? In what clauses and pathways? Even though simple economics directs our way of moral and monetary investment on people and causes should be on economic equilibrium. I doesn’t necessarily mean you should always do a selection before you hand out the material. Rather look for an efficient point where you can get invested in selection and elimination at the lowest points and still allow others to make use of your knowledge, and network and other things. With or without knowing the other parties directly. You may never know exactly how people are prone to change and how their change periods may produce.
