The question isn’t whether math is a noble pursuit. The question I was addressing (raised in the article) is whether math competitions are for everyone. Of course they aren’t. Any more than wrestling is.
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Math competitions are definitely not for everyone. But they are beneficial for everyone that wants to pursue a career in STEM. Do you HAVE to do them to pursue successful career in STEM? Definitely not! Some people are slow (but deep) thinkers, others just don’t like competing.
But I think that kids should be STRONGLY encouraged to TRY them, and see for themselves if they enjoy them.
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Maybe. But it seems more focused on the academic side of stem. Not entrepreneurial. Are engineers doing math competitions? Would love to know where these kids end up, carrer-wise, not just the tippy top performers.
From an empirical perspective, we aren’t really looking at this quite right. We’d want to take the college AO perspective and compare three types of students who are otherwise similar — took similar courses, got similar grades, similar test scores, etc. — those who win high stakes competitions, those who enter but don’t win, and those who don’t enter. And then see how those three categories predict success in college and in life.
If we DON’T condition them on being “otherwise similar”, then we’re basically saying that a national champion sprinter has a better likelihood of being faster at 25 than the average high school student. Pretty obvious.
If it turns out that those who win don’t do any better later on than other similar students, then the competition itself isn’t helpful as a predictor. It is just a single evaluation at which those folks are more likely to do well anyways.
I have zero clue what the empirical relationship would be.
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I haven’t read studies on that, but I can provide an anecdotal evidence about a student from our local high school. After being extremely successful at these competitions (being on the extended US olympiad team, not sure which science exactly), and graduating from college, he became the founder and CEO of a company with market value over $1 billion.
Does that count?
In the article I previously linked to:
“The conditional probability that an IMO gold medalist will become a Fields medalist is two order of magnitudes larger than the corresponding probability for of a PhD graduate from a top 10 mathematics program.”
That shouldn’t be so obvious, should it?
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My son is an engineer, working at a startup, with a specialty that uses pretty advanced practical math. This is of course always debatable…what is the hardest of anything? He is an electromechanical engineer with a graduate degree in fluid mechanics. As a result, he uses the heaviest lifting maths of both electrical and mechanical engineering. He did math competitions in HS, but only the inter school type in a similar structure to athletic competition, compete locally to advance to state and that’s it. He didn’t participate in the competitions being discussed here, because no one locally does. It’s just not part of the academic culture here. Had he though, I’m sure he would have done reasonably well and would still be working in a practical job in an entrepreneurial environment. That’s a population of 1 though and not the competitions we’re discussing here.
I asked my friends son (headed to a top STEM school always mentioned here) if he knew about these competitions and he said no.
Seems like if these are so beneficial to everyone studying STEM, a lot of work needs to be done to provide access to low income and URM.
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It isn’t that few women participate, it is that few American women participate. The Chinese have an excellent degree of female participation, and run special international contests just for girls. As to where they end up, one of my kids attended a summer camp with lots of overlap with math contest achievers. Their camp alumni club is now headquartered in Silicon Valley
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Just a guess, but if IMO didn’t exist in the United States, I estimate the total number of Fields Medalists during your lifetime would be approximately 52.
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Absolutely. Discarding these competitions as obscure, irrelevant, and not “education” (whatever that is supposed to mean) is not helping to get them more popular.
They definitely advance their education, science fairs e.g., they learn new things, stretch themselves, and it’s a lot of work. That’s probably why I never tried to do it! Also, Olympiad questions are not typically problems you can solve by memorization. Sure you can prep for them but it’s not going to be anything like the SAT or subject tests.
“By contrast, far fewer have access to the necessary resources to participate in the physics contests.”
Agree, you have to be plugged into this competitions, from probably middle school on. And as someone posted, the winners of the science fairs, Olympiads tend to come from similar schools and are more male dominated. Science fairs though may have a higher representation of women, iirc.
“But like I said, my views on the issue aren’t exactly in vogue.”
Well if you consider MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, Harvard admissions to be in vogue, then yeah, your views aren’t in vogue. As I’ve posted before, the MIT adcom blogged from the Intel finals saying these are kids MIT looks for. So they think these kids don’t have a problem with physics.
And this is not a new thing, even in the good old days of the 80s, the regional or state science fair winners did well in admissions.
"If it turns out that those who win don’t do any better later on than other similar students, then the competition itself isn’t helpful as a predictor. "
It’s definitely predictive as the MIT admissions blog indicates, the MIT adcom also met the Harvey Mudd adcom there.
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Several of the best mathematicians in my cohort (late 1980s) got deeply involved in the derivatives revolution and ended up being blamed for the 2008 crash when the banks where they were working had to be rescued by the government. I’d count that as “entrepreneurial”… (and they were certainly financially successful)
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My skepticism comes primarily from the homogeneous profile of the participants. A comment was made way upthread that Asian males see it as their only ticket to elite schools. U.S. women don’t participate as they should. Swathes of geographical areas don’t. Low SES folks don’t.
So while it seems like a great thing to do, it isn’t great for either finding talent or admissions gatekeeping.
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It’s something MIT and Caltech value, just as Harvard and Stanford value legacy status more than most other schools. Still, there are plenty of students at MIT and Caltech that didn’t compete and plenty of students at Harvard and Stanford who aren’t legacies.
More importantly, there’s nothing to say that attending said schools us ultimately better than attending any other. The sum total of NASA facility directors that went to any of the schools above for undergrad is zero. The head of one of NASA’s most famous programs (dual PhD in Math and Physics, professor at Caltech) told me straight up, “It doesn’t matter where you son goes to school. What matters is his drive and curiosity. Some of the most pedestrian engineers that have worked for me were educated at my institution.”
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The NASA facility directors are great bureaucrats, not the best scientists or engineers.
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That isn’t the purpose of these competitions. They are quite useful for preparing kids to think in a different way about the world, and to see things differently than they otherwise would have. My kid didn’t participate long, but will say that the thought processes used were helpful to her 10 years later. They expand the mind, and can be a helpful gathering place for other deep thinkers.
My kid compared them to wilderness hiking, as you were never exactly sure where you would end up, or which path you would take to get there, but the journey was the purpose.
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Totally agree, but it sounds like both schools and parents impute them with significance for college admissions.
Do them if they are authentically fun, but not for admissions. The authenticity is what matters, and admissions will follow, just like every other endeavor.
They are significant because they show a high level of intellectual activity, far higher than any high school could show. For colleges screening for that, they are useful.
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We all do things in our careers that are not fun, but make us more successful. Why do you think it should be different for high school students?
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