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Computers aren't just doing hard math problems and showing us cat videos. Increasingly, they judge our character. Maybe we should be grateful.
A company in Palo Alto, Calif., called Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements.
Those are among the things that normally earn a good or bad credit score, but these people haven't been in the working world that long. So Upstart looks at their SAT scores, what colleges they attended, their majors and their grade-point averages. As much as job prospects, the company is assessing personality.
The idea, validated by data, is that people who did things like double-checking the homework or studying extra in case there was a pop quiz are thorough and likely to honor their debts.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/using-algorithms-to-determine-character/
[Other Companies Involved With Similar Programs]: ZestFinance , Workday
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:55AM
I would differ with you here. What moral obligation is there when children in the United States have college and student loans marketed to them from an early age? In my case, they started in earnest in the 4th Grade, and that was 30 years ago. I recall distinctly them throwing sops to "getting scholarships to pay for college!!" only to find that when it came time to apply for those scholarships for matriculating at a university that charged $30K/yr that 90% of them were for minorities or special classifications which did not apply to me, and that 100% of them were for, say, $1000. So, let one high school graduate be incredibly awesome and win 30 of those $1K scholarships to pay for *one* year of college? Anyway college and student loans were universally, relentlessly marketed to me with the understanding that a college degree from a respected university was the key to a successful future!
Fast forward a few decades, and come to find out that, surprise, surprise, holding degrees, even advanced ones from one of the top 10 universities in the world, doesn't count for shit. So, well tough luck we're not going to uphold our part of the social contract that if you work & study hard and get good, solid degrees from respected colleges that you'll have career success! But hey pay up, bitch!
I say let the banks and student loan companies and the colleges burn.
This is excellent advice and I highly recommend any Soylentil with kids who will someday go to college to remember it. I know it's my plan A for my own kids, who are 4 & 6 years old now. College in America is already ridiculously expensive, and it will only get exponentially worse by the time they're in high school if the whole Ponzi scheme that it is doesn't collapse before then. Germany lets foreign students go to college for free. As such I'm teaching my kids the German I learned as an exchange student there in high school; they're gonna need it.
Plan B is to teach them how to get a college-like education by finding stuff online, building portfolios of work they have done, and teaching them how to network through apprenticeships and internships. In the end, it's about what you can do and who you know, not about some stupid expensive piece of paper.
Washington DC delenda est.