There is a common narrative, typified by a recent article from UpWorthy “Gen Z is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents,” that young people are universally coddled, incompetent, or lack conscientiousness. Maybe this is true for some, but I would submit for the top tier and the ‘aspirational class’, it’s the opposite. How does supposed laziness gel with all these stories and anecdotes of kids cramming advanced math and AP courses for competitive schools? Or grueling job interviews, assuming you even get a response at all? I would say it’s the opposite: From landing a decent job or getting into a decent college, everything has gotten more competitive and difficult. Even low-skilled jobs have this dynamic of more screening than ever, necessitating competence.
So why so much competition? An article from Human Invariant, “Hyper-Optimized Children,” offers a compelling explanation:
Regardless of what Twitter says, universities are still the institutional gatekeepers of intellectual social status. They are where most frontier ideas are exchanged and where lifelong peer groups are formed. With AI researcher compensation now on par with top NBA athletes, one should expect increasingly formalized hyper-optimized funnels to extend beyond college admissions and to a prestigious PhD program or top research lab.
Outsized individual returns to status, especially post-Covid, has led to more competitiveness for colleges and careers. At all levels of life–from high school, college, graduate school school, and finally, careers–everything has become harder, due to increased competition and screening. Acceptance rates at elite schools have been trending downward for decades:
It’s not just the Ivy League, MIT, or Stanford–even lesser-known or ‘second tier’ schools–the so-called “Ivy Plus”–have acceptance rates in only in the mid to high-single digits. This includes Duke, the University of Chicago, and Pomona. And on top of outsized returns, there is a second dynamic: affordability, or lack thereof. With homes prices surging with no end in sight–with even major crisis like ’08 or Covid only offering a fleeting reprieve–the only way to secure a piece of the pie without being priced out–is to earn a lot of money, hence necessitating good credentials to get a good job, and subsequently much more competition.
This has led to the admissions process being increasingly optimized, like college prep, math competitions, tutoring, and so on. ‘Calculus before college’ used to be uncommon; now it’s par for the course for today’s aspirational class. Math competitions and ‘summer research projects’ are the only ways of standing out, where even high SAT scores are a dime a dozen, and high-school calculus is downright pedestrian (as many can attest, math competition problems are way harder than the generic ‘junior college calculus class’). At the same time, this is juxtaposed with remedial classes and dumbing-down for the bottom half, as evidence the increasing bifurcation of America, culturally and economically.
As Invariant correctly points out, the returns to elite colleges and elite jobs (like in tech, finance, etc.) are the greatest ever too in terms of income and prestige. And despite Trump populist rhetoric and invective against elites on Twitter, this trend shows no sign of slowing either. When home prices and tech stocks are rising exponentially to no end (high interest rates and tariffs be damned), landing one of these high-paying jobs offers the best hope of not being priced out of homeownership or having the ladder to the upper-middle-class pulled up altogether.
An example I like to give is that as recently as the early 2000s, $80k/year was considered competitive pay for a tech or finance job, even in the Silicon Valley. This was at the nadir of the dotcom collapse and shortly after 9/11. Wages stayed relatively depressed until 2007–2009. What followed was a perfect storm: The combination of the consolidation of surviving financial firms of the ’08 crisis, massive bailouts and fed liquidity (aided by ‘ZIRP’), combined with Microsoft’s then-unprecedented $250 million investment in Facebook in October 2007, valuing the fledgling social network at an astonishing $18 billion. For context, just two years earlier, News Corporation’s $500 million acquisition of MySpace was widely regarded as an obscene sum.
This ignited an arms race for talent in tech and finance, with salaries and compensation packages ballooning accordingly. The trend has never really stopped–cycling from apps and cloud/SaaS in the late 2010s, to delivery platforms in the 2020s (Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc.), and now, inevitably, to AI.
Children intuitively know how much their parents are investing in them, even at a young age. They don’t want to let them down, but their parents’ expectations are so much higher and the competition is so much better that they get sent down this rabbit hole that they had no choice in selecting.
However, I disagree here. A common myth is that parents are the ones pushing reluctant children, when in reality the children themselves are often just as competitive and invested, having fully internalized the hyper-optimization mindset. You can see this by viral videos on social media of admittees showing off their acceptance letters to prestigious colleges. It’s not the parents who are posting these videos. High schoolers know fully-well that these top colleges are a ticket to a successful career and high social status, and this is apparent by the joy on their faces when they make these videos. For example:
@lavi.mantegazza #columbia2026 #acceptanceletter #collegedecision ♬ I Lived – Kenny Packer
Watching her rection to being admitted to Columbia, she may as well had won the Mega Millions (the video got 325k ‘likes’).
I agree that it is individually rational, but disagree that it is collectively insane. A more competitive and optimized society means everyone benefits to some extent indirectly, including non-participants. For example, a more competitive hiring process, even for low-skilled jobs, means better-qualified employees, which in turn means greater employer satisfaction, productivity, and higher customer satisfaction from better service (in theory at least). More competitive medical school admissions should mean better doctors. If you compare the post-War trajectories of the US vs the UK, it’s apparent that the former, by being more competitive and a magnet for top talent, has pulled way ahead economically.
Another common argument, which comes off as ‘cope’, is that cramming for tests is not the same as intelligence. Or the belief that ‘strivers’ are not actually that smart, because they try hard. The latter argument fails when one considers the enormous post-Covid returns to elite jobs and status, as mentioned above. It’s not so irrational to cram and study when the returns are so great in terms of prestige and careers, provided one’s individual preferences are aligned towards status seeking and the accumulation of capital, versus ‘learning for the sake of learning’. And I will add a third factor: student loan debt. If you’re paying a fortune on tuition, why wouldn’t you want to get the most out of it by studying hard?
Second, cramming is itself a subset of intelligence–specifically, long-term memory and recall. Imagine if every SAT or LSAT question were released in advance, with one catch: there are a thousand of them, and you’d have to study and memorize them all. It would still stand to reason that the most intelligent test-takers would memorize the entire set and score the highest.
The strivers were right all along. The 2025-2026 collapse of crypto has doused cold water on the dreams riches without college or careers. In spite of the endless insistence by pundits, AI isn’t going to take all the white collar jobs away either or make work obsolete, as many are hoping in order to reconcile one’s own low status or failure to attain those lucrative jobs in the first place. This isn’t to say the system cannot be improved or that there aren’t alternatives to college and careers, but credentialism is still the only game in town, and I don’t see this changing. For all the noise made by Twitter and politicians about housing affordability and “unreasonable” zoning laws, there is scant impetus to actually do anything about it. The unspoken solution is always the same: ‘earn more’.
Sam Altman and his cohort epitomize this reality, as do the thousands of millionaires tech firms have minted over just the past fifteen years. If you landed an AI job three to five years ago, odds are you’re already among them. That is what’s at stake. Even Trump, notwithstanding his shallow pandering to manufacturing and ineffectual calls to “return jobs to America,” gets it, which is why he keeps cozying up to tech elites and floating billions for AI infrastructure in the name of American competitiveness against China. No amount of elite-scapegoating or nostalgia for a “less competitive” past is going to change that.