Para-style and Marine-style selection

[pozorvlak]

The article about Harvard's selection procedures I linked to a while ago drew an interesting distinction, between "treatment effects" and "selection effects". Harvard, it claims, is largely a selection effect institution, which means that it produces outstanding graduates basically by selecting only outstanding students. By contrast, it claims that the US Marine Corps is a treatment effect institution, which is "confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier". I'm suspicious of this, but I'll get back to that in a minute. It reminded me of a related distinction: I don't know if there's a proper terminology for this, but I've always thought of it as the "Para-style selection versus Marine-style selection" distinction. Allow me to briefly explain.

The Parachute Regiment ("Paras") and the Royal Marine Commandos are two elite British infantry formations of roughly comparable standard. Not as elite as the SAS or SBS, but I believe that they provide most of the recruits to those units. But their approaches to training and selection (which are pretty closely intertwined: to a good approximation, you make the grade if you survive the training) are, from what I've read, very different. The Paras take the attitude that everyone's on his own, and that they don't care if you fail: in fact, they're actively trying to fail people. This attitude persists into the unit, which is very much "every man for himself": in the cadets, I was once taught sniper drill by a Para, which went "Dash, dive, down, look for muzzle flashes, then if you can't see the sniper, get the least popular member of your unit to jump up and run for twenty metres to draw fire..."

The Marines, by contrast, want you to pass if possible. If they can get you through the Commando course (without cheating, mind: some day, their life may depend on you), then they will. Their ways of helping are not necessarily pleasant, but they do help.

Oxford, in my experience at least (and totherme agrees), is mostly Marine-style. It's bastard hard, lots of people have to take a year off, but you hardly ever hear of someone dropping out. ETH in Zurich, by contrast, is apparently Para-style: their maths course has a 50% drop-out rate in the first year alone. They don't care, it doesn't affect their funding, and they get more applicants than they can care about.

As the Marine/Para or Oxford/ETH comparisons both show, either approach can produce good results (my flatmate went to ETH, and he certainly knows his stuff). But in academia at least, I think I prefer the Marine approach. You've got to think about the costs as well as the benefits of a scheme, and the Para approach seems to me to have the great disadvantage of a large number of dropouts who could have done great things with a bit more help.

So, readers: what do you think? What approach did your university take? Do you think this is an interesting distinction?

[As for the US Marines: I suspect that, ironically, they use Para-style selection. They'll take anyone, but they're confident that if you don't meet their standards you'll drop out at some point during training. Certainly Jarhead gives that impression: Swofford says that the marines who assessed his sniper induction would have been happiest not to pass any candidates, as it would confirm the elite status of their unit.]

Comments

[the-barlow.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that "Para-style selection" involves using the selection procedures developed for the Paralympics! :D

It's actually quite a big issue with education, especially in the private sector, as there are many selective schools who select bright pupils on the basis that they will be guaranteed to get good results and then wave those results at rich, gullible parents who will be convinced that the pupils achieved those results because of the treatment, and not the selection, and so the school is worth paying exorbitant fees for when in fact it's all a big con!

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[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yes... certain schools *cough*Winchester*cough* are famous for rejecting applicants if their ages are on year boundaries, because they won't count towards exam league tables.

[the-barlow.livejournal.com]

In my area there are quite a few independent schools who've capitalised on the fact that there are a small handful of others which are very good and there are also an awful lot of thick parents with a lot of money.

The bad private schools convince the thick parents that because the good ones have such a fantastic reputation then this is a reflection on the independent sector as a whole and so if they send their kids to the crap schools for an extortionate fee they'll get a good education (Which they won't), so the parents send their children to these schools (especially if they've already been rejected by the good ones). The kids then go to the crap schools and get told "if you don't get us some nice league table figures you're out", so they all get private tutors who then end up teaching them all the stuff their teacher's can't (My mother used to do private maths tutoring)!

These schools then make a big thing of their league table results by comparing them with the mixed comprehensives who all have the kids who wouldn't have had a hope of getting into the selective schools if they tried (my old school, and the school I was at for my last placement both have large special needs units, for example), so the comparison's totally pointless!

[/rant]

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[terpsichore1980.livejournal.com]

In education I generally subscribe to the Marine approach, up to a point. The "up to the point" bit probably comes from my complete lack of patience.

The real Marine approach doesn't seem to have done my cousin much harm, although he is a Marine medic so possibly it doesn't apply to the same extent, and I didn't know him before he was a Marine, so perhaps he is just an ok guy.

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

It depends on what you want from your education. Personally I didn't want to spend my university life being made to feel like I was in a big competition, so on the back of my own prejuidices about Oxford or Cambridge I didn't really consider either one as somewhere I wanted to do my degree. From what you say here I might have been misguided in my prejudices, but hey, I definitely don't regret going to Glasgow! For me the goal of getting to university wasn't ever about just my degree, it was getting away from home, meeting new people, and doing random things like GUST or whatever equivalent I would have found at another university.

The fact that neither of them offered a course I really wanted to do also played a big part.. but hey, this isn't really relevant to what you said...

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

Oh, and just to prove my point, i've spelt 'prejudices' wrong. Heh.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Hey, I don't regret coming to Glasgow either :-) From what I've seen, Glasgow students have more fun than Oxbridge students. The pace here is a lot less insane. And yeah, AFAIK neither Oxford nor Cambridge offers a Film & TV course, or anything comparable. Though I did once go to a lecture by the News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Studies... she didn't have a clue what she was talking about, unfortunately :-(

[wholepint.livejournal.com]

I would be surprised if you'd regretted coming to Glasgow! ;)

[sable-veins.livejournal.com]

I got taught sniper drill by a Royal Green Jackets sergeant, which is not quite as impressive. Although they do march slightly faster than everyone else, and were the first regiment to stop wearing those nasty clashy red jackets to war, and also have more VCs than any other regiment, as they are more than willing to tell you given five seconds in their company. They also claim to have the brightest squaddies, which is like having the sharpest butter.

Anyroad, an interesting comparison indeed. Not really the university type, but if I may compare to drama schools, perhaps selection effects are best demonstrated by LAMDA, who have access to some of the best candidates, and reputdely work up from their abilities, and treatent effects by East 15, who have a more thorough and feedback-oriented audition system, but are reputedly severely method, and will strip students down to nothing before completely restructuring their abilities into strong, adaptable, but often disturbed actors. Furthermore, if actor training fits Royal Marine-style selection, and it tends to, then the industry itself is very much Para-style.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

The Green Jackets have the most VCs? I'm mildly surprised - I would have thought the Gurkha Rifles.

"Stripping students down to nothing before completely restructuring their abilities into strong, adaptable, but often disturbed actors" sounds a bit like the first year of the Oxford maths degree. We had to forget most of our intuitions and prove everything in immense rigour for some time. When we were allowed to be less formal later, our intuition was a lot more reliable for having done the rigorous stuff.

[totherme.livejournal.com]

"sounds a bit like the first year of the Oxford maths degree"

From what I've heard, the acting thing is a bit more scary... The maths degree will show you that your previous rigorous reasoning intuitions were wrong, and will fix them - which can feel like a fairly major thing when you're in the middle of it. But that's quite a small part of your life and self when compared to the raw materials that those actors work with - I've heard that they actually systematically dismantle their entire personalities as the initial part of their training. That is to say, all their feelings.

I only have a single source mind - a single conversation with a theatre producer/admin friend of mine. Having said that, sable_veins does seem to be hinting at the same stuff... Perhaps he'll confirm or deny my assumptions. From what my friend mentioned of their methods in that conversation, it did seem to be grey-area UN human rights stuff...

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

From what I've heard, the acting thing is a bit more scary
Yeah, I'm sure it is.

[the-barlow.livejournal.com]

"Stripping students down to nothing before completely restructuring their abilities into strong, adaptable, but often disturbed actors"

It sounds a bit like first year moral philosophy at Glasgow too. They taught meta-ethics before they taught practical ethics, which was effectively a way of telling people their opinions were totally subjective and irrelevant before asking them their opinions on things!

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