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

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

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