Our obsession with elite colleges is making our kids feel worthless | Hacker News Reader

Our obsession with elite colleges is making our kids feel worthless

qz.com

40 pointskornish27 comments

Our obsession with fame/celebrity is the root problem. We want to go to famous colleges, work for famous companies (or start our own famous startup) and companies want to hire famous employees (at least at the executive level).

Fame is a fairly reliable way to quickly evaluate the quality of something (without knowing anything about the subject matter) but it severely limits your options and it's expensive.

Your comment reminded me of PG's "Cities and Ambition" essay. http://paulgraham.com/cities.html

HN seems pretty sure that the only difference between a top-20 residential college and a rural commuter school ranked in the 300s is the wealth of the people attending.

We recognize vast differences in quality between engineers, managers, companies, and code... but not education? Why?

Perhaps because formal-education's relationship to programming-savvy appears more tenuous than some other disciplines?

Imagined quality differences shouldn't be recognised where don't actually exist. To quote the story:

"in David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell draws upon research that shows it’s actually more advantageous for a student to attend a college where they can be in the top 10% rather than in the bottom half of the class. It’s the top students at every college who receive the kind of attention from faculty and access to special programs that pave the way to more opportunity after college."

Two thirds of CEOs didn't go to top schools... That means that 1/3rd of the CEOs were drawn from 2% of the schools. Similarly you find that a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs went to a top school. The network and credibility you get are clearly important. I think most parent realize how tough it has gotten and they saw the shortcoming of their own careers.

> The network and credibility you get are clearly important.

As is the network you go in with.

Expecting your kids to become CEOs is another way to make them feel worthless.

Growing up, it felt like I was raised with the sole purpose of attending an elite college. I took AP classes, did SAT prep, and signed up for all the right extracurriculars, but my heart was never in it, and I couldn't force myself through in the end.

I ended up getting rejected from all but my safeties when applying to colleges. It felt like I was dead inside; I'd go through my daily motions, but I basically lost my interest in living for a while.

A friend of mine is in a similar situation. When we talk about it I often find myself frustrated because I'm the complete opposite.

I was raised in a kind of hippie-environment where I could do what I wanted as long as I got acceptable grades and didn't get into trouble. While perhaps as a result me and my siblings are not the most ambitious of people (at least not conventionally so), I can say that I've had a very happy and even successful life so far. Definitely less stressful than that of many of my friends who were raised to be ambitious (and then weren't able to 'satisfy' this ambition).

Could you tell me more about what you did or what happened to you since that 'for a while' period that you describe? I have no desire to prescribe to my friend what he should do, but I'm kind of expecting a personal crisis of sorts in the near future as he seems to be able to only barely managing the ambitious environment he's in and the anxiety-filled, high-pressure life he's led so far. If/when he doesn't succeed, it might shatter his high expectations. I'd love to hear how others dealt with similar situations.

Sure, I'll share. After my rejections, I kind of fell apart during senior year of high school. I was extremely depressed and ended up almost failing all of my classes. In the end, I barely made it to graduation and was more relieved than happy about finishing.

Post-graduation, I went straight to college and tried to put the past behind me. I started off pretty strong, but it was clear that I still lacked maturity, and my grades took a nosedive during my second semester.

I ended up being disqualified from my scholarships, so I left school for a year to figure things out. I worked full-time and took courses at community college to keep myself busy. It took a lot of effort and introspection, but I finally transferred back to college and started working on my computer science degree.

Now I'm doing much better, having grown a lot as a person. I've also landed two internships since then and gotten involved with plenty of extracurriculars and social activities on the side. My path wasn't as smooth as it could've been, but I don't regret much about my experiences. Failing at a young age taught me to shrug off shortcomings and made me a stronger person for the future.

Well, look at YC's stats on success rate vs. founder went to an elite school.

What are those stats? Just curious.

if there's a positive correlation it can be due to:

- VCs biasing toward founders with an elite school on their resume

- Elite schools offering more opportunities for building a start-up (Stanford, CMU, etc. have separate funds dedicated toward investing in student start-ups)

- Those who go to elite schools usually come from a place of privilege allowing for higher risk opportunities

- Those at elite schools have more connections to get their foot into a VC's door

and so on..

So, are you arguing against elite colleges being worthwhile, or in favor of them? Are we not supposed to use every opportunity we get? That's cute ;)

VCs are probably missing opportunities by biasing in favor of elite universities. Just desserts, of course.

Sure, maybe. One could also claim smart students self select top universities.

This argument is also commonly made in the context of the pool from which companies search for candidates to hire.

The problem with both situations (VC/entrepreneurs and employers/employees) is that there's a cost associated with evaluating a candidate.

I don't think anyone doubts that good opportunities (and candidates) exist at all at lower tier schools, but it seems very likely that there are fewer of them.

If your resources are already constrained by something other than the number of opportunities you can afford to fund/hire (e.g. time to evaluate/interview), then it doesn't make sense to expand your search if it means lowering your success rate.

Elite schools expose you to people with a strong risk tolerance who are aggressively ambitious; this view is not reflected in many other institutions where people are primary looking for a job which leads to solid, middle class employment.

Pretty easy to have a strong risk tolerance when you come from a wealthy background and have an elite degree on your resume. Also, there's very little risk to starting a company these days.

That doesn't obviate the point that it's an asset. If family or the rest of society is willing to bear most of the risk of failure with no upside, why wouldn't a VC take advantage of it?

And since everyone know that correlation equals causation, I guess we can all go home now.

I don't think any HNers aspire to become Chris Christie.

> "Moreover, in David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell draws upon research that shows it’s actually more advantageous for a student to attend a college where they can be in the top 10% rather than in the bottom half of the class. It’s the top students at every college who receive the kind of attention from faculty and access to special programs that pave the way to more opportunity after college."

I thought this theory—mismatch theory—was discredited?

To clarify for future responses, check out this amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas. [0] There is a particularly exhaustive section pp. 14-16.

I bring this up (and prepare myself for the inevitable downvotes) because I feel like this mismatch theory exists only in the particular social debate around affirmative action, not because it necessarily is or is not true (even though mismatch theory is probably not true). Malcolm Gladwell's two stories in David and Goliath and in Outliers—general musings about private schools and musing about football players [1]—plus the one study by a journalist and an economist [2] arguing for Fisher are the entirety of the basis of mismatch theory. There may be two more articles supporting it since the Fisher case went to trial years ago. The amicus I link above must reference a dozen studies refuting it, from a variety of researchers in a variety of contexts. You'd have to believe there was a huge multi-academic conspiracy to simply ignore that evidence—you know, the kind that people think exists with climate change research.

Mismatch theory may be the only argument that is persuasive to these parents, because on the face of it, mismatch theory is consistent with their values for improving their children's positivist success. But what if it's not true? Trying to ignore the reality that the rat race pays off is not going to reduce suicides.

[0] http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/LCCR-an...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/books/david-and-goliath-by... "As usual, Mr. Gladwell’s science is convenient. He has charts to back up his premise about academic success, but how is success measured? In happiness? Salary? Getting jobs, or keeping them? Read the annotations if you must, but they won’t get you far. Mr. Gladwell needs a David-Goliath school story, so he creates one. His version happens to have common sense on its side, even if it is in no way definitive or complete."

[2] https://www.utexas.edu/vp/irla/Documents/ACN%20Richard%20San...

That's not my understanding, for example: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pain...

One site I found to 'debunk' mismatch theory focuses solely on graduation rate as a measure (ie students graduate more at more selective colleges). But that could be due these students transferring out to easier majors or simply graduating with lower grades (as discussed in the Atlantic article above).

One of the co-authors of that Atlantic article is Richard Sander, who's the leading proponent of the mismatch hypothesis and routinely overstates the evidence for it. His original study is based on outcomes for law students who started law school in 1991 -- not necessarily applicable, I'd argue, to undergraduates starting college in 2015 -- and his methodology has been pretty much discredited anyway (see the amicus brief that doctorpangloss cites).

This is off-topic from the original post, but I think the whole mismatch controversy has been kind of a scary illustration of how one determined academic can shape the narrative around an issue: because he's a professor, and because media outlets trust professors (and like controversy), he can easily find a platform to represent the debate in a way that's favorable to his side (e.g. [0]). I don't think it's a crazy hypothesis or anything, and it's definitely worth debating, but I'd be skeptical of claims coming from someone who's staked so much of his career on its validity.

</rant>

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

I think the mismatch theory is catching on because

1) It simply makes intuitive sense 2) There is simply lack of hard data that would disprove it

Ie when you place a group of students whose SAT scores are 250 points below the average, in a competitive environment, they will struggle because there is no AA once inside the university. So this is the default 'makes sense' theory.

If it is actually not true - you have to bring data to bear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com