Comment by Lawtonfogle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lawtonfogle | Hacker News Reader

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>What you don't get is a "better education". (Edit: Some have pointed out rightly that I should differentiate here between top non-elite instututions and the ones that are diploma mills, so to be clear, what I'm saying doesn't apply to the diploma mills.)

In my experience, it is more nuanced than even that. Just take computer science. There are schools that teach languages. You'll spend a semester with C, then a semester with C++, then one with Java. And then there are colleges that teach concepts. Let's look at memory management (and pointers), then let's look at data structures, then let's look at networks. Personally, the latter seem to be a far better education even if the overall experience leads to less initial skill at any given language.

Or take a look even with the same college between degrees. Some science tracks requires statistics for business majors where they will spend a day learning how to sum numbers. Other science tracks require statistics for science and engineering, where multi-variable calculus is a prerequisite. Now imagine if the degree requiring the simplified statistics was switched to requiring the harder version.

(All this being said, I agree connections are a bigger deal. I think what you learn does differ between colleges, but at the end of the day it isn't what you know but who you know.)

Your peer group makes a big difference too.

I attended undergrad at a big state school. My classmates were largely representative of the top 30% of my high school - people who are either gifted with raw intelligence, or who do well by working hard. My school had good sports teams, and the student body spent a lot of time and effort cheering for the teams, partying, and generally having a good time. I certainly enjoyed myself, though the academic standards were so lax that I was able to pass an entire semester where I attended no classes other than the exams. There are a lot of people who just aren't interested in the academic side of school.

Some years later, I went to a much more prestigious school for my MBA. This school didn't really have an athletic department (as a Division III school they were not allowed to issue athletic scholarships) and the student body as a whole was both smart and hard-working. I mean, sure, they drank their share too -- but learning was considered cool and group projects (while drinking, of course!) were a perfectly acceptable way to spend a Friday or Saturday night.

That attitude is infectious and it sticks with you. Once there is positive peer pressure to learn, suddenly everyone becomes invested in everyone else's success. You go from "I heard that class was an easy A so I'm gonna take it" to "I think that class looks really interesting. Want to take it with me?" Extrapolate that from school to life and you start to see why graduates of these elite schools on the whole tend to be more successful.

Extrapolate that from school to life and you start to see why graduates of these elite schools on the whole tend to be more successful.

And yet what this research and other studies like it are showing is that, for STEM majors, the kind of people you are talking about are equally successful regardless of where they go to school. The school itself doesn't add anything to their success; it's just that those who are going to be more successful anyway, regardless of school, are better at getting into harder-to-get-into schools.

And as for the connections, these comments keep talking about how the better schools give you better connections. If so, this research showing no mid-career earnings advantage suggests that if those "better" connections are worth anything at all, it isn't money or things that show up as more money such as better jobs, more access to jobs, more job stability, etc. My interpretation, though, and my own experience, is that the connections ARE worth money, but that birds of a feather soon flock together after graduation, regardless of where they went to school. Stanford and MIT engineers don't go to the same school, and if you have as much in common with them out in the working world as they have with each other, you will soon have similar connections and similar lives.

>Extrapolate that from school to life and you

Make the wrong assumption that this article illustrates. I think the only difference you really observed was between undergrad and grad school and had little to do with the prestige of the school.

Definitely not; the schools just had very different student body profiles. And the big state school I went to for undergrad wasn't a bad school, it just wasn't very challenging because the student body was so diverse in terms of background / intelligence. IMO that caused a lot of the students to slack off, and the school had a "party" culture as a result. Half my high school classmates went there, so I had a built-in friend network already.

Contrast with the undergrads at my grad school (I did a bunch of hackathons and pitch competitions with the undergrads, so I worked with quite a few of them), nearly all of whom were the smartest kid in their high school. Some were pricks, some were more humble, but god damn, every single one of those kids was ambitious.

This is probably the biggest difference. When you go to a really selective college, you're in a community that values academic achievement.

I'm at a community college right now, doing gen-eds, and I absolutely dread all group work because the vast majority of my classmates are a) completely unprepared for the class or b) completely indifferent to actually working. Some of it is immaturity, but a lot of it is the fact that kids at a community college tend to be lower-caliber students. There are some who are doing the exact same thing as me - saving money, saving the commute - but they're outnumbered by the "Welp, I couldn't get into Yale, but Mommy and Daddy want me to go to college, so here I am."

As a result, I'm a try-hard in classes that I'm paying for. I mostly grin and bear it, as I'm saving several thousand dollars per year by taking gen-eds at the CC, but there are times that I think, "You know, if I were in class with people who actually gave a shit, I'd probably get more out of it."

I'm in the same boat and it can be quite frustrating. The main issue that I've found is most of my classmates tend to be people who are "dipping their toes in" to the water of higher education and aren't sure what they want to do. It's very non-committal and many of them also aren't interested in putting the effort in (yet).

It's unfortunate, as discussions are not nearly as engaging as they could be.

What was your degree in? Not attending any of my engineering classes would almost guarantee a fail.

CS; I did all the labs and homework at the beginning of the semester and turned it in online. It was a huge state school, so even the hardcore engineering classes had lecture sections of 200+ students. It was far easier to get away with than I had expected.

I studied Software Engineering, and it was an ongoing debate in the school of IT as to whether a University should even teach programming languages.

In Australia we have a clear distinction between Universities, which typically teach the underlying theories and ideas of things like engineering, biochem, etc (the why) and TAFE (Technical and Further Education), which typically teach how to do stuff like welding and being a lab technician (the doing).

It's vary rare that a graduating mechanical engineer can weld, for example, because the University doesn't teach them that.

I personally think programming falls into the category of doing (like welding), but in this case it's difficult to teach the why of computer theory without having done some programming, but it's perfectly easy to teach the physics and math of building a bridge without ever having used a welder.

The reason why universities do not teach welding, is because it would become too clear to everybody involved that the teacher is not particularly a good welder. If he were, he would be welding and not teaching. The same holds true for programming.

It is possible that some people teach for the enjoyment and gratification of it. Some of my lecturers are excellent programmers.

Good programming skills are not necessary to teach CS, but that does not imply that teaching CS is a sufficient condition for having bad programming skills. (Propositional Logic 101, taught by someone who may or may not be good at programming).

Though it might still be a good idea for an EE to know how to solder, or a civil engineer to have at least visited a construction site.

In the UK To get Chartered status as a civil engineer you have to have time on site managing a project.

> It's vary rare that a graduating mechanical engineer can weld, for example

Funnily enough, the software engineers from my university (U of Auckland) are all taught how to weld, because all engineering students are (were?) sent to the technical college across the road for a short machine-shop course.

I'd say it was useful for the mechanical engineers and related disciplines, maybe civil engineering, but for most of us it was a bit of a non sequitur (though interesting to some.)

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