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Comment by akhilcacharya | Hacker News Reader

It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.

The flagship university in each state actually always has some very very bright students. The very elite schools don't accept many students and the admissions criteria are far from perfect so a ton of students who would be good enough for top tier schools end up going to state schools. I know a couple different people who were top of their high school class and within a question or two of perfect on their SATs that happily went to state schools.

Lots of people get accepted to fancy-ass schools but then can't afford to attend, and state schools will bend over backwards to get those people.

Is this still true? Most of the top schools today appear to have pretty generous aid compared to my undergrad, which was a state school. Only exception I can think of could be out of state public schools like Berkeley or Georgia Tech or CMU.

Every year the ratio between talent and seats at elite schools grows. Elite schools don't grow with the size of the general population.

stanford provides need based aid. if your parents’ earnings are high enough to not qualify for full aid, but have financial circumstances that make it infeasible to attend, you get crunched.

In the U.S., one's undergraduate institution does not correlate to success as much as it does in certain countries like France or Japan, where universities are a pipeline for elite selection and grooming.

Also, not all intelligent American kids can or want to go to elite schools, even if they are academically qualified. In the U.S., you often hear stories of kids turning down really good schools for ones they felt were a better "fit" (financially, culturally, etc.). And unlike the rest of the world, elite colleges in the U.S. are often private and expensive. Despite need-blind admissions, not everyone can afford them without going into heavy debt. (many middle-class parents make just enough money for their kid to not qualify for substantial financial aid).

So kids go to schools they can afford.

One of my college professors (who attended Princeton and MIT) once told me that in his observation, the top 5 percentile students in (good) state schools aren't that different from the kids who went to Princeton or MIT. I didn't believe him at the time, but having worked with different folks over the years, my experience inclines me to believe that there's some truth in that observation.

Owing to its population and economy, the U.S. has a large enough talent pool that the top percentile students at large, well-funded state schools (of which UMN is an example) are plenty smart. If you were to meet the really smart top-5-percentile kids from such state colleges (I have), you'd have no doubt that many of them could have attended MIT or CMU.

To be sure, good colleges can give you a headstart in life -- but it's what you do with that advantage that counts.

Examples of smart computer folk who went to decent, but non-elite schools for undergrad:

Doug Crockford (Javascript), SFSU

JJ Allaire (ColdFusion, Rstudio, etc.), Macalester College

Ward Cunningham (Wikis), Purdue

Rich Hickey (Clojure), SUNY Empire State (though he did go to Berklee College of Music)

John Carmack (Doom, Quake), U. Missouri Kansas City

Sergey Brin (Google), U. Maryland College Park (before Stanford)

Larry Page (Google), U. Michigan (before Stanford)

Dave Cutler (VMS, Windows NT), Olivet College

Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), U at Buffalo

Ryan Dahl (Node.js), UCSD, then U Rochester

Larry Wall (Perl), Seattle Pacific U (before Berkeley)

Alan Kay (Smalltalk, windowing GUIs), U Colorado, then U Utah.

Brendan Eich (Javascript, Mozilla), Santa Clara U (before UIUC)

> Owing to its population and economy, the U.S. has a large enough talent pool that the top percentile students at large, well-funded state schools (of which UMN is an example) are plenty smart. If you were to meet the really smart top-5-percentile kids from such state colleges (I have), you'd have no doubt that many of them could have attended MIT or CMU.

> To be sure, good colleges can give you a headstart in life -- but it's what you do with that advantage that counts.

I just graduated undergrad from a state school (Rank #49 in CS) but I'm still pretty skeptical of this fact.

Then it says more about you than it does about those schools.

I graduated from a school that I think was #40 when I was there and got a job at one of the top tier companies but each person has their own experiences. Now people couldn't care less about where I went to college (also fun fact my GPA was 3.2 so it wasn't even that good but luckily no one cares about that either).

Thanks for the list but I am not entirely sure about Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s alma mater.

Interesting fact: those two went on to create the search engine Google. You should check it out.

I meant I am not sure about their alma mater not being among the top reputed universities in USA, meaning I implied they were indeed from one of the top reputed universities in USA.

Apologies for not making myself clear enough :(

You can google them. :)

Looking back. I should have gone to my in-state school. There might be an incremental difference in quality, but I would not have rushed to get it done a year early, and would have actually done meaningful research and probably PhD.

This is incredibly elitist.

It’s not elitist, it’s just dumb.

The so-called Ivy Leagues miss out on people who peak in academic ability after high school, plus there are more excellent people than there are spots at Ivy Leagues. The upper echelons of pretty much every standard university are going to have equally competent people.

Non-American here -- what is wrong with UMN? I visited once, and it seemed like a decent university.

I'm sure it's fine, but it's not Harvard or Stanford or MIT - it has a 45% acceptance rate similar to my school (~45-51%). AFAIK it's not even considered a public Ivy like UMich or UW or UNC.

Might be true for the university as a whole, but many of the colleges at Minnesota are quite selective. The College of Science and Engineering is one example, accepting 1177 out of 14,000 applications for 2017.

More context on the big differences in selectivity between colleges: Minnesota used to have "General College"[1] which, by design, admitted every student regardless of qualifications. That was changed in 2005, but the legacy of inclusion over selectivity lives on in some places.

I can say that CSE was very selective when I was there, and getting into upper division was even harder. But overall I don't think acceptance rate is a very useful statistic because program size affects it so much.

[1] http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2005/06/10_ap...

Does being a public Ivy really mean anything? I went to Miami Universiry and it didn't really seem like anything special.

That's funny. Cray came out of UMN. He basically made CDC and Cray Research, which of course made the history of computing.

Since you clearly like math, suppose there are 20 million students applying to college every year. One million of them are very bright (2-sigma intelligence). Suppose that every Ivy League accepts around two thousand students every year. Can the sum of Ivy Leagues fit all of the smart people?

Bonus question: What if we change our constraints to only account for 3-sigma people? Does our conclusion change?

Of course there's a distribution of those folks at all other universities, especially at top public ivies like GTech and UCB. But the cumulative effect of being at a lower tier institution can be pretty significant when searching for future opportunities. One thing I've noticed among people at my school is that even if they are very capable, they often don't apply to top internships, top programs for grad school etc, just because they don't see it as an option.

I think you made an astute observation: top people at lower ranked schools sometimes don't apply to top internships or grad schools because they don't see it as an option.

This speaks to their lack of confidence more than their capability. Perhaps that is one of the advantages a good school, a good peer group, or a good network can confer: the confidence to aim higher.

People don't think they're good enough... which may be true, but no one can truly know until they try. Self-limiting thinking is particularly prevalent in rust-belt cities and regions where knowledge or achievement is not prized, so people in knowledge-intensive fields have no models to emulate.

And sometimes when they try (it's not unusual for graduates of lower ranked universities to send out 300+ resumes only to get single digit responses), they get demoralized when they don't succeed on their first few tries, when in fact there's more than one path in life -- if one doesn't have natural advantages, one might have to embrace the more circuitous path(s). This can mean joining a startup, going to a better grad school than one's undergrad, moving to a better city to upgrade one's peer groups (this is more important than most people think [1]), etc.

Life can surprise you if you keep trying and pivoting (ugh cliche, but there it is). There's an element of randomness and stochasticity in a free market, and I've seen enough counterexamples to distrust a static conception of how things "should be". (except for some stodgy areas like investment banking that only hire from certain schools; but even then there are backdoors)

* You're a new graduate, and the hardest hurdle you have to overcome is to get in the door. If you manage to do that and are able to prove yourself, your undergrad degree will become less and less and important. If you google Fortune 500 company CEOs, especially in non-tech companies, (you can do this exercise for yourself) you will learn that many of them went to non-elite schools for undergrad. For all its elite colleges, America is not really an academic-technocratic society (unlike countries like Germany where most CEOs have Ph.D.s). There are elements of William James' pragmatic philosophy that still influence the thinking in this country -- getting results is more important than academic knowledge.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

nothing is wrong with UMN - OP is making a joke based on the common refrain that Google only hires Stanford/Harvard kids.

Being at Google it's pretty rare to see a Stanford or Harvard new college grad.

It's more common to hear large public Engineering universities & technical institutes.

How many students does Harvard graduate each year? How many employees does Google have? If one year Google hired the entire math and CS graduating class of Harvard, would it still be "pretty rare" to see one of those people at Google?

Harvard you'll see more in the Cambridge or NY office. And at Facebook (and Microsoft, but maybe not anymore) due to the founder's alumni network.

And as another mentioned, Google is so big that most hires can't be from a few small schools.

umn is #30 according to us news. not top 10 but still very good.

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