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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Education has value. Degrees are merely a conveyance of an education. The educational institution is an indicator of the educational rigor. None of these are perfect indicators.

If you're interviewing candidates and you have a candidate graduating from Stanford, one from MIT and one from Middle-of-Nowhere State - which candidates are you going to prefer? We can argue whether such preferential judgement is justified. Living near the East Coast I can tell you I've met my share of MIT grads who are idiots and Middle-of-Nowhere State grads who've been really good. Yet the perception persists. Why? Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-of-Nowhere State hasn't. Those handful of exceptional graduates skew people's perception of reality for a really long time.

Who knows? Maybe this scandal will change people's perception of these elite schools but I doubt it.

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One of the best engineers I ever met went to a school you never heard of. He couldn't afford to go to MIT.

None of our team went to elite schools, we've all worked with elite individuals (also not from elite schools).

I didn't even go to university, but through hard work, perseverance and a TON of luck, have been able to work my self up to some interesting places.

I know when I'm hiring, I look more at where a person has worked than the school they have come from.

When I was in high school I was told there’s not really any such thing as “can’t afford MIT” as in, if you get in, they will make sure you can pay for it through grants/loans/etc.

Was that never true? Has that changed? Or by “can’t afford” do you mean “unwilling to take on debt” which is valid ... I’m just trying to understand that part of your story.

I'm not sure if it's still true, but that was a development that occurred in the mid-to-late 2000s. Before then financial aid was aimed at poor students. But if your family was middle class, you'd get virtually nothing (but loan options).

I know several people who attend UIUC with me who got accepted to MIT, Stanford, etc, but their parents couldn't afford private school.

But by the time my sister went to school, all the elite schools offered better terms.

Moving to Boston and living there is expensive. Some people can’t just leave their family behind for 4 years. There are more costs to College than tuition. There’s also the opportunity cost of going to college instead of working and earning a salary now.

I can share my story. I am a first generation student that applied to in-state universities in CA. When I got the acceptance package I got sticker shock when I saw the cost of attendance nearing $40,000. I didn't know how things worked and I didn't know how to navigate the system nor who to talk to. My reaction was one of aversion, I can't go into such large debt. Loans can cover anything, but I don't know how to be in debt, I always paid for everything up front. So I went somewhere cheaper that I felt I could afford.

In retrospect, someone that knew about this stuff would have told me that I could have received better financial aid, and I was probably misinterpreting some of the financial numbers. I mean, I was on my own, an 18 year old kid that was jumping into a scary world of getting into debt. I don't want none of that, give me something affordable.

From personal experience I can say that there was such a thing in the early 1990s. I was accepted to and attended an "elite" university, but left after one semester. I was not offered financial aid, and student loans were such that I could not have borrowed enough under Stafford or any other normal loan program to pay my tuition. I wound up transferring to a less expensive in-state public university and experiencing the best of serendipity so it ended well.

depends on what your definition of "afford" is. i was accepted into MIT, but there was no way my family was going to make their contribution amount and the total debt i would have had to take on was way too high.

there's a large gap between people that get enough aid and those that can just pay out of pocket. i got bored at the university i could afford, dropped out, and ended up in the tech startup world. MIT would have been great, but they way they assess need means people in my position (middle class) can't/won't attend. it sucks, because i would have loved the challenge and the atmosphere, but it didn't make financial sense.

I think that is a very out of touch thing to say. If you're poor you can probably get financial aid. If you're upper middle class you can either afford it or get approved for a loan, but the median household income in the us is $53k. From there to about $100k is too poor to pay out of pocket for an elite school, and to rich to financial aid.

Plus, you have to get approved for loans, and have parental co-signers. For me personally my parents had no interest in co-signing a $100k loan. For others their parents may have really bad credit.

If you want it enough there are probably ways, but as an non-rich 18 year old (or parent of an 18 year old) it's a a HUGE gamble to take on that kinda debt for a degree that you might not even finish and if you do it might not pay for itself.

You're kind of ignoring the thesis of the article.

This article is specifically NOT about hard schools (caltech, MIT) in fact it calls them out as counter-examples. This article is targeting prestigious, easy schools that do grade-inflation (e.g. Harvard). It is specifically accusing the easy-to-pass hard-to-get-in schools of being a mere status symbol, in turn the wider population of being silly for taking that symbol so seriously.

It's not on the university to stop, it's on the rest of the world to wake up.

There's also the fact that a graduate from MIT is likely to have more opportunities and resources: a middle-of-nowhere state school is unlikely to have multiple professors who lead the field while an average MIT graduate might interact with several, and a student from MIT is more likely to have access to research and advanced classes by virtue of their university.

Internet discussions about universities seem to love to ignore this aspect of what makes elite institutions elite - sure, they're often old boys clubs, but those old boys fund endowments that can support specialty programs staffed by elite experts with elite lab facilities and guest speakers and all sorts of other opportunities beyond classroom learning.

I'm not saying that you can't get a good or even great education at a community college or average state school - but I am saying that its silly to pretend that all university experiences are created equal and are just a way to consolidate class or whatever. What you do matters more than where you go, but an institution with better resources is going to have far more opportunity for its students to do meaningfully educational things.

I'm going to take a resume that has some do-nothing degree from Central Midwest State U about as seriously as one that has a do-nothing degree from Stanford on it, but I would fully expect that your average Stanford resume might have a few more interesting line-items on it than the CMSU one based simply on having more opportunities available to them.

(And for the record, I didn't attend a particularly prestigious school, and studied music in college despite working in tech now. I'm not exactly trying to defend my own background with this post).

> Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-of-Nowhere State hasn't.

But I can equally say the same for the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary people who never even graduated from college. This is still one of those perpetuated beliefs that just because you spent 4+ years worth of time, effort, and money to get a degree you are more likely to be better than others.

I think it's possible you'll have an easier time finding what you want if you look to the good colleges -- but only because the graduates who went there accepted the same belief that the employers do: that you need the degree to get a job. Chicken and the egg problem? Yeah, but I think it's slowly starting to change. It just takes enough young people to show the world that university is NOT needed, only the perseverance and love for what you do.

So it sounds like you're saying the real scam is pretending that degrees have value?

I'd phrase GP response as saying we attribute too much value on some degrees and not enough on others. They all have some (nominal?) value but we don't spend the time to figure it out and just shorthand it based on the "quality" of the school. The presumption is that these schools only let in the best so you can trust their stamp of approval but this scandal shows that is folly.

It can become a self-fullfilling prophecy: if most people believe that degrees have value, then the people who compete for those spots at "elite" colleges will go up, then the pool of high quality candidate goes up. Because the elite schools have the pick of the litter, the chances that their student body and thus their graduates will be successful goes up. This reinforces the perception that the degrees have value and the cycle repeats. I think an accident of history has started this cycle and it's going to endure for quite a while. It's akin to Silicon Valley: engineers think that being in SV helps them be successful and join the next rocketship. Startups get drawn to SV because they think SV is where the magic happens. Because the pool of talent and opportunities meet in SV, it reinforces the perception that SV is magic.

I think you hit on the way economists define "value"; value is derived from people believing something is valuable. Take gold or diamonds for example, which were highly valued before they even had industrial usages. Yes, both are pretty and are rare; however, there are many other equally pretty/rare things that weren't valued as highly. The only value they had was from perception, and that made the value real.

There was actually an interesting article about this in WSJ this past weekend[0]. I believe it's based on her paper released a few months ago[1]. For most students, what you do while in college matters much more than where you go.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-way-to-choose-a-colle...

[1] https://ed.stanford.edu/news/first-step-choosing-right-colle...

That’s one approach. Another approach is that you have a candidate that graduated from Stanford, one from MIT, and you have a candidate that doesn’t even have a degree from Middle-of-nowhere State but has 4 years full-time professional experience.

I’m going to be more excited about the last candidate than the other two.

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