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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists". The creator of the app is a guy who has a restraining order because of violent threats he made against a school he was kicked out of as coach. Based on his history that the article touches on, it seems possible he's a controlling authoritarian sociopath. Why anyone would roll out his system, based on a desire to control and manipulate others, well it's because they're a third rate college that doesn't have a lot of good ideas about academics, that's why.

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> Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists".

Surely on HN at least we can be free of the idea that only first-rate colleges have (a substantial quantity of) students with such exceptional potential. (I would go even farther and deny that there is any particularly strong correlation between 'rate' of the school and future potential of its students, except in the self-selecting sense that a Harvard degree opens doors that a community-college degree doesn't.)

He never once wrote that only first-rate colleges produce these individuals, nor has anyone with any sense ever stood by rankings as anything more than a proxy for some deeper hierarchy. And yes, like it or not, the higher ranked schools attract and produce more ambitious and intelligent humans in the aggregate.

> He never once wrote that only first-rate colleges produce these individuals, nor has anyone with any sense ever stood by rankings as anything more than a proxy for some deeper hierarchy. And yes, like it or not, the higher ranked schools attract and produce more ambitious and intelligent humans in the aggregate.

The specific claim was:

> > Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists".

which is much stronger than saying that more such people are attracted by higher-'rated' colleges; I have no problem with the idea that there are lots of such people at first-rate colleges, only with the idea that there aren't many at other colleges. I agree that the claim says nothing about causality or about 'production' of such students, but neither did I.

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