Are Big Name Universities Worth the Money? | Hacker News Reader

Are Big Name Universities Worth the Money?

newsweek.com

11 pointsnickb15 comments

I have to say that "graduated from MIT" is far more impressive to potential employers, investors and co-founders than is warranted, IMO. And I say this as an MIT grad. :) Being no dummy, I dig through my nightstand to find and wear my brass rat (MIT class ring) approximately once every 5 years, when I need a better shot at one of those things. Otherwise, no one I know cares, though half of our top technical leaders are from MIT.

I also look at the recruiting efforts my current company (startup in early 200x, now decidedly not-startupy, public, and $500+K in annual revenue): we bias heavily towards "top" CS schools when doing college recruiting. We've gotten some absolutely fabulous candidates from "second tier" schools and we naturally recruit there every year, but if you come from MIT, you get a full 25% (estimated) better chance right from the start of the interview.

For my own account (plural of anecdote not being data notwithstanding), despite being a pretty strong candidate, I strongly suspect that my current lot in life is based more than 50% on my attending (and not even spectacular results at) MIT, and as a result, I give heartily every time they call for alumni donations.

Employers and founders: MIT isn't all that special. So called "second tier" schools also have some extremely capable potential employees, and individual talent, motivation and drive is FAR more important.

High-school students: If you have the choice between MIT and $200K in debt and a state school with a full ride, and you're pretty sure you're going to work in engineering for 20 years, definitely go to MIT. Right or wrong, that name opens doors, and I believe I've done a lot more interesting and lucrative work than I'd have been able to do from the full ride I had offered to me at UMCP.

As an MIT grad, I'm a lot less impressed with the brass rat than most people who are in a position to help shape your lot in life. If you're going to found 5 startups in the hopes that one will be a solid success, save the $200K and invest it in your startups. If you're going to go work for someone else, even just for a while, you'll have no problem paying off your student loans from MIT, or any other top school, IME.

You touch on an interesting point (implicitly) that there is a large pool of folks at tier 1 schools that are tremendous workahols. The thing that isn't clear to me is how large a subset of those folks are also intellectually creative? It's not obvious at least to me that the number of such folks is particulaly large

For the majority of business it is easier to recruit from the top schools as they act as the talent filters (via selection bias) saving companies time, effort, and money, and ensuring a certain minimum quality (a general candidate from any top 10 school will perform the work function better than one from a top 50 school).

Most of the people hiring (HR) often did not go to a top tier school, hence continue the trend/myth with a mental model/image of institutions often being greater than they actually are. These are generally created by the achievements of a few superstar alumni that make mainstreram news, and not the masses?

Most of the people I know attended top schools, and sadly most of them do not consider the schools as great when looking from the inside. Basically, because top tier schools are elitist in entry, and excellent in branding and marketing and maintaining (mainstream) presence, they are percieved as being better. Which is not always the case.

I agree with your assessment. Having a brand-name degree does open doors - particularly if you're a graduating CS student in competition with thousands of other candidates for the small pool of 'interesting' software jobs. Right or wrong, landing that first job at Google (say) rather than Blubcorp has a significant influence on what positions are available to you down the road. It may not mean you'll make more money, but the work will be more intellectually rewarding.

I think the salient issue with big name universities is selection bias. MIT gets to choose valedictorians with perfect SAT scores as its student body; is it any surprise that its students are more successful than a less selective university's?

The real question is how well would the students accepted to MIT but who chose to go to less selective schools do (not perfect data, but the best we can get from the real world). I'm personally inclined to believe they do just as well as those who actually attended MIT, but I don't have the data to know.

Interestingly, a similar issue comes into play with YC. A surprisingly high percentage of YC accepted companies are successful (for some definition of success), just like a surprisingly high percentage of ivy league grads are successful.

The real question is how much of that success is due to the fact that companies yc funds are intrinsically better than the rest of the field versus how much impact pg's help has. Maybe pg is just amazingly good at picking winners, and the companies he picks would have succeeded with or without his help.

The only way to get a better idea would be to compare the success rates of people accepted by yc who declined to those actually accepting yc's offer. This wouldn't even be a perfect measure though, since maybe there is some underlying factor (media savvy, proclivity to seek help, etc) that causes a company to both accept yc investment and succeed.

The only real way to tell would be to have pg randomly issue offers to half the companies he normally would, and compare the success of companies he issued offers to against those he would have but didn't issue offers to and a random selection of those he didn't plan to make offers to.

For obvious reasons that would be an impossible experiment to run. In this case though, I'm inclined to believe that pg's help does provide more than a "6.4%" boost to your chances of success.

Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."

They've actually done a study on the effect of colleges on success here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322.

They looked at students who got into Princeton about 30 years ago, and compared the success of those who went to Princeton versus those who got in but went somewhere else. Unless you came from a really poor background, it doesn't seem to make a significant difference.

For grad schools, probably (keeping in mind that engineering/cs grad students almost never pay a dime to go to grad school).

For undergrad, no. I went to my state school (UF) instead of several ivy-caliber schools (Carnegie Mellon) because of financial situations. I got such a superior all-around college experience. I wouldn't have traded those 4 years for anything in the world.

Big name schools have big name people because of the research they do, not the classes they teach. That means unless you are doing research, you aren't benefiting. The only benefit is that, on average, you'll be around smarter people. You only need to find a small group of really smart people to make that part of college work for you, and you can find those at any good school.

I went to Northwestern, and I must say that "(a Big Ten university outside Chicago)" is not how I would describe it. It's the only private school in the Big Ten, and it's dwarfed in size by the others as well. To call it a Big Ten university is about as far off the mark as you can get while still being accurate.

The irony in the reporter's statement is that Bowdoin and Northwestern are probably more similar to each other than Northwestern is to any of the other Big Ten schools.

Yes, if the industry you are going into puts a lot of value on college name. If not, not really worth it. My sister got her degree from Cornell(considered #1 for her major), went into the 2nd most prestigious company in her field(assistant manager), put herself something like $160,000 in debt. Starting salary? $36,000, working 60 hours a week and is required to work weekends.

But if you are in Finance or Computer Science or some other field where school determines your ability to get interviews, that degree can help open most doors for you. I'd say the comparison in the eyes of the typical employer has a 3.75 from a regular state school on the same level as a 3.0 from an Ivy college.

Looks like yet another journalist who doesn't understand correlation vs. causation.

A university is what you make of it.

If you end up with smarter friends, then yes.

Smarter and more ambitious.

I went to Amherst College. Students there are very, very smart - in many cases, probably equal to the students at Harvard or MIT (a bunch of my friends got into those too). But culturally, students at Amherst and other top liberal-arts colleges aren't all that ambitious. The normal career track is to graduate, work for a couple years at a financial or consulting firm, go to Harvard Law or Harvard Business School, make partner or upper management, and then coast and enjoy the good life.

I'm finding that it's hard to recruit cofounders from among my college friends, simply because so many of them have other opportunities that don't entail the risk and hard work that a startup does. When you've been accepted to HBS and basically have a guaranteed $200k/year salary after graduation (as happened to my former cofounder), do you take the bird in hand or hang in there for the 5% chance of a bird in the bush?

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