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Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

The individual has been "vetted" in a more rigorous setting. For example, is someone who graduates with a 3.5GPA Math BA from the University of Central Florida trained as well as someone who graduates with 3.5 from the University of Maryland? What about UNC? What about MIT?

If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used. Mind you, I've seen this used against people as well. For example...

"The last few MIT grads we hired were full of themselves and way too combative." These are real words from a hiring manager.

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I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve. Maybe UNC I'd view with a bit more suspicion since it's more likely that someone got by there due to one form of privilege or another, whereas the Central Florida student I can feel more confident they probably survived only by merit.

One funny aspect of the very phenomena that this article is about, is that it highlights how little difference where you go to school matters. Whether you go to "super prestigious Ivy league school" or "non-prestigious flyover country state school" you're probably using the exact same textbook, syllabus and have a professors who were classmates and peers at the same "prestigious" university.

Basically, the difference between a student at a midwestern public school and an Ivy league is about 99.999% how privileged they were in terms of either having rich, well-connected parents or matching a diversity criteria the school was seeking and at most, a 0.001% difference in merit.

> Basically, the difference between a student at a midwestern public school and an Ivy league is about 99.999% how privileged they were in terms of either having rich, well-connected parents

Coincidentally, I was accepted to an Ivy League school but had to attend a Midwestern public school instead because my parents couldn't afford to send me to the Ivy League school.

So my pedigree was entirely based on money.

“I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve.”

Are you sure about that? Private, prestigious institutions have a habit of grade inflation beyond those of the nation’s reputable state schools (although all of the schools have inflated grades compared to previous decades)

I would probably view an equal or higher GPA from a top tier state school as a better distinguisher than one from an Ivy.

https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2022/04/brown-grade...

https://www.gradeinflation.com/

>If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used.

The notion of good pedigree benefits anyone who might fit in that category, so they're incentivized to convince people that this matters. For example, if someone on a hiring committee sees an applicant coming from their alma mater, they can call that a "good pedigree" and reinforce the value of their own background.

I mean, only if it actually is a good pedigree. I used to work at a company where one of the HR directors went to Harvard for undergrad. He could say that and people probably would have nodded their heads in agreement. You can't say that if you went to Ohio State. Nothing against the Buckeyes but it's just not in the same tier, to the point where that "pedigree" -- I can't even imagine anyone referring to their Ohio State education as a "pedigree" in any serious sense -- isn't any better or worse than any of the other ~60 half-way decent "$STATE State" or "$STATE University" schools.

There's also a lot of discussion here around the people who get excluded because they lack that pedigree. I don't think anyone is saying that you can't find brilliant folks who went to a small school you've never heard of. They're saying that you're hiring for one professorship, there are a lot of unknowns, and you're trying to eliminate false positives to avoid a bad hire. Seeing that between two otherwise-identical candidates, one of whom has a BA from Harvard and one of whom has a BA from West Virginia State, you're well within your duty as a member of the hiring committee to assume that the person from Harvard has at least as good a chance of being acceptable as the other one. False negatives are okay (not great), false positives are horrible.

The problem though is that exceptional people are scattered all over the system, since 1) not everybody can get into Harvard (class size) and a significant percentage who do are selected from a small monied elite. The number of non-Harvard graduates is much, much larger.

So statistically it is actually far more likely that the Harvard person is relatively mediocre to a neutral sampling of the entire system.

I don't think an equivalent GPA at a more prestigious school signals anything of the sort. In fact many more prestigious institutions grade fairly leniently on the assumption that their students are already ahead of the curve.

The few exceptions are at places like Berkeley where they accept a large number of students.

It's one of the reasons that I think eliminating standardized tests for admission to graduate institutions may be a mistake.

But I guess the argument is is that vetting equally available? And is the rigor in the vetting or in the self selection?

To me it seems self-reinforcing.

Lots of things in history have been used as signals.

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