Any College Will Do | Hacker News Reader

Any College Will Do

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49 pointsarthurk33 comments

By definition, a very small fraction of graduates attended a prestigious college. Wouldn't it make more sense to look at the odds of an individual reaching a certain level of (for lack of a better phrase) "corporate achievement", depending on where they went to school?

via Forbes, the median MIT graduate has a starting salary of $72,000. The median starting salary for all college graduates is around $43,000. Since only 50 people in the world can be CEOs of the top 50 companies at once, maybe it makes more sense to look at numbers like this?

I'm not saying that salary should determine your choice of school, just that this article is using a very strange metric to argue its point.

I think a lot of points in the article made sense.

Salary might not be as good a measure of college value as how each individual student feels about the school they attended and their performance in the real world many years later. Related, there was one example of a student who felt that attending community college gave him a chance to feel more confident than he might have otherwise. (He does not say this directly, but being around students who were like him and with similar abilities made him more confident, as well.)

Also, the majors offered at MIT are different than those at typical schools, which could alone account for your average salary statistic.

Next, I would not be surprised if students from top universities are more likely to work in big cities than those who are from schools in the middle of the country, accounting for cost of living differences and local job opportunities.

Finally, if salary is a factor, then the cost of college should be, as well.

I think success at MIT would be that a student found the coursework challenging, opportunities plentiful, and made lots of smart friends, and not a potential salary or prestige. And I think those same factors are also important for most students who succeed from other schools; in other words, doing things that make them happy.

>I think success at MIT would be that a student found the coursework challenging, opportunities plentiful, and made lots of smart friends, and not a potential salary or prestige. And I think those same factors are also important for most students who succeed from other schools; in other words, doing things that make them happy.

Looking at the CEOs of the top 50 companies doesn't tell you that at all. It is almost like an article about how your kids highschool doesn't matter because all of our astronauts, rockstars, and professional atheletes have come from all over the place.

That has rather little do do with MIT being better than State of Denial University and rather more with MIT graduating a lot of engineers and State of Denial University graduating a lot of English, Philosophy, and Women's Studies majors.

Engineers get paid more than generic office employees with no specific marketable skills. Film at 11.

Would be interesting to figure out # of CEOs divided by total student population for Ivys vs state schools. Since there are few Ivys I imagine the chance that a student from an Ivy becomes a CEO is still greater.

Exactly. While it's hard to get the exact figures (as CEOs graduated over a long time period), we can make at least some approximations.

I just run quick numbers for the year 2007:

  57,845 Ivy League undergraduate enrollment [1]
  15,386,000 Total US undergraduate enrollment [2]

Which makes Ivy League population just 3.76 promille of the total US undergraduates.

Thus Ivy League gives you around 27x higher chance to be Fortune 500 CEO compared to what you would get if the selection was random.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section1/table.asp?tabl...

I'm not sure I buy their assumption that an institution's success can be measured by the quantity of CEOs it produces.

I think they are trying to do just that: they are trying to argue against the common 'widsom' that going to a prestigious school is going to get you a more prestigious job, along with the corollary that you should rank job candidates by which school they went to.

Your education is what you make of it honestly.

Pithy but true.

It also implies that's not worth going into crushing debt over it.

Yes, any college will do. But if you're going to spend 3 (run through quickly) - 5 (take your time, explore, go abroad, etc) years somewhere, you should do it at a place you like. You wouldn't want to work at a job you don't like for that long. Same principle applies here.

The WSJ should be embarrassed at its [reporter's] inability to grasp simple stats and probability.

10% of the Fortune 500 are run by Harvard grads. Harvard's classes are about 1600/a. Just the Boston area has around 250k students. Let's assume only 160k of them are undergrads.

Even within Boston, Harvard is over-represented by 10x!

How about colleges in Eastern Europe - Bulgaria in my case?

Is it worth staying in EE at all for a young person interested in technology and engineering?

I am asking about economic possibilities, social mobility, business, interesting projects - that kind of stuff.

There are many reasons for a young person interested in technology to go to Silicon Valley.

Jobs in Bulgaria disconnect you from the result of your work much more than an average job in US. This can spoil your potential.

You will need a diploma for an H1-B application, for one thing.

Yeah sure it is. Get your undergraduate or even your Master's in EE (it will be amazingly cheap), then go get your PhD in North America (PhDs are paid, so no money worries). But staying long term? Unless you become an entrepreneur and do something like BitDefender - a product developped with local costs but sold to a global audience, I don't think it's worth developping a career in Eastern Europe yet. BTW, the BitDefender guys were in Bucharest, Romania. Stopped following, so I don't know what ther're up to now. Their story sure was an inspiration.

I'm from Romania and I am applying for college in UK, even though it's ok here I consider there are other opportunities in Western Europe (it's too hard for an EE student to go straight to Silicon Valley).

Translation: school alone is no merit to your success; you control that one.

The better the college, the more doors that are open to start one's career. But it seems once college is over, and the more work experience that one has, the less that college matters.

Not an expert on the area at all but it seems perhaps the college you go to is more important for technical professions than business ones?

It depends on how good you are and how hard you work. The point of the article isn't that elite colleges are bad for your career (of course not!), just that less prestigious schools aren't necessarily bad for your career, either.

Sure but what I mean is for engineering the difference between a good and bad college might be bigger than say for economy?

I don't think so, not beyond your very first couple of jobs. I've worked with MIT grads and college dropouts with the same title, salary, and job expectations.

The big exception is in academia, where the college counts for a lot.

"I don't think so, not beyond your very first couple of jobs." And how long is that, 5-10years?

And for the really attractive jobs, do you even get a shot if straight out of college if you are not from a top one(often you don't either how because of no experience but when you do)?

Don't want to bash the point though. Effort > talent, I agree.

It depends on a lot of things.

In computer science, if you're trying to go into a programming career, the difference between a prestigious college and a non-prestigious college is significantly less than the advantage you get from having proof of coding skill, such as significant open source work. Anyone serious about programming should definitely make sure to have something like this in hand before they leave, if they want the good opportunities.

Of course, side project + prestigious college is a winning combo... but even then, I'd say it's the side project dominating for most good employers.

I would imagine in fields where the means of production (whatever they may be) are not so much in the hands of the masses that the college distinction could be more important; how do you prove yourself a competent civil engineer with a side project? (I dunno, maybe there's a way, but it must be a lot harder.)

Anyone serious about programming should definitely make sure to have something like this in hand before they leave, if they want the good opportunities.

Every college freshman should be told this repeatedly. It is too easy to miss out on that bit of information and think that getting good grades and graduating is enough to land you a job out of college.

In my experience, the degree helps with "cold" applications (HR departments, recruiters, grad school applications, "over the transom" submissions, etc.) and does very little for "warm" applications (referrals, impressive projects/blogs).

The article may've found that degrees rarely help CEOs because CEOs rarely make "cold" applications. Once you get that high, nearly everything is done via network and past record, so the degree doesn't confer much information that isn't already available.

Similarly, technical people may rely on degrees more because their networks are not as well-developed as business people. Though honestly, most of the successful programmers I know either have no degree or went to a state school, and it's never hurt them. They maintain good networks, though.

And it may matter in academia because a lot of the grad school application process is blind, with very little information available. It doesn't seem to matter once you start to publish and people can judge the quality of your work for themselves.

There are plenty of extraordinarily capable people outside of elite colleges.

In The Bell Curve they mention SAT statistics for top verbal scores. Although their point was to show extreme concentration of talented people at the elite schools, it also shows how many are outside of them:

  90% of the top scorers were not in Harvard/Yale
  69% were outside of the top ten universities 
  40% were outside of the top fifty universities

What about investment banking, private equity, trading, etc?

It should be noted that most people actually get their jobs through their social networks (as discussed in books like Tipping Point) as well as other research into Management.

So, I think the logical result of these ideas is that the way to success for those at Ivies (and schools like Stanford etc...) is that their social networks include many other highly motivated and successful people. However, anyone at any large university has a huge network to possibly tap, including thousands of talented students, alumni, and world class professors. Thus, I think the more logical result is that motivated students at any large school do well by building large and powerful social networks.

I would actually downvote this comment because it seems you don't know what you're talking about. While a minute fraction of people do get jobs at i-banks through connections, the vast majority are admitted on merit.

I am an undergraduate (senior) at one of the nation's top i-bank feeder schools.

At analyst level I agree, but for more senior levels networking becomes a lot more important.

I would almost think the opposite. Not because the business students will learn any more at the ivy league, but their networking would seem to be much more effective, which is what usually matters to business students anyway.

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