Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
Let's call a spade a spade. College is another world. A vacation. Detached from reality. Please, please, please, don't confuse success in school with success in anything that actually matters.
"They got there because they're on the ball."
WTF?!?!?!?
Try paying a mortgage, raising children, staying healthy, caring for ailing parents, making it to work by 8:00 am, and completing 167 other required transactions each and every day, and still keep a smile on your face.
Versus reading books between beers, parties, and hookups.
Face it, what people in the isolated world of college call "work" is what people who pay their bills call "time off". After another 1000 lines of code, 3 more meetings with idiots, 27 more phone calls, hell in traffic, and a deep sigh of relief (it's Friday), I think I'll go to Barnes & Noble and read a little Kant to relax.
Paul was right on. Now STFU.
--> "College is.. a vacation. Please, please, please, don't confuse success in school with success in anything that actually matters."
There are some fields where discipline, jumping through (seemingly arbitrary) hoops, and ability to study/capture knowledge is a reasonable indicator of success, e.g., medicine. I'll bet that a student who can't stick through the pre-med requirements is not going to get through the four years of mind-numbing med school and another four to seven years of residency.
--> "Face it, what people in the isolated world of college call 'work' is what people who pay their bills call 'time off'."
I'm not sure if you'd be studying organic chemistry on your time off, and I'm very sure some college students pay their own bills. (I did. I got classified as a grad student very early and paid my way through Stanford via half-time research & programming jobs.)
So while I'm probably going to be down-modded for sticking up for the feckless idiots who decide to spend their time learning things in college, particularly the "elite" ones, I figure I should point out when the anti-college viewpoint gets taken too far. While some may view college as a "vacation", others actually use the resources of a top institution. They get access to cutting-edge faculty, computers, lab equipment, and research that's not being done at smaller institutions. Not everybody is hoping to build a business. And for some professions, there's a wide and deep knowledge base that has to be mastered before you can start work. I know one mother who returned to college after raising her kid and slogged through pre-med studies. It was hardly a vacation. Her success in school mattered.
You bring up many good points which are, sadly, exceptions to the rule.
I have a B.S. in mathematics and an MBA, both from supposedly "elite" institutions, and I am convinced that almost nothing from any of my classes has contributed to my career as an IT professional (with the exception of the "mind" exercise). I suspect this is true for most college graduates.
As president of my undergraduate fraternity, I learned 100 times more (things that I would need later) than from all my classes combined. Things like managing a budget, running a project, caring for a facility, interpersonal communication, leading others, achieving in teams, etc., etc., etc. If I knew then what I know now, I would have skipped the classes and just joined the fraternity.
And, yes, I do go to Barnes & Noble and read "Men of Mathematics", "GEB", and the work of Dawkins just for fun. Funny, I didn't appreciate any of it when I was forced to read it.
When I think of "success in school," I don't immediately think of GPA. It's not all about the courses, and in the debate of name-brand schools, I think it's rarely about the standard classes.
I guess I'd be a fool to argue with that.
Funny, I only remember 2 things a professor every said in class:
1. A degree in business is a degree in nothing. 2. Never put a lit pipe in your jacket pocket.
Maybe I should have paid more attention.
This is the point where my bull shit meter hit the red area and then went on to roll on the floor and laugh :)
When I got the marked essay back, there were lots of positive comments in the margins, until the last paragraph. There the comment was, "Jim, I think we should discuss this."
I got an A in that class.
My take is that intelligence follows a distribution curve for which graders at any decent college are only able to effectively evaluate the upper quartile, minus the top 1 or 2 percent. If you happen to be pushing the top 1 or 2 percent, you either have to lower yourself to the level of your graders or write your best thoughts and expect to receive less than the best grades for them.
If you follow the first track, you can expect the usual laurels for 'achievement.' If you follow the second, you can expect to increase your intelligence at a higher rate, which may (or may not) have some payback later on.
I've learned at least two things watching people misunderstand essays. First, when an essay touches on a polarizing issue, people tend to peg it as one end or the other of that polarization. Second, once people peg an essay as making an argument that they disagree with, they stop paying attention, if they keep reading at all.
I'm not trying to be critical of anyone; I tend to do the same thing.
Quote: I hear variations of this same tired argument probably once or twice a month. (It comes with the territory when you write a book titled How to Become a Straight-A Student).
He has you lumped in with the rest of his critics. "Obedience to authority" is a collective quote from the lot of you, with your words "index of obedience" as just one fuzzy part.
What's funny is in the end he agrees with your last three paragraphs. Quote: It's fine to make the point that college and grades aren't everything. In fact it's important.... I'll be the first say it: College is not necessary for success!
Statement 1: high school transcript is largely a measure of obedience
Statement 2: Going to a top school shows only obedience.
Statement 3: Doing well in college demonstrates only obedience.
Notice how statement one matches neither statement two nor statement three, let alone both combined.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
1) keyword #1: startup 2) keyword #2: software (80% www, 20% shrink-wrap)
what about other fields? commerce, business, law, agriculture, medical, dental, pharmacy, etc.
Philip Greenspun made a similar point in a shorter fashion not many days ago,
"What about homework? Students would do homework either in the library or at home. In 1865 both places lacked television, video games, email, etc. In 2007, the students who do best may be the ones with the best study habits, not those who are the most able. Companies do not rely on lecture+homework for getting work done; they create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day." (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-unde...)
, and overall it's a notion that meets acceptance from great hackers and successful people who recognize quality in people, because being early self-taughts gives them this inner understanding.
do these people actually read something before they reply to it?!
if we all look outside our windows we will see that not everyone wants to risk their ass for starting up. So, yes there is also need for colleges, a system to rank individuals abilities.
My favorite:
"Let us not then, Paul, put her (straight-A student) down. She too, just as much as any homegrown entrepreneur, has worked hard and made use of her talents."
Or she drinks with the TA, or her Dad plays golf with the dean, or she's book smart, none of whom I'd probably want to hack with.
There is no way that is true.
seriously though, one dedicated teacher at bhcc might give you way more than all the TAs you get at harvard. of course the same student that gets a lot out of bhcc would probably soak even more out of harvard. who knows
There are good arguments for college, but this isn't one of them...
One way attending an elite college helps is that it makes it easier to learn--both in that the resources are more obviously available, and in that the institution is pushing you to do work. You can graduate from Northwester Louisiana University going out drinking six nights a week and never really doing the work; you can't pull that off at Harvard. But if you're driven enough, 'easier' doesn't matter all that much; if you're determined enough, you can learn to the limits of your own abilities at Harvard or at NLU. Or, hell, you could pull a Ramanujan and teach yourself entirely out of books.
The problem is that most people aren't that driven; most people will get a lot more out of the college where it's easier to learn (I know I've needed the push more than once to keep going aggressively). But those people aren't the ones you're looking for at Y Combinator. If you need that kind of push, you're not going to succeed at a startup, because a startup requires drive and determination more than almost anything else. So your evidence says something like, "in the set of people to whom the institution matters the least, the institution doesn't matter very much." Which is probably true, but doesn't say much about the people who are going to settle down into a nice comfortable job when they graduate (doctor, lawyer, middle management), and aren't driven enough to go for broke the way you did.
Also, institution matters much more when you're doing something where letters of recommendation make a huge difference (say, applying to grad schools, like I am). When my profs write a grad school and say I'm in the top 25% of the math majors here, or whatever they wind up saying, that tells programs something; they've accepted students from my college before, and they can compare me to those other students to get an idea of how good I am. Sometimes this is explicit; I think one of my profs has written a rec letter along the lines of, "this student is about as good as student X whom you accepted three years ago." This gives them very precise data about whether they want me. But if I were going to a weaker institution, they wouldn't be able to get that sort of gauge of my ability; this makes me a riskier pick, and so I'm less likely to be accepted. But once again, this shouldn't factor much into your particular dataset.
I had a better idea: just not reading what follows. Thanks at least for being upfront about your trolling intentions.
if paul graham is able to create a site such as this one that is NOT eventually destroyed by its own popularity, then it may well be a first. noise like this article isn't helping in the least.
Something about a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.
However, that same study found that equally talented, driven people who chose to attend a less prestigious school did just as well in their careers as the people who went to the big name schools.
So there probably is a correlation between "I went to Harvard." and "I will be successful." But not necessarily causation.