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Comment by catz | Hacker News Reader

> I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.")

You do not really appreciate the quality of universities in the USA. Even the university that you view as "second tier" is excellent by world standards.

Also - smaller universities that focus on undergraduate education often provide a better education than large research oriented universities.

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Yes, it often seems that SCSU's only failing as a university was that the landscaping and architecture weren't as nice. The bureaucratic hassles were often pretty annoying, and from what I've heard, they aren't so bad at private schools.

But yeah, there are lots of very good, very cheap schools in this country. I have almost no student loan debt to speak of, and I got a great education. Not to mention that you can watch a lot of lectures on youtube and whatnot.

The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.

> The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.

Another advantage is that you can casually mention it repeatedly on HN (casual university name dropping).

And be completely ignored by the non-US people who're more interested in clue level than an atlantic-away university.

And the non-university people.

And all the people who ignored nicknames changing colour.

But I'm sure it'll impress everybody else :)

Another thing that I have noticed is that, the better the school's reputation, the more likely it is that people will try to BS their way through, knowing the that name on the paper will be enough to get them where they want to go. A lot of students at "second tier" schools recognize that they need to be on top of their shit because nobody's just going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

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