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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

At the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts.

It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.

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In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (http://www.hmc.edu). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail.

edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.

Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too.

(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)

HMC academically is as strong as the Ivies in engineering fields. Not really a good school to make your point with.

I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence. But, if you want to go into politics Yale is a far better choice. Rich may be well educated, but it's got little to do with raw intelegence.

> I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence.

That's extremely funny if intentional, even funnier if not :)

My point wasn't really the amount of smart people that exist at either schools. It is more so that existence of smart people does not equal a more challenging or more educational experience.

Although I agree with you that the further you get in a field, the more likely a prestigious school will be better. But I would credit that to having a more direct relationship with professors. When you are actually helping a professor with their research, the quality of the research matters more than when you are simply being lecture by that same professor.

>It is more so that existence of smart people does not equal a more challenging or more educational experience.

Huh. I don't have any hard data, but I always thought the opposite. I mean, I didn't go to school, but I put a lot of effort into being around people who are better (at things I want to be good at) than I am, and I attribute much of my success to surrounding myself with people who are better than I am.

I mean, I agree about the second bit... my understanding is that undergrad at a prestigious school offers little contact with the (usually very good) professors (thus, my assertion that it's all about the quality of the other students.) - thus, grad school there, where you get more contact with the (very good) professors would be even better.

Perhaps I am unqualified to say, because I didn't go to school. On the other hand, I managed to learn enough without school to get a job that often requires a degree, so maybe I am qualified?

In my experience (Brown undergrad), literally every undergrad I know who wanted to do research with a professor has gotten to. And usually they had plans on working with specific people by their freshman or sophomore year. And this is in fields as varied as Sociology, CS, Chemistry and Comparative Literature. Though, this may not be a function of going to a prestigious school, so much as a school that has 2000 grad students and 6000 undergrads, so professors are forced to interact and teach undergrads.

I don't think that is the case in many engineering fields at least. A greater presence of smart people sets the bar that much higher for grades/tests/projects.

Most engineering courses are based on a curve. If the rest of the class is brilliant, it's significantly harder to compete and get a good grade.

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