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Comment by frig | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no -- there's a chicken-and-egg aspect.

If a Harvard education was useless -- and Harvard alums to a one all room-temperature iq, slackjawed mouthbreathers -- it wouldn't matter how scarce the degrees are, as they'd be valueless.

Once you assume a particular level of educational quality and/or other 'intrinsic' value (here 'intrinsic' == everything other than the pure scarcity premium) it is of course the case that ceteris paribus the degree becomes less valuable the more people have it.

But even then not entirely: if you cut the class size too small the consequent diminishment of the alumni network might take away more than the increased scarcity gave.

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The "quality factor" of elite degrees has little to do with the education and a lot to do with who you can network with. Consequently, people think Harvard is the place to go not because they think Harvard grads have the prestige of being particularly smart (like say MIT grads have for CS or Julliard for music) but for being particularly well connected - something that everyone else has to bust their hump to build up happens by default at a place like this.

If the startup community (and well established, famous former startups like Google) only recruited from state polytech schools, those would be the hot schools to attend. Consequently, no-name schools like New Jersey Inst. of Tech would suddenly be full of startup minded people.

If those schools suddenly started charging $50k/yr for tuition and boarding (instead of the in-state tuition), that would select for people with money or access to money.

Make the admission process highly competitive and selective (GPA >3.8, SAT >1400 or parents donate a library wing).

Now NJIT is full of startup minded tech people with money. Add that up and you achieve the same thing that Harvard does for MBAs and Lawyers. Well connectedness with people who have the means to approach and achieve what they want.

There is no doubt that the education one receives at these places is also adequate to the task. Otherwise money, connections and no brains results in dumb ideas like Internet connected toasters and Flooz.com

The value of connections is definitely real.

My class ('76) was one year ahead of Gates ('77), and included Scott McNealy (Sun founder), Trip Hawkins (EA founder), Tim O'Reilly, John Quartermann (sp?), and others.

(Not that I knew any of them well. Gates I knew casually from chatting before/after class, and Trip was the roommate of a friend from San Diego.)

Exactly. What these schools are selling are exclusivity and access to the "club". Not the best education possible. This article shoots that right in the bullseye.

Were you personally able to profit from your connections?

Well, I had a shot at being #8 or so at Microsoft, primarily through another friend (Bob Greenberg, who was #6 or 7), but due to other circumstances, didn't take it seriously.

I worked on extending Chuck Geschke's (founder of Adobe's) PhD thesis from CMU while an undergrad, and got to know him that way. He called me in to talk about starting Adobe while he was still at Xerox PARC, but, again, circumstances made it impossible. (Had just started at another Stanford (Knuth TeX project) spin-off that ultimately went nowhere. At least I got to hang around Knuth.)

So, yes, in theory, those connections could have been useful. ;-)

What you're saying is not undoable; founding a modern-day Cooper Union but with a more entrepreneurial focus would be a more appropriate approach than trying to revamp NJIT.

You're underestimating the impact of combination: those startups will need CFOs and council and so forth and having attached professional schools with their own robust alumni network(s) helps.

Which is an interesting point. Most of the top schools are really only known prestige-wise for one or two kinds of majors (at least in my circles): MIT for engineering and CS; Harvard for Business and Law; Stanford for Engineering, CS and Computational Linguistics; Brown for Social Sciences and Education; Princeton for Math and Economics, etc. etc. etc.

Which is one reason why companies in those respective fields tend to recruit from those schools. I'd be highly surprised for example, if Baker & McKenzie spent a lot of time at the University of Virginia recruiting law students, but would fully expect Google to spend lots of time harassing M.I.T. students (but not Harvard students).

Also, not all of the top schools have representative schools of business or law. And for those schools that do, I'm curious how much interaction there is among the three student groups (technical, law, business).

In my experience: you typical undergrad will as an undergrad have pretty much nothing in the way of interaction with the professional schools, and your professional school students will later have not all that much interaction with the undergrads; a little more mixing between undergrads and graduate students, but not all that much.

What does happen is that later on substantial #s of your classmates while wind up having having gone back to the law school or the b-school or whatnot.

This means that even if you, personally, never met anyone at the b-school, you probably know people who went there later on, making most b-school people only a couple degrees of separation away from you.

This means the big alumni network is loosely connected, but is comparatively connected, and predictably so; it's also the case that probably someone in your undergraduate class went to Wharton (or whatever) and thus probably there's some chain-of-acquaintances connecting you to the class at Wharton some year, but it's a lot more tenuous than the intra-university network.

So, short version: not that much interaction @ the time of study; across time, the alumni bodies are much more cross-linked (though admittedly not to the same extent that you see inside the particular sub-schools).

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