Advantages of a name-brand school | Hacker News Reader

Advantages of a name-brand school

stanford.edu

21 pointsbrendano50 comments

I guess the only disadvantage is the apparently unbearable pressure of keeping it to oneself for more than 5 minutes?

>Take-home message number two is the importance of humility. I get seriously annoyed when I hear stories of people from name-brand schools being arrogant towards or looking down on people who weren't fortunate enough to go to name-brand schools.

Thanks Philip "MIT" Guo, but I don't want your sympathy or your company.

The author seems like a tool. That's the thing about name-brand graduates (particularly Harvard), within 5 minutes of meeting someone you will hear about where they went to college, even 10+ years after they graduated. Clearly this is an exaggeration, but definitely has some truth to it.

However I must agree with the OP sentiments, it is way easier for name-brandies to get job interviews/offers. Nevertheless, I am doubtful that the price differential is worth it strictly to help you land a job. I guess I will never know what I missed out on, but faced with ~40k per year in loans I am very glad I chose to go to a state school.

A friend's boss went to harvard and stanford - We meet up with him a lot, and he can be relied on to name drop his alma mater s once every 2-5 minutes. At first I thought this was a little pretentious and phony but I've actually come to like the guy - he tells pretty interesting stories, he's very outgoing etc. I guess we all have things that we are proud of. I'm definitely not a name-brand school person but there are somethings that I'm proud of that I probably talk about too much and I think most people are the same way. I try not to judge. I've found that you can actually learn some stuff from "arrogant" people if you just let them say the things that make them feel special.

Not me. Ever since I got back from Everest I keep my mouth shut.

See this is a great example - If I met you I would love to hear your story, but your modesty would make it unlikely that I would.

I was joking about Everest. Some day maybe :)

hi, this is the tool (author) here ...

regarding the price differential, please note that i am not trying to compare private vs. state schools, where the price differential is staggering! there are plenty of private schools that aren't "name-brand", and attending those costs around the same tuition as attending name-brand private schools. also, there are name-brand public schools (e.g., UC Berkeley) that cost the same as other public schools.

EDIT: Also, nobody has mentioned financial aid packages at private universities (not just 'name-brand' ones, but rather all private universities). depending on your family's financial situation, it's possible to pay tuition comparable to what you'd pay from going to a public school.

These programs tend to screw the middle class, the definition of which is actually pretty low (~50k/yr) I think. Sure if your parents work at McDonald's you will probably get a bunch of grants, but if not you are footing the bill.

> The author seems like a tool. That's the thing about name-brand graduates (particularly Harvard), within 5 minutes of meeting someone you will hear about where they went to college, even 10+ years after they graduated. Clearly this is an exaggeration, but definitely has some truth to it.

hi, while you are right in surmising that i'm a complete and utter tool, i don't understand how your point relates to my article. i don't think i mentioned anything about people name-dropping their alma maters when making introductions (if i did, please let me know, and i'll remove the offending sentences). i certainly don't remember meeting people and having them name-drop their alma maters within 5-10 minutes, and i don't remember ever doing that either. but i guess it does happen, or else people wouldn't keep mentioning it so much on threads like this one :)

Is this a Zen thing?

By gratuitously recapping the top 1% of humanity's absurd privilege through a litany of self-congratulating narcissism disguised as advice are we supposed to reach some sort of nirvana?

aka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy

Given that 4 years of tuition at one of those name-brand schools might run $150k (vs, say, $25k at your local state University), the given advantages don't seem to be worth it. Starting off your career 1/6th of a million dollars in debt in order to cut short your job search by a few months and earn perhaps a few percent higher salary (a lot of which will get swallowed up if you're unlucky enough to jump into the higher tax bracket in that range) seems a dubious decision to me.

If I had gone to one of those "name-brand" schools I suppose I might have been better off in some ways, but right now I'm 100% debt free and that gives me a hell of a lot more options than a diploma from a name-brand University would, in my opinion.

(this is the tool/author here)

Right on for being debt-free out of college :) The financial argument you make is convincing, but please note that I am not trying to pit private schools against public schools! There are plenty of people who are $150k in debt out of college who went to private universities that are not known as so-called 'name-brand' schools.

ADDENDUM: and, depending on the need-based financial aid they receive, there are plenty of people who attended name-brand universities who graduate with much less debt than $150k

If you don't start with the advantage of a name-brand school and work resume then you have less to risk or distract you from your world-beating startup.

An astonishing number of billionaires never finished college (http://www.pennylicious.com/2006/10/09/billionaire-dropouts/)

(this is the tool/author here)

yes i totally agree --- actually i've observed that people who graduated from name-brand schools are often more risk-averse and less likely to start their own companies, since they've been trained at a young age to take the safe and steady route through school and life.

regarding your billionaires comment --- please note that nowhere in my article did i say that going to a name-brand school would make you more likely to strike it rich :) the advantages are most prominent when you want to stay within "the system" rather than venturing off into new territory

Good comment - you would do well to balance your article with this unexpected risk-aversion result of having a name-brand academic and work pedigree.

Maybe those points(which glaringly describe benefits) are no substitute for competency & experience. This sounds more like entitled mediocrity from the author 'privileged' enough to have attended one of these schools.

I've known enough ivy league grads(even post-grads) who would argue against the claims in that blog post. Of course they are proud of the schools that they graduated from but their joy rests primarily in what they learned while they were there.

The author writes as if education ends after graduation.

Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into their first job with ?

(this is the author/tool here)

> Maybe those points(which glaringly describe benefits) are no substitute for competency & experience.

Agreed, but the title of my article was the ADVANTAGES of attending a name-brand school, so of course it glaringly describes benefits :) i should probably write a follow-up article talking about disadvantages

> Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into their first job with ?

sure, that's also a good topic to write about, but please note that many graduates of non-name-brand private schools also walk into their first job with the same 6-figure debt. i'm not trying to contrast private/public schools here.

> Why not also write about the 6 figure debt that many graduates walk into their first job with ?

ADDENDUM: there's been no discussion of financial aid packages at private universities (doesn't matter if they're 'name-brand' or whatever, many private schools offer need-based financial aid). depending on your family's financial status, you could end up paying tuition comparable to what you'd pay at a public school.

Good thing when you start a startup you answer to reality, and reality doesn't make estimations of your abilities based on a degree

Of course I agree, if you want to get a job, a name brand degree is going to help. Heck if I was recruiting for a company I'd certainly pay more attention to someone with a better degree (just more attention though). But doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that.

Exactly. A successful ENTREPRENEUR is worth 10 MBAs and 10 PHDs.

In other words: Connections and reputation. It lets you market yourself better and meet people you wouldn't meet otherwise.

Not just that, but many companies focus the large majority of their recruiting efforts on a select few universities. My company, for example, focuses almost entirely on CMU, Berkeley, and Caltech for technical hires.

If our recruiters' actions are any indication, a name-brand school can save your resume from being trashed right off the bat. But it won't land you a job; it just makes the competition more intense.

Articles like this make me glad to be working with the stuff I am. I could never handle a field that looks at anything other than portfolio. Reading this gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Yeah, a lot of companies do this. As somebody who went to a mediocre state school, I obviously don't care for this practice, but as somebody who does hiring, I understand. In addition to advertising our positions at good schools, I always post them at my alma mater as well (somehow I feel bad if I don't), and it's just depressing. Resumes I get from my school are routinely littered with embarrassing errors (how do you misspell the name of the college you're currently attending, anyway?) and are consistently weak on experience compared to their peers at the better-known institutions.

In general, restricting your candidate pool based on where they want to school probably really improves the signal-to-noise ratio. And since recruiting is a numbers game anyway, with dozens or hundreds of applicants applying to each position, it's not exactly an illogical thing to do.

The author speaks like not going to a "name brand" school will doom somebody or make things exponentially harder. This is simply, empirically not true.

If landing a first job out of college is what worries you, factors which matter a great deal more (for dynamic, high growth, technology companies of any size) are competence, curiosity and credibility.

Speaking from my own experience, somebody from an relatively uknown school but who spent his college and high school years working in the industry (even in small companies people have rarely heard of) and writing code outside of work/school in his spare time, will get noticed, interviewed and hired by top tier employers no worse than somebody coming from a brand-name school.

(this is the tool/author here again)

> Speaking from my own experience, somebody from an relatively uknown school but who spent his college and high school years working in the industry (even in small companies people have rarely heard of) and writing code outside of work/school in his spare time, will get noticed, interviewed and hired by top tier employers no worse than somebody coming from a brand-name school.

I totally agree with you, but one of my points in the article is that (rightly or wrongly, i'm not in a position to judge), somebody from a name-brand school would have a decent chance of getting that same job offer even without putting in nearly as much self-driven dedicated real-world hacking work experience as somebody who didn't have such privileges.

Question: which UK schools are known in the US?

Oxford and Cambridge are the only two that come to mind, and I know nothing about them but their names.

London School of Economics also comes to mind. But Oxford and Cambridge are probably the ones with the best reputation.

In fact, there are very few international universities that are well known among the general public in the United States.

The only other international schools that I suspect are well known are McGill and the Sorbonne.

Waterloo? U of Toronto?

Legitimate American here! Waterloo is that battle Napoleon was in, right? And U of X doesn't ever strike me as reputable unless it's Tokyo University, and I don't think many Americans know Tokyo University either. Outside of England the only schools I know of are Trinity in Ireland and IIT.

I don't have anything against "U of X"es. The University of Chicago, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), University of Wisconsin (Madison), and University of California (Berkeley) are all good schools. I think that in the right fields any of those schools will get you anything having gone to MIT or Stanford would (except with alumni of MIT and Stanford).

Incidentally, nobody interviewing me has ever asked where I went to school. Seems like something that matters only if you have no proof of competence.

You forgot UPenn, which is the only U of X that is in the Ivies. But that was kind of my point. The names all run together, and while I do recognize some (and not all positively), I don't recognize any outside the United States beyond TU.

I guess this means that the best way for Universities to advertise is by having an iconic clock tower that is in every animated television show with high-school or college-age protagonists. I think Keio and Waseda are objectively better schools (in Tokyo), but they clearly do not advertise as well as Todai. ;)

Yeah this is pretty funny. I work with a guy who graduated from Moscow State University - this name has a kind of strange anti-prestige to it in the U.S. I always joke around with him about it. (This is a very prestigious Russian university)

in Silicon Valley, IIT is a name-brand.

LSE is a specialist school in the social sciences, so it can't compete in programs it doesn't offer. LSE often ranks higher than 'Oxbridge' for the social science programs. LSE graduates also tend to be more highly sought after by employers than any other UK university, based on employment statistics six months after graduation and average starting salaries (1).

(1) LSE alumnus quoting HESA findings without bias ;)

UCL

University College London is a very fine university, but it is not well known in the United States among the general public.

I've heard of it, and respect it.

Non-American universities I have heard of and intrinsically respect: Queens, Waterloo, UCL, Ox, Cam, Imperial College, McGill. I know, UK and Canada-biased, sorry.

Edit: neglected to mention lse

Source: http://tr.im/CuGq

    * Open new career opportunities
    * Personal development & education experience
    * Increase salary
    * Potential to network

This guy's writing is poor. His tone is pretentious, and his use of words is offensive. In no uncertain terms, don't read this guys narcissistic bs.

This is not a study. It's also especially susceptible to confirmation bias.

Also, my friend went to a name-brand school and he did not experience any of the listed so-called advantages for which he was applicable. Clearly the article is only a celebration of the author's ego since he fails to cite the number one professional advantage from attending a name-brand school: receiving a world-class education, and becoming more intelligent than coworkers.

That's some confirmation bias too: You assume name-brand schools have better education than non-name-brand schools.

(this is the maniacally egotistical author here)

> Clearly the article is only a celebration of the author's ego since he fails to cite the number one professional advantage from attending a name-brand school: receiving a world-class education, and becoming more intelligent than coworkers.

yep i agree with the OP ... please note that nowhere in my article did i claim that you receive a higher-quality education or become more intelligent than your co-workers by attending a name-brand school. on the contrary, many people i know (from all sorts of colleges) would disagree with those claims. the course syllabuses from most US universities are now online, so you can make the comparisons for yourself; you can see what people in different schools learn, and it's pretty similar ;)

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