

Seth Godin on College Education - luccastera
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/the-greatest-ma.html

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henning
I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit. I went to a
local community college for a year, transferred over to a University of
California school, and doing that you get a degree that's precisely the same
as the one everyone else gets, at the same time, for cheaper, with a lot less
stress.

I didn't have to take the SATs or any of that nonsense, either.

The classes I benefited the most from were project-based ones where you spent
a few weeks in the library, hacked like mad for a few, then wrote a report and
gave a presentation.

~~~
aswanson
_I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit._

You were correct.

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Alex3917
Rule of thumb: If you think you need to graduate from a top college, you're
probably right.

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neilc
I don't think anyone "needs" to graduate from a top college. But I think it's
also true that the quality of the engineering education at, say, MIT is much
better than the quality of the education at an average university. Part of
that is the quality of the lectures and lecturers, but another major factor is
the environment -- the quality of your fellow students, and the social norms
in a place like that.

I think that is even _more_ so for graduate programs, but significantly less
so for degrees in arts or the social sciences -- if you're taking poli sci, I
think most of the advantage of going to Harvard is in the social connections
you can make.

~~~
aswanson
I think the point that Alex was trying to make is that if you are not
intelligent enough to realize that it doesn't matter that much, you probably
are going to need all the credentials you can get.

~~~
brent
Which is funny as he appears to have gone to cornell.

~~~
falsestprophet
as an alternative to going to a proper Ivy league school

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caveman82
The problem with the classic argument of "whether or not it is worth paying a
hefty premium to go to an elite school" is that it discounts the impact of
intangibles, such as positive peer influence and brand value.

I say yes. The effect is even more pronounced in highly competitive industries
like finance. I've found that an overwhelming majority of successful recent
grads in that industry (2-3 yr exp analysts making $300,000+/year) are top 20
grads. I doubt the average 18-22 yr old is going to exhaust the knowledge that
their professor can impart, but you put an above average student at a school
where he's rubbing shoulders with future entrepreneurs, politicians and
thought leaders there's no doubt that it will increase his likelihood of
success.

So back to the question: Is it worth paying $200,000(over 4 years at Skull and
Bones College over paying $10000 at Big State U? In many circumstances, yes.

And yes--there are always exceptions to this rule but the discussion is about
the overall trend not particular instances.

~~~
aantix
Along these same lines, Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages"
of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In".
<http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html>

Some would probably argue that going to a big name school allows you to make
better connections, etc, thus resulting in a higher income.

But as pointed out in the Gladwell article, this just isn't the case.

While it's easy to point out the kid that went to MIT is making more than the
kid that went to state college, this just isn't a proper comparison.

From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of
Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose
between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more
highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the
ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into
both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn
State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more
selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the
one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State
might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower
family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse
later on. But they don't."

The moral of the story is that if you're a hard working individual,
connections and money are going to follow regardless of where you go to
school.

~~~
caveman82
The problem with your argument is that you don't isolate factors when arguing
your point. I'm not arguing that there aren't other factors that make a person
successful. I'm saying that all things equal, the influence of one's
surroundings can have a significant positive effect on a persons chance of
succeeding.

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edw519
Logic and price rationality have no more to do with it than buying a McMansion
or a Mercedes instead of what you really need.

Having a kid at Swarthmore is a great way for boomer parents to further
differentiate themselves from the pack.

~~~
nostrademons
It doesn't work, though, because all the boomer parent's friends' kids went to
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams, and Columbia.

I think they do it to avoid falling _behind_ , because while having a kid go
to Amherst is nothing special with this group, having one go to UMass is
borderline shameful. Which is idiotic reasoning IMHO, because that UMass
student can take the exact same courses as the Amherst kid, taught by the same
professors, and might be just as smart, but parents can be illogical
sometimes.

