
Paul Graham: News from the Front - mattculbreth
http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html
======
rams
Peter Norvig in his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" says, "If
you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This
will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give
you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you
can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case,
book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make
anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can
make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's
Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School
degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and
made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. # Work on projects with
other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on
some others. When you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a
project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you
learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because
they make you do it for them)."

He is referring to Jamie Zawinski. <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

~~~
npk
Isn't it ironic that Peter Norvig touts this view, but works at google? I've
heard that GPA/pedigree are one of the key decisions for hiring?

~~~
cellis
Actually I think its the problem solving questions that they ask you. I may be
mistaken,since I don't work there. Theres an article in businessweek or b2.0
about it right now. Things such as "You are shrunk to the size of a
nickel..preserving your density proportional...and put in a blender...you have
5 seconds before the blades start moving - what do you do?

~~~
SwellJoe
Google is a total slut for a high GPA, make no mistake about that.

Google also has a list of schools that are considered top-tier, and if you're
not from one of those, you're unlikely to be hired. I don't believe Google has
always been this way--and I think the pressure to raise the hiring bar in so
many artificial ways comes not from any elitism, but from the fact that Google
is hiring way too fast, and the folks at the top know it. By ruling out
everyone below a quite high academic threshold, they've cut down the number of
applicants under consideration.

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that if you have a long track record of
producing good results, you can still get hired by Google. I received a
recruitment letter from them, but never followed up by going through the
hiring process to find out if someone with a couple of two year community
college degrees (and no computer science classes at all aside from AP high
school classes--I tested out of all of the computer-related classes for my
degrees) could get hired there, based on the strength of accomplishments,
alone. The letter came two days after I accepted funding from YC, and a few
months after we started making money with Virtualmin, so it wasn't really of
interest at all. But now that I think about it, it would have been an
interesting experiment.

~~~
jey
You're right for the vast majority, but Google does make a few exceptions. One
of my friends has no college degree but was hired by Google as a programmer
almost entirely based on his rank on the competitive programming site
TopCoder.

------
ecuzzillo
Two points: 1) It does seem to matter for at least CS grad school, as was said
in Undergraduation, because of research opportunities. So if you just want to
start a web startup and get rich, fine, but if you want to go to grad school
after you get rich, not so fine.

2) I've taken classes at CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford, and while the
differences didn't particularly correlate with the rankings (since the
relative rankings of those three places in CS get permuted regularly anyway),
there were serious differences in attitude and rigor. CMU and Berkeley were
both very rigorous; the difference was that CMU was rigorous in a somewhat
more pointless, soul-sucking manner, on average, and didn't explain things as
well. Stanford was somewhat less rigorous, which I imagine was because of the
Ivy-league difficult-to-get-in but easy-to-pass phenomenon. This seems to
correlate somewhat with the number of undergrads at each place involved in
research; at both CMU and Berkeley, I know many undergrads involved in
research, while the one professor I talk to at Stanford hungrily scrounges for
the rare undergrad who's good at research.

So there are differences in curriculum and selection, I think; they're just
not particularly amazing predictors of success. They certainly should
influence the decision of which colleges to apply to, though.

------
gojomo
Though as a reader I start sympathetic to both the thesis (it matches my
priors) and the author (always enjoy PG's essays), this struck me as hand-
waving.

For all the talk of, "I have a lot of data" and "[w]e're just finally able to
measure it," there are no supporting numbers, just general impressions.

C'mon, give this topic the rigorous Bayesian treatment. How does the
population of YC market-successes compare with YC-chosen and YC-applicants,
along the 'prestigious college' dimension? How do these compare with the
college-graduate population as a whole, and the college-graduate population
succeeding in other competitive fields?

Those numbers would be great, and I'm rooting for the "college-doesn't-matter"
result.

~~~
pg
We don't have enough data yet to prove anything by research paper standards,
but that doesn't mean I'm saying nothing. We try consciously to ignore where
people went to school; that is not standard practice; and moreover this is
something I'm claiming we've changed.

~~~
michael_nielsen
Presumably, your data can only show that it doesn't matter what school you
went to, conditional on being accepted by YC.

That is a completely different statement than showing that it doesn't matter
what school you went to. Your article appears to me like it is conflating the
two.

~~~
pg
No, I'm also considering people we invite for interviews.

~~~
gojomo
So the conjecture of the essay is some combination of the following:

(1) Conditional on having applied to YC, YC finds that having attended a
prestigious college makes one no more likely to be selected for interviews.

(2) Conditional on having been selected for YC interviews, YC finds that
having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to receive YC
support.

(3) Conditional on receiving YC support, YC finds that having attended a
prestigious college makes one no more likely to succeed in the market (here
defined as visibly thriving within about a year).

Given the initial essay's strong emphasis on market success as the ultimate
verifier (paragraphs 5-8), I thought the main idea was (3) -- but if interview
invites/subjective-evaluations are a factor, some amount of (1) and (2) are
mixed in, too.

------
aston
First, I'd just like to point out that PG is in an interesting place to report
that college doesn't matter, having himself attended two Ivy League schools.

There are two arguments happening here. The first is that entrepreneurship and
business success are not so well correlated with where you go to undergrad.
The second is that where you go to college doesn't make much of a difference
in life in general. I won't really quarrel with the first, since it's been
demonstrated pretty often, and YC's results support it as well. The second, on
the other hand...

The main problem with trying to assert that college doesn't make a difference
in life is that there's really no easy measurement you can do over "net
change" in life. That's due both to the long span of time a life consumes as
well as the complex and/or fuzzy cause-effect relationships that are at play
throughout. At best, I think, you would need to argue over objective
differences that have some immediate effect, and then hope that those actually
do make a difference. As an example, here are some of the things that I think
made Paul Graham successful that are pretty strongly related to his going to
graduate school at Harvard:

\- he met RTM and Trevor there

\- he got to spend his time in Boston, where he's acknowledged startups can
thrive

\- being able to drop the H-bomb almost certainly helped give credibility to
his company

\- he learned Lisp (not really the most popular language at the time, except
at certain places)

Would Viaweb have happened had he gone elsewhere, or skipped grad school
altogether? Well, maybe. But I doubt it. Harvard's name is what convened the
talent (peers, advisors, mentors, investors) that shaped much of that company,
and it's there that Harvard's value lies. I think this essay horribly
undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your
university is amazing.

~~~
pg
> strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard

This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by
always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear
enough.

> undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your
> university is amazing

Sure, but not by accident. The whole thesis of this essay that this "magic" is
bullshit, and that as success depends more on measurable results, it will play
much less of a role.

~~~
cperciva
>This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by
always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear
enough.

Certainly not clear enough for this non-US reader. But of course the word
"college" has a different meaning on this side of the border (and an entirely
different meaning in Oxford).

~~~
abstractbill
A bunch of other education-related words have different meanings on different
sides of the pond. For example,

UK: You write a dissertation for a masters degree and a thesis for a PhD.

US: The opposite.

I wonder if the terminology will converge...

~~~
npk
In the US you never write a thesis, you write a dissertation (document) based
on a thesis (idea.)

~~~
abstractbill
Interesting. Wikipedia thinks the two are synonymous:

"In academia, a thesis or dissertation is a document that presents the
author's research and findings and is submitted in support of candidature for
a degree or professional qualification."

[from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis>]

~~~
dfranke
Npk is correct, but it's a pedantic distinction. Most people, apparently
including the Wikipedia editors, just use the two words interchangably.

Edit: yikes. Somebody went on a downmodding spree on this thread.

~~~
npk
I asked all my academic friends, and I've come to the conclusion that it _is_
a pedantic distinction. But it's useful to have two different words for the
two separate concepts :)

------
Alex3917
When I was taking an education theory class we had to do simulated admissions.
We had to do three applicants every ten minutes, which works out to just over
three minutes per app. In that amount of time you can quickly scan over the
grades and SATs, and maybe read the first paragraph of each essay if you're
lucky. The other thing I learned is that the real admissions officers got
statistics updates twice a day for the average GPA and SAT score, and also the
projected US News rank. This means that whether or not your grades and SATs
were good enough depended largely on whether your app was read before or after
lunch, because what it took to get into the college completely changed every
time they were handed the new report.

For low income minority students there was an option to set the app aside for
a second reading in order to learn more about the student's situation and if
there were an ameliorating factors, but for the rest of the students the
admissions officers were expected to make a decision on the first pass after
the three minutes.

Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the academic department they were
applying for, so they pretty much knew whether they'd be accepted before they
ever applied. The flip side is that they only got an edge in admissions if
they applied early decision, because if they were going to bring down the
average GPA then they had to bring up the average matriculation in order to
not affect the overall US News rank.

I think it's one of those things like eVoting. That is, people with no CS
experience think eVoting is totally secure whereas CS experts know it isn't.
Similarly, I highly suspect that anyone who thinks getting admitted to an Ivy
shows a certain baseline level of respectability has never worked in
admissions. I'd guarantee it.

As for the importance of college GPA, if you want to see something funny then
apply for a wall street job. If they ask you what your GPA was in college, ask
them how GPA correlates with alpha. :-)

The craziest thing was that Google did a massive HR survey and determined that
there was basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for
the company. Because of this they decided that they would give jobs to five or
six people with sub 3.0 GPAs each year. Well if there is little or no
correlation, why should it matter what GPA is at all? I suspect the psychology
behind the Google hiring process has a lot in common with the psychology of
female circumcision. That is, it was done to me so it must be a good thing.
And if it's a good thing, then by definition it must be good to do unto
others.

edit: fixed a few grammatical errors

~~~
mynameishere
_Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the department they were applying
for_

As ridiculous as this is at a fundamental level, you know damn well that the
athletic recruiters take long, careful looks at all the potential players,
unlike the academic recruiters.

 _basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the
company_

I'm a GPA skeptic myself, having blown off every class (including the
important ones), but this is easily explained: If a company puts weight upon
GPA, then any low-GPA students they happen to hire likely had some _manifest
achievements_ that got them in. Such achievements are more important than GPA
one way or the other.

~~~
Alex3917
I won't argue that the athletic recruiting isn't a bit ridiculous, but in
general the academic standards are probably more fair and transparent than the
regular admissions process. Each team has its GPA published each semester for
all to see, and in general the number of recruits a team is allowed to bring
in is highly dependent on whether or not the previous recruits have been
succeeding academically. Of course each individual athlete is also highly
monitored, and if GPA dips below a certain level then it's even worse than if
you were a normal student. Not to mention the random drug testing that no
other students are subjected to, the prohibition against putting certain types
of photos in your Facebook profile, the mandatory diversity/alcohol/sex
training sessions, etc. Apparently it's no longer even allowed to smoke
cigarettes or use any other tobacco products.

That being said, the NCAA bureaucracy is still lame.

------
jedberg
When I was in college, I figured out that the education you get doesn't really
change. However, what does change is the people that you are associating with.

At the "elite" colleges, there is a greater percentage of smart students,
which lends itself to more productive discussions and more difficult tests
that force you to challenge yourself. Also, it is like the difference between
the regular classes in high school and advanced classes -- in the advanced
classes you cover the same material, but with greater breadth and a deeper
understanding.

And the number 1 biggest advantage of going to an elite college is that you
have a much better chance of meeting the world's future movers and shakers --
the people that will be the educational and business leaders of the next
generation. That alone is a good reason to go to an elite college.

So I have to disagree, and say that there are indeed advantages to going to an
elite college, just not the advantages that most people think.

~~~
pg
If you read all the way to the end you'll find you're not disagreeing as much
as you think.

~~~
jedberg
I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating
that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it
again, and still didn't see anything.

My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on
which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did
I misinterpret the point of the essay?

~~~
pg
[4] At the best colleges you learn more from other students than from your
professors. You should be able to reproduce this at almost any college by
making a conscious effort to find smart friends, instead of leaving it to
chance.

I.e. the benefit of going to an elite college is that you get almost for free
something you have to work at otherwise: knowing lots of smart people.

~~~
jedberg
Ah. I guess being in the footnote made me think it was more of an offhanded
comment than a major counterpoint to the premise of the essay. Perhaps in an
edited version, this should get its own paragraph.

~~~
pg
Ok, a lot of people seemed to be commenting about this, so I pulled that point
out of the footnote and up into the body of the essay.

------
alex_c
But it DOES matter where you go to college, and the essay itself argues for
that.

In this context, we can say there are three things that can determine
someone's success:

1) confidence others have in you

2) self-confidence

3) actual ability

Going to a "good" college affects 1 and 2 the most, and arguably 3 the least.
In a startup 3 and 2 are arguably the most important, and 1 the least - so I
guess that agrees with pg's argument. In the corporate world, 1 and 2 matter
the most, and 3 the least - aligned with what a brand-name college provides.

So the argument seems a bit circular: based on the yc sample set, college
doesn't matter because college doesn't matter to the yc sample set. Even if
that SHOULD extend to the world at large, it doesn't.

~~~
DocSavage
This is why Seth Godin champions NOBS instead of a traditional business
school:
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/04/nobs_the_end...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/04/nobs_the_end_of.html)
NOBS maximizes #1 and #2 with little work. Now if only there really was a
NOBS. Wait, it's called YCombinator! :)

------
cperciva
I did my D.Phil. at Oxford University, and my B.Sc. at Simon Fraser
University; while SFU is one of Canada's best universities, it clearly doesn't
have the stature of Oxford or Harvard. Were the students at Oxford more
intelligent than the students at SFU? No. Were they more motivated? No. Are
there jobs for which I'd rather hire an Oxford alumnus than an SFU alumnus?
Absolutely.

The largest advantage of a great university like Oxford is in increasing the
range and depth of ideas presented to students. It's impossible to completely
separate the teaching role of a university from its research role: Teaching
(and inconvenient questions asked by irritating students, like yours truly, in
class) informs research, and research informs teaching. And quite apart from
the "indigenous" research, if you're at a minor university without a strong
reputation for research, you don't have Knuth dropping by for a few months, or
Rivest visiting to give a lecture (albeit about the rather odd notion of
obtaining forward security by using a stream of broadcasted random numbers
which is too fast to be stored).

There are undeniable advantages to being at a great university in being
exposed to new ideas. Why haven't PG et al. noticed this? Probably because
their measurement -- can someone create a successful startup? -- is just as
biased as everyone else's measurements. After all, when was the last time that
a YC-funded startup really did anything new?

~~~
pg
> when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?

Considering how many there are of them, probably within the last couple days.
But instead of me giving you an example to which you will predictably reply
"that's not really new," how about you giving us an example of a non-YC
startup you think is doing something really new, so we can see what level of
really-newness it would take to satisfy you?

~~~
corentin
Why don't you fund a few (or at least one) "crazy" startups like Anybots?
Because that's probably the coolest thing YC-related! Are you only interested
in web stuff, or is it a lack of serious applications?

Here are a few "cool" ventures I have in mind:

<http://www.armadilloaerospace.com>

<http://www.intellasys.net>

<http://www.teslamotors.com>

~~~
pg
You don't count justin.tv as crazy?

~~~
corentin
Yes, I have to agree that the technology behind justin.tv is quite
interesting. Right now, it seems like it's only used by a bunch of
exhibitionist and egocentric persons in a real TV fashion, but it will
probably end up being used for more interesting stuff (like, say, a sailor
racing across the world).

On the other hand, they'd be stupid not to go where the money is (that is,
were all the MySpace generation kids are).

~~~
euccastro
A sailor racing across the world would be dead boring in real time. It would
be interesting to watch a half-hour documentary summarizing a couple months
worth of travel.

Then again, I guess that's true for all kinds of reality TV we've seen so far,
including justin.tv.

~~~
corentin
Most people are dead boring in real time; a sailor, an astronaut or any other
kind of explorer is just a little bit less boring than a teenage girl buying
whatever crap.

~~~
greendestiny
Lifecasting will attract a certain initial audience but to me its the least
interesting thing about justin.tv They want to be youtube live. The
opportunities for small theatres, musicians, sports, awards and presentations
etc to create a live event online is huge. The difference between a youtube
video that can sort of limp along without context for years to come, and a
live event will be very important if they can do it right.

At the moment though, they just aren't set up to make short snippets of
content from different broadcasters easily findable.

The distribution of tech is a problem as well. Another random idea; I wonder
if they could set up a post based rental of equipment for one off events.

------
bluishgreen
I have thought about this a lot.In fact lot of my teen years were spent
thinking about this. I went to an elite school in India. And I leave a comment
here just to confirm that its the same all over the world. These lines are
gold. ( I mean very valuable :)

"The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a
superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lot of people,
probably the majority of people in the America, have some amount of insecurity
about where, or whether, they went to college. The tragedy of the situation is
that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd
have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Colleges
are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only one real
advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be
missing much if you weren't. When you're excluded, you can only imagine the
advantages of being an insider. But invariably they're larger in your
imagination than in real life."

------
Jd
Analogue: no one ever gets penalized for upvoting comments that have already
been upvoted several times.

Same basic idea.

~~~
mynameishere
No, college is more like this: You see somebody, "Jd", (except let's call him
"Harvard") who already got a lot of upmods, and you attach yourself to him by
replying (except, let's say "applying") and _bang_ now my comment is closer to
the top of the page.

More people read it, leading to an extra opportunity to gain Karma. Of course,
if I don't stay "on topic" (let's say "go to class") people will notice and
downmod me (let's say "flunk me"). Staying "on topic" leads to a dull
uniformity.

~~~
Jd
Absolutely. My comment was more directed towards those that evaluate/hire ivy-
league/equiv. grads. Yours is correct re: why people attend such schools.

------
byrneseyeview
See also: [http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-
to-w...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-work-for-
bigco.html)

------
prakash
PG: Here's a good way to test this: Please ask the next round of applicants to
NOT mention the school they went to.

What do you think?

~~~
pg
We considered that, but there's more information there than just a scalar
value representing impressiveness.

~~~
prakash
Can you expand on that? What kind of information?

~~~
pg
We can tell which founders went to the same school. We can ask people who
teach at or went to school x about applicants from there. If they went to a
school we know about first hand, we can ask more specific questions about what
they did in college. If they went to a big hacker school like MIT, we can
suggest that they recruit friends and/or launch their beta there.

~~~
vegashacker
It also gives you the data you need to continue testing this theory.

~~~
asdflkj
He could always ask them after accepting (or even rejecting).

------
michael_nielsen
How was the data analysed?

The most obvious way, and the way the essay seems to imply, is simply to look
for correlations between success / failure and which school the founders
attended.

If this is how it was done, then the conclusion is flawed. All it shows is
that the school doesn't matter, conditional on being accepted by YC (rather
than rejected). This is a completely different conclusion than the one the
essay reaches, namely that the school doesn't matter, period.

------
rfrey
As always, a convincing case, well edited. :) Paul's point probably plays even
better among Hacker News readers, who are probably more suspicious than the
average bear of college in general.

Seems to me there's an extra factor contributing to the longevity of the
"which school" criterion. There are other roles in the business (especially
larger businesses) such as biz dev, M&A, etc. where attending an elite school
might enhance success considerably - not for the academic content learned, but
for the network of friends and colleagues you gain at that school. It's the
English Grammar School model of corporate success.

s Paul points out, hiring decisions are often made by HR types: but HR is a
very extroverted, business process focussed profession. As personalities, and
in job description, the HR folks have more in common with the people and roles
that do benefit from elite school connections than with technical people for
whom the elite school is irrelevant. Like all of us, they apply lessons from
familiar situations to more unfamiliar situations. And so the Stanford Screen
lives on.

------
henning
"The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math
and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges
before you stop finding smart professors in the math department."

I wish this would be repeated more often. I've implemented many interesting
algorithms based on papers written by people at, like, Louisiana State
University. Noname places.

~~~
dfranke
It's also interesting how many universities kick ass in little obscure
research niches. I had never even heard of Chalmers until I learned Haskell.

~~~
henning
I wouldn't have thought Glasgow even _had_ a university much less one that
produced a really nice implementation of a modern functional programming
language.

------
irrelative
This essay seems to resonate with another Paul Graham theme -- to avoid
prestige while choosing a job. His point then is that you are never
compensated for prestige, so you might as well stay away from it.

It looks to me like the education market is starting to catch up with the job
market. Prestige in either area probably means that you're paying too much or
being paid too little.

------
cstejerean
I'm surprised it took Paul this long to realize this about universities. A
little less than half way through high school I realized that the entire
process (get good grades to go to a good school, get good grades there so you
can get a good job) is crap. I decided that it was more important to spend my
time in high school learning what I cared about then to obsess over GPA.

I never got around to finishing my college degree, I left about 2 years into
it and got a job because I ran out of things to learn in college. I've worked
for a series of both small and large companies and I've found that most
companies also don't care where one went to college (Google is a big exception
to this). Most companies simply don't value people that are fresh out of
college because colleges don't teach people the right skills.

It's true however that in good schools there are more smart people and you are
more likely to meet interesting people, but that doesn't mean you need to go
to a top school, just live close to one.

------
epi0Bauqu
I was amazed initially (though that quickly faded) how few truly "smart"
undergraduates there were at MIT in the 9 years I hung around there. I put
smart in quotes because I really don't like that word, but I don't have a
great substitute either. Obviously they were smart enough to get in. But most
were significantly lacking in at least one necessary area to be labeled
"smart" IMO (often several), including intuitiveness, creativity, being a
self-starter, analytical thinking, breadth and depth of knowledge,
intellectual curiosity, etc.

Putting exact numbers on it is difficult due to the self-segregation at MIT
and subjectivity obviously at play. However, I would say perhaps 30% fall into
the seriously lacking category, another 30% in a substantially lacking
category and another 25% in a good but not great category (perhaps lacking
only one major thing). That leaves only 15% or so of people I came across I
would say were "smart" in the sense described above. When you move to people
with the essential qualities necessary to work successfully at a really early
stage startup, I would say it drops to 7% or so. I'm not saying found one,
just work at one as one of the first employees. When you move to people with
all the founding qualities, the % probably drops to 1-2%. I know this first
hand after trying to start companies with people in the "smart" category.

The above has really hit home other times as well. Here are two more
occasions. First, when graduating, 62 people in my class out of about 1,080
(~6%) were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. I was shocked at a) how many of these
people were my friends at MIT; b) how many of these people I had come across
(given that I didn't meet all 1,080; and c) that this list included pretty
much all of the people I had previously labeled "smart" myself in my class
that I had come across.

Second, my wife taught statistics at MIT for several years. One time a kid
came up to her complaining about an exam grade and told her it was not
possible to have gotten an A on this exam. He said all his friends studied
real hard and yet they all ended up with Cs and Ds. To which she replied,
actually roughly 30% of the class got As. The point is, they were completely
self-segregated by "smartness" and didn't even really know it.

All that being said, an MIT degree really does go a long way in terms of
impressing the average person/company. I have done independent consulting and
applied for jobs where they basically stopped researching me when they saw
MIT. That is the rule, not the exception. And that was in Boston. Now that I
live in PA, it seems even more shocking to people to come across someone from
MIT. Given the above, and in agreement with PG, this behavior is unwarranted.
I of course am thankful, but it also annoys me that so many people are free-
riding on the name.

~~~
brlewis
In response to your first paragraph, I think more people should obsess about
where there kids go to kindergarten.

Not obsess about how a selective kindergarten will help them get into the
right college, but about whether the environment will suppress creativity,
being a self-starter, and intellectual curiosity, as most schools do.
Unfortunately, schools that nurture those qualities usually cost money.

~~~
dfranke
One of my biggest motivations for getting rich is so that when I have kids, I
can afford to home-school them.

~~~
mtw
i disagree with home-schooling. kids need social interaction, they will get
more creative, they will learn faster, and more importantly be more open to
new ideas. putting your kids in a walled garden is going to harm them a lot

~~~
dfranke
Walk down the halls of your local middle school and tell me what behavior you
see which you think your kids ought to emulate.

Whenever I meet someone who was home-schooled (or occasionally alternatively
schooled) I can often guess that they were after a few minutes of
conversation. There's a certain kind of confidence and maturity in them that
doesn't survive public schools and never comes back afterward. I envy it.

------
Neoryder
For me the biggest thing about going to an elite school is expectation.

The more you expect for yourself, the more others expect from you the more you
are driven to succeed or make something of your life.

Elite colleges are like the newsweek article on octopart, it makes you want to
beat the expectations on you, only several order or magnitudes less.

I think getting an education is secondary in college. Finding people who live
with passion used to be a problem when we didn't have the internet. And
working/studying in elite institutions gave you a higher chance of meeting
passionate people.

------
sethjohn
I've noticed the same thing about top-tier chemists. Grad schools tend to have
a good mix of Ivy kids and others, but the most brilliant scientists always
seem to come from some mid-level state university or a little liberal arts
college.

Success at the highest levels of scientific research takes an odd mix of
creativity, intuition, and intellegence that has little to do with academic
success in high school or undergrad.

------
LaurieCheers
I think Paul's logic here is subtly backwards...

"It doesn't matter much where a given individual went to college."

From Y-Combinator's perspective, yes, I'm sure that's true. The people they're
looking at are self-selected, and pretty much guaranteed to be smart,
motivated and well-educated, which means that all Y-Combinator needs to do is
worry about how they think - not where they were taught. But that's after the
fact. To someone deciding what college to go to, or where to send their
children, I think the choice is still very important.

"someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart
people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all." True, of
course. But where does that thirst for knowledge come from? With the right
support, or the right teachers, perhaps that party animal would have changed
his ways. As far as I'm concerned, _that_ is really the purpose of good
schools.

In Y-Combinator terms, it's not that they make a founder more likely to
succeed: it's that they make him more likely to try being a founder in the
first place.

------
mdakin
One hundred years from now will an "elite college" still exist? The
reputations of today's elite colleges stem from a perceived legacy of alum
achievement 25, 50, 100 years ago. Are factors operating now that will more
evenly distribute this achievement in the future? Or is this "legacy of
achievement" and conferred eliteness already BS?

------
marrone
I liked this article, if for the simple fact that it can only help my cause (I
graduated, though not from a prestigious school)!

The whole time I was going to school I was super impatient to get done so I
could actually get working on something real. I was really just after the
piece of paper they give you at the end (though I never attended my graduation
to get that paper, and the original was sent to the wrong house).

Once I graduated I started my own project so that I would have some work to
show when applying for jobs. I found that that experience led to as much or
more knowledge gained as my best year in school. And that is not a knock
against the school I went to (I thought the staff there was awesome).

I am always reminded of a quote from some movie (cant think of the name of it
now)... "You spent x thousands of dollars on an education you could have got
for 2 dollars in library late fees"

~~~
abstractbill
_I am always reminded of a quote from some movie (cant think of the name of it
now)... "You spent x thousands of dollars on an education you could have got
for 2 dollars in library late fees"_

Good Will Hunting.

~~~
dfranke
Great movie. It became my nickname when I took a construction job the summer
between high school and college :-).

------
dpapathanasiou
The second paragraph reminded me of this Alan Watts talk:
<http://www.freshminds.com/animation/alan_watts_life.html>.

But unlike the Watts talk, the essay does converge to a very rigid notion of
"success".

------
portLAN
"Good" colleges are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the best students organized
online and randomly picked some backwoods institution and applied there, it
would instantly become _the_ place to be. Meanwhile the previous top schools
would be left with the second-stringers.

It bears repeating: out of the top 10 richest "U.S. Americans", 4 inherited
it; of the six who didn't, one has a degree (Warren Buffett), and 5 are drop-
outs: Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, and Michael
Dell. Woz dropped out to start Apple (he went back to school only after he was
done working there) and Jobs dropped out of Reed College here in Portland.
(We're all very proud of him.)

------
jey
Anyone have that awesome quote from Bowling for Columbine where Moore is
interviewing South Park co-creator Matt Stone and Stone explains the supposed
consequences of not getting into honors classes in the 3rd grade?

~~~
brlewis
They're like, "Don't screw this up...or you won't get into honors math in 7th
grade...and you'll just die poor and lonely."

[http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/word/Bowling-for-
Columbine.do...](http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/word/Bowling-for-
Columbine.doc)

~~~
jey
Thanks for the effort, but I think he phrased it differently.

------
whacked_new
It doesn't take a Paul Graham to realize this nor do I think this is the first
time the thought hit him. There are also things that I, and others, would
argue about, in favor or not, but nonetheless,

thank you for writing this.

------
davidw
As someone who took 1 term of a bad C++ class at a community college, and
primarily studied Italian prior to dropping out of the University, I can't
help but vote this one up.

------
nanijoe
I always wondered if boso getting into YC had anything to do with the founders
having gone to Oxford.

~~~
pg
No. It was because they were obvious ass-kickers.

------
epi0Bauqu
PG: have you noticed that a) GPA matters (at any school); b) that GPA matters
at so-called elite schools in particular; c) any other consistencies with
regards to college activities and/or honors, e.g. Phi Beta Kappa, having had
started clubs or groups, etc.?

~~~
pg
I don't know. We don't ask people what their grades were or what honors they
got.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Why not? I'm not implying that grades & honors definitely correlate in any way
with whatever it is you are looking for in applicants, but they could.

Additionally, it may be the case that overall you have noticed that attending
an elite school has no correlation with success in your program, but that
doesn't mean an identifiable subset of elite school candidates do not as well.
For example, suppose GPA doesn't correlate by itself, or even a high GPA at an
elite school. Yet maybe a super-higher GPA at an elite school does, or Phi
Beta Kappa or whatever.

------
henning
the idea that college is necessary is a relatively recent aberration that from
what I can tell dates back to the end of WWII and the GI Bill. before that,
going to college was rare.

college is not for everyone (we need good plumbers and auto mechanics, fer
chrissakes). i didn't apply myself as well as i could have at college, but
about 40% of the value I got was from reading interesting books I found in the
library, which I could have got for $100 a year while working in the real
world and gaining money and experience -- which is what I'm doing now.

that said, some things are very hard to learn outside of a classroom and the
mathematical maturity I gained from taking math classes will serve me for a
life time.

------
edw519
Here's another dirty little secret: Your grades don't matter either.

I still chuckle when I think of the drones in my fraternity that missed the
best 4 years of their lives because their heads were stuck in their books.
Sure, they got 4.0 averages, but who cares now?

~~~
whacked_new
They matter in different ways. High grades are like the good college. It's
instant attention. If your goal is to work on Wall Street, good grades are an
advantage. Just depends on what you want to do.

Similarly, high IQ implies smart, but low IQ does not imply unsmart.

~~~
cstejerean
Grades matter only if you have no other experience. If you want to work on
Wallstreet chances are you don't have much experience coming out of school.
But after you get the right experience nobody cares about grades. The question
is whether or not you can get the right experience in the time you would
otherwise waste worrying about grades.

------
vegashacker
This is the first of PG's essays I've seen with comments at the bottom. It
seems they're brought to us courtesy of Disqus, a YC startup.

<http://paulgraham.disqus.com/news_from_the_front/>

------
voidstar
ha, this is true. i go to rutgers for 4k/yr after a certain ithaca ivy wanted
43k/yr or whatever it was, so i get to keep a college fund's worth of seed
money for whatever i do post-grad. and the "elite college" types i meet in the
summers are no better-educated than me (and incidentally, drink a lot more...)

------
tipjoy
From what I can tell, being a YC alum has similar benefits to being a Harvard
(or other Ivy League) alum.

------
s_baar
Thank you, this helps me a lot.

