

Avoid the Ivy League - moinnadeem
http://mashable.com/2014/07/22/avoid-the-ivy-league/

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jmathai
TL;DR It's not what you know but who you know.

I've been slowly coming to a very different conclusion. Either go to community
college for a decent education or pay up to get into an ivy league college to
build your network.

For the vast majority of people I have worked with there doesn't seem to be
any major differentiators with regard to intelligence, smartness, work ethic,
etc. between those that graduated from MIT/Stanford/etc or some other school.

What I do see are the connections that these folks have to other fellow
alumni. MIT folks somehow know a lot of other MIT folks. I'm not sure if it's
because they share a common thread, knew each other while in college or some
other reason.

If you look at college as a financial investment into your future then my
hunch is that connections can be as valuable (if not much more valuable) than
what you learn. For that reason I'm starting to think you simply want to
surround yourself with others who are most likely to overachieve. I imagine
Ivy league schools house a disproportionate amount of overachievers.

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dllthomas
I am confused how what you wrote is "a very different conclusion" from your
TL;DR.

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jmathai
Sorry for confusion. The TL;DR was the short version of what I wrote. They're
both saying the same thing. I removed the "\--" formatting in case that was
confusing.

~~~
dllthomas
Gotcha!

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drewrv
For those that haven't read it, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education is a
great essay by this author.

[http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-
elite-...](http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-
education/#.U9AivIBdXEI)

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scottlocklin
Scoring systems are useful, but adding some random chance to the idea would
make the system more humane and useful. Say, rank the applicants by quantiles,
take some random distribution of applicants from people above some minimum
level. Otherwise, you'll get exactly the situation described. Many of the
"elites" generated by the present system are worse than useless. The Athenians
actually used to select some of their officials by random chance. That worked
out OK.

