
Are Big Name Universities Worth the Money? - nickb
http://www.newsweek.com/id/154374
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sokoloff
I have to say that "graduated from MIT" is far more impressive to potential
employers, investors and co-founders than is warranted, IMO. And I say this as
an MIT grad. :) Being no dummy, I dig through my nightstand to find and wear
my brass rat (MIT class ring) approximately once every 5 years, when I need a
better shot at one of those things. Otherwise, no one I know cares, though
half of our top technical leaders are from MIT.

I also look at the recruiting efforts my current company (startup in early
200x, now decidedly not-startupy, public, and $500+K in annual revenue): we
bias heavily towards "top" CS schools when doing college recruiting. We've
gotten some absolutely fabulous candidates from "second tier" schools and we
naturally recruit there every year, but if you come from MIT, you get a full
25% (estimated) better chance right from the start of the interview.

For my own account (plural of anecdote not being data notwithstanding),
despite being a pretty strong candidate, I strongly suspect that my current
lot in life is based more than 50% on my attending (and not even spectacular
results at) MIT, and as a result, I give heartily every time they call for
alumni donations.

Employers and founders: MIT isn't all that special. So called "second tier"
schools also have some extremely capable potential employees, and individual
talent, motivation and drive is FAR more important.

High-school students: If you have the choice between MIT and $200K in debt and
a state school with a full ride, and you're pretty sure you're going to work
in engineering for 20 years, definitely go to MIT. Right or wrong, that name
opens doors, and I believe I've done a lot more interesting and lucrative work
than I'd have been able to do from the full ride I had offered to me at UMCP.

As an MIT grad, I'm a lot less impressed with the brass rat than most people
who are in a position to help shape your lot in life. If you're going to found
5 startups in the hopes that one will be a solid success, save the $200K and
invest it in your startups. If you're going to go work for someone else, even
just for a while, you'll have no problem paying off your student loans from
MIT, or any other top school, IME.

~~~
carterschonwald
You touch on an interesting point (implicitly) that there is a large pool of
folks at tier 1 schools that are tremendous workahols. The thing that isn't
clear to me is how large a subset of those folks are also intellectually
creative? It's not obvious at least to me that the number of such folks is
particulaly large

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smanek
I think the salient issue with big name universities is selection bias. MIT
gets to choose valedictorians with perfect SAT scores as its student body; is
it any surprise that its students are more successful than a less selective
university's?

The real question is how well would the students accepted to MIT but who chose
to go to less selective schools do (not perfect data, but the best we can get
from the real world). I'm personally inclined to believe they do just as well
as those who actually attended MIT, but I don't have the data to know.

Interestingly, a similar issue comes into play with YC. A surprisingly high
percentage of YC accepted companies are successful (for some definition of
success), just like a surprisingly high percentage of ivy league grads are
successful.

The real question is how much of that success is due to the fact that
companies yc funds are intrinsically better than the rest of the field versus
how much impact pg's help has. Maybe pg is just amazingly good at picking
winners, and the companies he picks would have succeeded with or without his
help.

The only way to get a better idea would be to compare the success rates of
people accepted by yc who declined to those actually accepting yc's offer.
This wouldn't even be a perfect measure though, since maybe there is some
underlying factor (media savvy, proclivity to seek help, etc) that causes a
company to both accept yc investment and succeed.

The only real way to tell would be to have pg randomly issue offers to half
the companies he normally would, and compare the success of companies he
issued offers to against those he would have but didn't issue offers to and a
random selection of those he didn't plan to make offers to.

For obvious reasons that would be an impossible experiment to run. In this
case though, I'm inclined to believe that pg's help does provide more than a
"6.4%" boost to your chances of success.

~~~
aantix
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>

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."

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lbrandy
For grad schools, probably (keeping in mind that engineering/cs grad students
almost never pay a dime to go to grad school).

For undergrad, no. I went to my state school (UF) instead of several ivy-
caliber schools (Carnegie Mellon) because of financial situations. I got such
a superior all-around college experience. I wouldn't have traded those 4 years
for anything in the world.

Big name schools have big name people because of the research they do, not the
classes they teach. That means unless you are doing research, you aren't
benefiting. The only benefit is that, on average, you'll be around smarter
people. You only need to find a small group of really smart people to make
that part of college work for you, and you can find those at any good school.

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mark-t
I went to Northwestern, and I must say that "(a Big Ten university outside
Chicago)" is not how I would describe it. It's the only private school in the
Big Ten, and it's dwarfed in size by the others as well. To call it a Big Ten
university is about as far off the mark as you can get while still being
accurate.

~~~
evgen
The irony in the reporter's statement is that Bowdoin and Northwestern are
probably more similar to each other than Northwestern is to any of the other
Big Ten schools.

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vaksel
Yes, if the industry you are going into puts a lot of value on college name.
If not, not really worth it. My sister got her degree from Cornell(considered
#1 for her major), went into the 2nd most prestigious company in her
field(assistant manager), put herself something like $160,000 in debt.
Starting salary? $36,000, working 60 hours a week and is required to work
weekends.

But if you are in Finance or Computer Science or some other field where school
determines your ability to get interviews, that degree can help open most
doors for you. I'd say the comparison in the eyes of the typical employer has
a 3.75 from a regular state school on the same level as a 3.0 from an Ivy
college.

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rkts
Looks like yet another journalist who doesn't understand correlation vs.
causation.

------
henning
A university is what you make of it.

------
herdrick
If you end up with smarter friends, then yes.

~~~
nostrademons
Smarter _and more ambitious_.

I went to Amherst College. Students there are very, very smart - in many
cases, probably equal to the students at Harvard or MIT (a bunch of my friends
got into those too). But culturally, students at Amherst and other top
liberal-arts colleges aren't all that ambitious. The normal career track is to
graduate, work for a couple years at a financial or consulting firm, go to
Harvard Law or Harvard Business School, make partner or upper management, and
then coast and enjoy the good life.

I'm finding that it's hard to recruit cofounders from among my college
friends, simply because so many of them have other opportunities that don't
entail the risk and hard work that a startup does. When you've been accepted
to HBS and basically have a guaranteed $200k/year salary after graduation (as
happened to my former cofounder), do you take the bird in hand or hang in
there for the 5% chance of a bird in the bush?

