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> The lifetime earnings for a college degree holder[1] is probably a lot more than for those without a degree. > Even a Thiel Fellow probably needs to be admit

• tomp 11y ago
  > Absolutely you should strive be the type of person who can get into and graduate from an elite school. The value of then actually doing it is what's suspect. What's more, it might pay off even more to actually be accepted into an elite school, but never start it, and instead carry the letter of acceptance to an employer and get a job.
  • candu 11y ago
    Much of the real value of degrees to the prospective employee is in added leverage. As long as "enough" employers in field X require degrees, and as long as either a) the unemployment rate in X is low enough or b) your demonstrable skill is high enough, your value is increased by having that degree in X simply because now (non-competes, collusion pacts, and similar practices aside) there is competition for you. Conversely, if you don't have the degree, your choices for employment are (perhaps unfairly) limited - not just by the employers themselves, but also by immigration policies that limit visas for skilled work to degree-holders. (Of course, if either of those limits were to disappear overnight, universities that have implicitly bet on rising value by rapidly increasing their tuition fees would be in deep, deep trouble, save perhaps those with virtually bottomless endowments. Sort of a speculative bubble, in a way.)
    • pmiller2 11y ago
      Exactly. One employer unilaterally lowering or eliminating its standards with respect to degrees is not going to do anything in a competitive employment market. What's more, if the labor market becomes a buyer's market for employers, filtering by degree will happen, just because it cuts down the number of applicants.
      • dllthomas 11y ago
        If you just want to cut down the number of applicants, that's even easier - just pick a random sample to look at. It only makes sense to do it based on features of the individual candidates if you believe the remaining pool is, on average, better. (... or maybe more precisely, "that you will be able to select better candidates from the remaining pool for a given amount of effort").
        • pmiller2 11y ago
          No, filtering in the presence of an excessive number of applicants makes sense if the resulting pool is not worse than the original pool. They're saying academic performance is not correlated with professional competence. That means precisely that filtering by degree results in a not worse applicant pool.
          • dllthomas 11y ago
            Why expend additional effort to filter along meaningless axes to wind up with some unknown lesser number of applicants (which you might then want to shrink further) when you can already filter meaninglessly to end up with precisely the number of applications you want (by simply grabbing randomly and dropping the others on the floor)?
            • potatolicious 11y ago
              Because it lets people feel better about themselves and is - superficially - justifiable. A lot of what we do in hiring, even in tech, is effectively just ways to whittle down numbers of applicants, but even here on HN there are people who will insist their way of whittling numbers down improves the applicant pool, because hand-waving and superficial logic.
  • deleted 11y ago
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• gjkood 11y ago
  You are probably right. My intend in pointing out the Thiel Fellowship is that even if you decide to drop out of an undergraduate degree, the chances of doing better without a degree finally is only if you are part of an exclusive/elite group of outliers such as Thiel fellows. There are always outliers and then there is the general case.