9 ms·

The only point of a modern day university is that they are (a) exclusive, and (b) "guarantee" that students "know" what they are "taught". That's at least what

The only point of a modern day university is that they are (a) exclusive, and (b) "guarantee" that students "know" what they are "taught". That's at least what people who hire think. I remember someone saying "It wouldn't matter if MIT only taught basket weaving as long as they still had such a thorough selection process". This holds true here. People only care about the pedigree of your degree, it's substance comes second in my experience.

legutierr 11y ago
By this reasoning, you should put a list of the universities you were admitted to on your resume, not the university that you actually attended. Under these terms, what's the difference between going to Harvard for a couple of semesters and dropping out, and getting admitted to Harvard but deciding to attend Dartmouth instead?
- andreasklinger 11y ago
  tbh i had more than one (young) application who mentioned the universities that "were their options" in job interviews
- gravypod 11y ago
  If you have not joined the university you are not part of the "in" group. There is a perception among people that if you attend a "prestigious" university that you are smarter than someone who attends a community college. I find that crazy. Both teach basically the same thing. If they are both accredited, then it is almost indistinguishable. Who would you think is smarter off the cuff, a Harvard graduate, or someone who attended an accredited community college and followed it with a masters from an accredited online school? I'm sad to say that I've been programmed to assume that the Harvard graduate is smarter. It is just a bias that we are all taught as we are young.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    > I find that crazy. Both teach basically the same thing. If they are both accredited, then it is almost indistinguishable. Speaking just on computer science here, but the depth of CS courses varies radically across universities. Sure they all might follow the ACM model curriculum, but how much of the book you're actually reading (and which book you're using in the first place), the number and difficulty of practice problems you're assigned, etc. is definitely not basically the same. I went to an average engineering school, and also took a handful of grad classes. Many of the assignments in Master's classes were a similar difficulty level to the assignments in undergrad MIT classes on OCW. Not all of the courses were this way, but many were.
    - enjo 11y ago
      It's not just the depth, but the breadth as well. Better universities do an amazing job of teaching their students how to learn. The curriculum is thoughtfully designed to produce well rounded students who are capable of achieving expertise in their chosen field (they don't leave college as experts by any stretch.. and THAT is the disconnect surrounding education these days). The big difference between someone coming out of a higher-end school and a community college isn't (necessarily) intelligence or even knowledge, it's that the university educated ones have been prepared to reason about the world in a more complete way. Which is comforting for me to know when I'm hiring. I should note: I didn't finish college (I made it through three years). My wife on the other hand went on to a PhD. At 24 I was convinced that I had missed nothing. It wasn't until about a decade later that I began to understand that she was capable of seeing so much more nuance and detail than I was. Partly because she's smarter, but partly because she had so much more substance to her education. It gives her a basis to reason from that I don't have. It's a gap I'm feverishly trying to close through completing my own education... but it sure would have been easier to have done it in my 20's...
      - dhimes 11y ago
        For someone who can't see nuance, this is a remarkably perceptive comment.
      - ScottBurson 11y ago
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    I'm not U.S. based, so I don't have a total understanding of the whole "prestigious" university vs. community college debate. However, I find it hard to believe that they teach basically the same thing. I'd believe that their curricula are essentially the same, but that's what's "on paper", so to speak. Even if they're both accredited, wouldn't better faculty lead to better teaching? Or better research programs and partnerships with industry? Even stricter requirements and evaluation criteria. If at least some of these aspects are true when talking about "prestigious" universities, then the bias you describe isn't that bad of a heuristic.
    - Amezarak 11y ago
      > Even if they're both accredited, wouldn't better faculty lead to better teaching? No. Generally, at research institutions, faculty are not chosen for their teaching ability. They are chosen for their research background. They are often horrifically bad teachers, if they even teach the class at all and don't just assign it to a TA. It also doesn't take a world-renowned genius to teach an undergraduate or even a Master's program. It takes someone with a very solid grounding in the subject, which should be any graduate, who also happens to be a great (preferably enthusiastic) communicator.
      - gravypod 11y ago
        > No. Generally, at research institutions, faculty are not chosen for their teaching ability. They are chosen for their research background. They are often horrifically bad teachers, if they even teach the class at all and don't just assign it to a TA. I will have to say that I have had a few, select few, of those few bad teachers. As a TA, I can also say that I am thankful that my professor doesn't stick the load of our lecture work on me, but I have heard from many other TAs that this does happen. From what I understand, I'm VERY lucky that I am working with am amazing teacher.
      - paulojreis 11y ago
        I can see your point, but I believe this roughly depends on the education level we're talking about. I did my degree quite a few years ago, but finished my PhD last year. At least in the higher-level, when "learning" isn't exactly the classroom-like experience, I'd rather have a brilliant researcher but lousy teacher as a professor (instead of the opposite).
  - wfo 11y ago
    Intro courses are the same (calculus and basic chemistry are calculus and basic chemistry) but once you get past anything more difficult than 101 you see a wild disparity in difficulty across different universities (some universities will have material as junior-level undergrad that others have as graduate). Community colleges don't even try to teach the vast majority of courses taught at the smallest least prestigious 4-year university.
    - nostrebored 11y ago
      I went to two different state schools. 4000 level courses at one were 2000 level classes at the other, and vice versa. I lost 30+ hours transferring, because courses didn't meet the rigor, or they weren't even courses at the better university. For instance, a 4000 level linear algebra course counted as half of a calc 2 credit.
      - rtkwe 11y ago
        That in and of itself is a weird equivalence to draw. Calc 2 and Linear Algebra are radically different courses...
    - nommm-nommm 11y ago
      >Intro courses are the same (calculus and basic chemistry are calculus and basic chemistry) I went to a tech school. I also went to community college over my first summer for some basic classes. The community college classes were laughably easy and most certainly weren't anywhere near college level, and this was considered a "good" community college. I hear that in state schools they pack 100+ people in a lecture hall for biology 101 or whatever. That seems like it would be difficult to learn that way. I went to a private school and there was no giant classes.
  - hackaflocka 11y ago
    I would assume the Harvard person was smarter (unless their father also went there AND they have a building named after them there), simply because anyone can get into the Community College but not Harvard. That, in and of itself, is a filter. So it's not biased to think that.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    >Who would you think is smarter off the cuff, a Harvard graduate, or someone who attended an accredited community college and followed it with a masters from an accredited online school? "Smarter off the cuff"? After reading about Harvard's interview and admissions process, combined with their 98% 6-year graduation rate, I wouldn't think much about a Harvard graduate without speaking to them. >I'm sad to say that I've been programmed to assume that the Harvard graduate is smarter. Programmed by who? >It is just a bias that we are all taught as we are young. Whom are "we"?
  - Nimitz14 11y ago
    > Both teach basically the same thing. They should, but they don't. Teachers make a difference. I'm at a mediocre university and watching MIT lectures has made me realize I'm missing out on literally mountains of knowledge. Never mind the qualification process, spending several years with intelligent people (both students and faculty) makes a huge difference.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Keep in mind that any videos you're seeing are out there because they're mostly very good examples of lectures. Any large research university has lots of classes with very poor lectures. Not to say that the material isn't in depth and peer/TA interactions aren't valuable but don't assume YouTube and OCW are representative of lecture quality.
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    Someone attending MIT has the opportunity to expose themselves to far, far more than someone who went to community college. MIT has far more resources, and cutting edge research is taking place there.
    - hackuser 11y ago
      Don't forget access to the faculty and your peers.
      - tzs 11y ago
        When I was at Caltech there was an informal weekly thing where students in the freshman physics class who wanted some help or wanted to discuss some things from class in more depth could go as a group and get help from or discuss things with Richard Feynman. (One of my regrets is that I did reasonably well in freshman physics and was not smart enough to realize that spending time chatting about physics with Feynman would have been worthwhile even if I did not need it to pass the class).
- Taek 11y ago
  For me, being at MIT has been much more valuable than my time at RPI (my alma mater). And that's because lots of cool, innovative, and intelligent people flock to MIT. When hosting an event, MIT is able to get the best speakers in the world to show up, because the speakers are excited to be at MIT. I've had conversations with people who would never have come all the way out to RPI because RPI just isn't as interesting. And so it reinforces itself. Intelligent people flock there because intelligent people flock there. But it also means that the time spent there is more valuable.
  - pragone 11y ago
    To be fair, RPI is in Troy, NY, and MIT is in Cambridge/Boston, MA. Nonetheless, I agree with you. Location probably is a deciding factor in a minority of people who would rather go to MIT to talk than RPI.
    - crzwdjk 11y ago
      And what do you think is the advantage of Cambridge over Troy? At least in part, it's the fact that it's where people who go to MIT live. And once they graduate from MIT, there are plenty of companies just across the street waiting for them, having located their offices in part for the convenient access to MIT. It's not clear that Cambridge would be at all the same without MIT and Harvard.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  This advice exactly was given to me by my HS guidance counselor. He told me to apply everywhere I think I might be accepted and then use the list on my resume. Edit: Excepted to accepted. Read what your damn phone types for you...
  - supster 11y ago
    accepted = past tense of accept (to receive or admit formally) excepted = not included in the category or group specified
- edtechdev 11y ago
  Getting admitted isn't as valuable a signal as getting a degree. Both are a signal or proxy for intelligence (IQ), but getting a degree is also a signal of persistence and conformity to get through the grind of college courses. Bryan Caplan has written much about 'signaling theory' and education in posts like this one: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...
  - jasode 11y ago
    >Getting admitted isn't as valuable a signal as getting a degree. It depends. In the limited world of software startup hiring, a compsci student that got admitted to MIT/Stanford but drops out after his freshman year conveys a more valuable signal than graduating from the University of Alabama (a much lower ranked school) after 4 years of study. If it's an older institution doing the hiring such as IBM or Goldman Sachs, they'll want that official piece of paper showing you graduated regardless of the school's low ranking.
    - st3v3r 11y ago
      What signal does that show? Other than not being able to follow through with things (although dropping out of college can be due to a multitude of factors that has nothing to do with the candidate's work ethic or dedication)
    - telotortium 11y ago
      What exactly do you mean? Perhaps if that student founds a startup or joins as an early employee immediately after dropping out. I doubt a student who just washes out or lacks work ethic gets a particularly valuable signal if they decide to apply to a startup some time after, although it's probably easy enough to present the departure in a more favorable light, in which case the dropout would regain some prestige.
- cmurf 11y ago
  Not a bad idea. Bright person gets accepted to Harvard, Yale, etc, but chooses a state college. Kinda like the Spock2 maneuver declining the Vulcan Science Academy. If you're young, and don't have a particularly long resume, sure why not include it?
- SilasX 11y ago
  Some people do that, for exactly that reason, although it comes off sometimes as a bit cringey.
paulojreis 11y ago
I wouldn't say that the substance of e.g. a M.D. degree comes "second". Maybe you're focusing too much on IT?
- gravypod 11y ago
  If there were two medical schools, one a state funded community medical school and the other a big name like John Hopkins, what school would you want your doctor to have attended? Even if you were assured that they both teach the same material, you would want the Coca-Cola over the Pepsi.
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    Yes, of course. My intuition would be the same. But that doesn't mean that the only point of a university is to guarantee exclusiveness/selection and accreditation.
  - jimmaswell 11y ago
    I know what you mean but the soda analogy doesn't really make sense to me. How is Coca-Cola more "prestigious" or something than Pepsi?
    - gravypod 11y ago
      I use it to describe the "name brand" that everyone wants although the two are essentially the same.
      - jimmaswell 11y ago
        Is Coca Cola really more popular though? I never got that impression.
        telotortium 11y ago
        Yeah, he could have at least used RC Cola as an example. Coca Cola vs. Pepsi is more comparable to Harvard vs. Stanford -- I'm sure some people have strong opinions favoring one or the other, but they occupy the same stratum, in Silicon Valley at least.
ttcbj 11y ago
This econtalk provides some nuance for your point: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm... There are many reasons to believe that college is more about signaling than knowledge. While admission is an important part of the signal (certainly at the high-end), completing college is probably an important signal in the mid-range and below. Completing college is probably associated with work-ethic, the ability to follow rules successfully, etc.
- gravypod 11y ago
  I've not seen this before, I'll give it a look. Also, I do admit, my point is made bluntly.
dhimes 11y ago
"guarantee" that students "know" what they are "taught" That used to be the case, but now corporations require you to pass their own exam before they hire you. Let that sink in a moment. No longer are the universities taken at their word about their product. For some of you it has never been any different, but this change came about more or less when I was teaching at university/college. Some of us saw this as a quite profound change. In my view, that was the first signal of the beginning of the inevitable disruption of modern higher ed.
- gravypod 11y ago
  It's good to know that the teachers/professors who still care are aware of how bad things have gotten. Do you, as a former/current educator, see things changing in the future?
  - dhimes 11y ago
    I see two things. One is what I've already discussed. The other is something perhaps just as interesting. Colleges and universities go up for accreditation every ten years (perhaps it varies, I'm not the world expert on this but I've been part of the process). A large part of this process is a self-study conducted by the faculty and staff of the university. In the recent (one-to-two accreditation rounds) past there have been high profile universities that have failed that process. The thing that I find interesting is that the faculty at these universities (to the best of my knowledge) don't particularly give a shit about this process. This accreditation means very little, and is not worth them putting time into. Now, accreditation by their respective professional society is quite important- the Chemistry department cares deeply about what the American Chemical Society (or whomever it is) says, but not about what the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools says. This is exactly the way that certificate programs work: Learning to be a Honda mechanic, for example, requires a program accredited by Honda, not specifically by the NCACS. So it could be that the idea of going to a university and spending $100K on a "broad education" becomes a thing of the past for all but the true scholars, and most people start turning to specialized education for jobs like engineering and computer science. Just a hunch.
- 11y ago
_jeans 11y ago
Paul Graham said something similar in his essay How to Start a Startup[0], though he's referring to how driven these students are to succeed, and being surrounded by like-minded people. > It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
kamaal 11y ago
>>It wouldn't matter if MIT only taught basket weaving as long as they still had such a thorough selection process The whole point of Ivy leagues has been reduced to being a hub for assembling smart/rich people at a place. This has all sorts of unintended consequences like for example, alumni network which exists solely for career benefits. Though great works still comes out of these universities. They are not exactly making people smarter or helping ordinary people directly in any way. They just exist to gather rich/smart people at a place, and see if they can go further.
a3n 11y ago
Nobody ever got fired hiring a college graduate.
holografix 11y ago
Totally agree. He's basically saying: we have high IQ students. Hire them.
sliverstorm 11y ago
Are you familiar with accreditation? ABET is the one that comes to mind. Systems whose whole purpose is ensuring students really do know what they are expected to have learned.
sytelus 11y ago
This is not entirely true. Institutes such as MIT also has much much harder class work. One of the premises of being so selective is to make sure students are capable of getting through grueling coursework that will be required of them. So the MIT graduates are very well "stress tested" in addition to have been very selectively chosen.

legutierr 11y ago

By this reasoning, you should put a list of the universities you were admitted to on your resume, not the university that you actually attended. Under these terms, what's the difference between going to Harvard for a couple of semesters and dropping out, and getting admitted to Harvard but deciding to attend Dartmouth instead?

andreasklinger 11y ago
tbh i had more than one (young) application who mentioned the universities that "were their options" in job interviews
gravypod 11y ago
If you have not joined the university you are not part of the "in" group. There is a perception among people that if you attend a "prestigious" university that you are smarter than someone who attends a community college. I find that crazy. Both teach basically the same thing. If they are both accredited, then it is almost indistinguishable. Who would you think is smarter off the cuff, a Harvard graduate, or someone who attended an accredited community college and followed it with a masters from an accredited online school? I'm sad to say that I've been programmed to assume that the Harvard graduate is smarter. It is just a bias that we are all taught as we are young.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  > I find that crazy. Both teach basically the same thing. If they are both accredited, then it is almost indistinguishable. Speaking just on computer science here, but the depth of CS courses varies radically across universities. Sure they all might follow the ACM model curriculum, but how much of the book you're actually reading (and which book you're using in the first place), the number and difficulty of practice problems you're assigned, etc. is definitely not basically the same. I went to an average engineering school, and also took a handful of grad classes. Many of the assignments in Master's classes were a similar difficulty level to the assignments in undergrad MIT classes on OCW. Not all of the courses were this way, but many were.
  - enjo 11y ago
    It's not just the depth, but the breadth as well. Better universities do an amazing job of teaching their students how to learn. The curriculum is thoughtfully designed to produce well rounded students who are capable of achieving expertise in their chosen field (they don't leave college as experts by any stretch.. and THAT is the disconnect surrounding education these days). The big difference between someone coming out of a higher-end school and a community college isn't (necessarily) intelligence or even knowledge, it's that the university educated ones have been prepared to reason about the world in a more complete way. Which is comforting for me to know when I'm hiring. I should note: I didn't finish college (I made it through three years). My wife on the other hand went on to a PhD. At 24 I was convinced that I had missed nothing. It wasn't until about a decade later that I began to understand that she was capable of seeing so much more nuance and detail than I was. Partly because she's smarter, but partly because she had so much more substance to her education. It gives her a basis to reason from that I don't have. It's a gap I'm feverishly trying to close through completing my own education... but it sure would have been easier to have done it in my 20's...
    - dhimes 11y ago
      For someone who can't see nuance, this is a remarkably perceptive comment.
    - ScottBurson 11y ago
- paulojreis 11y ago
  I'm not U.S. based, so I don't have a total understanding of the whole "prestigious" university vs. community college debate. However, I find it hard to believe that they teach basically the same thing. I'd believe that their curricula are essentially the same, but that's what's "on paper", so to speak. Even if they're both accredited, wouldn't better faculty lead to better teaching? Or better research programs and partnerships with industry? Even stricter requirements and evaluation criteria. If at least some of these aspects are true when talking about "prestigious" universities, then the bias you describe isn't that bad of a heuristic.
  - Amezarak 11y ago
    > Even if they're both accredited, wouldn't better faculty lead to better teaching? No. Generally, at research institutions, faculty are not chosen for their teaching ability. They are chosen for their research background. They are often horrifically bad teachers, if they even teach the class at all and don't just assign it to a TA. It also doesn't take a world-renowned genius to teach an undergraduate or even a Master's program. It takes someone with a very solid grounding in the subject, which should be any graduate, who also happens to be a great (preferably enthusiastic) communicator.
    - gravypod 11y ago
      > No. Generally, at research institutions, faculty are not chosen for their teaching ability. They are chosen for their research background. They are often horrifically bad teachers, if they even teach the class at all and don't just assign it to a TA. I will have to say that I have had a few, select few, of those few bad teachers. As a TA, I can also say that I am thankful that my professor doesn't stick the load of our lecture work on me, but I have heard from many other TAs that this does happen. From what I understand, I'm VERY lucky that I am working with am amazing teacher.
    - paulojreis 11y ago
      I can see your point, but I believe this roughly depends on the education level we're talking about. I did my degree quite a few years ago, but finished my PhD last year. At least in the higher-level, when "learning" isn't exactly the classroom-like experience, I'd rather have a brilliant researcher but lousy teacher as a professor (instead of the opposite).
- wfo 11y ago
  Intro courses are the same (calculus and basic chemistry are calculus and basic chemistry) but once you get past anything more difficult than 101 you see a wild disparity in difficulty across different universities (some universities will have material as junior-level undergrad that others have as graduate). Community colleges don't even try to teach the vast majority of courses taught at the smallest least prestigious 4-year university.
  - nostrebored 11y ago
    I went to two different state schools. 4000 level courses at one were 2000 level classes at the other, and vice versa. I lost 30+ hours transferring, because courses didn't meet the rigor, or they weren't even courses at the better university. For instance, a 4000 level linear algebra course counted as half of a calc 2 credit.
    - rtkwe 11y ago
      That in and of itself is a weird equivalence to draw. Calc 2 and Linear Algebra are radically different courses...
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    >Intro courses are the same (calculus and basic chemistry are calculus and basic chemistry) I went to a tech school. I also went to community college over my first summer for some basic classes. The community college classes were laughably easy and most certainly weren't anywhere near college level, and this was considered a "good" community college. I hear that in state schools they pack 100+ people in a lecture hall for biology 101 or whatever. That seems like it would be difficult to learn that way. I went to a private school and there was no giant classes.
- hackaflocka 11y ago
  I would assume the Harvard person was smarter (unless their father also went there AND they have a building named after them there), simply because anyone can get into the Community College but not Harvard. That, in and of itself, is a filter. So it's not biased to think that.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >Who would you think is smarter off the cuff, a Harvard graduate, or someone who attended an accredited community college and followed it with a masters from an accredited online school? "Smarter off the cuff"? After reading about Harvard's interview and admissions process, combined with their 98% 6-year graduation rate, I wouldn't think much about a Harvard graduate without speaking to them. >I'm sad to say that I've been programmed to assume that the Harvard graduate is smarter. Programmed by who? >It is just a bias that we are all taught as we are young. Whom are "we"?
- Nimitz14 11y ago
  > Both teach basically the same thing. They should, but they don't. Teachers make a difference. I'm at a mediocre university and watching MIT lectures has made me realize I'm missing out on literally mountains of knowledge. Never mind the qualification process, spending several years with intelligent people (both students and faculty) makes a huge difference.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Keep in mind that any videos you're seeing are out there because they're mostly very good examples of lectures. Any large research university has lots of classes with very poor lectures. Not to say that the material isn't in depth and peer/TA interactions aren't valuable but don't assume YouTube and OCW are representative of lecture quality.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Someone attending MIT has the opportunity to expose themselves to far, far more than someone who went to community college. MIT has far more resources, and cutting edge research is taking place there.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    Don't forget access to the faculty and your peers.
    - tzs 11y ago
      When I was at Caltech there was an informal weekly thing where students in the freshman physics class who wanted some help or wanted to discuss some things from class in more depth could go as a group and get help from or discuss things with Richard Feynman. (One of my regrets is that I did reasonably well in freshman physics and was not smart enough to realize that spending time chatting about physics with Feynman would have been worthwhile even if I did not need it to pass the class).
Taek 11y ago
For me, being at MIT has been much more valuable than my time at RPI (my alma mater). And that's because lots of cool, innovative, and intelligent people flock to MIT. When hosting an event, MIT is able to get the best speakers in the world to show up, because the speakers are excited to be at MIT. I've had conversations with people who would never have come all the way out to RPI because RPI just isn't as interesting. And so it reinforces itself. Intelligent people flock there because intelligent people flock there. But it also means that the time spent there is more valuable.
- pragone 11y ago
  To be fair, RPI is in Troy, NY, and MIT is in Cambridge/Boston, MA. Nonetheless, I agree with you. Location probably is a deciding factor in a minority of people who would rather go to MIT to talk than RPI.
  - crzwdjk 11y ago
    And what do you think is the advantage of Cambridge over Troy? At least in part, it's the fact that it's where people who go to MIT live. And once they graduate from MIT, there are plenty of companies just across the street waiting for them, having located their offices in part for the convenient access to MIT. It's not clear that Cambridge would be at all the same without MIT and Harvard.
noonespecial 11y ago
This advice exactly was given to me by my HS guidance counselor. He told me to apply everywhere I think I might be accepted and then use the list on my resume. Edit: Excepted to accepted. Read what your damn phone types for you...
- supster 11y ago
  accepted = past tense of accept (to receive or admit formally) excepted = not included in the category or group specified
edtechdev 11y ago
Getting admitted isn't as valuable a signal as getting a degree. Both are a signal or proxy for intelligence (IQ), but getting a degree is also a signal of persistence and conformity to get through the grind of college courses. Bryan Caplan has written much about 'signaling theory' and education in posts like this one: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...
- jasode 11y ago
  >Getting admitted isn't as valuable a signal as getting a degree. It depends. In the limited world of software startup hiring, a compsci student that got admitted to MIT/Stanford but drops out after his freshman year conveys a more valuable signal than graduating from the University of Alabama (a much lower ranked school) after 4 years of study. If it's an older institution doing the hiring such as IBM or Goldman Sachs, they'll want that official piece of paper showing you graduated regardless of the school's low ranking.
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    What signal does that show? Other than not being able to follow through with things (although dropping out of college can be due to a multitude of factors that has nothing to do with the candidate's work ethic or dedication)
  - telotortium 11y ago
    What exactly do you mean? Perhaps if that student founds a startup or joins as an early employee immediately after dropping out. I doubt a student who just washes out or lacks work ethic gets a particularly valuable signal if they decide to apply to a startup some time after, although it's probably easy enough to present the departure in a more favorable light, in which case the dropout would regain some prestige.
cmurf 11y ago
Not a bad idea. Bright person gets accepted to Harvard, Yale, etc, but chooses a state college. Kinda like the Spock2 maneuver declining the Vulcan Science Academy. If you're young, and don't have a particularly long resume, sure why not include it?
SilasX 11y ago
Some people do that, for exactly that reason, although it comes off sometimes as a bit cringey.

paulojreis 11y ago

I wouldn't say that the substance of e.g. a M.D. degree comes "second". Maybe you're focusing too much on IT?

gravypod 11y ago
If there were two medical schools, one a state funded community medical school and the other a big name like John Hopkins, what school would you want your doctor to have attended? Even if you were assured that they both teach the same material, you would want the Coca-Cola over the Pepsi.
- paulojreis 11y ago
  Yes, of course. My intuition would be the same. But that doesn't mean that the only point of a university is to guarantee exclusiveness/selection and accreditation.
- jimmaswell 11y ago
  I know what you mean but the soda analogy doesn't really make sense to me. How is Coca-Cola more "prestigious" or something than Pepsi?
  - gravypod 11y ago
    I use it to describe the "name brand" that everyone wants although the two are essentially the same.
    - jimmaswell 11y ago
      Is Coca Cola really more popular though? I never got that impression.
      - telotortium 11y ago
        Yeah, he could have at least used RC Cola as an example. Coca Cola vs. Pepsi is more comparable to Harvard vs. Stanford -- I'm sure some people have strong opinions favoring one or the other, but they occupy the same stratum, in Silicon Valley at least.

ttcbj 11y ago

This econtalk provides some nuance for your point: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm... There are many reasons to believe that college is more about signaling than knowledge. While admission is an important part of the signal (certainly at the high-end), completing college is probably an important signal in the mid-range and below. Completing college is probably associated with work-ethic, the ability to follow rules successfully, etc.

gravypod 11y ago
I've not seen this before, I'll give it a look. Also, I do admit, my point is made bluntly.

dhimes 11y ago

"guarantee" that students "know" what they are "taught" That used to be the case, but now corporations require you to pass their own exam before they hire you. Let that sink in a moment. No longer are the universities taken at their word about their product. For some of you it has never been any different, but this change came about more or less when I was teaching at university/college. Some of us saw this as a quite profound change. In my view, that was the first signal of the beginning of the inevitable disruption of modern higher ed.

gravypod 11y ago
It's good to know that the teachers/professors who still care are aware of how bad things have gotten. Do you, as a former/current educator, see things changing in the future?
- dhimes 11y ago
  I see two things. One is what I've already discussed. The other is something perhaps just as interesting. Colleges and universities go up for accreditation every ten years (perhaps it varies, I'm not the world expert on this but I've been part of the process). A large part of this process is a self-study conducted by the faculty and staff of the university. In the recent (one-to-two accreditation rounds) past there have been high profile universities that have failed that process. The thing that I find interesting is that the faculty at these universities (to the best of my knowledge) don't particularly give a shit about this process. This accreditation means very little, and is not worth them putting time into. Now, accreditation by their respective professional society is quite important- the Chemistry department cares deeply about what the American Chemical Society (or whomever it is) says, but not about what the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools says. This is exactly the way that certificate programs work: Learning to be a Honda mechanic, for example, requires a program accredited by Honda, not specifically by the NCACS. So it could be that the idea of going to a university and spending $100K on a "broad education" becomes a thing of the past for all but the true scholars, and most people start turning to specialized education for jobs like engineering and computer science. Just a hunch.
11y ago

_jeans 11y ago

Paul Graham said something similar in his essay How to Start a Startup[0], though he's referring to how driven these students are to succeed, and being surrounded by like-minded people. > It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

kamaal 11y ago

>>It wouldn't matter if MIT only taught basket weaving as long as they still had such a thorough selection process The whole point of Ivy leagues has been reduced to being a hub for assembling smart/rich people at a place. This has all sorts of unintended consequences like for example, alumni network which exists solely for career benefits. Though great works still comes out of these universities. They are not exactly making people smarter or helping ordinary people directly in any way. They just exist to gather rich/smart people at a place, and see if they can go further.

a3n 11y ago

Nobody ever got fired hiring a college graduate.

holografix 11y ago

Totally agree. He's basically saying: we have high IQ students. Hire them.

sliverstorm 11y ago

Are you familiar with accreditation? ABET is the one that comes to mind. Systems whose whole purpose is ensuring students really do know what they are expected to have learned.

sytelus 11y ago

This is not entirely true. Institutes such as MIT also has much much harder class work. One of the premises of being so selective is to make sure students are capable of getting through grueling coursework that will be required of them. So the MIT graduates are very well "stress tested" in addition to have been very selectively chosen.