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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

by smanek 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 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."
zasz 18y ago
They've actually done a study on the effect of colleges on success here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322. They looked at students who got into Princeton about 30 years ago, and compared the success of those who went to Princeton versus those who got in but went somewhere else. Unless you came from a really poor background, it doesn't seem to make a significant difference.

by smanek 18y ago

aantix 18y ago

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 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."

zasz 18y ago

They've actually done a study on the effect of colleges on success here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 http://www.nber.org/papers/w7322. They looked at students who got into Princeton about 30 years ago, and compared the success of those who went to Princeton versus those who got in but went somewhere else. Unless you came from a really poor background, it doesn't seem to make a significant difference.