12 ms·

Tangentially related and for sure I'm not always a Malcolm Gladwell fan but this one seemed interesting. Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard https://www.youtube.c

Tangentially related and for sure I'm not always a Malcolm Gladwell fan but this one seemed interesting. Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college. "If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school. At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree. This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers." So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.

havblue 4y ago
Is this more about ivy league schools being the most prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a brain drain of the smartest people in the country?
legalcorrection 4y ago
This is awful advice. Go to the highest ranked university[1] you can get into and afford because for the rest of your life, people will assume a lot about you based on that choice. It will open more doors than you expect. Your friends will be smarter and more successful too. [1] Not literally THE highest ranked. There’s reasons to go to UPenn instead of Harvard, but if you get into Harvard and go to a state school instead, you might be screwing up.
mbrodersen 4y ago
Agree. I have worked with developers from well known prestigious universities from all over the world. And they were not smarter than other people I have worked with from less known universities. Just more in debt :)
abhaynayar 4y ago
The top scorers for my university's entrance exams had the option to go for the CSE course. I had the option to go for the CSE course as well, but ultimately I decided to go for the IT course which was below the CSE course in terms of desirability. The course material was almost the same, placements opportunities were the same, and I would have had to work much harder to get good grades in CSE because all the top scorers would be in it. In my IT batch, even when I didn't study a lot, there were semesters where I got academic awards. And with my remaining free time, I was able to focus on things I was interested in. No stress. I don't have any regrets, but I just wonder how my life would have turned out had I taken CSE. I would have most definitely landed somewhere else, doing something else in life. Better or worse, I don't know.
sideshowb 4y ago
If "we" means "employers", the student attachment to those institutions is not irrational.
- somethoughts 4y ago
  I agree - I think that the employers in STEM themselves have figured it out and combine convenience of proximity/quality of STEM as the decision point/size of recruitable pool. In fact the secret hack is probably to figure out the university recruiting schedules of your target companies and work backwards. [0] I do think society in general and finance/medicine/law (which are harder to analyze based on test scores/leetcode and have more fuzzy needs for network effects) still uses legacy measurement techniques for "worthiness". The top US 10 universities producing tech staff: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-10-universities-that-produce-the-most-staff-for-global-tech-firms/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-10-universities-tha... The report identified the following universities as having the most graduates become employees at major tech companies, along with the number of employees. University of Washington (16,786 employees) University of California–Berkeley (13,260 employees) Stanford University (12,973 employees) University of Texas–Austin (11,049 employees) University of Southern California (9,071 employees) Arizona State University–Tempe (8,320 employees) Carnegie Mellon University (8,274 employees) Georgia Institute of Technology (7,961 employees) University of California–Los Angeles (7,829 employees) University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (7,671 employees)
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    The list is funny. Every listed tech firm's employees come mostly from the region they were founded. There's a lotta bias in that list.
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  Even with that definition it may still be irrational as a student, or at least short-sighted. The further you get in your career, the less it matters which school you went to. Employers may be interested in your schooling if you're fresh out of school, but after that, they're much more interested in your work experience. I went to community college and then transferred to an fairly inexpensive 4-year college. In my first job I got a huge amount of work experience and leveled-up to the senior software developer title. Maybe an employer after that first job would look at me suspiciously for my choice of schools, but they really shouldn't.
robertakarobin 4y ago
This is really interesting! I started my Stanford undergrad as an engineer. After my first Calculus class, I switched to American Studies because it was one of the least engineering-y majors available. Then I dropped out in my Junior year. That was over 10 years ago. Now, ironically, I work at Google as a software engineer — the only one on my team without an engineering degree, let alone without a degree at all. I never thought of my disillusionment with engineering in the context of other students, but rather just as an absolute: "Engineering is too hard for me." Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result. I don't know. Calculus (and a lot of CS nowadays) is pretty standardized across schools. Same textbooks, similar problem sets and curricula. People dropping out of engineering isn't anything new [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJbE-CukPsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJbE-CukPsU
  - corner_case2 4y ago
    > People dropping out of engineering isn't anything new [0]. What is new is: students were told all their life that “they’ll make it” in life. Spoiler alert: not everyone does. Most will never make 7 figure compensation as a SWE, for example.
    - kapp_in_life 4y ago
      I think if the average person thinks the goal for making it in life as a 7 figure comp, 99% of people will never be happy.
- universityguys 4y ago
  I feel like Stanford is a little different. Despite being as selective as Harvardm Harvard has a very unique international reputation as the world's best university (or at least america's best university for the oxbridge lovers)
yunohn 4y ago
But GPAs have almost no value, and people don’t go to such schools for grades. It’s all about networking and prestige, and wanting to be around accomplished or ambitious people. Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily agree with these views, just summarising what I’ve seen.
- acomjean 4y ago
  My Mom went to an Prestigious University, when my Mom went back to work after the kids got old enough to take care of themselves (to some extent..), that degree opened doors. She was explicitly told, hey great university when she went for an interview. We had a friend in our peer group didn't go to state school like us but another "Prestigious University", he was a history major (we were engineers), but he never had trouble finding work. I mean Balmer and Allen met gates at Harvard... Its not the only thing, I suspect it not nothing.
helen___keller 4y ago
> The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree. In the context of grade inflation, this sounds like Harvard is actually one of the better choices and that grade inflation is a desirable property of an elite university
- csa 4y ago
  It depends, but probably not as much as you would think. With a grade curve that high, a B usually means one of the following: 1. Tough weeder course. 2. The person does not really understand the material, especially for upper division courses. 3. Something personal (illness, family issues, personal issues, etc.). For folks who care about grades, like hiring officials or graduate admissions folks, they typically know about the grade inflation. It might be a benefit in law school admissions that mostly use a strict formula with gpa as part of that formula. Anyway, if someone is choosing Harvard over another school due to GPA inflation, then I have a feeling that they won’t gain that much at Harvard or the other school(s) that admitted them. That seems to be optimizing for something fairly minor in the scheme of things.
williamstein 4y ago
View from the faculty POV: I taught mathematics as an Assistant Professor at Harvard for five years (2000-2005), and this advice seems wrong. It’s very generic and abstract, whereas the actual mathematics department (students, faculty, preceptors) at Harvard at any point in time is made up of real people, most of whom are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings. I guided dozens of students in seminars, interesting math research projects, and much more, and many of them really benefited from the environment and went on to truly love mathematics as a long term career.
- universityguys 4y ago
  I agree, even as OP. Malcom Gladwell's writings on elite universities have gone viral, and even though some good points are sometimes made, many are just stretching the truth for clicks. As for the general grade inflation problem: It is confusing that Harvard's grade distribution is so different than schools with similarly strong student bodies like Princeton, Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc. Especially very, very large portion of students are legacy / recruited athletes / very wealthy donor parents. According to the affirmative action lawsuit, over 10% of the student body alone was on the "Dean's interest list," a very elite group of autoadmits, for example.
  - dba7dba 4y ago
    Berkeley has no legacy admission...
    - tatersolid 4y ago
      If daddy’s name is on a building you will find that you get admitted to Berkeley (and most other “no legacy preference” state or private schools).
- somethoughts 4y ago
  If you can get beyond the clickbait title - I think what you'll find is that Gladwell is really talking about the very real STEM people, most of who are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings - who were weeded out in Freshman Calc BC or Differential Equations because the bar is so tremendously high if everything is graded on a curve at a extremely selective university - before you had a chance to meet them.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
Anecdotally, degrees from the Ivy Leagues are not nearly as indicative of intelligence and aptitude as they used to be. They still function as great signals for prestige and networking ability, but they no longer translate to "this person must be a genius, they went to Harvard/Yale". The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas and leave the company after a short time in order to advance somewhere else.
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  I'd slightly amend your statement. The smartest undergrads in the county are still at your HYPSM universities. However, the median intelligence at these schools has definitely dropped drastically as these schools are putting less of an emphasis on SAT scores and the like.
- twofornone 4y ago
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Ivys have always prioritized diversity over merit. The diversity they valued used to be wealth and power instead of just merit, now they've expanded that to include cultural diversity too. But make no mistake, these universities were never just looking to accept the smartest students.
  - dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop. Please don't create accounts to do that with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Ivy's aren't the top schools for stem. MIT/Stanford/CMU are where the stem geniuses want to be, and after that the top public schools are probably more desirable than ivys because they're so much cheaper. I went to UIUC cs over uchicago and northwestern because of the price differential. By far the largest value ad ivys provide is networking with the soon to be rich and powerful. Seems like aspiring stem students realize that's not as important in their field.
gnicholas 4y ago
I wouldn't say someone should choose the University of MD over Harvard, since many potential employers would not know how to map a 4.0 MD GPA onto a Harvard scale. If you're between Harvard and Penn, and Penn gave you a great scholarship, that's a bit easier. Maybe for UC Berkeley even. But if you get too far out of the ballpark people will (1) assume you didn't get into any top-notch schools, and (2) not know how to compare your success at a lower-ranked school to moderate success of your peers at top-rated schools. Full disclosure: I went to the top-rated college I got into, and purposely chose not to go to the top-ranked law school that I got into. The difference wasn't huge (UCLA vs Michigan), but it did mean I wasn't in the top-10. But I saved a bunch in tuition, and that allowed me to have the flexibility to leave the law several years later and bootstrap a startup. OTOH, maybe I would have had an amazing legal career had I gone to Michigan!
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Pair it with the idea that the primary filtering signal of top tier schools is in the admission, not the graduation. Something like 99% of Harvard end up graduating, so simply having a Harvard degree doesn't tell me much more about you than simply having an admission letter. If you were admitted, then it's almost certain that you'll get a degree. So, if instead you hold onto your admission letter, as proof of ability, and then go to a lower tier school where you can be more certain to be one of the biggest fish in the pond, you get the best of both worlds. Hell, even include a list of "universities admitted to" on you resume to signal the brand name to employers that aren't smart enough to realize the brand doesn't matter much anymore. Then again, why would you want to work for an employer that still puts stock in college brand names over individual ability?
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I did consider the possibility that one could say "I got into Harvard but went to X because..." This could have made sense before Harvard's financial aid became so generous, but now they give loads of aid to middle- and low-income students. It would sound a bit weird to keep saying "I got into Harvard...", likely for the same reason you mention at the end. Who wants to be an eliteness snob? Unfortunately there are many such people in the world, which is part of the reason their cachet persists.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
No, its because 10-20 years after you graduate, no one asks you for your GPA at Harvard but they certainly think you are a genius just because you went there (you could graduate with a 2.0 GPA). As opposed to average state school guy with a 4.0 GPA. Many years after you graduate, you regularly get asked where you went to school but rarely asked "what was your GPA". This isn't even mentioning the type of whiz kids or socially powerful people you can befriend at these type of institutions. Steve Ballmer is smart but if he didn't meet Bill Gates, i doubt he would ever have become a multi billionare.
- erosenbe0 4y ago
  Harvard and Yale have 10x horrible negative character connotations compared to MIT or UChicago, and it gets worse all the time. McNamara (Vietnam), Kissinger (illegal bombing of Laos), Clinton (impeached), Bush (WMD lies), Ted Cruz and other senators who literally can't pass 7th grade science. I can continue for an hour.
  - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    For even the "elite", character connotations take a back seat to "ability and drive", which neither of those people mentioned are lacking. To the average person, most of them probably don't even know too much about who Henry Kissinger was or what he did, the see Harvard and think "ohhh smart"
erosenbe0 4y ago
I thought Harvard was just a terrible school for uppity people? There are maybe five U.S. senators with Harvard degrees who can't pass a 7th grade climate science unit. You don't see this from MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern. I can't really imagine a worse school. Except Yale.
- HuShifang 4y ago
  I'd wait a few years on Chicago -- my impression is that they've been undergoing some pretty profound cultural shifts regarding admissions and grading, i.e. their rigor is getting more performative and less real (and it was always at least a little performative, or at least, rooted in being just a little gratuitously mean). EDIT: Not coincidentally, it was an admin brought in from Yale who got this ball rolling.
  - erosenbe0 4y ago
    True, all of the top schools have a problem with either attracting or nurturing unethical clowns of blockbuster proportion.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Can't pass or are unwilling to pass?
  - vkou 4y ago
    On the one hand, passing it would get them a good grade 7 test score. On the other hand, not passing it lets them keep their job. This seems like an easy decision, especially for someone smart enough to finish a degree at Harvard. /S
    - erosenbe0 4y ago
      So we are saying that Harvard and Yale are overrepresented when it comes to leaders of superlative moral depravity, perfidy, and mendacity?
HuShifang 4y ago
I went to Harvard (for grad school) and taught there as a TF; I also have lots of experience of other private and public schools. I don't think Harvard's lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. Let's set aside the egregious legacy or athletic admits. Is the second-lowest quintile of Harvard students smarter than the top quintile of "average school" students? More polished, yeah, sure; more cunning (not necessarily in a negative sense, but in the sense of understanding how to work the system, how to give evaluators what they want), sure. And maybe by the end, there's more difference than there was coming in, thanks to competitive motivation and other network effects. But admissions are something like a lottery, and I would say that the mean "smartness" of Harvard students is not much different from that of a generic selective private school (let's say, Harvard's second-lowest quintile would be the middle quintile at another reasonably selective private school), and that the top percentiles at a generic public school would perform quite comparably to Harvard's top quintile (even if Maryland has a lower mean, as Gladwell notes). Are there very smart people at Harvard, and other prestigious liberal arts universities? Absolutely. But there are lots of people who are merely above average and lucky, by dint of birth or chance, and some people who aren't even above average. (FWIW MIT and Caltech have much better claims to being filled with the smartest people in the world -- rigorous standards of admission, no legacies, NCAA Div3 athletics, etc.)
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas, makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by aptitude scale.
  - PretzelPirate 4y ago
elil17 4y ago
I had a choice between University of Maryland and a much more prestigious institution. It should have been a no brained because of the tuition alone but I struggled with it at the time. Being around people who care about things besides school was super healthy for me and I’m so thankful I made the right choice. (Go Terps!)
MattGaiser 4y ago
> Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions. Do good employers recruit from Maryland? Will you find FAANG and all the investment banks there? How tight is the Maryland alumni network? I didn't go to a school anywhere near as prestigious as Harvard, but I did go to one with a strong reputation and it means that there is a strong community and good employers recruit from there. The degree is a small part of university.
rhino369 4y ago
Apply a rule of thumb to outliers generally isn't appropriate. While it might be true that generally success rises 2% for every 10 SAT points, that doesn't necessarily mean it applies to Harvard and U Maryland. Especially due to grade inflation. 15 years ago, flagship state schools still harshly curved science/engineering classes to weed people out. While Harvard give you a gentleman's B+.
- brewdad 4y ago
  My kid is attending a flagship state school now. His school still very much uses a harsh curve to weed out. A B- keeps you on the track to success in your major. If he decides to go to grad school, he'll be screwed even though he's been on the plus side of the curve in all of his classes so far.
  - rsfern 4y ago
    Grad admissions committees vary quite a lot from program to program, in terms of how they value different admissions criteria. if your kid is interested in research don’t let grades faze them. Demonstrated ability to think independently and write clearly is much more important IMO, at least for PhD work
the_only_law 4y ago
But at Harvard that kid can get in good with future elite, which is probably more valuable than any silly degree.
lumost 4y ago
Having worked with many top tier graduates from many top schools, I think we need to dispense with the idea that academic performance is determined by intelligence. In my experience it was highly correlated with work ethic, many top tier graduates would come in with a push to work exceptionally hard. Sometimes they’d come in with an attititude that they’d “made it” and not work hard enough.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  I don't think that is what science agrees with. IQ correlates pretty strongly with educational achievement. You can disagree with IQ all you but one thing it pretty surely doesn't measure is work ethic.
  - gregw2 4y ago
    I went to a top tier high school and a top tier university. At a top tier university, in STEM at least, the fraction of students who had both high IQ and could work incredibly hard was noticeable. The fraction of STEM people who could get an A without working hard was low to nonexistent.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions. I've heard there are employers that have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions. Also if you've always been the smartest at your school you might not realize you won't be the smartest at Harvard until you get there.
Mikeb85 4y ago
On the flipside, nowadays the school matters more than the degree. Saying you "went to Harvard" is far more prestigious than having a bachelors degree from some forgettable school. And most employers don't care about whether or not you have a specific degree from any school, they care about whether you have any degree from a prestigious school.
wesleywt 4y ago
You don't go to Harvard for an education, you go there for the network you will build. Grades mean nothing when you are friends with a guy who's Dad owns billion dollar companies.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
I know someone who graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. I'm not usually one for ranking people by intellect, but she's not one of the smartest people I know by a long shot. Meticulous? Sure. Does she present herself as if she's a Harvard grad with the economic status that usually entails? Absolutely. But I know several people who graduated from a small directional university who are absolutely smarter than she is. Same with grads I know from Cornell, Penn, and Yale. Maybe the mystical "school where everyone is actually super-intelligent" exists somewhere, but if so, I don't know the name of it. Unless your professors are so lazy that they're grading on a bell curve, there's no need to be afraid of any class. Test scores and project grades are based on rote knowledge and level of effort, not innate talent... and Harvard educators are usually vastly superior to those of "lesser" schools.
- newbie2020 4y ago
  That mystical school is MIT or Caltech
uoflcards22 4y ago
I went to an Ivy League (recently, graduated in last 5 years). This describes me to a T. Started out in CS, dropped to a libarts major because I felt like I couldn't keep up with my peers. I still work in SWE, and began doing it in HS when I was 17. Partner and I discuss frequently that I would have been better off somewhere else.
- wyclif 4y ago
  I know loads of SWEs who dropped out of CS degrees outright or changed majors and graduated with a liberal arts degree (I myself am a SWE but a liberal arts grad; I never took a single CS course but worked as a sysadmin for the I/O department at my school). I can't think of a single one of them that regrets dropping out or switching. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt their career opportunities or their compensation. The only thing I've found that they do regret is spending the tuition money and walking away without a degree.
JamesBarney 4y ago
I've heard this as a reason why HBCU's are so great. Basically a lot of African American's come from schools that don't prepare them as well for science and math as their peers who went to more expensive elite schools. They have to work twice as hard because they're playing catch up and thus many transfer out of math/science/pre-chem and into less rigorous subjects. This is one theory as to why HBCU's do such a better job at preparing the next generation of black scientists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers then other comparable schools.
oneoff786 4y ago
I went to a mid tier undergrad and was easily among the smartest. I went to mit for grad school and was… still among the smartest although the bar was much higher. Luck factors into a lot of things. But the top decile of every school is probably great. The bottom decile is probably totally uninterested in learning. It’s the median that’s interesting. My undergrad median was deeply disappointing. Couldn’t write a simple paper. Literally did not understand how to construct an argument. Grad school median was solid and impressive e
acjohnson55 4y ago
Whether to go to an Ivy or not depends on what you're looking for. I went to Iowa State for undergrad and then did a masters at Princeton immediately afterwards. I greatly appreciate both schools. At Iowa State, most of my classes were easy. But I pushed myself with the sheer quantity of classes I took. I was super involved in extracurriculars and still went out multiple nights per week. I was one class short of a double major and I spent a semester abroad. My only regret is not spending 2 semesters abroad. It was an incredible time. Princeton also did not disappoint. The Graduate School is for sure the most intellectually rich environment I've ever been in. Academically, it was far more demanding, and pushed me to a much deeper level of engagement with my studies. I also know that Princeton would have been a way too intense environment for me at 18. At 22, it was what I was looking for. I also went to NYU for another masters program, which was in many ways even more different from the first two universities. Some people just go there to be at university in NYC, but it's a sprawling school with tons to offer and feels physically and socially much more integrated with the real world than campus-centric universities. I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for whether to go to Harvard or any other school.
- somethoughts 4y ago
  This seems to be a pretty pragmatic approach - it avoids spending a lot of high tuition dollars and effort on the freshman/sophomore generic weeder courses and focuses the high return on effort/investment upper level courses that are specific to your area of study.
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    I wish I could say it was my plan all along, but it just kind of happened. But yes, from a credential standpoint, a masters program can upgrade your prestige, for sure. Although it would be important to note that there are social aspects of the Ivy League in undergrad experience that aren't the same in grad school (and vice versa), if that's what someone is looking for.
epolanski 4y ago
You missing two key things you want from Harvard: - a better CV - a better network
Der_Einzige 4y ago
I could make more money right NOW with a BS in gender studies from Harvard, than I ever could all things being equal with my CS BS from a no name public university. Anyone who takes this advice is indeed self selecting and I suppose that's good, because anyone who can't see that obviously shouldn't go to harvard in the first place!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

havblue 4y ago

Is this more about ivy league schools being the most prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a brain drain of the smartest people in the country?

legalcorrection 4y ago

This is awful advice. Go to the highest ranked university[1] you can get into and afford because for the rest of your life, people will assume a lot about you based on that choice. It will open more doors than you expect. Your friends will be smarter and more successful too. [1] Not literally THE highest ranked. There’s reasons to go to UPenn instead of Harvard, but if you get into Harvard and go to a state school instead, you might be screwing up.

mbrodersen 4y ago

Agree. I have worked with developers from well known prestigious universities from all over the world. And they were not smarter than other people I have worked with from less known universities. Just more in debt :)

abhaynayar 4y ago

The top scorers for my university's entrance exams had the option to go for the CSE course. I had the option to go for the CSE course as well, but ultimately I decided to go for the IT course which was below the CSE course in terms of desirability. The course material was almost the same, placements opportunities were the same, and I would have had to work much harder to get good grades in CSE because all the top scorers would be in it. In my IT batch, even when I didn't study a lot, there were semesters where I got academic awards. And with my remaining free time, I was able to focus on things I was interested in. No stress. I don't have any regrets, but I just wonder how my life would have turned out had I taken CSE. I would have most definitely landed somewhere else, doing something else in life. Better or worse, I don't know.

sideshowb 4y ago

If "we" means "employers", the student attachment to those institutions is not irrational.

somethoughts 4y ago
I agree - I think that the employers in STEM themselves have figured it out and combine convenience of proximity/quality of STEM as the decision point/size of recruitable pool. In fact the secret hack is probably to figure out the university recruiting schedules of your target companies and work backwards. [0] I do think society in general and finance/medicine/law (which are harder to analyze based on test scores/leetcode and have more fuzzy needs for network effects) still uses legacy measurement techniques for "worthiness". The top US 10 universities producing tech staff: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-10-universities-that-produce-the-most-staff-for-global-tech-firms/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-10-universities-tha... The report identified the following universities as having the most graduates become employees at major tech companies, along with the number of employees. University of Washington (16,786 employees) University of California–Berkeley (13,260 employees) Stanford University (12,973 employees) University of Texas–Austin (11,049 employees) University of Southern California (9,071 employees) Arizona State University–Tempe (8,320 employees) Carnegie Mellon University (8,274 employees) Georgia Institute of Technology (7,961 employees) University of California–Los Angeles (7,829 employees) University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (7,671 employees)
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  The list is funny. Every listed tech firm's employees come mostly from the region they were founded. There's a lotta bias in that list.
justin_oaks 4y ago
Even with that definition it may still be irrational as a student, or at least short-sighted. The further you get in your career, the less it matters which school you went to. Employers may be interested in your schooling if you're fresh out of school, but after that, they're much more interested in your work experience. I went to community college and then transferred to an fairly inexpensive 4-year college. In my first job I got a huge amount of work experience and leveled-up to the senior software developer title. Maybe an employer after that first job would look at me suspiciously for my choice of schools, but they really shouldn't.

robertakarobin 4y ago

This is really interesting! I started my Stanford undergrad as an engineer. After my first Calculus class, I switched to American Studies because it was one of the least engineering-y majors available. Then I dropped out in my Junior year. That was over 10 years ago. Now, ironically, I work at Google as a software engineer — the only one on my team without an engineering degree, let alone without a degree at all. I never thought of my disillusionment with engineering in the context of other students, but rather just as an absolute: "Engineering is too hard for me." Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.

908B64B197 4y ago
> Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result. I don't know. Calculus (and a lot of CS nowadays) is pretty standardized across schools. Same textbooks, similar problem sets and curricula. People dropping out of engineering isn't anything new [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJbE-CukPsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJbE-CukPsU
- corner_case2 4y ago
  > People dropping out of engineering isn't anything new [0]. What is new is: students were told all their life that “they’ll make it” in life. Spoiler alert: not everyone does. Most will never make 7 figure compensation as a SWE, for example.
  - kapp_in_life 4y ago
    I think if the average person thinks the goal for making it in life as a 7 figure comp, 99% of people will never be happy.
universityguys 4y ago
I feel like Stanford is a little different. Despite being as selective as Harvardm Harvard has a very unique international reputation as the world's best university (or at least america's best university for the oxbridge lovers)

yunohn 4y ago

But GPAs have almost no value, and people don’t go to such schools for grades. It’s all about networking and prestige, and wanting to be around accomplished or ambitious people. Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily agree with these views, just summarising what I’ve seen.

acomjean 4y ago
My Mom went to an Prestigious University, when my Mom went back to work after the kids got old enough to take care of themselves (to some extent..), that degree opened doors. She was explicitly told, hey great university when she went for an interview. We had a friend in our peer group didn't go to state school like us but another "Prestigious University", he was a history major (we were engineers), but he never had trouble finding work. I mean Balmer and Allen met gates at Harvard... Its not the only thing, I suspect it not nothing.

helen___keller 4y ago

> The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree. In the context of grade inflation, this sounds like Harvard is actually one of the better choices and that grade inflation is a desirable property of an elite university

csa 4y ago
It depends, but probably not as much as you would think. With a grade curve that high, a B usually means one of the following: 1. Tough weeder course. 2. The person does not really understand the material, especially for upper division courses. 3. Something personal (illness, family issues, personal issues, etc.). For folks who care about grades, like hiring officials or graduate admissions folks, they typically know about the grade inflation. It might be a benefit in law school admissions that mostly use a strict formula with gpa as part of that formula. Anyway, if someone is choosing Harvard over another school due to GPA inflation, then I have a feeling that they won’t gain that much at Harvard or the other school(s) that admitted them. That seems to be optimizing for something fairly minor in the scheme of things.

williamstein 4y ago

View from the faculty POV: I taught mathematics as an Assistant Professor at Harvard for five years (2000-2005), and this advice seems wrong. It’s very generic and abstract, whereas the actual mathematics department (students, faculty, preceptors) at Harvard at any point in time is made up of real people, most of whom are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings. I guided dozens of students in seminars, interesting math research projects, and much more, and many of them really benefited from the environment and went on to truly love mathematics as a long term career.

universityguys 4y ago
I agree, even as OP. Malcom Gladwell's writings on elite universities have gone viral, and even though some good points are sometimes made, many are just stretching the truth for clicks. As for the general grade inflation problem: It is confusing that Harvard's grade distribution is so different than schools with similarly strong student bodies like Princeton, Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc. Especially very, very large portion of students are legacy / recruited athletes / very wealthy donor parents. According to the affirmative action lawsuit, over 10% of the student body alone was on the "Dean's interest list," a very elite group of autoadmits, for example.
- dba7dba 4y ago
  Berkeley has no legacy admission...
  - tatersolid 4y ago
    If daddy’s name is on a building you will find that you get admitted to Berkeley (and most other “no legacy preference” state or private schools).
somethoughts 4y ago
If you can get beyond the clickbait title - I think what you'll find is that Gladwell is really talking about the very real STEM people, most of who are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings - who were weeded out in Freshman Calc BC or Differential Equations because the bar is so tremendously high if everything is graded on a curve at a extremely selective university - before you had a chance to meet them.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

Anecdotally, degrees from the Ivy Leagues are not nearly as indicative of intelligence and aptitude as they used to be. They still function as great signals for prestige and networking ability, but they no longer translate to "this person must be a genius, they went to Harvard/Yale". The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas and leave the company after a short time in order to advance somewhere else.

LewisVerstappen 4y ago
I'd slightly amend your statement. The smartest undergrads in the county are still at your HYPSM universities. However, the median intelligence at these schools has definitely dropped drastically as these schools are putting less of an emphasis on SAT scores and the like.
twofornone 4y ago
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Ivys have always prioritized diversity over merit. The diversity they valued used to be wealth and power instead of just merit, now they've expanded that to include cultural diversity too. But make no mistake, these universities were never just looking to accept the smartest students.
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop. Please don't create accounts to do that with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
colinmhayes 4y ago
Ivy's aren't the top schools for stem. MIT/Stanford/CMU are where the stem geniuses want to be, and after that the top public schools are probably more desirable than ivys because they're so much cheaper. I went to UIUC cs over uchicago and northwestern because of the price differential. By far the largest value ad ivys provide is networking with the soon to be rich and powerful. Seems like aspiring stem students realize that's not as important in their field.

gnicholas 4y ago

I wouldn't say someone should choose the University of MD over Harvard, since many potential employers would not know how to map a 4.0 MD GPA onto a Harvard scale. If you're between Harvard and Penn, and Penn gave you a great scholarship, that's a bit easier. Maybe for UC Berkeley even. But if you get too far out of the ballpark people will (1) assume you didn't get into any top-notch schools, and (2) not know how to compare your success at a lower-ranked school to moderate success of your peers at top-rated schools. Full disclosure: I went to the top-rated college I got into, and purposely chose not to go to the top-ranked law school that I got into. The difference wasn't huge (UCLA vs Michigan), but it did mean I wasn't in the top-10. But I saved a bunch in tuition, and that allowed me to have the flexibility to leave the law several years later and bootstrap a startup. OTOH, maybe I would have had an amazing legal career had I gone to Michigan!

anonporridge 4y ago
Pair it with the idea that the primary filtering signal of top tier schools is in the admission, not the graduation. Something like 99% of Harvard end up graduating, so simply having a Harvard degree doesn't tell me much more about you than simply having an admission letter. If you were admitted, then it's almost certain that you'll get a degree. So, if instead you hold onto your admission letter, as proof of ability, and then go to a lower tier school where you can be more certain to be one of the biggest fish in the pond, you get the best of both worlds. Hell, even include a list of "universities admitted to" on you resume to signal the brand name to employers that aren't smart enough to realize the brand doesn't matter much anymore. Then again, why would you want to work for an employer that still puts stock in college brand names over individual ability?
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I did consider the possibility that one could say "I got into Harvard but went to X because..." This could have made sense before Harvard's financial aid became so generous, but now they give loads of aid to middle- and low-income students. It would sound a bit weird to keep saying "I got into Harvard...", likely for the same reason you mention at the end. Who wants to be an eliteness snob? Unfortunately there are many such people in the world, which is part of the reason their cachet persists.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

No, its because 10-20 years after you graduate, no one asks you for your GPA at Harvard but they certainly think you are a genius just because you went there (you could graduate with a 2.0 GPA). As opposed to average state school guy with a 4.0 GPA. Many years after you graduate, you regularly get asked where you went to school but rarely asked "what was your GPA". This isn't even mentioning the type of whiz kids or socially powerful people you can befriend at these type of institutions. Steve Ballmer is smart but if he didn't meet Bill Gates, i doubt he would ever have become a multi billionare.

erosenbe0 4y ago
Harvard and Yale have 10x horrible negative character connotations compared to MIT or UChicago, and it gets worse all the time. McNamara (Vietnam), Kissinger (illegal bombing of Laos), Clinton (impeached), Bush (WMD lies), Ted Cruz and other senators who literally can't pass 7th grade science. I can continue for an hour.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  For even the "elite", character connotations take a back seat to "ability and drive", which neither of those people mentioned are lacking. To the average person, most of them probably don't even know too much about who Henry Kissinger was or what he did, the see Harvard and think "ohhh smart"

erosenbe0 4y ago

I thought Harvard was just a terrible school for uppity people? There are maybe five U.S. senators with Harvard degrees who can't pass a 7th grade climate science unit. You don't see this from MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern. I can't really imagine a worse school. Except Yale.

HuShifang 4y ago
I'd wait a few years on Chicago -- my impression is that they've been undergoing some pretty profound cultural shifts regarding admissions and grading, i.e. their rigor is getting more performative and less real (and it was always at least a little performative, or at least, rooted in being just a little gratuitously mean). EDIT: Not coincidentally, it was an admin brought in from Yale who got this ball rolling.
- erosenbe0 4y ago
  True, all of the top schools have a problem with either attracting or nurturing unethical clowns of blockbuster proportion.
MattGaiser 4y ago
Can't pass or are unwilling to pass?
- vkou 4y ago
  On the one hand, passing it would get them a good grade 7 test score. On the other hand, not passing it lets them keep their job. This seems like an easy decision, especially for someone smart enough to finish a degree at Harvard. /S
  - erosenbe0 4y ago
    So we are saying that Harvard and Yale are overrepresented when it comes to leaders of superlative moral depravity, perfidy, and mendacity?

HuShifang 4y ago

I went to Harvard (for grad school) and taught there as a TF; I also have lots of experience of other private and public schools. I don't think Harvard's lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. Let's set aside the egregious legacy or athletic admits. Is the second-lowest quintile of Harvard students smarter than the top quintile of "average school" students? More polished, yeah, sure; more cunning (not necessarily in a negative sense, but in the sense of understanding how to work the system, how to give evaluators what they want), sure. And maybe by the end, there's more difference than there was coming in, thanks to competitive motivation and other network effects. But admissions are something like a lottery, and I would say that the mean "smartness" of Harvard students is not much different from that of a generic selective private school (let's say, Harvard's second-lowest quintile would be the middle quintile at another reasonably selective private school), and that the top percentiles at a generic public school would perform quite comparably to Harvard's top quintile (even if Maryland has a lower mean, as Gladwell notes). Are there very smart people at Harvard, and other prestigious liberal arts universities? Absolutely. But there are lots of people who are merely above average and lucky, by dint of birth or chance, and some people who aren't even above average. (FWIW MIT and Caltech have much better claims to being filled with the smartest people in the world -- rigorous standards of admission, no legacies, NCAA Div3 athletics, etc.)

DANK_YACHT 4y ago
I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas, makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by aptitude scale.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago

elil17 4y ago

I had a choice between University of Maryland and a much more prestigious institution. It should have been a no brained because of the tuition alone but I struggled with it at the time. Being around people who care about things besides school was super healthy for me and I’m so thankful I made the right choice. (Go Terps!)

MattGaiser 4y ago

> Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions. Do good employers recruit from Maryland? Will you find FAANG and all the investment banks there? How tight is the Maryland alumni network? I didn't go to a school anywhere near as prestigious as Harvard, but I did go to one with a strong reputation and it means that there is a strong community and good employers recruit from there. The degree is a small part of university.

rhino369 4y ago

Apply a rule of thumb to outliers generally isn't appropriate. While it might be true that generally success rises 2% for every 10 SAT points, that doesn't necessarily mean it applies to Harvard and U Maryland. Especially due to grade inflation. 15 years ago, flagship state schools still harshly curved science/engineering classes to weed people out. While Harvard give you a gentleman's B+.

brewdad 4y ago
My kid is attending a flagship state school now. His school still very much uses a harsh curve to weed out. A B- keeps you on the track to success in your major. If he decides to go to grad school, he'll be screwed even though he's been on the plus side of the curve in all of his classes so far.
- rsfern 4y ago
  Grad admissions committees vary quite a lot from program to program, in terms of how they value different admissions criteria. if your kid is interested in research don’t let grades faze them. Demonstrated ability to think independently and write clearly is much more important IMO, at least for PhD work

the_only_law 4y ago

But at Harvard that kid can get in good with future elite, which is probably more valuable than any silly degree.

lumost 4y ago

Having worked with many top tier graduates from many top schools, I think we need to dispense with the idea that academic performance is determined by intelligence. In my experience it was highly correlated with work ethic, many top tier graduates would come in with a push to work exceptionally hard. Sometimes they’d come in with an attititude that they’d “made it” and not work hard enough.

rowanG077 4y ago
I don't think that is what science agrees with. IQ correlates pretty strongly with educational achievement. You can disagree with IQ all you but one thing it pretty surely doesn't measure is work ethic.
- gregw2 4y ago
  I went to a top tier high school and a top tier university. At a top tier university, in STEM at least, the fraction of students who had both high IQ and could work incredibly hard was noticeable. The fraction of STEM people who could get an A without working hard was low to nonexistent.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions. I've heard there are employers that have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions. Also if you've always been the smartest at your school you might not realize you won't be the smartest at Harvard until you get there.

Mikeb85 4y ago

On the flipside, nowadays the school matters more than the degree. Saying you "went to Harvard" is far more prestigious than having a bachelors degree from some forgettable school. And most employers don't care about whether or not you have a specific degree from any school, they care about whether you have any degree from a prestigious school.

wesleywt 4y ago

You don't go to Harvard for an education, you go there for the network you will build. Grades mean nothing when you are friends with a guy who's Dad owns billion dollar companies.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

I know someone who graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. I'm not usually one for ranking people by intellect, but she's not one of the smartest people I know by a long shot. Meticulous? Sure. Does she present herself as if she's a Harvard grad with the economic status that usually entails? Absolutely. But I know several people who graduated from a small directional university who are absolutely smarter than she is. Same with grads I know from Cornell, Penn, and Yale. Maybe the mystical "school where everyone is actually super-intelligent" exists somewhere, but if so, I don't know the name of it. Unless your professors are so lazy that they're grading on a bell curve, there's no need to be afraid of any class. Test scores and project grades are based on rote knowledge and level of effort, not innate talent... and Harvard educators are usually vastly superior to those of "lesser" schools.

newbie2020 4y ago
That mystical school is MIT or Caltech

uoflcards22 4y ago

I went to an Ivy League (recently, graduated in last 5 years). This describes me to a T. Started out in CS, dropped to a libarts major because I felt like I couldn't keep up with my peers. I still work in SWE, and began doing it in HS when I was 17. Partner and I discuss frequently that I would have been better off somewhere else.

wyclif 4y ago
I know loads of SWEs who dropped out of CS degrees outright or changed majors and graduated with a liberal arts degree (I myself am a SWE but a liberal arts grad; I never took a single CS course but worked as a sysadmin for the I/O department at my school). I can't think of a single one of them that regrets dropping out or switching. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt their career opportunities or their compensation. The only thing I've found that they do regret is spending the tuition money and walking away without a degree.

JamesBarney 4y ago

I've heard this as a reason why HBCU's are so great. Basically a lot of African American's come from schools that don't prepare them as well for science and math as their peers who went to more expensive elite schools. They have to work twice as hard because they're playing catch up and thus many transfer out of math/science/pre-chem and into less rigorous subjects. This is one theory as to why HBCU's do such a better job at preparing the next generation of black scientists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers then other comparable schools.

oneoff786 4y ago

I went to a mid tier undergrad and was easily among the smartest. I went to mit for grad school and was… still among the smartest although the bar was much higher. Luck factors into a lot of things. But the top decile of every school is probably great. The bottom decile is probably totally uninterested in learning. It’s the median that’s interesting. My undergrad median was deeply disappointing. Couldn’t write a simple paper. Literally did not understand how to construct an argument. Grad school median was solid and impressive e

acjohnson55 4y ago

Whether to go to an Ivy or not depends on what you're looking for. I went to Iowa State for undergrad and then did a masters at Princeton immediately afterwards. I greatly appreciate both schools. At Iowa State, most of my classes were easy. But I pushed myself with the sheer quantity of classes I took. I was super involved in extracurriculars and still went out multiple nights per week. I was one class short of a double major and I spent a semester abroad. My only regret is not spending 2 semesters abroad. It was an incredible time. Princeton also did not disappoint. The Graduate School is for sure the most intellectually rich environment I've ever been in. Academically, it was far more demanding, and pushed me to a much deeper level of engagement with my studies. I also know that Princeton would have been a way too intense environment for me at 18. At 22, it was what I was looking for. I also went to NYU for another masters program, which was in many ways even more different from the first two universities. Some people just go there to be at university in NYC, but it's a sprawling school with tons to offer and feels physically and socially much more integrated with the real world than campus-centric universities. I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for whether to go to Harvard or any other school.

somethoughts 4y ago
This seems to be a pretty pragmatic approach - it avoids spending a lot of high tuition dollars and effort on the freshman/sophomore generic weeder courses and focuses the high return on effort/investment upper level courses that are specific to your area of study.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  I wish I could say it was my plan all along, but it just kind of happened. But yes, from a credential standpoint, a masters program can upgrade your prestige, for sure. Although it would be important to note that there are social aspects of the Ivy League in undergrad experience that aren't the same in grad school (and vice versa), if that's what someone is looking for.

epolanski 4y ago

You missing two key things you want from Harvard: - a better CV - a better network

Der_Einzige 4y ago

I could make more money right NOW with a BS in gender studies from Harvard, than I ever could all things being equal with my CS BS from a no name public university. Anyone who takes this advice is indeed self selecting and I suppose that's good, because anyone who can't see that obviously shouldn't go to harvard in the first place!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]