3 ms·

I will echo this. The only things top school really do is gate-keep who is allowed to get in, providing as a consequence some sense of exclusivity. The quality

I will echo this. The only things top school really do is gate-keep who is allowed to get in, providing as a consequence some sense of exclusivity. The quality of education does not seem to be that different. And even if it was, it doesn't matter that much in a field like CS that is mainly self-learned and gets reinvented every decade.

rented_mule 3y ago
I had an interesting experience a decade ago when I spent a week recruiting at UT Austin and the next week recruiting at MIT, both for software engineering jobs. UT Austin is no slouch, but it doesn't have the reputation of MIT for software engineering related majors. We collected several hundred resumes from each. Only the best resumes from UT Austin were as good as the worst resumes from MIT. But, talking to the students and interviewing them revealed that the quality distribution, in terms of what we wanted to see in interns and new grads, was much harder to tell apart. My conclusion was that the MIT admissions process did a great job of selecting for people who present themselves well on paper, probably because admission is so competitive. Both schools offer a great education for those who take full advantage of it. And we wanted to hire from that pool of people, regardless of school.
- godelski 3y ago
  I think part of this too is that the top universities are really good at metric hacking. I do agree that the biases are baked in, but the other aspect is the compounding effects. E.g. MIT students have a better "foot in the door" for internships, research opportunities (especially at undergrad), and so on. Not only does their name do lifting, but they get more recruiters and the universities themselves do a lot of lifting. We know many internships are provided not through blind applications but connections (often grad students get internships via their advisors). These will definitely make the resumes look far better, but don't necessarily correlate with skills. It gets worse because this metric hacking is everywhere. As a researcher I honestly believe that were I at a higher ranked university more of my papers would be published in conferences (instead of arxiv or dead), I'd have to refine less to get published, and I'd have double the citations (university evangelism. Just being a MIT student will get you more Twitter followers than being a UT Austin student, so more people see when you post about your work). None of these things have to do with the actual quality of the work. Though of course, they can also tend to do "better" work in the sense that they have more resources. In a world where we have ill-defined goals and metrics compute becomes a large edge because instead of performing nuanced analysis you instead perform a more exhaustive analysis (the sledgehammer approach). Which is not necessarily better, though can (often) have lower entropy. As I posted in a sibling comment, measuring and evaluating things is insanely hard. Idk why as our world is increasing in complexity we've adopted to simplifying things more and more. Maybe the double edge sword of access to knowledge is feeling more knowledgeable than we are.
  - rented_mule 3y ago
    Yeah, it certainly can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the MIT students we hired eventually left us to create a startup when they were accepted into a Y Combinator class. When it came time to pitch for their series A at Andreessen Horowitz, their YC advisor told them to wear their college sweatshirts to the pitch (MIT and an ivy). Apparently, the business plan / product hardly even came up in the pitch - according to one of them, it was just a "bro-down about our schools." They got the money.
    - godelski 3y ago
      I've heard plenty of stories like this actually. It just makes me surprised because it clearly leaves so much efficiency off the table. But then again, the system they're trying to optimize might be about something else...

rented_mule 3y ago

I had an interesting experience a decade ago when I spent a week recruiting at UT Austin and the next week recruiting at MIT, both for software engineering jobs. UT Austin is no slouch, but it doesn't have the reputation of MIT for software engineering related majors. We collected several hundred resumes from each. Only the best resumes from UT Austin were as good as the worst resumes from MIT. But, talking to the students and interviewing them revealed that the quality distribution, in terms of what we wanted to see in interns and new grads, was much harder to tell apart. My conclusion was that the MIT admissions process did a great job of selecting for people who present themselves well on paper, probably because admission is so competitive. Both schools offer a great education for those who take full advantage of it. And we wanted to hire from that pool of people, regardless of school.

godelski 3y ago
I think part of this too is that the top universities are really good at metric hacking. I do agree that the biases are baked in, but the other aspect is the compounding effects. E.g. MIT students have a better "foot in the door" for internships, research opportunities (especially at undergrad), and so on. Not only does their name do lifting, but they get more recruiters and the universities themselves do a lot of lifting. We know many internships are provided not through blind applications but connections (often grad students get internships via their advisors). These will definitely make the resumes look far better, but don't necessarily correlate with skills. It gets worse because this metric hacking is everywhere. As a researcher I honestly believe that were I at a higher ranked university more of my papers would be published in conferences (instead of arxiv or dead), I'd have to refine less to get published, and I'd have double the citations (university evangelism. Just being a MIT student will get you more Twitter followers than being a UT Austin student, so more people see when you post about your work). None of these things have to do with the actual quality of the work. Though of course, they can also tend to do "better" work in the sense that they have more resources. In a world where we have ill-defined goals and metrics compute becomes a large edge because instead of performing nuanced analysis you instead perform a more exhaustive analysis (the sledgehammer approach). Which is not necessarily better, though can (often) have lower entropy. As I posted in a sibling comment, measuring and evaluating things is insanely hard. Idk why as our world is increasing in complexity we've adopted to simplifying things more and more. Maybe the double edge sword of access to knowledge is feeling more knowledgeable than we are.
- rented_mule 3y ago
  Yeah, it certainly can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the MIT students we hired eventually left us to create a startup when they were accepted into a Y Combinator class. When it came time to pitch for their series A at Andreessen Horowitz, their YC advisor told them to wear their college sweatshirts to the pitch (MIT and an ivy). Apparently, the business plan / product hardly even came up in the pitch - according to one of them, it was just a "bro-down about our schools." They got the money.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I've heard plenty of stories like this actually. It just makes me surprised because it clearly leaves so much efficiency off the table. But then again, the system they're trying to optimize might be about something else...