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I think there's a classic fallacy here of confusing signals with proof. Admittance to an elite program signals (with higher confidence) higher competency, but i

I think there's a classic fallacy here of confusing signals with proof. Admittance to an elite program signals (with higher confidence) higher competency, but it can never prove it, largely because part of what determines competency is emotional engagement, which can naturally change long after admission to the elite program. You would think that there would be arbitrage here on the part of employers - find more people from non-elite backgrounds who are actually competent. And surely they exist, but they don't have a way to signal it. Application queues (for jobs, grants, etc.) are already incredibly long. Good luck finding the competent people in the pile who can't signal it.

godelski 3y ago
Sure, that's possible. But at least with my observations the likelihood of the samples doesn't line up. It isn't that there's just some duds, it is that there are some duds and nearly all other samples are on par with those of others. Which puts the sampling pretty consistent with a random effect rather than a correlation with school ranking. But such a thing would be incredibly difficult to prove one way or another (that competency strongly correlates with ranking or no effect). But I did give a mechanism for a plausible explanation of no effect. I'll add that at least with csrankings.com if you do a regression analysis there's a huge correlation with ranking and number of faculty, but that should also make sense if you just look at the metric used to rank those schools.