3 ms·
First, I'd just like to point out that PG is in an interesting place to report that college doesn't matter, having himself attended two Ivy League schools. Th
by aston 19y ago
First, I'd just like to point out that PG is in an interesting place to report that college doesn't matter, having himself attended two Ivy League schools.
There are two arguments happening here. The first is that entrepreneurship and business success are not so well correlated with where you go to undergrad. The second is that where you go to college doesn't make much of a difference in life in general. I won't really quarrel with the first, since it's been demonstrated pretty often, and YC's results support it as well. The second, on the other hand...
The main problem with trying to assert that college doesn't make a difference in life is that there's really no easy measurement you can do over "net change" in life. That's due both to the long span of time a life consumes as well as the complex and/or fuzzy cause-effect relationships that are at play throughout. At best, I think, you would need to argue over objective differences that have some immediate effect, and then hope that those actually do make a difference. As an example, here are some of the things that I think made Paul Graham successful that are pretty strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard:
- he met RTM and Trevor there
- he got to spend his time in Boston, where he's acknowledged startups can thrive
- being able to drop the H-bomb almost certainly helped give credibility to his company
- he learned Lisp (not really the most popular language at the time, except at certain places)
Would Viaweb have happened had he gone elsewhere, or skipped grad school altogether? Well, maybe. But I doubt it. Harvard's name is what convened the talent (peers, advisors, mentors, investors) that shaped much of that company, and it's there that Harvard's value lies. I think this essay horribly undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing.
- pg 19y ago> strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough. > undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing Sure, but not by accident. The whole thesis of this essay that this "magic" is bullshit, and that as success depends more on measurable results, it will play much less of a role.
- cperciva 19y ago>This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough. Certainly not clear enough for this non-US reader. But of course the word "college" has a different meaning on this side of the border (and an entirely different meaning in Oxford).
- abstractbill 19y agoA bunch of other education-related words have different meanings on different sides of the pond. For example, UK: You write a dissertation for a masters degree and a thesis for a PhD. US: The opposite. I wonder if the terminology will converge...
- npk 19y agoIn the US you never write a thesis, you write a dissertation (document) based on a thesis (idea.)
- abstractbill 19y agoInteresting. Wikipedia thinks the two are synonymous: "In academia, a thesis or dissertation is a document that presents the author's research and findings and is submitted in support of candidature for a degree or professional qualification." [from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis]
- dpapathanasiou 19y agobeing able to drop the H-bomb You do know that's a sexual euphemism, right? ;)
- aston 19y agoIt's a pretty overloaded term.