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This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same a

by ceras 14y ago

This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT. Do you think it's true? I don't, personally. These companies hire more from MIT because MIT has so many great candidates, but they are not shy about hiring qualified students from all over (as you personally demonstrate). There is some evidence (from Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study) to support the claim that where you go to school does not generally matter (with a few important caveats related to class and ethnicity -- poor black and hispanic kids do benefit a bit from brand name schools). EDIT: I should also add that since the elite schools have such great financial aid, the problem with the rigid class structure starts and ends in the K-12 years, like hkmurakami said. The middle and upper class kids get the best schools and academic support network while growing up, so they're the ones that go to Harvard, even though Harvard will always make sure you can afford to attend. This is very disheartening: I agree.

timr 14y ago
"This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT." A brilliant, hard-working student who goes to Oklahoma State will have fewer opportunities than a brilliant student who goes to MIT. The "average student" is irrelevant to my argument.
- ceras 14y ago
  It's relevant because, quite frankly, there aren't that many brilliant students at low-tier schools compared to the top ones. The only evidence you've given for your argument is that there are lots of top tier people in Silicon Valley, but this is a flawed application of conditional probability. What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT.
  - timr 14y ago
    You're trying to argue that the reason that there are so many top-tier grads in positions of power is that top-tier schools are disproportionately graduating talented people. But then you say this: "What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT." If this is true, then it implies that the top schools are simply very good at monopolizing the world's intellectual talent. So which seems more likely to you: that the top-tier universities monopolize the world's intellectual talent, or that we've set up a system that systematically rewards the kind of people who get to go to top-tier schools? Given your previous caveats about minorities and middle-class kids, I think you generally agree with my premise, and now you're arguing just to argue.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    It's relevant because, quite frankly, there aren't that many brilliant students at low-tier schools compared to the top ones. But we're not comparing low-tier to high-tier. We're comparing top 4 or top 5 versus top 20 or top 50. There's plenty of probability that a brilliant student might end up at a top-20 or top-50 institution rather than a top-5 one.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
It's a nice piece of Bayesian reasoning, but it increasingly fails to hold up. The problem is that while there's a very high probability that a randomly-chosen graduate of MIT is very smart and qualified, there's an extremely low probably (and going further down) that any randomly chosen very-smart-and-qualified graduate went to MIT. So by biasing your hiring towards MIT, you're almost eliminating false positives at the cost of massively increasing false negatives during the hot part of the business cycle when demand for new workers is highest. I've seen a similar effect in action personally. I went to UMass Amherst for undergrad, and when I finished I did interviews. Some companies wanted to talk, many didn't, I ended up with two offers from BigCos and lots from SmallCos and start-ups (this was 2011, so yeah, during a hot-hiring cycle), but still a noticeable "failure rate". I get a little bit of real work experience and then come to Technion (which, at least in this country, is not known to be called "Israel Institute of Technology" for nothing) for graduate school. Internship-application season arrives. Now everyone wants to talk, and the only things to which I can rationally attribute the change are the name-brand of Technion and the fact of having had some work experience (which does set me strongly above "pure academics", but many people work between undergrad and grad school). I didn't change (much). I just acquired a pre-made Bayesian evaluation of my potential from someone whose word is taken more seriously than that of UMass Amherst. And the really neat trick here is that Technion simply is not as selective as MIT, by sheer numbers: I'm told that maybe the top 10% of applicants can get into Technion for undergrad, and another 20% of those (2% total) can do well enough to go on for an advanced degree. These are far more than the percentages of applicants who can get into the CS programs at Stanford, CMU, Berkeley and MIT combined. Technion just doesn't have equally tough competition for entry due to its smaller applicant pool.

by ceras 14y ago

timr 14y ago

"This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT." A brilliant, hard-working student who goes to Oklahoma State will have fewer opportunities than a brilliant student who goes to MIT. The "average student" is irrelevant to my argument.

ceras 14y ago
It's relevant because, quite frankly, there aren't that many brilliant students at low-tier schools compared to the top ones. The only evidence you've given for your argument is that there are lots of top tier people in Silicon Valley, but this is a flawed application of conditional probability. What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT.
- timr 14y ago
  You're trying to argue that the reason that there are so many top-tier grads in positions of power is that top-tier schools are disproportionately graduating talented people. But then you say this: "What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT." If this is true, then it implies that the top schools are simply very good at monopolizing the world's intellectual talent. So which seems more likely to you: that the top-tier universities monopolize the world's intellectual talent, or that we've set up a system that systematically rewards the kind of people who get to go to top-tier schools? Given your previous caveats about minorities and middle-class kids, I think you generally agree with my premise, and now you're arguing just to argue.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  It's relevant because, quite frankly, there aren't that many brilliant students at low-tier schools compared to the top ones. But we're not comparing low-tier to high-tier. We're comparing top 4 or top 5 versus top 20 or top 50. There's plenty of probability that a brilliant student might end up at a top-20 or top-50 institution rather than a top-5 one.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

It's a nice piece of Bayesian reasoning, but it increasingly fails to hold up. The problem is that while there's a very high probability that a randomly-chosen graduate of MIT is very smart and qualified, there's an extremely low probably (and going further down) that any randomly chosen very-smart-and-qualified graduate went to MIT. So by biasing your hiring towards MIT, you're almost eliminating false positives at the cost of massively increasing false negatives during the hot part of the business cycle when demand for new workers is highest. I've seen a similar effect in action personally. I went to UMass Amherst for undergrad, and when I finished I did interviews. Some companies wanted to talk, many didn't, I ended up with two offers from BigCos and lots from SmallCos and start-ups (this was 2011, so yeah, during a hot-hiring cycle), but still a noticeable "failure rate". I get a little bit of real work experience and then come to Technion (which, at least in this country, is not known to be called "Israel Institute of Technology" for nothing) for graduate school. Internship-application season arrives. Now everyone wants to talk, and the only things to which I can rationally attribute the change are the name-brand of Technion and the fact of having had some work experience (which does set me strongly above "pure academics", but many people work between undergrad and grad school). I didn't change (much). I just acquired a pre-made Bayesian evaluation of my potential from someone whose word is taken more seriously than that of UMass Amherst. And the really neat trick here is that Technion simply is not as selective as MIT, by sheer numbers: I'm told that maybe the top 10% of applicants can get into Technion for undergrad, and another 20% of those (2% total) can do well enough to go on for an advanced degree. These are far more than the percentages of applicants who can get into the CS programs at Stanford, CMU, Berkeley and MIT combined. Technion just doesn't have equally tough competition for entry due to its smaller applicant pool.