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If you broaden it a bit to include other elite schools like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, etc. the impact is enormous. Their innovations won WWII. Their s
by russell 17y ago
If you broaden it a bit to include other elite schools like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, etc. the impact is enormous. Their innovations won WWII. Their students and alumni founded HP, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Intel, and on and on. These schools tend to have alumni networks all over the place. There are Harvard Clubs coast to coast.
Take a look at Nobel Prizes; these schools dominate. Take a look at the diploma on your doctor's or lawyer's wall.
"Do they just attract smart people, and smart people tend to have good ideas and execute them well?" Not necessarily that they think better or execute better than everyone else. It's just that in the aggregate there are so many of them that there are bound to be ones around anything significant.
As a counterpoint, I live near Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. It's not a top tier school, but it's surprising the number of successful startups that have come out of it. Jamba Juice come to mind.
- physcab 17y agoThanks for the response. I broadened it a bit. What I'm more interested in is what these schools may offer specifically that helps cultivate disruptive technologies.
- stcredzero 17y agoSmart people. Lots of them in a safe, enjoyable, yet competitive environment.
- russell 17y agoI think it's the culture. Stanford has long had culture of fostering entrepreneurship. The concentration of smart people helps. You can spout off about your latest harebrained scheme and there is better chance of good criticism or even an eager partner. And as I said the alumni networks are significant. Name recognition helps a lot. Harvard has opened door for me, especially in other countries where people haven't even heard of the lower tier universities.
- menloparkbum 17y agoTons of good engineers come out of Cal Poly. I think it has been ranked "best value in engineering education" for 20 years. It seems to have a very practical engineering oriented bent. I.e. people go there to actually become engineers. When I was a TA at MIT all the engineering majors planned to work in finance or IP law.
- sanj 17y agoWhen were you there? All my cohorts from MIT are building stuff: robots, companies, cars, batteries...
- menloparkbum 17y ago2000. There were tons of people building stuff but still something like 40% of them went into Finance. I was TAing in EECS and almost everyone wanted to work on wall street. It looks like it's trended down a bit but still 29% of MIT grads go into finance. Also 13% go into "consulting" and 3 of the top 5 employers are McKinsey, BCG and Booz-Allen. http://web.mit.edu/facts/graduation.html http://web.mit.edu/facts/graduation.html