4 ms·

Seth Godin on College Education

• Alex3917 19y ago
  Rule of thumb: If you think you need to graduate from a top college, you're probably right.
  • neilc 19y ago
    I don't think anyone "needs" to graduate from a top college. But I think it's also true that the quality of the engineering education at, say, MIT is much better than the quality of the education at an average university. Part of that is the quality of the lectures and lecturers, but another major factor is the environment -- the quality of your fellow students, and the social norms in a place like that. I think that is even more so for graduate programs, but significantly less so for degrees in arts or the social sciences -- if you're taking poli sci, I think most of the advantage of going to Harvard is in the social connections you can make.
    • aswanson 19y ago
      I think the point that Alex was trying to make is that if you are not intelligent enough to realize that it doesn't matter that much, you probably are going to need all the credentials you can get.
      • brent 19y ago
        Which is funny as he appears to have gone to cornell.
        • falsestprophet 19y ago
          as an alternative to going to a proper Ivy league school
    • rms 19y ago
      The engineering education at Pitt is solidly mediocre, yet we're still reasonably high ranked. Most of my upper level IE classes have 60 people which is unreasonable and really hurts the quality of learning. Still, engineering, at least, is in demand enough that Pitt graduates don't have any trouble finding jobs around Pittsburgh.
• edw519 19y ago
  Logic and price rationality have no more to do with it than buying a McMansion or a Mercedes instead of what you really need. Having a kid at Swarthmore is a great way for boomer parents to further differentiate themselves from the pack.
  • nostrademons 19y ago
    It doesn't work, though, because all the boomer parent's friends' kids went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams, and Columbia. I think they do it to avoid falling behind, because while having a kid go to Amherst is nothing special with this group, having one go to UMass is borderline shameful. Which is idiotic reasoning IMHO, because that UMass student can take the exact same courses as the Amherst kid, taught by the same professors, and might be just as smart, but parents can be illogical sometimes.
• caveman82 19y ago
  The problem with the classic argument of "whether or not it is worth paying a hefty premium to go to an elite school" is that it discounts the impact of intangibles, such as positive peer influence and brand value. I say yes. The effect is even more pronounced in highly competitive industries like finance. I've found that an overwhelming majority of successful recent grads in that industry (2-3 yr exp analysts making $300,000+/year) are top 20 grads. I doubt the average 18-22 yr old is going to exhaust the knowledge that their professor can impart, but you put an above average student at a school where he's rubbing shoulders with future entrepreneurs, politicians and thought leaders there's no doubt that it will increase his likelihood of success. So back to the question: Is it worth paying $200,000(over 4 years at Skull and Bones College over paying $10000 at Big State U? In many circumstances, yes. And yes--there are always exceptions to this rule but the discussion is about the overall trend not particular instances.
  • alaskamiller 19y ago
    It's a self fulfilling prophecy. That Harvard grad looking for a job at BigPapa Stearns might get the job because he happens to know the secret handshake or presents himself as trustworthy but in reality, at worse, he might be an idiot, and, at best, he's simply good enough to do the job. But BigPapa Stearns only hires Harvard grads because no one was ever fired for hiring Harvard grads. In the end, if you don't make your life an empty pursuit for the almighty dollar that consumes 16 hours of your days for a good 3 or 4 years before succumbing to that coke addiction and none of this would matter. A Savile Row bespoke suit doesn't necessarily make you a better man, or a hero.
    • caveman82 19y ago
      So all Harvard grads in big i-banks work 16 hour days and are coke addicts? Let's put something else in context, one could make the argument that a majority of college grads from any school embark on "a journey of empty pursuits for the almighty dollar...". I hardly think this is symptomatic of going to a top20 school, but how much blind ambition a person has.
      • 19y ago
• henning 19y ago
  I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit. I went to a local community college for a year, transferred over to a University of California school, and doing that you get a degree that's precisely the same as the one everyone else gets, at the same time, for cheaper, with a lot less stress. I didn't have to take the SATs or any of that nonsense, either. The classes I benefited the most from were project-based ones where you spent a few weeks in the library, hacked like mad for a few, then wrote a report and gave a presentation.
  • aswanson 19y ago
    I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit. You were correct.