Pedigree is industry-specific. Bankers think of Stanford as a mediocre party school. (I'm not saying it is, but admitting Duplan and Speigel didn't help their c

Pedigree is industry-specific. Bankers think of Stanford as a mediocre party school. (I'm not saying it is, but admitting Duplan and Speigel didn't help their case.) The Valley thinks of Yalies and Princetonians in similarly negative terms: third-rate artsy goofs. (Again, I'm not saying that it's an accurate perception.) Good-ol'-boy blue bloods (who still populate F500 boardrooms and attend Davos, but aren't relevant to any industry we care about) hold mediocre-but-rich northeastern schools in high regard, but don't think much of MIT (or, more accurately, they despise it). School snobbery isn't rational and there certainly isn't a linear ordering (it being the parochial prejudice of pseudointellectuals too dumb to actually judge people as individuals). But the Yale and Princeton students (disliked by the Valley) can easily find good jobs outside the Valley, and do. Usually, however, they go into something like management consulting, which means they come in a bit later and clean up the messes resulting from badly-architected California companies and a decade or so of man-child management.