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Comment by RigelKentaurus | Hacker News Reader

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I know he will get a fantastic education at most schools. But he truly is a special kid who gets inspired by super smart people and thrives on challenges, and will do better at Cal, Caltech, Harvey Mudd etc. We're not looking at non-STEM schools and Ivies -- I guess they don't want us and we don't want them.

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Just one anecdote but, FWIW, I found that my peers at UBC were significantly smarter and harder-working than my peers at MIT.

Many schools have honours programs or especially challenging degree programs, which will be filled with excellent and ambitious students, even if that school is not an ivy league.

A (perhaps funny) anecdote of my own: I had just started as product manager for a remote engineering team, and it had been briefly mentioned in passing that one member of the team was an intern from UBC. I quickly got a feel for the work ethic and output of the team members (and they were generally great), and just jumped to the conclusion of who the intern was.

Fast forward to the first time I meet them all in person, and I say to who I thought was the intern something like “how have you enjoyed your internship?”. Cue horrified looks, and my engineering manager counterpart swiftly moving in to smooth things over. Turns out the worst performing, least engaged engineer on the team was an FTE, and the UBC intern wasn’t even remotely who I thought it was (they were awesome)!

My point is that he’ll be surrounded by super smart people giving him real challenges at many schools beyond the ones you’ve listed.

There is a massive gap between top schools and middle schools in terms of the quality of education, the connections you make, and the opportunities you get. The density of smart people is far higher at those top schools he mentioned.

Downplaying that doesn't do anything for anyone.

Connections sure, but what advantage is there in quality of education? It's not like winning a nobel prize makes someone better at teaching organic chemistry, during the one class they teach (aided by a team of assistants who actually deal with the students). If anything I'd say the places with the worst students have the best teachers by both necessity and by experience level. What are you defining as "middle schools"?

Sure, but he’s fixated on ~1% of the “top schools”, and seems closed to the possibility that the other 99% will be just as good (and in some cases better) for his son than that list.

That’s before we even unpack your claim that there’s a clear line between “top” and “middle” schools. I see it as more of a spectrum myself, ignoring “brand recognition” (which is a mostly meaningless metric).

>> Very few of the best graduates I’ve worked with in my ~30 year career studied at those schools - it was places like UW, UBC and Waterloo that stood out to me as producing a high number of high quality, socially adapted graduates.

> But he truly is a special kid who gets inspired by super smart people and thrives on challenges, and will do better at Cal, Caltech, Harvey Mudd etc.

As opposed to UW, UBC and Waterloo, which are filled with less intelligent people? It is laughable.

My theory - you have precisely zero idea what those schools even are.

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