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Comment by rdr | Hacker News Reader

thanks for the quick reply! i'm curious about your statement about "skill commensurate with the name brand of your degree" ... does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered expectations since they don't have a name-brand diploma). if 2 people are in the same position at the same company receiving the same pay (working as peers), shouldn't others expect something similar from them regardless of their degrees?

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On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean another person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite as easily how well they'll do.

If you give an easy exam and everyone scores 90% or better you don't know much more about the person who scored 100% than you do about the person who scored 90%. If, on the other hand, you give an extremely difficult exam that results in a curve with the 90% cut-off at 80% and the 10% cut-off at 20% you know much more about the abilities of those who did well compared to the abilities of those who did poorly. I think people tend to view a name-brand college as a the very tough exam and a non-name-brand college as the easy exam. Whether or not this is a safe assumption is another question.

Is it really unfair to hold someone to a higher standard because they went to a 'good' school? I think part of the way we estimate future performance is by examining past performance, and performing well at a name-brand school should indicate ability to perform well at tasks for which their education prepared them. On the other hand, doing well at a non-name-brand school doesn't mean another person can't perform well, it just means that you can't predict quite as easily how well they'll do.

I agree with this, which is why I put "unfairness" in quotes in my other response. There's a certain political correctness that makes people uneasy about comparing two candidates based on the schools they went to. The fact is, the rigor of training for the same degree varies wildly depending on the school you attended.

If you're comparing two seemingly equivalent unknowns who've got no body of work other than a degree, I think it makes perfect sense to bias towards the person who completed the better program.

I should have been more clear about what I was responding to - this commend by rdr:

"does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations) and to everyone else (who have lowered expectations since they don't have a name-brand diploma)."

I agreed with both your original comment and the follow-up. The question of fairness got me thinking, though, and I wanted to present one way of thinking about it.

does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard [with unreasonably elevated expectations] due to where they went to college?

In my experience it's true. Do I think it's unfair? Probably exactly as unfair as giving preference to someone during the hiring process because of where they went to school. Equal and opposite "unfairness." :)

does that imply that certain people are held to a higher standard due to where they went to college? that seems unfair both to those people (who have unreasonably elevated expectations)

What makes those higher expectations "unreasonable"? All else being equal, I'd expect the quality of an average grad from Stanford or MIT to be higher than the average grad of some random state school. Of course, there is always more information to consider -- the work you've actually done is far more important than where you went to school, and there are great people at unknown schools (and mediocre people at top places). But in the absence of more information about a candidate, I think marginally higher expectations for grads of top schools is justified.

> that seems unfair

LOL welcome to life, buddy.

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