Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

I may be wrong and this may be more fueled by my own insecurities about not having gone to a top school, but this attitude that The End of The Degree as the next phase of education shows a real two-faced side to Silicon Valley.

You have investors and startup founders who firmly believe that soon degrees won't matter, that credentials and pedigree shouldn't be a reflection of your skill and talent. They write blog posts, they invest and start companies. And yet, when you go look at the biographies of many of the rising stars, you'll notice that the majority of them do have pedigree. When watching TC Disrupt last weekend, I tried looking up the background of every investor and founder that stepped on to the stage, and it became obvious just how many of them have a strong pedigree. You can't help but think that it actually does go a long way in Silicon Valley, despite what's said.

Maybe people with those pedigrees on average are more intelligent than those who aren't, but nevertheless it's a pattern you can't ignore, and one that makes me doubt the Valley's conviction to topple formal education.

One theory some skeptics have is that the movement towards MOOCs/etc. isn't really about toppling formal education overall, but about toppling non-elite formal education, which would cement the dominance of a handful of top institutions. In that view, MOOCs become a kind of franchising for MIT/Stanford/Harvard, where they offer a lower-tier product that mainly aims at competitors, but doesn't really threaten their own top-tier product. If anything it might provide some advertising for the "real" university, by increasing name-recognition of their faculty.

A decent number of people at the top of the food chain in Silicon Valley come from finance, a world very much driven by pedigree. We tend to forget that from time to time, most of us here (I would imagine?) being engineers, and fewer of us being financiers. But pedigree has always counted in finance. Though it counts slightly less today than it did 30 years ago, it still counts for quite a lot.

To this day, there are circles one simply can't break into unless one comes from a top Ivy/Stanford undergraduate program or business school. These circles dominate recruiting at top investment banks and consultancies, which in turn feed VC firms and executive positions at many tech companies. It's not impossible to land one of these roles without a degree from, say, Harvard Business School. But that degree will open doors that are, by default, closed to most everyone else without extraordinary hustle.

Another very important point: many of those doors opened on campus, not afterward. Having Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc., on your resume looks lovely. But that's almost incidental to the real benefit. The real benefit is that the top banks, consulting firms, and recruiters show up on those campuses and pay greater attention, hire more interns, and so on. The advantages begin at school and start accumulating afterward. This is the secret sauce that MOOCs will have a hard time replicating, at least until the top firms become more open-minded about recruiting.

The importance of pedigree will change when the demand for pedigree changes, not the supply. This is why I remain optimistic about the prospects of online courses in the long run, but skeptical of their prospects to really shake things up in the short run. So long as top-tier job recruiting demands pedigree, pedigree will matter.

I think demand-side investment by organizations like YC, 500 Startups, etc. -- many of which seem fairly indifferent to pedigree -- will make a bigger impact than will supply-side attempts such as MOOCs or their equivalents. At least for now.

> I think demand-side investment by organizations like YC, 500 Startups, etc. -- many of which seem fairly indifferent to pedigree

They are indifferent to pedigree because they are a new line of pedigree.

Fair point.

Experiment. Pick a random VC firm, look at the bios, and count Ivy/Stanford UG/MBA.

E.g. Accel Partners, just the SV office: http://www.accel.com/#people.

I count 15 of 23 that have either an undergraduate degree or an MBA from an Ivy-league school or Stanford. Mostly HBS/GSB. That's 65% representation, relative to the less than 1% of undergraduates who graduate from the Ivy league.

Now, you can theorize that maybe it's because people who get into these schools are smart to begin with, and would have been equally successful elsewhere. But there is a lot of overlap in predictors between these schools and the ones right behind them. E.g. SAT Math interquartile ranges for Duke are 690/780 and the ones for Princeton are 710/800, and within that narrow range also fall Northwestern, Stanford, U Chicago, Penn, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. The student bodies at these schools overlap more than they differ. If the key differentiator was the quality of the people coming in and not pedigree by itself, you would see a more graduated drop-off in representation.

I think it's obvious that the pipelines that Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Wharton/Stanford have to elite organizations in finance are a huge boost for people who have the option to acquire that credential, distinct from the qualifications those people come in with.

True. It should be pretty simple to model this out in Bayesian fashion. Doing so would probably bear your theory out, i.e., these schools seem overrepresented in top-tier finance relative to their numbers of graduates in any given region (VC in this case, perhaps IB/PE/etc. in other cases).

It goes beyond the credential, though. The credential is a side effect. Many (most?) lucrative careers in finance don't happen when a person with a Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford diploma applies blindly to a job at Goldman Sachs. They begin when that person is an undergraduate at H/Y/P/S, where the Goldman recruiters show up in greater numbers (and with bigger quotas) at those schools than they do elsewhere. That's where the pipeline begins, and that's precisely why it's very hard for any credential to rival the pipeline these schools have built. From there, advantages begin to accrue and compound over the years (the "Cumulative Advantage" Theory).

Arguably, in many cases you could trace the origins of the pipelines even further back, to the elite private and prep schools with well-paved inroads into H/Y/P/S/etc.

There's no question you need to be smart to flourish at these schools, and to succeed in high finance. Probably in the top decile of IQ and effort, at least. But smart is just table stakes.

I don't think it's about intelligence, I'm from Chicago, I know a lot of incredible people from the top schools, but I've also met plenty of the "less intelligent" people from Northwestern and University of Chicago.

I believe it could be about being able to get your way in into the right circles. Getting in into an ivy league school is usually challenging, unless you're born into money, you have to figure out a plan and correctly execute it in order to get in--just like meeting the right people, starting a business, and then getting funded.

Also I think we like to associate and surround ourselves with people of the same background. So when a successful Harvard graduate sees another Harvard alumnus, there is an automatic desire to help out.

"Getting in into an ivy league school is usually challenging, unless you're born into money, you have to figure out a plan and correctly execute it in order to get in--just like meeting the right people, starting a business, and then getting funded"

You do realize that the planning for getting into an Ivy League school has to start at around age 14, right? At that age, whether you'll be able to "execute a plan" to get into a school (or even have the perspective to care what school you get into) will 100% depend on whether your family is rich and privileged itself.

Poor kids don't think about going to Ivy League schools at age 14. And neither do rich kids. Only rich kids' parents do.

Get real.

How sure are you of this?

I was thinking about getting into a top school at this age, although I was thinking CalTech and MIT for science instead of the Ivies, and while they were a special case (as in, not really planning on spending anything to speak of on our educations), my rich parents were very much not. Of course, one of the reasons for that was I'd been told for as long as I could remember that I had to study and make good grades or I'd end up "digging ditches" as a career.

Heinlein wrote a book, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel that you tend to read at about that age which has a hidden sub-agenda of telling you exactly what you need to do to get into one of those schools. Hmmm, his first juvenile also touches on it, but its much more of an aside.

Greater Fool's Theory.

If the whole credentials bubble takes another decade or two to collapse, it's still worthy to go for a top degree today. Aaand feed the bubble.

I applaud your approach and don't know whether your conclusion is correct.

But if it's not, it's for reasons right in front of you - TC ain't doing any investing. An invite to participate at Disrupt is less like a "most likely to succeed" award at a regular high school and more like "best hair" at a magnet high school.

Oh, I know. I wasn't going for a solid experiment. I was curious to know where these guys came from and noticed the pattern in the process, one that I'd noticed before.

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