Seth Godin on College Education | Hacker News Reader

Seth Godin on College Education

sethgodin.typepad.com

24 pointsluccastera17 comments

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.

I thought the college application process was a bunch of bullshit.

You were correct.

Rule of thumb: If you think you need to graduate from a top college, you're probably right.

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.

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.

Which is funny as he appears to have gone to cornell.

as an alternative to going to a proper Ivy league school

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hyperbole isn't going to work on you, I see.

That's the point that Godin makes.

Along these same lines, Malcolm Gladwell examined the so-called "advantages" of going to an Ivy League school in his piece "Getting In". http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

Some would probably argue that going to a big name school allows you to make better connections, etc, thus resulting in a higher income.

But as pointed out in the Gladwell article, this just isn't the case.

While it's easy to point out the kid that went to MIT is making more than the kid that went to state college, this just isn't a proper comparison.

From the article... "As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."

The moral of the story is that if you're a hard working individual, connections and money are going to follow regardless of where you go to school.

The problem with your argument is that you don't isolate factors when arguing your point. I'm not arguing that there aren't other factors that make a person successful. I'm saying that all things equal, the influence of one's surroundings can have a significant positive effect on a persons chance of succeeding.

This matters in industries where they don't have an objective metric for skill, like finance, business, law, etc. The only thing they can go off is a school name and grades. In more objective enterprises, like starting a tech company, for instance, the only thing that matters is objective competence and execution. Almost no tech company, scientific discovery, or novel mathematical proof comes out of a classroom.

For subjects like biz and finance that don't focus on exact answers, what else do you have to go off of? But who would major in something like that anyway?

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.

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.

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