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Comment by windlep | Hacker News Reader

The more elite the school, the more elite the ppl you meet. The financial outcomes can be easily explained solely on the networking effects of meeting ppl from more powerful sectors of society. No one sends their kids to an Ivy league school to get "Super smart", its to hang around the "right group" for later influence and networking with the "right people".

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If you are going to send your kid to one of those, be sure to clearly explain to them that is the point, lest they fall into the trap of studying and getting good grades at the expense of networking.

(I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which parts of that are sarcastic, and how much. Frankly I'm not sure myself.)

FWIW, in my experience, those goals weren't at all exclusive of each other. I went to one of those schools, studied hard, and did well. The CS program had a strong feeling of community, particularly among undergraduates who worked as TAs, and from that I developed a network of smart people (including people several years older and younger than me) who also studied hard and did well. There's no doubt I've benefited from that. But the network I'm talking about isn't a prototypical "old boys" network, and it wasn't developed by shmoozing at networking events. I feel very lucky for the opportunity to have the experience.

Pretty much every job I know of outside of our little SV tech bubble will reward you based on your college GPA. Unless something has changed in the last 8 years, a majority of my accounting/finance friends all were vetted on interviews and GPA when applying to E&Y, KPMG, Goldman and the like. Also, it's all about who you know. These type of people represent the majority of white-collar, white college graduate jobs out there - not tech.

Note - that being said, I've interviewed quite a few young graduates recently and for the life of me, I don't remember a single time I looked at someone's GPA. But that's because in tech I'm trying my best to hire young people based on merit. All that matters is whether you can ship code.

Just make sure your kid studies just enough so the geeks don't think he's a completely good-for-nothing party bro. Because he's going to need to hire them as the developers for his next-big-thing startups. After all, every head-buried-in-the-sand developer needs a well-connected idea guy to part the clouds and let the sun shine through, right?

(I, too, leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which parts of that are sarcastic, and how much. Frankly I'm not sure myself.)

It would actually be incredibly practical advice, but it's also some truly depressing advice.

"Kid, nobody cares how smart you are. Just smile and nod and you'll go further than you can imagine."

Exactly look at how many of the British political elite know each other through Oxbridge let alone the memners of the buller (think skull and bones but with much more dinking and bad bahavior).

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