41–50 of 111 posts
If you want to get a job because your roommate started a billion-dollar tech company, or inherited a billion-dollar company, or has a parent who is the President of a foreign country, you had best go to Harvard (or maybe a Princeton/Stanford type).
Not how I think about it. It's looking at ROI. And the cost of education typically correlates with quality and long-term earnings. (Put your pitch forks down, not all schools, just generally.) So, if I think about this on a 20 year horizon. I have a $50K degree program at a state school vs a $200K degree from Harvard (numbers rounded). Lets just use 10% as the ROI. At 10% over 20 years, the return on the state school…
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-u...
An interpretation is: for humanities, who you know matters more than what you know (ie, the connections you make).
Line of best fit is wrong and a terrible approximation here. If they used a curve fit they'd have seen the line curves up as Admission rate decreases.
For me, the explanation is that it's relatively harder to determine whether someone has learned their stuff if it's Math or Science, but quite hard if it's creative writing or history. There's an xkcd about this.
That's why something like an online coding test might work: someone clueless will not be able to write that palindrome quiz. You can have a zero false positive rate at the expense of a false negative rate (competent people can freeze in exam situations). With essay subjects, it's pretty hard to separate the BSers from the real deal. You'll always have some false positives.
What is this "it" which depends? Is the curious language in this headline trying to say: "it matters what you study, not where?" Ironically, where did this author learn grammar?
Neither majors nor schools are randomly assigned to students, so I don't think that there's actually much to take away from this.
For most people I agree. However, as someone who has graduated from a top school (U. of Michigan), I can't tell you how many times my credentials have got me both interviews and jobs. Where you go to school CAN make a big difference, but it depends on the school, the person, and the field of study.
I went to University of Illinois for math (grad school), and I haven't really seen that effect, although it probably didn't hurt. I've mostly gotten interviews because of my open source credentials & impressive accomplishments for early in my career. I'm of the opinion that while school calibur might be able to get you interviews and jobs a lot of times, it's selecting for mediocrity since it doesn't go for professio…
Neither majors nor schools are randomly assigned to students, so I don't think that there's actually much to take away from this.
If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.
If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.