We Don’t Do Legacy (2012)

National graduates can't--and shouldn't--be fungible. Harvard, for example, selects and trains for team players. Its graduates can reliably be dropped into client-facing roles with minimal training. They're also extremely responsive to hierarchy. Their campus tradition champions the Socratic method [1] and deëmphasises individual performance. (The joke I've heard is an A is an A-, an A with a glare is a B and an A with a talk is a C. B means you effectively failed.)

Yale, on the other hand, is extremely competitive in terms of grading. Its graduates are ruthlessly ready to challenge hierarchy. This makes them great for internal situations where you need to inject disruption. They need polishing, however, before being placed in front of clients.

High achievers in a field should be diverse, in terms of how they work and approach problems. This is healthy. Degrees mean something. It's just that there's a lot else that's difficult to test for or assess in an interview that matters. What that "else" is varies.

[1] http://casestudies.law.harvard.edu/the-case-study-teaching-m...

I went to Arizona State. This is basically how I learned. That said, the most valuable moments in my college experience were when I made an effort to develop a relationship with my professors (and certain brilliant peers).

The insights from those interactions sound silly in words (e.g. "have your slightly neurotic friend or employee read securities' footnotes with you" or "you can model anything as an option" or "flow separation can be desirable"). That might be why they aren't taught in class. The moments preceding them (missing game-changing information in a footnote, struggling with yet another wonky security, or going crazy trying to control every factor between my computer and metal models) made them memorable. The bigger lessons (use your and your peers' stereotypically "negative" personality attributes as strengths, it's okay to master one thing and bend your universe of problems to look like it, and it's okay to let go of control) would not have been learned, as they were, without them.

Incidentally, if you want another metric that makes the Ivies jump over themselves to admit students, it's placing in basically any extracurricular contest/tournament they sponsor or host. For example, placing in the top six at Harvard Nationals for Speech & Debate essentially guarantees you admission if you have decent grades. For some categories, this is less difficult than you'd think.

That said, two of the most intelligent people I have ever known placed in Harvard Nationals and later went to the school. I can't speak empirically to the correlation vs causation of placing in these sorts of tournaments, but I think those two in particular could have gone to any school they wanted. One was a student at Stuyvesant.

On the other hand, I also knew someone who was a concert pianist in addition to a nationally ranked Speech & Debate competitor. He also had excellent grades and was admitted to five Ivies and MIT. I don't think he applied to any safety schools. He was someone I would consider extremely capable in the sense of time management and executive functioning, but in raw intellectual capacity (such as critical thinking), he never stood out to me.

But I could be mistaken in these value judgements. It's hard to even define intelligence rigorously. I think that's part of the problem with these discussions. How do we qualify intelligence, then set out to design a meritocracy that controls for the nature (having intelligent parents) component of intelligence, if we can only limit the nurture aspects (socioeconomic and parenting)?

https://outlookzen.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/481/