Hollywood cares, for one. I think almost every movie (or book) I read that involves a smart person with good credentials involves Harvard or mit or sometimes Stanford. It’s getting old. Be more creative, people
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Who cares about the Ivy League?
31–40 of 178 posts
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#32We are on the brink of an AI revolution, which mean Intelligence will become a commodity. In comparison, credentials will have even more value than ever. Supply vs demand.
No we aren’t. Intelligence will never be commoditized. You'll just have higher degrees of competition and disinformation. Hard disagree with you.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#33>a rough estimate of about 100,000 undergraduates at top private schools in the U.S. That might sound like a lot, but it’s compared to 22 million total undergraduates in the country. In other words, top private schools are educating less than half a percent of Americans. The entire Harvard undergrad student body could fit into the University of Michigan football stadium more than 15 times over.
Those figures are completely irrelevant. The proportion of those 22M undergraduates who will need to make use of any specialized knowledge or skills acquired during their student-hood is also miniscule. They are simply following a social convention by going to these schools. There is no equivalence between these populations, except by sloppy word-based reasoning.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#34I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most i…
Ostensibly the value of Ivy league as it pertains to tech is in making connections and partnerships with people who have cash-flow and ambition to match. Maybe this is overstated or tech entrepreneurs are more likely to find investment some other way.
If the goal is just to get in at FANG, well, better show some astounding grades, a grab-bag of portfolio items, a knack for communication, among other things. That isn't contingent on Ivy league.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#35Formal education is a great tool, however the organisation that delivers it is irrelevant.
Brilliant people are brilliant. They're the people you want to hire. And those people will be learning from everything, not just their Ivy League school.
IMO large amounts of students topping IT classes at these schools are doing majority of the learning on their own at a faster pace.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#36The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of t…
You're arguing a different point though. OP's point is that you'd have a much greater overall benefit to society by increasing access to more accessible places. The issue of elitism is not a refutation of this.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#37The author has a point about broad access to education and its effects on mobility, but overlooks something vital: to be in the ruling class, entry into these schools is very important. All but one of the members of the current Supreme Court went Ivy (and nearly all in the 20th century before), and while Congress is more diverse when it comes to undergrad (it would be very interesting to see grad school data), 5 of t…
I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League? I suspect it's much more of the former than the latter. It's not that you have to go to an Ivy League school to run the country. Instead, the people born into the families that run the country have no reason not to go to Ivy League schools.…
> I would invoke "chicken and egg" here: are the leaders of this country in the Ivy League because they're from ruling families, or are they ruling because they went to Ivy League?
Obama went to columbia and harvard. Trump went to UPenn. Neither are from ruling families.
It's simply a matter of the ivy league representing some of the oldest institutions in the US and the ruling elite being entrenched members of these institutions. So those who want to serve the ruling elite need to go to these schools to get themselves vetted.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. Yes but for many the reason they were at Google was because of the MIT degree. So not only do you get a great education, but then you go on to do solid work (hopefully) and get good experience. It's acceleration on ROI of the degree.
It doesn't necessarily work like that anymore. I have 4 close friends of mine who did EECS@MIT who didn't get recruited at Google.
Overall it does work like that though. Google (or other tech companies/elite institutions) attends MIT engineering career fairs, it doesn't attend others.
Corporations are not good at identifying promising talent outside of their traditional (Ivy League, etc.) recruiting grounds so they stick with their traditional recruiting grounds and then they'll favor "diverse" students from their traditional recruiting grounds. That's why they (corps) haven't made any substantial progress in "diverse hires" IMO.
For example if "Google" wanted to make a difference it would actually ban hiring from Ivy League or top-20/30 universities (wiggle room on details here) and instead focus on universities that have higher admission rates (50% or so), large public universities, big time diverse populations relatively speaking.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#39I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most i…
> I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. Yes but for many the reason they were at Google was because of the MIT degree. So not only do you get a great education, but then you go on to do solid work (hopefully) and get good experience. It's acceleration on ROI of the degree.
Exactly this. I now work in a team with a bunch of Ivy League UK equivalents (Oxford/Cambridge), but I'm about 5 years older working at a similar grade/comp ratio. I had to hop around 4 different teams at 2 companies, and build a pretty extensive portfolio of work, before I got a foot in the door they did straight out of university.
Re: Who cares about the Ivy League?
#40I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career. Even if say you have someone that went to MIT and then went to work for Google, as a hiring manager I would want to know more about what they did at Google than at MIT. I can really only think of two professions where your school matters: law and medicine. With Law I think it's the most i…
>I can't speak for other industries but I know in tech, the college you went to is basically irrelevant 1-2 years into your career.
I would like this to be true, but I think it varies a lot. I have seen execs be very excited by name-brand degrees well past that point. And then do the same thing with name-brand companies, without inquiring much as to what a given developer did at, say, one of the FAANGs.
When I've asked, the stated theory was that those places were good at filtering for smart people, so we didn't really have to evaluate actual competence. And that is one of the theoretical functions of things like degrees, so I get what they're saying, however horrifying I find it personally.