Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?

Very good point. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet but it also isn't feasible to have an entire society (or even just the population of people with undergraduate/graduate degrees) asking the big questions and shaking everything up. Society needs people to keep the cogs turning which involves a lot of "menial" jobs (I use menial not to imply that they do not require intelligence or skill, but instead to point out that they are simply not novel or unique)

I went to school, then dropped out, and then went back. I finished my BS last week with a 4.0 GPA. I dropped out because I wasn't learning anything, and it was an incredibly time consuming grind that wasn't any fun. I dropped out to start a company, and probably learned more every few weeks doing that, than it would be possible to learn in years of classes. There isn't a guide and every problem requires actual thought and understanding. Memorization will do nothing for you.

I started to think seriously about going back two years ago, as I observed friends that had graduated in soft subjects moving up in their careers, to the point where they were making hiring decisions. An overheard conversation that really stuck out, was when I heard someone relating their thought process in deciding not to hire a technically capable but degree-less candidate, "How could I hire them? That's a hard technical position. It's impossible to do something like that without college. I had to spend four years learning HRs, and that was really hard. That job is even tougher than HRs." It started to become obvious after a while that people that make hiring decisions in large companies many times are not very intelligent, and it would be basically impossible to get a job many places without a degree. Your resume will get bounced by HR before it ever gets to the technical people that should be doing the interviews. It would be OK if my company succeeded, since I could point at it and say it sold for $X, justifying the decision to drop out. But if it failed, these people would never understand. So I went back as a hedge, part time.

The only difference between the first and second time I went to school, is that the second time I was determined to get straight A's, and graduate as quickly as possible, so I could get into a good post-grad program. I was able to do a little over 30 credits one summer when I maxed out the number of Credit-By-Exam courses I transferred in. I found that if I studied anything that I had a general understanding of for about four hours (like Business Ethics), I could easily pass the exam by a large margin. The actual coursework was mostly very easy. Almost always, it was more a question of doing all the work, and turning it in on time, than anything else. I would take the syllabus, and check off everything that had to be done as I completed it. Getting an A is as easy as doing everything, it doesn't require any real intelligence or understanding. This is really what college is all about.

People hire college graduates because they have demonstrated that they can be given a list of work, and a criteria for how their work will be judged, and complete the work. That's it. From my experience many grads will require a lot of hand holding to actually complete their work the first time, because they don't really know how to do anything, and can't think for themselves. The degree indicates that they are trainable; once they are shown what to do, they can keep checking the boxes for at least 4 years. I wish I didn't have to go back to school, it cost time and money disproportionate to what I got out of it. Having said that, for now, a degree is difficult to avoid without seriously limiting prospects. It is the present reality, and if I could do it over again, I would have tried to go to a top-tier school right out of high school and ground out a BS with honors in 2.5 years.

I don't think a world in which everyone is trying to be (or thinks they are) the next Steve Jobs would be so great.

We've created a winner-take-all society where the cost of losing is a soul-sucking micro-managed job and the constant worry that getting sick could mean medical bills that can never be paid off. In this society you do not get points for asking big questions. You get points for getting the right degrees to serve the right signaling functions to get the right jobs which offer luxuries like health insurance and the flexibility to leave the office for 15 minutes during the day to take care of an errand.

Kids aren't stupid. They tailor their behavior to the incentives they are offered. All of the author's political science students from Stanford are going to keep their head down then head to boring corporate jobs in consulting, law, or finance because those jobs pay the bills and offer health insurance. They might go and live a life of asking big questions if we lived in a country where your baby can fall and hit its head and you can take it to the ER without weighing the benefit versus the staggering cost of the ER visit, but we don't live in that kind of country. And under those circumstances only irrational people are willing to take the risk of asking big questions.

I think it's far more likely that the faculty of elite schools are selected for being really excellent sheep.

They have jumped through many more hoops for a much longer period of time.

I could buy that the student body were largely using the elite schools for their own ultimately non-conformist ends, but it's much harder to convince myself that the faculty is doing so.