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After Credentials

paulgraham.com

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Re: After Credentials

#71

Post by cperciva »

arebop wrote: post #69
cperciva wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did. In Canada, one of the strongest selling points of universities is what fraction of their students got a job in a related field within X years of graduation -- so at least here, institutions do track this sort of data. In addition, there's a lot of work done to validate admissions processes ba…

I've heard that U.S. universities have similar "black books." It's too bad they don't publish their data, because that would be an interesting way to compare the performance of high schools.

They're probably afraid that publishing their data would result in lawsuits.

Re: After Credentials

#72

Post by bootload »

"... It was not so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market. You had to go through bosses, and they were influenced by where you'd been to college ..."

What was the hack Apple, MS and other tech companies used? Aligning themselves to rapidly improving technology where greater performance was really noticeable?

I still see the barriers described here occurring particularly in market bottle-necks (interfaces where technology collides with its ancestry) where old-world business has influence. The biggest one I can think of is access to capital. It seems the closer you get to capital, the greater the effect credentials can come into play balancing out performance.

"... What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next ..."

Is YC acting as an anti-cram school hack? Using YC credentials to gain leverage to gain capital to the next generation Startups to be measured by performance?

Re: After Credentials

#73

Post by DaniFong »

aswanson wrote: post #70
michael_nielsen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.

Are you controlling for those not admitted that went to similar caliber schools, or have an example of how that statistic compares to those schools with a similar quality applicant pool?

You can show fairly quickly that the success of Caltech alumni in sciences, as measured by awards, is comparable only to the École Normale Supérieure (and possibly Phystech in Russia depending on how you count). Check out http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_A(EN).htm

The column 'Alumni' compares the number of Nobel prizes or Fields Medals won by Alumni to the number won by Harvard (in percent). Caltech scores 52.8 on this, and ENS 53.4. But Caltech and ENS are by far the smallest of the universities on the top 100 list (unless I am mistaken). Both Caltech and ENS enroll about 200 undergraduates a year, with ENS enrolling only about 100 of those in science and engineering. Caltech has a population of another 1200 graduate students.

One thing to note about Caltech, ENS, and Phystech, they are extremely small, extremely selective, have no legacy admissions, limited or no affirmative action, and pay heavy attention to competitive exams, in the case of ENS and Phystech, administrating them.

Re: After Credentials

#74

Post by netcan »

cperciva wrote: post #45
pg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…

College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did. In Canada, one of the strongest selling points of universities is what fraction of their students got a job in a related field within X years of graduation -- so at least here, institutions do track this sort of data. In addition, there's a lot of work done to validate admissions processes ba…

Australia too.

Re: After Credentials

#75

Post by retyred »

evgen wrote: post #56
retyred wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this entire "lots of small firms are the future" meme is probably just wrong. paul graham knows a lot about websites but very little about the rest of the economy. show me the ten person company that can produce the equipment to generate and transmit electricity. or food production. where are all the ma and pa grocery stores? and banking...we have fewer banks now than ever and the number is still dropping. and PCs...…

Music production. Video production. Any industry where the capital costs are low, or where a small group of niche specialists can add a significant multiplier to the value chain are candidates for this sort of effect. As more industrial tasks are farmed out to large companies that specialize in flexible production it is possible that you will see this show up in industries that are currently have strong vertical inte…

Any industry where the capital costs are low

no, that thins margins even more and drives to even faster consolidation. i can make PCs in my garage, yet there are only three real players in this market - dell, hp, apple. the lower the barrier to entry, inevitably you will erode margins to the point that only a large player can stay solvent.

Re: After Credentials

#76

Post by michaelneale »

pg wrote: post #10
aristus wrote: post #4

I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success. People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past se…

Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer. The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our…

>but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name

Yes, not to the customers of the app, but the interest the YC brand generates in "insider" circles, which helps bootstrap popularity I think you are underestimating.

> YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer.

Yes but as before, the "brand impact" in the blogosphere (I feel dirty writing that) is still a huge thing. If that comes under the umbrella of advice, then that makes sense.

Re: After Credentials

#77

Post by ryanwaggoner »

alexandros wrote: post #15

Paul seems to be hitting on the optimization by proxy issues seen in many areas, even in pagerank. Google looks not for quality of a page but for indicators of that quality, namely inbound links by quality websites. Similarly exams and credentials do the same. If you can write about these books, you know literature. If you got a degree there, you must be very capable. And in the first generation it works. However, as…

I fear this is a problem we have to either solve or live with.

Aren't they all? :-)

Re: After Credentials

#78

Post by netcan »

Paul mentions small companies interacting directly with markets as the catalyst to shifting from credentials to performance.

Another potential catalyst is the growth of freelance/contract labour. Essentially, what is being created is a less secure labour environment where there is more incentive & ability to directly measure performance. The assumption is that you are fired at the end of the job. If you can get further work or a referral, it's a bonus.

There is something obscuring the effects of this though. The growth of freelance/contacting partly coincides with & partly is driven by the internationalisation of labour markets. That will obscure some aspects of it. A copywriter in a cushy job in a high wage country won't leave to pursue a $25/hr career as a elence copywriter. They stay away from competition with international labour markets.

I don't think that will go away any time soon. What would be interesting to study would be these kinds of markets in low wage countries where hiring freelancers on international labour markets is not a cost advantage to hiring local employees

In any case, if we are moving to a higher performance/credentials ratio, I think this is a big part of the equation, bigger then startups.

Re: After Credentials

#79

Post by pg »

cperciva wrote: post #54
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that would also translate into far less users a year from now That's the mistake. The number of users you get long term depends more on the "interest rate" than the size of the initial seed. E.g. Google.

I have to dispute the notion that the "initial seed" is irrelevant. Given a fixed "interest rate", the number of users at any time will be proportional to the initial number of users; and given that the initial number of users can easily vary by an order of magnitude based on external factors, I'd say this is pretty significant. (Of course, it's quite possible that the growth rate is not independent of the initial nu…

I didn't say the size of the initial user base is irrelevant, just that in practice the growth rate matters more.

And while growth rate is not in itself visible, what drives it is something that's usually even more visible than the size of the user base: the quality of the product.

Re: After Credentials

#80

Post by daniel-cussen »

DaniFong wrote: post #73
aswanson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you controlling for those not admitted that went to similar caliber schools, or have an example of how that statistic compares to those schools with a similar quality applicant pool?

You can show fairly quickly that the success of Caltech alumni in sciences, as measured by awards, is comparable only to the École Normale Supérieure (and possibly Phystech in Russia depending on how you count). Check out http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_A (EN).htm The column 'Alumni' compares the number of Nobel prizes or Fields Medals won by Alumni to the number won by Harvard (in percent). Caltech scores 52.8…

Caltech admissions struck me as particularly clean. I think part of this is that they're very much into maths and sciences, fields in which SAT score do a great job of determining proficiency. You either know the answer or you don't. On top of that, they give back to their alumni in other ways; one couple that donated 200M to the university had their kid denied, but the university named a star system after them.
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