Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College

But does it matter what college you DIDN'T graduate from?

Enough data?

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what about other fields? commerce, business, law, agriculture, medical, dental, pharmacy, etc.

Let's not get carried away and take a reasonable argument in new directions and also to the extreme.

--> "College is.. a vacation. Please, please, please, don't confuse success in school with success in anything that actually matters."

There are some fields where discipline, jumping through (seemingly arbitrary) hoops, and ability to study/capture knowledge is a reasonable indicator of success, e.g., medicine. I'll bet that a student who can't stick through the pre-med requirements is not going to get through the four years of mind-numbing med school and another four to seven years of residency.

--> "Face it, what people in the isolated world of college call 'work' is what people who pay their bills call 'time off'."

I'm not sure if you'd be studying organic chemistry on your time off, and I'm very sure some college students pay their own bills. (I did. I got classified as a grad student very early and paid my way through Stanford via half-time research & programming jobs.)

So while I'm probably going to be down-modded for sticking up for the feckless idiots who decide to spend their time learning things in college, particularly the "elite" ones, I figure I should point out when the anti-college viewpoint gets taken too far. While some may view college as a "vacation", others actually use the resources of a top institution. They get access to cutting-edge faculty, computers, lab equipment, and research that's not being done at smaller institutions. Not everybody is hoping to build a business. And for some professions, there's a wide and deep knowledge base that has to be mastered before you can start work. I know one mother who returned to college after raising her kid and slogged through pre-med studies. It was hardly a vacation. Her success in school mattered.

The potentially scary question for me is: how many kids who get As on their Kant papers think they really understand Kant because of it? The kids I hung out with all acknowledged that they were just bullshitting to get the grade, but I don't know if most kids would admit that even to themselves.

First of all, you should never be down-modded for engaging in good debate. And if so, who cares.

You bring up many good points which are, sadly, exceptions to the rule.

I have a B.S. in mathematics and an MBA, both from supposedly "elite" institutions, and I am convinced that almost nothing from any of my classes has contributed to my career as an IT professional (with the exception of the "mind" exercise). I suspect this is true for most college graduates.

As president of my undergraduate fraternity, I learned 100 times more (things that I would need later) than from all my classes combined. Things like managing a budget, running a project, caring for a facility, interpersonal communication, leading others, achieving in teams, etc., etc., etc. If I knew then what I know now, I would have skipped the classes and just joined the fraternity.

And, yes, I do go to Barnes & Noble and read "Men of Mathematics", "GEB", and the work of Dawkins just for fun. Funny, I didn't appreciate any of it when I was forced to read it.