Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=428046

by tokenadult • 18 years ago

13 50 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Every once in a while a long thread develops here on HN about how colleges choose applicants. To turn that around, how should an applicant who receives more than one offer of admission choose a college? Is list price the most important criterion? Or does prestige (however that is gauged) trump list price? If you were advising a high school student who is choosing colleges this year, what advice would you give about which college to choose?

stcredzero8• 18 years ago

Don't choose a college. Choosing a college means you are choosing a particular brand of credentials.

http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

Instead, the best thing to base your choice on is people. The next best thing is environment. Are there particular professors who you look up to who would want to mentor you? Is there a high potential for meeting the kind of people who will inspire you? Do you have good evidence that being in that environment will inculcate something valuable? (And starry-eyed reminisces of an alum are not good evidence. Lots of things can happen at an institution in a decade or so. Get current information.)

(Another way to put it -- the reputation of a school is marketing. Doesn't it seem wise to corroborate that with more direct measures of value?)

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

Instead, the best thing to base your choice on is people.

That's a good concrete suggestion, followed up by specifics. I suppose this would be a criterion to apply during admitted student visits.

stcredzero8• 18 years ago

You can also apply these by developing contacts over the web.

Seriously, your most important experiences will be with people. The most important thing will be forming truly meaningful and effective working relationships with particular people. If you fail to do this, your college experience is wasted. If you do this in a half-ass way, you will only get a half-ass benefit. Therefore, your criteria should be focused on this.

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

This is all good advice, but don't underestimate the value of credentials. I agree that credentials are overvalued by society, but there isn't a lot that tokenadult can do to change this or even avoid it.

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

don't underestimate the value of credentials

I'm agnostic on this issue, so I'll ask a follow-up question. What would be the value of credentials (in the form of a college degree) for a young person who desires to launch a start-up right after college?

stcredzero8• 18 years ago

Disagree. There are enough people out there who are aware enough to realize what really counts. Why waste your time on people less aware than that?

I have Ivy-League credentials. Has this benefitted me ever? Yes, a little. Was that worth the 6 figure amounts it cost my family to get me there and put me through there? Nope. Not sure how well my experience generalizes, though. I suspect that I would've gained several times the benefit, had I taken some time off and prepared myself for college with regards to emotional development.

Still, I think it's better to spend that time and money in ways more directly correlated with gaining enriching experiences.

There was once an AT&T study that found the success of execs in AT&T was correlated more with how well the exec did in college, and not so well with which college he went to. And this is from the monopoly AT&T days, which is well within the heyday of credentials.

easp7• 18 years ago

It's hard to measure the brand value of an Ivy League diploma. There have been studies that show that ivy league grads earn more than grads of other schools, but their controls haven't been very good. Earlier in the decade though, there was a study published that took great pains to get the control group right. Their control group was people who'd actually been accepted to an Ivy League school, but chose to go elsewhere. When comparing "ivy league material" that chose to go elsewhere, with those that did end up going to ivy league schools, they found no significant difference in earning potential down the road. Between the two groups. Neither the ivy league education, nor the connections that supposedly come with it, nor the prestige of the diploma made a significant difference when comparing between equal starting material. There was one exception, students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

If you accept post-college compensation as a proxy for the value placed on educational credentials, it appears that, in the end, there is little extra value from, say, a Harvard diploma.

utnick• 18 years ago

its probably really hard for any of us to give good advice because there are so many personal factors and each of us has only attended one or maybe 2 colleges so we are all biased.

you should just make a list of pros/cons and trust your instincts

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

you should just make a list of pros/cons and trust your instincts

Agreed that ultimately the applicant has to decide, if he is in the position of having more than one offer of admission. No applicant should feel bad about disagreeing with someone else's sincere advice, including the sincere advice of a parent. Nonetheless, sometimes an applicant knows himself better after feeling his own reaction to someone else's advice.

I ask here because I was a language major as an undergraduate, and not particularly entrepreneurial, and now I am a math coach and am getting into college advising with my more sci-tech-interested clients, some of whom would like to grow up and run for-profit businesses. Within my own family, I don't have lore to pass on that is fitting for my oldest son (who will go through the application process at the end of this calendar year), so I appreciate hearing everyone's advice here.

walterk4• 18 years ago

Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:

- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas? What's the balance between theoretical and more immediately practical classes, and which do you care more about?

- Professors: How are the professors regarded as instructors by their own students? During undergrad, your professor's quality of instruction matters more than their quality of research.

- Rigor. Top colleges are pretty comparable, afaik.

- Class size.

- Affordability.

- Quality of environment.

No one criteria ever really "trumps" other criteria. You have to determine your personal weightings for each and decide which place offers the best balance. Also, you may find that your priorities change once you've been at college for a year or two, so unless you have a super good idea of what you want to do, you might prefer well roundedness to strength in only a few key areas.

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

Here's a list, but don't take the order too seriously:

- Courses: Do they have courses that you're interested in taking, and is the department strong in those areas?

One great thing about the World Wide Web is that these days most course syllabuses for many universities are posted on the Web, so that a prospective student can make head-to-head comparisons among the "same" math class at different universities.

stcredzero8• 18 years ago

I'd put courses on the bottom of that list. In fields like Comp Sci, many of these are standardized, so there is less differentiation. What differentiation there is is due to the efforts of individual professors.

You don't even need to get accepted to any school at all to take some courses. They're free on the web. The differentiating factor is the instruction.

walterk4• 18 years ago

> I'd put courses on the bottom of that list. In fields like Comp Sci, many of these are standardized, so there is less differentiation.

I disagree. Having been to Berkeley and Georgia Tech, I found that the latter's undergrad CS/CM program would have catered considerably more to my interests. For instance, if you're interested in creative/expressive computation, Georgia Tech and CMU vastly outrank other colleges, while Stanford has been notable for offering more "timely" courses like Facebook and iPhone development.

bokonist4• 18 years ago

Funny, in my opinion, the first four things you mention do not matter at all. Throughout my schooling, 98% of my learning came from books, self study, and friends. If you can't learn from reading a book faster than you can learn from a professor, you're probably in the wrong field. But if you are choosing a college based on the professors, look for professors doing interesting work, not necessarily good teachers. Basic instruction you can get from a book. But if you can be near someone who's at the top of their field, you can learn stuff that is not written down anywhere, and gain valuable contacts.

walterk4• 18 years ago

> Throughout my schooling, 98% of my learning came from books, self study, and friends.

This is probably reflective of your learning style more than anything else. While I've certainly learned more from the books (there's only so much you can cover in lecture and section), I've also benefited a great deal from instructors who could convey their passion and communicate clearly, and I'd wager this is true for more people than not.

> But if you are choosing a college based on the professors, look for professors doing interesting work, not necessarily good teachers. Basic instruction you can get from a book. But if you can be near someone who's at the top of their field, you can learn stuff that is not written down anywhere, and gain valuable contacts.

Only a few undergrads will actually generate a working relationship with a professor who's at the top of their field, and this depends heavily on what their priorities are. It's certainly not the default advice I would give to a college applicant.

cmos2• 18 years ago

None of it really matters. Visit each college until it's just obvious. "I could spend 4 years here and be happy" Stay overnight with a freshman. Get a feel for how things are run. Talk to as many freshman and seniors as possible, candidly, in private. Go to some sample classes.

Don't just take a tour or investigate it online. I chose my college because the people going there were all pretty hard core geeks. And undergrads could get paid to work for Masters and PHD students on their thesis. (I wanted hands on experience) This, naturally, made having a killer social life a little more challenging, unless your definition of a "killer social life" is playing net trek at 3:00am on a friday night in your dorm's computer room.

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

None of it really matters. Visit each college until it's just obvious.

My son forms some of his impressions of colleges from summer program classmates older than he who have already gone off to college. His current favorite college is the one where most of the summer classmates he likes best have gone. I certainly agree that campus visits are a great idea, and some colleges formalize those for admitted students. They can be expensive for families (like mine) that live in the middle of the country if the colleges being considered are mostly off on one coast or the other.

stcredzero8• 18 years ago

Pick a coast. Wait for temperate weather. Borrow a car. Arrange with admissions departments to crash with students. Give yourself a couple of weeks. Heck, why not a couple of months?

I did this with a friend of mine looking to transfer schools. She visited 4 or 5 schools on the east coast this way.

cmos2• 18 years ago

A road trip is a lower cost way to travel.. though compared to the cost of college, and the greater cost of picking the wrong one, at least a visit to the final choice is worth it. Visiting all the local colleges could be enough of a comparison to that.

easp7• 18 years ago

On the one hand, I think too much emphasis is placed on going to the one best college -- for most students, there is likely more than one good fit.

On the other hand, the cost of doing campus visits is going to be a tiny part of the cost of their education, which is, itself, a foundation for their adult life. I think the advice to tackle one coast at a time and make it a road trip is a good one. A week spent doing that is probably at least as valuable as a week spent in high school senior year.

When I was applying to transfer away from the state school I spent my freshman year , was wait-listed by my first choice and we paid the deposit it my second choice. I ended up being accepted by my first choice, but I wasn't going to go, because, among other things, we'd already paid the deposit at the other school. My father put it in perspective for me. The deposit was small change compared to the total cost of my college education.

DTrejo• 18 years ago

Some colleges like Amherst College and Swarthmore College will fly a student out for an all-expenses paid weekend. If he is not yet a senior, have him apply to those weekends (or just look into them for the various schools he is interested in).

A friend of mine went to at least 6 such weekends, though he is a minority student, which makes a difference.

alex_c• 18 years ago

I think there are two main benefits that you get from a college education.

The first is your personal growth: what you learn from your courses, what you learn about yourself, what you learn from your classmates. The personal relationships you make with faculty and with other students that last past your graduation. Like stdcredzero said, this is all about the people and the environment.

The second benefit is the few seconds of recognition you get when a new acquaintance or a potential employer finds out that you studied X at college Y, and they think "ah yes, that's a good college" (or alternatively, "I've never heard of it").

If you play your cards right, the first benefit should vastly trump the second one. Unfortunately, the second benefit is much easier to quantify when you're choosing colleges.

Ideally, I guess, you would get both, but that's not always possible.

Within reason, list price should be the least important criterion. At most, it should be a tie breaker.

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

The first is your personal growth: what you learn from your courses, what you learn about yourself, what you learn from your classmates.

I imagine that some of that personal growth and learning from classmates can come just from being farther away from rather than closer to home during college studies. I commuted to the very nearby state university (but didn't usually live at home) for my undergraduate degree. I thought I learned a lot just from the surrounding environment when I lived overseas after I obtained my arguably nonprestigious college degree.

maximilian• 18 years ago

I would say you should go to the hardest college you get in to (that you generally like). The more smart people there, the better because the classes will be more challenging and likely more stimulating. I went to a hard school, and going from being the smartest to suddenly being average was a stimulating transition. It makes you learn to work hard to get good grades, which are that much more rewarding.

I would also say you should go to a bigger school. For technical fields, the more students, the more choice you will have for courses. Diversity in a technical field is a great thing because you get to see what you are really passionate about. I ended up really loving applied math after going through an engineering track.

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

That's my general tendency in giving advice, but I've had people disagree with based on the idea that being a big fish in a small pond can build a student's self-confidence and win the student recommendations from professors and the like. Does that make sense to you?

easp7• 18 years ago

If a student needs their self confidence built, then maybe this makes sense. Otherwise, though, the people who disagree with you are wrong, and probably second rate in their own right (I'm only half joking).

For me, having great profs who were committed to teaching was really important, but even more important that my classmates were smart and committed to learning. Pretty much everything I learned, I learned by working and talking through things with other students. The professors set the stage, and helped us through the sticking points, but for most of my courses, the 3-4 hours a week I spent with a prof were generally met with an equal or greater amount of time spent in academic interaction with classmates.

I know that there are some people who can't cope when they go from being exceptional in high school, to be being average in a school filled with people who were exceptional in high school. To the extent that this can be predicted ahead of time, I think the right thing is not to steer them to a less rigorous school, but rather to help prepare them to find motivations other than being "the best," and, perhaps, to direct them to an institution that where the tone is more collaborative than competitive.

bokonist4• 18 years ago

1) Go to the best school where you can get a full ride. Convince your parents to use the money they saved to fund your startup some day. It's a far better use of money than college tuition.

2) Either major in a hard, useful, technical subject, like mechanical engineering or computer science, or find a super easy major where attendance in classes is mostly optional. If you do the second, you can work full time on your startup during college, and get it to the point where you can live off of it by the time you graduate.

tokenadult8• 18 years ago

* Convince your parents to use the money they saved to fund your startup some day.*

Would that advice generalize to a student whose parents are not providing any funding for his education? (That's not my son's situation, but it's a situation I've seen more than once, and one of my son's friends is in that situation.)

bokonist4• 18 years ago

I suppose it depends why the parents are not funding his education. If the parent cannot afford to pay for college, they probably cannot afford to help fund a startup either, no?

Also, it's not startup funding is a better use money than college. A down payment on mortgage, money for travel, or even just an outright grant of cash is a better way of giving your kid a head start in life than sending them to an expensive college.

From the student's prospective, paying as little tuition as possible is even more important if you have to pay for college yourself. Entering life with more than $20K of debt is a very bad idea.

easp7• 18 years ago

I don't see the point in wasting time and money on a super-easy major. Or is the idea that this is a trick to get parental support and student loans to help finance living-expenses while working on the startup?

bokonist4• 18 years ago

Right. If you can get a scholarship and/or have parental support, your cost of living will be far lower than your cost of living after you graduate. So you might as well attend, it's cheaper than paying for an apartment yourself. Plus, the environment is a lot of fun.

ibgeek2• 18 years ago

Computer Science is a super easy major, imo. I would suggest that people at least double-major in math or something else to stretch their mind.

lallysingh• 18 years ago

One thing to look for is lots of other disciplines around, where you can interact. I got some of my best experience programming while writing control code for a bunch of mechanical engineers.

rantfoil3• 18 years ago

It's not the populist thing to say, but I'll say it anyway.

The top colleges are a great place to be because of the friends you'll make and the level of competition at those places. You can meet amazing people anywhere, but generally speaking they are in higher concentration at more competitive universities.

If you're going to be a hacker, go to a top CS school if you have the opportunity. The competition will be more hardcore, the faculty will be great (and will have written some of the textbooks!), you'll be heavily recruited by top software companies, and maybe you'll meet your cofounders there. If it costs a little more, then do it anyway -- does it matter if you're a good hacker? Even at the top schools, if you had to pay for most of them with loans, you'd be making more than enough to pay off the debt in short order after graduation.

Debt IS bad though -- you want to avoid it if you can because it ties your hands when it comes to starting a company right out of college. But then again, working for a few years and earning a solid salary for a bit can be a great thing too. Make your mistakes on other people's time. =) Worked for us.

endtime• 18 years ago

I can second this. I go to one of the top CS schools in the country and people here are, in general, very cool. I didn't have the same experience as an undergrad, despite the fact that I still went to a pretty good school. If you can get into MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley etc, go for it.

jmtulloss• 18 years ago

I went with the college that had the "best" program. I loved every minute of it and got a ton out of it. The quality of the professors and students in a top notch program is invaluable. They provide you with stimulating material while you're in school and great connections when you're out.

People say that just doing something is more important than where you went to college. That's true, but it's not a coincidence that a large number of successful startups and engineers in general come from Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois (and a few others, of course). The network can't be emphasized enough.

ibgeek2• 18 years ago

I'm currently a junior in college. I decided on a good (but not great), liberal arts school with about 1800 students over going to Univ of Florida, where I was also accepted. Here's my analysis of that.

Advantages up to this point: * Flexibility -- There is a lot of flexibility in my choices of courses and in life here in general. A lot of students here are able to double-major, travel abroad, etc. because of that flexibility.

* Cost -- with financial aid, it's cost me a little bit more than a public univ but not by much. ($4k/year difference max)

* Personal attention -- I can show up at a prof's office and chat about anything. They know my name, my interests, and my abilities. This has helped with solving bureaucratic problems, enabled me to get great letters of recommendation, find professors to do research with, and helped me to gain access to various academic programs. If you're at a research school, most profs. don't care about you, the lowly undergrad, unless you can do something for them. And some of those prestigious schools have profs. like that.

* Size and Selectivity -- Eckerd is not the most selective school I could have gone too but I have found some peers (although not most) who can challenge me. The advantage of this is that you can quickly find the other cream of the crop and challenge each other, but at the same time, I have found it easy to gain access to research programs, awards, TA positions, etc. on campus because I could easily get myself noticed and show myself as the cream of the crop.

* Time -- My courses aren't always very challenging or time consuming so it's easy to take overload or to use my free time to do other things, particularly things related to research or future academic endeavors.

Disadvantages: * Challenge -- I feel like few of my courses have really challenged me. But, I have friends who transferred here from schools like Rochester Inst. Tech and Univ of Rochester who say that those schools don't offer more of a challenge necessarily, either. However, they have also said that maybe you have high quality peers there in your field, but they tend to lack social skills. (This may change as I get farther into the courses for my double-major in math.)

In my case, Eckerd offers a lot of advantages in terms of accolades, letters of recommendations, good grades, etc. which will help me get into grad school (which is my goal). But at the same time, it's been frustrating over the last few years since I've rarely run into people who know more than I do or who have are more skilled than I am.

(I should also mention that I have done research not only at Eckerd but at the University of Connecticut for the last few years... I've tried to take advantage of resources outside of Eckerd to supplement its small size.)

easp7• 18 years ago

For most private schools (and the more prestigious public schools), the only people who pay list price are those most able to pay it. Working class and even squarely middle-class kids will generally qualify for significant amounts of need-based financial aid in the forms of grants. So, to the degree that cost is a factor, you should be considering the tuition in conjunction with the financial aid package offered.

I think neither cost (as long as the cost is affordable) nor prestige should be the top criteria.

I think its more important to find a good match between the student and the environment of the college. The most important aspects of the environment are the professors, the other students and the available academic programs.

I'd discount big research universities, since the foremost criteria used by the institution for evaluating undergrad instructors is 1) are they cheap (ie grad students), 2) does their research attract prestige, funding, and cheap labor (ie grad students). The foremost criteria used by undegrads in evaluating their profs is "coolness" and the ease of getting a good grade. Also, access by undergrads to profs is limited. They are usually teach in big lecture environments, and their office hours are limited.

Focus more on institutions, like small liberal arts colleges, that place a high value on undergrad instruction, while still expecting profs to maintain a level of engagement in scholarship and research. The classroom environment is usually more intimate and profs are more available outside of the classroom.

The students are important too. Every hour spent with a prof will also be spent with other students. Better they contribute to the experience. Also, for every hour spent in a classroom setting, there should be at least as many spent studying and socializing with other students.

Even if you have your criteria firm in your mind, its hard to get enough information to base an evaluation on, so it pays to look for points of leverage among friends, family, family doctor, high school teachers, etc. None of them are going to have good knowledge of more than one or two institutions, but teachers will have a sense of the experiences of former students. Older friends and relatives will know about their own institutions. Parents of friends and relatives will know something about the experience of their own children, and also of the children of their own friends and family. What's most important though is that these people will have an inside perspective not just the institutions, but on the prospective student. So, tell these people what the student is looking for, ask them for suggestions based on what they know, and then ask them why they made the suggestion they did and see if it makes sense.

It's also worth paying close attention to the way the schools markets themselves. If a college manages to communicate a strong and consistent identity for itself in its marketing materials then i'd give that identity some weight unless their is strong evidence to the contrary (particularly if the same message is delivered once they've issued their acceptance). There are some perverse incentives for small schools to misrepresent themselves, but these mostly come into play before applications are received. Also I think these perverse incentives are checked by the fact that they don't have a lot of flexibility with respect to class size. Too many students and their quality of teaching suffers. Too few and their finances suffer. In addition, if its a bad match and the student drops out, it can damage their reputation, and hurt some of the metrics on which they are judged when it comes time for re-accreditation.

Take advantage of the net to get more of an inside view on schools too. We used to have prospective students checking out our live journal group. I think that's died off a bit, but there are still groups on facebook and whatnot, and the school should be able to put you in touch with current students and recent grads.

In the end though, its great to do a campus visit, particularly if you are choosing among just a handful of schools. Arrange it with admissions. They may get you a room for a night in a dorm, and they'll get you into classes, and give you a campus tour. Outside the formal activities, take advantage of unscheduled time to talk to other students.

Regarding the academic program, a lot of students end up graduating in something they might not even have known about when they entered, and they may end up making a living doing a job that didn't even exist when they graduated. For these reasons, I think its important to get a good solid liberal education, with exposure to a variety of subjects and viewpoints no matter what major they choose, and a grounding in the humanities, so they have a perspective on the forces that have shaped society in the past, and can apply that perspective to understanding present day changes.

Last thing, I think the prospect of launching a startup after graduating was raised in another thread. I generally encourage people to keep their options open after graduation by not taking on too much debt. For a student who is planning on a pursuit (like writing a book, or starting a company) where they can expect little or no income for a long stretch after graduation, I think the goal should be graduating with no debt at all. In those cases, cost could become a more important factor; 10K in loans might not be decisive if one expects to have some sort of paying job after graduation, but it could be the difference between having grocery money, or going to bed hungry if you are planning on scraping by while trying to get a startup off the ground.

numair• 18 years ago

Since you're young, and you're already a hacker, you might want to look at going to a place where there's an entirely different sort of student body. This would help "balance" things out a bit for you, and would give you a more interesting life. If you take the time to understand and collaborate with your newfound peers, you will also end up with a bunch of great friends whose perspectives are entirely different from your own; this is good for your brain and will keep you from becoming one of those ignorant, boring people.

For example, arts school in another country would be interesting. Oh, and believe it or not, the girls would find it kinda alluring that you're not like the rest of the guys at their school. Probably has to do with our natural desire for genetic diversity...

Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?

Related Stories