Paul Graham: News from the Front

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

by mattculbreth • 19 years ago

103 124 19 years ago

paulgraham.com

byrneseyeview• 19 years ago

Jd2• 19 years ago

Analogue: no one ever gets penalized for upvoting comments that have already been upvoted several times.

Same basic idea.

mynameishere2• 19 years ago

No, college is more like this: You see somebody, "Jd", (except let's call him "Harvard") who already got a lot of upmods, and you attach yourself to him by replying (except, let's say "applying") and bang now my comment is closer to the top of the page.

More people read it, leading to an extra opportunity to gain Karma. Of course, if I don't stay "on topic" (let's say "go to class") people will notice and downmod me (let's say "flunk me"). Staying "on topic" leads to a dull uniformity.

Jd2• 19 years ago

Absolutely. My comment was more directed towards those that evaluate/hire ivy-league/equiv. grads. Yours is correct re: why people attend such schools.

rfrey• 19 years ago

As always, a convincing case, well edited. :) Paul's point probably plays even better among Hacker News readers, who are probably more suspicious than the average bear of college in general.

Seems to me there's an extra factor contributing to the longevity of the "which school" criterion. There are other roles in the business (especially larger businesses) such as biz dev, M&A, etc. where attending an elite school might enhance success considerably - not for the academic content learned, but for the network of friends and colleagues you gain at that school. It's the English Grammar School model of corporate success.

s Paul points out, hiring decisions are often made by HR types: but HR is a very extroverted, business process focussed profession. As personalities, and in job description, the HR folks have more in common with the people and roles that do benefit from elite school connections than with technical people for whom the elite school is irrelevant. Like all of us, they apply lessons from familiar situations to more unfamiliar situations. And so the Stanford Screen lives on.

ecuzzillo• 19 years ago

Two points: 1) It does seem to matter for at least CS grad school, as was said in Undergraduation, because of research opportunities. So if you just want to start a web startup and get rich, fine, but if you want to go to grad school after you get rich, not so fine.

2) I've taken classes at CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford, and while the differences didn't particularly correlate with the rankings (since the relative rankings of those three places in CS get permuted regularly anyway), there were serious differences in attitude and rigor. CMU and Berkeley were both very rigorous; the difference was that CMU was rigorous in a somewhat more pointless, soul-sucking manner, on average, and didn't explain things as well. Stanford was somewhat less rigorous, which I imagine was because of the Ivy-league difficult-to-get-in but easy-to-pass phenomenon. This seems to correlate somewhat with the number of undergrads at each place involved in research; at both CMU and Berkeley, I know many undergrads involved in research, while the one professor I talk to at Stanford hungrily scrounges for the rare undergrad who's good at research.

So there are differences in curriculum and selection, I think; they're just not particularly amazing predictors of success. They certainly should influence the decision of which colleges to apply to, though.

jedberg3• 19 years ago

When I was in college, I figured out that the education you get doesn't really change. However, what does change is the people that you are associating with.

At the "elite" colleges, there is a greater percentage of smart students, which lends itself to more productive discussions and more difficult tests that force you to challenge yourself. Also, it is like the difference between the regular classes in high school and advanced classes -- in the advanced classes you cover the same material, but with greater breadth and a deeper understanding.

And the number 1 biggest advantage of going to an elite college is that you have a much better chance of meeting the world's future movers and shakers -- the people that will be the educational and business leaders of the next generation. That alone is a good reason to go to an elite college.

So I have to disagree, and say that there are indeed advantages to going to an elite college, just not the advantages that most people think.

pg14• 19 years ago

If you read all the way to the end you'll find you're not disagreeing as much as you think.

jedberg3• 19 years ago

I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything.

My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?

brlewis5• 19 years ago

This essay posits that choice of college doesn't act as a success indicator when evaluating a pool of people. That's addressing a different question from whether choice of college acts as a success factor for individuals.

pg14• 19 years ago

Uh oh. Actually the second half is about the latter. Is that not clear?

cstejerean3• 19 years ago

Well you don't get it for free, you have to waste valuable years of your life to become worthy of admission to such a place. Depending on how good your social skills it might be easier to study hard and go to a good school to meet smart people.

irrelative• 19 years ago

This essay seems to resonate with another Paul Graham theme -- to avoid prestige while choosing a job. His point then is that you are never compensated for prestige, so you might as well stay away from it.

It looks to me like the education market is starting to catch up with the job market. Prestige in either area probably means that you're paying too much or being paid too little.

cperciva4• 19 years ago

I did my D.Phil. at Oxford University, and my B.Sc. at Simon Fraser University; while SFU is one of Canada's best universities, it clearly doesn't have the stature of Oxford or Harvard. Were the students at Oxford more intelligent than the students at SFU? No. Were they more motivated? No. Are there jobs for which I'd rather hire an Oxford alumnus than an SFU alumnus? Absolutely.

The largest advantage of a great university like Oxford is in increasing the range and depth of ideas presented to students. It's impossible to completely separate the teaching role of a university from its research role: Teaching (and inconvenient questions asked by irritating students, like yours truly, in class) informs research, and research informs teaching. And quite apart from the "indigenous" research, if you're at a minor university without a strong reputation for research, you don't have Knuth dropping by for a few months, or Rivest visiting to give a lecture (albeit about the rather odd notion of obtaining forward security by using a stream of broadcasted random numbers which is too fast to be stored).

There are undeniable advantages to being at a great university in being exposed to new ideas. Why haven't PG et al. noticed this? Probably because their measurement -- can someone create a successful startup? -- is just as biased as everyone else's measurements. After all, when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?

pg14• 19 years ago

> when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?

Considering how many there are of them, probably within the last couple days. But instead of me giving you an example to which you will predictably reply "that's not really new," how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new, so we can see what level of really-newness it would take to satisfy you?

cperciva4• 19 years ago

>...how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new...

The first example which comes to mind is powerset.

corentin5• 19 years ago

Why don't you fund a few (or at least one) "crazy" startups like Anybots? Because that's probably the coolest thing YC-related! Are you only interested in web stuff, or is it a lack of serious applications?

Here are a few "cool" ventures I have in mind:

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com

http://www.intellasys.net

http://www.teslamotors.com

comatose_kid• 19 years ago

SFU one of Canada's best universities? Care to elaborate? I always thought that Waterloo and University of Toronto were the best.

Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.

cperciva4• 19 years ago

>SFU one of Canada's best universities? Care to elaborate? I always thought that Waterloo and University of Toronto were the best.

For universities with medical programmes, I'd say that UToronto is at the top, closely followed by UBC and McGill. If you're not interested in medicine or law, though, I'd say that Waterloo and SFU are pretty much tied, with UVic coming second.

>Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.

I'm sure you could find people who think that any of the universities I've mentioned are Canada's best university; to a certain extent it will depend upon their field. That said, few would dispute that all the above are better than UCalgary, UManitoba, York, or Carleton.

rams2• 19 years ago

Peter Norvig in his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" says, "If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. # Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because they make you do it for them)."

He is referring to Jamie Zawinski. http://norvig.com/21-days.html

npk3• 19 years ago

Isn't it ironic that Peter Norvig touts this view, but works at google? I've heard that GPA/pedigree are one of the key decisions for hiring?

cellis• 19 years ago

Actually I think its the problem solving questions that they ask you. I may be mistaken,since I don't work there. Theres an article in businessweek or b2.0 about it right now. Things such as "You are shrunk to the size of a nickel..preserving your density proportional...and put in a blender...you have 5 seconds before the blades start moving - what do you do?

rams2• 19 years ago

Maybe not all Google employees agree with what their HR dept/management does ?

jey7• 19 years ago

Anyone have that awesome quote from Bowling for Columbine where Moore is interviewing South Park co-creator Matt Stone and Stone explains the supposed consequences of not getting into honors classes in the 3rd grade?

brlewis5• 19 years ago

They're like, "Don't screw this up...or you won't get into honors math in 7th grade...and you'll just die poor and lonely."

http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/word/Bowling-for-Columbine.do...

jey7• 19 years ago

Thanks for the effort, but I think he phrased it differently.

michael_nielsen2• 19 years ago

How was the data analysed?

The most obvious way, and the way the essay seems to imply, is simply to look for correlations between success / failure and which school the founders attended.

If this is how it was done, then the conclusion is flawed. All it shows is that the school doesn't matter, conditional on being accepted by YC (rather than rejected). This is a completely different conclusion than the one the essay reaches, namely that the school doesn't matter, period.

aston4• 19 years ago

First, I'd just like to point out that PG is in an interesting place to report that college doesn't matter, having himself attended two Ivy League schools.

There are two arguments happening here. The first is that entrepreneurship and business success are not so well correlated with where you go to undergrad. The second is that where you go to college doesn't make much of a difference in life in general. I won't really quarrel with the first, since it's been demonstrated pretty often, and YC's results support it as well. The second, on the other hand...

The main problem with trying to assert that college doesn't make a difference in life is that there's really no easy measurement you can do over "net change" in life. That's due both to the long span of time a life consumes as well as the complex and/or fuzzy cause-effect relationships that are at play throughout. At best, I think, you would need to argue over objective differences that have some immediate effect, and then hope that those actually do make a difference. As an example, here are some of the things that I think made Paul Graham successful that are pretty strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard:

- he met RTM and Trevor there

- he got to spend his time in Boston, where he's acknowledged startups can thrive

- being able to drop the H-bomb almost certainly helped give credibility to his company

- he learned Lisp (not really the most popular language at the time, except at certain places)

Would Viaweb have happened had he gone elsewhere, or skipped grad school altogether? Well, maybe. But I doubt it. Harvard's name is what convened the talent (peers, advisors, mentors, investors) that shaped much of that company, and it's there that Harvard's value lies. I think this essay horribly undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing.

pg14• 19 years ago

> strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard

This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough.

> undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing

Sure, but not by accident. The whole thesis of this essay that this "magic" is bullshit, and that as success depends more on measurable results, it will play much less of a role.

cperciva4• 19 years ago

>This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough.

Certainly not clear enough for this non-US reader. But of course the word "college" has a different meaning on this side of the border (and an entirely different meaning in Oxford).

aston4• 19 years ago

Yeah, I didn't realize grad school wasn't part of these considerations. That said, I think the graduate school vs. undergraduate line gets kind of blurry for hacker types. An awesome Scheme hacker coming into MIT freshman year is going to have access to Gerry Sussman right out of the gate. No need to go to grad school for that sort of thing. And it's not entirely clear that a Master's buys you much in the software industry regardless of whether you do a startup or work for BigCo, so your chance to meet hacker types is sorta limited to your undergraduate days in many cases.

dpapathanasiou2• 19 years ago

being able to drop the H-bomb

You do know that's a sexual euphemism, right? ;)

aston4• 19 years ago

It's a pretty overloaded term.

vegashacker2• 19 years ago

This is the first of PG's essays I've seen with comments at the bottom. It seems they're brought to us courtesy of Disqus, a YC startup.

http://paulgraham.disqus.com/news_from_the_front/

henning3• 19 years ago

the idea that college is necessary is a relatively recent aberration that from what I can tell dates back to the end of WWII and the GI Bill. before that, going to college was rare.

college is not for everyone (we need good plumbers and auto mechanics, fer chrissakes). i didn't apply myself as well as i could have at college, but about 40% of the value I got was from reading interesting books I found in the library, which I could have got for $100 a year while working in the real world and gaining money and experience -- which is what I'm doing now.

that said, some things are very hard to learn outside of a classroom and the mathematical maturity I gained from taking math classes will serve me for a life time.

prakash3• 19 years ago

PG: Here's a good way to test this: Please ask the next round of applicants to NOT mention the school they went to.

What do you think?

aston4• 19 years ago

Too bad about those school email addresses...

pg14• 19 years ago

We considered that, but there's more information there than just a scalar value representing impressiveness.

prakash3• 19 years ago

Can you expand on that? What kind of information?

marrone2• 19 years ago

I liked this article, if for the simple fact that it can only help my cause (I graduated, though not from a prestigious school)!

The whole time I was going to school I was super impatient to get done so I could actually get working on something real. I was really just after the piece of paper they give you at the end (though I never attended my graduation to get that paper, and the original was sent to the wrong house).

Once I graduated I started my own project so that I would have some work to show when applying for jobs. I found that that experience led to as much or more knowledge gained as my best year in school. And that is not a knock against the school I went to (I thought the staff there was awesome).

I am always reminded of a quote from some movie (cant think of the name of it now)... "You spent x thousands of dollars on an education you could have got for 2 dollars in library late fees"

abstractbill3• 19 years ago

I am always reminded of a quote from some movie (cant think of the name of it now)... "You spent x thousands of dollars on an education you could have got for 2 dollars in library late fees"

Good Will Hunting.

dfranke6• 19 years ago

Great movie. It became my nickname when I took a construction job the summer between high school and college :-).

limeade• 19 years ago

that would be good will hunting

nikolaj• 19 years ago

It's tempting to dismiss the experience gained at college as being not useful or applicable, but from my experience, there is generally a noticeable difference between those who learned all the fundamentals (e.g. college level math, physics, language theory), and those who are self taught.

There are alot of really talented self-taught coders out there, but for the rest of us, the breadth of understanding from slogging through those boring lectures on BNF, multi variable calculus, and linear algebra gave us an incredible analytical base thats easy to assume we always had.

marrone2• 19 years ago

oh, I wasn't trying to say that school wasn't useful. I don't think you can argue that school is useful. I was just trying to say that I agreed with pg's point that it depends more on the person, rather than the school.

dpapathanasiou2• 19 years ago

The second paragraph reminded me of this Alan Watts talk: http://www.freshminds.com/animation/alan_watts_life.html.

But unlike the Watts talk, the essay does converge to a very rigid notion of "success".

davidw• 19 years ago

As someone who took 1 term of a bad C++ class at a community college, and primarily studied Italian prior to dropping out of the University, I can't help but vote this one up.

bluishgreen• 19 years ago

I have thought about this a lot.In fact lot of my teen years were spent thinking about this. I went to an elite school in India. And I leave a comment here just to confirm that its the same all over the world. These lines are gold. ( I mean very valuable :)

"The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in the America, have some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to college. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. When you're excluded, you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life."

mdakin• 19 years ago

One hundred years from now will an "elite college" still exist? The reputations of today's elite colleges stem from a perceived legacy of alum achievement 25, 50, 100 years ago. Are factors operating now that will more evenly distribute this achievement in the future? Or is this "legacy of achievement" and conferred eliteness already BS?

alex_c• 19 years ago

But it DOES matter where you go to college, and the essay itself argues for that.

In this context, we can say there are three things that can determine someone's success:

1) confidence others have in you

2) self-confidence

3) actual ability

Going to a "good" college affects 1 and 2 the most, and arguably 3 the least. In a startup 3 and 2 are arguably the most important, and 1 the least - so I guess that agrees with pg's argument. In the corporate world, 1 and 2 matter the most, and 3 the least - aligned with what a brand-name college provides.

So the argument seems a bit circular: based on the yc sample set, college doesn't matter because college doesn't matter to the yc sample set. Even if that SHOULD extend to the world at large, it doesn't.

DocSavage• 19 years ago

This is why Seth Godin champions NOBS instead of a traditional business school: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/04/nobs_the_end... NOBS maximizes #1 and #2 with little work. Now if only there really was a NOBS. Wait, it's called YCombinator! :)

Alex39172• 19 years ago

When I was taking an education theory class we had to do simulated admissions. We had to do three applicants every ten minutes, which works out to just over three minutes per app. In that amount of time you can quickly scan over the grades and SATs, and maybe read the first paragraph of each essay if you're lucky. The other thing I learned is that the real admissions officers got statistics updates twice a day for the average GPA and SAT score, and also the projected US News rank. This means that whether or not your grades and SATs were good enough depended largely on whether your app was read before or after lunch, because what it took to get into the college completely changed every time they were handed the new report.

For low income minority students there was an option to set the app aside for a second reading in order to learn more about the student's situation and if there were an ameliorating factors, but for the rest of the students the admissions officers were expected to make a decision on the first pass after the three minutes.

Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the academic department they were applying for, so they pretty much knew whether they'd be accepted before they ever applied. The flip side is that they only got an edge in admissions if they applied early decision, because if they were going to bring down the average GPA then they had to bring up the average matriculation in order to not affect the overall US News rank.

I think it's one of those things like eVoting. That is, people with no CS experience think eVoting is totally secure whereas CS experts know it isn't. Similarly, I highly suspect that anyone who thinks getting admitted to an Ivy shows a certain baseline level of respectability has never worked in admissions. I'd guarantee it.

As for the importance of college GPA, if you want to see something funny then apply for a wall street job. If they ask you what your GPA was in college, ask them how GPA correlates with alpha. :-)

The craziest thing was that Google did a massive HR survey and determined that there was basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company. Because of this they decided that they would give jobs to five or six people with sub 3.0 GPAs each year. Well if there is little or no correlation, why should it matter what GPA is at all? I suspect the psychology behind the Google hiring process has a lot in common with the psychology of female circumcision. That is, it was done to me so it must be a good thing. And if it's a good thing, then by definition it must be good to do unto others.

edit: fixed a few grammatical errors

mynameishere2• 19 years ago

Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the department they were applying for

As ridiculous as this is at a fundamental level, you know damn well that the athletic recruiters take long, careful looks at all the potential players, unlike the academic recruiters.

basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company

I'm a GPA skeptic myself, having blown off every class (including the important ones), but this is easily explained: If a company puts weight upon GPA, then any low-GPA students they happen to hire likely had some manifest achievements that got them in. Such achievements are more important than GPA one way or the other.

Alex39172• 19 years ago

I won't argue that the athletic recruiting isn't a bit ridiculous, but in general the academic standards are probably more fair and transparent than the regular admissions process. Each team has its GPA published each semester for all to see, and in general the number of recruits a team is allowed to bring in is highly dependent on whether or not the previous recruits have been succeeding academically. Of course each individual athlete is also highly monitored, and if GPA dips below a certain level then it's even worse than if you were a normal student. Not to mention the random drug testing that no other students are subjected to, the prohibition against putting certain types of photos in your Facebook profile, the mandatory diversity/alcohol/sex training sessions, etc. Apparently it's no longer even allowed to smoke cigarettes or use any other tobacco products.

That being said, the NCAA bureaucracy is still lame.

henning3• 19 years ago

"The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department."

I wish this would be repeated more often. I've implemented many interesting algorithms based on papers written by people at, like, Louisiana State University. Noname places.

dfranke6• 19 years ago

It's also interesting how many universities kick ass in little obscure research niches. I had never even heard of Chalmers until I learned Haskell.

henning3• 19 years ago

I wouldn't have thought Glasgow even had a university much less one that produced a really nice implementation of a modern functional programming language.

whacked_new2• 19 years ago

It doesn't take a Paul Graham to realize this nor do I think this is the first time the thought hit him. There are also things that I, and others, would argue about, in favor or not, but nonetheless,

thank you for writing this.

edw519• 19 years ago

Here's another dirty little secret: Your grades don't matter either.

I still chuckle when I think of the drones in my fraternity that missed the best 4 years of their lives because their heads were stuck in their books. Sure, they got 4.0 averages, but who cares now?

whacked_new2• 19 years ago

They matter in different ways. High grades are like the good college. It's instant attention. If your goal is to work on Wall Street, good grades are an advantage. Just depends on what you want to do.

Similarly, high IQ implies smart, but low IQ does not imply unsmart.

cstejerean3• 19 years ago

Grades matter only if you have no other experience. If you want to work on Wallstreet chances are you don't have much experience coming out of school. But after you get the right experience nobody cares about grades. The question is whether or not you can get the right experience in the time you would otherwise waste worrying about grades.

Neoryder• 19 years ago

For me the biggest thing about going to an elite school is expectation.

The more you expect for yourself, the more others expect from you the more you are driven to succeed or make something of your life.

Elite colleges are like the newsweek article on octopart, it makes you want to beat the expectations on you, only several order or magnitudes less.

I think getting an education is secondary in college. Finding people who live with passion used to be a problem when we didn't have the internet. And working/studying in elite institutions gave you a higher chance of meeting passionate people.

gojomo3• 19 years ago

Though as a reader I start sympathetic to both the thesis (it matches my priors) and the author (always enjoy PG's essays), this struck me as hand-waving.

For all the talk of, "I have a lot of data" and "[w]e're just finally able to measure it," there are no supporting numbers, just general impressions.

C'mon, give this topic the rigorous Bayesian treatment. How does the population of YC market-successes compare with YC-chosen and YC-applicants, along the 'prestigious college' dimension? How do these compare with the college-graduate population as a whole, and the college-graduate population succeeding in other competitive fields?

Those numbers would be great, and I'm rooting for the "college-doesn't-matter" result.

gojomo3• 19 years ago

As a followup:

Even with hard data, two major sample-selection issues would make me hesitate to generalize the YC experience. First, the YC process attracts especially confident and ambitious people -- not representative of all graduates of the same colleges. Second, prestigious college graduates may have found high-fulfillment work or more traditional startup financing before even considering the YC route. So YC may be rigged to attract an A-team of general collegians (smart go-getters still with something to prove) but a B-team of prestigious collegians (those not already swept up by other plentiful opportunities).

Indeed, "Notes from the Front" can be read as a YC recruiting letter to ambitious prospects from less-prestigious academic backgrounds.

pg14• 19 years ago

We don't have enough data yet to prove anything by research paper standards, but that doesn't mean I'm saying nothing. We try consciously to ignore where people went to school; that is not standard practice; and moreover this is something I'm claiming we've changed.

michael_nielsen2• 19 years ago

Presumably, your data can only show that it doesn't matter what school you went to, conditional on being accepted by YC.

That is a completely different statement than showing that it doesn't matter what school you went to. Your article appears to me like it is conflating the two.

nanijoe• 19 years ago

I always wondered if boso getting into YC had anything to do with the founders having gone to Oxford.

pg14• 19 years ago

No. It was because they were obvious ass-kickers.

voidstar• 19 years ago

ha, this is true. i go to rutgers for 4k/yr after a certain ithaca ivy wanted 43k/yr or whatever it was, so i get to keep a college fund's worth of seed money for whatever i do post-grad. and the "elite college" types i meet in the summers are no better-educated than me (and incidentally, drink a lot more...)

epi0Bauqu3• 19 years ago

I was amazed initially (though that quickly faded) how few truly "smart" undergraduates there were at MIT in the 9 years I hung around there. I put smart in quotes because I really don't like that word, but I don't have a great substitute either. Obviously they were smart enough to get in. But most were significantly lacking in at least one necessary area to be labeled "smart" IMO (often several), including intuitiveness, creativity, being a self-starter, analytical thinking, breadth and depth of knowledge, intellectual curiosity, etc.

Putting exact numbers on it is difficult due to the self-segregation at MIT and subjectivity obviously at play. However, I would say perhaps 30% fall into the seriously lacking category, another 30% in a substantially lacking category and another 25% in a good but not great category (perhaps lacking only one major thing). That leaves only 15% or so of people I came across I would say were "smart" in the sense described above. When you move to people with the essential qualities necessary to work successfully at a really early stage startup, I would say it drops to 7% or so. I'm not saying found one, just work at one as one of the first employees. When you move to people with all the founding qualities, the % probably drops to 1-2%. I know this first hand after trying to start companies with people in the "smart" category.

The above has really hit home other times as well. Here are two more occasions. First, when graduating, 62 people in my class out of about 1,080 (~6%) were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. I was shocked at a) how many of these people were my friends at MIT; b) how many of these people I had come across (given that I didn't meet all 1,080; and c) that this list included pretty much all of the people I had previously labeled "smart" myself in my class that I had come across.

Second, my wife taught statistics at MIT for several years. One time a kid came up to her complaining about an exam grade and told her it was not possible to have gotten an A on this exam. He said all his friends studied real hard and yet they all ended up with Cs and Ds. To which she replied, actually roughly 30% of the class got As. The point is, they were completely self-segregated by "smartness" and didn't even really know it.

All that being said, an MIT degree really does go a long way in terms of impressing the average person/company. I have done independent consulting and applied for jobs where they basically stopped researching me when they saw MIT. That is the rule, not the exception. And that was in Boston. Now that I live in PA, it seems even more shocking to people to come across someone from MIT. Given the above, and in agreement with PG, this behavior is unwarranted. I of course am thankful, but it also annoys me that so many people are free-riding on the name.

brlewis5• 19 years ago

In response to your first paragraph, I think more people should obsess about where there kids go to kindergarten.

Not obsess about how a selective kindergarten will help them get into the right college, but about whether the environment will suppress creativity, being a self-starter, and intellectual curiosity, as most schools do. Unfortunately, schools that nurture those qualities usually cost money.

dfranke6• 19 years ago

One of my biggest motivations for getting rich is so that when I have kids, I can afford to home-school them.

epi0Bauqu3• 19 years ago

PG: have you noticed that a) GPA matters (at any school); b) that GPA matters at so-called elite schools in particular; c) any other consistencies with regards to college activities and/or honors, e.g. Phi Beta Kappa, having had started clubs or groups, etc.?

pg14• 19 years ago

I don't know. We don't ask people what their grades were or what honors they got.

epi0Bauqu3• 19 years ago

Why not? I'm not implying that grades & honors definitely correlate in any way with whatever it is you are looking for in applicants, but they could.

Additionally, it may be the case that overall you have noticed that attending an elite school has no correlation with success in your program, but that doesn't mean an identifiable subset of elite school candidates do not as well. For example, suppose GPA doesn't correlate by itself, or even a high GPA at an elite school. Yet maybe a super-higher GPA at an elite school does, or Phi Beta Kappa or whatever.

portLAN• 19 years ago

"Good" colleges are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the best students organized online and randomly picked some backwoods institution and applied there, it would instantly become the place to be. Meanwhile the previous top schools would be left with the second-stringers.

It bears repeating: out of the top 10 richest "U.S. Americans", 4 inherited it; of the six who didn't, one has a degree (Warren Buffett), and 5 are drop-outs: Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, and Michael Dell. Woz dropped out to start Apple (he went back to school only after he was done working there) and Jobs dropped out of Reed College here in Portland. (We're all very proud of him.)

cstejerean3• 19 years ago

I'm surprised it took Paul this long to realize this about universities. A little less than half way through high school I realized that the entire process (get good grades to go to a good school, get good grades there so you can get a good job) is crap. I decided that it was more important to spend my time in high school learning what I cared about then to obsess over GPA.

I never got around to finishing my college degree, I left about 2 years into it and got a job because I ran out of things to learn in college. I've worked for a series of both small and large companies and I've found that most companies also don't care where one went to college (Google is a big exception to this). Most companies simply don't value people that are fresh out of college because colleges don't teach people the right skills.

It's true however that in good schools there are more smart people and you are more likely to meet interesting people, but that doesn't mean you need to go to a top school, just live close to one.

sethjohn• 19 years ago

I've noticed the same thing about top-tier chemists. Grad schools tend to have a good mix of Ivy kids and others, but the most brilliant scientists always seem to come from some mid-level state university or a little liberal arts college.

Success at the highest levels of scientific research takes an odd mix of creativity, intuition, and intellegence that has little to do with academic success in high school or undergrad.

tipjoy• 19 years ago

From what I can tell, being a YC alum has similar benefits to being a Harvard (or other Ivy League) alum.

s_baar• 19 years ago

Thank you, this helps me a lot.

LaurieCheers• 19 years ago

I think Paul's logic here is subtly backwards...

"It doesn't matter much where a given individual went to college."

From Y-Combinator's perspective, yes, I'm sure that's true. The people they're looking at are self-selected, and pretty much guaranteed to be smart, motivated and well-educated, which means that all Y-Combinator needs to do is worry about how they think - not where they were taught. But that's after the fact. To someone deciding what college to go to, or where to send their children, I think the choice is still very important.

"someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all." True, of course. But where does that thirst for knowledge come from? With the right support, or the right teachers, perhaps that party animal would have changed his ways. As far as I'm concerned, _that_ is really the purpose of good schools.

In Y-Combinator terms, it's not that they make a founder more likely to succeed: it's that they make him more likely to try being a founder in the first place.

Paul Graham: News from the Front

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