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I recall a Supreme Court justice saying that the best law clerks they ever got were NOT from the Ivy schools – but regardless, because the Ivy schools tended to weed out incompetent clerks (helping ease the screening process and provide a veritable "double check" on someone's competence) they would only pick Ivy credentialed clerks in the future. Stakes were to high not to.

I wonder if the same can generally be said for employers and gov (it's just easier to screen from a pool that has be whittled down to a more manageable size already).

Unfair? Probably. Rational? I think so.

3 comments

This is why it's a good idea for people from non-top tier colleges to run away from prestige. You'll never be able to compete on merit at a place like McKinsey, a top law firm or an IB. You'll be undervalued due to lack of pedigree. Better pick something more meritocratic and less focused on signalling value of your CV. I know this is an ideal that doesn't truly exist anywhere, but there's certainly degrees to which it's true and that varies between industries.

> This is why it's a good idea for people from non-top tier colleges to run away from prestige. You'll never be able to compete on merit at a place like McKinsey, a top law firm or an IB

It certainly won’t be as easy as folks from Ivies might have it, but folks from state schools can make it big time.

Tim Cook is an Auburn grad, for example.

A friend of mine is a Michigan State grad. He worked his way up the chain in NYC by providing tremendous value. He retired in his 40s with a mid-eight figure net worth after being a partner in a hedge fund that ran its course (raised money, made money, closed down).

If someone is ambitious and talented, their degree won’t stop them.

No, you earn your way in. Nobody asks where the CTO of an acquired company went to school (or didn't). Elite school degrees are just a shortcut for signal various attributes for young people. It means less and less the further you get from college. And you can "credential" yourself via other accomplishments. Witness Perelman and arxiv, or Bill Gates, noted Harvard dropout.

Right, but a lack of pedigree is more of a handicap at McKinsey than it is at Facebook, and it's more of a handicap at Facebook than your own startup. It's possible to earn your way in to McKinsey after going to a tier-3 college, but it's just way harder all else equal (and why would anyone bother without the boost of pedigree at a place that highly values it, we will be at a disadvantage from day one).

Investors certainly care about pedigree and having McKinsey on your resume (or Google or Facebook if you will), not to mention the experience and connections, are going to help when you're trying to raise money for your startup. There's no escaping from signaling simply because of the impossibility of evaluating every single person on merit (as you can see from discussions on hiring here), so it doesn't hurt to play the game when the opportunity arises.

And generally speaking, lack of pedigree is much less of an issue once you're in and once you have prestigious employers on your resume, where you went to college becomes a lot less important to prospective employers.

McKinsey is in the business of convincing governments and other entities into parting with massive sums of cash for relatively simple research and recommendations. They get by mostly on the appearance of prestige rather than any legitimate value add, thus their focus on hiring based on school prestige.

I can't speak for McKinsey at all. I will take your word for it. My limited experience has not been positive.

I think you two are basically agreeing. GP is saying that such credentials are [edit]not a strong proxy for merit (true) but a good proxy, along with a few other things, for network value and social standing, etc. So if you don't have that credential but want to compete with people who do, the worst thing to do is do it on their home field, as it were (e.g. Mckinsey). Instead, prove yourself somewhere else and if you do it well enough you'll be on an even footing (or better) later on.

No, that is not accurate. I disagree. I think ivy league degrees are a great proxy for intelligence and work ethic. Ivy league grads I've worked with are fantastic. If you have to hire a bunch of college graduates, it's a fine strategy. If you are hiring on the open market, though, you don't have to rely on it, you can rely on someone's professional accomplishments which is a truer proxy of the values you are hiring for.

Rereading, I overstated: "poor" should have been "not strong". The Ivy grads I've known worked with have ranged from perfectly ok, to really good. But that doesn't differentiate them from many other non-Ivy sources, in my experience. Which isn't to say all sources are equivalent - far from true.

As a hiring strategy it works ok, but you are leaving out far more talented people that you can possibly include. It's a small pool after all.

GP's point I thought was more that if you end up without such credentials at a place that values them highly, you'll have a hard time even if you are more talented than many of your peers. This seems true in my limited experience.

I do think you have a point somewhere that if your bar isn't too high and you know what you are getting, picking from the same small pool (doesn't have to be Ivy, maybe you mostly hire Stanford or whatever) is a safe strategy, in that it reduces your variance. You are giving up something for that safety, but that's life.

"As a hiring strategy it works ok"

From an employer's perspective, I think an elite college-only hiring strategy can work fine if the employer itself is prestigious or there's a clear unique value proposition there. For others, they're going to incur a negative selection penalty that may outweigh the signalling value that pedigree provides.

Let's play devil's advocate: you have limited and messy data about the qualifications of a hundred 20 year old candidates. You have one qualification that shows they worked quite hard for the majority of their life and a sustained and high level. You should value that data point almost as much as you value hiring the best candidate. There is not likely to be any other data point as valuable at that point in the applicants' lives.

It's a Bayesian problem all the way through and you can probably quantify the value of the signal provided. However, and most importantly, it's just a signal. I personally prefer hiring interns, completely irregardless of school, and developing and hiring them, any time. At that point, there isn't signal, it's just measured performance that is de-risked.

Now, people that use it as credentialing are morons. I mean that bluntly and literally. Randomly picking on CFOs: "I want a CFO with a Harvard degree" is stupid thing to say, on its face. The person saying something like that has literally inverted the real point, which should be, "I want an excellent CFO, and a Harvard degree is a signal of some properties correlated with that outcome". Once you invert that, it's just another data point in a meritocratic decision, and a relatively minor one.

Sorry to post/write so much on this. Startups are the ultimate meritocracy in some ways, and having something posted here that's populist and almost anti-intellectual bothers me. Ycombinator has no problem pulling from Stanford. And Stanford, MIT, and Duke (and many others) are as elitist as any Ivy on any day that ends in y. That's leaving out the really class conscious "small liberal arts" colleges out there, and ignores the differences between ivy league schools in this regard, which is large.

I think it's also a good proxy for quality as well. The average IQ of people in Ivies is over 130, compared to about 110 in regular colleges. I just think that a 140 IQ graduate from a regular college should self-select out of areas that specifically value prestige (such as an IB), since they're likely to be undervalued.

I suspect we mostly agree (although I don't have much faith in IQ as a useful predictor except at the margins) but there is a semantic issue; what do you mean by "quality"?

I find "went to an Ivy" a really good predictor for "above average performer", but I find it a weak predictor for "top rate performer", at least without a bunch of extra information. I also think the number top performing people who did not go to an elite college handily outweighs the number who did - but this is the nature of elite unless the selection criteria are very rigorous and targeted at something measurable.

Your comment about people in institutions that highly value this is on target, I think.

From this, I think one thing we can deduce is that Ivy League schools select for the same criteria as SCOTUS clerks. We can probably say this is true in other fields, as well.

After all, we see how successful some Ivy dropouts are: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Matt Damon, Cole Porter, Buckminster Fuller, etc., are just examples from Harvard. It's not the Harvard education that makes one successful, but being the type of person that gets into Harvard in the first place (a person with, i.e., that same combination among old money, connections, a parent who went to Harvard, dumb luck, etc. that they look for in SCOTUS clerks).

I'm not sure we have a list of people who were accepted into an Ivy and decided not to go, but I'm sure those people would be just as likely to be successful.

I would argue the opposite. That it's harder to weed out incompetent people from Ivy schools because so many of the people there are there based on their wealth and not their merit.

This really isn't true. There are very few actually incompetent people going through Ivy's.

You have some really talented people (especially on full rides), and you have a bunch of average to slightly above average talent with a) a 1st class education from birth and b) good networks.

Both of those things have real world value, you can't dismiss out of hand. Yes, it's privilege - that's how it works.

Depends on what role you're hiring for, because a good network does not help you write code (for instance).

That doesn't make someone incompetent; it may make them a bad fit for a particular job.

No, it makes them incompetent. They lack the competence required to do the job. Semantics aside, my point is that being from an ivy league is not a strong signal for being a good developer (and many other things).

Your characterization is not realistic. Sure if you hire an ivy league grad with a degree in french literature they may not be much of a programmer. If you hire one with a CS degree they will probably be decent - at least at the higher end of US colleges.

The idea that the ivy league is swimming with under-performing people who are only there because of wealth and connections just isn't true.

What is closer to truth - there are lots of people there who are a bit above average capability, very good preparation, and also have family money and/or connections.

In a truly broad, merit only based admissions process most of these people wouldn't make the cut. But it's not because they are weak students, rather because the number of slots in ivy is a small number compared to the total number of strong potential students in the country if you looked really hard.

> If you hire one with a CS degree they will probably be decent.

I'm saying from experience, this is not the case. I've found ivy league CS students to consistently under perform. School in general is not a strong signal, but for whatever reason the ivys consistently produce people who struggle to ship.

My original point is that OSS contribution is a strong signal and what people should look at if they want strong developers. I'm sure other industries have other work oriented methods for determining aptitude.

The ones who are there because of wealth and connections aren't going to be applying for jobs on the open market, they're going to get jobs directly thru connections.

I think you're likely running into what hntrader mentioned here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26242516

> This we agree on. But we have to factor in adverse selection. If you're a prestigious employer, adverse selection is going to be small to non existent. The Harvard grads joining Dropbox are going to be all excellent. If you're a tier-2 employer with no particular unique value proposition, a Harvard grad that is willing to join you isn't the same thing as a randomly selected Harvard grad (unless there's a compelling reason why they would want to join), let alone the same thing as a Harvard grad entering Dropbox. There are selection effects working against you as an employer.

Edit:

I'll add that if you're hiring in tech, you're fairly unlikely to run into ivy league grads who got in primarily on the basis of their wealth. Computer Science attracts upwardly mobile types who got into these schools because they were nerdy overachievers and tends not to attract people born into wealth (they typically have better options and coding isn't really that prestigious at this level).

> Computer Science attracts upwardly mobile types who got into these schools because they were nerdy overachievers and tends not to attract people born into wealth (they typically have better options and coding isn't really that prestigious at this level).

This has not been my experience at all. There are plenty of wealthy ivy CS students. Most non-wealthy CS people go to a more "normal" university known for CS like UW or CMU.