Ask HN: Have you ever felt inferior for not being from a name-brand college?
I saw an interesting comment in the thread for the post for "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645000) that prompted me to flip the bit and ask this question.
95 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadI want to add that even if you personally don't feel inferior about it, you'll probably still feel something when you know someone else is judging you for it.
And of course, sometimes it doesn't even matter how you feel. You are at a disadvantage regardless.
As I said in the other thread, college degrees today are titles of nobility by definition, thanks to state support. Titles of nobility were supposed to have been abolished.
Examples include credential requirements for many different occupations, licensing laws, and job eligibility.
Of course, there are also the more "unofficial" effects of these policies. Credentialism is widespread in society thanks in no small part to the massive, state-funded school system.
Either you're speaking metaphorically or you're pushing some crank theory, I can't tell which.
"A title of nobility grants special legal privileges to an individual at the expense of the rest of the people."
If you have a different definition, that's fine, of course. Then we're just down to semantics, and I guess you could say I'm speaking metaphorically. But I hope you're not just excluding certain titles because they don't fit the preconceived idea of a title of nobility in most people's minds.
Inventing a deliberately weak definition and declaring victory isn't an especially effective or honest debating tactic.
I'm not the first person to use such a definition. Here is one from over a century ago, from an opinion in a court case from Alabama:
"To "confer a title of nobility" is to nominate to an order of persons to whom privileges are granted at the expense of the rest of the people. It is not necessarily hereditary, and the objection to it arises more from the privileges supposed to be attached than to the otherwise empty title or order. Horst v. Moses, 48 Ala. 129, 142."
Again, if you have a different definition, fine. But don't accuse me of being dishonest when it's quite clear mine is at least as valid.
Incidentally, "nominate to an order of persons" is probably the operative text there, and is something that you probably neglected to include in your earlier definition. I do not think that Alabama court of a century ago, or indeed the drafters of the Constitution, intended university degrees to count as a title of nobility. Especially since many of them founded universities themselves.
As for the rest of your post, it no longer seems relevant.
Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.
Or, in other words (since you are no doubt preparing to quibble that you weren't acting particularly smug), the onus is on you to clearly communicate your argument, and using phrases like "titles of nobility were supposed to be abolished" and then not answering my objections about the Constitutional text that did, in fact, abolish titles of nobility impeded getting your point across, rather than helping. You give the distinct impression that you're blaming me for misunderstanding what you so poorly communicated in the first place.
If your argument is simply that college degrees are anti-egalitarian, I will happily agree with you. But our society wasn't meant to be legally egalitarian in the first place. It had slavery. I'm also happy to point out that it's not possible to even have pure egalitarianism, which is one reason why meritocracy is so much better. (You will undoubtedly counter that reliance upon college degrees is not efficiently meritocratic, but see? Now we've got ourselves a truly interesting and worthwhile discussion.)
There is also the alternate hypothesis that whenever I debunk your argument, you start pretending you meant something entirely different from the outset. But I am choosing to be charitable and assuming you simply miscommunicated what you meant in the first place.
This seems to be a habit of yours, because even in this post, twice you claim that I'm "undoubtedly" about to respond in a certain way. Perhaps if you read what I write without jumping to conclusions about what must be in my head, this would be more productive.
"our society wasn't meant to be legally egalitarian in the first place. It had slavery."
You appear to continue with your US-centric perspective here. And even with that perspective, so what? The fact that it had slavery sounds like a good reason not to take what was "meant" as gospel.
As for legal egalitarianism being impossible, that's certainly not true. I'm not sure why you believe that.
In particular, the onus is on you to clearly define what "legal egalitarianism" means, why college degrees violate that principle, and why we should care. That's an honest discussion. Trying to cleverly redefine terms like "nobility" isn't.
Many? I can come up with law, medicine, professional engineer, architect, and CPA. What else do you have in mind?
Note that the vast majority of engineers aren't licensed....
Licensing laws cover plumbers, electricians, massage therapists,barbers, air conditioning contractors, auctioneers, boxing (judges, promoter, referees, boxers themselves, managers), cosmetologist(and their schools), tow truck drivers, moving companies, temp agencies, elevator contractors and inspectors.
Yes, let's. One of the claims was that there were credential requirements for many different occupations. (Licensing for other things is a separate claim.) I've listed a couple of examples and we're nowhere near many.
I'm perfectly willing to agree that state imposed licensing is widespread, but that's a separate claim. I note that licensing is largely independent of public supported schools.
For example, imagine that universities can no longer confer the noble title of medical doctor. How shall I determine who to select to remove my gallbladder?
Or, perhaps you prefer some sort of alternative medicine. Using whatever criteria you choose, you are allowed to have a procedure done regardless of whether or not your doctor has a title. After all, the majority is wrong sometimes.
Second (but related to the first difference), the main problem with a title of nobility is that it grants legal privileges, thereby erecting legal barriers for others. That doesn't happen in this scenario.
Now, as for your point about eliminating the legal barriers to practice-- ie anyone can practice medicine-- while removing licensing would eliminate direct legal action (ie no going to jail for practicing medicine without a license) I think it would instead lead to increased civil suits. Consider: right now if a licensed physician is prone to malpractice or has other deficiencies they are forbidden from practicing. This can happen without anyone being actually harmed. On the other hand, if a physician gets bad ratings from yelp-for-doctors then they just need to find uninformed consumers or at least people who chose to disregard those ratings. When members of the public are inevitably harmed by poor doctoring they will have no legal recourse but to sue the doctor. True, they could avoid going to that particular doctor again, but the damage is already done. I'm not sure if we actually want more lawsuits to be brought against professionals-- it may end up making the cost of their services even more expensive than they are now, wiping out any cost savings from them not having to go to school and become licensed.
I guess my point is that there is no free lunch: guilds and professional societies are ancient institutions and they enjoy legal status in recognition for the useful role that they have in serving society. It may be fun to speculate what would happen if they vanished but don't be surprised if the institutions that arise to replace them necessarily gain the properties of the original institutions.
I know you're speculating, but I don't think that's realistic. For that to happen, people would have to unanimously agree on a single rating mechanism.
As for doctors, their guild gives us a great example of what actually happens when guilds enjoy special legal status. Guilds and professional societies work to restrict entry into their fields, in order to prop up their own salaries. When they do this, they usually claim they are simply ensuring high quality.
I don't think this is an exclusively libertarian issue. Your original question could be generalized to include all titles of nobility, and that seems relevant because one of the purposes of such titles is to make titleholders feel superior, thereby making others feel inferior. In other words, you don't have to be a libertarian to oppose titles of nobility.
You're not here to fish for acceptance by pleasing people in random positions of prestige. If you feel inferior, the quest is to learn to ignore it and find your own worth yourself. Then nothing can make you feel like crap because you know better anyway. Nobody needs to feel like crap because he didn't go to institution X, Y, or Z. (And because of many other things as well.)
You also don't need each and every possible advantage to yourself as if you couldn't make it otherwise. You just need enough and if you know enough to be able to help people, you'll surely get them.
At the minimum, if you feel inferior because of something like this, try to find a way to turn it into a challenge to succeed at whatever you want to do in spite of it. There are many successful people out there with non-name brand college degrees.
i suppose it's harder when you are around people from name-brand colleges, no?
if nobody around you went to a name-brand college, then of course there's no point of reference
Actually, this is a question I've thought about a little too much, I'd wager, because, as a prospective undergraduate, I actually turned down an offer to read mathematics at Cambridge and decided to study at the University of Bristol instead. The latter is in itself a well-regarded institute, no doubt, but it cannot be said to have anything near the Oxbridge 'name-weight' (for want of a better term).
Do I regret my choice? In some ways yes, in some ways no. The decision was very much informed by my particularly working class background - I did not believe I would have 'fit in' to the predominantly upper-middle-class culture of either the university or the city that surrounds it. In hindsight, my opinion hasn't changed at all. Bristol suffers many of the same problems as a university, but as a city it is as colourful as they come.
I believe that forgoing the 'top tier' university worked such wonders for my social development (and, hence, my subsequent happiness) that I cannot bring myself to regret it wholesale. However, I can't help but feel there's an undeniable magic that happens when a highly selective and competitive institution brings a bunch of smart, young people together to explore their interests.
Being a part of that could, as the "Disadvantages of an Elite Education" article suggests, have ended up insulating me from the 'regular world', but there is the odd occasion where I cant help but wonder what could have been if I'd chosen to experience it. Maybe that's what it takes, you know? I try not to dwell on it for long, though - I've left that to my folks!
I've not planned to become a high-ranking politician or appear on BBC Radio 4 (yet), so a non-Oxbridge education hasn't hindered me much so far... Either way, though, I'm still (relatively) young and it will be a good few years before I can evaluate these decisions with any great degree of accuracy.
We'll see, I guess.
However, I do think that the emphasis on the prestige of one's university in this country (these days, at least) largely stems from a good decade or so of policies pushing perhaps less-than-ideal candidates into higher education. The replacement of vocational training with degree-level equivalents has in many ways depreciated the whole university process, leaving employers necessarily needing to look for the 'value' of a degree anywhere they can.
In the UK, getting into Oxbridge is nowhere near as difficult as getting into Harvard, Yale, Princeton. There are 24,000 undergraduate spots at Oxbridge for 60 million Brits, compared to 17,000 spots at HYP for 300 million Americans.
Also, the application criteria at Oxbridge is far simpler. It is based entirely on academic potential. British universities are uninterested in extracurricular activities and "well-roundedness". In the US, very smart students with perfect grades are rejected from Harvard because they weren't editor of the school newspaper, because they got a D in History in 9th grade, or because they couldn't write a good essay about "If you were going to sing a song in a talent show, what would you sing and why?" That doesn't happen in the UK. If you are smart, work hard in school and get good grades, you'll get into Oxbridge. The same can't be said for getting into HYP.
All of the British universities are public, so there doesn't exist the situation where students may choose to go to Berkeley instead of UPenn because they want to save money, or because they were offered a scholarship.
Which university you attend in the UK tends to be a better indicator of intelligence and academic success than where you study in the US.
From what your saying, that makes Oxbridge rather attractive for many people on this site, who were never interested in being "well-rounded" just for the sake of university admission.
Also, Bristol is a lovely city.
1. Did you go to public school? (i.e. privately educated) 2. Was either of your parents a doctor?
If you answered either of those with 'no', then the concensus was you could kiss that place goodbye.
I have to disagree, though, with the comment that anyone with brains can get into Oxbridge - from what I've heard, they seem much more obsessed with preliminary interviews than other UK institutions - potential applicants stay for several days of interviews IIRC. Many private school kids get special tuition to pass these tests, which is an advantage that state school kids don't have.
I don't know what doors were never open to me because of my college.
I do know that for every door I did enter, it was only a matter of time before the only thing that really mattered was demonstrated performance.
If more people would just forget about B.S. like "pedigree" and focus on delivering value to their customers, we'd all be better off.
People who went to elite colleges built a valuable network, many of their friends and class mates are in big business or startups. None of my class mates are anywhere near the valley or startups.
I am motivated to try harder at work because I feel like I'm fighting for all smaller school graduates in a company full of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Illinois, Harvard, CMU, and Michigan grads. I also ensure that everybody knows where I came from with a huge Razorback flag on my wall.
Some of the participants went to the Ivy League, but all of them went to highly respectable schools. There were a few points that I'd like to share.
Quite a few of the participants had a feeling like they screwed up big time in choices in their education. Not necessarily about the choice of school, but in, for example, choosing the English department instead of Literature and end up studying Theory rather than readings and after a few years they found out they missed out on Anna Karenina in favor of Foucault. This was to the extent that some of them claimed to go to masters school to make up for what they didn't do as an undergraduate, and regretted that too.
Another idea that they quickly agreed on is that the very nature of a regret is to notice what choices you should have made, and clearly it is too late to do anything about it. Yet, some of the participants were reluctant to even call them regrets. How can you call your life a regret? This is a group of people where there was no question that reading the right book at the right time would (and did) change their life, and it really wasn't a question of "for better or worse", but they would learn their lessons and are the better for it.
I suppose I'm talking about making decisions, reflecting on those decisions over time (sometimes it takes years, decades even), and then gaining a modicum of wisdom.
Feeling inferior would seem to me a common sentiment. Hasn't everyone had this feeling before? You feel like you missed out on something you may have not known existed until you had the years to figure out it was even there. Yet, I don't think you should deny yourself the line of thought that this would take you down, and it may take a long time, but I think you need to turn these feelings around to find a genuine calling/relaxedness of what you are here to do.
No affiliation with the publishers, but I highly recommend the $9 "What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions" (aka regrets) pamphlet: http://www.nplusonemag.com/pamphlet-two. It is well worth the money, especially if you are in the situation where you think you might be ready to hear their advice.
At some point in time, I'm still thinking about getting a masters ... but Penn State would be a lot easier to get a company to pay for.
You have to remember that once you go to some top-rated school, you're suddenly in an environment where everyone goes to that school, and it stops being special.
Set goals that will get you to a place where you can do the kind of work that you really want to be doing. If you can achieve that, you're better off than most Ivy grads. A top school brings a few advantages, sure, but nothing that a little success can't cure, and certainly not happiness.
What I'm trying to get at is that while being from MIT or Stanford makes a good first impression, personal achievements say a lot more about you than the hand you were dealt by the extremely noisy college admissions process (consider this: I am a CS grad student at Stanford, and I was rejected from UMD and UMass Amherst for grad school).
UW is a top name brand grad school for CS.
personal achievements say a lot more about you than the hand you were dealt by the extremely noisy college admissions process
Grad school decisions at all the universities you mentioned are made by professors themselves, and they typically look for candidates who are interested in getting a PhD. Stanford's three year Master's program is career oriented.
Oxbridge > Red brick university (old) > ex-Polytechnic
This could be changed of course, but the things that the Oxbridge and red bricks do so well is the networking. The societies, the sticking together, the essence of "you must be thoroughly decent and clever because I experienced that system and you did too", except the entry requirement was not smarts but whether you could afford to fund yourself through and could get through the entry requirements.
I say it could be changed because I see similar power of networks in smaller social nets. For example I see cyclists online have a great bond with other cyclists and a very strong bias towards other cyclists... to the degree of giving work to cyclists based on no other criteria than those people appearing to be qualified (but many thousands of others are) and exist in the pre-requisite community (belong to a cycling community).
So the class system can be thought of as exclusive social networks. The education itself is not the measure here, it's whether you are in the network or not.
Why this opens it to change is that the network they are in has to be exclusive, and so would a replacement, but it changes by you working with those you went to college with to build your own networks and positively discriminate towards each other. To the degree that if you have 2 candidates in front of you and 1 is MIT and one is <insert your college> you opt for your college or fellow institute over MIT.
Basically... you do have means to weaken the influence class system by discriminating positively towards your social network. Just standing by and bitching that you (not the poster, but general "you") don't belong to the advantaged network isn't going to help you, and you can't become a member of that network... you can just build a new network and make it strong.
I've perhaps over-simplified a hell of a lot of this post... it's early and I'm hungover.
That remembers me Sir Popper wrote a book "All of Life is Problem Solving." Got to read it some time...
The only plus side to name-brand colleges is well known professors, but most of learning is self-motivation anyway.
That was my impression of ECE at Purdue University (a top 10 graduate school at the time, unsure of undergrad ranking). Most undergrads were incapable of functioning as engineers. I taught two different senior-level courses while I was there. The top students were excellent, as you would expect. The rest hobbled along. I had seniors who couldn't approximate the gain of an op-amp or make a common-emitter amplifier. Not one of the senior design students bothered to simulate their circuits before building them (and frying them). They had no idea how to test a circuit once they built it.
I actually credit the undergrads' ineptitude to the curriculum. Purdue has lots of classroom instruction but very few labs. I had approximately double the number of labs as an undergrad at the University of Arkansas. Even the worst students were capable of building and testing a circuit, whereas the Purdue students would expect the TA to do their testing for them.
I love it! When I tell my friend of my major, they roll their eyes in disbelief. But then I tell them of all my classes with the basketball players and they are quickly envying me:) That aside, I am studying rhetorical studies and truly enjoy it!
http://zaid.posterous.com/tyler-hansborough-is-talllllllllll...
Sure, graduating from Harvard offers some short-term advantages, but if you're motivated you can take the lead.
Consider how much time in college is wasted studying minutia for a competitive exam that has no impact on learning.
Consider how much of college is often spent stressing about stupid deadlines that really don't matter or fawning over prestigious faculty who did something noteworthy 30 years ago and have coasted since.
My advice: Do something that really matters, and take the initiative to teach yourself as you go. You are (and should be) your own harshest critic. Make it your responsibility to find others to join you in your quest (if necessary). A college campus might be a good place for you to recruit.
But certainly don't hang your head!
note: most students at top phd programs didn't go to major name brand undergrad programs... they went to small (not well known) schools and accomplished meaningful research that would have been harder to accomplish in a cutthroat name brand atmosphere.
i think it depends on the department. some smaller departments at top schools are fairly elitist in their admissions, mostly since they're based so heavily on recommendation letters. if you didn't go to a top undergrad institution, chances are they don't know who your letter writers are and might not give as much weight to your letters or application. just speculation, tho :)
All (yes, all) the top schools are need-blind, meaning they don't look at your financial situation when deciding whether to accept you. A few of them (Stanford, Harvard I think) are offering completely free tuition if your parents make less than $100k. For other situations, you typically would get around 75% of your tuition free even if your parents make over $100k a year.
The difference in first year average salary for an MIT grad vs. a state school grad is enough to make up that difference.
The fact that you have to state that shows there is an issue with information.
I scored really high my SAT/ACT (and again on my GRE I scored perfect in 2 of the 3 categories - in English I was weaker). But I didn't grow up with friends/family who went to top schools, and growing up in eastern kentucky, my public school didn't let me know that I should be applying to "good" schools.
I think that many computer geeks grow up having a hard time fitting in at school, so they don't think that they have what it takes to go to the elite schools - especially if that geeks grows up poor in a rural setting.
The financial equation is different for every person, but the value add of a name-brand school over a state school is typically a hard sell--for a motivated student a decent education is available everywhere.
That being said, I got an excellent scholarship for the college I went to. But I still regret not going to a "name-brand" school independent of the educational quality of the college. The kind of people you're around and the contacts you make are really different. That can be useful on an ongoing basis, not just right after you graduate.