Does it Matter Where Kids Go to College?

The new school year is starting and soon MLHS kids will be scrambling to submit college applications, and agonizing over whether they'll be accepted to their top choice school or their "fallback." There is probably some time before the stress begins in earnest, so it seems like a good time to mention Paul Graham's latest essay, in which he argues that it doesn't matter where you go to college. Graham is a tech entrepreneur who went to Cornell for undergrad and Harvard for his PhD. He founded ViaWeb, which eventually became Yahoo Stores. Now he runs Y Combinator, a venture that funds technology startups. His company has evaluated hundreds of applications from thousands of potential startup founders. His conclusion: there's no relationship between what school someone went to and how smart or talented they are. My favorite quote:

There's nothing like going to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any illusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. And yet Y Combinator showed us we were still overestimating people who'd been to elite colleges. We'd interview people from MIT or Harvard or Stanford and sometimes find ourselves thinking: they must be smarter than they seem. It took us a few iterations to learn to trust our senses.

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We're talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

There is other evidence, including the Dale and Krueger study that showed that attending a more selective school does not lead to higher income over time:

They find that school selectivity, measured by the average SAT score of the students at a school, doesn't pay off in a higher income over time. "Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges," the researchers write. They also find that the average SAT score of the schools students applied to but did not attend is a much stronger predictor of students' subsequent income than the average SAT score of the school students actually attended. They call this finding the "Spielberg Model" because the famed movie producer applied to USC and UCLA film schools only to be rejected, and attended Cal State Long Beach. Evidently, students' motivation, ambition, and desire to learn have a much stronger effect on their subsequent success than the average academic ability of their classmates.

As Graham points out, even non-prestigious schools will have some smart students and professors to hang around with and learn from. Practically all public research universities now have honors programs, whose students are at least as smart as -- and probably smarter than -- the average Harvard undergrad.

What do you think? Is it worth the extra 2x to 3x tuition, plus the time the kids spend, organizing their high school lives around the perceived preferences of the admissions officers?