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<p>I never said that HYPS are always going to be the best bet. My basic point is that brands have value. Are they the only factor? Of course not. But they are a factor. It’s up to the individual to determine how much of a factor they are. But they are a factor. </p>
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<p>Yes, yes, but you know I was focusing on undergrad. </p>
<p>However, I would point out that ‘changing majors’ even in graduate school is not entirely unheard of. For example, MIT is actually relatively lenient when it comes to graduate students changing fields, which has led to the underground notion that the easiest way to get into a particular MIT graduate program is to already be a graduate student in another program. The graduate intra-transfer process is easier than trying to get admitted from the outside. </p>
<p>Case in point. Take Pepper White, who write “The Idea Factory”, an expose on life at MIT. He came in as a MIT graduate student in TPP (Technology and Public Policy). He never graduated with a TPP degree. Instead he ended up graduating with a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, and even got admitted into the PhD ME program, but he failed his quals. </p>
<p>I also know that at Harvard, master’s and doctoral students can actually switch fields if they can demonstrate sufficient justification. For example, I know students who were admitted to the PhD program in Information Technology Management (a program run jointly by Harvard FAS and Harvard Business School) and who later switched into the DBA program in Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, and also vice versa. Granted, this is not a major shift (the ITM and TOM programs are allied programs), but still, it shows that there is soom room to move around. </p>
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<p>That’s highly idealistic of you. But come on. You know and I know that most college students are there because of careerism. Let’s face it. If college degrees did not improve career prospects, we both know that most college students would drop out immediately. And far fewer high school seniors would be interested in college. </p>
<p>Like it or not, that’s the reality of the situation. Most people go to college because they want to get a decent job. </p>
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<p>Look, the truth is, anybody can get a perfectly decent education just by hanging out at the library and reading lots and lots of books. I myself have often found that it is more pedagogically productive for me to skip class lecture and instead just stay at home and read the book. There really aren’t that many things that you can’t learn just by reading about it and doing your own labs and experiments and self-practice. </p>
<p>But that’s often times not the true value of the college experience. To use econ-speak, the value of a brand-name college is that it sends an economic signal to the market that ameliorates the problems of asymmetric information. By saying that you graduated from Harvard (or SAIS or wherever), you are trying to make a credible signal to employers that you will be an exceptional employee by virtue of the fact that you were able to get into and graduate from Harvard or SAIS or wherever. </p>
<p>To give you an analogy, it’s the same rationale for why people want to work for big famous companies for a few years in order to build their resumes. I know lots of people who choose to work at famous companies, but only for a couple of years, before they intend to quit to work elsewhere. They do that because they know that having the name Microsoft or Goldman Sachs or General Electric on their resume looks good. Having that big famous company name on their resume is just another market signal that you were good enough to get hired at that company. Goldman Sachs is not the highest paying investment bank out there. Yet they are able to attract premier talent because of their prestige - people know that the name Goldman Sachs can open doors. Similarly, Microsoft and General Electric (especially GE) are not exceptionally high-paying employers. Yet they are able to attract top-quality talent, again, because of the prestige of working there. It’s all the same idea. People know that if you want to have a career in manufacturing, having GE on your resume is better than having the name of some mediocre manufacturing company. </p>
<p>The point is, if you want to decry the careerism that is inherent in this process, feel free to do so. Just understand that you are condemning the vast majority of people out there. </p>
<p>As a case in point, to extend your analogy, Bill Gates famously dropped out of Harvard. Yet look at all the top management at Microsoft. All of them (with the exception of Gates himself) are college graduates, mostly from the best schools in the world. Furthermore, Microsoft recruits graduates from the best schools in the world, but doesn’t go around recruiting dropouts. Bill Gates, the most famous dropout in the world, doesn’t say “Well, since I dropped out and was successful, that means I should fill my entire company with dropouts”. Why is Microsoft actively recruiting people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. but not actively recruiting college dropouts? </p>
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<p>Like I said, what ultimately matters is the final product. The Yankees can spend more money than there is tea in China on payroll, but at the end of the day, they either won the World Series, or they didn’t. </p>
<p>You also have to factor in the power of ‘network effects’. The truth is, much of your education is not obtained from the facilities or profs. Much of it is obtained from your fellow students, in an informal setting. Maybe 20% of your waking time is actually spent in class, in lab, and in a formal educational setting. Most of your time is actually spent hanging out with other students. That is where I think a lot of the REAL learning takes place, through those midnight rap sessions and discourses over dinner, all the social networking, all that stuff. </p>
<p>That’s where network effects come in. The better the other students that are there, the most that you will learn. Conversely, you can have great facilities, but if the other students are weak, then you will learn less. But of course that means that a school that has good facilities has to convince good students to come. And all the good students will be afraid (and rightfully so) that no other good students will come, which will hurt their networking. </p>
<p>But look, I agree with you that obviously having better facilities and better profs and all that stuff helps. Stanford, which started life as quite weak, became elite in part because they got the money to spend lavishly on resources. Harvard vastly developed its research infrastructure such that it is almost unrecognizable compared to what it was 100 years ago. MIT, Princeton, Yale, Caltech, Berkeley - each of these schools built themselves into giant research centers in their own right. </p>
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<p>Very very funny you would mention that, because what you have said has actually been proposed as a way to break the information logjam. Basically, everybody knows himself the best. There is no asymmetric information when you’re talking about yourself. Therefore if you don’t feel you are being well served by the general market because of imperfect information, then one way to solve that is go to into business for yourself. </p>
<p>However, the fact is, most people don’t do that, either because they are risk averse or because they know how good they are and so they know that they aren’t cut out for running their own show. Hence, they have to play the information game of branding and signalling.</p>