<p>No way, Dstark!!! My college outranks your college anytime!!! :p</p>
<p>Kluge, uhhhhh, didn’t we go to the same college? :)</p>
<p>Never mind, dstark. </p>
<p>Kluge, and many others, including myself, happen to agree with Graham, regardless of the schools we attended.</p>
<p>I’ve read quite a few of Paul Graham’s essays, but at some point his bias starts to really come through. “The Age of the Essay” (<a href=“http://paulgraham.com/essay.html[/url]”>Paul Graham) is just absurd – according to him, there’s no point in writing an essay that presents and defends a point, because in the “real world” you don’t have to do these things.</p>
<p>Yeah, right…</p>
<p>BusinessGuy – thanks for that. That is an interesting article. That is a funny statement, to make isn’t it, about essays? Isn’t Graham trying to make a point in <em>his</em> essays? Perhaps not . . .</p>
<p>Maybe… but it was ranked higher when I went there than when you did!!! So there!!! 
:p</p>
<p>well, BusinessGuy, maybe you object to Graham’s essay because you align yourself with the tradition of rhetoric that he traces. He explains quite well, I think, how that tradition evolved into lit crit. And he didn’t say there was no point to rhetoric – just that it wasn’t an “essay.” An “essay” is an exploration, not an argument. (As in, “how do I know what I think until I see what I say.”)
I spent part of my summer in conference with a range of successful writers, and I’d definitely score Graham’s essay with the best of what they offered at the writer’s conference. But we’re not lawyers.</p>
<p>Kluge, yeah, you’re so much older. What you say is probably true. :)</p>
<p>Well, celloguy, I don’t like the way schools teach writing any more than Mr. Graham does, but in certain cases when you’re simply trying to state your position and “win the argument” I think the persuasive essay has value. Look at what we’re doing right now: I knew before I started typing that I think the way lawyers argue a point is valid in contexts outside of the courtroom, but I also think there is value to the exploration approach. My opinion isn’t changing as I’m not being exposed to any more information and I already thought about his position before typing this. I’m simply trying to disagree with you, in which case you may decide that I am, in fact, correct, or you may present further information supporting your stance. Either way, one of us is going to learn more and potentially change our position. Is this not a valuable skill to learn?</p>
<p>Concerning his definition of essay. I looked it up on dictionary.com:</p>
<ol>
<li>a short literary composition on a particular theme or subject, usually in prose and generally analytic, speculative, or interpretative.<br></li>
<li>anything resembling such a composition: a picture essay.<br></li>
<li>an effort to perform or accomplish something; attempt.<br></li>
<li>Philately. a design for a proposed stamp differing in any way from the design of the stamp as issued.<br></li>
<li>Obsolete. a tentative effort; trial; assay.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>If he’s merely intent on proving that the definition of an essay has changed over the years, then I would agree with him, but he didn’t have to go to such length to make a simple statement.</p>
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<p>Okay, so Paul Graham is a computer guy. It’s still not to clear to me why we should care what he thinks about college selection.</p>
<p>Ouch. Dstark. <shakes head=“”> That was cruel. 
(I am this close to notifying the mods that you’re being mean to me.)</shakes></p>
<p>lol…</p>
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<p>He is now a small-scale venture capitalist who looks at the world from a different perspective than most of us. </p>
<p>He is a guy who thinks through a lot of dissimilar topics and ties them together in his writing, methodically explaining his point of view using anecdotal but concrete examples from his experiences in a style that doesn’t require a dictionary to decipher. </p>
<p>Should we “care” what he has to say? No more and no less than anybody else who has a thoughtful opinion to share (including the “experts”). I suspect, based having read a few of his essays, that he doesn’t care a nit whether the reader agree with him or not, so long as he can provoke the reader to think more deeply about the topic at hand.</p>
<p>So we can read what he has to say, consider his arguments, and debate his conclusions, as many have done in this thread. </p>
<p>On the other hand, it might be easier to skip the reading and simply question his credentials, make fun of his name, dismiss him as a contrarian LISP programmer, or denigrate his mundane prose as indictment of the elite schools at which he clearly did not belong.</p>
<p>^^Sounds to me that this a long way of saying that Paul Graham is another opinionated blogger. Which is fine. One of the joys of our open society is that no one has to have any particular credentials on anything in order to express an opinion. But I do think that when considering the opinion of others, it’s important to consider it in context. The various opinions about education coming from say the Secretary of Education, the President of the University of California, and a random parent on CC are all valid opinions, but they come from entirely different contexts. </p>
<p>Now in Paul Graham’s case he is appears to be a computer guy and venture capitalist who writes a blog. Fine. That puts his opinions in more or less the same context as any other modern, college-educated businessman. His opinion carries about the same “weight,” if you will, as any of the parents here on CC. As long as we understand that, threads about his opinions can be viewed as about as valuable as any other around here. But what we shouldn’t do is somehow assume that he is some sort of Enlightened Master that has been granted special knowledge, or that if Paul Graham said so then it must be true.</p>
<p>Coureur, the fact that PG’s firm interviews and investigates thousand of recent college grads per year in order to invest venture capital in a handfull certainly makes his observations far more than mere opinions and infinitely more valid that any anecdotal examples that most CC posters are able to provide.</p>
<p>Quality of education and quality of ideas is overwhelmingly a function of the individual and not the college he or she attended as an undergraduate. If this were not so, how could thousands of undergrads from little known private colleges and moderately selective public universities go on to more selective graduate programs and succeed as well as their peers from more highly regarded institutions. In fact, because research universities have so much invested in their graduate students, why would the highly selective even consider their admittance if they were handicapped with an inferior undergrad education?</p>
<p>^^If you wish to imbue Paul Graham with Special Knowledge and insights far beyond the rest of us, that’s your choice. My firm also interviews thousands of recent college graduates every year and chooses to invest in a few select opportunities coming out of academia, but I don’t see where that makes me or anyone else at this company a revered expert in college selection.</p>
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<p>Good point. And various versions of this point have been made over and over again on this very forum for years. Like I said, the parents here are regularly coming up with opinions about the same the Graham’s.</p>
<p>The interesting thing is that Paul Graham, a smart, successful person who went to Cornell & Harvard, is saying what smart, successful people who went to State U have been saying. In his case we know it’s not sour grapes or wishful thinking. :)</p>