<p>People’s insistence to link everything back to institutional prestige is incredibly tiresome.</p>
<p>The very fact that most Nobel prizes these days are going to teams of researchers and not to individuals, and that these researchers usually work at different universities, underscores the irrelevance of the universities themselves.</p>
<p>So a professor from Princeton and a professor from NYU won a Nobel prize together. What does that tell me? It tells me that these guys had to work with someone outside of their department to achieve a breakthrough, and that their achievement is theirs alone, and also that said breakthrough happened a long time ago, when one or both of them may have been working at a different university.</p>
<p>Congratulations to the econ majors at Princeton and NYU, who will now be able to brag about taking classes with a Nobel prize winner, but seriously, this doesn’t actually change anything for Princeton and NYU.</p>