Undergrad school matters for Econ grad school

1NJParent
Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:13:23 +0000

MWolf:

This brings us to funding. Academics need funding for their research, and universities which can provide the funding will attract top faculty.

I wouldn’t discount the importance of funding. It’s certainly a necessary ingredient. But the most critical ingredients are the talented people. Talents tend to want to congregate around other similarly talented people in their fields (or in adjacent fields), so they can exchange ideas and be informed more quickly and efficiently. What makes a university, or a department, or any entity or place for that matter, a success is a critical mass of talented people. Some rich Arab Gulf states were able to, periodically, attract some talents to their universities, but they never managed to achieve a critical mass. On the other hand, CMU, not very well endowed (by the standards of some elite privates), managed to create a critical mass of talents in computer science in its early days to become a powerhouse in that field.