I think we need to look at the populations of these colleges not as solid blocks, but as distributions.

In the simplest case, we could plot the population based on objective talent vs. financial access.

And it's likely that with Stanford, you'll find some people with both high objective talent and medium financial access, and others with medium objective talent but high financial access. Even the scholarship recipients are going to need the freedom to ship off to college and pay for incidental expenses, rather than remain at home to support their families.

On the flip side, at less prestigious colleges, it might be true that in the aggregate the objective talent level is a bit lower, but there are going to be some students with objectively high talent who simply lack the financial access to a place like Stanford, even if scholarships were on the table.

From a recruiting standpoint, is it easier for a company like Google to just ignore students from those less prestigious colleges? Yes. But will it create a bias toward people with more wealth and privilege, and undermine the goal of diversity initiatives? Also yes.

This assumes the "top colleges" actually are better, and not just bigger good ole boy's clubs.

Yes, they are a lot better than most. Like a lot a lot. They do have some ole boys and gals around, but they also have a lot of extremely hard working extremely talented young people.

This does not mean that there are not hardworking talented people elsewhere. They will make it too. But the density of talent at a place like MIT, compared to most other places on Earth in general, is unprecedented, and if that rubs you the wrong way, so be it.

I suspect these schools are riding on the coattails of great intellectuals from long ago, rather than anything recent.

Is there any quantitative evidence supporting your argument from the last 10 years?

Based on what? Have you ever been to MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, CMU? It really sounds like haven’t.

Go study CS for a semester at one of those places.

What evidence are you looking for? How would you even quantify “great”? Just go there and see for yourself and go somewhere else.

I have. They're not any better than many other schools out there... The graduates are not any better either when it comes to actually working either. I am not blown away by any ideas from anyone who has a degree from UCB, Stanford, MIT, etc.

I don't subscribe to mysticism around some unimaginable quality of graduates from the top-20 universities, but I bet if you picked one person from each of the top 20 schools and one person from each of the schools ranked 181-200 (from any earnestly attempted ranking source), and worked with them for a month, by looking only at their work product, you could tell which group was which far, far more often than chance.

I think the same is true for 1-20 vs 21-40, but it wouldn't be quite as clear-cut.

Top universities being top is not some kind of mass hysteria.

This is what not having any evidence looks like.

Don't feed the troll

I used to think like this, but as someone who went to an okay college and later on competed with people from top schools, this meme is untrue and counter-productive. The top colleges have many more opportunities, including a much wider variety of courses taught as well as access to the best researchers in a field.

Well they are better as long as they attract better students. This is the most important factor when trying compare educational institutions from the perspective of a potential employer. Actual curriculum is secondary (as well.. it should be to be fair).

> Well they are better as long as they attract better students.

Which is debatable, given the prevalence of legacy admissions.

Of course, universities with an established name would also attract the best and brightest. That doesn't mean they produce the best and brightest, though.

It’s not debatable. Those who attract the best students will be considered top, of course provided they have the resources to give the students.

What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school. You can say the same about affirmative action.

Nobody believes colleges produce the best from nothing. They produce good results by starting on third base (great students) and letting them run as fast as they can. Some of those will become the best. That’s how it works.

> Those who attract the best students will be considered top

Universities are not ranked like that, at all. Top universities don't necessarily have the best students, they have the best academics.

Harvard could take the dumbest students and still be ranked top 10.

> What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school.

You assume that there is a 60% of absolutely brilliant students, but there is no proof of that.

> Top universities don't necessarily have the best students, they have the best academics.

What on earth are you trying to say? We are talking about school rankings, not professional researcher rankings.

Have you met any brilliant people? Ask them for their opinion.

The proof is in their grades, test scores, competition scores, PhD theses and papers, and later work output.

> We are talking about school rankings, not professional researcher rankings

That's how university rankings work. This is widely known stuff.

If you think that Stanford is up there because they have brilliant students, you are objectively wrong. In fact, there is no standardized way of comparing students of two different institutions other than research work and citations, which makes them, again, part of the academic body.

There are literally standardized tests used in admissions. Looking at the averages of those standardized test scores of Stanford students vs other schools will tell a story about the student body that does not come as a surprise to most of us.

"Stanford is committed to a holistic review of all candidates. We consider the vast array of information provided in and with each student’s application, whether that information includes test scores or not. Students may continue to self-report test scores in their application if they would like. Applications without test scores will not be at a disadvantage." [0]

This paints a very different story.

Also, the fact that there is a percentage reserved for legacy admissions, invalidates your point completely.

[0] https://admission.stanford.edu

> invalidates your point completely

Do you think that Stanford's legacy admission policy makes their student body indistinguishable from that of Pasadena City College? Or that no standardized scoring system would reveal any population-wide differences in academic ability between a school which admits 1 of 25 applicants from another that admits 25 of 25 applicants? Hell, admissions rate alone is probably enough to tell a pretty good part of the story.

They are. I have been to top and non-top. The difference was massive.

We’re there great students at the non-top? Absolutely. At the top one though, every other student was just hard core. It was incredibly competitive and the talent was off the chart.

One of my (dual ivy) co-workers (dual state school) always liked to point out that we both ended up at the same place, doing the same job, to playfully troll me. Your point is spot on.

Yale, Columbia, Community College and a State school here. I've also taught college courses at an extension school of a public university.

The population differences are real. They're like normal distributions where the mean of one is perhaps a whole SD higher than the mean of another. That said, if you pick the top 5 students at the State School and the top 5 at the Ivy, the students themselves are roughly equivalent, but the ones from the Ivy had a lot more access to higher quality facilities, funding, opportunity, faculty, and peers.

So, should the top state school students be more desirable, since they achieved similar results with less resources?

Oh,I wasnt suggesting that the end results were similar, merely that the students themselves were: hardworking, very smart, determined,efficient. The results themselves are different precisely because of the greater access afforded to kids at the ivies. The result suggests thay top students anywhere are still top students.

Their point is more around the fact that schools vary in quality. You can change the schools in their example as you’d like

Google prefers people that also prefer monoculture rather than diversity. And as a result, this selection bias continues.

Google prefers people who can pass hard interviews. Google never asked me a diversity question during an interview.