With all the predictions buzzing about how higher education will be radically remade by the Internet Real Soon Now, please allow me to tell a little story.
In 1975, I visited Stanford's campus. At that point in history, the hierarchy of prestige in American higher education went:
1. Harvard
2. Yale
3. Uncertain, but probably either Princeton, Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech.
My impression of Stanford 37 years ago was highly favorable: Why would anybody go anywhere else if he could get in here? The climate, the campus, and the career opportunities in the surrounding Silicon Valley ...
In the 3/8ths of a century since then, Stanford has triumphed in just about every conceivable way, as Silicon Valley has grown vastly.
And yet, it's by no means certain that Stanford has managed to move up at all in the prestige rankings, weighted down by its Mark of Cain: having only been founded in the 19th Century, not the 17th or 18th Century. That's how much stasis there is in this industry.
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74 comments:
It's not inertia. Harvard and Yale have grown more important due to the connections between those institutions and the government - which now controls more and more of the nominally private economy.
That Stanford is still in the running for third shows a huge amount of gain. It's just that HPY have gained more.
At this point it's:
1- Harvard
2- Harvard
3- Harvard
4- Yale
5- Yale
6- Stanford, Princeton, MIT
Nationally Harvard and Yale are slightly ahead of Stanford in the prestige rankings, but in California and elsewhere on the Pacific coast Stanford is first or at least equal among the three. Even on a national level, Stanford is arguably ahead of Harvard and Yale in STEM fields, though behind Cal Tech and MIT.
True, college prestige rankings are about as ossified as anything you'll find outside of the Vatican.
But that's not the point. Rather, what you're seeing with all this buzz is the realization that the economic cost of a college credential has turned negative for a great many students at a great many institutions. People are floundering for a remedy, and hey the Internet is the big stick that's turned everything else upside down so why not college too? (Paid prognosticators love linear extrapolation, it's cognitively easy for both the buyer and seller.)
The prestige of Harvard, Yale, and the N-way tie for third place is not going to change. But at the margin, paying $30-60k a year for at a local selective college no one outside the state in which it resides has ever heard of, has its days numbered.
For most subjects, HYP still attracts much better faculty than Stanford. The prestige reflects this.
Oxbridge has become much less-well funded than US schools, they are unable to attract top-rank faculty in many subjects, and I think their prestige has accordingly begun to decline relative to HYP.
Stanford has a poor pipeline to Wall Street, given its overall prestige. They feed a fair amount of programmers/technical people, but for more front office/trading/banking jobs, i.e. the BSD career path, you don't see many Stanford alums. Besides for the occasional quant trader, and even then they don't do much better than the ivys.
For the very intelligent and ambitious elite Wall Street is still the better place to go to maximize expected future income. (Though Silicon Valley is quickly catching up). Besides you're much more welcome in a Silicon Valley startup as a Harvard or Wharton grad than you are as a Stanford grad on Wall Street.
When Harvard, Yale, etc. were founded, the world's best universities were German. Heidelberg was where it was at. So there is occasional movement in this sphere.
It was much the same when I applied for college in 1999-2000, and is probably much the same today. I found also that for medical schools (which I later applied to) the hierarchy also changes very little over time.
Stanford lacks the historic pedigree (being founded in the 1800's) of the older Ivy League schools. It also gives scholarships to jocks, which is seen as low brow. It's also too heavily oriented towards the tech industry. It's not as heavy a hitter for other corporate jobs, especially banking. Also, I hate to say it, but it's too heavily Asian (and I'm South Asian myself).
That said, I tell everybody to send their kid to state-U these days. Private school just isn't worth it. I went to an Ivy League school and it changed nothing, with regards to my medical career. I think the Ivy Leagues and similar schools are only worthwhile if you're gunning for a competitive corporate job in a particular industry (e.g. Wall Street), or you're legitimately focused on some real specific aspect of the curriculum or extracurricular (like being involved in undergrad research, get your name on a scientific paper for which top schools are still better than average ones).
There was a lot of stasis in the European royal houses, too, until most were swept away...
This is wrong on a few levels.
Among technologists, Stanford is by far the clear #1. MIT and Berkeley are #2 and #3 respectively. And technology is all that matters nowadays.
Some signs of the times...
1) Think about the Social Network. Recall how Saverin refers to how 'they have to see this at Stanford', and how Facebook only got big after West Coast venture capitalists saw it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eu9yZ6pWjg
2) Kids at Yale are dreaming of the Valley, kids in the Valley are not dreaming of the East Coast:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/technology/11computing.html?pagewanted=all
3) Or think about the recent Ken Auletta profile:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta
4) Or just list every major company that has blown up and hit international headlines. Facebook is the exception that proves the rule: it wasn't a Harvard thing, it was a Valley thing, it only got big after Zuck came to the Valley. Like Google, Youtube, Paypal, and all the rest.
Just this year:
Instagram: billion dollar ack by Stanford alum.
Yammer: billion dollar ack by Stanford alum.
5) "Will the world's greatest startup machine ever stall":
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/20/stanford/
The new trinity is Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley, because of the ascendance of technology. Yale and Princeton don't even figure in this equation. Harvard is competitive because of its partnership with MIT through the Broad, but is on the back foot. IQ is flowing out of academia and into the Valley.
During the last 10-20 years this has meant Stanford's gain at the East Coast's loss. Now, however, Stanford people are cannibalizing Stanford itself with Udacity and Coursera.
As for brand: Steve, how long ago was Google founded? Facebook? Youtube? Twitter? It is possible to build an incredibly enormous, prestigious multinational company in less than a decade now, with financial resources that vastly outstrip even the $32B endowment of Harvard.
And this works for certification as well. As an employer, Google or Facebook on a CV carry the weight of a top Ivy. They erase all that came before. Even if you've got a state school or community college or no degree, if you managed to make it to Google/FB, you are a capable engineer and will make $100k+ in the Valley easily.
Steve, you're right about a lot of things, but you are off base here.
Maybe I live in a bubble. I work in STEM fields and have been to school in various STEM fields. While I do work with governments, they're mostly local. I have nothing to do with parasite value-destroying industries like defense contractors, health insurers, and Wall Street.
Most of all, everything I'm involved in requires that actual useful and desired goods or services finally be delivered. Just standing in the way of productive people and charging a toll is frowned upon. That includes the government agencies: though they do have bureaucratic behaviors, they are close enough to constituents that they must ultimately deliver.
I'm not in California.
And most here thinks Stanford is the most prestigious school. Harvard is close and the first choice of many. But more interesting is that, outside lawyers, nobody thinks Yale is in the top three. Princeton, MIT, and CalTech are reliably ahead of Yale. Chicago and Penn(?) for economists, Harvey Mudd (and Olin emerging?) for engineers, and various others (Cal?) also come in well ahead.
I blame the neglect of the science departments at Yale. What Harvard understands is that the science and engineering are like fine arts for the prestige school. Scientists don't make the kind of money Wall Street does or get the power Washingtonians do but if you don't have a respectable theatre department and physics department, the larger society eventually notices that you're a useless leach mostly training sharks to fleece the productive people in society. If you neglect French lit and computer science because graduates are likely to be poor compared to the sophisticated thieves that make your endowment, people will begin to see through your scam.
Stanford has done well adding value creators to its classes by mixing with Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture. They're far from Wall Street and necessity is the mother of invention. We'll see if it can continue.
Steve,
I think it is safe to say that in our society, the top four are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton.
Anyone who is accepted to one of those four should go to one of the four over any alternative
Steve, can you point to evidence of how big the income premium is to people who attend one of these four schools
that is to say, if you took identical triplets and had one of them graduate from high school and start a business right out of high school, one of them go to the average state university and the third one go to one of the four prestige schools listed above, what is the difference in lifetime earnings between the three triplets
the answer to this question is crucial for public policy but i cant find it anywhere
I think Truth is closest to the truth. The ranking here mostly says that most people know that Harvard is the best, and that Yale is second best, and that they all lose interest fast once you get away from the big 2.
It isn't just age though. William and Mary in VA was established in 1693 and housed a number of important early Americans, but hardly anyone knows it exists. It is public however, and not in New England or the Ivy League...
Harvard and Yale not only produces science and business giants but POLITICAL giants. Any president come out of Stanford?
Herbert Hoover (Class of 1895) claimed to be Stanford's first ever student by having shown up early for the first class in 1891.
The real problem is money. Universities may continue to be useful but they are getting so damn expensive in an economy that is sinking for Middle America. And so, elites may be pushing new ways for masses of non-elite Americans to get higher education. But of course, elite colleges will exist for the rich for whom it's like a club.
Stanford and Son.
Much of higher education is PC medication. It should be called meducation.
It was a bunch of Grinnell College undergrads who founded SV. How is Grinnell doing in the rankings?
Here is another way to think about it: the industries that non-technologists populate are on the defensive and under attack by technology. And that technology is coming out of Stanford, and by Stanford alums/affiliates.
1) Software is Eating the World, quoth Marc Andreessen (Stanford trustee) and Peter Thiel (Stanford alum x 2).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111
903480904576512250915629460.html
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22660214207/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-10-notes-essay
Either you know this already and it is old hat, or you don't know this while your industry is being targeted for incredible productivity improvements and complete disruption.
2) It has already happened to the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/business/media/in-latest-sign-of-print-upheaval-new-orleans-paper-scaling-back.html
3) And the RIAA:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/keen-on-cary-sherman-the-riaa-needs-to-give-music-consumers-what-they-want-tctv/
Yes, the RIAA CEO told me, there is a close connection between the dramatic fall in the industry’s revenue and the rise of illegal file sharing – an economic collapse he describes as “enormous” and “devastating”.
4) The movie industry is next:
YC RFS 9: Kill Hollywood
ycombinator.com/rfs9.html
5) And then higher ed:
coursera.org
udacity.com
6) oh yeah, hotels and cabs too:
airbnb.com
uber.com
7) and technology giveth jobs just as it taketh them away:
taskrabbit.com
odesk.com
exec.com
dribbble.com
The biggest industries to be disrupted over the coming decade will be finance, law, and healthcare. And government. But even there the game is afoot.
I already know what the response to this will be. There are those in software, who think everything I've written above is completely obvious. And there are those outside it, who really don't understand what kind of freight train is about to hit the world.
Once you understand that this decade is about computer science vs. the establishment, it is clear that Stanford >> Harvard. Stanford itself may be devoured by technology -- we'll see -- but no one else in higher ed really has a chance.
PS: Antiquity means nothing. Lehman Brothers was pretty storied. So was Bear Stearns. So was the USSR. Empires fall when they overextend, and $1T of tuition debt means Harvard has overextended.
Why are you predicting the future of college education by writing about Stanford and the Ivies? Would you make predictions about the auto industry by writing about Rolls Royce and Ferrari?
The vast majority of students do not attend elite schools. I went to a state college and learned little in the lectures. There was very little interaction in most classes. Some people gained a lot from the social life or extracurricular activities but you don't have to go to college to network.
I see talk of value creation here in connection with Facebook, Google and Paypal. Umm...
Technical progress is mostly just progress in hardware. The difference between Facebook and its predecessor Myspace was confined to marketing, wasn't it? And if any sort of a genius was involved in the success of Myspace itself, it would have had to be a genius for marketing too. There isn't a lot of tech in these success stories.
> There isn't a lot of tech in these success stories.
If you think Google, Paypal, and Facebook haven't advanced computer science you don't know the slightest thing about what you are talking about.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919
http://money.howstuffworks.com/paypal2.htm
Read their engineering blogs or their github accounts. It's hard to make something look so easy.
I think it is safe to say that in our society, the top four are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton.
Anyone who is accepted to one of those four should go to one of the four over any alternative
Except maybe Cal Tech and MIT.
Except Steve, we are not talking about the top universities. Which as you've noted before HAVE changed radically, after WWI the German ones no longer dominated.
We are talking about all those institutions NOT named Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Penn, Chicago, Northwestern, Princeton, NYU, and Columbia. The ones MOST people attend: Cal States, U Texas, U Tenn, UGA, Ohio State, Notre Dame, University of California schools, Univ. of Washington, Syracuse, Fordham, Emory, Univ. of Illinois, Oregon, Oregon State. THOSE guys are profoundly threatened by certification offered by Stanford, MIT, maybe say Univ. of Paris, Milan, or Heidelberg (in English) costing a fraction of the amount at say Notre Dame much faster.
If you want to be an accountant, why wouldn't a tenth of the cost offered by Stanford, MIT, or Milan online in two years beat four years at South Bend? Faster-cheaper is what killed the music industry, is killing the movie industry, and is shaking up other industries.
"Software is Eating the World..."
Software is an irrelevancy. It's not even tech. Nothing is eating the world. If anything technological has recently contributing to changing it somewhat, it was stuff like faster and cheaper processors, denser and cheaper storage, faster and cheaper network connections, touch screens.
The record business, for example, was killed by faster Internet connections.
If there's anything interesting in the stories of Facebook, Google, eBay, Paypal, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., it's marketing, licensing, corporate politics.
Why do entertainment, retail, whatever companies call themselves tech companies? The word tech has positive connotations. Progress, altruism, the future. Why do economics, psychology, etc. call themselves sciences? Why did Karl Marx call himself a scientist? It's just hucksters' appropriation of terms that were made prestigious by the work of others.
BIG UP the 5:05 anon, awesome comment.
There are those in software, who think everything I've written above is completely obvious.
I thought everything you said was obvious, should I get into software? If so, how?
Mercer is right.
I am a professor at a low tier university and I have put off teaching on-line for some time, but I am currently teaching my first on-line class this summer.
I am a frequent visitor to this website and have been following the discussion intently. I think the focus has veered too far away from the masses that do most of the living and dying out here in fly over country.
First thing I keep thinking is what are we going to do with all these 18-22 year olds if we don't send them off to college. There are no jobs for them. No one wants that demographic laying around with time on their hands. At least at university they might pick up some skills and it keeps them in a semi controlled environment. In Loco Parentis to a large degree.
Along those lines I am also a parent. I went to a small liberal arts school for part of my undergraduate education. I have often said it wasn't worth the $. For an education it wasn't. We all know the information is out there if someone is motivated.
However, I met a great woman there who became my wife. Parents know that their children will have a good chance of meeting their future spouse at college. Because I have a daughter I have rethought the benefits of paying through the nose for the local selective small lib arts college.
To date the comments have been geared too much toward actually receiving an education (your local community college has far superior staff and is better for most students) or rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi.
Someguy
The Hoover anecdote is great. I had never heard that.
Berkeley is super prestigious for its grad programs (though not its professional schools, with the exception of Boalt, which is probably the #1 public law school in the country). However, for undergrad, HYPS all blow it away. They are way more selective for one. Nobody gets into Stanford but not Berkeley whereas lots of kids get into Berkeley but not Stanford. At one Big Game in the mid '80s, when Stanford was getting crushed, the Stanford student side started chanting "We Got In" as a taunt. They later made buttons that said that.
Also, Berkeley undergrad is a degree mill. They really don't care about teaching undergrads and they make that very clear. Stanford on the other hand coddles its kids ridiculously. The grade inflation there is the worse of any elite school in the country. There is to this day very little grade inflation at Berkeley, especially in lower division (frosh-soph) classes, because state education policy requires all UC campuses to take in a set amount of community college transfers as juniors and the way Berkeley clears the space is by flunking out a lot of kids. Pretty dumb policy. If you're smart enough to get in as a frosh (which still means top 5% or so of entering college freshman naturally), you might get bounced in favor of someone transferring in from Diablo Valley College which has an open admissions policy and basically a joke of a curriculum. Stanford, on the other hand, once you're in, they take care of you. You have to work hard not to get a 3.5.
Berkeley's rep was stronger 20 years ago and probably peaked as long ago as the early '60s. Those tied to the institution would say that the decline is because of budget cuts but it's also true that you can only be so silly for so long before people start to notice that you are full of crap.
And, unlike HYPS (especially HY), Berkeley does not draw its undergrads nationally nor does it send them in large numbers to DC and NYC. Cal grads are relatively rare back east whereas Harvard grads are everywhere. Cal kids tend to stay in California. The school just does not have the same influence over the commanding heights of the culture, especially since the culture is increasingly dominated by the NY-DC axis.
If you think Google, Paypal, and Facebook haven't advanced computer science you don't know the slightest thing about what you are talking about.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919
http://money.howstuffworks.com/paypal2.htm
Read their engineering blogs or their github accounts. It's hard to make something look so easy.
Get a handle so we can ignore you in the future. With the possible exception of Google search, none of these other things can possible be considered to have "advanced computer science".
6) oh yeah, hotels and cabs too:
airbnb.com
I don't think airbnb.com will replace hotels. Not everyone wants to crash on some stranger's dirty futon.
The biggest industries to be disrupted over the coming decade will be finance, law, and healthcare. And government. But even there the game is afoot.
I already know what the response to this will be. There are those in software, who think everything I've written above is completely obvious. And there are those outside it, who really don't understand what kind of freight train is about to hit the world.
What's also completely obvious is that techies are woefully inept at politics and power games. After they slave away disrupting and downsizing all these various industries, the non-techie sharks in finance, law, politics etc. will swoop in and centralize even more power.
Empires fall when they overextend, and $1T of tuition debt means Harvard has overextended.
Harvard undergrads don't need to take out student loans. They get grants.
"Why are you predicting the future of college education by writing about Stanford and the Ivies? Would you make predictions about the auto industry by writing about Rolls Royce and Ferrari?"
Rolls and Ferrari are just luxury cars, not standard-bearers or leaders.
Harvard and Ivies are standard setters for rest of higher education. They lead, all others follow.
They are more like Mercedes or Lexus.
I think it depends on the field. Stanford is currently #1 in MBAs.
Plus there's the chance to date an ex-porn actress in Cali. Can't match that in Boston.
In every field that I can reasonably judge, Stanford is way better than Yale. Harvard still rules but that's because it, like a powerful vacuum, suck up everything in sight. In every field that I can reasonably judge, Princeton is a provincial university comparable in quality to any of the top 25 public schools. Columbia tops Princeton easily, for example.
Why is it always the case that the more ludicrous the prediction, the more confidently it is made? Harvard is going to be "devoured" by technology, huh? We shall see . . .
"The biggest industries to be disrupted over the coming decade will be finance, law, and healthcare. And government. But even there the game is afoot."
Facebook, groupon, and instagram are technology companies in the same way that 50 shades of grey is literature. These things may have made some people rich or creamy in the pants or both, but their long term usefulness is questionable. What serious technical problems do these companies solve? How to best arrange my grandmother's 5,000 baby and cat pictures? A great gathering place for child pornographers?
http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/193929/
What sort of revolution do you expect software to cause in finance? Program trading? Computerized real time risk monitoring? Uh sorry but you're a decade or two late on those. Those "advances" did a great job and in helping to bankrupt the world.
In healthcare, computer physician order entry may eventually improve health care, but it the meantime it's been useful for killing people.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/116/6/1506.abstract
There are lots of serious technical problems. Improving fracking techniques to minimize draining water tables and poisoning groundwater. Updating power grids. Reducing water requirements for solar energy. The silicon valley "tech" wizards are of limited value in these endeavors.
Stanford's Mark of Cain isn't its date of establishment, but its position on the west coast.
Just look at your own impression, Steve: The climate, the campus, and the career opportunities in the surrounding Silicon Valley.... Climate? Career opportunities? Those are things you (a) can have anytime you travel to Italy and (b) don't need. You are obviously not Yale material.
Until Stanford rebrands itself to dissociate from California and Silicon Valley, it will never rise far unless the whole system is overturned.
Plus there's the chance to date an ex-porn actress in Cali. Can't match that in Boston.
Yeah. Who doesn't want sloppy ten-thousands? I mean why else spend the first 3 decades of your life jumping through academic and professional hoops?
If you think Google, Paypal, and Facebook haven't advanced computer science you don't know the slightest thing about what you are talking about.
PayPal and Facebook haven't advanced "computer science". Google really hasn't much either beyond its original search engine.
Im doing a thought experiment; I'm closing my eyes and imagining a distance learner profile: thirty-six years old, female, pudgy, mother of two, smart, witty, daughter of upper blue collar family, bookkeeper, works for a small company with no tuition reimbursement, white, just pays the bills, seeking an accounting degree, medium energy, neat, doesn't need two commutes per day, computer user- but not savvy, drives a four year old - accord/camry/sentra, little savings, parents getting old.
These people are important, they will be in the work force for probably another close to 40 years. Maybe distance learning won't replace college, but a cheap respectable alternative is needed if they are to remain productive.
Oxbridge has become much less-well funded than US schools, they are unable to attract top-rank faculty in many subjects, and I think their prestige has accordingly begun to decline relative to HYP.
Oxford, yes, but Cambridge's endowment is now more than 2x its rival, and has far better STEM depth. It'll still be top of the heap in 2042, but Oxford may well be Leeds U. with better architecture.
" in 2042, but Oxford may well be Leeds U. with better architecture."
Oxford might be the best brand name in the world, better than Cambridge, better than Harvard or Yale. Somebody will figure out a way to exploit that 800 years of branding.
Harvard and Yale not only produces science and business giants but POLITICAL giants. Any president come out of Stanford?
Steve already mentioned Hoover, but JFK was there when Pearl Harbor was bombed and he had to bail out Daddy Joe by signing up. Rehnquist came out of Stanford. And Mitt attended too.
Does France have any renowned college anymore? Is anyone there getting smart?
Yale has dropped relative to Harvard since 1975 because Yale's business school is mediocre. Princeton faces the same problem. Back in 1975 a b-school was viewed like the school of education - a backwater for intellectual mediocrities - but today that is certainly not the case. A top university should have a great med school, law school and business school. Interestingly MIT and CalTech don't have much status outside of STEM, arguably they convey negative social status in places like New York. Stanford has risen quite a bit, but probably unfairly. In my experience Stanford undergrads are not Harvard-Yale-Princeton caliber - they certainly don't work as hard (at least that was true in the early 90s, may be different today). The nice climate may be the problem.
Does France have any renowned college anymore? Is anyone there getting smart?
Good question! Ironically, egalitarian France took it farthest than anyone else:
For all intents and purposes, a few colleges provide overwhelming influence over France's elites in science, business and politics. École Polytechnique is harder to get in than into Harvard, Stanford and Yale combined. Sciences Po, another école and also in Paris, is essentially a required to enter politics. I am sure that there is a similar entity of singular importance in business but I don't know what it is. In France, things are highly concentrated and ore rigid. So where we have 1%, they have 0.1%.
"In every field that I can reasonably judge, Stanford is way better than Yale. Harvard still rules but that's because it, like a powerful vacuum, suck up everything in sight. In every field that I can reasonably judge, Princeton is a provincial university comparable in quality to any of the top 25 public schools. Columbia tops Princeton easily, for example."
Anyone who is in University now knows how laughable this is. Princeton and Harvard are the only Universities in which it is possible to get an interview with a top 5 finance firm without majoring in math/econ/physics/comp sci/finance.
Steve, right on...the hierarchy is stagnant and will remain so. HYPS is how it is in this world.
"What sort of revolution do you expect software to cause in finance? Program trading? Computerized real time risk monitoring? Uh sorry but you're a decade or two late on those. Those "advances" did a great job and in helping to bankrupt the world. "
The hypothesis that more rapid execution of moves the market was already going to make "bankrupted" the world is antithetical to a moment's thought. The revolution in software-finance is quite simple: software has already replaced the floor trader, the technical analyst (who had dubious prediction powers) and is slowly, but surely replacing the front-desk and fundamental analyst. That's the next software revolution.
THOSE guys are profoundly threatened by certification offered by Stanford, MIT
Maybe. There's the possibility of economies of scale appearing. Formerly there was a hard and fairly low limit to the number of students in one place at one time. If universities do start to scale then the strongest brand names may crush the mid-market actors. Even if, say, Harvard limits distance learning to maintain exclusivity the same effect occurs elsewhere when State U Online Certification competes with Local Community College.
It will probably be a lumpy transition, with certain majors more likely to be targeted first. Accounting is a good test case. The humanities are mostly luxury goods these days and would be resistant to change.
And in the end there are only so many smart people to be distributed among the various institutions. You can't have 50 million Americans taking the MIT math sequence because there aren't that many Americans who can handle it.
And by the way, what are the actual skills, knowledge, and attitude employers are looking for? For the most part employers aren't asking "did this applicant pass _Heteronormative Oppression and American Society_? I need me some of that in my employees." What is it that the online schools are certifying their students are competent at? For the last couple decades a college degree was a good sign that the person was minimally competent and probably not a violent crack addict. Event that level of "certification" is starting to break down.
"Princeton faces the same problem."
Princeton doesn't have graduate programs in medicine, law, or business...
In the field of business the University compensates by hiding business-type economists in the economics department. For instance, the thoroughly practical Burton Malkiel or Harvey Rosen would not be at home in the hypertechnical economics departments of MIT, Caltech, Berkeley or even NYU. There's probably no competing with Harvard's medical school at any rate, but Columbia, Penn, UChicago, MIT and UCBerkeley are all better in some but not all respects (the case study program that Harvard uses is quite limiting).
Went to a Southern Calif. prep school, one usually sending more than a dozen up to Stanford. Among the sort who thought most about these things, Stanford was considered at least equivalent to Harvard, or even preferable for the reasons you list (I knew non-early admits at both who ended up picking Palo Alto; as well as Harvard admits turned down by Stanford, which reinforced the appearance of absurdity and randomness). Since the HS was in California it might be presumed to have a better relationship with the in-state Stanford--unless you heard the HS's name.
So I think things have changed a bit since 1975, your declaration notwithstanding. Regionalism is still heavy and depending where you made your AP valedictorian CIF bones you may not hear so many casual references to "Penn," whatever that is (seriously, sounds like a Louis Auchincloss character talking). Of course my school also regularly supplied its share to USC, the undisputed local champ of social networking.
Oxford might be the best brand name in the world, better than Cambridge, better than Harvard or Yale. Somebody will figure out a way to exploit that 800 years of branding.
What I don't get is how pretty much no Continental universities really have that super brand name status. It's basically only Oxford, Cambridge, and American universities.
Disappointing that Steve didn't mention the mid-century origin of the "Ivy League" (well after Stanford's foundation) which I'd think of as right in his wheelhouse. It's always charming to read old papers with sports columnists describing Syracuse or Rutgers as Ivies, and the tawdry history of how the "Elite 8" got picked is equally amusing: the all-male student bodies of Penn and Cornell were literally begging to be included; Columbia was a late add; and Providence R.I. adjoining Brown's site was--crazy but true--still a major industry/finance center and not yet descended into Mafia dysfunction.
The Ivy + MIT antitrust case on financial aid is a fun byway of recent history too!
The latest US News and World Report Best Colleges ranking has Harvard and Princeton at #1, Yale at #3, Columbia at #4, and Caltech, MIT, Stanford, U Chicago, and Penn at #5.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/data
The ranking is a bit strange, however, because while the number ranking suggests a tie of sorts, each university is counted separately, and being counted ahead of other schools that share the same number ranking seems to imply that it's ahead despite the same ranking. The five universities ranked 5th are followed by Duke at #10.
"What I don't get is how pretty much no Continental universities really have that super brand name status. It's basically only Oxford, Cambridge, and American universities."
Ask yourself: Who won The Big One?
http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-college-paradox-not-everyone-gains-by-higher-education
"The hypothesis that more rapid execution of moves the market was already going to make "bankrupted" the world is antithetical to a moment's thought. The revolution in software-finance is quite simple: software has already replaced the floor trader, the technical analyst (who had dubious prediction powers) and is slowly, but surely replacing the front-desk and fundamental analyst. That's the next software revolution."
Floor trading began dying roughly a decade ago. There are now a smaller number of traders pretending to manage huge amounts of risk. Mostly unsuccessfully. It is not a technical achievement to replace people that were useless in the first place with software that helps produce even worse results.
There is to this day very little grade inflation at Berkeley, especially in lower division (frosh-soph) classes, because state education policy requires all UC campuses to take in a set amount of community college transfers as juniors and the way Berkeley clears the space is by flunking out a lot of kids.
It's the other way around. Back in my parents' day, it wasn't unusual for a department at Berkeley to flunk out half its undergrads. Nowadays, a student would really have to try hard to flunk out. Instead of flunking them out, the department gives them C-minuses. You still have to earn your A's, though.
Consider the three classes in Charles Murray's Coming Apart.
The education bubble isn't that much of a problem for the upper class who send their kids to HYPS. However, a radical correction in the pricing of college degrees will have a negative effect on the finances of HYPS.
On the other extreme, the lower classes do not go to college and can't get much benefit from a typical college education. Overall, they are unlikely to benefit much to the education bubble popping or from online education, at least directly.
The middle class is where the real action is. For this group, HYPS is largely out of reach anyway. But they are spending nearly as much to send their kids to lower tier schools with significantly social signaling and networking value than HYPS. This is where the remaking of undergraduate education is going to happen.
"Floor trading began dying roughly a decade ago. There are now a smaller number of traders pretending to manage huge amounts of risk. Mostly unsuccessfully. It is not a technical achievement to replace people that were useless in the first place with software that helps produce even worse results."
This is pretty unpersuasive because the floor traders were NEVER good at managing risk. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they'd take a derivative in the right direction to their trades but I remember reading that they mostly used outrights. Options traders (ironically) being the worst.
"The Hoover anecdote is great. I had never heard that." Don't worry, you're an American. Nobody expects you to know any history.
The comments here are significantly underemphasizing the importance of the specific degree. Connoisseurs of higher-ed status know exactly what is signified by each degree. For a BA, MBA, JD, MD, etc., the status of each university's degree is quite clear. Trying to aggregate all of these degrees into the overall status of the university, by assigning some weight to each one, is arbitrary and imprecise.
Ask yourself: is a degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government or Graduate School of Education more valuable, in any sense, than a STEM BS from Berkeley? No, of course not. That's so obvious that no one here has even brought up the point.
What really matters is the difference between #1 and everything else. Everyone knows who's number one. I'm not even in any of these fields, and I can tell you who's number one, because I went to Harvard, and that's the kind of thing we care about there.
BA in verbalist fields: Harvard
JD: Harvard and Yale
MBA: Harvard and Stanford
Finance: Harvard, Wharton, Columbia
Engineering: Stanford and MIT
MD: Harvard
BS in STEM: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Caltech
MFA in arts: Yale
Masters in Education: Harvard, Columbia
Masters of Divinity: Harvard, Yale
PhD in Economics: Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Princeton
I'm probably wrong about these, but that's the conventional wisdom, anyway.
For the most part employers aren't asking "did this applicant pass _Heteronormative Oppression and American Society_? I need me some of that in my employees."
Lol!
Made me think though. If we take this idea of online certification to its conclusion its these BS subjects that will suffer the most.
Surely any value they have is being lumped together with real stuff in an institution? If the institution largely disappears these nonsense goes with it because you are just someone with a worthless certificate, you didnt go to Harvard or wherever.
PayPal and Facebook haven't advanced "computer science". Google really hasn't much either beyond its original search engine.
And what, really, was so great about the search engine anyway? They didnt invent the search engine, they didnt even build the best one.
"Im doing a thought experiment; I'm closing my eyes and imagining a distance learner profile: thirty-six years old, female, pudgy, mother of two, smart, witty, daughter of upper blue collar family, bookkeeper, works for a small company with no tuition reimbursement, white, just pays the bills, seeking an accounting degree, medium energy, neat, doesn't need two commutes per day, computer user- but not savvy, drives a four year old - accord/camry/sentra, little savings, parents getting old."
These people are important, they will be in the work force for probably another close to 40 years. Maybe distance learning won't replace college, but a cheap respectable alternative is needed if they are to remain productive.
I think your mental exercise conjured up a reasonably accurate picture. Good for their talent for something useful like accounting; better than an art/language major such as myself, who believed in academia and worked my way through. My sister learned computer programming on the job in the 70s, when such things still happened, and makes six digits despite working for an Indian owned firm that hires mostly Indians. She just hopes to stay on until retirement. Sister, by her own admission, never did have much imagination, but she was always good in math. Very linear thinker who dropped out of high school and got a GED. I graduated, but she makes much more. Many would have been more grossly paranoid when arsonists (probably aiming for the people next door) burned down her house on Thanksgiving eve, killing her little dog and almost killing her small children. She and her husband and two babies just got out alive. The perils of living in an area filled with meth addicts perhaps, though it seemed nice enough on the surface. She was never too "upwardly mobile", or "frou frou" as one friend calls it. I think if she had it to do over again, she'd do the same profession, but by correspondence, and live in the same area. Like I said, no imagination.
Two of my brothers did the engineering/ physics route at universities, and they are doing much better, but not vastly better--well, one of them might be. The parents getting old and needing care phrase -- been there done that -- is chilling, and will be haunting the corridors of American homes and institutions in the century now unfolding.
"This is pretty unpersuasive because the floor traders were NEVER good at managing risk. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they'd take a derivative in the right direction to their trades but I remember reading that they mostly used outrights. Options traders (ironically) being the worst."
I'm not sure what you are basing this on but it doesn't really matter. The largest trades never took place on the floor anyway. The bottom line is all the fancy models like VaR turned out to be worse than useless and a few trillion in bailouts later, the world still teeters on the edge of financial meltdown. Which is coming no matter what software they happen to use. The original anonymous poster called what is coming in finance, health care and government disruptions. We've had plenty of those. Improvements would be nice for a change. A good place to start would be putting people like John Corzine in jail and allowing the many insolvent banks to collapse and disappear.
Anonymous:"Steve already mentioned Hoover, but JFK was there when Pearl Harbor was bombed and he had to bail out Daddy Joe by signing up. Rehnquist came out of Stanford. And Mitt attended too."
JFK did his undergraduate degree at Harvard. He went to Stanford for a graduate degree in Business.
Syon
"The new trinity is Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley"
You must be Asian.
On the East coast, HYP are the most prestigious. In that order (though Y and P are interchangeable). After that it gets hard. New Yorkers would say Columbia is next. Many others would say Stanford. STEM types would argue MIT and CalTech. Some might even argue Duke or Georgetown.
Stanford on the East Coast is not really any better than like 10 other non HYP schools. Part of the problem is it is on the West Coast, part of the problem is it does not produce Wall Street titans or Presidents, and part of the problem is that it needs to drop to 1000 or so SAT for some of its athletes, while HYP generally requires at least 1200.
Berkeley, on the East Coast, is no better than UVA/UNC/Michigan. It's not part of the equation.
A school's endowment might be the most objective view of how much graduates "like" their school, as well as an indication of how much those graduates ultimately earn (and can donate). While the $32B at Harvard is impressive, they also had a 255-year head start over Stanford ($16.5B). Pretty pathetic when one does the math.
You also get the John Elway, Tiger Woods, John McEnroe, Andrew Luck, Kerri Walsh, Summer Sanders athlete that rarely shows up in the Ivies. In fact, if you back out the recruited athletes from Stanford (10% of the undergrad population), one might argue that the others who matriculate had an even greater admissions hurdle to clear than at other schools....
UCLA was great during Nixon era. Nixon tried to run America with people from UCLA.
And the result was Watergate.
Before Nixon UCLA was good at basketball and little else. After him, it is no longer that good, even at basketball.
It is probably the most overrated school in Asia; I rank it slightly below Norte Dame.
Anon on 7/9/12 @ 451pm asks “Harvard and Yale not only produces science and business giants but POLITICAL giants. Any president come out of Stanford?”
I’m not sure I’d brag about producing winners of an ‘industry’ in which the market leaders in the past decade include George “I’m a fan of the country known as It-Lee” Bush and Barry “Don’t Call me Urkel” Obama, but yes, Stanford produced Hoover. Before anyone corrects me and points out W went to Harvard B School, I am referring to undergraduate degrees in the following: Harvard has five (both Adams, both Roosevelts, JFK), Yale has three (Taft, both Bush’s), while William & Mary has four (Washington [sort of, he studied surveying], Jefferson, Monroe, and Tyler). Granted W&M has been in a bit of a slump lately but I’d rank stopping with Tyler well above producing a disaster like GWB or either Roosevelt. Princeton is a wash with Madison being offset by World War Woodrow.
Anon on 7/9/12 @1122pm says “The latest US News and World Report Best Colleges ranking has Harvard and Princeton at #1, Yale at #3, Columbia at #4, and Caltech, MIT, Stanford, U Chicago, and Penn at #5.”
I won’t argue with the rankings but do wonder why people pay attention to ratings from a 3rd rate magazine that as far as I know NOBODY actually reads such as USN&WR . Think how hard you have to suck as a news magazine to be below comic books such as Newsweek or Time.
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