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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2937 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 25, 2024

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I have a general impression that college admissions matter a great deal for degrees in parents basement studies, but that outside of a small number of top schools, not so much for job tracks.

How accurate is this impression? Obv it depends a bit on where you draw the job track/parents basement studies line. But in the broader picture, is it more or less accurate?

Everything will matter by job and major. If you are in a highly competitive market, the credentials will matter a lot. If not, you’ll be able to get by with lesser schools or in some cases no school at all.

I have a general impression that college admissions matter a great deal for degrees in parents basement studies, but that outside of a small number of top schools, not so much for job tracks.

I'd disagree on a few points:

  1. For anything involving research where you're specifically paired with a professor, there's a huge difference. I'd place it roughly on three tiers: i) you're learning cutting edge techniques, contributing to important research papers and networking with the best ii) you become familiar with basic techniques and look good to go to (i), or iii) you go to classes but your practical skills are absolute ass.

  2. The networking and prestige from the upper schools are huge when trying to start your own venture or climb beyond a certain point. All my friends/contacts from the big schools were able to raise 7-8 figures after graduating or finishing their postdocs. Even after most of their ventures fail, they can (accurately! They learned many things I don't know) sell themselves as having management experience and land high positions in VC/consulting/tech.

Even controlling for talent, the opportunities you get coming out of these schools compound and often make you a better employee/founder.

Anecdotally, it's pretty accurate, but this probably varries by industry. I work for a big name engineering firm and outside of very specific schools and programs nobody gives a shit. In fact there is an ongoing discussion about waiving the degree requirement for entry-level technical positions entirely.

The argument being why pay college graduate wages to somone whos probably picked up a lot of bad habits when you can use internship opportunities with local high-schools and community colleges as "free" labor + attitude and aptitude screening and then train-up the ones you want to keep.

Highly inaccurate, but not fundamentally wrong. There are certain job tracks that are much easier to achieve from certain schools, and certain job tracks that are more or less impossible to achieve without a prestigious school.

{{Unless we're playing some semantic marxist game where "parents basement studies" includes everything but starting your own manufacturing company from scratch.}}

The advantage that you get is a leg up in the job market off the bat. Credential act as a substitute for deliverables. Consulting, major corporate hiring, government, law, finance, etc. All rely on elite school recruiting. Often this can be overcome with sufficient effort and/or time, but in certain cases they can be closed off entirely.

Compare Brett Kavanaugh and ACB. Brett glided all the way to the SCOTUS through a series of elite schools without ever actually having a private sector job with deliverables. ((His brief tenure at K&E was a sinecure, placed for political and judicial connections, and the only cases he was known to have worked on were political in nature, where his role was mostly advisory)) He substituted a series of ladder-climbing prestige jobs (Prep school to Yale to Yale Law to Federal Clerkship to SCOTUS Clerkship to Kenn Starr's assistant to sinecure at K&E to Bush Admin to Appeals Court to SCOTUS). ACB, meanwhile, went to Notre Dame law, which is just a few steps down, but as a result she had to actually work for quite a while by comparison. She practiced law, for real, at a real law firm, worked her way up the academic ladder at lesser schools, published extensively in law reviews, before landing the same job as Brett.

SCOTUS being the absolute tip of prestige in jobs, and law being one of the most prestige obsessed professions, you see in that example how a minor difference in school prestige can set up a glide path versus a climb. Graduates from top schools need to just not fuck it up or piss anybody off, while graduates from lesser schools need to strive and excel. I see the same thing in friends in finance and tech, people who went to top schools find their way easily, those who wen to lesser schools need to be at the top of their game to hustle their way into the same jobs. Talent will out, regardless of where you went (one can always go to grad school for a shot of prestige, this is much of the purpose of the MBA), but it takes time to show talent, while school prestige is gifted to you instantly and in full upon matriculation.

What do you mean by "parents' basement studies"?

I would say that generally means humanities majors. Basically anything where it has dubious usefulness in getting a job, such that one might say "well it's fine to study X if you are going to live in your parents' basement...".

Credentials seem to matter most when the output of workers is not legible to their bosses.

I feel like this is one of those things that will vary a great deal by position and industry. My impression is that in industries with hard outputs the importance of degrees has declined precipitously in the last decade or so.

It does vary a lot but I think the heuristic generally works.

There are two reasons why I think it works:

  1. In cases where the worker has more technical skills than the boss, like engineering, it makes sense to outsource the training and skill assessment to professionals. Physical engineering, and medicine are often in this category.
  2. In cases where worker output is just vague or unmeasurable, bosses need to justify why they are hiring someone to their bosses. A degree is a decent and widely accepted justification. Certain parts of marketing / HR / corporate communications / legal. Can all be like this.

No one cares about degrees in sales jobs, because sales is often one of the easiest things for bosses to track.

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