As someone in a status-conscious profession who didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I would like to believe that Paul Granam is right about this. But although I certainly think it’s true that the value of an Ivy League education is often overstated, I don’t think it’s true that it doesn’t matter where you went to college.
To get the obvious point out of the way first, I believe him that an Ivy League education won’t make you any smarter. If you were smart when they accepted you, you’ll be just as smart when you leave. And since to a first approximation career success is a function of intelligence and determination, neither of which an Ivy League college can impart, I’m not surprised that studies have found little correlation between Ivy League attendance and lifetime earnings.
However, I think an Ivy League institution offers two important advantages, both relating to who your classmates are. First, the intelligence of your classmates determines the pace and intellectual of your classes. Professors pace their classes to be understandable to the average student. If you’re significantly smarter than the average student in a class, you’re not going to learn as much as you could be learning, and if you’re lazy and undisciplined, like I was at 19, you might get bored and stop showing up for class entirely.
Second, in most professions, who you know does matter. It matters more in some professions than others, of course, but there are hardly any professions in which it doesn’t matter at all. Indeed, Graham himself has noted that one of the best ways to meet possible startup-founder-partners is to meet them in college. And although there are smart people at every college, on the margin there will certainly be more smart people at Ivy League schools than non-Ivies.
It matters even more in public policy (this might be largely a reflection of the fact that public policy isn’t an especially meritocratic field, but I don’t think that’s the entire explanation). Being a good journalist, policy analyst, lawyer, lobbyist, etc is largely a function of knowing a lot of people who are doing things related to what you’re doing, preferably in prominent positions. If I’ve got a question on education policy, for example, it’s helpful to have in my rolodex a friend who works on education policy. People who go to Ivy League schools are likely to have a larger number of people in positions of power and influence than people who go to non-Ivies.
I would note that at least from an outsider’s perspective, at least, academia seems to be a bit of a special case in the sense that who your professors were actually does matter. Going to a good school for a PhD allows you to develop relationships with people whose recommendations will carry more weight on the academic job market. This seems to be the same mechanism that makes going to a good law school important to getting good clerkships, which in turn is a major qualification for being a law professor or judge. If you aspire to a profession in which a limited number of slots are doled out using subjective by existing elites, where you went to school can matter quite a lot.
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