Articles by Tim Lee

The other thing to say about Paul Graham’s essay is that success at founding startups seems like almost the worst possible metric for judging the value of an Ivy League education. At least the way Graham tells it, to succeed at a startup, you have to be reasonably smart, extremely dedicated, and willing to break a few rules in order to find a new way of doing things. Intelligence is useful for getting into a good college as well, but the other major criteria are almost exactly the opposite. To get into an Ivy League school, you need to be good at following rules, sucking up to grown-ups, and performing activities that look good on your resume whether or not you’re actually interested in them. In some cases, getting into an elite school is helped by having access to good tutors, career counselors, test prep coaching, and in some cases parents willing to make 5-figure donations to their alma maters. The sort of intense, deep, and sustained interest in a single subject that is essential to success at a startup is hard to convey on a college application form or a resume.

Now, the thing is, the skills that are required to get into an elite school actually are useful in a lot of high-status careers. For example, becoming a good doctor involves achieving proficiency at a lot of different aspects of medical practice. You don’t really care if your doctor is capable of devoting months of intense effort to a hard technical problem, as long as he can correctly diagnose your condition and competently administer the remedy.

So I think the question of whether someone’s Ivy League background matters is largely a function of what qualities you’re looking for. An Ivy League degree is a good signal for the kinds of qualities that allow people to get admitted to Ivy League schools. If you’re in a business in which those qualities aren’t important, as Graham is, then it obviously doesn’t make sense to pay attention to where someone went to school.

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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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EFF predicts that the Holt bill will finally be coming to the floor for a vote later this week. As Larry Nordin and I wrote last month (and as I wrote in The American in May) the bill would be an important step in the direction of a more secure and reliable voting process. If you didn’t catch it, be sure to check out the discussion we had on the podcast with Ed Felten on e-voting reform and the Holt bill.

Still, I agree with EFF’s Matt Zimmerman that the Holt bill leaves a lot to be desired:

Are DREs, even those utilizing VVPATs, fraught with problems? Of course. Should more rigorous audits be mandated? Absolutely. But a heartfelt desire to ban DREs or improve audits is no reason to oppose this bill, especially since states are not prohibited from making either of these reforms — or nearly any other voting system-related reform — on their own.

Our support for HR 811 is tempered by profound disappointment that one of the bill’s pillars has been watered down to the point of ineffectiveness due to pressure from the proprietary software industry. The source code disclosure provisions, requiring that voting system source code be disclosed at the very least to litigants and other “qualified persons” who can test the integrity of the voting system under a non-disclosure agreement, have since the bill’s introduction been replaced by a requirement that “voting system software” — a definition that does not explicitly include source code — be disclosed. While “correcting” language was included in the Committee Report as a result of prompt feedback from computer security experts after the bill’s current language was released, that Report will likely not be sufficient to ensure source code access. Having litigated cases in which prompt access to voting system source code is critical, EFF’s strong advocacy for this bill has been based in large part on the source code disclosure requirement. We call on Rep. Zoe Lofgren and the other members of the Elections Subcommittee to promptly fix this provision — using the explicit language included in the Committee Report — before the bill makes it to the floor of the House.

Probably the biggest problem with the latest versions of the Holt bill are the provisions allowing the use of cheap thermal printers in the 2008 and 2010 elections. In my opinion, using these cheap printers might be worse than no paper trail at all, because they’re prone to jamming and because if the paper is left on the reels it can compromise vote anonymity. I would rather have legislation that exempted states entirely for 2008 and imposed more rigorous standards for 2010 than to try to impose half-baked reforms for 2008 that end up making the concept of paper trails look bad.

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