Is Stanford University Dying?
Despite its reputation, Jim Russell writes that Stanford may have seen better days.
The Pacific Standard magazine writes:
Stanford University Is Dying
Parents work hard and will do whatever it takes to put their children in the best preschool. Such parents should relax. Two graduate degrees in one household is an air-tight predictor of academic success. Ask any university admissions program. Good social science aside, mothers will go to great lengths to put their kids on the right academic track. Frank Bruni of the New York Times trying to make failed over-educated, underemployed moms feel better:
I also spoke with Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of first-step seed money for tech start-ups. I asked him if any one school stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off. “Yes,” he responded, and I was sure of the name I’d hear next: Stanford. It’s his alma mater, though he left before he graduated, and it’s famous as a feeder of Silicon Valley success.
But this is what he said: “The University of Waterloo.” It’s a public school in the Canadian province of Ontario, and as of last summer, it was the source of eight proud ventures that Y Combinator had helped along. “To my chagrin,” Altman told me, “Stanford has not had a really great track record.”
In this case, distinguish between talent and ideas. I have advanced an economic geography of talent production. Wherever the best talent is produced, firms will go. I was wrong. Waterloo, Ontario, proves how wrong I was. The place that produces the best ideas will attract firms.
Comments
Jack Welch once described where he found his best talent at GE. He said “State schools”. It was because these students didn’t have the best academic credentials, and had to work harder to prove themselves.
I couple this with the fact that education accounts for no more than 30% of human knowledge – experience accounts for the rest. In combination, these two ideas seem to posit that there is something in the effort and time getting credentialed that provides advantages in the “disadvantaged” over the kids who have everything.
What matters post-academia is results. Operational, interpersonal, intellectual…whatever, but results. All of us need to turn that ability into something tangible. Maybe that difference is what is being referred to here.
I don’t mean this as a putdown to academics. It’s just that academics isn’t everything (and may not mean more than 30%). In building my career, I have more degrees than a thermometer and an alphabet soup of letters after my name, but what has made the difference is the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I did it all in night school, and applied it along the way. The failures and successes have provided an iron-clad sense of confidence, and an optimism my peers find really annoying 🙂
A quick look inside the Washington beltway should tell you all you need to know about highly educated fools.