Paul Graham is in good form here, as usual. This time on education and on going to the right kindergarten, school, university, company etc.

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

It is true that for the purposes of business, a university degree is a signal. A signal that you can a) stick it out for several years without any tangible reward other than arbitrary grading. b) be part of a collective entity over which you have no control or impact c) able to absorb, regurgitate and communicate large amounts of data and knowledge by dead white men d) care about performing well within institutional environment.

Not much about innovation, irreverence, disruption and not caring about consensus. Unless you, of course, went to Oxford.

I am half-joking here actually. There were many things I learnt at Oxford, one of them that there was plenty of stupid people around. But the most important was the ability to ask ’stupid’ questions, as in very simple questions, which often go to the heart of the problem and ferret out inconsistencies. With that comes the confidence to ask when things don’t make sense. Even when everyone else is looking like they know what’s going on. There is a touch of irreverence and disruption in that. And it maximises your chances of coming up with the right answer.

So back to business:

Things are very different in the new world of startups. We couldn’t save someone from the market’s judgement even if we wanted to. And being charming and confident counts for nothing with users. All users care about is whether you make something they like. If you don’t, you’re dead.

Knowing that test is coming makes us work a lot harder to get the right answers than anyone would if they were merely hiring people. We can’t afford to have any illusions about the predictors of success.

Paul Graham hit another significant nail on the head:

The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in the America, have some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to college. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you’d have liked is your own feeling that you’re thereby lacking something. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn’t be missing much if you weren’t. When you’re excluded, you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider. But invariably they’re larger in your imagination than in real life.

This is certainly true in a sense that Oxford looks very different from the inside compared to how people outside view it, for example. They tend to value different things than those who have been through the experience. But that does not mean that those things are not worth valuing and the advantages not worth having. It seems to me that the best combination is a smart and eager person in an educational environment that works with that individual, respecting both their character and mind. Paradoxically (to our expectations), the benefit of education should accrue to the student and not to his employer.

Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to college is not just that you can stop judging them (and yourself) by superficial measures, but that you can focus instead on what really matters. What matters is what you make of yourself.

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