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Manfred comments on Open thread, Jul. 18 - Jul. 24, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What are the differences between the 'big names' of higher education, in comparison to other places?
For example, I often hear about MIT, Oxford, and to a lesser extent, Cambridge. Either there's some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of 'University of X, YZ'?
In a little bit of unintended self-reflection I noticed that I have a strange binary way of thinking of higher education. It feels that if I don't go to one of the top n, my effort is wasted. Not sure why.
I'm just becoming somewhat paranoid regarding the real world after reading HPMOR because I always get a 'how much do I really know?' feeling. I'm not sure how my impressions were formed and I better double-check how well does the ideas in my mind reflect the real-world truth but at the same time I'm not even sure what's a reliable indicator.
Post-high education LWers, do you think the place you studied at had a significant effect on your future prospects?
There's a lot of self-selection, and the classes and extracurricular resources are therefore allowed to be geared towards smarter students, and that's nice. You'll also get more opportunities to learn about current research in your chosen field, which improves your grad school chances.
A lot of the value is if you plan to get a job straight out of college, going to a top n school will have a name brand advantage (not without reason).
However, controlling for smartness and research experience, I think that where you did your undergrad doesn't matter all that much for grad school.