Comment by jltsiren
7 hours ago
I had two main points.
First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That seems to be at least as true in the US as in Finland.
Second, theoretical education is more useful in the long term, because it's a better foundation for learning new skills. It can be a disadvantage when you are trying to get your first job, as you have fewer practical skills potential employers would need right now. Which is why, from an individual perspective, theoretical education only makes sense in higher-tier institutions, where the prestige can offset the initial disadvantage.
I heard your points - you communicated them very well. I failed to communicate that the first, while true, isn't going to matter in a few years time and the second is not true.
I will repeat what I said - if an employer arbitrarily restricts their talent pool to legacy credentials, they are optimizing for signaling rather than raw productivity.
By 2026, there is overwhelming anecdote and evidence that credentials and where you went to school have very little to do with demonstrated performance. (See citations 1-3)
Hence, it's mostly theatrics.
It seems like you're arguing that it's safer to attend prestigious schools because that increases your chances of being employed. I argue that in the age of LLMs, where the cost of learning is very low and speed of building prototypes (and hence learning and improvement) is rapid, it's easier than ever to start your own business.
> First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That seems to be at least as true in the US as in Finland
This represents a trailing-indicator mindset typical of "MNC".
Yes, legacy corporations still filter by prestige because they want to signal to others they hire only the best, but that's because in extremely large orgs like theirs, it's impossible for a single person's contributions (outside the C-Suite) to have an outsized effect on that org, so they resort to proxy metrics, like credentails, for signalling.
In real life though, credentials have an extremely weak correlation with impact (see citations).
What this translates for an end user, is that the end user doesn't care about the credentials of the person who built the product. I explain that below.
On the frontiers of excellence - startup founders will tell you that hiring people from prestigious schools is a liability over those who might only have a high school degree because the prestigious school graduate is entitled and is looking to build a resume so they can jump ship in 2 years instead of the barely high school degree student who's hungry to prove they are worth investing in.
The selectivity of prestigious schools is gamed heavily in the U.S where you have literally floors of "prep schools" full of trainers telling you which piano lessons to take, which tennis tournaments to play at, which charities to volunteer for and which SAT question types to learn well. Getting into Harvard is less about ability and more about checking off boxes on a checklist.
Notice that absolutely none of this actually has to do with what the student actually wants to do in life and everything to do with impressing the gatekeepers to admissions.
However, make no mistake, the end customer rarely cares about the credentials.
When you watch Netflix or play the XBox, I bet you don't look up the credentials of the production team or the engineers who built it - you enjoy the content and vote with your dollars - and that's real life.
HN is full of people who don't have anything past a high-school degree but they were obsessed with solving one problem well and now they are multi-millionaires and billionaires because they ended up having an outsized impact. There are far more in that bucket who are comfortable but not multi-millionaires (so you never hear about them).
The money is not the end result but proof of impact and this proves my point.
Let's even discard that, citing survivorship bias. Let's reduce my argument to one fact: engineering/code doesn't care about the author's pedigree - all that matters is whether the system compiles, works correctly and scales under load and a prestigious university certainly doesn't have exclusive rights to those skills.
> theoretical education only makes sense in higher-tier institutions, where the prestige can offset the initial disadvantage
That doesn't make any sense. An institution will hire as per their needs: higher-tier, lower-tier, mid-tier all have their unique needs.
The reason why higher-tier institutions can afford to hire advanced degree graduates is because lower-tier, mid-tier simply cannot afford that baggage: highly credentialed individuals often won't work on tasks they consider "beneath them", the actual "plumbing" of engineering, which makes them useless to lean, high-velocity teams - which is precisely the point the founders at start ups make.
I think you're conflating multiple issues together altough you're not alone in the population that strongly advocates for education as a proxy for ability. They have nothing to do with each other and have a lose correlation.
Here's a thought experiment:
- Kid A (Rural Finland): Has internet access, a Claude Code subscription, and a singular obsession. They spend their time learning how to write a provably correct, memory-safe OS kernel. Through sheer, unhindered iteration and thousands of failures, they master thread management, hardware concurrency, durable scheduling, and modern CPU architecture.
- Kid B (New York City): Attends a prestigious prep school. Their entire mental bandwidth is consumed by a generalized conveyor belt: memorizing 100 years of Eupropean and U.S. history, computing the molality of an acid drop, identifying stereocenters in organic chemistry, and writing essays on what Socrates said to Glaucon. They barely touch operating systems because there is no time left after juggling DBMS trivia, analog design, and quantum physics to satisfy a rubric.
Which person would you listen to or hire when it comes to building an OS?
Now your argument might then pivot to "but what if instead of building an OS, I wanted someone to do algoritmic trading on Wall Street? Ha! I got you there! Kid A knows nothing about that, they only know how to write a kernel!"
Kid A doesn't care. Their singular obsession is OSes and they are world class at it. Their brains aren't clouded by molality and stereocenters - an OS kernel certainly doesn't care about them. If in the future, we had a CPU that worked off organic chemistry, maybe he will learn about it or maybe not and there will be Kid C in the unlikely case Kid A failed to build a trading engine from scratch, fail 1000 times, and learn the math on the fly just like they did for the kernel.
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[1] Google's Internal Data (Laszlo Bock): In 2013, Google's SVP of People Operations publicly revealed that GPAs, test scores, and university prestige had zero correlation with employee success. They explicitly began hiring more candidates with no college degrees because work-sample tests were far better predictors of impact.
[2] The Dale & Krueger Study (NBER): A famous National Bureau of Economic Research study found that students who were accepted to Ivy League schools but chose to attend less prestigious state schools earned just as much money later in life. It proved that the ambition of the student drives success, not the prestige of the institution.
[3] The Schmidt & Hunter Meta-Analysis: The gold standard in industrial psychology (examining 85 years of hiring data) found that "years of education" has a dismal 0.10 correlation with job performance, whereas "work sample tests" and "cognitive ability" are highly predictive.
The actual Finnish kid who wrote a somewhat successful OS kernel was born in Helsinki, to an upper middle class family with a communist father. He chose to study in the most prestigious university in the country, largely due to his family ties. Because the CS program was theoretical, it didn't take that much of his time. He could enjoy student life and also pursue his other interests. The OS kernel emerged from the latter.
That's what education in a research university is like, when you actually take advantage of it. You don't have to focus on whatever seems useful and practical in the short term, you don't have to compete against your peers, and you don't have to overwork yourself. Instead, you have a socially acceptable opportunity to study whatever interests you, and you hopefully gain the attitude that you can learn whatever you need to learn.