September 2007A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprisedme. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a goodcollege was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up.What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades.Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college.And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons:you'd learn more, get better jobs, make more money. But it didn'tmatter exactly what the benefits would be. College was a bottleneckthrough which all your future prospects passed; everything wouldbe better if you went to a better college.A few weeks ago I realized that somewhere along the line I hadstopped believing that.What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worryingobsessively about what kindergartenyour kids go to. It seemed tome this couldn't possibly matter. Either it won't help your kidget into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won't meanmuch anymore. And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?It turns out I have a lot of data about that. My three partnersand I run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator. Weinvest when the company is just a couple guys and an idea. Theidea doesn't matter much; it will change anyway. Most of ourdecision is based on the founders. The average founder is threeyears out of college. Many have just graduated; a few are stillin school. So we're in much the same position as a graduate program,or a company hiring people right out of college. Except our choicesare immediately and visibly tested. There are two possible outcomesfor a startup: success or failure—and usually you know within ayear which it will be.The test applied to a startup is among the purest of real worldtests. A startup succeeds or fails depending almost entirely onthe efforts of the founders. Success is decided by the market: youonly succeed if users like what you've built. And users don't carewhere you went to college.As well as having precisely measurable results, we have a lot ofthem. Instead of doing a small number of large deals like atraditional venture capital fund, we do a large number of smallones. We currently fund about 40 companies a year, selected fromabout 900 applications representing a total of about 2000 people. [1]Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocaltest that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator has been anunprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick winners. Oneof the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matterswhere people went to college.I thought I'd already been cured of caring about that. There'snothing like going to grad school at Harvard to cure you of anyillusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. Andyet Y Combinator showed us we were still overestimating people who'dbeen to elite colleges. We'd interview people from MIT or Harvardor Stanford and sometimes find ourselves thinking: they must besmarter than they seem. It took us a few iterations to learn totrust our senses.Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvardor Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believeit.But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elitecollege, how could this be true? We're talking about a decisionmade by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on acursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applicationssubmitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on?An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you whatthe kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum;a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. Whowould rely on such a test?And yet a lot of companies do. A lot of companies are very muchinfluenced by where applicants went to college. How could they be?I think I know the answer to that.There used to be a saying in the corporate world: "No one ever gotfired for buying IBM." You no longer hear this about IBM specifically,but the idea is very much alive; there is a whole category of"enterprise" software companies that exist to take advantage of it.People buying technology for large organizations don't care if theypay a fortune for mediocre software. It's not their money. Theyjust want to buy from a supplier who seems safe—a company withan established name, confident salesmen, impressive offices, andsoftware that conforms to all the current fashions. Not necessarilya company that will deliver so much as one that, if they do let youdown, will still seem to have been a prudent choice. So companieshave evolved to fill that niche.A recruiter at a big company is in much the same position as someonebuying technology for one. If someone went to Stanford and is notobviously insane, they're probably a safe bet. And a safe bet isenough. No one ever measures recruiters by the later performanceof people they turn down. [2]I'm not saying, of course, that elite colleges have evolved to preyupon the weaknesses of large organizations the way enterprisesoftware companies have. But they work as if they had. In additionto the power of the brand name, graduates of elite colleges havetwo critical qualities that plug right into the way large organizationswork. They're good at doing what they're asked, since that's whatit takes to please the adults who judge you at seventeen. Andhaving been to an elite college makes them more confident.Back in the days when people might spend their whole career at onebig company, these qualities must have been very valuable. Graduatesof elite colleges would have been capable, yet amenable to authority.And since individual performance is so hard to measure in largeorganizations, their own confidence would have been the startingpoint for their reputation.Things are very different in the new world of startups. We couldn'tsave someone from the market's judgement even if we wanted to. Andbeing charming and confident counts for nothing with users. Allusers care about is whether you make something they like. If youdon't, you're dead.Knowing that test is coming makes us work a lot harder to get theright answers than anyone would if they were merely hiring people.We can't afford to have any illusions about the predictors ofsuccess. And what we've found is that the variation between schoolsis so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it'snegligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in thefirst minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went toschool.It seems obvious when you put it that way. Look at the individual,not where they went to college. But that's a weaker statement thanthe idea I began with, that it doesn't matter much where a givenindividual goes to college. Don't you learn things at the bestschools that you wouldn't learn at lesser places?Apparently not. Obviously you can't prove this in the case of asingle individual, but you can tell from aggregate evidence: youcan't, without asking them, distinguish people who went to oneschool from those who went to another three times as far down theUS News list. [3]Try it and see.How can this be? Because how much you learn in college depends alot more on you than the college. A determined party animal canget through the best school without learning anything. And someonewith a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smartpeople to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all.The other students are the biggest advantage of going to an elitecollege; you learn more from them than the professors. Butyou should be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you makea conscious effort to find smart friends. Atmost colleges you can find at least a handful of other smart students,and most people have only a handful of close friends in collegeanyway. [4]The odds of finding smart professors are even better.The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especiallyin math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down thelist of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in themath department.So it's not surprising that we've found the relative prestige ofdifferent colleges useless in judging individuals. There's a lotof randomness in how colleges select people, and what they learnthere depends much more on them than the college. Between thesetwo sources of variation, the college someone went to doesn't meana lot. It is to some degree a predictor of ability, but so weakthat we regard it mainly as a source of error and try consciouslyto ignore it.I doubt what we've discovered is an anomaly specific to startups.Probably people have always overestimated the importance of whereone goes to college. We're just finally able to measure it.The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such asuperficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lotof people, probably the majority of people in America, havesome amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went tocollege. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatestliability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked isyour own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Collegesare a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only onereal advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you knowyou wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. When you're excluded,you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider. Butinvariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life.So it is with colleges. Colleges differ, but they're nothing likethe stamp of destiny so many imagine them to be. People aren'twhat some admissions officer decides about them at seventeen.They're what they make themselves.Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went tocollege is not just that you can stop judging them (and yourself)by superficial measures, but that you can focus instead on whatreally matters. What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that's what weshould tell kids. Their job isn't to get good grades so they canget into a good college, but to learn and do. And not just becausethat's more rewarding than worldly success. That will increasinglybe the route to worldly success.Notes[1] Is what we measure worth measuring? I think so. You can getrich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but getting richfrom a technology startup takes some amount of brains. It is justthe kind of work the upper middle class values; it has about thesame intellectual component as being a doctor.[2] Actually, someone did, once. Mitch Kapor's wife Freada wasin charge of HR at Lotus in the early years. (As he is at painsto point out, they did not become romantically involved tillafterward.) At one point they worried Lotus was losing its startupedge and turning into a big company. So as an experiment she senttheir recruiters the resumes of the first 40 employees, withidentifying details changed. These were the people who had madeLotus into the star it was. Not one got an interview.[3] The US News list? Surely no one trusts that. Even if thestatistics they consider are useful, how do they decide on therelative weights? The reason the US News list is meaningful isprecisely because they are so intellectually dishonest in thatrespect. There is no external source they can use to calibrate theweighting of the statistics they use; if there were, we could justuse that instead. What they must do is adjust the weights till thetop schools are the usual suspects in about the right order. Soin effect what the US News list tells us is what the editors thinkthe top schools are, which is probably not far from the conventionalwisdom on the matter. The amusing thing is, because some schoolswork hard to game the system, the editors will have to keep tweakingtheir algorithm to get the rankings they want.[4] Possible doesn't mean easy, of course. A smart student at a party schoolwill inevitably be something of an outcast, just as he orshe would be in most high schools.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, JackieMcDonough, Peter Norvig, and Robert Morris for reading drafts ofthis.
