The idea of an elite league is it takes a certain level of performance to get in. Is Major League Baseball a failure because only a tiny percentage make it? Should everyone make it to the bigs?
False analogy. Going to Harvard isn't about getting a better education, and it's not about getting there because you're just so durn meritorious that the Harvard admissions people were wowwed by your obvious intelligence and industriousness. It's about getting the Harvard name. Essentially, people are paying $200K for a piece of paper that says "Harvard" on it.
Ever hear of anything called "the Harvard number"? If not, then Google it.
Yes, the Harvard argument that Thiel made was ridiculous.
However, the idea of an education bubble makes some sense. Except for engineering and law, I can’t think of many fields that might have a reasonable pay-back. Even medicine isn’t such a good payback anymore (mainly because of Obamacare).
I’ve seen signs of the bubble:
- an MBA was once a valuable pedigree - now they’re a dime a dozen.
- an increasingly popular trend is to complete the first two years in a community college and transfer the credits to a four-year institution. This way the core class requirements can be obtained on the cheap and the student only has to pay through the nose for the specialty classes.
- one of the decisions that are considered when a student selects a college is its status as a “party school”. I didn’t see this when I applied in the 1970s, and in the 1980s it was done as a joke. Now it’s a part of a school’s attributes. Apparently, college is now viewed as a pre-adult passage of time rather than a means in which to train for a career.
- the attitude from new college grads is more along the lines of ‘what can you do for me’ rather than ‘what can I do for my employer’. I’ve seen engineering grads who don’t know how to take a derivative, others who are unwilling to work overtime, and expect break rooms that have video games and ping-pong tables.
I think his point is that Harvard grads are successful more because of the abilities they had to show in order TO GET IN, rather than due to what they learned while they were there.
Bill Gates is a successful guy who went to Harvard -- but he never got past his sophomore year, correctly judging that taking advantage of business opportunities in the computer area was a better idea than going to class.