Reply to Perspective on the Madness

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People don’t need to argue with anecdotes, there are studies on this. There was the big one in Nature last year that looked at the backgrounds of 26k+ high achievers. Yes, top schools are overrepresented but also, yes, the majority of high achievement people in non-academic fields (academia is a different story) didn’t attend a top-top school. And a lot of the people identified as having attended a top school went there for grad school instead of undergrad.

OP is not wrong that people need to chill a bit. There is life and opportunity outside of four years of college.[/quote]

Here is the Abstract from the study you cite.  Hard to square this with your conclusion:

The highest-achieving figures in politics, business, academia, and the media dominate public discourse and wield great influence in society. Education—perhaps especially at “elite” colleges and universities—may lie at the heart of the divide between the general public and these top achievers. In this paper, we build a new data set for the American “elite” and systematically examine the link between selective schools and outstanding achievements. In Study 1, across 30 different achievement groups totaling 26,198 people, we document patterns of attendance at a set of 34 “Elite” 34 schools, the 8 Ivy League schools, and Harvard University in particular. In Study 2, we surveyed 1810 laypeople to estimate how well they are aware of the key empirical facts from Study 1. We found that exceptional achievement is surprisingly strongly associated with “elite” education, especially obtaining a degree from Harvard, and the general public tends to underestimate the size of this effect. [b]Attending one of just 34 institutions of higher education out of the roughly 4000 in the U.S. appears to be a critical and surprising factor separating extraordinary achievers from others in their fields.[/b][/quote]

Along these lines, Harvard graduates have a higher rate of incarceration (really), divorce and health problems. This is reported by none other than Harvard professor and father of Disruption Theory, Clayton Christensen.
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