The survivorship bias is kind of the point. An employer can't administer an IQ test, but they can hire from MIT or Stanford. They can't pull employees from the good old boy's network, but they can recruit from Harvard.
This is only because schools are so crappy to begin with, by design. If a degree actually meant something it wouldn't matter what school you attained it from.
> If a degree actually meant something it wouldn't matter what school you attained it from
National graduates can't--and shouldn't--be fungible. Harvard, for example, selects and trains for team players. Its graduates can reliably be dropped into client-facing roles with minimal training. They're also extremely responsive to hierarchy. Their campus tradition champions the Socratic method [1] and deëmphasises individual performance. (The joke I've heard is an A is an A-, an A with a glare is a B and an A with a talk is a C. B means you effectively failed.)
Yale, on the other hand, is extremely competitive in terms of grading. Its graduates are ruthlessly ready to challenge hierarchy. This makes them great for internal situations where you need to inject disruption. They need polishing, however, before being placed in front of clients.
High achievers in a field should be diverse, in terms of how they work and approach problems. This is healthy. Degrees mean something. It's just that there's a lot else that's difficult to test for or assess in an interview that matters. What that "else" is varies.
Fair enough. I should have said "more competitive". Individual performance, e.g. being ranked against one's peers, is prized more at Yale than at Harvard. I have mostly hired Yale undergraduates and lawyers--no visibility into their B school.
Thats how university accreditation is meant to work: industry and state/gov agencies are supposed to certify an institution's graduates meet certain minimum standards.
Given that university is becoming the new high-school, is there merit to the idea of just having all universities follow the same curriculum and standardised assessments and exams? Like the University of California system, but nationwide - if not international.
Absolutely. However, because of the current issues there are a lot of politics involved in education, so it's hard to change anything. For example, even if you wanted to implement a "random" system, which is objectively superior for most parents (who wouldn't get in otherwise), it would be shot down quickly.
Similarly, a nation wide curriculum would be shot down because it would make school way more difficult for a lot of parents' kids.
