I was honestly expecting a different sort of rant from Mark Cuban. It's nice to see someone taking on the business of college, without dismissing the need for a college education. Bravo to someone who gets it.
That said, while I agree with his premise, I'll admit to being a little sad about the consequences: people in power rarely talk about it, but the kids who go to the "name schools" have a huge career advantage over the kids who go to Podunk University. I should know -- I went to a tiny school, and somehow managed to end up in silicon valley, where the leaders and power brokers are (wait for it)...almost exclusively graduates of the Ivy League. And this isn't the only industry where that's true.
It's disheartening. A hard-working, smart graduate from Oklahoma State with a degree in computer science degree will be at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to getting the best jobs -- the big boys (Google, Facebook, etc.) might send a recruiter to the campus career fair once a year, but they aren't hosting hackathons, sponsoring scholarships, or setting up permanent shop in the career center, like they'll do for Stanford or Berkeley or MIT. And when it comes time to reach for the management fast-track, those Ivy contacts go a long way.
So, who wins when the ability to pay for college out-of-pocket determines the economic winners and losers? Not the poor. We're rapidly heading to a country with a rigid and unyielding class structure, thanks to the brutal realities of unfettered market capitalism.
Most of the "elite" schools offer fairly generous need based aid. Yes, there are problems like some middle class families getting caught in the gaps -- but the financial divide is a bigger problem in the younger years of a student, all the way from elementary school to high school, where the family's financial means makes a massive difference in the extra attention, extracurricular pursuits, and the quality of instruction at the school.
I can only speak for Silicon Valley where I grew up, but there's a strong correlation between a school's quality and the income level of the school district. Your family's financial status impacts where you live, which impacts the quality of your education, which in turn deeply affects your odds of being accepted to an "elite" school in the first place.
"Most of the "elite" schools offer fairly generous need based aid. Yes, there are problems like some middle class families getting caught in the gaps."
That's a huge problem. The "need" calculation takes into account things like your parents' savings for retirement, as if they're going to cash out their 401k to put you through school. The effect is to lock out the vast majority of students whose parents were responsible, but not rich.
"but there's a strong correlation between a school's quality and the income level of the school district."
Absolutely. That's probably the biggest source of institutionalized classism (and racism) in our society.
Facebook, Apple and Google campus recruitment is about half and half state schools and half private schools. They don't even bother with some of the Ivies like Yale and Dartmouth.
There are quite a few Harvard MBAs at VCs like Sequoia but largely most people working in the valley are not Ivy League. Especially in engineering.
If a kid was already a scion of the upper eschelons of the rigid class structure you're suggesting, why on earth would they squander their birthright to go work 15 hours a day with a bunch of tech weirdos? Rich kids don't go into engineering.
"Facebook, Apple and Google campus recruitment is about half and half state schools and half private schools. They don't even bother with some of the Ivies like Yale and Dartmouth."
You're wrong. They may spend more time at MIT and Stanford, but they spend plenty of time at Brown and Yale and Harvard and the other top schools with CS programs. I know for a fact that Facebook hires a ton of people from Harvard.
"Rich kids don't go into engineering."
You're thinking Paris Hilton, when you should be thinking Moderately Well-Off Kid From Berkeley. That's more than sufficiently "rich", for the purposes of my argument. There are huge numbers of kids living in the suburban midwest for whom a Berkeley CS degree is a financial pipe dream. Dad might be an insurance salesman, and mom a teacher, and they barely have enough money to send junior to State U., let alone a top-tier CS school.
This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT. Do you think it's true? I don't, personally.
These companies hire more from MIT because MIT has so many great candidates, but they are not shy about hiring qualified students from all over (as you personally demonstrate). There is some evidence (from Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study) to support the claim that where you go to school does not generally matter (with a few important caveats related to class and ethnicity -- poor black and hispanic kids do benefit a bit from brand name schools).
EDIT: I should also add that since the elite schools have such great financial aid, the problem with the rigid class structure starts and ends in the K-12 years, like hkmurakami said. The middle and upper class kids get the best schools and academic support network while growing up, so they're the ones that go to Harvard, even though Harvard will always make sure you can afford to attend. This is very disheartening: I agree.
It's a nice piece of Bayesian reasoning, but it increasingly fails to hold up.
The problem is that while there's a very high probability that a randomly-chosen graduate of MIT is very smart and qualified, there's an extremely low probably (and going further down) that any randomly chosen very-smart-and-qualified graduate went to MIT. So by biasing your hiring towards MIT, you're almost eliminating false positives at the cost of massively increasing false negatives during the hot part of the business cycle when demand for new workers is highest.
I've seen a similar effect in action personally. I went to UMass Amherst for undergrad, and when I finished I did interviews. Some companies wanted to talk, many didn't, I ended up with two offers from BigCos and lots from SmallCos and start-ups (this was 2011, so yeah, during a hot-hiring cycle), but still a noticeable "failure rate".
I get a little bit of real work experience and then come to Technion (which, at least in this country, is not known to be called "Israel Institute of Technology" for nothing) for graduate school. Internship-application season arrives. Now everyone wants to talk, and the only things to which I can rationally attribute the change are the name-brand of Technion and the fact of having had some work experience (which does set me strongly above "pure academics", but many people work between undergrad and grad school).
I didn't change (much). I just acquired a pre-made Bayesian evaluation of my potential from someone whose word is taken more seriously than that of UMass Amherst. And the really neat trick here is that Technion simply is not as selective as MIT, by sheer numbers: I'm told that maybe the top 10% of applicants can get into Technion for undergrad, and another 20% of those (2% total) can do well enough to go on for an advanced degree. These are far more than the percentages of applicants who can get into the CS programs at Stanford, CMU, Berkeley and MIT combined. Technion just doesn't have equally tough competition for entry due to its smaller applicant pool.
"This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT."
A brilliant, hard-working student who goes to Oklahoma State will have fewer opportunities than a brilliant student who goes to MIT. The "average student" is irrelevant to my argument.
It's relevant because, quite frankly, there aren't that many brilliant students at low-tier schools compared to the top ones. The only evidence you've given for your argument is that there are lots of top tier people in Silicon Valley, but this is a flawed application of conditional probability.
What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT.
You're trying to argue that the reason that there are so many top-tier grads in positions of power is that top-tier schools are disproportionately graduating talented people. But then you say this:
"What the study I linked suggests is that if the brilliant student was capable of getting into MIT, regardless of whether or not they did get accepted, they are likely to have a similar outcome to the ones who ended up going to MIT."
If this is true, then it implies that the top schools are simply very good at monopolizing the world's intellectual talent. So which seems more likely to you: that the top-tier universities monopolize the world's intellectual talent, or that we've set up a system that systematically rewards the kind of people who get to go to top-tier schools?
Given your previous caveats about minorities and middle-class kids, I think you generally agree with my premise, and now you're arguing just to argue.
It's relevant because, quite frankly, there aren't that many brilliant students at low-tier schools compared to the top ones.
But we're not comparing low-tier to high-tier. We're comparing top 4 or top 5 versus top 20 or top 50. There's plenty of probability that a brilliant student might end up at a top-20 or top-50 institution rather than a top-5 one.
I went to Iowa State, and have participated in a dozen startups. In my experience the big-name school gets you an interview only. The rest is up to you.
And I'm amused to see listed Standford, Berkely and MIT as 'Ivy'! Big, yes, famous, but Ivy?
That said, while I agree with his premise, I'll admit to being a little sad about the consequences: people in power rarely talk about it, but the kids who go to the "name schools" have a huge career advantage over the kids who go to Podunk University. I should know -- I went to a tiny school, and somehow managed to end up in silicon valley, where the leaders and power brokers are (wait for it)...almost exclusively graduates of the Ivy League. And this isn't the only industry where that's true.
It's disheartening. A hard-working, smart graduate from Oklahoma State with a degree in computer science degree will be at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to getting the best jobs -- the big boys (Google, Facebook, etc.) might send a recruiter to the campus career fair once a year, but they aren't hosting hackathons, sponsoring scholarships, or setting up permanent shop in the career center, like they'll do for Stanford or Berkeley or MIT. And when it comes time to reach for the management fast-track, those Ivy contacts go a long way.
So, who wins when the ability to pay for college out-of-pocket determines the economic winners and losers? Not the poor. We're rapidly heading to a country with a rigid and unyielding class structure, thanks to the brutal realities of unfettered market capitalism.