If we set aside the social jockeying and ego boosting, to me the obvious relevance is for hiring/selecting employees. The primary reason I would care whether or not somebody went to a fancy school would be dependent on to the extent that this information can tell me whether or not they would be successful in a particular job I am hiring for. To the extent that it is predictive of success on the job, then I’d want to know.
My gut tells my that it is only slightly helpful, but I don’t have any evidence to support that gut feeling: I think that there are few idiots at the Ivy Leagues, but there are lots of smart people outside of the Ivy Leagues. My rough mental model is that if I were to filter job candidates based on school ranking and look only at candidates who attended the top 25 or top 50 schools, then I would successfully eliminate some bad fit candidates (in a simplistic model in which we can condense success on the job down to a single metric, maybe I’d eliminate the bottom 10%). But I suspect that I’d also end up eliminating a lot of really good candidates from the top 50%.
If we set aside the social jockeying and ego boosting, to me the obvious relevance is for hiring/selecting employees. The primary reason I would care whether or not somebody went to a fancy school would be dependent on to the extent that this information can tell me whether or not they would be successful in a particular job I am hiring for. To the extent that it is predictive of success on the job, then I’d want to know.
My gut tells my that it is only slightly helpful, but I don’t have any evidence to support that gut feeling: I think that there are few idiots at the Ivy Leagues, but there are lots of smart people outside of the Ivy Leagues. My rough mental model is that if I were to filter job candidates based on school ranking and look only at candidates who attended the top 25 or top 50 schools, then I would successfully eliminate some bad fit candidates (in a simplistic model in which we can condense success on the job down to a single metric, maybe I’d eliminate the bottom 10%). But I suspect that I’d also end up eliminating a lot of really good candidates from the top 50%.