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%.
Probably something like how much effort should be spent on building EA groups at said University. I agree with the examples Linch gives for where this wouldn’t be relevant.
Hmm, I think it depends on what the relevance is for. What do you have in mind?
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%.
Probably something like how much effort should be spent on building EA groups at said University. I agree with the examples Linch gives for where this wouldn’t be relevant.