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Obviously they already had political connections and it didn't matter whether they went to Harvard or some state college.
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<p>Uh, how's that? Have you bothered to read the biographies of these Presidents I mentioned? Nixon grew up dirt-poor. After all, that's why Nixon couldn't afford to go to Harvard despite Harvard giving him a full-tuition scholarship, because he still couldn't afford the living costs. Truman never graduated from college at all, and was basically a farmer in his early life. Ronald Reagan's early life was, at best, middle-class. LBJ too was basically born to a poor farming family. </p>
<p>So I'm quite curious to understand what are these early political connections that these guys "already had". If they did have these early political connections, historians apparently don't know about them. What is more accurate to say is that these guys CREATED THEIR OWN political connections. They were certainly not born with them. Again, if Nixon was so well connected, then why could he not come up with even the living costs to go to Harvard? </p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Truman%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Truman</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_nixon%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_nixon</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_johnson#Early_years%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_johnson#Early_years</a></p>
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doesn't prove that the average person can be as successful coming from a no-name college as from an Ivy
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<p>Nobody is saying that the average person can be as successful coming from a no-name school than from an Ivy. But the point is, people who go to no-name schools should not be discouraged or demoralized. You can be highly successful coming from a no-name school through sheer dint of hard work. </p>
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I really think that the overwhelming majority of any benefits coming from an Ivy or equivalent is actually from the intelligence and motivation of their student body. That's not to discredit any of those schools, because I'm sure they are wonderful places, but to try to say that there are actual quantifiable benefits in the medical school admissions process by graduating from one of those places I think is extremely difficult to do with any conviction.
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<p>Well, actually, I would say that there is one big advantage that the top schools bring to the table. It's what economists would call the 'reduction of sorting costs'. To use Econ-speak, basically, the top schools are highly selective, and by graduating from such a school, you are signalling to the market that you were good enough to get admitted to the school in the first place. In other words, the graduates have already been "pre-sorted", which means that later adcoms or later employers can spend less effort in doing their own sorting. For example, at every no-name school, there are always some students who are just as good as the students Harvard. The problem is, at the no-name school, how exactly are you going to find these top students? How do you sort through the pile in order to identify them? Yes, you can use certain indicators like grades and so forth, but these are poor indicators because the fact is, some classes and some majors are easier than others, and many students can get very high GPA's for doing very little work. </p>
<p>Consider this analogy. Let's say that you go to the soup shelf of the supermarket and you can see all of the various kinds of soups by reading the labels. I.e., this is cream of broccoli, this is chicken noodle, this is minestrone, etc. Hence, all of the items have been presorted. People are willing to buy these cans of soup because they know what kind of soup is inside. They don't know EXACTLY what they will get, as Campbell's might have screwed up and accidentally switched cans. But you know with a high degree of confidence that what you buy is what you are going to get. Then I come in and I rip off all of the labels from the cans. So now all you see are a bunch of bare cans. Are you willing to transact? Probably not, because you don't know what kind of soup you are buying. And even if you are willing to transact, you are certainly not going to pay as much as you were before because, again, you don't know what kind of soup you are buying, and that uncertainty reduces value. </p>
<p>So look at things from the perspective of the adcom at, say, Harvard Medical School. When they see an applicant from Harvard College, the adcom has a long history of admitting Harvard College students, so they know what to expect, they basically know what they're going to get. So there will be few surprises. However, if they get an application from a guy who comes from some college that nobody has ever heard of, there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding the candidate. The safe thing to do is then simply reject this candidate in favor of a known quantity.</p>