I was accepted to a very prestigious university, and as my friends, their parents, and other adults (including some family) found out, there was mostly encouragement to just go there. The attitude was, “why wouldn’t I want to go there? Just think of the opportunity!” They we’re shocked I was thinking of attending a state school instead of automatically saying yes to the prestigious one.

My parents were much more practical, pointing out how much it would cost - even after the scholarships I’d be given - and how much debt I’d have at the end of 4 years.

They pointed out how difficult it can be to go a long ways away for college sometimes, and how young adults of that age can struggle, especially in the first year. I saw that happen to many friends and acquaintances; leaving to a school far away, only to move back much closer to home after a year or two.

One friend who wasn’t strongly encouraging me to go to the prestigious school? Someone who was in a grad program at that prestigious school. He was confident I’d succeed and be happy at either a smaller, state university, or the big name one. When I chose the state school, this friend - who had been pretty neutral up to then - said he was very impressed and happy that I went the way that I did.

All the people who hadn’t had that experience seemed pretty hesitantly approving of my choice to go to the state school. “Oh, you chose that one? ... well, good for you!”

I later ended up working at the same company as many people from more prestigious schools, and graduating from the state school with no debt let me be a co-founder of a company much earlier in my life than if I had tens of thousands of college debt. I’m totally happy with my choice.

After you meet a few dunces from a top school and the rare genius who went to CC, you really stop caring.

College is what you make it. If you aren't networking a top school, I don't see the purpose, we all learn math.

I'll never be able to truly compare the two, but I know at my state school that I learned a lot, improved my ability to learn, and gained a lot in perseverance, not to mention made some great friends.

My friends generally did not have parents who worked at top Wall Street firms, were nationally-elected politicians, or were celebrities, and my friends generally were not going to work at the most high-paying, time-demanding, possibly-quality-of-life-shrinking companies/jobs. That's okay, because I don't want to do 80 or 100 hour work weeks, and I don't want the people around me encouraging that, because I want to experience a lot more to life than those kinds of work experiences. Nothing wrong with people who want that, but this route worked well for me.

Part of why it worked for me is because I was privileged enough to have parents who helped me understand myself and what I wanted out of life.

>if Elon Musk comes out and says SpaceX considers a cert from $NetflixOfEducation as equal to an engineering degree from MIT on a resume... then it's all over.

If 50 developers apply for a job and 3 of them are from MIT and 47 are from lesser known schools, using the MIT signal as a filter is efficient. If $NetflixOfEducation is too accessible and half of the applicants have it, then it loses its value as a hiring signal. Of course there are other filters too. Previous employers is an important one. You can create comprehensive professional examinations like they do in medicine, where a passing grade is a major achievement. But these don't scale well because the more they scale the easier it is to cheat, especially if the risks of getting caught cheating are minor (i.e. there aren't previous barriers that must be overcome via investment of time in other institutions first).

The other dynamic of top schools is the networking effect. There is real value in concentrating thousands of the "best and brightest" together in one place and bouncing them off each other. It doesn't scale, which is both a problem (for qualified people who are excluded for whatever reason) and a benefit (for those who participate, there is value in the scarcity).

Only for companies who hire for signals.

For companies that hire for throughput this does not hold.

Additionally, a person with a hard science BS from a small college may well have received a far superior education than someone graduating from a top tier university in the same discipline. It makes a huge difference for many students how engaged their professors are in teaching, vs research.

My undergrad courses might not have gotten me totally ready for an interview at a FAANG company (though it's been over a decade since I graduated!), but that also wasn't a goal of mine.

And my undergrad courses did totally prepare me for a few interviews at very highly-respected companies, complete with job offers, without needing a lot of external practice.

Indeed. Additionally --- not sure if this is true for all fields --- the stuff taught on the college level is basic enough so that passable level of teaching is fine, as better teaching is marginally useful for good students. Things change a bit on the doctoral level, where the topics diverge more and it's important to go to a good direction early on --- however, not sure how much this differentiates universities inside the US.

I had mediocre grades and stats (#2 in class, 1500/1600) but I didn’t get into a prestigious school and went to my state school. The fact that I couldn’t even get into a top school appears to bode pretty poorly for my future if this is the criteria!

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:akhilcacharya%20school&sort...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:akhilcacharya%20elite&sort=...

I get how strongly you feel, but it goes against the spirit of the site when people keep posting so repetitively about one particular issue that they feel strongly about. HN threads are supposed to be driven by curiosity, which is a quite different motivation.

If we're talking whether someone will be generally happy and successful in life regardless of where they attend school, yes, I 100% think a person very much does matter more than any school they may attend.

And if we're talking whether someone is more "worthwhile", or will have a better life, if they get accepted into a prestigious school, I don't think that at all.

I think some circumstances I had no influence over, including going to high school in a less-populous state that likely had many fewer people even applying to prestigious schools, probably had a big part in me getting accepted.

> The fact that I couldn’t even get into a top school appears to bode pretty poorly for my future if this is the criteria!

What is the criteria you think would bode poorly for you? If you're a hard worker, spend lots of time to learn your chosen career skills, and spend lots of time becoming a clear and empathetic communicator, I think you can be very successful in your chosen career path, regardless of your GPA or standardized test scores from high school.

And with the cost of schools only rising, the impact on families that might appear "well off" only increases too. So people get loans. And maybe that loan will be worth it and the networking you do will pay for it. Or maybe it won't.

I would argue that for many people, unless it's not just an elite school but THE elite school, it probably doesn't pay off.

This was not at all true in my situation.

Over ten years later, I imagine some things are different, and I know some very rich schools have shifted certain policies since then.

However, meeting those goals require a lot of money. This is especially the case since interesting tech jobs, access to niche resources, and tolerance of alternative lifestyles are all associated with living in a large city.

Therefore, I find myself in a situation where making a lot of money isn't my goal, but I feel that I have to do it if I want to achieve my goals.

I always wonder why using a modern tech is interesting? Let's say there's a job where you're using J2EE 1.4 or some other outdated technology from the early 2000s. The thing is, I remember when that technology was hot shit and people considered working on it very interesting. So, it looks like, over the course of time, doing the very same task, with the same day-to-day activities, went from interesting to uninteresting?

I doubt the OP would mind building a J2EE project from scratch to solve a novel problem. But nobody does that -- usually if there is a J2EE job, it's maintenance, which can be less interesting. And if there is a novel problem, it will likely be solved with the current status quo ("modern") technology.

For me it's couple of things:

My experience has been that newer languages and frameworks tend to be more user friendly. In particular, I tend to enjoy the abstraction and design aspects of programming more than the nuts and bolts technology aspects. So, for example, I find the low level aspects (e.g. memory management) of C annoying and I appreciate that React lets me use all of the abstractions that a programming language provides to define UI.

I tend to like functional programming techniques and dislike object oriented ones. FP techniques seem to be popular with the current generation of tech while the previous generation seems to have been dominated by OO. Of course that's not true in every domain and could change in the future.

This is a stereotype, but I tend to associate older tech stacks with companies that are more conservative, less innovative/more established, and/or less technology focused.

Finally, like you guys have mentioned, newer tech is associated with less maintenance work and greater future job prospects; even if that's just signaling as opposed to being inherent to the technologies themselves.

I wrote my comment because I felt some disingenuity in the OP saying that jobs with modern tech stacks are interesting for him. It means that he's either genuinely intersted in following the tech frameworks threadmill, and jobs with modern tech stack allow him to do that - or, he's lying to himself that he's intersting in it, to make getting up for work every day a little bit easier.

Can't you work remotely? There are a lot of smaller cities (at least in Europe) that have a great vibe, are welcoming to all kinds of people, and do not have extreme housing costs.

I live in such a city, a large chunk of the population are students, so there is a vibrant social and nightlife. But the city is too small to have a lot of 'big city problems'.

We lived in Tübingen (Germany) for five years. But the city was just a tad too small for my taste. There are only few stores (outside tourism-focused stores) and it there is fairly little to do in terms of concerts, etc. It is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area, so there are a lot of work opportunities. I loved the scenery of Southern Germany, but Germany is too hierarchical, conservative, and old-fashioned for my taste (of course, there are exceptions, such as Berlin). It's really a drag that you can't do groceries on a Sunday, people expect you to pay with cash everywhere, internet connections are somewhat mediocre, etc. Oh, and there is almost no biking infrastructure in cities (outside cities it's quite ok). That said, a lot our our friends/colleagues there like Tübingen/Stuttgart area.

We moved back to Groningen, The Netherlands (where I studied + did my PhD and my wife did her PhD). It may be somewhat remote for some people. But I love it, there are multiple concert venues (including the legendary Vera), there are plenty of tech-related activities. We have fiber to home. We can shop on Sundays (handy when you work throughout the week). Bicycles are the primary form of transportation. Our 5yo daughter clearly enjoys school here more (used to be in Kindergarten in Germany). The largest downside of Groningen is that there is not a lot of challenging local work (outside the university).

If my wasn't offered a job in Groningen, we would have considered Nijmegen, perhaps Utrecht (+ nearby towns) or Leiden. I have worked several months in Amsterdam, but it is too busy for me ;).

In America I can buy groceries any day of the week, but as someone who often works odd hours, I find it a drag that almost none are open past 10 or 11pm. The buses don't run after midnight~1am, either, so if I need a dozen eggs at 3am, I have to get in my car and drive.

I feel that's not the sort of behavior that a city with aspirations should be encouraging. If you want interesting things happening in your city, you need people working at all hours to make it happen, and many will be on wages that don't support living downtown. You don't want every worker driving a car. It's simply not scalable.

> people expect you to pay with cash everywhere

I'm the opposite. I only pay by card or check for regular pre-planned purchases (like rent, or insurance). It's well established that people buy less when they pay with cash! I'm disappointed by all the trendy new shops that are card-only.

I used to live in Atlanta and there was a 24-hour Kroger right across the street from my townhome. One night at 2am, I bought a gas grill at that Kroger on a whim. Good times.

Now I live in Silicon Valley and there are quite a few 24-hour grocery stores according to google map.

Choosing a small city with a train station, however, can dramatically improve your access to most of these things as the trains typically imply population, which typically begets services such as internet, pharmacies, etc.

So honestly my first recommendation is filtering small cities by that.

0: https://www.thelocal.de/20181221/germans-turn-to-medibus-as-...

1: https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/divided-nation-g...

Well, Nentershausen is very small ;). We had weekends with friends in Nentershausen for a couple of years. It's a village, not a city.

I was more thinking along the lines of (random Dutch/German university cities): Heidelberg, Tübingen, Ulm, Erlangen, Nürnberg, Nijmegen, Groningen, Leiden, etc.

It's a big city but it's so spread out that living in one of the outlying districts can be like living in a small town near a big city (in many ways Berlin feels more like an agglomeration of many smaller cities than e.g. Vienna).

It's also (still) a relatively affordable city, especially outside the central districts.

I had a similar high-achieving story until I experienced some mental health issues during my PhD. I came out the other side realising that what made me happy wasn't a high-octane, top-of-my-field job, but a bunch of other stuff that I went for instead. I mainly feel lucky that I was well-placed to do that, even if some might say I'd wasted some potential.

For example, my daughter recently asked if she should stay home to study for exams that are about 3 weeks away instead of going on a school trip to a different city. I told her to study her ass off precisely so that she could go without any guilt.

She did, and she feels much more rounded and fulfilled.

Don't think that what your parents did was so wrong it needs to be corrected. Think of what was missing and what you can do about it.

But generally, I talk to them about their goals and ask them if they really want them. Usually the answer is yes.

Then I say something like "Are you willing to give up some play time with fortnite (or equivalent)" to achieve your goal? Usually the answer is yes.

Then I ask them how they will know they are getting closer to their goals. Usually they'll say something that makes no sense (because they're kids) and so we'll google characteristics of getting towards said goal.

Then I'll ask them what do they think they should do on a weekly basis so that in 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, they will be at the level they should be in that time. They usually have a good answer based on aforementioned googling.

Then I ask them when they plan to make the time for this. Usually they have a good answer for this since they manage their own schedule.

Then, my job is just to remind them if they forget and if they are not keeping up, ask them if their goals have changed or why they are not keeping up with their plans. This is the part where sometimes I need to pound them on their heads figuratively.

I like my 9-to-5(ish) job coding up software that people actually use. I also like that when I go home, I don't have the emotional baggage of worrying about work.

It isn't like smart would mean more motivation or anything. I do think it would have benefits like not being as able to be ripped off or fooled by mostly simple math. I think it'd mean we'd have more knowledgeable nurses and fewer folks that believe medical woo.

I'd even argue that being good fails if you aren't smart. "Schools just need to get back to the 3 R's - readin', writing', and 'rithmatic" isn't all ill-intentioned, after all, and is (in part) a complaint that kids aren't ready for the world, but their solution shows ignorance to what the schools teach, why it is taught, and things like that.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that smarts without wisdom and/or ethics can cause some serious damage?

I have to also note that in my ~20yrs of corporate experience, the kinder you are, in concert with being as blunt and truthful as possible, the more people will trust and value your input.

I think these traits emerge if you repeat mantra's like the ones above to yourself multiple times a day - when skimming through your emails in the morning (I often just delete or archive all but 1 or 2), when in a meeting that's going in circles or getting heated (I often just smile and leave), when you're running late for work, when you're worried about taking time off, when your air conditioner brakes or you get into a minor fender bender, or $200K of you're employee owned shares are suddenly nullified. It's all a grand illusion, and it just doesn't matter.

This is not one to tell others when they struggle, same as yours, but it can help me from time to time.

You will screw up. There are people smarter than you. Do your best to contribute and be honest about what you know and don't know, and you will be highly valued by your peers.

I like the last bit: What I am saying is this: the score is not what matters. Life does not have to be regarded as some game in which scores are kept and somebody wins. If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Just thought I'd say I love this description.

I've recently changed my mind and I think offloading the discovery of purpose onto children creates more pressure on them than a moderate pressure to conform to society's existing expectations. What's worse than being unhappy and being told you have no reason to be unhappy?

If they discover on their own that they don't care about society's rules and living off in the woods and growing their own food is the key to happiness, so be it. But to assume everyone will be able to develop that path to happiness is optimizing for the edge case. Most people need guard rails for life and to live within a social construct that defines success and failure for them.

> not make the Forbes rich list or a Nobel prize

...not to mention that many scientists gave up opportunities to go after Nobel prizes to focus instead on more meaningful topics of research.

I'm interested in Ivy League universities admissions though. From their point of view I think they want the best of the best

I wonder if they try to filter out the people who are smart but would rather enjoy life than change the world.

Taking a mindfulness class was what introduced me to the concept, but regular practice of gratitude helped save my mind (and perhaps my life!).

That's what I'm struggling with with my 15 year old. This is currently affecting his GPA to the point where it'd limit his college options to community college, and maybe not even that (since you do have to work even there to not fail).

I simply can't convince him that this is not a good use of his time, and he will regret it profoundly later in life.

Not sure about your situation or feasibility, but banning the activity for 30 days might clear the fog. There are blogs about journalists giving up Twitter temporarily for example.

Another angle might be explaining the difference between a creator and consumer.