I am a physics graduate of a state school. I thought my physics program was excellent. I have since studied some additional math from MIT's OpenCourseWare and some machine-learning classes from Coursera. In my opinion, the quality of the classes are roughly the same.

But what I have noticed is that a lot more of the original research comes from the big-name universities. (I suppose that professors compete to go where the most funding is, and also where they can get access to the best grad students.) If I wanted to get a PhD in machine-learning, I'd most want to go to U.Toronto or UCL (University College London). Because that's where the action is.

As a graduate student, if I'm studying the xyz algorithm, I might be learning it from the guy who invented the xyz algorithm. (As well as surrounded by grad students and post-docs who are studying the next version of the xyz algorithm.)

I suppose that, in the STEM fields, there's a trickle-down effect to the undergrads. Surely there's more energy in studying something right where it's being invented.

The comment was claiming that Justin claimed that education didn't matter. I was clarifying that his point seems to me to be that the prestige of the institution you attend doesn't matter, and that more prestigious universities do not offer correspondingly better educations.

Now, as to the truth of that matter, it's a topic there's not a lot of good evidence on.

Obviously MIT and Yale and CMU all select from the very best students, so their graduates are correspondingly better than average as well. The question is whether they are more-better after attending prestigious schools.

Anecdotally, my friends who went to state schools got educations every bit as good as mine, in terms of the quality of instruction and rigor of the classes. Ditto for me comparing my CS degree to a MIT degree (I don't know about CMU).

Also, the null hypothesis (or the dominant prior if you're bayesian) should be that schools provide equivalent educations unless you have some reason to believe that's not the case. What evidence do you have that MIT and CMU provide better educations than other schools?

Again, note that the claim is not "You don't learn anything in college", the claim is "You don't learn anything more at prestigious schools".

Fair enough.

Obviously MIT and Yale and CMU all select from the very best students, so their graduates are correspondingly better than average as well. The question is whether they are more-better after attending prestigious schools.

Sure.

[The] null hypothesis (or the dominant prior if you're bayesian) should be that schools provide equivalent educations unless you have some reason to believe that's not the case.

See, this is where the argument gets pretty flimsy. The prior should take into account the data we have on hand and practically all of it points in the opposite direction. Some data we have includes:

* professors (in many cases, learning techniques from those who invented them)

* quality of students you're interacting with

* laboratory resources available

* the "wisdom of the crowds" about the schools in question

Sorry, but the burden of proof is yours (or Justin's) — practically ipso facto — given that this is a contrarian claim.

From a pure common sense perspective, we should be surprised if there is literally no difference between the CS education at MIT and, say, UC Irvine, just as we should be surprised if there is literally no difference between the dining experience at a restaurant with multiple Michelin Stars and that at one without.

Well that's quite a bit harder to refute. ;)

For example I am in the UK and studied computing at an FE college (probably equivalent to a US community college) and also at a "red brick" university.

Both courses contained introductory Java programming modules. At university the first few lectures were spent whizzing through the Java syntax and by about the fifth lecture we were being introduced to BST implementations.

The college course took about the same time to explain the difference between an object and a class and many students still struggled.

Of course if you are comparing "good college" to "really good college" the difference in intelligence might be much more minimal and admission comes down to whoever studied the hardest for their exams.

At the time I got my engineering degree, my dept was in the top 20. It was pretty clear through the entire 4 years that educating undergrads was not a serious priority for the professors or the dept as a whole; research was king. I'd be pretty open to evidence that colleges without world-renowned research are actually better teachers.