Thread by @dhh

Let’s no forget why this college admission scandal is a thing: Because so many American companies use a diploma from a brand-name university as a caste sorting system. This isn’t about “education”, it’s about gate-keeping the aristocrats.

Tech companies are notorious for their Ivy preferences. Stanford, MIT, Berkeley. I’m sure you can get a nice education there but gtfo about it being some singular mark of virtue. Evaluate candidates on merits related to the work. Not credentials, not Ivy markers.

I graduated from Copenhagen Business School. My “application” was simply my high-school diploma and C+ grade point average. No fucking laundry list of extracurriculars, athletic trophies, or any of the other bullshit the American application process makes students dance for.

And you know what? My education was FINE. Introduction to all the basics of business administration and computer science. All the tools needed to run a software company for ~two decades that’s made 100s of millions in revenues. Cost to the Danish state? $10k per undergrad!

That’s not $10k per year. That’s $10k TOTAL for an undergrad degree at Copenhagen Business School. This assumption that a quality education must be six figures to be worth it is utterly insane. It’s a debt trap that reinforces the same caste system.

And of course, I didn’t actually pay that $10k as a student. The Danish state paid ME to attend university. Which meant that attending university without well-to-do parents or a crushing debt burden was possible. Basic societal investment in the education of the populace.

So. Maybe at least a portion of the (justified) outrage over this college admissions scandal could be directed at the root cause: The caste system based on brand-name degrees perpetuated by American businesses.

Which of course is the conclusion of anyone who actually examines the data. Google used to be Stanford snobs until they ran the data. Conclusion: brand-name degree is not correlated with higher performance! forbes.com/sites/gregoryf…