Being a faculty brat, I’ve never really taken some of the rankings seriously. It’s a game. There is the work that you do, and the credit you manage to get for it. You have to advertise yourself in academia and it’s easier to do at some places because they have bigger megaphones. I’m always amused when people don’t get the game and take the name brand stuff too seriously. Quality work will tell.

I did once have someone tell me, I am not making this up, ‘us Harvard types know….’ Hilarious. Look, I’ve met good people and bad people throughout my academic wanderings. Like I said, I can’t take the game too seriously, and personally, I love those big land grant colleges, because I grew up in the shadow of one.

This is a sentiment that, being from California, has always irked me. Why are state schools assumed to be inferior? Elite state schools are better by many measures than most privates. Back in the mid-90′s (so yeah, a bit dated now, but the most recent), NSF rated all the graduate programs in the US. If you count the quality of a school by the number of programs rated in the top 10, then the number one school in the country is UC Berkeley, a state school, with 35. I forget if it was Harvard or Stanford in the #2 position with 24.

My favorite bit was that if you wanted to look at schools under 100 years old (e.g. Duke), the #1 school was founded in the early 60′s – UC San Diego with 18 top-ten programs.

Disclaimer: My BA is from UCSD, and my MA is from Berkeley. My post-doc was in North Carolina.

Okay, I was bit rushed before so my comments really weren’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to address the bit above – if you can’t speak for other programs, how do you know the one you attended was the best?

I think, no I know based on personal experience, that you can have a fine education in many places, and most serious people understand that. Most serious people understand that accomplishments in life are not the necessarily the same as credentials. It’s the unserious who get hung up on ‘name brands’.

In fields with little rigor, I think the added value of a an elite education is minimal. Does it really matter if you get a degree in transgendered studies at a state school as opposed to Harvard? What exactly will a Harvard graduate in such a field know that someone else couldn’t learn by reading a book.

Business is a grey area on this spectrum but I tend more to believing that an elite education does not add much value. Business is more art than engineering. Certainly one can learn many skills at college but every business is unique and every day in business different from the day before. I am dubious that there exist an elite education that will give a graduate a generalized superiority in any business endeavor they might undertake over the course of their lives.

I have experience of a variety of schools, including the elite set. Basically, my experience (limited to five years in a teaching hospital) of Harvard is that it is an excellent place. It’s just that excellence exists in many places, but human nature being what it is, the Harvard types will hire from schools they know because they know the people doing the recommending personally. It’s about trusting people in your own circle and not knowing what you will get if you move outside it. A bit different from excellence, but I can understand the impulse. It can serve you well.