> It turns out that universities succeed by being prestigious, not by teaching well.

As someone that's gone to mid schools and has lots of friends that went to top schools, I was surprised to find that I think I got more education out of my experience. BUT they certainly got far more opportunities (internships, RSUs, ability to publish, networking, etc). I could sit down and solve a problem faster than them but they had more hands on experience and had several internships and research opportunities I envied. It was kinda odd but made sense.

But it took me far too long to realize something rather obvious. Education quality __should__ saturate and likely have a bias towards the mid schools being slightly better at teaching. The reasons? Well, this is conjecture, but I'd like to hear other's thoughts.

Now I still think in general the top schools are probably better. But I think the difference is much flatter than many assume.

- There's just far more graduates per year than academic positions. Even at the Community College I started at I had a Harvard educated math professor. At my Uni (I did physics), we had a Harvard, a few MIT, a few Berkeley and others. I guess it should make sense that it should trickle down if the market is saturated. Differentiating candidates can be a messy business sometimes and can come down to nuance if all of them are top level. MIT alone graduates about 50 PhDs in physics a year and across the US there's 200 tenure track positions. Berkeley does about the same, and so 2 schools could fill half of all positions (without getting into specialty and all the nuance like living location and spouses. We're guesstimating here).

- Possible bias towards mid schools can happen when top schools are highly focusing on research. At a R1 university, professors are more judged by their research than their teaching skills, so it becomes a secondary priority. They care more about their grad students, research grants, etc. So you get graduate students teaching (which can be very hit or miss) or often checked out professors. Of course, there are also lecturer positions and those can make this fuzzier. And we all know stellar people like Gilbert Strang. Basically if you want to do the best research you're going to aim at the top schools with the top funding who will enable you to do the most. But if you're more theoretical or care more about teaching or where you live, you won't prioritize that as much.

- Does metric hacking or metric pursuit play a role too? Academics is very cut throat and competitive. There is a big publish or perish paradigm and a major focus on work being novel. You can probably imagine it can be difficult to publish work that is highly novel and successful while doing it quickly and continually. We've seen plenty of works that get through by "novelty through obscurification" as well as flat out frauds. These are far from the majority of cases, but certainly we should recognize that the system has a pressure that encourages this behavior. Which what I'm getting at is that if you want to sit down and study a long term problem or want to research unpopular ideas and teach you probably aren't going to end up at a top university either. So question is how this factors in.

Overall I think the first point is really the most critical, but I think the others are worth considering. I'm sure some other people might have thoughts and I'm very open to hearing them. I think we can do a lot for academia by destroying this notion of prestige. At the end it matters what people can do, though unfortunately that is often hard to measure (otherwise hiring would be really easy and fast). But prestige is self-reinforcing as it makes those schools more likely to get recruitment, internship opportunities for their students, and grants.

I do really think there is a big opportunity for disruption in education. I do love remote and online education, but I still do not think it is a substitute for what can be done in person. But I think this disruption is much harder and requires a cultural shift. Assuming the premise is true. But some of that cultural shift can be things like taking interns from lower schools, because those networks need to be formed.