reinventnow

Paul Graham succinctly describes what I’ve thought all along… it doesn’t matter where you go to college:

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

And, he summarizes it quite nicely:

What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that’s what we should tell kids. Their job isn’t to get good grades so they can get into a good college, but to learn and do. And not just because that’s more rewarding than worldly success. That will increasingly be the route to worldly success.

I would go even further to say that it doesn’t matter how much formal education you do after high school (or even high school itself). At this time of the internet, if you have the passion, you can make the connections and learn what you need & want to learn…