(An interesting take on perils to be avoided in college culture from Dan Wang)
A good starting point is this SSC post, which notes: "In general, [Dale & Krueger 2011] find no advantage from attending more selective colleges. Although Harvard students earn much more than University of Podunk students, this is entirely explained by Harvard only accepting the highest-ability people. Conditional on a given level of ability, people do not earn more money by going to more selective colleges...Overall, unless people come from a disadvantaged background, there’s surprisingly little evidence that going to a good college as an undergraduate is helpful in the long term – except possibly for a few positions like President or Supreme Court justice." No argument that many colleges are getting harder to get into; but clearly, it doesn't matter as much as you might think.
And that's the point I'd like to expand on. There are two messages that we're getting these days from the ambient culture about college decisions:
- If you don't get into the college of your choice, your life is ruined, that's your one chance, you're now a loser and you won't be able to get a good job (society's current message)
- In order to work on anything meaningful, it has to be something involving AI, x-risk, or EA/rationality-adjacent topics. (this community's implied message)
It turns out that neither of these have much to do with meaning or personal happiness.[1]
I worry that earnest young rationalists, who are already anxious enough when they recognize the pervasive irrationality in society, will have their anxiety exacerbated by these discussions and the extra fuel they add to the (unnecessary) college admissions madness I'm arguing against here. There is also something to be said here against the tendency of people in the rationalist community to define themselves based on intelligence. Intelligence is only a proxy indicator for actual accomplishment. (No one was ever recruited onto a basketball team for being 6'10". They're recruited because they can play good basketball. Yes, height is correlated with that, but it's still only a proxy.) And you have to keep in mind, getting into college isn't the accomplishment.
There are certainly choices you can make that will damage your happiness in life. These do not have to do with which college you go to. They are things like abusing substances, driving unsafely, harming the people you care about or allowing them to harm you. I should clarify that this is not an argument that college is pointless, that you shouldn't try to get in, or that choice of program is 100% entirely irrelevant to your life. I think you should try to get into the best school you can, that's best-suited to what you want to do. What you should take away from this is that there's no point killing yourself to do it, and don't worry too much, because if you don't get in to your top choice(s), you'll be fine anyway.
The overall message is that wherever you go to college, it will not significantly harm or help your chance at a good life.
College admissions madness – noticeably worse in the 30ish years since I applied to undergrad – is mostly motivated by status considerations. Yes, status helps you do other things, much like developing a chess piece's position, and I've wondered myself about how much time to spend looking impressive vs actually "doing things." I don't have an answer for that, other than for me personally, the answer is clearly not "indefinitely increase status throughout life." I tried it. It makes me miserable and is unsustainable, and defeats the purpose of being able to use the status to "do things." Some problems are 1) that we can never know when your quest for status is actually just motivated by the immediately positive feedback you get right now from someone recognizing your status (rather than it being a vehicle to accomplish other things) and 2) that status is an ordinal good – it's about ranking, not absolute value. Moreover, it's necessarily zero sum. If you rise one spot in a status competition, someone else drops one spot. Smart people – emotionally and intellectually smart people – stay out of zero-sum games, including status competitions. One major drawback of the internet is that suddenly we're all aware of the same status hierarchies and aware of how the other half live, and we are drawn into the game, instead of appreciating that in absolute terms we mostly have good lives, and will have the same life regardless of where we rank in status competitions, including "where was your undergrad institution ranked?"
It's tragic that, so far as we know, this is the one place and time in the universe where such a thing as happiness can exist, and the most evolved beings on this planet who live in wealthy free nations with material lives our ancestors could only dream about, are squandering our happiness to worry about whether their neighbor might think they're better.
So here are some follow-up questions and objections that I imagine might be voiced by a young person connected to the rationality community, puzzled by what they're reading here, against the backdrop of other messages they've been getting.
"I want to work on the most important problems, especially x-risk problems. I can't do that unless I get into these institutions."
It is very unlikely that getting into a certain university is 100% gating to whether you can do anything that contributes in a certain area. (Worth asking here: are you working on nuclear x-risk? Why not? Even the risk vs probability graph here shows nuclear war having an expected value worse than rogue AI on the 200 year horizon; I don't think the probability of nuclear war drops as much with shorter time periods as rogue AI drops. Seriously. Work on nuclear weapons reduction, that has a much clearer payoff.) If you don't end up in a position to do anything related, you'll still have a good life. And to that someone might say, "So you're admitting you're just interested in having a good time, and you're not stressing too much about working on x-risk or any other cause? How incredibly selfish!" This is the paradox. If you want to work on x-risk, and you apply and can't get in to your preferred programs – guess what? It's probably because people better than you at those skills got the spots you were applying for. And they're going to do a better job working on those problems than you would have, so the work gets done anyway. So there's the paradox – unless you're saying what matters is you and your little ego getting into that spot, rather than progress being made, you shouldn't be upset about that.[2] It's fine, and you'll still have the same quality of life you would otherwise have.
If you're objecting to my statement that the admissions process is fair and accurate, and you're saying "the applicants who beat me out won't necessarily be better than me – they're just people who hire better essay writers, or whose richer family gave more money to the university, or who are better looking, or [endless list of unfair gamey things that have nothing to do with success in the chosen field of endeavor.]" And you are quite possibly correct! So this doesn't reflect on who you are, you have no control over it, and you'll still have a good life!
"But I can't do [exact career] unless I get into [chosen institution.]"
Rarely are career tracks so black and white. Yes, it might be harder to go from A to B (become a professor, get funded by a VC, etc) if you don't start out at a top institution, but rarely is it a go/no-go situation. But even that difference in access is not really about the education, and is more about networking and access. You can do that with internships, visiting your friend who did get in and making contacts, or doing projects with contacts you make online. If you're hoping you can just rely on the credential you get from institution X and are not doing anything related to that career before you get there, outside of the institution...then maybe it's just the status of the institution you want, and not what it can actually do for you in terms of making you better at that field of endeavor? (See more on this below in the "But I won't be able to learn..." section.)
In fact there are very few one-hour periods in your life that strongly determine the rest of your life – life is mostly the accumulation of small decisions made multiple times a day. The discrete future-determining events tend to be either not programmed (e.g. random introduction at a social event) or have nothing to do with your career (asking someone on impulse for their phone number, and later you start a family with them.) You might object that there was an admissions test you didn't do well on, but guess what - your ability at that test was determined well before you sat down, in fact mostly before you were born.[4] And even then, a bad score because you were sick doesn't destroy the rest of your life the way, say, mistreating a family member might.
An anecdote, with thrills and spills: a med student that I once supervised as a resident got back her Step 1 score while I was working with her. For non-medical people, this is the single most important test score that determines how competitive you are as a residency applicant – both in terms of the programs you might go to, or even the specialty you might get into (some specialties are harder to get into than others.) She remains the best med student I ever worked with – but when she got back her score it was quite disappointing to her. "I feel like my future just closed off! I can't get into [competitive specialty.]" And with her score, she was probably right (a spill.) So I asked her to go for a walk with me and I told her I thought she would have wasted her talent on [competitive specialty] and that she'd be a talented psychiatrist (which is not as hard to get into, though this is changing – fashions in medicine are funny things.) Fast forward, she is now in her psychiatry residency (thrill), and got into [extremely competitive program.] I told her to stay at our program, partly out of selfishness at wanting to retain her and work with her (which I freely admitted) but I also thought she would be happier. I haven't spoken to her recently but I've heard that she hasn't enjoyed her training experience so far, for deeply unpleasant reasons that have to do with the culture of the place but not the rigor or work hours (a spill.)
"If I want to be a professor at a major university, or a physician, or a lawyer, there are big differences in my chances based on what college I'm applying from. There are real hoops and gatekeepers."
First, see "But I can't do exact career" above. Also, the same thing applies as with X-risk above: if you're really in it for patient care, or justice, etc. and you didn't get in, then someone else better than you got your spot. Fine! Your patients or clients will still be taken care of, and you'll still be happy as not a doctor or lawyer. (In fact, likely happier. The burn-out statistics for these professions are abysmal. And sometime read up on the lives of people who had physics units, or other equally Important Things, named after them. Maybe you're more selfless than most people – actually probably not – and most people would rather have a good life than a unit.)[5] Regarding getting a PhD and getting a full-time tenured faculty position, in a place you might actually want to live for its own sake – you're entering a lottery similar to that jock you scoffed at in high school, who said he was going to play pro sports.
Also, if you can't get into a good institution, maybe you're not cut out to be a doctor or lawyer. That's fine, and in fact I'm happy for you that you didn't get stuck in those careers, where unless you're suited for them you would be abjectly miserable. (See below, "There's a clear hierarchy...") Even within medicine, I meet psychiatrists who hate being psychiatrists, surgeons who hate doing surgery, etc. – and they have bad lives. We live in a technologically advanced wealthy country. There are many, many, many things to do with your life that will be fulfilling, make money, and give you a chance to create value for others. I once overheard a middle-aged mountain guide on Mt. Shasta once talking with the people in his climbing party, and it turned out he had applied to med school and then withdrawn his application. He was having a blast on the mountain that day and showed no sign of regretting his life choices.
"I see a lot of information online about how VCs and top companies only recruit young people from elite universities. And various people who talk a lot online about start-ups and technology companies say that unless you're working in technology, you're not doing anything important."
If CNN ran stories all the time that said, really the only significant thing in your life is to become a TV journalist, and it's incredibly competitive and you should start thinking NOW about where to attend so you can get hired...I hope you would laugh at the obvious self-servingness of it. So when you read online about how tech is the only thing that matters – how is that different?
It's worth pointing out that VC partners like young founders, despite data showing that older founders are more likely to be successful. That is self-evidently because they can control the founders more easily, and make them work harder – no families, no expectations of a healthy life-balance. (That little twinge you just felt that you must be a loser if you want time with your family and a balanced life? That means that "the 1%" have already done their job on you.) In the same way, consulting firms are not interested in older applicants, because they can't mold them and get them to work stupidly long hours – a fully formed personality and set of values is not useful when you want to control someone. So don't be so eager to put yourself in this position.
"There's a clear hierarchy in life. Don't kid yourself. This is all just wishful thinking."
There are certainly status hierarchies. If you haven't bought into their lack of innate value by now, you should stop reading. But it's true, we're human, and they affect us – which is why the healthiest societies are ones with multiple overlapping status hierarchies, and the healthiest people are members of multiple status hierarchies. First, there's not just one dimension with "MD/PhD at UCSF" (in my world) at the top, and everyone else below that. Whatever is at the top of the hierarchies you spend your time worrying about, rest assured that the majority of human beings don't care about it. It can be easy to forget that other status hierarchies exist when you're inside one, but if you can, avoid taking them seriously, and stop worrying about who's above and below you.[3] (If there is a secret to a happy life, it's the ability to do this. I'm still working on it myself but when I can do it, it feels great.)
Second, to the extent that you're willing to subject yourself to a status hierarchy because there are good people participating in it who you respect and whose opinion you admire – make sure it's one that fits you. People differ tremendously in their innate talents and temperaments. You might not be cut out for a STEM field. You might not even be college material. There are many many many things to do in life that are fun, create value for others, and can make you a decent living, that don't require a bachelor's degree (ie trades.) Don't rob yourself of a career you'd be great at because classmates look down their noses at your choice. There are many many many people stuck in postdocs or at big law firms wondering why they chose this path. Ask yourself seriously how much you're collecting status coupons (degrees from prestigious institutions) to reassure yourself that random strangers who don't matter to your life or goals will think you're impressive, versus how much those status coupons are actually getting you toward your goals. If you don't know what those goals are, figure them out.
"But if I don't get into a good STEM program, I won't get a job."
Most jobs that require a bachelor's degree, still do not specifically require STEM degrees. With the exception of programmers, we produce way too many STEM graduates, particularly ones who want to go beyond undergrad. (See "If I want to be a professor" above.) You can learn programming from any institution and you'll be in demand. You can also learn programming on your own (see "But I won't learn" below.) If you say you want to be a programmer but your reason for not spending more time learning it is that you didn't get into XYZ University...chances are, your self-starting passion would not have been kindled there either.
"But unless I get into XYZ University, I won't be able to learn [field.]"
Don't MIT and Harvard literally have all their courses online? Why aren't you already taking them? If you need a professor to threaten you with bad grades to make you learn the material, you are not a talented and self-driven achiever in that field, and going to such a program will give you a piece of paper that impresses people and maybe gets you paid a little more, but will not turn you into a talented and self-driven achiever.
"Fine, but that 10% income premium does make a difference over time. If I don't get into an elite school, I can't join the 1%."
First: if you're thinking your salary is going to be what gets you into the 1%, then you're woefully middle class and don't understand the 1% at all. Being rich is about capital, not salary. I'm a physician, but I still rely on my salary. I'm not elite. I have to go to work on Monday or I can't pay my mortgage. So your university experience is very unlikely to get you into the 1%. Second, above about US$70,000 (maybe a little more adjusted for today's dollars and your local cost of living) the happiness curve plateaus. One caveat – if you're the first generation in your family to go to college, or you come from an underrepresented minority or immigrant population, college does give a bigger benefit to your future prospects than others, and the better the college, the more disproportionately bigger the increase.
"Sure, it's easy for you to say 'don't worry about getting in, status doesn't matter.' You got into med school and you're now established in your career."
Oddly enough, the thing that I think has most made me relax about my career is having a family. It really does put things in perspective. So it's not really "I did it, so it can't be hard", it's more "I realized my career is actually not as important as I used to think it was." And the reality is that a job is a job (see "Fine, but that 10% income premium" above.)
"Status does matter. I can't help noticing how people regard me. So I'll be scared and depressed if I follow your advice, and I'm still going to try to get into the best school possible."
First, you should try to get into the best school possible, but you shouldn't kill yourself trying, and you shouldn't feel bad if it doesn't work out. But if you feel controlled by your own need for status recognition – this actually IS something you have some control over (try CBT!) Second, there are two sides to the coin. What if you go to Harvard, and don't do much with your life? Many Harvard grads have regular jobs, and are constantly feeling pressured from other Harvard grads, their coworkers, families, etc. when someone says "So you went to Harvard, and now you're doing...this?" (i.e., the same job with same office that someone who went to State U is doing.) I have known Harvard grads who feel this, and it's unpleasant. They have the same life that a State U grad has - which is fine - but also the feeling that they've disappointed people - which is not fine.
An anecdote: an acquaintance from my undergrad (a decent but not awesome public university) was interviewing for a prestigious international scholarship. When they asked him what he would do if he didn't get it, he said, "Oh I'll be fine, I already got [other, less prestigious international scholarship.]" (Which he had.) He soon realized this was the wrong move, and needless to say did not get the scholarship he was interviewing for. Guess what? He has had and continues to have an amazing career, so much so that I'm changing details and not naming him because you might be able to figure out who I'm talking about based on his presence online. And, it's very difficult to see how he would be happier OR more successful if he had gotten the "better" scholarship. It is also difficult to believe that he would not have had a fulfilling career even if he did not get any prestigious scholarships (and again, note that successful is not the same as happy!) And looking at top scholarships - Rhodes Scholars are smart people, but they don't change the world. The people who get into top scholarships and programs are the people who are best suited for getting into top scholarships and programs - not necessarily doing the things that those programs are ostensibly training people for.
"I was reading your other post, and I read where you say you looked for data on happiness outcomes from attending universities of varying quality – and there's little to no data on this? This is even worse than I thought! How am I supposed to make a decision! I'm flying blind in my quest to have a good life!"
No you're not. What data we do have suggests your quest for happiness is minimally impacted by where you go to university.
"This is so selfish. If everybody thought like this (maximizing personal happiness) then progress would grind to a halt, the AIs will get us, etc."
But guess what! Not everyone thinks like this. But, if you're willing to sacrifice your personal happiness, I truly do appreciate your decision. I just want you to realize that's what you're getting into. Working 20 hour days will not make you happy, even if you get into the school/company/etc. of your dreams.
"Look, I know I will be happy if I get into [college program of my choice.] You can't explain that away by saying my life will be fine either way."
Yes, you will have a bump up in your mood if during application season you get a thick envelope and some bad days if you get a thin one. But happiness set point is a real thing. You will have good and bad days at either university, or job, or in your life, regardless. In fact, very close to the same number and intensity of good and bad days. Just like people who win the lottery or become paraplegic return to their own set points in mere months. If the devil appeared and said he was either taking away your ability to walk, or making you not get into your top choice for college, which would you pick? (And guess what – you would be okay either way.)
ADDENDUM: The Community College Strategy
People often attend community college with the goal of transferring to a four-year college, and ultimately, getting the same degree everyone else does. Community colleges accept all comers, and if the stressful part of this process is getting accepted to a four-year college, then isn’t this a very obvious back door? Yet I don’t hear many people discussing it. On one hand, I wonder if people avoid this seemingly very workable strategy due to the (stupid) status stigma of starting at a community college; on the other, I don’t know the numbers and maybe it is actually quite hard to transfer to a decent four-year college from a community college even for motivated people. There’s also the consideration of missing out on networking opportunities – some colleges are very cliquish, and landing there junior year when all the relationships are already established might be a very lonely experience, and you miss out on the friendships and career connections that are an important part of your career.
Bottom line, if you want to attend a good public university in a state, and you can't get in straight from high school, then if you're actually motivated and you attend a community college in that state, that's a realistic shot at getting in as a transfer student.
However it was hard to find statistics along the lines of "x % of people entering community colleges stating that they wanted to transfer to a selective four-year institution were able to do it." What I did find are some stats for specific universities (decent list here.) At UCLA, 30% of its undergrads are in-state community college transfers. Top public universities do take lots of community college students. (Interestingly, community college transfers outperform the direct-from-high-school students at top universities, but private schools don't take many - indeed, Princeton only recently started taking them at all again. Why might that be? One theory that explains observations is that Princeton isn't looking for performance throughout its student body, it's looking for alumni contributions that give them some mediocre legacy students, along with a "certain type" of applicant. Again, if you're the applicant, that's not about you or any choices you've made.)
You might also know that community colleges have an abysmal rate of its students ultimately graduating with a four year degree, so how does that match the higher success rate of community college students once they get to a four year campus? Because it's not the community college or four year college "making" the student - the community college students that succeeds at UCLA might not succeed first time around in the initial admission but they get to the same place, because of their innate properties. And if you go to community college and don't graduate - higher ed isn't for you, and that's fine too. Also worth noting - once you're at a UCLA, more selective private schools are within reach for graduate education. (But again - why? Ask yourself very seriously.)
FOOTNOTES
[1] If you're worried about a meaningless life: don't be. This is literally the thing that you have the most control over. As well, happiness is composed of three components, pleasure, meaning, and flow. With respect to these things, humans discount the future in two different ways. We value pleasure over meaning too much in the short term; that's easy to understand. But we also value meaning over pleasure too much in the long term. If you go years sacrificing food, fun, and friends to work like a dog at your meaningful job, you will likely burn out, and you may not get as much meaning from your career as you thought when you considered it for sixty seconds while you were 17.
[2] I am a physician, and did not get into the (highly competitive) top-ranked residency programs I ranked first. This was devastating at the time, especially because I realized some decidedly non-clinical-skill-reflecting poor choices likely played a part (i.e., it didn't occur to me to go over my application with my own med school, which includes getting a professional photo done, and I sent out my application with a headshot that made me look like a serial killer.) I complained to a friend that the people who did get those spots were just status-seekers who played the game better than me, to which she replied, "How is that not what's motivating you? And are you admitting that how well you play the admissions game is the important thing about your life?" Once I realized that I had become a physician to (news flash!) help patients, and that I would still be able to do this just the same, I got over myself. And the program I went through ended up giving me opportunities I never would have had at the other ones. Now, if I had gotten into the more competitive ones, would I not be writing a blog post about how that program ended up being the best one? Probably. Because it doesn’t matter to my overall happiness.
[3] People with narcissistic personality disorder have very little empathy or interest in others beyond using those others as a constant source of attention and flattery, so that the narcissist can convince himself he’s not garbage. Narcissists have very little self-value other than knowing where they are in status hierarchies, and very little knowledge of other people beyond categorizing them as higher or lower status. And narcissists as a rule are miserable.
[4] While on my surgery rotation, I met with the director of the clerkship, a trauma surgeon. He asked what specialty I wanted to go into. At the time I already knew it would either by psychiatry or neurology. But I was on my neurosurgery rotation at the time. In reality, for multiple reasons, there was never any danger of my becoming a surgeon. But the game I had been told to play was to include my current rotation in my list of interests in the hopes of avoiding offending the attendings and getting a better grade. So I did that – and the trauma surgeon looked contemplative and said, "I'm going to be honest with you. I don’t see you as a neurosurgeon." Of course he had seen through me and was exactly correct. There was a second of fear ("Oh no, he’s going to fail me") and then a feeling of immense relief – a physical sensation of weight lifting from my shoulders. That’s when I realized that my not being a neurosurgeon had been determined many years before that moment.
[5] Neurosurgery sounds cool but the training is especially grueling, even by doctors' standards. When I was a med student, I was in a seminar where a doc was going around the room asking what specialty people wanted to go into. One guy said neurosurgery, and the doc held out his hands as if weighing options and said "Yeah...(one hand) neurosurgery...(other hand) happy life...(one hand) neurosurgery...(other hand) happy life..." As it happens, I love what I do, psychiatry, which has a much more humane schedule than neurosurgery. I can't imagine why everyone doesn't do it, other than they don't think about what it would be like at age 50 to have a neurosurgeon's schedule.
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