The Prestige Trap

The insights here resonated with me and the way I viewed my own decision making coming out of college—and I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but a state college.

For the majority of Ivy Leaguers, the most impressive thing they've accomplished is achieving admission to their university. When you're deemed successful because you went to Harvard rather than celebrated for what got you there in the first place, you learn to game the system and just focus on the credentials the next time around.

And later:

Sometimes, achieving excellence even runs orthogonal to the certainty of prestige. For example, I saw within my own studies that getting an 'A' in a class was very different than actually learning the material. With an intense course load and impending deadlines, many students find it easier to take shortcuts to get the 'A' rather than to really grapple with the material which could take time away from learning how to game the test. The same problem happens within the workforce, except instead of getting an 'A' in a class, it's optimizing to get promoted during your annual review.

And yet later:

But what worries me most about the prestige trap are its effects on an individual level. While recruits may confuse a Stanford CS degree for evidence of world-class programming skills, the candidate won't. We know when we're optimizing for credentials vs. pursuing excellence for its own sake. There is something deeply fulfilling about the latter and rather unsatisfying about the former.

Lots of introspective insights here worth pondering.