From Nate Silver: Go to a state school.
This guy was taken seriously as a election pundit, and after capitalizing on that fleeting fame until his prediction models stopped working, basically been a long decline as a contrarian gadfly ever since.
his week, for instance, Google — despite probably being the most progressive or Silicon Valley company, nevertheless fired dozens of employees involved in pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests that resemble those on university campuses.
Google employs tens of thousands of people. Dozens of employees dismissed over protests is immaterial and within the a single standard deviation of variance. Given his reputed expertise of statistics, he should know that. It’s also a non sequitur to call this as indictment of elite academia, as what does Google employees being fired for protesting have anything to do with what schools they attended. Even the CEO said it was unrelated to politics. All he does is piece together bits of data that is supposed to coalesce into a thesis but doesn’t.
He supplies the below chart:
There is some initial evidence that the Congressional hearings did matter to public opinion, at least when it came to Harvard — its net favorable ratings declined by 15 percent after the hearings according to Morning Consult polling, with the decrease concentrated among Republicans:
The decline of Republican support is offset by increased Democratic support, so we see only a smallish net loss of overall support. Again, this is within a standard deviation of variance. It looks like noise.
Importantly, I expect the decline in perceptions of elite private colleges to extend to people tasked with making hiring decisions. I expect an increasing number of hiring managers to look at two resumes — say, one from a recent graduate of Columbia, and one from a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina — and potentially see advantages for the UNC student. They’ll regard the Columbia grad as:
Except hiring is never done this way. Hiring, especially for a major tech company, is a multi-step process involving sometimes many interviews and other steps. Both candidates, assuming they are applying for the same position and only differing by school, would be put through a similar gauntlet.