“Elite” colleges are highly overrated, and most of their graduates would’ve been successful anyway

People massively overestimate how much elite colleges actually cause their students to become successful.

The biggest advantage of going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. isn’t that the professors possess some secret knowledge that professors at other universities don’t. The biggest advantages are the connections, prestige, recruiting pipelines, and the other highly ambitious people you’re surrounded by.

The actual academic material often isn't fundamentally different. Calculus is calculus. The concepts you learn in calculus at a community college are the same concepts you learn at MIT. MIT might teach it faster, go deeper, and give you much harder problems, but derivatives and integrals don't become different mathematical concepts because you're at MIT.

The much bigger thing people ignore is selection bias.

To even get into these schools, you basically have to already be successful. Elite colleges aren't generally taking completely average teenagers and magically transforming them into world-class achievers. They're selecting from a pool of people who were already at the top of their classes, winning competitions, starting organizations, doing research, building companies, publishing things, or otherwise demonstrating unusual ability and motivation.

Obviously this is hyperbole, but sometimes elite admissions almost feel like: MIT doesn't admit the kid who might cure cancer someday; MIT admits the kid who somehow already cured cancer in 11th grade.

Then 20 years later, when that person accomplishes something incredible, everyone points to MIT and says, "Look what an MIT education produces."

But how much of that person was actually produced by MIT?

Take the same exceptionally intelligent, obsessive, hardworking 18-year-old and send them to a decent state university instead. Are we really supposed to believe they suddenly become an average person?

Elite universities absolutely provide advantages—especially networks, prestige, research opportunities, recruiting pipelines, and access to other exceptional people. But those advantages shouldn't be confused with the university creating the underlying talent.

A huge portion of the correlation between elite colleges and successful graduates exists because elite colleges are extremely good at selecting people who were already unusually likely to succeed.