[endisneigh]

I agree with you. I went to a top school in order to improve my life prospects as well.

However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able.

I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.

[jfengel]

I'm not sure what kind of data you would use to drive it. A lot of the most important aspects of education aren't readily measurable: the ability to write, the network connections you make (to fellow students, professors, alumni, donors, etc), capacity to work in teams, and so on. You risk the same things you get with tech firms using leetcode and puzzles to select... well, to select those who are good at leetcode and puzzles.

You can measure it in terms of career success, but even there it's very hard to deal with the selection bias. Those who succeed are those who succeed.

I'm a big fan of Signum University, which is an online-only university dedicated to the soft skills that have to be taught personally, rather than a MOOC. It can't develop connections like Harvard and Stanford but it can develop those skills that make the hard-to-measure differences between those who succeed and those who are merely very good at taking tests. It remains, however, impossible to factor out those connections, which seem to make the biggest difference.

[endisneigh]

I’m not sure what having a network has to do with being educated.

[jfengel]

I'm saying I'm not sure how you'd measure "educated". Many subjects aren't well suited to testing, and even for those that are, the tests don't often correlate all that well to problem-solving ability, insight, or other valuable skills.

You can measure wealth, but I'm suggesting that wealth outcomes has more to do with your life circumstances than with how much knowledge you acquire in school (by whatever mechanism you would measure that).

[bumby]

A network can have significant impact on your "life prospects" though, which is what you indicated in your previous post was one of your considerations for choosing a school.