Q1: How strong is the correlation between a college student’s grades (an imperfect gauge of academic performance) and later professional success?

More importantly for this discussion …

Q2: How strong is the correlation between a college’s academic reputation and its graduates’ professional success?

Most Chinese/Indian parents believe in this correlation; many people dispute it; I don’t believe it.

Looking around at our coworkers, we see plenty of evidence to dismiss the correlation between an individual’s professional success vs her university’s reputation. That means top universities are overvalued in terms of their graduate’s success.

University reputation reflects professors’ academic performance. Top universities are research powerhouses.

Q3: based on a large enough unbiased sample, what’s the Q2 correlation as a number? I guess very few of us have such a sample.

Q4: which country and which profession is the sample from?

If you look at quants, then probably … stronger correlation, since they are mostly PhD’s. If you look at researchers like my father, then strong correlation. If you look at managers like my sister, then lower correlation.

I do believe in strong discipline by the school. 20-year olds can cope with pressure better than at high school age. Tough and high standard gets these young students to work hard and cultivate work ethics, confidence and discipline.

My friend Abhihav pointed out that at least for comp science, graduate level is significantly tougher than undergrad level. He said graduate students have picked the discipline for a long term commitment. He said many of his fellow graduate students love to do realistic projects where they learn practical software engineering. For that purpose, a serous, tough college is much better than a medicre college.