- Why I Wont Hire From The Ivy League

It’s been a policy of mine for years to never hire anyone who got their undergraduate degree from an Ivy League university. Some people in my industry find this surprising, but my experience is that those graduates aren’t that much smarter than someone who attended a top tier public school like Michigan, UT, or UVA. The graduate schools are different. But I stay away from those BA’s from Harvard and Princeton.

People with a background like that have very lofty expectations about how they should be treated in the business world. They've been taught that the world should genuflect when they enter the room and defer to their brilliance when offered. These expectations are almost never justified and absolutely never met. So when they enter the ‘real world’ where there are consequences to bad decisions, they end up deeply disappointed with how they're being treated. Maybe it’s different inside Goldman Sachs, but this is a consistent story wherever I’ve worked, whether the Ivy Leaguer in question works directly for me or not.

Also, among the Ivy League, there are differences. And it's Princeton that has the reputation as the place where the patrician elite can always buy a library for their idiot sons to have a place to get their art-history degree. The sons then go off to their career of teaching tennis to debutantes in the Cayman Islands or something equally as challenging. Even at Harvard and Yale Princeton is considered a ‘snob factory’. Physics is the exception for Princeton, where they have consistently produced results. But in every other area, they are not particularly well thought of.

There is also a mannerism that comes with being a Princeton grad. I’ve seen it from multiple people although how they are taught this kind of thing mystifies me. (I keep thinking it must be a selection bias of some kind) You can see it when you watch Paul Krugman speak. I can’t explain it precisely, but he kind of ‘looks at his shoes’ between ideas, as if he isn’t really certain of what he says or as if he knows he’s lying and he’s afraid that he’ll be caught at any second. He even keeps this manner when he’s discussing his own opinion and the issue of right or wrong is off the table.

At a glance it telegraphs a kind of personal insecurity, but I don’t think that’s it exactly. I think instead, Krugman truly believes that he is so much smarter than the rest of us that only he can see the truth clearly, but he dare not speak it plainly for fear of spooking the herd. He’s trying to let us down easy on the various ways that we’ve failed to meet his expectations, and have therefore done ourselves harm in the process. It's more like he doesnt' want to seem to be too harsh and unforgiving a god.

This would be more consistent with this insightful assessment of Krugman from Stephen Spruiell at NRO.

In my world Krugman is a laughing stock; his 'streed cred' from his Nobel prize has long since expired. He’s so widely ridiculed that you have to be careful about mentioning him positively at all for fear of reducing your own credibility through association. But to your average New York Times reader, desperate to find further justification for a faltering self congratulatory worldview, Krugman’s articles are like a leaky life raft in a hurricane. They cling to his writings like life itself so long as there is a little air left. Since their self opinion depends on people who think like Krugman being right, they'll support any stupid idea rather than face the harsh truth of reality.

It doesn’t matter to them that Krugman is wrong about virtually everything. It doesn’t matter that his kind of institutional short sightedness will push the country to the very edge of ruin. And it doesn't matter that anyone with skin in the game thinks Krugman has become a national joke. To them, it's all about supporting their ego's just a little bit longer, until the new soviet man can spring fully formed from the ashes of capitalism, and prove that they were right all along.

In other worlds, all that matters to them is that he’s telling them exactly what they want to hear.