Truth be told, an Ivy League degree would not get you much by itself. There are a number of schools just as good as the Ivy League, and similar brand recognition in particular fields for schools that otherwise aren't highly regarded or well-known.

The Ivy League degree primarily buys you an opportunity to network with the powerful, get interesting internships and so forth. Not everyone does much with this. Those who don't might get +5 points or something but it's not a night and day difference.

(Except if you are looking at a specific school-to-company nexus like Stanford has with certain companies)

Those goods are not impossible to get from schools with somewhat less standing.

The problem is that in school, nobody is very aggressively counseling and seeking the interest of students who do not know what to do and might not even be aware there is anything they would have to do.

So the slack has to be taken up after you leave school in various ways and it can just be hard. One of the things you have to do is pretend to be happy with the status quo, not look negative and make people feel smart and awesome if they have something to hold over you.

No all positive indicators are not created equal and the which school did you go to is one of the smaller ones - certainly for undergraduates. Good schools deliver three things

1. Higher self confidence than average. This is oftenentitlement not talent 2. Good networking - yes but these days so does LinkedIn 3. Better teaching. Top universities do shine here. But that is the point. And really at undergraduate level it barely matters.

In short, stop worrying about the college you are going to / went to. Feeling you missed out? Read SICP

but if you really want one piece of right now advice here it is - choose one, just one of those ideas you have. And find evenings, lunch hours weekends and get that one idea out the door. Just do it. Then post to Show HN

everything else follows from getting something out the door

I'm glad you responded.

Not all positive indicators are created equal. It's totally true. An Ivy league degree is recognizably hard, and it's an easy quantifier, if . If your work is equally hard, you need to figure out a way to show that. You may also have to work harder to find connections in small tight circles that are slightly more immediate if you went to an Ivy League school (that's part of what you're paying for to be totally frank). You can lament it privately, or you can keep learning and keep kicking ass. You could do great through your undergrad and get an Ivy-class education for post-graduate work if you really wanted. Do good work. Show it off to people that would be interested in it. If the people that you think you want to be around aren't interested in the work you're doing, you've got the wrong people, or your work isn't really that good. Figure out which it is, that isn't always easy.

I wrote one of these articles in 2009. Looking back it was stupid. I live in Palo Alto now. I'm working for another startup and learning very different things than I learned by starting a startup, or running a consultancy. I'm also better connected here. Try to take your assumptions and turn them totally on their head "what if pg is 100% correct about 'why to be in a startup hub'?" and try to prove to yourself that he is. It's good practice for all critical thinking.

I don't know what you work on. It's probably not worthless compared to an ivy league degree, but it depends what you want, and why you're comparing them. Learn to do the things that will get you what you want, and learn how to present those to other people, and you'll (hopefully) quit feeling like others got where they were just because they had more cash, you don't buy a degree in CS from Brown, you earn one.

I don't know where you are, or what you're working on, but feel free to reach out, I'm happy to have a conversation about it, in person or online.

http://www.issackelly.com/blog/2009/01/11/Columbus_is_not_ju... http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html