Do Ivy League Degrees Actually Matter? Plus, When to Rent vs. Buy

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**Scott Galloway** (1:42)
Welcome to Office Hours of Prop G. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind.
If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofpropgmedia.com. Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question number one.

**Ty** (2:04)
Hi, my name is Ty. I live in the Boston area. Long time listener, first time caller here. Your career advice video actually led me to move to Boston. Four years later, I have a great relationship and a financially rewarding start to my career. So I feel like I owe Prop G a significant debt. Thank you.
My question focuses on finding top tier talent. I currently work at a business and on a team that sources almost exclusively Ivy League talent. I'm the lone exception, but I did have to get an engineering degree and go to grad school to break through.
I'm trying to think about how we can build a richer set of perspectives on our strategic planning team because I've noticed that there are some common ways we look at business challenges and consumers as a group of people from only Ivy League backgrounds. I think we're losing sight of what the true consumer may actually be experiencing in some ways, especially as we're trying to target premium price tiers of our business and a younger consumer demographic that can't realistically support that spending. How have you gone about finding top talent outside of Ivy Leagues when there's no brand name to give you a heuristic?

**Scott Galloway** (3:14)
Thanks for the question.
I started a strategy firm my second year of business school, and it grew fast, and we needed to hire people fast. I was very fond of big brand names, specifically branded elite universities. I was really excited to hire someone from Stanford, or MIT, or Harvard, or Berkeley, or whatever you.
Generally speaking, what you find with small firms is that, and this has probably changed a little bit, that the best people at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are going to work for hedge funds, tech companies that are scaling. They weren't going to work for small companies like mine. And the ones I was able to attract, generally speaking, were the B players from those schools. And the B player from Harvard is just a B player. And we have a tendency to fetishize these universities and think that everybody there is amazing. The Ivy League generally attracts two cohorts, Freakishly Remarkable Kids and the Children of Rich People. And disproportionately, increasingly, more the latter than the former. The former is used as Vaseline to smear over the lens of income inequality and the fact that we're letting in the kids from the top 1% income earning households are 77 times more likely to get into an elite university.
This is what you do as a small firm. One, there's a recognition in their studies that the top 10% at any university are pretty similar. So your job is to find a local university where you have connections and identify the top 10%. The top 10% at CUNY Buffalo are as good as the top 10% at an MIT or a Boston College or what have you. Now, having said that, the elite schools, generally speaking, the median is a little bit better. There is a value. There is a selection process where they get to populate their student body with just incredibly impressive kids in addition to the rich kids. And to be fair, most of the rich kids are at a certain level to get into most universities unless you're really, really rich. But your job is to identify the top 10% at a local university as a small firm. And then the secret weapon in hiring is the following, reference hiring. The first thing I do when someone is good is I sit them down and I offer them a bonus and really incent them and ask them to identify amongst their friends and their classmates a group of really smart together people.