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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Being a PhD student and probably never leaving the university, I'm always interested in how to assess program quality and make comparisons between them. Thus far, for me, the most illuminating indication of quality of undergraduate education has been the reports of students who are graduate students at my school who came from other ones. For example, I got an undergraduate degree in computer science, and when I run into other people who also got undergraduate degrees in computer science but from different institutions, I find that often I learned a lot more math than they did, but they learned more about software engineering, reflecting a difference in program goals. Similar stories, I expect, appear across most programs. The trouble is that it's hard to get this kind of information to make comparisons before you enter college because universities, in general, focus more on advertising clear indications of status rather than describing the objectives of degree programs and the social setting in each program.

As I always say to my students, algebra is the same whether you're learning it in Cambridge, MA or right here. What matters is your desire to learn.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Toby, the fact that you are uncertain about how to best match patients and doctors does not seem a good reason to prevent them from trying. It seems to me you are too quick to assume better students should go to better schools, but that richer or sicker patients should not go to better doctors.

In any case, there is a good reason to let people evaluate quality even if there are no sorting benefits from matching who goes with who: better quality evaluation creates better incentives to produce quality.

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