What would be interesting would be to compare this type of list with a list of people who have “made it big” who got through college. Would a systematic difference in the what “makes it big” means for each list? I suspect the former list would be all outliers, with college serving to level the playing field among the extreme outliers (who might have made it big anyway) and folks closer to the mode of the population’s distribution. This is the academy as an engine for creating an egalitarian, just society, very different than the spin the US neo-conservatives place on colleges as bastions of elitism.
What would be interesting would be to compare this type of list with a list of people who have “made it big” who got through college. Would a systematic difference in the what “makes it big” means for each list? I suspect the former list would be all outliers, with college serving to level the playing field among the extreme outliers (who might have made it big anyway) and folks closer to the mode of the population’s distribution. This is the academy as an engine for creating an egalitarian, just society, very different than the spin the US neo-conservatives place on colleges as bastions of elitism.