The Real Hidden Truth About College

Once more on the Plumber Discourse and selective breeding...

Of note: posting on The Accelerationist has become infrequent because in the meantime I have founded a company which has captured most of my attention and time. I may still use this platform for time to time for thoughts that are too longform for X dot com and outside the scope of my media company.

The great Dr Bennett, founder of EXIT, had me on his podcast to discuss two topics featured here: first, my piece on selective breeding in the French aristocracy, and second the Plumber Discourse on X dot com.

For those keeping track, Plumber Discourse refers to the idea that universities and more broadly the white collar world have become so scammy, so twisted by DEI, and so captured by ideological enemies of the right, that young right-wing men are better off getting into the trades than going to college, even if they are talented enough to get into a good college.

With the two important caveats that everybody’s case is unique and that the trades are indeed a very honorable path and, yes, on in which one can (though it’s by no means guaranteed) make a very good living and a better one than the average white-collar worker, I disagree with the Plumber Discourse. I endorsed Steam Age Mindset’s “white boy career plan” of going into the military, getting into a very technical specialty, going to college for free, and then getting VA loans and (if possible) VA disability.

Dr Bennett wanted me to weigh in on the Plumber Discourse from the perspective of an “elite insider,” someone who was born and raised into the upper echelons of the Western elite, attended elite schools, and has generally been in that world at least for some of my time.

After thinking about this, I thought about something I should have said on the podcast and didn’t (ah, l’esprit de l’escalier). Want Real Elite Insider knowledge? Read on…

Most smart/ambitious people have a model of society as having an Official Rulebook and a Second, Secret Rulebook. Most smart/ambitious people understand that while society has an official narrative about how things go, there are also unwritten rules that insiders understand and that help them get ahead in life. But precisely because most people understand this, the secret isn’t that much of a secret, is it?

But what I’ve found out is that it is actually a triple-layer cake. There’s an Official Rulebook, there’s a Second, Unofficial Rulebook, but that rulebook is not that secret, and if it’s true it’s only partly true or misses the point. There’s a Third, Truly Secret Rulebook, and the Second, Unofficial Rulebook is really there to mask the true secret.

This is why memes like broke/woke/bespoke or the three-tier galaxy brain meme are so powerful. As so often, truth is found in memes.

So, what’s the Official Rulebook when it comes to college? The Official Rulebook is that college is a ticket to the middle class, that it will teach you valuable skills, which will allow you to get a good job and set you up for life. Everyone knows that.

What’s the Unofficial Rulebook? The Unofficial Rulebook goes like this: college is a scam, you get loaded up with unsustainable debt, almost all majors are BS, and a college degree is no longer a guarantee of a good job.

Is this idea that much of a secret? I mean, not really. Not anymore. It may not be the dominant or mainstream view yet, but it’s not exactly some sort of super secret. You can’t go 10 minutes on Instagram without seeing some scammy influencer encourage you to skip college and instead watch TED talks and trade meme cryptocurrencies. The average middle class family thinking about college for their kids may not believe in the Plumber Discourse but they’ve probably at least heard it or considered it. It’s on their radar.

The problem with this Unofficial Rulebook isn’t that it’s wrong, exactly—everything I’ve said above is factually correct—it’s that it’s partial. It obscures a deeper reality.

Wanna hear it? Wanna know the secret?

Ok, here’s the Third, Truly Secret Layer: most college degrees are basically worthless but if you go to one of the truly top elite colleges, you will be set up for life.

To be absolutely clear, I am talking about the truly top colleges. Ivy League (minus Cornell), Stanford, Chicago, maybe Duke and a couple others. The dropoff is very sharp and steep (this is also a very politically incorrect truth).

(The top engineering schools like MIT and Caltech are a special case because their status is based on actual excellence at disciplines where excellence is measurable objectively, as opposed to other elite schools whose elite status is very much a self-sustaining, self-defining “social construct”—but just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it’s not also very real for practical purposes.)

The network is real. Not so much in the 1950s sense of how a “Yale man” will always help out another “Yale man” as the schools at the very top are basically indistinguishable now, but in the sense that if you went to one of these very top schools, the other graduate of those very top schools will absolutely recognize you and give you a hand if they can, in a way they probably won’t for an equally talented person who didn’t go to one of those schools. It’s just true.

This secret is extremely taboo in a society that professes to be egalitarian, but it is very much true. I have seen it in operation too many times for me to name.

Of course a successful guy interviewed on some podcast is not going to say “Yeah, once I graduated from Princeton all doors opened for me, so sorry, if you’re listening to this and you didn’t go to Princeton, you’re screwed.” He’s going to say “Sure, it helped a little, but it was mostly a combination of intelligence, hard work, and luck.”

In Silicon Valley, officially (and very often truly) the most meritocratic, we-don’t-care-where-you-went-to-school, we-don’t-care-if-you-dropped-out, the-only-thing-that-matters-is-your-technical-skills-and/or-your-hustle place on the planet, the Stanford network is very very real and very powerful. And, perhaps more surprisingly but more tellingly, so is the Harvard network. A famous VC once told me “If I see Berkeley on your resume, the only thing that tells me is that you couldn’t get into Stanford.” Of course, Berkeley is a world-class university. Doesn’t matter. It’s not in the elite. Another famous VC once told me that he changed his mind on investing in a startup once he checked out the founder and found out he went to Harvard, and then berated him for failing to include that fact in his pitch deck. The founder had naively assumed that people in Silicon Valley don’t care where you went to school, but the reality is very different. It’s a brutal world out there, which is why nobody likes to say it publicly.

The successful guy may not even be consciously aware of how much of his success is down to where he went to school. Nobody says “Oh my God, you went to Harvard, can I invest in your company?” But lots of people definitely think it.

Before writing this post, I had a conversation about this topic with two friends, one of whom went to Yale and the other UVA—a very good school, but not a top-tier elite school. The Yale graduate, a very intelligent and successful man, confidently asserted that his degree didn’t matter at all, that nobody asked him about it. My public school friend snorted, “Spoken like someone who went to Yale.”

By the way, this is a “woke more correct than the mainstream” moment. Woke people like to talk about privilege, and about how it is so pervasive in a “fish in the water” way that people with privilege aren’t even aware of their own privilege. The mainstream retort is that privilege doesn’t exist, but this is obviously not true. Woke people lie about the true sources of privilege in America, and the true hierarchy of privilege in America, but privilege as such obviously exists.

I have known extremely beautiful women who truly, sincerely believe that everyone on the planet is a nice person, and that anybody can walk up to any random person and ask for a favor, and that person will gladly do it, just out of the goodness of their heart. This is not at all how the world works, but it is their experience of the world because they are an extremely beautiful woman (this also works for some extremely beautiful men). Beauty privilege is real, and in some ways it is the most unjust form of privilege. Of course, the bartender won’t tell her “I’m giving you a free drink because you’re hot and I want to sleep with you,” even though that’s exactly what’s going on. The person treating a beautiful person differently may not even be consciously aware that that’s what they’re doing.

Note that this Third, Secret Truth is not opposed to the Second Layer Truth. Indeed, it’s complementary: in large part, it’s because the value of the average college degree has dropped so much that the value of a super-elite degree has comparatively increased so much. It’s precisely because most college degrees have become a scam that the top college degrees have become so much more valuable. Everyone tells you the first part, nobody will tell you the second part. But elite families absolutely know the second part.

The Second Layer Truth serves to obscure and protect the Third Layer Truth. If you’re a very talented non-elite person who might compete with elite persons at places like Harvard and Princeton, you might learn about the Second Layer Truth, and this might convince you to forego college, and you might feel very clever in doing so.

America does have a hierarchy of privilege, and obviously a super-elite degree is the biggest source of privilege in America, with money only a distant second. (America has lots of very rich people who own a bunch of car dealerships and live in places like Oklahoma, who will never be part of the elite, in the sense of having high status and influence and getting invitations to the places where elite narratives are formed and important decisions made; maybe they could conceivably ascend to the elite, but would find in doing so that it would require a lot more time and conscious effort than if they’d gone through the trouble of getting a Wharton MBA. By the way, it’s not a bad thing as such that you can’t just write a check to get into a nation’s elite.)

An idea you sometimes hear is that racial justice is a con deployed by the ruling class to distract from the true dividing line in American society, which is class. This is probably partly true, but you could make the opposite argument. Leftists go on and on about how Elon Musk’s dad was a prosperous mining engineer; nobody mentions that he went to Penn. For all Musk’s intelligence and talent, I find it hard to believe that an Asperger’s Afrikaner with a McGill degree could have gotten the VC connections to found Zip2 and sell it to Compaq, allowing him then to start X/PayPal. His VC connections also fixed his visa situation, since for a time he was living and working illegally in the US, overstaying his student visa.

Now that I’ve said all this, let me get the obvious disclaimers out of the way: obviously, I am talking about degrees of difficulty and probability. I am not saying that it is impossible to ascend to the elite or succeed without one of those degrees, just a lot more difficult than is commonly portrayed; conversely, I am also obviously not saying that one of those degrees is a 100% ironclad guarantee of wealth and success.

What I am saying is that these super-elite degrees matter a great great deal, that this effect is as real as it is taboo and hard to see for various social psychology reasons, that a super-elite degree is worth a lot more than an officially slightly-less prestigious degree. What’s more, as American society becomes more stratified and more stagnant, the rewards of these super-elite credentials will only increase.

Another obvious disclaimer is that if you’re a white (or Asian) male, non-legacy and non-athlete, competing for those elite school spots is even more extremely difficult. That being said, it’s not impossible. And so if you can possibly compete for one of those spots, and you are ambitious, I would strongly encourage you to strongly consider it. If you have to make a choice like “Yale on a bad scholarship vs Michigan on a good scholarship,” pick Yale. You’ll thank me. You may ultimately decide you don’t want to go to Goldman or McKinsey or the Hill, which is fine—but you will have the option, and usually if you can defer life-altering decisions from 18 to 22 it’s a good idea to do so (though obviously you shouldn’t defer them infinitely).

What about the politics? Well, if you’re reading this I’m assuming your politics are already pretty strong and strongly-anchored. If anything exposure to these campuses will only radicalize you further, which is good. I feel like the stereotype of the good Christian kid who goes to college and returns a communist is outdated; at this point people have formed their views earlier through the internet. You will meet like-minded individuals, and they are bound to be smart and interesting, and it’s probable they will become lifelong friends because you will be forced to make a tight-knit crew.

Anyway, everybody’s situation is different. Make of this information what you will. This is not legal advice. But at least now the secret’s out.