Not everybody gets the most out of being at an Elite university.
My family comes from an ethnically Catholic background, you know, Italian, Polish, French-Canadian, many of the people who came to the U.S. fleeing the aftermath of WWII, members of the surplus humanity whose livelihood was destroyed by the mechanization of agriculture in the early half of the twentieth century.
In the 1960's and 1970's, in a time when it became unfashionable to attack blacks and indigenous persons, academics such as Mark Granovetter and Edward C. Banfield were writing treatises about the inferiority of traditionally Catholic ethnic groups. And I'll just say that in graduate school, people from these backgrounds find there is no organization for their "national advancement" or "anti-defamation" and they'll be left to their own devices to understand why certain doors just aren't quite open to them.
[Disclaimer: the author of this post has no relationship to the Catholic Church other than having many family and friends who are members, and in fact, is a pagan]
I don't know if this is still the case, but Catholics were the single largest religious group at the University of Chicago when I was there in the late 90's.
My issue with the formal academic training is that it teaches you to be an academic, not a practitioner. I feel that if you want to learn how to start a company, then start a company. If you want to become an academic, go to school. Now, I'm probably a rare case because I grew up in management consulting and have been an entrepreneur since I was 8 years old so I feel that it's not the education that's important, it's what you do with it that is.
To that end, I love seeing folks in this HN startup "tribe" have an idea that others may think is silly, pour their blood, sweat, and tears into and maybe it works out. Or maybe it doesn't.
I've always said, "we'll either all end up in a mansion or a cardboard box, but we'll have a blast along the way". That pretty much sums up what it means to be an entrepreneur to me. Meet like minded people trying to make the world a better place, and maybe make a little cash along the way.
So kudos to all of us kids playing around in the sandbox trying to create a bit of the future, today.
Some people do waste their time in grad school. I had a friend who took out loans to go to Columbia's J-school, went 60k in debt and two years later found himself back in the job he left. He passed up the one offer he managed to cultivate in order to be closer to a woman he dumped a few months down the road.
Years later he's in a job that he could have worked his way into by now, except a large chunk of his (disappointing) salary goes toward his loans.
"I've learned more from the community than I did during my $100,000 MBA from the University of Chicago."
You weren't out meeting people and making awesome connections?
You didn't build relationships with the brilliant professors?
I am shocked by the content of your post.
What have you learned on Hacker News? And then what did you learn at Booth?
I would pay to read that write-up.