Codie Sanchez

that is a huge amount of research that just says when you're in the bottom third or the bottom quarter, whatever, it's psychologically quite debilitating.

And if you're not a strong student to begin with, you're compromising your future if you put yourself in an environment where you get overwhelmed.

So a good rule of thumb is choose a place where you can comfortably be in the top third of your class, right?

So if you're a brilliant student,

then by all means go to a big pond.

I mean, you'll be fine, right?

If you have an IQ of 180, go to MIT, right?

You're not going to get overwhelmed.

But if you're a normal person, then choosing the most prestigious school possible is not a good strategy, right?

Because you're way better off at a slightly lesser school where you can excel than you are at the greatest school where you're finished in the bottom of your class.

And I think that...

There is some intriguing evidence that if you're an employer and you're hiring, you're better off choosing people who are at the top of their class regardless of where that class was situated, right?

In other words, paying more attention to class rank than you do to the prestige of the institution.

And there's a number of reasons for that, but it follows in the same logic that being overwhelmed in school can have lasting consequences.

And conversely, the kind of confidence you get from being at the top can translate later on down the line.

We're never in an environment that is as clean and easy to kind of calibrate as we are when we're choosing colleges.

We don't rank employers the way we rank colleges, right?

You can't say that, you know, working for Yahoo is, you know, is different from working for Microsoft in the same way that East Tennessee State is different from MIT, right?

There's not that kind of... So it's just a little trickier.

But I do think...