On College and grades

When I completed my masters degree I started working for  a large pulp and paper company (www.bilt.com). It was founded by one Karam  Chand Thapar
 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karam_Chand_Thapar), an Indian industrialist. The corporate folklore has it that while a student at the well-known Forman Christian College at Lahore Pakistan (http://www.fccollege.edu.pk/about) in undivided British India, he flunked five times in his sophomore year. Forman Christian College was then the equivalent of Harvard in South Asia. Its students went on to occupy the top positions in the industry, government, and education in South Asia.
Failing five times provided K.C. Thapar an incredible advantage; he came to know the students in five class years. That paid handsomely when he started his career (without a degree). He knew everybody in the industry and the government. He went on to create the Sugar, Pulp & Paper, Electronics, Banking, Coal, Chemical,... industries and was a billionnaire in an era when you could count billionnaires in India on one hand. His sons served on the Boards of universities including USC (one of his grandsons donated $1 million to SUNY Albany three years ago, I had nothing to do with that).
The reason I narrated the above story is to make a point that for the employment (and entrepreneurial) market the grades are absolutely irrelevant so long as you have the right address. The market does not need a finer signal than that you got in and that you have the backing of its enormous social network, and if you do not want to alienate any one, it is stupid to have grades at all. That is the reason why when I was at Claremont Colleges I used to joke that they should auction to the highest bidder their degrees once students were admitted.
Once the prestige is established what counts is that you got ion, and that you have the entire social network behind you. With that, it must be a miracle if you fail.

What matters is what you do when you succeed with or without Ivy education. Thapars were wonderful employers; I literally cried when I left them. They provided rent-free housing for all employees, provided schooling, college, and even had a university (http://www.thapar.edu/) for the employees along with others. The place IO worked at they even had a country club for the managerial employees. So I was not at all surprised when I heard that they were the first Indian company to gain ISO certification.

When my daughter got into an Ivy school (Brown) and other fancy schools, I advised her to go to a state school (University of California at San Diego) that did not have a football team and did not have a business school. She was not very happy then, but she did fine. This year she was nominated for an Emmy award in the news category for one of the news programs she produced.

Life is a wonderful cruise if you get into one of these schools, but making it without all that tail wind must be exhilarating and self-fulfilling.