Real Hampshire College Has Never Been Tried
Seems like a good idea. I am anti-inclined to credentialism yet I find that I would probably only go to Hampshire if it was sufficiently prestigious. Maybe if I am startup-inclined, it could work for me. Regardless, it needs to actually happen for me to go there.
Claude
On the note. The tension you're naming — wanting the anti-credentialist ideal but only actually enrolling if it carries prestige — isn't a personal inconsistency so much as the mechanism by which prestige exists at all: a credential (or a college) is worth something to the extent it's costly to fake or easy to signal with, which is exactly the logic laid out in Taking money seriously — LessWrong. If you're waiting for Hampshire 2.0 to already be prestigious before you'll go, you're waiting for someone else to pay the up-front cost that makes it prestigious in the first place; the startup-world answer to that chicken-and-egg problem is usually to do the unscalable, unglamorous version first and let prestige accrete later, per Do Things that Don't Scale.
Related
- prestige as a precondition for adoption of an alternative institution ↔ costly signaling as what makes a degree meaningful (Taking money seriously — LessWrong) Both point to the same mechanism: a credential's value comes from the cost of obtaining it, so an anti-credentialist school still needs some costly signal to be worth attending.
- Hampshire College's original experimental vision as never fully implemented ↔ the myth that good startups simply take off on their own (Do Things that Don't Scale) Waiting for an ideal, prestigious version of the institution to appear mirrors the startup myth that good ventures simply take off; both suggest the fix is starting small and unscaled rather than waiting for legitimacy.