The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Do Ivy League Degrees Actually Matter? Plus, When to Rent vs. Buy

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Scott Galloway explains why small firms shouldn't chase elite-school résumés, whether renting really beats buying, and how to make decisions before you feel qualified. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Plus, you can now call or text Scott a question at our new Office Hours hotline: ‪[phone]‬. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Welcome to Office Hours of ProVG. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to Office Hours ofProfgemedia.com. Again, that's Office Hours of Profitemedia.com or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Question number one. Hi, my name is Ty. I live in the Boston area. long time listener, first time caller here. Your career advice video actually led me to move to Boston.

Four years later, I have a great relationship and a financially rewarding start to my career. So I feel like I owe prop to you a significant debt. Thank you. My question focuses in finding top-tier talent. I currently work at a business and on a team that sources almost exclusively idly talent. On the lone exception, but I did have to get an engineering degree and go to grad school to break through. I'm trying to think about how we can build a richer set of perspectives on our strategic planning team because I've noticed that there are some common ways we look at business challenges and consumers as a group of people from only Ivy League backgrounds. I think we're losing sight of what the true consumer may actually be experiencing in some ways,

especially as we're trying to target premium price tiers with our business and a younger consumer demographic that can't realistically support that spending. How have you gone about finding top talent outside of Ivy League when there's no brand name to give you a heuristic? Thanks for the question. So I started a strategy firm, my secondary business school, and it grew fast, and we needed to hire people fast. And I was very fond of big brand name, specifically branded elite universities, right? I was really excited to hire someone from Stanford or MIT or Harvard or Berkeley or whatever. And generally speaking, what you find with small firms is that, and this has probably changed a little bit, but the best people at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are going to

work for hedge funds, tech companies that are scaling. They weren't going to work for small companies like mine. And the ones I was able to attract, generally speaking, were the B players from those schools. and the B player from Harvard is just a B player. And we have a tendency to fetishize these universities and think that everybody there is amazing. The Ivy League generally attracts two cohorts, freakishly remarkable kids and the children of rich people. And disproportionately, increasingly more the latter than the former.

The former is used as Vaseline to smear over the lens of income inequality and the fact that we're letting in, you know, the kids from the top 1% income earning households, are 77 times more likely to get into an elite university. This is what you do as a small firm. One, there's a recognition in their studies that the top 10% at any university are pretty similar.

So your job is to find a local university where you have connections and identify the top 10%. The top 10% at CUNY Buffalo are as good as the top 10% at an MIT or a Boston College or what have you. Now, having said that, the elite schools, generally speaking, the median is a little bit better. There is a value. There is a selection process where they get to populate their student body with just incredibly impressive kids in addition to the rich kids.

And to be fair, most of the rich kids are at a certain level to get into most universities unless you're really, really rich. But your job is to identify the top 10% at a local university as a small firm. And then the secret weapon in hiring is the following. reference hiring. The first thing I do when someone is good is I sit them down and I offer them a bonus and really incent them and ask them to identify amongst their friends and their classmates a group of really smart together people. You can identify two or three really solid men and women that you know who are just incredibly smart, incredibly good at what they do. I almost am entirely now reference hiring. And that is if someone, I was using, example of Ed Ellison, who's my co-hosts from property markets, a woman named Joanna Calls called me and said,

I have someone you have to hire. And I said, for what role? And she said, it doesn't matter. That's my British accent. And so I will hire someone on the spot that someone I trust says I must hire. Because I get fooled in interviewing. I think recruiting is a difficult process to try and find the smartest people. I get fooled all the time. So in terms of finding top talent, don't fetishize the Ivy League, find that try to find the top 10% at a local college. It has some connection to your company or to staying in the region. But more than anything, good people can help you find other good people, reference hiring. Question number two comes from Reddit. Zesty POVU 2 says, Hey Scott recently heard a compounder's podcast claiming that young people who can't afford a home

will actually be better off in the long run because they're buying stocks instead of paying off a 30-year mortgage. Does this make sense to you? We'd love to hear your take on the theory. So just some data. According to Zillow, the median U.S. home sale price has risen 53% over the last six years, while borrowing costs have more than doubled over the same period. More than half of U.S. homes lost value last year, the highest share since 2012. J.P. Morgan Global Research projects U.S. home prices remaining flat in 2026 with slight improvement in demand, likely offsetting any increased supply. Fix mortgage rates are projected to remain above 6%. And the Fed, or if the Fed begins easing, which I don't see. Adjustable rate mortgages could fall, but I don't think it's going to

happen. It's based on the latest inflation report. So what's the case against homeownership? According to a January lending tree analysis, renting is now cheaper than owning in every large metro area in the U.S. And again, it's situational, but most U.S. cities, when you do the math, and that is what you could buy the place for versus what it costs to rent, you're better off renting. And essentially, you look at the yield, if something costs $100,000 to buy or $200,000 is more realistic. That's not even realistic. And it costs $1,000 a month. That's $12,000 into 200. What is that about a 6% yield? There's a number where if it's above or below, you want to rent versus buy, and I would look at that. Homeownership forces households to concentrate their wealth in a single illiquid leveraged

asset in one geographic market, leaving them with less capital for diversified financial assets, including equities, which have historically produced higher risk-adjusted returns in housing over long periods. Now, why might homeownership be worth it over the long time? Paying a mortgage is non-negotiable and equity accumulates over time, and research from the Journal of Economic perspectives found that over the long haul, owning has been financially superior to renting for most households. According to the Fed's 2022 survey of consumer finances among households age 55 to 64, homeowners have significantly higher net worth than non-homeowners in the same age range, a product of decades of forced savings and leverage.

So, okay, what to do. I think you look at the ratios of that yield, of the cost of rent to buy in your area. And if it seems, I just think it makes, unless you have a lot of money, I don't think it makes sense to buy right now in New York or L.A. or San Francisco. I just think you're better off renting,

and that's probably true at most metros. Having said that, if you can get in what isn't an outrageous multiple or ideally an attract, I bet the ratio in St. Louis or El Paso is pretty good right now, or Las Vegas. I think they're struggling right now. Is that true? Anyways, I would buy, and I would err on the side of buying. Why? It's for savings. One of the keys to building wealth is that money isn't in your hands. And it's almost like forced savings, automatic deposit into ETFs or your company's equity, whatever it might be. And the thing about once you commit to a home is that you make that payment. Now, granted, you don't want to be. house poor and get over levered and not be able to enjoy your life because you're making a housing payment. But a bunch of the ancillary benefits of housing help you accrete wealth.

One, it's a forced savings plan. Two, it lends itself towards mating and pairing and marrying. And those things tend to be good for building economic power. So generally speaking, I'm in favor of homeownership. I think the psychic benefits are real. It's more fund to fix up a home you own. But you absolutely want to do the math initially. And if you're struggling to make that mortgage payment and you're going to put everything you have into it and you're in a market that's frothy and it's a yield of 2%. In other words, it's 50 times the annual rent to buy the place, then I would think about renting for a while. And so I think one, Okay, one, do the math.

Find out if it's at a cyclical high or if the yield, if just renting just makes a lot more choice, a lot more sense. But when you get close to it making some sort of financial sense, opt on the side of buying. It's good psychic return. It's forced savings. It builds equity quietly. And it has the ancillary benefit of establishing what I think are good relationships.

It ends up that an increase. in housing prices is a form of birth control, that for every 10% housing prices have gone up, birth rates have gone down 1%. I find it tremendously rewarding to own a home, so there is some psychic benefit there. Anyways, thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding can help you build faster than ever.

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Qualifying direct deposits required terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com slash disclosures for details. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other.

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Welcome back. Question number three comes from Jamie, who emailed us. Hey, Prop G, I'm about to start my PhD at Stanford and a STEM field. I love the idea of running a small to mid-sized firm that conducts its own research and builds great products from it. I got into research because I love learning, but there are times when I need to make decisions from highly incomplete information. This worries me a lot, especially when I'm working under the watch of experts. How do you learn to act decisively before you feel fully qualified, especially when surrounded by people who know more than you do? Well, I think you answer your own question. I don't think you need to. I think you provide your opinion. I mean, the wisdom of crowds is staggering.

A huge mistake I made at your age was believing that leadership and masculinity was to do a quick assessment of the landscape and then make a decision and that the right thing was to talk everyone into my decision as opposed to the right thing being to get to the right conclusion or decision, even if I meant acknowledging I was wrong. So if you're blessed in academia, the whole basis of a peer-reviewed research, which is incredibly powerful, is that a bunch of other smart people start poking holes. in it. But I don't think, I think what you want to do is show up with data-driven research and opinions, not be emotional about it, be willing to accept feedback, be willing to say when you're

wrong. But if you're surrounded by super smart people, as you will be pursuing a PhD at Stanford, Jesus Christ, you should be giving me advice. I think you take advantage of that peer network. And even if you're thinking about starting a business, roll over to the business school or talk to some alumni and get their advice. I have totally gone 180 on this, whereas I used to think leadership was making decisions in absence of information, I now don't make any decision without calling several people and asking their advice. And if you're blessed with the incredible brainpower and judgment and research of being, you know, of your colleagues at Stanford pursuing a similar field and access to people from different fields at Stanford, I think the problem is

and knowing when to decide, the problem is deciding too quickly. At some point, you have to provide your view and make a decision. Okay, I get it. But you would be cheating yourself if you didn't take advantage of the environment you're in and your colleagues and ask them just a lot of questions and listen and then make your own decisions. But in terms of decisions around research, obviously, you have to put forward your opinion and then maybe defer to the experts. But gosh, brother, it's good to be you.

Pursuing your PhD at Stanford. Jesus Christ. Well done. That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hours of provitymedia.com. Again, that's office hours ofproptuemedia.com or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode.

This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Jinnar. Cameric is our social producer. Brad Williams is our editor. And Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Propgee pod from Provgy Media. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odu comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together.

From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com slash box. That's ODOO.O dot com slash box. If you win a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free?

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