I had coffee this morning with an engineer who is going back to business school in order to segue into real estate development. This is a fairly typical journey. Lots of people come into development from a related discipline. In my case, it was architecture (even though I never practiced architecture). It was also the case when I went to Rotman that something like a third of the class had a background in some sort of science or engineering field.

However, one thing I did mention this morning was that he will likely find that he will need to unlearn certain things as he moves forward. Every discipline tends to indoctrinate us with a certain way of thinking about the world. Lawyers tend to be a certain way. Engineers tend to be a certain way. And architects tend to be a certain way.

In my case, I found that architecture school taught me to be, among other things, an intense perfectionist. The modus operandi in design studios is that your project is never ever complete. The more you work on it, the better it will become. And as a result, you should feel a deep onus to work on it as much as humanly possible. But in business, this isn't practical. In the vast majority of cases, speed over perfection will serve you better.

I believe wholeheartedly in multi-disciplinary backgrounds, and maybe this is one of the reasons why. It shows you what you should unlearn. What would you say your biases are?

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) just announced a new 12-month degree called the Master in Real Estate (MRE). Here's a short excerpt about the program:

The MRE program is designed to train future practitioners to address new and urgent realities facing the built environment and cities today. Whether undertaken by for-profit businesses, not-for-profit organizations, or public entities, real estate occupies a pivotal role in determining how the places where we live, work, and play are equitable, environmentally sustainable, and appealing, in addition to being productive for the economy.

The key takeaways are that this is a graduate program being designed for aspiring real estate entrepreneurs and that it will live within Harvard's Graduate School of Design. So there is an implicit recognition that the world of real estate doesn't need to run counter to the pedagogical goals of a design school.

Anyone who went to architecture school will tell you that real estate is often viewed as the "dark side." Either you commit yourself to the pure world of architecture and design, or you sell out and seek profits in the world of real estate. But I have always considered this to be a false dichotomy.

Real estate is a fundamental component of how we shape our built environment. And so if one's ambitions are to improve the built environment -- which is something that architecture schools do teach you -- why should the delivery vehicle matter? Shouldn't we be encouraging people to optimize for maximum benefit?

I completed my undergraduate degree in architecture. But very early on I had the feeling that I was only getting one piece of a larger picture. And so I went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate school and completed a degree that combined both architecture and real estate. My goal was to figure out a way to combine both passions. Maybe I'd become the next Jonathan Segal.

Penn was very open to cross-disciplinary studies at the time (this was the mid-2000s), but there was still a gaping divide between the school of design and the business school. Walking across campus meant taking off one hat and putting on another. There wasn't a lot of overlap.

After school, I returned to Toronto and started working in development. I then decided to pursue my MBA part-time, which really wasn't necessary for my career, but was probably driven by some sort of insecurity I felt at Penn. I was the outsider design student (with funny glasses I might add) trying to keep up with Wharton MBAs.

I went back to the University of Toronto for my MBA and thoroughly enjoyed it. But I still couldn't understand why there was such little overlap between the design school and the business school when it came to matters of the built environment. The real estate courses at Rotman were also extremely limited at the time.

So I started talking to faculty members: What would it took to create a joint real estate program that lived somewhere between the design school and the business school? I offered to help and I tried to press upon everyone that this was a gaping void and a huge opportunity. Canada was falling behind in terms of real estate education. It was time to step up.

The answer I got was generally always twofold: (1) Rotman's real estate courses were already good enough and (2) it's pretty hard to start a new program at the University. You have to do a bunch of things, one of which includes finding money. So, sorry.

Harvard's new Master in Real Estate degree is the kind of program I had in mind. So I'm happy to see others taking action. And I ultimately think it will be a good thing for our cities.

If you'd like to apply, you can do that starting this fall.

We know that educational attainment is probably the single biggest determinant of urban economic success. If you're hoping to predict average household incomes, looking at the percentage of the population with a 4-year college degree is a pretty good place to start. But let's take this a step further: to what extent does graduating from an elite university affect both pay and performance?

It turns out, according to this recent study, that the pedigree of one's university isn't all that good at predicting motivation and talent. It does, however, impact pay. Average early career salaries for graduates of the top 10 colleges in the US are almost 50% higher than those with degrees from the ten colleges within the City University New York school system. This is according to data from Payscale and the US Department of Education.

But this pay delta doesn't necessarily match the performance delta that you might expect. The study found that for every 1,000 positions that you move in Webometrics' global university ranking (which is what they used for their research), overall performance only changes by about 1.9%. In other words, a graduate from the alleged number one university is only going to perform, on average, about 1.9% better than someone from the 1,000th best school.

I'm not exactly sure how to practically interpret a 1.9% improvement in performance. But 2% compounding on 2% each year should get you somewhere. Regardless, graduates from top universities do generally score higher on competency examinations. The reasoning behind this is thought to be at least twofold: 1) more selective admissions create a better pool of students and 2) top universities should provide better training.

Whether that's enough to justify the higher pay is a separate discussion. But if you're looking to measure urban economic success, the data does suggest that elite universities should lead to overall higher average incomes.