For me personally, grad school was considerably more important than undergrad.

I thought the conventional wisdom was that undergrad matters more for the personal identity, and grad school matters more for the professional identity.

(I agree with the CW)

In grad school, I mastered a discipline and learned the norms and conventions of that discipline. Useful stuff.

As an undergrad, I grew up. Vital stuff.

So I'd say that my undergrad experience did more to shape who I am, what I believe, and how I act, than grad school did.

In a question about education, usually what counts is the highest level. If you got a Ph.D. from Stanford, whether you went to a posh highschool or not is probably immaterial.

I don't think you can answer any "formative experience" question with anything as vague as the name of an institution, no matter how respected (something like "boot camp" might be an exception).

If Scheiber's argument rests on an underlying assumption that is difficult to grasp, I would say that that difficult assumption is not that graduate school is significant relative to other educational and life experiences, but that graduate schools are heterogeneous.

I agree with the commenter above that naturally one looks to graduate school experience when seeking to explain professional style; and Obama, Clinton, and for that matter Bush all track with what is widely known to be typical for their respective graduate institutions.

What is less obvious perhaps (but what I think is nevertheless true) is that Harvard Law, Yale Law, and Harvard Business are really so different. One could forgive someone who hadn't experienced a few graduate institutions for thinking that they're all the same. I see huge differences, but then, I would, because I see such institutions up close.

Law school taught and shaped me so much more than undergrad. It's not even close.

I'm inclined to agree with dcoffin's take - that I grew up in undergrad and got all professional in grad. However, I think that moving to another country to do my grad school had more of a profound affect on me than the four years of my undergraduate combined. You really learn to fend for yourself when your closest family is an eight hour flight away. Additionally, I found out that the Brits had a completely different way to thinking about IR than what I was used to.

That being said - I'd still go with learning the basics and critical thinking in undergraduate, but really polishing up my knowledge and technique in post-grad.

For Obama - I think Harvard is such a big deal to his personna not so much for the fact that he was there, but because he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. (The fact that he was a law student seems almost tangential... in fact, people seem to make more of the fact that he was a law professor....)