<p>It’s possible to make the most of connections, or not use them at all. And once you get out in the real world and become part of a community, you are just as likely (perhaps more) to make connections through your kids’ schools, your church/synagogue, your yoga class or whatever. And besides that, anyone who uses LinkedIn knows how easy it is to MAKE connections via people-who-know-people.</p>
<p>I guess I have a different view regarding connections. Undergraduate is a better time to make those connections since you have 4 years to be with your group and is plenty of time to develop strong friendships. Also, one of the other main factors in attending an elite school is that it opens up more doors for careers. You have student A from a state school and student B from an Ivy League school, guess who is LIKELY be picked for the job? As a former recruiter for engineering students, folks from top schools climbed the ladder much quicker and most of the upper management are from top schools (at least where I work). Parents pay lots of money when their kids are attending an elite school and ultimately it does pay off. At this point, at least for me my daughter is an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and her summer internship work wouldn’t have been possible if she had been attending the local state university. Her mentor is a graduate from Brown University and told her when he had the list of applicants to choose from, hands down he wanted my daughter. In this case the Ivy League connection made it possible. I realize this is only one data point but I’m sure there are many other instances as I’ve just described with students and graduates from elite schools. We probably just don’t hear about them.</p>
<p>Every time we have this kind of thread, there is always some parents whose kids went to an Ivy league schools and made such claim. If I remember correctly, one parent on CC claimed her daughter went to Harvard and was told by the human resource that she received a higher salary because of that Harvard degree. Yawn!</p>
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<p>@Gtbguy1, so you’re saying the mentor only wanted your daughter because she’s a Penn student, or he was impressed by her experience/credentials AND it just so happened that she went to Penn? Because Penn State engineers, for example, are held in VERY high regard, and I’m not sure, all things being equal, the Penn kid would get chosen over the Penn State kid in most situations. Sure, maybe that Brown alumnus believes in the Ivy League cachet, but that doesn’t mean his firm is typical all firms everywhere. </p>
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<p>It’s just as likely that we don’t hear about State U grads hiring fellow State U grads!</p>
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<p>A lot of “top” students are at “elite” schools, but that doesn’t prove they wouldn’t have been equally successful at another school. (And the data suggests just the opposite.) </p>
<p>Every family has to do the old cost-benefit analysis and make a determination. For a full-pay family, is a $240,000 Penn engineering degree a better “investment” than a $120,000 one from Penn State? (Not to mention a full ride or full tuition at another school?)</p>
<p>A lot will depend on how much money they have in the bank and what they’d do with the difference in cost among these choices. Show us the data where an engineering (or Wharton) degree from Penn will earn someone a lot more money and success than the comparable Penn State grad, who may have graduated from Schreyer, and I’ll believe it.</p>
<p>I suspect, however, what you’re suggesting is based on nothing more than selection bias and wishful thinking. But, hey, whatever gets you through the night!</p>
<p>It also depends on the type of engineering. For CS/EE type, companies in Silicon Valley don’t care, they give you interview questions to solve in reasonable time and that’s how they determine your technical ability, not where you went to school. </p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
On “reputation is region-dependent”: That’s absolutely true. For example, Mexico’s UNAM is widely regarded as one of the finest higher education institutions in Latin America… yet I’m sure that a lot of people in the US have no idea it even exists!</p>
<p>LucietheLakie, first of all the Penn connection for my daughter was not for an engineering internship, it was for law. In her case the Ivy League was the connection. He was impressed since being from Brown, he knows the difficulty these school are and obviously, ONLY the best get admitted to these schools ESPECIALLY as an undergraduate. Second, I believe you were assuming an engineering internship and as I mentioned it wasn’t. BTW, we do hire lots of Penn State grads and I completely agree they are outstanding engineers. Penn Engineering is on the rise but not at the level Wharton is in the business world. You also failed to mention the upper management discussion in your posting, percentage wise, elite school graduates are in those positions. As the original post “A shocking number of the worlds rich and powerful attended elite colleges” can’t be ignored and there is a lot of truth to it.</p>
<p>Wharton graduates well that is another discussion many successful folks come from there. just google it.</p>
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Borrowing the words from the title of this this: “the world’s rich and powerful”, they most likely have a decent amount of money in the bank by the definition the rich.</p>
<p>The word “powerful” reminds me of this: A few years ago, I read from somewhere that Chelsea Clinton was invited to be a member of some governing body of Columbia Physicians and Surgeons. For a person from a family of this caliber, are you surprised by this? Considering her age at that time, it is quite possible that one of her classmates at Stanford was at that time having a grueling life at that med school as a student or at an affiliate hospital as a resident. It is quite possible that she may not even take any premed class while she was at Stanford but that med school does think she is “knowledgeable” enough about the medicine to be one of its governing board members. (Of course, we may say that her UG premed classmates had only exposed to “low-level, hands-on” stuff but she had a more valuable high level view about this field.)</p>
<p>This is a prime example of how the rich and powerful get and make use of their “connections” - majoring in CS/EE because it is a marketable degree? This is only the concern of the rest of us who are not “world’s rich and powerful.” Those rich and powerful live in a world where the priority is very different from the majority of us who are neither rich nor powerful.</p>
<p>Oh please. There are plenty of “best of the best” who don’t even bother to apply to the Ivies…or choose other options for any number of reasons. </p>
<p>I hope your daughter got the attention of her internship folks due to her skills and expertise, and that the tie breaker was perhaps her enrollment at Penn.</p>
<p>My opinion…that Brown alum was being very shortsighted. </p>
<p>Gtbguy, your logic is flawed. Yes, we all make “connections” with our peers as undergrads. But by the fact of them being our PEERS, they too are 22 years old, give or take, when they graduate. They are not already captains of industry or senior recruiters at major corporations. The people who ARE the decision makers are 15, 20, 30 years older, and they have a very wide range of backgrounds. Where I live it ABSOLUTELY would benefit me to have attended the local state university. The network is huge and powerful.</p>
<p>You also seem to contradict yourself. You have said you used to recruit for engineering positions, and that Purdue was a major source of qualified candidates. Last I checked Purdue was a state school, as are UIUC, Georgia Tech, and others that are widely considered among the “top” schools for engineering. If those are among the most likely places to find the most promising candidates at the entry level, I seriously doubt they enter the work force and then just suddenly start falling behind the students from Ivy League schools when it’s time for promotions.</p>
<p>It’s great that you are so proud of your daughter attending Penn, but you should give HER more credit than you give her college. If she is as bright as you say she is, she would thrive in a wide range of environments. You also might want to consider that there are Ivy League graduates teaching at a wide range of universities, since there just aren’t enough faculty positions at those same schools to support all the graduates each year. You will find Ivy PhDs at many state schools and lesser-known liberal arts colleges. There is not an exclusive club of people living in an elite-school bubble, except perhaps on Wall Street.</p>
<p>Gtbguy, for law school graduates, I can see it but I think your post is a little misleading, why mention the fact that you are engineering director in your post, what does that having anything to do with hiring for law. </p>
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<p>With all due respect to you and your daughter, @Gtbguy1, that’s just a ridiculous statement. And, for the record, I’m a Penn grad myself and my grandfather was a Wharton grad.</p>
<p>I know just from my own kid’s school that MANY students are admitted to Penn (and any number of “elite” schools) on the basis of their parents’ connections to the school (both as legacies and/or employees) or because they’re accomplished athletes. I’m not saying they’re not great kids and won’t be successful in their own right, but compared to many of the “rejects” from these school I know of personally (including one who is in a doctoral program at Princeton right now), these future Penn students were hardly the “best,” not if we’re talking about academic accomplishments or sheer intellect.</p>
<p>You mentioned that you used to hire for an engineering firm and then in the same paragraph brought up your daughter’s recruitment by a Brown alum. That’s why I was confused. Are you saying you daughter was recruited as an undergrad by a white shoe law firm for a summer internship before she’s even attended law school? And that this will help her get into a top law school one day, which ergo guarantees she’ll be recruited by one of these firms in the future? </p>
<p>That’s a pretty big leap!</p>
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<p>Show me some data beyond your own individual experience and maybe I’ll believe there’s something statistically significant there. So far all you’ve cited is your own anecdotal “evidence.”</p>
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<p>With all due respect, your daughter got in with a 30 ACT. So she must have other qualities besides test scores that make her exceptional. Now imagine Student B, just like your daughter, who didn’t even apply to Penn because she knew her scores were at the bottom of the accepted range. That similarly wonderful student is now being wonderful somewhere else, and is likely thriving just as much. There is NO evidence that the “college makes the person” and in fact others have cited evidence to the contrary. It surprises me that you seem to give the institution more credit than you do your daughter.</p>
<p>@Gtbguy1
Penn Engineering may be on the rise, but Cornell has always been ahead of every ivy in terms of engineering.</p>
<p>Even with Cornell CS/Engineering there is no guarantee for success. I know a few Cornell grads to prove otherwise.</p>
<p>@DrGoogle
No school is. Not even MIT or Stanford. It all falls unto the individual to make the most of his or her institution and take every possible chance.</p>
<p>Exactly. And by success I don’t mean like the WhatsApp guy, billionaire overnight. I meant to hold a decent job and own a home by the time one is between 40-50. I know a couple with degrees to the ying yang, Emery, Cornell, Stanford, Haas, you name, they chase prestigious degrees. The couple has not bought a starter home yet. They are a few years younger than me and I’m ready to retire.</p>
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Is there any evidence that it is more difficult to get into one of these elite schools as an undergraduate than as a graduate student?</p>
<p>Some argument against attending an elite school as an undergraduate is that it is usually the last degree that is more important, for someone who would further their education after college.</p>
<p>many years ago, one of my previous coworkers told me that for some graduate program at an elite school, it is not very difficult to get into. His single data point is that his wife got into the statistics graduate program at that school. Another example was that a relatively not particularly competitive student got into some environmental engineering program at the same school (and then left the environmental engineering field after graduated from that graduate program, for a job position in the finance industry, likely because he now got the “name’” and maybe with some family connection as well.)</p>
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<p>With all due respect, the explanation for these types of situations isn’t related to the schools attended. Its related to election results and the willingness to shake organizations and people down for fun and profit. </p>
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<p>You will have to look at admission stats. Generally yes, for elite schools it is harder because of the large freshman applicant pool. For graduate programs, you have to look at the specific department at the school.</p>