<p>The list of CEO’s is truly interesting. </p>
<p>I never said you NEED an Ivy for success. I said that the Ivy kids are MUCH more likely to succeed. By going through the list of 50 of fortune’s 500 CEO’s, we can see that Ivy grads and those from upper tiered U’s way overrepresent by gigantic factors. (Considering the grads of elite institutions only make up a tiny percent of the work force).</p>
<p>But you keep defining “success” as “money in your bank account / in your paycheck.”
Where did you get that definition from? Doesn’t success have to do with enjoying your job / career and doing well at it? The art history major who “only” makes $40,000 working at the art museum is just as successful as the engineer making $100,000 (numbers pulled out of the air) - if they both love what they do and enjoy what they’re doing. If the art history major was forced to go into engineering and hated every minute of what it took to make that $100,000 – why on earth would you call that “success”? Very odd.</p>
<p>Besides, who says that being a Fortune 500 CEO is a goal everyone should aspire to?</p>
<p>I deliberately stepped off a fast track at such a company because I wanted a different kind of family life and wanted to be able to work at home as my children got older and wanted to specialize in a particular area in my field that I find very intellectually satisfying. I still do quite ok monetarily, tyvm. Why on earth would I say that someone who stayed on that track is more “successful” than me? They might make more. That doesn’t mean that they’re more successful. If we’re both happy with our choices, then we’re both successful. Successful is measured internally, not by comparison to others.</p>
<p>Some said they thought Jason was a high school student so clearly there is a lack of perspective that only time will bring. I can somewhat understand why a high school student would have the perception that Ivy is best and that money is the definition of success. Actually many people would define success exactly as you spell out Pizza, an ability to have work/life balance and a steady decent income and many would give up tens of thousands of dollars to do just that. Everyone will have a different number in their head but for me that freedom of work/life balance is worth at least $30,000 if not more (and I’ve spent timing thinking about that) and it could be more or less for others. As far as Ivy League, it just is so inconsequential after a few years out of school that I can’t even get behind the argument. The vast, vast majority of people, even successful ones, can’t even name all the schools in the Ivy League. Try this game at your next cocktail party, it’s similar to naming all the dwarfs Sleepy, Dopey, Happy uhhhhhhh what were the others???</p>
<p>I’m on CC and I still can’t name all the Ivy League schools. It’s Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and, uh, some other ones. Oh . . . and Stanford, right? ;)</p>
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<p>Exactly!</p>
<p>My point in posting the Fortune 50 CEO list was NOT to say that reaching that position is the definition of success. Rather, IF you define success (as a previous poster seems to be doing) as money/power/prestige, here’s a list of guys (I think all men back then) who have achieved that without an Ivy League undergrad.</p>
<p>I would certainly agree with you that there are many measures of success in life.</p>
<p>I want to point out that whoever brought up the topic of fortunes 500 CEOs suggested that is success. I did not bring up the topic.</p>
<p>The highest earners in society are the most useful people. The CEO’s get paid so much becase they add value to society. A wall street baron earning 15 million a year is much more successful than a mid leve manager. 1) he supports much more of society- taxes
2) his company relies on him more because he adds value. If your CEO died, u’d panic to find a new one. If a mid level manager died, u’d call up ur lawyers to try to leech some of his life insurance.</p>
<p>Because I can’t edit, I’ll double post (on phone). </p>
<p>Happiness is not success. Success means making sacrifices, pain, hardwork, and money.</p>
<p>JasonInNy, answer me this question, honestly: how old are you? What? 14? 15? </p>
<p>I am not trying to offend you, but you sound young and a little naive. If you honestly think “success” only equates to monetary gain, you have a lot more to learn, kid.</p>
<p>I’m guessing young, from a family of modest means, attends school with wealthy kids and clearly the NY in his name give clue to the obsession with Wall Street. Starting analyst salaries average 50-70,000 with a few select entry positions closing in on 6 figures which doesn’t go all that far in NYC. It was the big bonuses that attracted the kids. It will be interesting if big bonuses will hold up in the next 3-5 years under all the banking scrutiny or at least until JasoninNY’s wisdom teeth errupt during the next couple years.</p>
<p>^ He’s quite naive. I’ve gone back to his previous posts and I assert that he’s a rising senior at a prep school with interest in capitalism/Wall Street.</p>
<p>Agreed with posters suggesting that there are expectations that A will lead to B and B will take one to C in terms of education. I still remember my AP Psych teacher saying to my class on the FIRST day of class, “When I began law school, our dean gave us a speech. He said that we were among the top in our class. But this is a new school with a new class. Someone’s gotta be the bottom.” They simply couldn’t rank everyone the same.</p>
<p>Same goes with jobs, Jason. CEOs aren’t the only ones who are “useful” to the society. Neither are college presidents. Who’s going to clean your dirty dorm bathroom after a weekend of partying and vomiting? Who’s going to cook and serve you your meal in a hot line at your school’s cafeteria? What about mowing the lawn to keep the place looking pretty for visitors? Taking out garbage filled with disgusting, sticky beer cans? If you can’t imagine yourself doing any of those, well, then those people are indeed important. That’s why they get tips in coffeeshops, taxi cabs, hotels, and so forth. I actually consider them more useful than some of other positions in an university than I can think of. Same goes for the Real World. If there weren’t these people, then we may not have had so many rest stops on the highways.</p>
<p>I certainly hope that you’re looking to apply to other schools beyond the top 20. And with that attitude of yours, you’re not going to get too far with adults. As I silently tell my 20 year old brother, grow up and open your eyes.</p>
<p>^^^^^ The problem is that those lowly workers are replaceable.</p>
<p>For every janitor there are cleaning my dorm, there is at least another one dying for a chance for the job and all the perks associated with it (staff benefits, prestige of saying “i work at ___ prep school”).</p>
<p>An economic professor once argued that if everyone had an advanced degree (medical, law, masters, and etc.), we’d invent machine thats do all of our minimum wage work. Our engineers would faint at the ideas of scrubbing a toilet! Consider making Bill Gates building a skyscraper by himself. He would start in the drawing room writing robots scripts instead of jumping in stacking steel columns.</p>
<p>Our engineers, doctors, MBA’s, lawyers, and other human capital rich individuals cannot be replaced so easily…</p>
<p>We’d still have our rest stops on the highway although the tour man there would be a robot.</p>
<p>@momofthreeboys</p>
<p>The wall street people dont see bonuses as “bonuses.” They see it as part of their total salary package, kind of like a benefit add on. Slashing their bonuses would be equal to taking away your health benefits at your job: You’d be throwing a media controversy too. Bonuses are based on how much value you add to the company and thus bankers rightfully feel that bonuses are the fruits of their labor, the same way you view your base salary.</p>
<p>Wall street has innovated its way out of every single debacle or obstacle thrown in its way to higher profits before. There is no reason to doubt the motivational effects of greed to spin off new profits and exploit loopholes in the present age. Wall street also has the best lawyers and lobbyists money can buy… Naysayers have claimed the death of the Wall Street Goliath many times before, never once had they gotten it right.</p>
<p>Guess what? Not everyone A) can afford education and B) is made for college. They need to do something that don’t require a college degree, don’t they?</p>
<p>And as for bragging rights, really, it just depends on the family. Some people just couldn’t care less if they’re working at Andover or Harvard as a custodial staff. These days, a job is a job that feeds their families. They may be more inclined to work there because the pay rate may be higher.</p>
<p>Jason asserts that college graduates’ average beginning salary is $60,000. Where did he get that number? I did a google search and found these statistics: </p>
<p>According to the National Center for Education statistics, “In 2008, the median of the earnings of young adults with a bachelor’s degree was $46,000.”</p>
<p>The International Association of Employment websites said: “The overall average salary offer made to 2009 bachelor’s degree graduates is $49,353—nearly identical to the 2008 average of $49,300.”</p>
<p>And CNN says: “Overall, the average salary offered to 2010 graduates is $48,351—down 2 percent from the 2009 average of $49,353.”</p>
<p>Since the kid in the NY Times article didn’t major in the higher paying fields, his entry level salary should be in the low range. One website I found said the average history major in 2009 earned $37,900. Another said political science majors got $41,300 their first year. So that $40,000 offer he got was exactly on target for his degree.</p>
<p>I never said average beginning salary was 60K.</p>
<p>I said the average salary for a college grad was around 60k (off the top of my head).</p>
<p>I simply implied that grads from elite institutions should accept nothing less than $60k at their first job. Reread my posts if you are not convinced those are my words.</p>
<p>My point about the previous post is that lowly workers are MUCH less valuable to society. A MD is hard to replace (look at all those physician recruitment website which still cant find a radiologist or internist after years of search in rural areas). A burger flipper is not.</p>
<p>I want to steer this thread back to its original topic: Are today’s college graduates getting a raw deal?</p>
<p>I read the original article posted, and my first though was that the student described had no right to complain given that he turned down a job with a $40K starting salary. Then I thought about it a little harder. Why do I think $40K is a decent starting salary? I think $40K is a decent starting salary because it is about equal to the $48K I was paid when I started working after college. OK, but how long ago was that? Almost 12 years ago! </p>
<p>For a current college graduate to have the same level of buy power today that I had in 1998 when I started working he/she would have to earn $63K. Hmmm, maybe turning down that job wasn’t as bad an idea as I originally thought. I almost definitely would have turned down a $30K job (1998 equivalent of today’s $40K job) as a college senior. $30K would not have been sufficient to service the student loan debt I had accumulated.</p>
<p>Which brings me to my next though. When I attended my undergraduate college the annual tuition was $22K per year. I though that was unbelivably expensive. However, today that same college costs a whopping $40K per year. So today’s graduates are paying twice the tuition for a smaller chance of landing a jobs with a 35% lower starting salaries.</p>
<p>How long has this trend been going on? A quick survey of my parents revealed that my fathers starting salary out of HIGH SCHOOL in 1969 was $13,000 per year as an assistant manager at a grocery store. That’s right, my father earned the equivalent of $75K per year (in todays dollars) with just a high school diploma. My mother earned $26,000 per year as a new elementary school teacher when she started work in 1980. $26K in 1980 is $67K today. Both earned more to start then than even those greedy new ibankers out of Wharton do today, and neither had to live in NYC or drop $120K in tuition to do it. Can you really blame today’s graduates for scrambling for Wall Street jobs? All they want is the same kind of starting pay that high school graduates recieved 50 years ago.</p>
<p>So back to the question at hand: Are today’s graduates getting a raw deal? You bet they are.</p>
<p>“My mother earned $26,000 per year as a new elementary school teacher when she started work in 1980.” This is amazing to me. I graduated from college in 1980 and my first job was as an admissions counselor at a SUNY college. My salary: $13,500.</p>
<p>In general, it is easier to get a job when you have a job, so in reference to the original post, taking the job might have been the prudent thing to do.</p>
<p>^^^^^ The problem is that those lowly workers are replaceable."</p>
<p>Something tells me you’ve never done any manual labor or service work in your life. Let’s see how long you’d last scrubbing toilets, or making lattes at Starbucks, or waiting tables in a diner. How dare you be rude and insulting to people who are doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.</p>
<p>When you do become rich and make your $10 million a year or whatever, what are you going to do with that money? Well, you’ll buy a nice house or condominium. You’re going to people to make and hang your draperies, people to saw, build and create your kitchen cabinets, people to design the appliances, people to manufacture them and people to install them in your home. So, all those people are replaceable and you’re not? What arrogance. Do you have those skills? Can you sew, can you create, can you install, can you wire? What makes you think these things are so easy?</p>
<p>With that money, you’ll undoubtedly also spend on entertainment. Let’s say you go to a Broadway show. That requires “menial” ticket takers, but also involves costume designers, sound design people, carpenters to build the sets, people to market the show / theater, and of course the actors and musicians themselves. Really? Those people are all replaceable, too? Let’s see you design the costumes for a Broadway show, build the sets, and sing on stage.</p>
<p>You have a very overinflated sense of what talents are worth.</p>
<p>MD Mom,</p>
<p>I can’t vouch for the veracity of my parents memories as they are both over 60 now. However, my mother works in the same school district today, and the current 25th percentile salary for teachers in that district (which I assume includes most new teachers) is just over $60K. Therefore, I don’t think her recollection is too far off as, thanks to collective bargaining, teachers salaries have done a pretty good job of keeping up with inflation. This is a HCOL area by the way.</p>
<p>Regarding the student in the article, I agree that he almost certainly should have taken the job he was offered. However, I feel that point is tangential to the discussion of whether or not our economy is failing today’s college graduates and 20-somethings.</p>
<p>Thanks B-schooler, I was not questioning what you said at all. And I am not too far behind you parents in age, but I remeber what I made in my first job.</p>
<p>I thought that your inflation figures were interesting.</p>