Beyond what you like/need in a facility so that you can be successful, does where you go for your undergraduate really matter?
I think it does, but a lot of people would disagree. If you look in the parents forum, this gets argued endlessly. A lot depends on your career goals.
This question has been asked a lot. It really depends on what you mean by “matters.”
Different colleges expose you to different things and have different atmospheres and resources. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Berkeley, et al. have excellent resources - big libraries, beautiful study spaces, giant recruiting machines, lots of alumni connections. They attract high-achieving students who will be your classmates fellow alumni. That’s going to affect who you socialize with (you may find yourself rooming with the daughter of a CEO of a company you want to work for or working on a group project with someone who can hook you up with an internship). It’ll affect what roles you can visualize yourself in (if all of your friends are talking about consulting and investment banking positions and interning or interviewing with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, then you may be motivated to do so as well). It may, indirectly and directly, affect the quality of what you learn (you may write better research papers with access to better libraries, for example). Similar things can be said of prestigious liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, etc., on a smaller scale.
Keep in mind, though, that there’s a wide range of schools that can provide you that type of environment in different levels. For example, many of the colleges and universities within the top 100 are excellent places - they may not be tippy-top elite like Swarthmore or Harvard, but many of them still have beautiful libraries and great alumni associations and excellent on-campus recruiting. Many flagship public universities are quite excellent at that, too - so even thinking beyond Michigan, the UCs and Virginia to places like Ohio State, UT-Austin, Georgia Tech, UW (Madison or Seattle), UMass-Amherst…there are lots and lots of places where you can have that kind of good influence.
There are some career fields that do necessitate or ask for prestige. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to become a Wall Street investment banker without an Ivy degree - it’s just harder, and may take longer. Then there are a whole lot more career fields that really don’t care where you went to college.
In the long-term in most careers, where you go to undergrad won’t matter very much in terms of the name on your resume.
I’ll give examples at two ends of the spectrum. As a public school teacher, no one cares where you went to school. The Harvard educated teacher makes exactly the same as the University of Delaware teacher, with similar experience levels. Dustin Moskovitz is a billionaire primarily because he was in the right place, at the right time to be Zuckerberg’s roommate.
@juillet interesting how you mentioned UMass Amherst…
“does where you go for your undergraduate really matter?”
I think that it depends upon what you are comparing, and to some extent what you want to do.
There may be a few jobs where it matters. Mostly I think that this involves prestigious/pretentious top name consulting companies and law firms (the ones where you expect the consultant or lawyer to wear a three piece suit and charge at least $500 per hour). Some of these “elite” firms expect to recruit people from “elite” universities.
If you are comparing your local community college versus any university in the top 100, then particularly after the first couple of years most students will see some advantage to be at one of the universities in the top 100.
On the other hand, if you intend to go to graduate school, and you are trying to decide whether to do undergrad at MIT, McGill, or U Mass Amherst, then it probably doesn’t matter which one you go to. You can get a very good undergraduate education at any of these (and probably any university in the top 100 in the US, and most universities in the top 200).
On the other hand, if you want to go to graduate school, and one undergraduate option leaves you with no debt whereas the other leaves you with $100,000 in debt, it really does matter that you pick the “no debt” option. Otherwise you likely will not be able to afford to go to graduate school.
Also, how you do as an undergraduate matters. You might graduate with straight C’s, but this could limit your options going forward.
“I think it does, but a lot of people would disagree. If you look in the parents forum, this gets argued endlessly. A lot depends on your career goals.”
I agree that this does get argued endlessly. Also, “it depends” is correct.
I found this interesting, http://time.com/money/4364104/top-colleges-fortune-500-ceos/. A lot of the usual suspects are there, but several schools I never would have thought of.